Trona – Interview

Trona

(Cosmic)
An interview with Chris Dyas (guitar/vocals), Mary Ellen Leahy (guitar/vocals), and Pete Sutton (bass)
by Scott Hefflon

A year ago, you won the WBCN Rumble after only being together for a year… Did that quick local success come as a surprise?
Chris: We were surprised. They’re always saying that thing is fixed, but we had no idea. If someone chose us to win, they didn’t tell us.

Mary Ellen: Someone was telling me that Ramona Silver is about to get signed, and her label had “fixed” the Rumble so she would win. We’re sitting here as Rumble winners hearing people say labels fork over thousands to have their bands win – give me a break!

Chris: It’s funny, we played one of our worst shows ever with Ramona Silver.

Mary Ellen: One of your worst shows.

Chris: One of my worst shows. I wasn’t feeling well. It sparked an argument between Mary Ellen and myself that lasted months. Her mom was there, and I just played a horrible show.

Mary Ellen: He sucked.

Chris: So I ran into Ramona a few months later and admitted we played our worst show ever with her, and she said, “Really, you guys too?” I thought she was alright though.

Mary Ellen: You asked us about the Rumble, we ended up talking about Ramona Silver.

Chris: Her label paid us to talk about her.

Only your first 7″ was out when you entered the Rumble, right?
Chris: Our 7″ on Cosmic was out…

Pete: And then the Time Bomb 7″ came out right after the Rumble. I think we have the distinction of being the band in recent memory to win the Rumble without a CD. It seems everyone’s got one these days.

Chris: They’re called CD demo tapes. Your band makes a full-length album, you press it on CD, and that’s what you send to T.T.’s to get booked on a Tuesday night.

How’d you hook up with Time Bomb?
Mary Ellen: Cornelia (former Taang! radio publicist) moved out there and was doing management and stuff. At some point, I sent a tape and asked her to ask her boss if he’d put a 7″ out for us. She called back saying he’d said yes.

Chris: He heard our tape and asked what we wanted. We weren’t interested in getting signed, we just wanted to put out 7″s. I don’t understand why bands want to get signed in the first six months…

Well, you’ve already been there. You already know the feeling of being signed to a big label, well, Imago.
Chris: Orangutang had been around for a while, but, yeah, I’ve been there.

You’ve all been involved in music for a while. Seeing as he’s not here, tell me of drummer Nick White’s background.
Pete: Nick’s background is pretty low-key – he was kickin’ around in various bands for about five or six years, bands like Sun Spots, Buzz Morelands, and Fireproof Women. He auditioned for us at the behest of a friend of ours, and he got the gig.

Chris: He was perfect. He made us wait forever before he gave us an answer. We were so depressed, we just could not find the right drummer.

Pete: Our backgrounds are pretty far reaching. I moved to Boston in ’89, and I’ve known Chris ever since. He met Mary Ellen soon after that, so the three of us go back a good seven years or so.

Chris: We were all friends long before we ever thought of being in a band together. Pete used to be in the Barnies, and I was kinda a temporary guitar player in that band, on and off, for about a year… When they were looking for a new guitar player, I said I’d play with them ’til they found someone, but they never found someone. When Orangutang broke up, Pete, Mary Ellen and I were already doing a little side project called Bullet LaToya. Dominique from Grind played drums for us. We were just going to play out once or twice, but it turned out to be really fun. But we couldn’t ask Dominique because she takes Grind seriously.

Was Jocobono up and running by then?
Chris: No, not really. I was debating on whether I wanted to play with any of the guys from Orangutang again. I thought about playing with Joe the bass player because we moved up here together from Baltimore, he’s great, he’s in Jack Drag now, but it was exciting to play with someone who had a different style. Pete and Joe play very differently. I played with Todd (Perlmutter) for a little while, but he plays really loud. He totally destroyed my hearing in my old band, and I just didn’t want to sign up for another four or five years of that.

Todd did some of the production work on the album. You recorded with three producers at four different studios…
Mary Ellen: A lot of that probably had to do with the Rumble. When we first started, Paul Kolderie (Hole, Radiohead, Tracy Bonham, and, coincidentally, Orangutang) expressed interest in working with us. I mean, who’s going to say no? It’s ludicrous – the first 7″ we did was produced by Paul Kolderie. Pete Weiss from Zippah did some of the actual production…

Chris: Paul pretty much did our single on his lunch break from Tracy Bonham’s recording sessions. It’s funny, we showed up at noon, and the thing was mixed and finished at five. They were supposed to be rough mixes, but we really liked the way they came out. They were the five hour single.

And having Tim O’Heir on the record is just a Boston thing…
Mary Ellen: We’ve worked with Tim O’Heir, Matt Ellard, Paul Kolderie, Todd Perlmutter, Drew Townson, Pete Weiss, and we worked with John from Metropolis on some stuff we haven’t released yet. So our official count is seven producers.

What kind of effect does that have on your sound? You seem to have much more of a mid-western twang thing going on.
Mary Ellen: What about the Del Fuegos?

Pete: I think some of our early stuff sounds like the Pixies. Not that we’re as good as that…

But getting your name from a town in Death Valley, using all the rural images in the CD booklet…
Mary Ellen: The first stuff we started playing wasn’t twangy at all. It was kinda like Jesus and Mary Chain. I couldn’t play guitar, so I just played simply with a lot of distortion. It was much noisier. In the beginning, I was still learning how to play guitar, so I couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time. What I’d do is I’d play a guitar part, then I’d stop, and then I’d sing. Now I could probably do both at the same time, but what we’ve found is that the original way really worked. It left a lot more space in the song. There’s no need to have everything going on all the time. We gradually grew into the more twangy stuff and dissident vocals as I became more confident about singing and playing guitar.

Chris: But we do like country music, it just wasn’t something we’d originally thought of incorporating.

Pete: And we’d be remiss if we said the name meant nothing.

Chris: We sort of grew into our name.