INTERVIEW: Squirrel Nut Zippers' Tom Maxwell

- Dan Enright

For those readers who don't know, the Squirrel Nut Zippers are a seven piece swing jazz band from North Carolina that recently released their debut self titled album on Mammoth Records. In case you wondered, they've borrowed their name from a chewy, peanut-flavored confection made in Massachusetts. While they've been influenced by small jazz "Hot Bands" from the '20s and '30s, don't make the mistake of thinking they're mired in the past. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unleashed by founders Katherine Whalen (banjo, vocals) and James Mathus (guitar, vocals), they've recruited Tom Maxwell (guitar, vocals, percussion), Don Raleigh (string bass), Chris Phillips (drums), Ken Mosher (alto/baritone sax, guitar, vocals) and Stacy Guess (trumpet) to bring evening gown and tuxedo clad dance music to the world.

I recently spoke with guitarist and resident musical historian, Tom Maxwell about the bands roots and style. So, without further ado...

Consumable: What's the philosophy behind this project?

Tom: We're trying to capture emotional content and feeling. I was talking to the bass player before the interview and was reminded of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. And basically, music can serve as the elephant. It's a constant and it's universal, just like human feeling. You can get bound by convention, which will obviously become obsolete as it always does, but music is a constant. That's what we're really interested in.

C: The members of the band come from a "college radio/contemporary rock background. What inspired you to pursue this type of music?

T: I started listening to this music in '88 when I was playing rock and roll. I picked up Cab Calloway and was blown away! To me, it was rock as much as anything else I heard, except it was a little bit more subtle.

It's the difference between real and implied threat. I like Sonic Youth a lot but their threat is real, whereas Cab Calloway singing "You Rascal You" - I just couldn't get enough and started listening to Fats Waller and everything else. When I became friends with Jim and Katherine I found that they liked a lot of that music too. We would get together, have dinner, and play records for each other.

C: A music club...

T: Oh yeah. It was a blast! So, I don't know. Is that an accurate answer?

C: I don't know either..

T: Jim was, "I'm forming a jazz band." I was like, "Terrific, that's great." But we never sit around and discuss authenticity, or what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. We just get together and play. I have a working knowledge of the history of a lot of the small band swing, but most of the people in the band don't. They listen to all kinds of music. We just intuitively know how to make the same sound.

C: You're contemporary musicians with a love for this style of music so you're updating it...

T: Precisely. Jazz abandoned a lot of the tenets of this kind of music in the '40s and went on and played Bop, that kind of music. This kind of swing was enormously popular for a generation, so I can see that people were ready to try something else. But rock and jazz never went back and picked up on what I think is tremendously fertile ground.

This swing we're playing is so natural, such an easy thing to do and in many ways lends itself to whatever you want to do with it. I feel we are picking up a strain someone put down a few years ago. Which is antithetical to the idea of recreating something, or trying to pander to nostalgia. So, yes. That's what we're doing. We're updating it. I think it's as viable right now as it was then.

C: And your lyrics are definitely contemporary...

T: Yeah. "Danny Diamond" is about a high school transvestite Ken knew. That song is an example of bizarre subject matter and "Plenty More" is... I still don't know how to take that song. I wrote the thing and my friend John wrote the lyrics... I think it can be taken any number of ways. I think most great music has a sense of irony to it. Hopefully we do too and can get that across.

C: This album is twelve songs out of how many total in your catalogue?

T: Oh gosh, upwards of 40. Since the time we've done this record, we've written enough material for the second. And by the time we get around to recording the second record, we'll probably have written half the material for the next one. We work at a frenetic pace. There are four songwriters in the band so there is never a dearth of material.

C: How does the songwriting work? Do you each write complete songs, or do you collaborate...?

T: We each bring in a full song. I, or Jimbo, will write a song and lyrics and bring it in... but then the song becomes "zipperized!" So it doesn't do any good to have the thing down in your head. You can have a chord progression worked out and a melody line, sometimes we'll have horn ideas, most of the time we just go, "Play what you want." That's so exciting because you end up with a song you never would have been able to do on your own.

C: Everyone owns the song, in a sense...

T: And the song will never sound like it does unless the band is playing it. Which is why we decided to split up royalties. The person who wrote the chord progression will get the bulk of it. But the way we're going about it, whoever played on the recording is entitled to a cut, because in many ways they helped bring the song together. I think it's a southern way of doing things. Each individual player is... we leave it up to them as to what they want to play or how they want to interpret the thing. What they want to add to it. And everyone does it well. It's one of the true pleasures of playing in this band.

C: I wanted to ask you about your "image"...

T: A lot of people assume we have a marketing savvy which we simply do not posses. They're like, "The clothes are important! What about the clothes?" And that's something I wanted to talk about. When I first got into the band, I fucking got a tuxedo, toot-sweet! For a number of reasons. One, I saw pictures of Cab Calloway looking like a million bucks, so why not? Wearin' that white tuxedo with all those paper mache lightning bolts? Who wouldn't want to look like that? I certainly do!

The other thing is, I always get nervous and there is a certain ritual to putting on a tuxedo. Mine has become quite elaborate. There's all these studs and buttons and shit you put on. It's a ritual to help assuage my bad nerves. I have found wearing these clothes, most of us dress like this anyway. Jimbo and Stacy, if they didn't have day jobs, would be wearin' a suit all day long.

There's a certain respect that is implied when you go on stage wearing, say, tails. Not only are you showing respect for the music, you are showing respect for the people for whom you're playing the music. If you come on starin' at your shoes, ripped hole in your jeans, that's fine. There's a lot of good stuff that has come out of the do-it-yourself attitude in music. But that should not preclude a certain ritualism, or properness, or just wanting to look good. People respond positively to that.

C: That's how the original performers of this music dressed.

T: And let's face it. When you are a performer, you are just that. You're doing stuff that most people don't want to, or don't feel they can do. You are, by definition, separating yourself from the audience. So any attitude you take is going to be contrived. It's going to be artifice.

You can study being nonchalant, wearing torn tennis shoes. I mean a lot of young rock bands have paid the same kind of attention to their clothes and attitude as we do. They simply are trying to look sort of everyday. But they're still doing the exact same thing we are, dressing up in monkey suits. So, to me it's all the same.

C: Do you think your costume colors the perception of your performance?

T: Sure. And it also enhances the way we play. You just play differently when you're wearing a tuxedo. When you're looking really good, you change somehow. You play a little better, or more respect, or be more attentive to what you're trying to do. ---