As is right by most Amerindie standards, the stage of Athens, Georgia's 40 Watt Club remains the unadorned pedestal of several generations of DIY rock heroes and associated wannabees. Typically met at all flanks by clutches of boho-baggy clad boys and girls who are usually greeted by the mumbles and indirect glances of those they've come to worship, the welcome cry of "Buh-ruthers and Sistas!!" goes out to meet the throng. In the half-light, evening jackets and strands of faux pearls can be seen muscling for hip swinging room alongside the staid band shirts and random piercings. The Squirrel Nut Zippers take the stage armed with swing, smiles, and a flu bug that's unoticeably tagged a few key members. The horns are phat, the furnace is lit, and the the first congo lines probably ever seen within the club's dingy walls are drawn in the sands of the altera-nation. A day or so later, Tom Maxwell elucidates from a hotel room the satisfaction of the post-inaugural buzz and the stress of being hot.
Consumable: Someone at the label (Mammoth) told me you were sick during the Athens show.
Tom Maxwell: Oh yeah, absolutely. It's a winter tour my friend. Jim (Mathus) and Katharine (Whalen) had to actually go to the doctor. In fact, I spent the first song and a half deciding whether or not I was going to pass out.
C: And you had just come from the Inaugural didn't you?
TM: Yes, we played the inaugural ball. What a whirlwind. We played a Rock The Vote party the night before at this restaurant called the Red Sage and astoundingly enough it made the front cover of the Wall Street Journal, "Hottest party in town, music by the Squirrel Nut Zippers." It was basically like a frat party because there was too many Goddamned people in there, but everybody looked great and one of them happened to be Kevin Costner. Every so often I'd turn around and there would be Uma Thurman or something.
C: I know there were a lot of parties up there, but was there any sort of theme to the gig you played?
TM: Yeah, we were at the 21st Century Ball, the so-called youth Ball and it was held at the Postal Museum.
C: So were you guys onstage when the President came in?
TM: No, I don't think anyone was onstage, because when he comes in, they have a big 'ol lockdown and they pick a few representatives from each band to come up. So like a clutch of security guys come in and gather up everybody in some room and basically I got to peek through a curtain at the back of his head. However, Jim and Katharine were onstage and they got to meet the President and Vice-President and their wives. They were thrilled to death. It's incredibly surreal.
C: Didn't you guys do a long engagement at the Olympics? I remember thinking that when the bomb went off, that you were one of the bands down there that week.
TM: We had played our last show the night before and I guess it happened late Friday night, early Saturday morning. We had really been held up getting out of town because the President was coming in. So we go up to Asheville and play a show and somebody comes up to us and says "Did you hear about the bomb?" and we were just crushed. That experience had been so positive for us. There was really a good spirit there...a great spirit. For whatever reason, we were part of a southern music showcase, and they put us up in a dump of a motel but with all these great cajun fiddlers, Austin two-step bands, American Indian singers. So we all instantly congregated on the deck outside of the bar and held jam sessions nightly until six in the morning each night. And soon the performances at Centennial Parl became secondary to these incredible jam sessions that would take place.
C: Now just taking those two events into account, do you guys consider yourselves "made" yet?
TM: If anything we're going to have to start cloning ourselves to meet the demands being made on our time. We just started receiving some airplay on some big FM stations and now the ballgame is starting to change. We've gone from the kind of band where it's "Just do your records, and do your thing." to "Jesus, we NEED a video and we need it right now!!" So we're kind of stunned. We spend most of our time being exhausted.
C: Did you guys put out a video for this record?
TM: Yeah, well I got to direct a video for "Put the Lid On It," but then came the one-two punch of that it didn't turn out to be the radio single and MTV wouldn't play it because we intimated that we might burn a house down. We're shooting the video for "Hell" the day we finish this tour. It's my goal to set it up to be as much like the Lawrence Welk show; the way it's lit and shot and the costumes. How can you get any better than that? I really want it to look like a late 60's broadcast.
C: Now is the third record more or less in the can now?
TM: Yeah, just about. It's recorded, mostly mixed and we're going to master it out on the west coast. We recorded it in an old house in my hometown of Pittsboro, North Carolina. We had convinced the label to let us do it ourselves. Instead of going back to a studio, we took the money that was going to be advanced to us and bough or borrowed a bunch of a recording equipment. We brought up Mike Napolitano how worked with us on Hot, and we just set up this house. I mean the plumbing needed fixing, the foundation was rotting, the electric wiring was primitive to say the least and the heat wasn't on. We had to get all this shit fixed up, and get this equipment in, but it was a good old North Carolina house. One room has a high ceiling and it sounds good, and every room has different personalities and we made a record. However hectic and stressful a time it was, I think we knocked one out of the park. I think it's better than the first two put together. We were able to realize more of the production sound that we've been trying to go for even though we were basically reinventing the wheel. Not everything worked out as well as we would have liked, but I think it starts where Hot left off.
C: So how will that work now? I think you called it from the stage, that this would come out in Spring.
TM: Not even brother. Summer or fall. We're pushing it back a little bit because somebody smells money on Hot. We're going to strike a delicate balance, because the band wants to keep rolling and putting out material. I don't want "Hell" to be played into the ground on FM radio and to have people get sick of it. This new one is more like Big Star's Third Record. The songwriting is really great, but there's also times when things kind of break down. We were making weirder sounds on this record than we ever have. I feel like we've gone onto a new level. It was like we were getting our sound on The Inevitable, we became a live band for Hot, and then on this record there's this new thing going on that's weird and great.
C: I know you guys are into people like Cab Calloway and Fats Waller, but do you find yourselves going back to that well for inspiration or is that music around you so much that it's ingrained at this point?
TM: Both. I actually wrote a tribute song to Fats Waller's guitar player Al Casey on this record. I got to meet him and it was the thrill of my life. And I wrote a song for him. There's also a song on there that's kind of a tribute to Cab Calloway. I really didn't think about it when I wrote it, but when it came out, I was definitely going for that Cotton Club orchestra sound. So I always go to that well. But even our weirdest and darkest moments, I think we retain some of that sensibility even though on the face of it what we're doing doesn't bear much of any resemblance. It's just damn good music. Are you saying that we're at the point now where we can be musically self-sufficient?
C: Yeah.
TM: I think we always have been in that we haven't covered people's songs or lifted people's riffs. We've just always tried to go for the emotional nut of the thing and proceed from there.
C: Does anyone ever come up and accuse you of being derivative in that sense?
TM: Never. Never to my face. If some people come away feeling like that, they don't ever tell us about it. Besides by and large, I don't think most people have ever heard of these guys. Rock and roll didn't pick up on a lot of the things that were in pre-war jazz that we like and jazz disassociated itself from it and denied it. And when they do talk about Fats it's much more of a condescending thing. I mean they can't deny how popular he was, but nobody is interested in giving him credit. I think he was the greatest thing in the world.
C: But it's amazing how now that you guys are htting your stride, whether it's commercially or just getting a bigger fan base, you see things like swing nights in Atlanta rock clubs.
TM: Well, that's cool. I don't know how much we had to do with that. Of course everybody wants to contextualize what we're doing, which is the last thing that we want to do.
C: What sort of response do you get from older people?
TM: Overwhelmingly positive when we can reach them. For example, you're not going to reach these people playing the 40 Watt in Athens. But when you do NPR people hear it. When we play early shows in Chapel Hill, for instance, we're able to get the twelve year olds that love us and the seventy year olds. The people seem to be universally excited about it. But the market is devisive where they say "You fit into this six year age range, by God, and we don't expect anybody else to listen to this." And it can be extrapolated just as easily to race. I talked to our label about how can we get black people to come out and they looked at me like I was from Mars. "They have their own charts." is what was told to me. Which is true, but it's FUCKING insane!!
C: But considering some of the roots of the stuff you're doing, it seems sort of logical.
TM: Sure, it did to me too, but that doesn't seem to be theway that things work out. I mean there are black people that are fans of ours, but the percentages are infinitessimal. We don't even physically move in the same circles.
C: Is the dynamic changing for you at all now that things are taking off?
TM: Well we just fired our bass player, which was a traumatic thing to do. That was a thing where friction that might have been there when we were all dishwashing chumps didn't make a difference and now three or four years down the road, we couldn't work together. It was very painful for everybody. When money gets involved everything changes. And when you're not allowed to get together in a relaxed manner and enjoy each others company and play music, it's a sad thing. When we see each other, it's associated with being tired, sick, being on the road, humping and doing our thing. But right now the band's getting along great. We split the publishing money equally, not just to the songwriters. But you know, I've been in the thing for three years now, and one day it will derail, but I'm just trying to do the best job I can now and see this thing through.
