Haunted House

[October 2009]

This year is a big year for Minneapolis’s Haunted House. Not only are they attempting to release three albums between now and next summer, but their music is taking a new direction, especially in the live setting. Indeed, it’s been a long road since the band’s debut as "Andrew W.K. as an Enya-inspired drunken blackout."

Over the course of six months, Tiny Mix Tapes worked on an epic interview with Mike Watton, the founder of Haunted House. But while it took months to complete, we feel that much closer to understanding the Haunted House mystique, Sparks, Morris Day, and Greg Ginn’s Grateful Dead fandom.

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Let’s start by bring everyone up to date. Fill me in on the last few years for Haunted House.

When I moved to Chapel Hill in 2006, I had maybe 8-10 songs worked out that I had done since recording "Upper Class Red White Living," our 2nd album. When I say "songs" I’m saying I had the keyboard part worked out and maybe a vague idea of where I wanted it to go from there. When I moved to Oakland, I slept on the couch of Clipd Beaks, whom you may have heard of. I finally got my own place after getting a job with a casino company in Oakland. I worked from 8 p.m. until 4:30 a.m., sitting on blackjack tables and watched the players and dealers for cheating. I would have to pay the winners and take money from the losers, everyone trying to fuck me over every time, the amounts occasionally in the thousands.

It was hell in a lot of ways, but I was settled down finally, so I started working on music. This went on for about a year, the remainder of my stay in Oakland. At the end of that time I had 37 songs I wanted to use. I missed Minneapolis, wanted to work on this stuff with the band, so I went back. The guy who had been drumming (Cole Claerhout) is an amazing guitarist, so we put him there. We had both gotten really into the ’70s band Sparks and we wanted to work that influence a bit, so guitar was necessary. We kept the same bass player (Jon Davis), and got an amazing drummer named Adam Patterson. Cole and I worked out all 37 of the songs in my basement, him playing drums and guitar, me writing lyrics and singing over the keyboards, guitars and drums on a 4-track. Then we worked out a handful of those songs with the other two to do live. We played shows around Minneapolis for a while, then went in the studio and recorded all 37, the live drummer playing on the tracks he knew, Cole doing the others, except for 3 I played drums on.

We picked up another drummer when the first drummer went away for a couple of months. He is an 18-year-old kid, just out of high school. We didn’t want to teach him any songs, so we decided to improv all our shows, make it seem like we were playing songs, but we actually had no idea what we would do. It was a lot weirder than the pop stuff we usually do. When the regular drummer got back, we put some of the songs back in, but still improvising between songs.

We’re kind of like the Grateful Dead; we don’t have a set list, and we jam a lot, while still playing some rehearsed songs. We did a show with Ariel Pink a few months ago, and he didn’t show until 1 a.m. because of weather, so we did a 90-minute set, which included only 7 actual songs. The set had a 10-minute drum solo. Lately we’ve worked with some other drummers, Colin Johnson from Vampire Hands, Dosh, Freddy from Skoal Kodiak, which is a Minneapolis band everyone should see. This year we are working on releasing 3 albums called Guess Who’s Not Coming To Dinner, Lesh Is More (named after the Grateful Dead bass player), and Ravage Through The Bum’s Hair. The last one is supposed to include a video game of the same name, but that’s probably a pipe dream. You would have to find different items in the hair of street people, who get progressively more dangerous as you advance through the levels.

In some circles, mentioning the Grateful Dead is like tolling the death knell. What’s your thoughts on the Dead?

I love the Grateful Dead. My dad got me into them in junior high. I had every album after a couple years, plus some shirts, comic books, some other stuff. Teachers at my high school were giving me condolences when Jerry Garcia died. Even after I got into punk shortly after, I never bought into the whole "you have to think the Dead is uncool" thing. That’s absurd. I love seeing old pictures of Greg Ginn playing in Black Flag wearing a Dead shirt, pissing off all the skinheads. It was seriously uncool, but I’m pretty sure that I was the only teenager running around Des Moines growing his hair out and being super into Nirvana, but at the time being positive that American Beauty was the best album ever. I even love listening to the ’70s studio albums that so many people like to diss. Wake Of The Flood is one of the most underrated albums ever made. One from the ’60s, Anthem Of The Sun is absolutely one of the most artistically interesting albums ever made, and one of the best overall. I wish I had gotten to see them. But Jon and I are both huge fans, so it was kind of a natural to think of them more when we started improving our live shows more. When doing some rehearsed songs with a lot of jamming between, they’re kind of the godfathers. But as far as people who think that it’s uncool to be into the Dead because hippies are lame or whatever, screw them, they’ll get theirs. Colin from Vampire Hands is super big into them too, it’s nice to have some backup around here. He just got me into Garcia, Jerry’s solo record, which is totally chainless.

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"It’d be fun to have a CD booklet like every band in the ’90s where every page would be the lyrics to a song with an out-of-focus picture of a flower or something."
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How do you explain the differences between the way your earlier stuff sounded and your newest output?

I think when I first started doing Haunted House I had a more focused sense of what kind of music I wanted to make. The whole "Andrew WK-meets-Enya that you can dance to" thing. There was a lot of hip-hop on my mind at that time too, which I don’t know if you can really hear or not. Its probably there in the dancy-ness of it. But as I kept at it, I decided to acknowledge more music that I’m really into in the music that I make. Stuff like Germs, Can, Swell Maps, Radiohead, Sparks. So those things merged into what I had been doing. And as I got more comfortable playing with people live, I thought about what other instruments should do while writing on the keyboard, and it became more of a band thing from that. The other guys being so good at what they do definitely has made a huge mark. So it was just a willingness to add more of what I like and playing live as a band that did it.

These songs have a much less gritty and distorted feel - is there a concious effort to clean up your sound?

Yeah, I would’ve recorded the early stuff at the most expensive studio in LA if I could’ve. It sounds shitty because that’s what I was able to do on my own. I had a digital recorder and put everything in the red. I wonder if a lot of the bands that are doing that now would sound better if they had the means or the technical know-how. I definitely would have. I had this huge, pristine wall of sound in my head. I would’ve liked it to hit people like a tsunami of laundry detergent, in a very pleasurable sense. But it turned into something else out of trying to make it that way when it was totally impossible, and I’m happy with it. I’d like to re-record that first album in a studio though and see what would happen.

Did you keep the 18-year-old drummer when the regular drummer got back?

Oh yeah, he’s awesome. Karl Tabeest is his name, he drummed in this noise band in Minneapolis called Sarah Johnson for quite awhile. One of the other guys in that band recommended him to us when we needed someone to fill in, and I wasn’t sure because he seemed to be very harsh, musically speaking, in Sarah Johnson. But the first time we played with him we just jammed and it was perfect. The guy is an incredible drummer. He made us sound like Can when we were sick of playing our songs and just winged it live. He’s just an awesome drummer, and when you put him together with Adam Patterson it’s amazing. I’m pretty sure that if nothing else, no other band can fuck with our live rhythm section, taking them along with Jon Davis. I wish we could go back and do our recording with this lineup. I like the fact that we have an age range of 18-32 in the band. Unfortunately he’s just moved to Florida to attend some sort of accelerated dental school, but we should get back together with him when he comes back next year.

One of my biggest complaints about Haunted House has been that the lyrics are so good, but I can’t hardly understand them. Are you going to include the lyrics with the release? Do you want to share some of your favorites with us?

The first album is like that because of all the crazy fx and layering I was doing with them. I think it’s possibly even worse now for a few reasons - a lot of them are hard to sing first off, and I’m no professional. But also, we recorded 37 songs, did at least two layers of vocals on all those, and we did all that in maybe a day-and-a-half. I was shredded. I can really hear it on a few of them. But when you have time constraints in a studio that you’re paying for, that’s what you have to do. It wasn’t ideal. I wish we recorded in the Seychelles and I could stroll on the beach and drink a beer out of a coconut between vocal takes. Next time, for sure. But I think I’m pretty good at making lyrics. As for other musicians, I really only think about Darby Crash and Leonard Cohen. So many bands just try to come up with lyrics that sound like "rock lyrics" so a lot of it is just being really sure to not sound like that cliche. But mainly, it’s thinking about images. Movie scenes that I make up in my head. Or just natural settings, and emotions like anxiety. I like to think about lush tropical settings and put some violent, hallucenigenic anxiety into it. I feel like I do that exact thing in damn-near every song. We probably will just put the lyrics online somewhere, it takes too much space in an album. It’d be fun to have a CD booklet like every band in the ’90s where every page would be the lyrics to a song with an out-of-focus picture of a flower or something. But that probably won’t happen. As far as personal favorites, I’m partial to the An island of flowers shot into space, gardened by the girl from the red corvette/Out on the highway in the summer sun they could freeze to death line from "Ravage Through The Bum’s Hair."

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"The only flaw is that it’s actually considered a compliment or an honor if Morris Day throws you in a dumpster, it’s not an insult."
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I’m assuming you’ve seen Purple Rain. If not, that’s absurd. But I figure you have, and I wonder how you feel about that movie.

It’s a pretty realistic portrayal of how everything goes down in Minneapolis. There’s a lot of coordinated dancing in the balconies at shows, especially when Wolf Eyes comes through. I, and everyone I know, puts their coat over puddles before walking through them. The only flaw is that it’s actually considered a compliment or an honor if Morris Day throws you in a dumpster, it’s not an insult.

Where do you place music in your life?

Extremely high. But not to the point where I want to be living in a garage when I’m 60 with no health insurance because I wanted to spend years riding around in a van with some dudes and sleeping in some cat piss in Missouri. Totally love it though, playing it and listening to it.

Since returning to Minneapolis, what has been the response from people who were familiar with the early Haunted House? How do they react to the changes in format (from the Karaoke-style to an improv style)?

I don’t know, some people like it. Some people definitely do. No one would say they don’t like it as much, it just isn’t the kind of town where you get negative feedback to your face. Sometimes not even positive feedback, people are just very reserved around here. But very, very few people are going to come up to you at your show and be like "I don’t like it." Gotta save that shit for the internet, or maybe you hear from somebody way down the line that anonymous people aren’t digging it. It’s probably like that almost anywhere I suppose. Nobody wants to make waves. Also, with a couple exceptions, this is very much a three-and-a-half-minute-rock-song town. And some people here do it quite well, but no one’s going to freak out over improvised kraut-noise Garcia jams.

Tell me more about ’70s Sparks, at least what you know.

Sparks are a very mysterious band to me, and I kinda like it that way. I know about the Mael brothers being from LA and taking off for the UK, in the late ’60s I think, getting a backing band once they got over there and making it big. Ron Mael has a huge Air Jordan collection. But that’s about it.

Are you releasing all three albums at once, or at least this year?

We were trying to figure this out for a long time, whether to release them all at once, separately, just do 18 7"s, a 2.5-hour song on iTunes or whatever else. We’ve got 3 albums plus leftover material that we like. I think it makes more sense to do the three albums separately, it’s kind of a load to listen to all at once, especially since it’s all similar stylistically, so we might as well spread them out a little. So the plan is to have Guess Who’s Not Coming To Dinner this October, Lesh Is More in February or March, and Ravage Through The Bum’s Hair in the summer.

Where do you see Haunted House going now?

I don’t know for sure. I’ve started working on some stuff in the same way that I used to, just me and my keyboard, but I’m leaving it way more sparse, because I’d like to work with the other guys more in the writing process. The other guys are just too good not to. I feel pretty absurd standing onstage with the other 4 guys, they’re all a lot better than I am, at least technically. It’s pretty great to be able to come up with songs and have OJ’s legal team come play behind them. I’ve always enjoyed the mix of personalities, so it’s our own little village of love.

Um, not to offend, but it seems you’re saying you’re getting away with murder because your back-up band helps cover up the evidence of your technical in-expertise. Do you feel somewhat self-conscious or bashful about your music, or am I reading too much into this?

Haha, no, I get what you’re saying, "OJ = murder"? Not at all. The ’27 Yankees maybe? Point being, it’s a strange position to be in when you’re not a technically distinguished musician, yet you’re in a band where everyone else definitely is, and you’re the frontman. I think I know how to make things interesting in a different way than most, but I’m not like the other people I play with. It is totally great to write stuff and have such serious muscle to come fill it out.

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