Chris Kurtz

PROBE

Poptart Monkeys
(continued)

By Alyce Wilson

ALYCE: It's an old story, too. So many great bands never even make it to M-TV because they just can't get it together. Are you still doing those Spring Break gigs?

JAMES: Yep.

ALYCE: What's that like? What kind of energy's going on down there [in Florida]?

JAMES: Well, first of all, the room that we're in, we're right next to the beach. ... So, before they kick the air conditioner on, right when you get there, you have that beach, hot humid smell. It just has that certain...

ALYCE: Is it good or bad?

JAMES: You leave your guitars there overnight, you come back and your strings are rusted. Because of the salt water, the air. It's amazing.

ALYCE: Wow.

JAMES: Now, you sweat. You sweat a lot. ... There's people coming in there that look like they just came off the beach. ... But it's a whole new atmosphere for us, because you've got people from all over the U.S. ... This guy comes up to me: "I live in Ohio. I seen you at Spring Break last year; I'm coming down for Spring Break this year just to see you." They live in Ohio, but they went to Florida -- they won't go to Pennsylvania. ... We have a mailing list, like an e-mail list, and we have fans from, you know, Texas, Michigan, Alabama, you know, wherever. Germany. ...

...

ALYCE: I was asking (James) about the song, "Star Washed" ... I can hear that being a hit. ... But then, the lyrics ... There's no way you could play that on the radio. Was that intentional, or was that something where you were having fun, and you didn't think about?

CHRIS: ... I know me and Bill (Talanca), I can speak for Bill on this one, we want to convey a certain emotion, which is what a good song does. It brings out an emotion. If it makes you move, it makes you sad, it makes you think of old times, it's a good song. And one thing that me and him pretty much, when we write songs, we have blinders to the whole marketing angle, whatever radio stations are going to do to make money off it, whatever they're going to do. If we want to say, "I have a fucking splitting fucking headache," we're going to say that, and we're not going to say, "Oh, my head hurts real bad" just because they won't play it on the radio.

... Rob (Hampton), for instance would be on the other side of the fence. And he's the business type of guy. What's it going to take to get our song on the radio, what's it going to take to (hit this type of market). And that's his point of view with everything in the band. But you know that's his department, so. ... It kind of clashes with creative things like that. I know we have, sometimes we have discussions about that on the way to shows. Me and Bill have always been that way, if that's the feeling that we want to convey. You know, when you go to a friend and you say, when you drop something on the floor, you're at home cooking, you don't say, "Oh, dang," you say "Shit." And people can relate to that.... I don't go looking, saying, "I need to put a bad word in just to make it cool or impress my friends" or nothing like that. But it's mostly to convey a certain emotion.

ALYCE: Or in this case, just making it funny.

CHRIS: Off the wall.

BILL: ... Like he said, it's a feeling thing, and most of the time that's how we feel. Whether it's serious or funny, that's just how we felt at the time.

ALYCE: He was telling me that you write most of the songs?

BILL: I came up with a lot of the hooks.

ALYCE: Okay. Who does the lyrics? Or is that everybody?

BILL: That's kind of a group effort.

CHRIS: Yeah. Pretty much all the band there.

BILL: The song, "Star Washed"? That's (Chris's) baby.

CHRIS: What was happening was, my first CD effort with the guys ... So I wanted to step up to the plate in some aspects. And what happened was, every time we went into the studio Bill was coming up with these great hooks, and we'd finish them as a whole at practice, and I just felt that I wasn't really doing my part. I kind of approached it, like... Bill will come up with a cool riff, a cool sound, a cool ditty, and he'll bring it to us and he'll say, "This is what I have, let's work on it." As a whole we'll all sit around and add to it, and it will become a song.

... I took a different approach. I did all of it at home; I wrote it from start to finish: lyrics, and pretty much the whole arrangement of it, and I brought it to the band in hopes that they would like it, but if they didn't, that's fine, too. But I really didn't want too many things changed with it 'cause I wanted to keep the same feel, and we have a habit of ... Bill gets frustrated sometimes when he brings something to us: I won't see it the same way, or Paul won't see it the same way, and we'll end up changing it to where he hadn't envisioned it. So that's kind of a frustration. ... So I feared that.

ALYCE: I'm thinking, now that I know how that song was written compared to some of your other songs, maybe that's why that's the one that I picked out ... because it does have a unique, a single voice, and I think that's typically what you hear on the radio, whereas the rest of the music, is so much more complicated: it's a choir of voices.

BILL: What you're saying is, his is more directed... Where our music, year after year gets more complicated.

CHRIS: A chorus will go to here and it changes emotion. And the verse will be here ... whatever the emotions are of the band. And I just took the whole, "Okay, I'm in a good mood and I want to write a funny, zany song," and I was the only one entering input to it. So ... what did I do with the strings I brought in?

ALYCE: There's some broken ones on the floor, if you want those.

CHRIS: There they are.

ALYCE: I'm thinking, too, about how it seems that what you're doing is almost like solidifying what a jam band might do. You put it all together, and then you perform it that way.

CHRIS: Right.

ALYCE: Whereas, a jam band will step out on the stage and they'll have something they'll build off, and it could go a million different ways, and they could throw in this kind of sound and that kind of sound ...

CHRIS: That's a good point, because that's kind of like our song-writing practices. We are, when we do write, it kinda turns into that. We'll just keep playing it until someone comes up with something that all of us like, which doesn't happen much, but it will just take its direction as, like you said, as we jam it together. And we'll all have five different inputs into it.

BILL: Writing sucks. It does.

ALYCE: It's a painful process. Does it bring you closer?

BILL: No.

CHRIS: [laughs]

BILL: After the finished product... Then it's oh, my god!

CHRIS: Yeah, then it's cool. ... If we're the ones that it came out the way we envisioned it. There might be a guy sitting in the corner going, "This is not how I was thinking this song was going to sound like."

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