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Bon Jovi, the Breeders and Sonny Rollins will never walk into a bar together
Published on 6/30/08
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Thee Oh Sees frontman John Dwyer napped right through the appointed time of our interview. “It was pure laziness,” the San Francisco resident later admits over the phone, before letting loose a shamelessly mammoth yawn. Dwyer, a high-energy motormouth, has probably been called many things, but lazy wouldn’t be one of them. Since the early ’00s he’s been a constant presence in underground rock, the kind of guy who builds up healthy discographies with multiple groups, some overlapping, others leading into new projects more or less accidentally, with band names changing haphazardly and peripheral musicians coming, going and being stolen from yet more outfits. Anything but linear, Dwyer’s bustling résumé includes the manic garage trio Coachwhips, noise duo Pink and Brown (he was Pink), scorching garage-rockers the Hospitals and even the oddball techno identity Zeigenbock Kopf.
Dwyer’s newest group, thee Oh Sees, has a stylishly taut, maddeningly catchy new album, The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In. But as things go with Dwyer, thee Oh Sees aren’t as new as they seem. The band began in 2003 as OCS (later the Ohsees), a home-recording project conjured while Dwyer was still tearing it up with Coachwhips, which remains his best-known group by dint of its frantic touring and unhinged performances (which usually took place on floors rather than stages). “Yeah, I was doing more drugs back then,” Dwyer says cheerily about one SXSW a few years ago, when Coachwhips seemed to play a dozen times in five days. “We were franchising that year, too—that asshole only looked like me.”
While not raging with Coachwhips, Dwyer was laying down some very different sounding demos, “late-night four-track stuff, ideas that wouldn’t work in the band.” Dwyer is now up to album No. 8 with OCS/the Ohsees/thee Oh Sees. He’s not sure exactly when it went down, but Coachwhips amicably split up around the time OCS started to become a proper band. “Um, that was two or three years ago?” he half asks. “It’s hard to time-frame stuff—what seems like two years to me could be five for everybody else. I started playing with Patrick Mullins, a noise guy out here who also played brush drums. We did stuff in the kitchen—a lot of weed-smoking and trying to find reverb tanks and amplifiers to make the music seem really underwater.” The sound, an alluringly drowsy sort of guitar exotica mixed with rootsy folk, was a shock only to those Coachwhips fans who didn’t know Dwyer. “John’s a master of traits and guises,” says Kelley Stoltz, a San Francisco musician and producer who recorded thee Oh Sees’ 2007 album, Sucks Blood. “He’s one of those people who can play any kind of music he wants, and his attention moves from one thing to the next really quickly.”
Given that, it’s not too surprising that thee Oh Sees would bring Dwyer back to where he once was. “The further I got from Coachwhips’ sound,” he remembers, “the more I wanted to do it again.” He recounts the rest of the metamorphosis from OCS to thee Oh Sees like he’s ticking off an afternoon’s errands. “Patrick moved, and I got a more rock-based drummer; picked up Petey Dammit to play guitar, and Brigid was just kind of a lucky score.” Let’s hope Brigid, whose last name is Dawson, isn’t offended by that, because her presence in the band is crucial. Besides balancing her tattooed guitarists’ boyishness with a low-key glamour, she makes a perfect foil for Dwyer, their high voices elevating the spectral vibe of the band’s heavily reverbed rock. “Brigid’s really good at picking out her own direction inside a song,” Dwyer says. “She taught me to harmonize.”
Though it was a zigzagging path that led Dwyer to The Master’s Bedroom, the album could be seen as an unplanned negotiation between Coachwhips’ manic energy and the earlier Oh Sees material. People would go berserk at Coachwhips shows, pressing in on the trio as it played; fights and injuries were not uncommon. That chaotic vibe is tamped down and tightened up on The Master’s Bedroom, allowing fans to dance instead of spaz, and the copious reverb “turns me on and covers up any mistakes we make,” Dwyer attests. “I still get stupid occasionally,” he remarks, thinking back to a Coachwhips gig that he played on top of a washing machine. “I will fall down if a show needs it, but that’s a last resort these days. I mean, we actually play on stages half the time now. I’m 33; I take naps. I love a nap, man.”
Thee Oh Sees’ The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In is out now on Tomlab.
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