Girls Against Boys

A phone interview combined with an actual live music experience. No I didn’t go thrift store shopping or sit down to have lunch with Girls Against Boys. You see I am socially inept and poverty stricken. This magazine isn’t financed by car dealers, boom box peddlers or commodity brokers. It isn’t subsidized by a corporation either. Since I was busy selling last minute Mother’s Day gifts to the clueless I arrived too late to view Les Thugs or Therapy?. All I saw when I entered the sweet smell of the Bar & Grill was the headliners. Call me a frat boy. Actually I was too cheap to buy drinks at the bar so I sat in my car in the Sears parking lot drinking Old Style until Girls Against Boys began.

The press is correct, their hair never gets messed up. It is the audience’s hair that gets messed up. Fucking rhythmic noise. How could it not be rhythmic when there are two bass players and an uncompromising drummer. They played all the hit songs from their “records” and videos that are in heavy rotation on MTV and at the local “active” music, “alternative” stations. The milkman was absent, probably parked at the smelly lake, but there were photographers with perfect hair and goatees in abundance. The Bar & Grill oversold the show (hope the fire marshall isn’t reading). It was a mess. I think a mess is what Girls Against Boys make of girls’ panties so it was cool. Unlike more “popular” bands (the offspring) Girls Against Boys delivered the best album of their careers to Touch and Go before heading off to the “big show.” They also delivered on the live experience. I’m glad I saw them this time through and I hope they play a “shed” next time, I won’t be there, but fuck all that (Sweet F.A.).

I had a phone conversation with the Girls Against Boys drummer Alexis Fleisig before they arrived. I am an expert at talking to drummers. They are the only band members I ever talk to. 

SLUG: Do you have any worst venue stories? 

Fleisig: We used to play a lot of squats in Europe and those were always a lot of fun because they’d always be…sometimes they were really cool, but other times they’d just be totally falling apart, lots of stray dogs running around. Plus there’s speed metal playing all the time and basically a pretty terrible situation. 

SLUG: How about a favorite place to play? 

Fleisig: We played a bar one time in Cologne, Germany and we got to the show and the owner didn’t even know we were playing. He was excited to have us anyway, so we set up. It was such a tiny little restaurant/bar place that we set up inside a little booth. We crammed all of our stuff inside a little wood booth. We played in a five foot square area. 

SLUG: How did the idea of using two basses in a band come about? 

Fleisig: We had a song a long time ago that Eli (Janny, bass/ keyboards/ vocals) played bass for. When we actually went to play live Johnny (Temple, bass) was playing bass so Eli didn’t have anything to do. For a while he tried to come up with a keyboard line, but then he decided that he would play the bass part also. It worked out really well. It was very cool. It sounded very heavy and extra atmospheric. We started trying to write more songs like that. A whole bunch of new ideas came out of having two basses instead of just one. 

SLUG: Was Eli originally the keyboard player?

Fleisig: He was originally everything. Mostly keyboards and bass. Scott (McCloud, vocals/guitar) did a lot of guitar stuff.

SLUG: When you have an album as good as House of GVSB how do you go about picking “Superfire” as the single?

Fleisig: It was really hard. We had to make a lot of different choices. We had to decide between different songs that we liked that we thought would make good singles. We’re going to do another single I think. We’ll have to do it again. We wanted to pick a song that was more indicative of what we normally sound like. That seemed like a good choice. It was a little different from what we normally sound like, but it also had a lot of the same elements. 

Girls Against Boys are now signed to Geffen Records. This next question isn’t one of those “sell-out” questions. It is about the current state of music retailing. Small independent stores (mom and pops) are waging a battle with huge corporations selling CDs at or near cost. Consumers appear happy to spend their money in these stores and most would care less about the mom and pops. As mom and pops go out of business independent labels and breaking bands are, in a growing number of instances, finding it more and more difficult to reach their audience. The conspiratorial nature continues because corporations are snatching up two, three, four and more radio stations in each market. I asked Fleisig what he thought.

SLUG: Possibly more frightening than the major Vs indie labels subject is the indie Vs chain store subject. Does it really matter what label you’re on when retailing and the radio airplay is controlled by huge corporations?

Fleisig: They can never cut into the music that the mom and pop store sell. They can’t sell that kind of music because it is not profitable for them so they won’t. There will always be a niche for mom and pop stores to sell really cool records that chains just won’t sell. I don’t know how much something like Bush would sell in a mom and pop store anyway. I don’t think that people who go to mom and pop stores really buy that kind of stuff anyway. That’s my guess. It is a problem. It does matter what label you’re on. If you’re on an indie, it is really hard to get into the big chains. If you’re in a major then little chains aren’t interested in stocking your record. The big corporations are going to have more leverage to what they do. More control over everybody. 

SLUG: What would you do if you weren’t in a band?

Fleisig: I don’t know, I’d probably be working on houses right now.

Read more interviews from the SLUG Archives:
Interview: Son Volt
Van Gogh’s Daughter