When did you start playing bass?

I started playing guitar about 18 years ago and mostly just taught myself. I have never seen much difference between the technique of playing bass vs. playing guitar so it was natural and easy to switch over, I just had to make my hands a LOT stronger for those thick strings. I picked up a bass because I was tired of knowing a dozen good guitarists for every one mediocre bass player, and when I used to front my own bands, I was always frustrated with the bass players, so I used the 'if you want something done right...' rationale and started playing it myself. I ended up liking it better, if used in an unconventional way, it can add a lot of counter-melody and intricacy to music instead of just following the guitar chords. I use a lot of the techniques I learned from guitar that bass players just don’t do, I have been teased by more 'purist' conventionally trained bass players for playing the bass like it is a guitar, and playing the guitar like it is a bass.

What kind of bass do you play?

My favorite bass, (my 'wife'), is a JBP 'Artist' series acoustic that I have had heavily customized over the years. I played it for the original recordings of Death To Birth and a couple of other tracks, but acoustic basses are limited in their uses, so for most of our studio recordings and live shows I use a 1968 Fender Jazz Bass (my 'mistress') that we picked up in Milan last year. I get a kick out of the fact that it is older than I am and it doesn't even have a scratch on it. She is really beautiful, and sounds really punchy and thick, and probably weighs more than I do. They just don't make 'em like they used to.

How did you become apart of Pagoda?

This is a long story... I was living in Portland as a squatter and gutterpunk, we lived in tribes, slept in the woods, and congregated in parks, under bridges when it rained, and so forth. Me and my 'street' band, Kallisti had become a bit of a local sensation at an open mic run by my friend Jed, we were like the house-band. week after week, all the street kids would congregate in this little punk club to hear us play, and bring other folks with their guitars, and eat free food, and so-on. I was wasting my time in the park one day on 'guard duty' over my friend's backpacks for a couple hours while they ran around town, I was strumming my guitar, waiting for my homies to return, and this new kid comes up. Looks as sloppy and unkempt as the rest of us, but I had never seen him before. "hey can I play your guitar?" and he plucked a couple of chords, we chatted about music for a bit, he said he was from New York and visiting a friend for the weekend. I asked him if he wanted to go play the open mic that night with me and all of my riffraff friends. So my band played the open mic, rocked the house, then we went out to the parking lot to drink cheap wine and smoke cigarettes and listen in through the window as the new kid ('New York Mike' we called him) rocked the house. We were all impressed. He came up to me after and said 'damn! you can play some fuckin BASS!' or something along those lines, and we traded flattery as musicians. He had a recorder at his hotel and wanted to record us... so we went to the hotel and I see that he has a nice recorder, not the sort of thing a gutter punk travels across the country with. I asked him 'what do you do?'... 'oh I'm an actor' yattah yattah we chitchat... turns out he was checking out the west coast local music scene for his character in Last Days, and this 'friend' he was visiting was Gus Van Sant, the director. Well, Mike recorded some tracks of ours (I think he still has them on his hard drive, I'll ask him) and he stayed up all night mixing it in his hotel because he wanted to burn me a CD before he caught his plane in the morning. that's some dedication... I was sleeping across the park from his hotel on a church doorstep with some of my tribe, and at like 4 in the morning, Mike comes by, leaves me a dozen cigarettes and a CD and tells me 'good luck i'm glad i met you' or something like that and i tell him 'thanks for you help' and that was the end of it.... so i thought.... four months later i bumped into him down the street from that same park, he was in town to see Gus again and he had been hanging out trying to run into us... this time he had an email address, but had to run to catch a plane... no time to talk for very long. less than a month later, right after Kallisti had broken up, I get this Email 'I need a bass player, can you come to New York?'. At the time, I had just broken up with my GF, quit my band, living outside, and was working construction for 50 bucks a day, so New York seemed like a pretty cool alternative.... so theres my story....

What other bands were you in before joining Pagoda?

My most recent previous band I played with for about 3 years and was playing with when I met Mike. We were called Kallisti. We started in Olympia, WA. as a full electric art-rock act and gradually made our way to Portland OR, where we traded our amps for acoustics and became kind of street-rock gutter punks. Kallisti was a soap opera, plagued by artistic egos and creative headbutting between me and the other co-founder but I loved the music we made, someday I want to go and finish what we started when I have time. Before that I was working with Sundoze in chicago for about 2 years, which was kind of Radiohead-esque and (we thought) destined for greatness. I have filled in with a number of bands ranging from Johnny Cash covers to 'The Indestructable Battle Robots of Death' which did death-metal-techno remakes of horrible 80's pop music. Right now I am also sitting behind the drums for another New York band called Lower 48, which makes insane dance punk music and throws one hell of a party.

How far along is "House of Worship" from being completed?

well.... I have already done my part in that process. All of the songs have been written and recorded and mixed already. It is out of my hands at this point. I think what remains to be done is to pick which songs to put on it (we have almost 40 songs recorded, so narrowing it down is no easy task) and figure out what to do about the artwork and stuff like that, and figure out how to get it distributed. I honestly don't know for sure but I am hoping for November. I really don't make those decisions, I mostly just play.

Will any of the five songs from the demo EP end up on the album?

I am not sure what songs are on the EP, I don't even own a copy of it. I imagine some of them will, but not all, that way people who have the EP can have something special in their collection. Once again I don't make these decisions.

What's your favorite song that you've done for the album so far?

that's an odd question. Its like picking your favorite friend or playing favorites with kids. From a purely egotistical point of view, I have to pick the ones with basslines I am especially proud of or that are fun to play. There's a song called 'Gulp' which I think is really pretty and allows me to do some intricate melody work, and another called 'Never Was' which lets me show off a lot and fly all over the neck of my bass. I listen more to the musical riffs than the lyrics, so my picks tend towards the more complex arrangements rather than the meanings behind the songs.

Last month MTV reported that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth were interested in signing Pagoda to their Ecstatic Peace label. Was there any progress made with that? Is it still a possibility?

I think so. Michael is friends with Thurston more than I am, I have only met him a few times, but he was really cool, encouraging and enthusiastic. He was right up by the stage when we played at Cannes last spring and hopping up and down rockin out to us, so I think he digs the sound. It was a funny feeling when I think back that I was doing the same thing at one of his shows as a starstruck kid about 10 years ago.

It's been revealed that the Last Days DVD will contain a music video as one of its features. For which Pagoda song is this and can you tell us anymore about the video?

I don't know much about Last Days, I went to the screening in NYC and played the release party in France, but I had nothing to do with making the movie, that's all Mike's project. Pagoda is a separate entity from the movie. Its easy to get that confused and overlapped since Mike is involved with both. I know they used 2 of our songs on their soundtrack which was very nice of them, but I don't know about a video. I haven't been in a shoot for one (yet?). My guess is that they will use Death-To-Birth because Mike actually plays a solo accoustic version of it in the film.

One of the things people who write in to the site seem to like most about the band is the use of cellos... Who plays cello in Pagoda?

His name is Indigo. He is from a little town somewhere in Vermont and he is studying music in NYC. It was a fluke that we found him. He responded to an on-line flyer and was one of a few Cellists we had to audition. They were all good, but Indie stood out because he wasn't playing cello like a classically trained player, he recognized the experimental nature of our stuff and played along more like Hendrix or something. I remember looking at Mike and him looking at me almost simultaneously while Indie was just noodling around over the top of Sadartha, our mouths were hanging open and our eyes were wide and the look on both our faces was something like 'dang I wish we were recording this', and that was his first time hearing it. That plus he was a really nice guy and we all got along with him from the first time we met him. He is immensely talented, I have seen him pick up other instruments that he isn't familiar with and just figure out how they work in a few minutes, its really amazing. What 'closed the deal' with him is that he didn't ask anything like "is this a paying gig", which would immediately make him a session-musician and not a member of the band. He adds his own parts in his own way instead of playing some sheet music he's been given. He came with us to Europe last spring and I shared hotel rooms with him, which was the first time I had hung out with him in a non-rehearsal setting and he turned out to be really cool, very humble about his talent when he doesn't have to be, we really lucked out when we found him.

What's been the best show you've played so far?

My personal favorite was at a club in Paris called 'Le Pupin'... the stage was ridiculous, it was about 4 feet wide and stretched along the back of the room so we were all in a line, instead of the usual arrangement of drummer behind band, front man in the front, and side men on the sides. Very awkward stage to play on, but the crowd was SO cool. This was only a couple of days after the Cannes party we played, where we were sort of like a sideshow for the movie release, but in Paris, they weren't there for the movie, I doubt if many of them had any idea there was any connection, they were there for a show and they rocked out to it, and we all had this pent up energy from the surreal experiences at Cannes so we were playing hard and intense.

Are you currently playing with any other bands? I know when Mike and Ryan are working on films, there must be a lot of down time.

I recently did a show where I played drums for my friends (and former temporary roommates) band Lower 48 at the DeLancey in Manhatten. I have done a couple of shows with them, but I doubt if it is a permanent thing as I am not primarily a drummer and I know one day they will want someone who is. They are really good, but very different from Pagoda. They have a MySpace page too whoever reads this may want to check it out. The downtime can be frustrating since its hard for me to hold a 'day-job' because I have to suddenly get a week off here or there for band stuff ("gee, sorry boss, I gotta go to France for a couple of weeks, can you cover my shift?"), so I do odd jobs from craigslist and so forth. I work on my own music sometimes where I sing and play guitar solo. I am kind of a nomad, so when Mike or Ryan have acting work, I just wander off with a backpack and a guitar and occupy myself in other ways - seeing the world - visiting old friends -etc. (like for instance discovering 'myspace' and answering interview questions)

What influenced you to get into music?

When I was little and my family first came to the States, we drove around from state to state in this little VW Camper, and there were 4 cassette tapes that we listened to over and over, Simon and Garfunkel Troubled Water, Beethoven's 9th, the Beatles Sgt. Pepper, and Bob Dylan grt hits. I think those were four major influences on my interest in music - all radically different but intricate in their own way - Simon n Garf. had their harmonies, the Beatles broke so many boundaries and experimented with so much different sound, Dylan was so poetic and direct and political, Beethoven was so raw and powerful and dark compared to other classical and romantic composers. I used to harmonize to Beatles and Simon n Garf. and my mom taught me a couple of guitar chords when I was about 8 or 9. I played in Orchestra in high school, but really I loved the guitar, because I could accompany my own voice with it and play my own songs. That's all well and good if music is just a hobby, but to take myself seriously as a 'musician' first and foremost, really I think it ultimately comes down to not being very good at anything else.

Any last words?

ummm.... stay in school....? no seriously, at the risk of sounding cheesy, I want people to know that we are grateful that so many people have shown an interest in our music. We love it, (otherwise we wouldn't play it)and it is good to know that someone else gets some enjoyment from what we are doing. I want to thank anyone and everyone who has given us their ears for a moment in time, and anyone who has introduced their friends to it. We appreciate it.
luv n stuv
Jme