 |
| “What I didn’t like about the other records is that our live energy didn’t come across at all,” says Bailey Smith (snarling on the right), “not even on one song.” |
For eight years now, Morning 40 Federation has been as well known for its drinking as it is for its raucous, horn-driven blend of rock ’n’ roll, soul and theater. That might be an inevitable byproduct of naming your band after the pledge to drink a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor for breakfast, or, it might be the result of drinking a lot. Whatever the case, it hasn’t interfered with the band developing a loyal international following of people who have seen the band’s shows in New Orleans during Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest. Those nights inevitably turn into the sort of wild, sweaty dance parties that everyone involved is still getting over the next day.
Guitarist Ryan Scully is trying to shake off his Super Bowl at happy hour Monday. He bet on the Seattle Seahawks and once the tide started to turn against him, well, so did the evening. Band mate Bailey Smith shows Scully a bruise on his arm from where he socked him last night, and Scully flickers with recognition. We’re in One Eyed Jacks, the New Orleans club Smith books, and where the band played with R&B outlaw Andre Williams on New Year’s Eve. Since Morning 40 Federation (Scully, Smith, Josh Cohen, Mike Andrepont, Rick Hukill and Steve Calandra) is playing SXSW this year (sponsored by OffBeat) as is Williams, they talk about hoping to meet up while there.
They’re also guardedly excited about the upcoming Morning 40 Federation album, tentatively titled Ticonderoga — “It’s Indian for ‘The land between two bodies of water,’” Scully explains — and it will be the band’s second national album for M80 Records. The first, Morning 40 Federation, was released in 2004, and it collected highlights from the first two independent releases, You My Brother and Trick Nasty. It only hints at how hard the band can be live, though with the lesser ideas on those albums pared away, the band’s ability to write good songs becomes clearer. The new album was produced at Piety Street Studios by Mark Bingham, and Smith says, “I think when you hear the record, you’ll be impressed with how tight it is. It’s more cohesive than our other records. Mark Bingham produced it and he kept us from going too far out, but at the same time, he went far out in his own way.”
Smith: Before we went in the recording studio, we played three nights at Café Brasil. Mark he set up in the next room and recorded three nights so we could all listen to it and figure out exactly what we were trying to get. What I didn’t like about the other records is that our live energy didn’t come across at all. Not even on one song. Doing that gave us a good idea of what we were trying to do in the studio and helped a lot. We knew what we wanted to capture, but we didn’t want to do a document.
Scully: We also played all in the same room, so it has a lot of the energy we have live. But, I’ve always thought it was stupid to try to [capture that energy] because you can never achieve it. When you listen to a record at home, it’s not like being in a room with a few hundred people, everybody’s drunk and dancing — to try to get that on a recording is impossible. But we did pretty good. It’s got a more visceral feel than our other records.
I think that’s the great New Orleans challenge, capturing a live band’s charms on recordings.
Smith: It’s easy to not concentrate on that here. The life of our band seems to be going well, but it really just consists of playing out and having really good shows in the city, basically. We get a lot from that, so it’s easy to not concentrate on making a really good record. A year and a half will go by and we haven’t done anything but play shows because you can do that here.
Scully: I know what you mean, though, because a lot of bands have made some pretty candyass records here that don’t sound anything like they do live. I don’t know if that’s just New Orleans or if other cities are like that.
This is a city that is so much about the experience that I doubt many people are really thinking about making good records.
Scully: Not enough people are making records as records, utilizing the tools they have, making it sound better than you do live. Because you have all the tools there, you can trick time and do whatever you want. I think we utilized the tools in the studio and got a live feel —
Smith: — because the basic tracks came from playing in the big room together. It wasn’t recorded doctor’s office style. We suffered from that a couple of times before, recording in little cubicles. You can’t animalize like we’re used to. That was Mark Bingham’s thing: “Alright, animalize!” He was a very good facilitator. Right after we started tracking, he called me and said, “How do we make this record like AC/DC’s Back in Black, something that will be on a bar jukebox 15 years from now?” That’s what he was thinking about.
So you plan to go on tour when this CD comes out?
Smith: We just got an RV to tour in.
Scully: A nice one. It only has 12,000 miles.
Smith: We’ve ridden around in some death traps. We had a big diesel vehicle that was a prisoner transport bus from Florida that we bought from a cycling team. Cycling stickers all over it. Lock cages inside and primitive bunks they put in there, and a fast food table. We drove around in that for a long time, and when you woke up, you’d blow your nose and have black snot because the fumes were kicking back into the bus.
Scully: You couldn’t roll the windows down because prisoners can’t do that. It was horrible.
Smith: If you wanted to go up front to sit in the seating area, you had to pass a cigarette through to the driver before he’d open the cage. It was 29 feet long.
Remember Harper’s Ferry? It was winter and we were sliding down an incline. I hear people screaming, so put on my headphone and pull up my hood down over my face, and I can feel the incline. The driver was apparently standing on the brakes.
Scully: Too much mortal terror on the road.
We toured in a van the first few years, and there was a shelf in the van. There were six people in the band, so you had two in the front, two in the back, three on the bench, and someone had to lay on the shelf, and it was only, like a foot high. If the bus rolled, you’d be dead. We can’t do that anymore. We’re supposed to on the road a lot.
Do people out of town get you?
Scully: New York is pretty great for us.
Smith: People find it pretty easy enough to understand our music. It’s visceral. We were at this boilermakers’ convention once on the north side of Kansas City. It’s a place that was a Denny’s that wasn’t a Denny’s anymore. It was a family restaurant, and it had a bar. We were, like, “Why would anybody do this to us?” The only people in the bar were this boilermakers’ convention, and they hated us at first. Tough crowd. By the end of the night, this really macho dude is faking giving some other guy head onstage. They were loosened up, loved our music, and wanted to get onstage and sing. I guess they got it.
Has Morning 40 changed over the years?
Smith: Immensely. We can play our instruments better. Actually, we can play our instruments. The way we make music has changed. The way we write has changed. It was always catch phrase-driven before, and we’d find riffs to go with it. Now, it starts with musical ideas.
Scully: And, there’s more guitars and less horns. We do some songs that don’t have horns at all. The new record is very much a guitar record. It’s a rock record.
I listen to tapes of old shows and the tempos are so slow—
Smith: — it’s hard to believe people were watching. It’s so drunken. Now it’s more amphetamined out. I have this old tape of Morning 40 and I remember at one point thinking, “Oh, I’m so glad we’re recording. We’re so awesome. We really are going to be good. What am I saying? We’re good already!” We listened to it and said, “Is something wrong with the tape deck?” It was plodding and slow. Slow and incredibly sloppy. That has definitely changed.
Do you drink as much as you used to?
Scully: I don’t black out anymore. You don’t drink hard stuff. You used to get drunk and freak out.
Smith: I had about three years like that. I went through a few plate glass windows. Abused everybody in the band. We’re over that shit — hopefully. We’re definitely not as dysfunctional. We know everybody’s quirks and whatnot.
Scully: I’d know when Bailey shifted from happy drunk to evil drunk. I could tell because we know each other so well. We know each other in ways that make working together easy.
What condition are you in when you go onstage?
Scully: Sauced. For Mardi Gras, one or two of those shows I probably will not have slept from the night before. I’ll be blotto. I’ll always have five or six beers before I go onstage. But, I don’t smoke pot before a show, anymore. Pot makes me self-conscious —
Smith: — and that’s no fun really loud and through a microphone. (laughing)
Scully: I have to ham it up, and marijuana’s not very conducive to hamming it up. Alcohol is, though.
Smith: We got this agent from the Agency Group and he flew down here to meet us. There was a party next door to Tipitina’s at the Tchoup House. We were playing, it was your birthday. Remember that? The whole beginning of the show — I don’t remember it. I swear, I think we were playing “Bottom Shelf Blues” and I realized I fucked up, and then I realized I was onstage with a guitar in my hands. We were way into the set! Josh (Cohen, singer and sax player) looked at me, like [Shakes his head disapprovingly]. I felt a little guilty. We usually avoid that.
Scully: We seriously don’t suck anymore.
Do you practice?
Scully: We don’t have a practice space since the hurricane.
Smith: We tried to rehearse at my house, but it was too loud. Plus, the one day we did that, we hadn’t seen each other in nine weeks and it sounded bad. I was, like, “Uh-oh. Weren’t we a really good band a few months ago?” Then we rehearsed once more at the Circle Bar before we had to go play in Baton Rouge, and that was passable.
Is it a weight to carry to have your band named for drinking?
Smith: It is in some ways, like when really, really drunk people come up to you in the middle of the day and they expect me to be wasted, and I’m not. These are really drunk people, and they’re excited about it.
I used to worry, “Oh, shit. Now I have to write another song about drinking.” Morning 40 Federation’s just the name of our band. We don’t have to write songs about drinking, anymore.
Scully: Not really. Think about how many songs there are about love. We can write an infinite number of songs about drinking, drugs, partying, stinking — you can go on forever, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But, the songwriting does have a little more depth.
The spirit of the music is the same. It’s all celebratory music, positive music. Positive in it’s negative way.
It seems like the people who are nutty for Morning 40 Federation are the last ones you would expect.
Smith: We played some place, Shepherdstown, and all the generations of the town was there. That was a little surreal, singing a song about “Chew my pussy” with a kid out there dancing with his grandmother.
Scully: We definitely hit all age groups. But you know the group we need? Teenagers. They buy records, but we don’t play all-ages shows. There’s no drinking.
Smith: We played at the WOW Hall in Eugene, Oregon, and you couldn’t drink onstage. I can’t play a whole show and not drink. I’ve done it; it sucks. You can’t smoke. You couldn’t even drink near the stage. There was one room way far away from the stage and there was nobody in it but us. Doing that, being from New Orleans, where you can do anything you want at any time —
Scully: How do people in an orchestra do it?
