I MIGHT HAVE TO FIGHT MY WAY OUT OF THIS ROOM

I MIGHT HAVE TO FIGHT MY WAY OUT OF THIS ROOM

Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer talks legs, eggs, drugs, and death

Sam McPheeters

I met John Dwyer in 1997, when he was a supporting player in the Fort Thunder warehouse scene of Providence. Dwyer was the scariest member of the scariest band, Landed. In a group of fabulous and unique weirdos, he clearly played the role of designated lunatic. And then, at some point in this century, Dwyer made the jump from the lumpen ranks of Pauper Journeyman Musician to the rarefied strata of Successful Independent Musician. For those of us who’ve known him over the years, Dwyer’s rise announced itself in many different unexpected moments. Mine came from hearing his current band, Thee Oh Sees, on Breaking Bad, not merely on the soundtrack, but as in-universe music, as a band high-ranking Mexican cartel members might actually enjoy (and then die to). My first, visceral reaction still holds up: This band has no right being as good as it is.

Did we meet at that fucking strip club?

We did.

What an awful way to meet someone. I thought it was a great way to meet you. I told you this before.

But we have different memories of that incident. As I recall, me and my bandmates woke up in Providence, and our hosts announced that they were taking us to a “surprise breakfast.” Then they drove us to the Foxy Lady for something called “Legs and Eggs.”

Did you have the breakfast, though?

Jesus. No. Ick.

It wasn’t bad.

I remember I entered the building, realized what was happening, excused myself to “get something from the van,” then split for the day with all the band cash. It was only years later that you told me that you’d also left,

and that we talked in the lot before I stormed off.

I was there before you, though, because I had time to eat before I flaked outside to have a smoke. And then I think I just ended up sitting outside waiting for them to be done, which I’ve done at other strip clubs. Regardless of how we got to that spot, standing outside and having a conversation for just a moment made me realize that me and you were kind of on the same page about at least one thing.

Somehow I’d forgotten that we’d talked. For some reason, I thought of you as one of the instigators of that morning, which meant I thought of you as an instigator in general. For example, I heard you got kicked out of Landed because you’d set off a bunch of professional fireworks in the practice space.

That’s a mash-up of stories. But yeah, I’ve toned it down a lot, which is good. It took me a long time to, and still, I certainly bother people all day every day. I have to apologize once a day, probably. And I catch myself doing it all the time. I think I have an extremely immature soul.

So, the opposite of an old soul.

Brian Chippendale [of Lightning Bolt] really got mad at me one time and yelled, “You always take it too far!” And I remember being like, “That’s not okay. If that guy’s yelling at me, I probably need to reflect a little bit.” But I think I am where I am because Rhode Island had a lot of crossover between the college kids and the townies, and I got to transcend that invisible barrier between Brown University and RISD and me, a fucking guy who grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

You were a townie!

Literally. I remember sleeping with an extremely beautiful girl, and the next morning she’s like, “Are you a townie?” Her face looked like she’d screwed a carny or something. But I’ve been so fortunate to be in Providence during what I consider to be, from my personal perspective, one of the best periods for music. That city is really cyclical in that its student body would come in and sort of determine the lineup. And when I was there we had Lightning Bolt, Six Finger Satellite, Mat Brinkman, Arab on Radar, Thee Hydrogen Terrors. Same thing with San Francisco. I moved there right in time, too. And then I came to L.A. kind of at a good time. One of my talents is being able to sniff out a good opportunity for a place to be for a moment.

You moved to San Francisco around the same time I moved to L.A. County. Pink and Brown used to play the Smell in Downtown Los Angeles a lot during this period. At the time, my understanding of that band was: good cop, bad cop. And you were the bad cop.

I was still more of a cunt then. And Jeff [Rosenberg] also was somebody I needed in my life as a foil.

We crossed paths in Oakland a few years later at a warehouse show. You were playing with either Coachwhips or the Hospitals. Do you remember this show? The cops arrived, and the entire crowd won them over by singing “God Bless America”...

I don’t remember that at all.

I remember being very aware of your presence. You radiated a wild and scary energy, like a Mad Max maniac. How much of this was speed? I’d thought that was your life back in Rhode Island.

“I THINK I HAVE AN EXTREMELY IMMATURE SOUL.”

No, Rhode Island, you can’t really get speed. I don’t know about now, but touring on the East Coast, I would FedEx myself speed in New York when we’d go to play there.

Wait, FedEx? From where?

From San Francisco. San Francisco has the best speed. I met Mark E. Smith from the Fall that way. He knew I FedExed myself speed in New York, so he was like, “I want to meet that guy right now.” We got really, really high on two separate occasions with a group of people partying all night on speed and cocaine. He and I got along fabulously.

Did you perform on speed?

Oh, all the time. I was going to say about Mark E. Smith, in his book there’s an intro to one of his chapters where he finally talks about meth, where he says only 2 percent of the population is built for this drug. And I think everybody I knew who did speed and who liked the Fall was like, Yes. It’s just not for everybody. I love speed and hate heroin and don’t even really like cocaine, honestly, although cocaine was for me, ironically, a way to get off speed. But we definitely wrote a lot and played a lot during that period. I've been really lucky with drugs. I always physically and mentally know when it’s time to stop. And speed is a drug you can’t do for a long time. I only did it for a handful of years, maybe two years at peak usage, but I had to stop because I would find myself buying it in extremely sketchy situations. Anytime you’re buying drugs and thinking, “I might have to fight my way out of this room,” or buying speed off a crying pregnant woman...

“EVERYTHING I'VE DOME ON STAGE IS A SLIGHT NOD OR EVEN RIP-OFF OF OTHER ARTISTS.”

I remember this story. At a bus station?

No, it was in a men’s bathroom at a supermarket in San Francisco—at 6 a.m. I was asking if she was okay as I was putting my hand out for the drugs. Like, “I will help you. But this transaction has to happen first. Let’s get our priorities straight.” She also just gave me speed in my hand, not even in a bag, like I’d bought a crystal at the D&D store. That was the day where I was like, "Okay, I’m done. This is fucked up.”

You know, it took me a bit to figure you out.

There was a period where I could tell you were hesitant. And my goodness, with that it was you, Joe Preston, Weasel Walter, these dudes of caliber whose music I respected and who were always like, “All right, all right. Slow down just a little bit.” I was always coming in hot. When Weasel and I first met, he was like, “I don’t think so." And he and I just made an album together.

Next thing I know, you’re in Thee Oh Sees. I noticed that your stage persona goes in two directions at once. One, you engage the audience. That sounds obvious, but lots of musicians don’t. Being a good musician doesn’t mean someone’s a good live performer. It’s a different set of skills. And yet, two, your performance persona is very precise. You stake out your space, your four feet of stage, and perform within that box. You’re not a guitar player at risk of damaging your equipment, or even missing a note.

Certainly. But Thee Oh Sees have done really well with crowds for a long time. Because if we have a shitty crowd, we’ll suck. It’s like a give-and-take scenario where if somebody’s checked out, I swear to God...there could be somebody right in front of me bummed out during the show and I'll be focused on that one person even if there’s moshing for a mile behind them. But yeah, everything I’ve done on stage is a slight nod or even rip-off of other artists.

Well, that’s where I was going. Like who?

I took things from artists that I thought were interesting and from people that I respected as frontmen, especially because it’s a weird, boring trope half the time. Landed once played a show where we’d walked into the venue and immediately got called “faggots.” And [frontman] Dan St. Jacques said to me, “Don’t hold back tonight. They will be fucking scared at the end of the show. I want you to stand on my head." Dan would lie face down on the ground and I literally just stood on his head playing guitar. He could take it. And then afterwards, those guys who had been talking shit were terrified of us. I remember things like that.

But there are two people I can think of whose moves I’ve blatantly ripped off. Which means that anybody that rips me off, I can’t really be offended by them. I remember Wilco [Johnson] from Dr. Feelgood, the pub rock band from the ’70s. That dude would walk on stage. He did the same thing you said I do: He stakes out a square and then he just, I mean, I'll mimic it, but he just plays guitar and walks back and forth in this one little spot. Really intense dude. When you see him on YouTube, you'll be like, “Oh yeah, Dwyer rips off that guy. Certainly.” And then Tracy [Eliscu] from Deep Throats, that sort of lunging.

As a prolific touring musician, do you ever zone out on stage?

That’s the best thing that can happen. That’s why my band does improv so much. I've had moments where I've literally fainted on stage—passed out from exertion, I guess. But waking up and having just a dude that works in the club holding a guitar. And I get up and I’m like, “What the fuck?" And you have that moment of in-between worlds where you don’t realize you fainted, but you’re like [weak falsetto], “I’m okay.”

For many performers, having to mentally reboot on stage would be a bad thing.

The only time I forget what we’re doing is when we have songs that sound alike. And we have so many songs that sound alike because I've written 500 fucking songs over the years. A problem with being prolific is that you’ll write things that are adjacent to each other, either melodically or structurally. If we play those two songs next to each other in the set, I’ll only be able to remember one of them. Sometimes we can’t put certain songs near each other, even though they were written 20 years apart. It’s at the point now where I'm worried about my brain, where I’m kind of ripping myself off from back in the day. I even hear our music sometimes at a bar. I’ll hear it and be like, “What is this bullshit ripping us off?” And then I’m like, “Oh, it’s actually us just playing a kind of shitty version of ourselves.” But one thing I can give myself is that I’ve been a big proponent of other bands. I want our opening band to rip. So I pick bands that I like, because I don’t want to be better than the opening band. I want the opening band to fucking inspire me to play a better show. I would love nothing more than to play with a local band I’ve never heard of, every night, and be pleasantly surprised. Which does happen every now and then. And every now and then we play with a band who the audience loves way more than us. It’s definitely happened.

“I'VE BEEN REALLY LUCKY WITH DRUGS. I ALWAYS PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY KNOW WHEN IT’S TIME TO STOP."

I’ve known bands who wanted their openers to be worse than them, on the theory that it made the headliners look that much better.

I will watch every band that we play with.

All the way through?

I give them three songs. I give ’em a pretty good swath of their set. But, you know, open with the good shit. If you open with a bad song, that’s fucking on you. Come out of the gate, give them the fucking thing they want. Iggy Pop walks out and he’s like, "All right, ‘T.V. Eye.’ Then a new song."

I would imagine it would be weird to play with bands better than you. Because so few of them will reach your level. This isn’t a meritocracy. For every one musician like you— someone successful on his own terms—I know a dozen more who just didn’t make it work.

I can list a thousand bands that are friends of ours who should be able to make a living from their music and just fucking don’t. At the same time, I’m prepared to go back to painting houses tomorrow if I have to. I always had a job. My stepdad’s still a janitor at an old folks’ home. He’s in his 70s now and still fucking working two jobs. The dude’s got balls for days. He just won’t let himself retire. Some people can’t. I got that from him, I feel like.

Are you up for talking about that Krang show?

Which one?

The one where an audience member died.

Oh. That was fucking heavy.

This was one of your first shows as a performer, right?

Krang was the first band I was in. Jeff Rosenberg of Pink and Brown was the singer. We probably played three or four shows and nobody liked us. Providence was all about really noisy acts, but there was also a shoegaze scene, like Difference Engine, or Swirlies in Boston. At the time, I was worshipping early “The Burning Spear”era Sonic Youth, those sort of alternate tunings. I’d just been playing guitar for a few years, so it was all alternate tuning. I wanted something strange but inherently poppy. It was pretty much an indie rock band; nobody liked us. It wasn’t anyone’s cup of tea. But that night at that house party, it was fucking packed. And we just wrecked it. It was a really good show for us. That was the first time playing a show where I was like, “Wow, people are digging this and this is fun.’’ That was the first reciprocating sort of moment I had where... you’re playing a house party and you’re like, "Everybody’s getting laid tonight. It’s going to be an amazing night." And in the middle of our really killer set, this guy came up to me trying to get us to stop. I’m telling him to fuck off. It was like, this is our moment! And then he yelled, “Somebody died!” Everything got really quiet really fast. It was raining and we heard screaming outside. Everybody froze, and I remember that was the first time I realized that people were really bad at reacting in emergencies.

What happened?

The show was on the third floor of a Victorian house. It was totally packed. Two old friends saw each other in the crowd—a guy and girl, I knew them both. They went to hug in front of a big window with glass not thick enough for its size. And they broke the window and fell out. She died, he didn’t. I’m getting choked up, wow. [Pauses] So I ran through the crowd, all the way down, saw two bodies in the driveway with blood running down the pavement, and I just kept running. I found a cop at the Domino’s Pizza, and he drove behind me as I ran back to the house in the pouring rain. I don’t remember anything about the rest of the night.

What a horrible thing to happen at the start of your career.

I don’t think about it a lot. But you know what? I swear to God, several times in my life shit has happened and I was the first one to go call 911. Most people are just bad when shit happens. Recently, I had a couple buddies over. Me and one of these buddies tried to load my crossbow at night, outside, while drunk. Suddenly, he made a horrible noise, but it was dark out and hard to tell how badly he’d hurt himself. He walked in the house holding his face and I followed him in, basically getting ready to take him to the hospital. And after about 20 minutes, I could see that he’d just split his lip. He didn’t have an arrow through his head. Meanwhile, my other friend just turned ass-white. He just shut down.

The crossbow is a terrifying weapon.

It’s the worst thing I own.

There’s that Mad Max maniac!