Thee Oh Sees
Impatience Gets Things Done
By Bob Ham
Photos by Mathew Scott
“I am an incredibly impatient person with no attention span.”
That matter-of-fact comment from John Dwyer could easily rank as one of the biggest understatements in music. Since moving to San Francisco in 1998, Dwyer has been a member of at least 12 bands, including the extremely noisy and extremely speedy trio Coachwhips, the frenetic electronic group Zeigenbock Kopf and bruising garage rockers The Hospitals. He has also had his name attached to at least three-dozen CD and LP releases in that time.
This exhaustive pace has also helped speed up the evolution of Dwyer’s musical approach. Running throughout almost all of those projects is a strain of rhythm and blues, garage rock and psychedelia that can sometimes get lost amid the aggressive tempos and healthy coatings of noise and distortion. In just 10 years, Dwyer has managed to peel away the layers of that sound, refining and polishing it into the crystalline goodness that can be heard via the band consuming much of his focus these days: Thee Oh Sees.
Started four years ago as an outlet for Dwyer’s solo recordings and demos released under the name OCS, the project has since morphed into a solid four-piece band, responsible for the last two albums released under the Oh Sees name: 2007’s Sucks Blood and The Master’s Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In, which was released this year on Castle Face/Tomlab.
As they prove on these two albums and during their dynamic live performances, Thee Oh Sees clearly relish playing with one another. Dwyer and Petey Dammit’s guitars rumble and chime together with precision and stamina worthy of early Rolling Stones and any of the dozens of bands found on the Nuggets box sets. Dwyer has also managed to find the perfect vocal foil in Brigid Dawson. The two harmonize together with an eerie precision, made even more chilling thanks to the thick layers of reverb that block out any comprehension of what the two are singing about.
This current incarnation of Thee Oh Sees was put together in 2006 with Dwyer grabbing friends and acquaintances from the thriving San Francisco music scene. “I met Brigid at the caf she worked at, Petey and I had played together in the past and Mike Shoun was a drummer from the scene that I had always admired.”
Dammit says that he got to know Dwyer particularly well when the two toured together. “In 2004, there were a lot of great things going on, including John playing as OCS. We started setting up some shows including them, Eric Landmark [of the band Numbers] playing old timey, turn-of-the-century country songs and me playing solo acoustic finger-picking guitar songs.”
What attracted Dammit to Dwyer’s sound from the beginning and encouraged him to join up with Thee Oh Sees was “the rock aspects and energy of all of John’s projects,” he says. “Back then there was a lot of costumed noise in San Francisco. But having guitars, drums and melodies you could feel in your body interested me a little more than a homemade giant killer panda costume going ‘bleep bleep blllarrrrgg ssssshhh’ through a bunch of effects pedals.”
In fact, the sound of Thee Oh Sees comes closest to harnessing Dwyer’s musical influences during his formative years in Rhode Island. “I loved AC/DC,” he recalls. “They were my first love. Then The Misfits and Black Flag and The Cramps.” A lifelong music geek, Dwyer didn’t actually start playing until the age of 16 when his parents bought him his first guitar. “A cherry red, hideous Epiphone,” he remembers. “I think I maybe even cried when I saw it.” Later on, the 17-year-old Dwyer saved up for a drum kit by “selling swag off a scooter. Still to date more money than I have made since. Kind of sad.”
The young Dwyer started venturing into the music scene of his native Providence, with stints in the bands Netmen and Landed, but didn’t show any signs of turning into the musical polyglot that he is nowadays until his move to San Francisco (a relocation inspired by seeing a performance by Greg Saunier of Deerhoof). Upon his arrival in 1998, Dwyer says that he became quickly immersed in the many sounds that he discovered in his new hometown. “Things sort of seemed to start really coming to a head after I moved here, with the likes of Total Shutdown, Extreme Elvis, Numbers, Burmese, The Fucking Champs. The list goes on and on, really.”
Dwyer wasted no time becoming a fixture on stage as well. Not long after his move, he and fellow former-Rhode Islander Jeff Rosenberg started the frantic noise rock duo Pink & Brown. Using the name of the band as their pseudonyms (Dwyer was Pink; Rosenberg was Brown), the two would put on bizarre costumes and blast through short sets filled with relentless energy. “It blew me away,” says TV on the Radio member/Oh Sees producer Dave Sitek of his experience listening to Pink & Brown, “in a spontaneous and almost dangerous regard. I had high hopes for new sounds as a result of that band.” 
By the time Pink & Brown broke up in 2003, Dwyer had already formed Coachwhips and was well on his way to further refining his noisy yet precise combination of vintage 1960s rock played with the distortion and anger of punk. It was also around this time that Dwyer’s quieter side started to come out through the first OCS releases, which initially had a surprising folk edge to them. Sitek, by this time a huge fan of Dwyer’s work, says that he found himself blown away even more by these solo recordings. “As I listened to the words, I realized that he was following a long tradition of songwriters that I admire: frank and honest, revealing the dark underpinnings of our modern life. I was convinced that I would be playing catch up with John for a while.”
Although the spacey acoustic guitars and experimental folk leanings were a welcome diversion for Dwyer, both he and his fans knew that it wouldn’t be long before he returned to the world of rock music. As he puts it, “I can’t stay away from it. It is the kind of music I listen to so it is always in my head when it comes time to play.” Dwyer cobbled together a band of fellow S.F. music mainstays like Shoun and Dammit, and together they helped make Thee Oh Sees’ sound as lean and immediate as it has proven to be.
The impact of this approach has been palpable. Just ask Sitek who, after hearing Thee Oh Sees play live for the first time, insisted that they work with him in the studio. “I am quite impatient,” Sitek says. “I didn’t feel like waiting around for someone else to recognize what I knew at that second. And I wanted to immediately record where [Dwyer’s] music was at that particular moment . For that, I was willing to offer my studio and my ‘jibber jabber,’ if needed.”
Sitek worked with the band on tracks for both Sucks Blood and The Master’s Bedroom at his studio, Stay Gold, but doesn’t feel that he added much to the recording. “I really think that time was the major contribution on my part,” he says. “I was really trying my best to preserve what they already had in spades and not tamper too much. Even if I did, it was impossible to predict where they would be by the time they got to the studio. I really wanted them to lead the way and I would make sure the lights stayed on.” The rest of the band’s work was recorded with A-Frames member Chris Woodhouse at his home studio.
True to the aesthetic that Dwyer has favored in almost all of his musical projects, the majority of the new album was recorded live. It’s a method that Thee Oh Sees can handle easily with the amount of time that they spend rehearsing their material together, in true collaborative fashion, according to Dammit.
“John will bring an idea to practice,” says Dammit. “Generally only his part or maybe an idea of what he would like us to do. We play around with it. One person adds this, another subtracts that, and then we all throw some cinnamon on it until it tastes right.” Dwyer too seems pleased with having a new bunch of co-conspirators working with him, but thinks of it in much blunter terms. “Without them, it would just be me and a shitty song on guitar.”
As excited as Dwyer is about The Master’s Bedroom and touring with the rest of Thee Oh Sees, true to his impatient nature, he is already looking ahead to other projects. There has been talk of a live Oh Sees DVD, as well as the release of a CD featuring demo versions of material from their last two albums.
And if that weren’t enough, Dwyer has started another band. “It’s called The Drums with Anthony Petrovic from Easy Tiger. It’s just drums and vocals. Like a pep rally with two older handsome gentlemen rather than 10 hot young girls with pom-poms and short skirts.”
Dwyer readily admits that there’s no way he can stop living this kind of anxious lifestyle. “The older I get, the less and less I want a job for real,” he says. “I have to stay busy and there ar way too many gifted people here to ever stop at one project.”
Dammit, on the other hand, has his attention focused solely on Thee Oh Sees. “I would like us to be able to continue doing exactly what we are doing — progressing, playing and putting out records. I certainly hope we’ll be together for a while. I love being in this family.”
www.myspace.com/ohsees |
