HXR20YR RETROSPECTIVE: HXR007- THE MINOR TIMES, "Chris Chambers Never Misses" CDEP

Not long after Inkling had split up The Minor Times began.  In fact, it was pretty much immediately after Inkling broke up that the core of the band began writing in earnest and honing the songs that became the “Chris Chambers Never Misses” EP.  I was a little miffed with them for splitting up, especially since it was not that long after the Inkling record I released had come out.  I didn’t see them all for several months and we didn’t talk much.  However, they were hunkered down, writing music and working out their new vocalist, a local Lansdale guy by the name of Brendan McAndrew who been playing in a band of his own for a bit.

Once things began to come into focus I distinctly remember guitarist Chris Mascotti calling me up and stating that he wanted to come visit me up in Syracuse.  Just kind of out of the blue.  That’s kind of how it was with those guys after that.  They would just randomly say they wanted to come visit and next thing you know, they were in town.  Why anyone would want to visit my city as a tourist destination is beyond me.  But here we were.  And within a week both Chris and other guitarist Tim Leo were knocking on my door.   I hadn’t seen either of them in at least several months.  Chris looked the same but I didn’t even recognize Tim.  He had had some health issues and lost a ton of weight.  Prior to that he was a pretty big sturdy guy, but now he was someone different.  He had easily lost over 100 pounds, probably more.  It was a pretty wild transformation.

Either way, we caught up and any feelings of frustration I had about Inkling ending were quickly dissolved because these guys made the effort to come and visit, and hang out, and catch up.  We talked about what they were up to now and, indeed, they were hard at work on The Minor Times.  It was really a thing that was happening.  We kept in close contact once again after that and pretty soon they were ready to record and start playing shows under this new identity.

 The Minor Times (from left): Tim, Brendan, Justin at See Spot Gallery, Ithaca, NY

The Minor Times were heavier, weirder, more technical, and really had it together.  It seemed like everything that they weren’t quite sure of how to do in Inkling they figured out with this band.  Brendan, who had previously played in a band that took more than a handful of cues from stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate, really showed his versatile nature as a vocalist and produced one of the meanest screams possible and a confrontational stage presence that pushed the band into people’s faces.  Pretty quickly they returned to Salad Days Studios (where the Inkling EP was recorded) with Brain McTerrnan and recorded their EP and then set out to get in the van and tour.  They were finally able to make big moves as a band that saw them hit the road frequently.  This is where the real first grouping of Hex-related bands began to coalesce with The Minor Times, Ed Gein, Achilles, and Engineer all playing together and touring together on a pretty regular basis.  The Minor Times ended up moving on to doing records with Level Plane, Robotic Empire, and Prosthetic Records and doing multiple tours across the US and Europe before calling it a day.  Since that time I still try to stay in touch with the guys.  It’s also where my friendship with Tim Leo really began to take off and we became pretty tight since that time.  So much so that when I called him up to do this thing he was in the midst of having a baby and didn’t blow me off, which would have been a totally reasonable thing to do.  Instead I got a message back saying, “I had a baby, I’m at the hospital.  Can I call you back tomorrow?”  Tomorrow?  Dude just had a kid.  I can wait a few days, no big deal.  So a few days later we caught up for real and I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that my old pal Tim Leo has a kid now.  Holy crap. 

So anyway, aside from that, it’s long overdue that I finally pick his brain about that time with The Minor Times and catch up.

So basically right after Inkling split up you began working on The Minor Times, right?  How did that come together and what were things like for you during that transition time?

So the last couple Inkling songs we wrote became Minor Times songs.  Brian (Shmutz, Inkling vocalist) had written vocals to one of them and the other just sort of hung out and they were sort of the starting point for the band.  So we just turned them into Minor Times songs.

We had booked a tour of sorts, like an East Coast tour, down to Florida.  And then Brian Schmutz quit so we just went anyway as a vacation- me, Brain (Medlin, drums), Chris (Mascotti, guitar), and Justin (LaBarge, bass).  We all just went to Florida for a week because we had all taken vacation time from our jobs, since we were planning on touring.  When we got back we started writing songs.  It was a little slow going at first.  I’m sure you remember we were going to get Raver Bob to sing for the band.  He was planning on coming down here.  We sent him a bunch of demos-

Wait, what?  I do not recall this.

-Real deal.  Raver Bob (Bob Swift, Syracuse guy who later ended up being the singer for the Seattle band The Helm, who released records through Hex Records- ed.).

We would just talk on the phone for hours about ideas for the band.  But logistics kind of played out, and then Brendan came into the picture.  Brendan had just played in some local punk bands around here in Lansdale.  One was called Unsuspecting Public.  He came to our practice and at first we didn’t really take it seriously.  But he was so serious about it. It was just this side of Brendan that we had never seen.  He had written all these words to go with certain parts.  So he really impressed us with his preparation.  I think after that Justin was the only one not sold on him because I think he preferred the idea of Bob.  Plus, Brendan was very young at the time, so maybe that was part of it.

I thought Brendan fell in with the band because he was already a local guy and you all knew him.

It was a total surprise.  A total surprise.  He had the one punk band, and then he did another band called Fairmount with Mark Price (visual artist and frequent collaborator with The Minor Times), which was way more mellow, kind of Weezer or Hum sort of music.  We didn’t expect anything like that from him.  He came to practice and flipped out in our tiny little practice space.  And before he was doing lights for us Mark (Price) came in and did this sort of harsh noise stuff for the first few songs we wrote and it sounded really cool at first, but it was pretty limited.  He had only, like, five or six sounds he could make so it stopped making sense.  But at first it was really cool.  So at that point we were like, ‘well, we should probably entertain Brendan as our singer because the noise stuff isn’t really panning out.’

Early ad for the EP that appeared in several zines around the time

Did you have some of that material already set, or a plan in place, once The Minor Times began because you moved really quick on it.

A little bit.  I think that everyone was a little nervous because we weren’t sure if it was something that you would want to get behind.  Do you remember when Chris and I came up and we stayed at your place, like shortly after Inkling broke up and Minor Times wasn’t exactly a thing yet?

Oh yeah, I remember.  I remember you looked so different and I didn’t even recognize you.

That’s another thing about being in that band.  It sort of follows me around.  Any time that anything that I thought about for so long disintegrates I kind of just go nuts for awhile.  When Inkling broke up I lost 160 pounds in four months.  When The Minor Times broke up I got divorced for the first time.  When Ladder Devils and Legendary Divorce all imploded and I dragged myself into oblivion and got divorced again.

Maybe you should stop doing bands! (laughs)

Right! (laughs)  But yeah, we came up to see you and we were a little tentative about bringing it up that we had a new band.  But you were just like, ‘fuck yeah, let’s do it!’  That was the first stepping stone, to see if you wanted to do the record.  So next was recording and the recording process for that EP was a fucking nightmare.

                         Skeletal Tim, not doing so hot here

Why did you decide to return to Salad Days to record “Chris Chambers”?

We really liked being in a studio where there was an engineer that you didn’t have to direct in any way.  I thought Brian McTerrnan (Salad Days engineer) was awesome.  He’s just steeped in the same type of music we liked, he’s just like 10 years older so he had more experience.  We didn’t have to explain to him what we wanted to sound like, he would tell us- ‘this will sound cool. Or this will sound cool’.  It was great recording with him, he was funny as fuck.  When we went to record “Chris Chambers” with him his studio had moved to Maryland so it was all new.  But I was really, really sick when we went to record.  I was super sick.  It was freezing cold.  I remember trying to play guitar and I just couldn’t.  I could barely do it man.  I just wrapped myself in this electric blanket because I weighed like 98 pounds, and trying to play the electric guitar.  And McTerrnan was finally like, ‘I don’t need you to die in my house.’  I tracked as much as I could and then Eric (Haag, former Inkling bassist) came down and got me before they even started tracking vocals.  I just went back to Philadelphia.  I was out of it for about three days.  It was brutal.  But then things started to get better.

Once that record came out we really wanted to tour and started doing weekends and stuff.  Breather Resist took us out for about a week and a half.  We went out as far as Louisville and then stayed at the Patterson compound (Ryan and Evan Patterson’s house) for about three days and played a bit more around there.  That was the first time we went out with a band that was like-minded people.  Same with the Ed Gein dudes.  We liked just finding other weird people and playing weird shows.  And it didn’t matter how many people were at the show, we were just happy to be around good-spirited people that we toured with.  After that we did tours with All Else Failed.  We toured with that band Dead To Fall.  All Else Failed was fun, but Dead To Fall just didn’t feel like the crowd we wanted to play to.  They were a cool band to hang out with, just their audience was not our audience, ya know?

Plus, at the time, none of us really drank and neither did the Ed Gein guys.  Most of the Engineer guys didn’t either.  So we would tour with them and we were all just weirdos.  It was just hanging out with friends.

What was the idea of calling the EP “Chris Chambers Never Misses”?

We threw a bunch of titles around but we settled on that.  It’s from that movie “Stand By Me” and it’s that idea of the camaraderie, all the kids in that movie have their jokes with one another, and when River Phoenix is saying that line about having a dream where he’s falling and the other person doesn’t drop him…  I don’t know, it’s just a melodramatic thing about how the whole world was just us.  It’s literally how we spent our entire early 20’s- we just practiced all the time, and if we weren’t practicing then we were just writing songs.  My first bachelor party was literally all of us in our practice space just jamming the night before I got married the first time.

There was a weird European pressing that happened with the EP where it became a split with another European band called Llynch on a 12”.  How did that come about?

That might have been Medlin.  He tended to handle most of the correspondence that came in for the band because he’s such a friendly dude.  And that Llynch band hit up Medlin saying they had just recorded this record, and had a label, and do you want to hear it?  So they sent us some songs and we thought it was cool so they asked if we wanted to split a record.  So, sure, let’s do it.  I remember, too, they had really specific art direction for that record.  They didn’t want photographs.  They wanted video stills instead.  So we all went to my old apartment and took video in my hallway of us just standing around, it was really awkward.  I still never met those guys, but I know one of them is in that band Heads.

The LP version of the EP, released as a split in Europe with Llynch

It seems like Minor Times were really set on hitting the road even more and you all didn’t waste much time in doing that.  How did you manage to get over the issue of not having as many contacts or resources which held Inkling back from touring more to going full-on with Minor Times?

I think it might have been you.  I think it was the Hex stuff that did it.  When you think about it the first tour we did with Minor Times was with Ed Gein.  The first real exposure we had that mattered to anyone later was at Hellfest.  And then we went out with Breather Resist and we had gotten tight with Evan (from Breather Resist) through The National Acrobat, which he was in, and you put out their record too.  I don’t think they would have heard of us if it weren’t for another thing that had come out on your label.  That’s the way I always saw it anyway. 

I was thinking about why we played more shows in Syracuse than we did in Philadelphia, like 10:1.  I think that has a lot to do with it.  We played shows in Philly, some great ones.  But we were always just the local band.  When we would come to Syracuse we were the traveling band and we had you there to tell us other bands to check out.  That’s why Ed Gein gave a shit about us, ya know?  And in Philly, even to this day, it’s a very clique-y place.  I remember going to eat with some people one night after work back when I worked at Relapse and there was a kid who joined us wearing a Minor Times shirt.  And the whole time I felt so awkward that finally at the end of it I just said, ‘hey man, I like your shirt, I played in that band.’  And he just said, ‘oh, I never listened to the band, I just like the t-shirt.’  It was super weird.  If that makes sense to you- you’ve been in bands- it’s weird to just be ‘the local band’ unless you got some crazy gimmick.  But when you go somewhere else people appreciate it more.  We definitely had local people who came out and would see us, and hung out with us, but we were never going to be another Ink and Dagger, or some other well-loved Philly band.  All Else Failed, for most of their existence, were kind of like that- just the local band no one cared about where the singers would just bludgeon themselves and they played this super chaotic music.  No one cared until they played one of their 20 farewell shows, like ‘where were all these people before?’  But ultimately, having the Syracuse thing where we got to meet other bands that were like us was a good thing.  It got us started on some good tours.

Not long after the EP came out your brother Matt came in on bass.  Had he been in other bands before this, or was it all new to him?

Matt played guitar in high schools bands.  Then he moved to California and became an engineer and started playing with these guys who were in a band called God Lives Underwater.  He came back to Philly for my wedding and he ended up just staying.  Justin ended up quitting and sort of getting kicked out.  Everyone was just fighting all the time.  So we were trying out bass players at the time and Matt just said, ‘I’m not going back to California, I’ll stick around.’  So it just worked out, it made sense. 

                                         Bassist Matt Leo

You all started touring with a lot of gear including TVs and Brendan had his little sampler station thing. I imagine that got to be a real pain in the ass getting everything set up.

Yeah.  But Brendan was really good at it.  When Mark Price would tour with us he and Brendan worked out this system where all the extra stuff just fit in these two tupperware containers.  They also had this light system set up that involved a switch that you would use for like Christmas lights and the whole thing would fit into a suitcase. It was pretty cool.  We would end up often playing these tiny little places and figured as long as the power was there we were good.  But we would blow the power in a lot of places we played.  It was one thing to have these 150 watt amps, but when you put those lights on there and now it’s 1000 watts, you just blow the power.  We blew the power catastrophically in Kansas City one time.  It was this really big venue and into the first song the entire place just went completely dark.  That was the down side, but the rest wasn’t too bad.

Chris left the band after touring on your first full length “Making Enemies”.  What led him to leave?

Well, basically his parents gave him a hard enough time about focusing on school that he left to complete school.  It was a tough decision, but an obvious one.

Why did The Minor Times end up splitting up?

So Chris left, and then we got Lou from Fight Amp for a short amount of time, and then he quit.  So I was the only guitarist for a while.  And I remember we played this show in Philly with Trap Them down in a basement and the promoter was like, ‘did you bring a PA? I was expecting you guys to bring a PA.’  And it was a real deal basement, like a six-foot ceiling, I had to duck to be down there.  So we drove back to Lansdale, got the PA, and then drove back into Philly for the show, and I think we parked in this tiny alley.  Brendan was drinking and I think he was just tired of it.  We had a show a couple days later with Doomriders and he was like, ‘that’s going to be my last show, I’m tired of it.’  I remember him trying to get out of that alley and just banging into everything, it was crazy.

                          Healthy Tim (on left)!

Was it just burn out?

Yeah.  We had just done the “Summer Of Wolves” record and we decided that at that point it was either go on tour forever or just quit.  I was working for Relapse Records at the time and for the first time in a long time I was just like, ‘let’s do it, let’s just be gone for months on end’ and everyone else was like, ‘yeah, either get to it or don’t.’  And Brendan was like, ‘Nope, I’m tired of playing shows, I can’t do it.’  And that was it.  We played maybe a few more shows we were required to play and that was it.

What was your favorite part of being in Minor Times?  What was your least favorite thing?

There were times where writing songs together were the best times and there times where that just totally fucking sucked too.  I remember we got towards the end of writing that “Summer Of Wolves” record and everyone was just so mad.  There was just a lot to be mad about.  The beginning of the writing process would be so fun and the end was just not fun.  What was fun became not fun.  When the Minor Times started we just thought it was all going to be so fun.  We were going to do all this stuff we didn’t do in Inkling.  And we did.  We would play these amazing shows too.  We toured with Engineer and played in New Orleans with Thou and there were like six people there.  We played with Anodyne and Majority Rule in a basement in Philly and like two people came.  That basement show with Trap Them we played, I think one person paid.  After years of doing that we got tired because we would throw everything we had into it and the fun of it became tedious.

 The Minor Times playing one of their early shows in Rochester, NY

Whew, that was a long one!  Well, now you get to the bit where, this week, you can grab the "Chris Chambers" CDEP through the Hex store for only $4!  And if you just want the digital tracks you can grab them via the bandcamp page for only $2!  Sorry, I don't have any of those Euro LP pressings to dole out.