HXR20YR RETROSPECTIVE: HXR019- NIGHT OWLS, s/t EP

            There isn’t a great big story to tell about Night Owls really.  It was more of a chance to do something for people who I’d admired as creative people for a long time.  Without even hearing them I pretty much knew that whatever they created would be something I would enjoy.

            As a bit of history, I had previously been in The Funeral with Grant and Tony.  And before that I had released a record for Grant’s old band Spark Lights the Friction.  So working with those guys was old hat.  John had been in No Idols with me and was now living in Syracuse instead of Rochester.  And John Davis?  Well, I’d never done a band with him, or released a record from his band, but I booked his band Another Breath on several occasions.  And by the time Rachel Bass joined up with the band I was well-acquainted with the bands she had been in around town that ran the gamut from math-y indie rock to full-on punk-hardcore groups.  It was close-knit Syracuse people existing in our little bubble.  It was a good thing that I found the music of Night Owls to be engaging, fun, and unique to our scene.  I thought they demo they released was really, really good and I thought it deserved a proper release.  But I didn’t want to re-release something that was already out.

            After some time I had understood that they would be recording again and this was a good opportunity to approach the band about releasing something proper.  At the same time a newer label around town, Barbarossa Records, was putting some stuff out here and there and also asked Night Owls about doing a record.  We all came to a decision- Barbarossa Records would release the new material as a 7” and I would do a CD version of all their material to date, which was the demo, the 7”, as well as a live set the band had recorded.

            As things moved along we hit some stumbling blocks:  the art was delayed quite a bit, and there were some financial concerns associated with it.  I ended up doing most of the layout on my own.  The CD packages were printed overseas and took awhile to get to me due to international shipping and customs (it was a pretty unique style of package I haven’t seen used since).  Josh, who ran Barbarossa, asked if I would be the liaison between him and the pressing plant in regards to getting  the 7” pressed as he was going to be on tour for awhile.  I agreed, but many issues with that came up including the covers being printed on the wrong type of paper and having to be totally redone, as well as three rounds of test pressings that all skipped.  It was kind of a nightmare, but moreso for the 7” version and not the CD version, which had just a few minor hiccups.

            I’d like to think the Night Owls project was one in which I didn’t feel totally overwhelmed by costs, and knew full well they wouldn’t be touring on the release.  So if I lost a few bucks it wasn’t a big deal at all.  I just wanted that music out there because it was really cool.  And that CD version looked really cool too.

            Night Owls is a band that didn’t stick around too long, and they don’t have any huge catalog to fall back on.  But what they did do was really exceptional and remains another check in a long list of very exceptional Syracuse-area bands.  To talk about this band, and this release, I caught up with my old friend Grant Johnson, who played guitar and sang in the band, while I was visiting Syracuse over the Spring at Recess Coffee, the same place where Night Owls played some of their first shows.

Night Owls was not terribly long-lived.

And we weren’t terrible either.

(laughs) Not terrible either!

Actually, that’s not entirely true.  We were around for about four years.  It was not a consistent four years of doing anything.  It was on-off, dictated by various factors.  It was one of the longer-tenured bands that I have been in.

So starting backwards a bit, The Funeral broke up and you moved to California.  What made you want to move out there in the first place?

I think at the time I was with Rachel Bass, who ended up being the second, and final, bass player in Night Owls, and we were both just looking for something new.  Neither of us had ever lived anywhere else, at least in our adult-ish lives, and we took a vacation to California- Long Beach specifically- and thought, ‘this place is cool, let’s move here.’

It was almost that spontaneous.  Plus, you know, the winters here (in Syracuse) wear on you.  I think it was just the allure of living somewhere sunny all year was too strong to turn down.  When we moved out there it was an experiment.

Rachel moved back after a year, and we split up, and I stuck around for another year and a half.  I did a lot of the same things.  I was playing in three bands.  My living situation changed and that’s what resulted in me deciding to move back to Syracuse.  It was either go through all the headaches of trying to find a new apartment, and buying furniture, yadda, yadda, yadda, and I wasn’t doing anything aside from playing in three bands.  I was just scraping by.  I had some friends, but I felt it was time to leave.

So I landed again here in Syracuse in the safety of my parent’s house.

The bands I played in were cool, but the quality of life was just not what I wanted it to be, and I was just sort of aimless.  I was around 26, working a ho-hum job, playing in bands, and I didn’t feel like it was going anywhere for me.  And again, the change in my living situation, felt like a good excuse to leave.  It was a really hard choice, and I was legitimately heartbroken to leave California.  It’s still a very significant experience for me, and I still have friends from there, and it was very formative leaving Syracuse and trying something new, and it’s OK that it didn’t work out.

Yeah.  Did you have any feelings of failure, or being upset, that you came back here?  Or were you totally OK with just giving it a shot and it not working out?

I talked to a few friends both here and in New York City.  I have a lot of friends from New York, and friends from college that moved down there after school, and are still there.  That was my original plan.  Syracuse was only going to be a stopping point and I was going to move down to New York.  But that didn’t happen for a couple reasons.  First off, I met someone, who I ended up dating for almost three years.  That caused me to choose to stay here.

But I also went down there (to NYC) to hang out and get a feel for things and thought, ‘well, maybe I don’t want to be here.’

Again, there was this aimlessness, and uncertainty, about what I really wanted to be doing.  And maybe if I had moved down there we wouldn’t be sitting here, having this conversation. You never know.

So I decided to stay here, went back to the same job I had before I left for California- at the sign shop where I lost my fingertip- and that was supposed to be temporary.  But I stayed there for another year.  I had become a manager, and the next step was to murder the shop supervisor and take his job.  But I didn’t want to do that so I went to grad school.

So between the time you came back and when you started Night Owls there was a few years you weren’t doing anything, right?

I jammed with a couple people.  I jammed with Ted (Niccoli, from No Idols and Oak and Bone) and one of the songs we worked on ended up becoming a Night Owls song.  But the way we were playing was not Night Owls-y at all.  I got together with him once, but nothing really came of that.

I was sort of just tooling around at home and I believe it was Tony Tornabene (drummer, Night Owls, The Funeral) who called me up and said we should jam.  It’s a challenge to remember when the first time we got together to jam, but it was me and him, and John Twentyfive (first Night Owls bassist, original No Idols bassist).  I think the three of us jammed once before we looped in John Davis (guitarist, Another Breath).

But you’re right, I moved back in July of 2006 and it was a good year and half before Tony and I started playing together.

I remember hearing that you were moving back and right away I started thinking, ‘great!  I can’t wait to see what kind of band he starts!’, automatically assuming that’s what you would do.  And I remember it seeming a little weird that for awhile after you moved back that you didn’t have a band.

So my question is, when you did move back did you have an idea that you wanted to start a band, or a band like this?

Yes and no.  An idea did come to mind in a way.  When I lived in California I worked at a record store.  I’ve always been a rabid consumer of music.  And living in California I was exposed to a ton of new music.  Where a lot of people might get into a new genre of music and immediately try to emulate that I know I have limitations in terms of ability and creativity.  And I listen to a lot of different types of music, but I wasn’t about to go out and start an old timey jazz band, or a Japanese-style noise band, or some lo-fi black metal band, or whatever I was into at the time.  It’s the curse of being someone who plays music- there is a compulsion to always be doing it.  I’m always writing stuff that just sort of goes into a mental storage and a lot of it gets lost.  But some ideas stick and I had a set of riffs, or songs, that were sort of inspired by old California punk like Agent Orange, or Dangerhouse Records stuff.  I think that was the stuff that I first presented to Tony and John Twentyfive.  And I said, ‘what do you think of this?’, and they said it was cool, so I thought, ‘OK, I guess this is what we’re doing.’

I actually remember making them- Tony, John, and John- a CD with a bunch of stuff like Agent Orange, Rockbottom Spies, and a bunch of other inspirational stuff that I was aiming to do.  But I’m not the type of person to do a band that directly apes another band.

Let’s take some ideas from this and insert it into our own thing.

Yeah, like, let’s just play and see what happens.  That’s often when the most interesting things happen.  Bands are always the sum of their parts.  People have certain strengths that will make a band sound a certain way.  Any band that Tony is in, he is a very rock solid, precision, metronomic drummer.  That adds a certain quality to the songs that is different from, say, Jeff Walters who plays with me now in Difficult and is a very different kind of drummer.  People’s different approaches to music help form a band.

I may have come into Night Owls with these ideas that are inspired by this thing, but when put through that blender of different people’s strengths it comes out sounding totally different.  So I guess we ended up sounding more Hot Snakes-y?  It wasn’t super intentional, but some of our stuff did sound kind of like that.

Night Owls was also the first band I’d ever sung in, so that was a whole other dimension that was unique.  But I hate my voice, and no one else was going to do it, so we made it work.

So you said Tony reached out to you to get things started.  Did you have the others guys in mind when you started?

No.  I didn’t know John Davis before I moved to California.  I met him after I moved back.  He was doing Another Breath at the time.  We hung out in groups and I think, at the time, John Twentyfive lived upstairs from him, which is how he got into the mix.

That’s when John Twentyfive was living in Syracuse, not Rochester.

Right.  He moved here after I got back.  That, I think helped, our situation.  We needed a bass player so let’s get this guy that I’ve already known for 10 years.  And I know John (Twentyfive) was into punk and hardcore, but other stuff too.  He’s a very specific kind of player.

But once Tony asked me I think it quickly fell into place.  I think after our first practice was when we got John Davis.  He’s a pretty phenomenal musician and I think he can pretty much adapt to anything, and pick anything up quick.  I had never played with John Twentyfive before either.  We had played a million shows together with different bands, but never in the same band.  It was pretty easy to play with him, but not knowing John Davis at all it was just something where it could have been strange but it came together very naturally.  And now he and I have been playing in bands together for over 10 years.

An early Night Owls show with John 25 on bass

So Twentyfive didn’t around for too long.  So what happened there, and what was the process for Rachel come into being part of the band?

I can’t quite recall if John stopped playing with us because he was moving to Seattle, or if it was before that.  I do remember that when we knew he was leaving and we weren’t sure what to do.  You get to a certain age where you don’t want to just play with a bunch of randos.  So we were thinking, ‘who do we know that is someone we want to play with.’  The first person we actually thought of was Scott Mayo, from Another Breath, but he just wasn’t interested. 

So then I was with Rachel at Strong Hearts (Café), and I said, ‘hey, we need a bass player, would you be interested in playing with us’ and said ‘yeah’ right away.  She’s also a phenomenal musician who picks things up and you never have to tell her what to play.

She’s easily one of the most talented musicians in town.

Without question.  And she knew Tony and John, so once we knew she was interested it was fine.  Plus, Rachel and I had been in a band before called AWOL, playing bass, before we moved to California.  So I knew she could play bass in a punk-style band, and I knew she liked some of that music, so she wasn’t the first choice, but it worked out really well.

So once the band got moving along there had to be the discussion of whether or not to be a touring band and Night Owls was decidedly not a touring band.  I think you all only played outside of Syracuse on a few occasions?

Yeah, we played once or twice in Ithaca.  And that might have honestly been it.  I don’t know if we even played in Rochester?  But I think that was a function of Tony having three kids, and I was going to grad school.  I wasn’t even living here really.  I was in Ithaca and coming back here on weekends to practice, and keep writing.  So there was never going to be a situation where we would be able to tour.

To be honest, I can't recall if this show actually happened or not

Was there anybody in the band who wanted that?

John (Davis) was in grad school.  Tony was working.  Rachel was working.  Everyone was busy.  I think we all, to varying extents, had done the touring thing.  Even  now sometimes I think, ‘wouldn’t that be nice?’  And I think, ‘Nah, not really.’  I wish I had done more of it back in my heyday of playing in bands, but at the time it was totally fine with me that we weren’t going to tour. 

If you were to list our resume of all the bands we had all been in it’s a pretty long list.  But it’s a lot of bands that not a lot of people weren’t super familiar with outside of this region.  Also, most of those bands did not sound, sonically, like what we were doing with Night Owls.  We didn’t sound like Another Breath, or Another Victim, or The Funeral, or AWOL.  It was something totally different.  We didn’t want to be an ex-members type band.  So it would have been difficult getting shows.  It would be like starting over.  That would have been fine if we were five, or ten, years younger. It wasn’t in the cards for us to tour.

Eventually it came time for you all to record.  Did you end up going to Moresound?

No.  We did our demo and our seven inch in Josh Coy’s attic, and bedroom, a couple houses down from where I live now (Wayne Manor Studios).  We were happy with that.  I’m not as into the recording on the 7” as I am with the demo, but there were some other challenges with that, as far as the mastering goes.  But he was cheap, and we didn’t have any money, we didn’t make merch really so there wasn’t any money being generated by the band, so that was the avenue that made sense at the time.

Talk a bit about the problems you had with the 7” version of the record, which I did not release (I did the CD version with the demo, 7”, and a live set).

Right.  The test pressings kept coming back where there was a problem with the vinyl master and I think that was just a function of not being properly mastered.  We went back and forth with a couple bad test pressings.

I believe there were three rounds of test pressings.

Yeah, it got to the point where I suggested to Josh Smith, who released the 7” version, that he just abandon it.  I told him, ‘you are just wasting money at this point and you are never going to get your money back from this.  If I were you I’d just cut your losses.’  But he wanted to keep at it, so I think we had Jocko (Moresound Studios) do a vinyl master and then it was fine.

So that all went through and the 7” came out, and we sold 4 or 5 copies.  I don’t have one of my own any more.

Night Owls at the Hex Records 10 year anniversary show..  which was 10 years ago

I have one.  As well as some of the CDs.

Oh yeah, sorry about that.  I’m very grateful you put that out.  But Night Owls is not a band that comes up very often in conversation.  I sometimes think about picking up some of those and just giving them to people, but I already have way too many Spark Lights the Friction full length CDs that I cannot get rid of.  I can’t bring myself to landfill them, or donate them, they’re fucking worthless.

Would you say, though, that with that CD- with the 7”, demo, and live set combined- you are pleased with how it turned out?

You have a conflict of interest with that question.  I’m not sure I can answer that.

It’s more of a ‘is there something you would change about it, or things that stand out to you?'

Yes, overall I like it.  One of the things I’ve always had trouble with, though, with most bands I’ve been in is cover art.  And that band was no different.  A friend of ours had put together that cover and we thought it was fine.  And then after he had already given it to us he tried to demand a bunch of money from us.  Generally, you ask for money up front.  But he waited until after he had already given it to us, there was never a conversation about that.

Yeah.  My understanding is that he volunteered that art.

Yeah.  At the time it led to an uncomfortable situation.  We ended up paying him, but not what he had asked.  I didn’t want it to be like that.  He did put effort into it.  I’m not one of those people that is good at telling people what sort of art I want from them.  I’m more like, ‘show me something and I’ll either accept it or reject it.’

With the last Funeral record I had an idea in mind.  With the Difficult full length the art for that was an idea I had, very simple, and it was executed perfectly.  But very rarely do I have that idea.  And with Night Owls I had no idea.  I thought, ‘what makes sense for this band?’

But with that CD I’m happy it exists because there is sort of a change in our songs between the recordings.  I think some of that has to do with Rachel singing on some of the songs, especially our final stuff, which was the “Rapture” EP we self-released.  But I think the stuff you put out was like Night Owls, Mach 1.  It documents the early part of the band.  That was a fun time for the band, and the Syracuse scene in general.  Things are always with ebbs and flows and at the time Oak and Bone was coming up, and it was always awesome to play with them.  And there were a couple other goods bands, shows were generally still good, people were still coming out to shows.  I wouldn’t really say that now.  There are virtually no good bands here.  You can print that, I don’t give a fuck.  Very few people come to shows and I think that sucks.  But like I said, there are ebbs and flows, and that particular time was pretty good.

That live set (on the CD) was a memorial show for a kid named Zach who had passed away, and I remember it being a great show.  And I think of that time, how we played a lot, and we played in the basement of Recess here with Oak and Bone, and Bad Cops.  I have a lot of positive memories associated with that band and first year or two of that band, and that CD documents that.

Bad Cops, Night Owls, and Oak and Bone is a coffee shop basement

Why did the band end up splitting?

Because John moved to Seattle.  It’s that simple.

Sorry, that makes two Johns who moved to Seattle.

Right.  John Davis moved to Seattle as well.  So we had already recorded, and released, the “Rapture” EP and he had already announced that he was moving to Seattle.  But when he eventually moved back we started Difficult and used a couple Night Owls songs we never recorded as a jumping off point for that band.  Also, by the end of Night Owls John had begun taking on more vocal duties in the band, along with Rachel and I and we were not going to try and replace him.

A question I have been asking pretty much everyone I do these interviews with is what was the best and worst thing about the band.  But I feel like it almost doesn’t apply to Night Owls because most of the people were younger and more brash during their band’s tenure and made decisions that led to bad- but often funny in hindsight- situations.  Everyone in Night Owls was pretty grown up by the time the band started and finished.

You know, my favorite thing about Night Owls, which is my favorite thing about my current band Difficult, is that it’s with people that I’ve known for a very long time.  I’ve known John for over 10 years now.  I’ve known Rachel for close to 20 years at this point.  It’s a lot of hanging out and playing with people who you just have a language and understanding with that is a lot different than playing with people when you’re younger.  I think your priorities are different.  I think Night Owls was like that.  There was no pressure with that band.  We could just do whatever we wanted at our own pace.

But as far as least favorite things that’s tough.  There really aren’t any with Night Owls.  In bands in the past I’ve been in I may look back and wish we had done some things differently, but with Night Owls not so much.  I wish more people had been able to hear the song “Rapture” from our last EP.  I think it’s a fantastic song.  It’s not that I want money from it or anything, I just want to share.  That’s really all I get out of music these days anyway.  I just want to share it.  If you like it, cool, if not that’s OK too.  The ship has sailed a long time ago.  I’m never going to make money off of music and I don’t give a shit about that, but writing stuff and thinking, ‘hey, we all believe in this, check it out’ doesn’t really help if no one hears it.  So all of our stuff sort of just languishes on bandcamp.  People from around here remember it, but maybe since we didn’t get the chance to play out much that might be a bit of a regret.  But that’s alright we’re all still friends.  We might not see Tony as much, but three of us are still in a band together and that’s fun.

Here's that song "Rapture" from their last release.  It IS a great song.

So yeah, Night Owls haven't been in a band in quite awhile.  But you can still get their self-titled CD for just $4 this week and the digital download for $3 HERE.  It's good stuff.  And if you want to check into what they're all doing now check out Difficult (featuring John, Grant, and Rachel) and The Flashing Astonishers, which is Tony's primary band these days.