Who’s in the band?

My name is Aaron, Andy plays drums, we got Creepy Dave on guitar and vocals and then Jim on Bass. That’s the whole band right there.

Original line-up or…?

Uh, it’s not the original line-up but that’s the line-up as of now.

How long have you been playing?

The band’s been together for about a year and a half. Something like that

How did you meet the other guys?

We were in some other bands together. Som other people stopped playing so we got together and now we’re the Blowtops.

What other bands were you in?

Just some local stuff ’round here. Like… Jim’s actually still in the Baseball Furies. You know, just some other local stuff, nothing big.

What about your new record… What was it like recording with Jim Diamond?

He was real nice, real helpful. Let us do whatever we wanted to do.

How come you decided to go to Jim Diamond?

Ah, that was just our label, Flying Bomb, put us there. They’re outta Ypsilanti and Andy is just friends with everybody there. They just told us to drive out and they just paid for everything. Couldn’t say no to that.

How come Flying Bomb got interested in you?

I don’t know. We sent him a tape like a year ago and he wrote us back and the tape was just a little too noisey. And then we put out the single and we mailed it to him and Andy called me up two weeks after we sent it out to him. That he wanted to do an album and what not so

When is it coming out?

There’s a single that I didn’t send you guys coming out in about a week or two I think. It’s at the pressing plant now. It’s got ”Maniac At Large” on it and two songs that aren’t on the album. And then I think end of next month or early the following month the album will be out. I think that’s the plan as far as I know it.

Are you gonna do some touring and stuff?

Yeah, we’re hopefully gonna do some. We’re not sure what we’re doing right now ’cause it’s depending on this Crypt thing with the Baseball Furies. We’re gonna try to find another guy here soon. We definitely wanna tour around. We don’t have a booking agency or anything so we have to set everything up ourselves. It’s kind of a pain in the ass.

Yeah, but it’s kinda fun too.

Oh yeah, it’s definitely fun. We toured last summer down south for a couple of weeks. That was a lot of fun. It was really hot though.

Where’d you go?

We went… Like we’re in New York state and we went all the way down to New Orleans was our farthest point south. And we came back up. So we played in the Carolinas and Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama… In the middle of August of course.Even better.

Yeah, fantastic.Where did you record the single?

Oh yeah, the first single you have? Yeah.That one we recorded, me and our drummer and this guy Mr Skimask. We recorded it ourselves up in our room. Big Neck will probably send you the Baseball Furies 7” that they’re putting out. We did that as well.

Sounds really good.

Thanks.

The stuff that we sent you that you guys are gonna put out, we recorded that ourselves as well. That’s the difference between the big studio production.

So, do you get a lot of gigs in New York?

We don’t really play out around here too much. Buffalo’s pretty boring. There’s not really much going on. So we play maybe once a month around here. The guy who runs Big Neck, Bart, he owns a bar around here we all kinda work at. We do shows y’know. Like I try to book bands and stuff. We have the Hentchmen playing next month. So we try to do some shows and you know, we play when we get bands that we like. It’s kinda like a metal town. A lot of bad Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson kinda stuff. It’s terrible. Like Cannibal Corpse is from here. They’re from Buffalo and there’s a lot of bands like that around here.

So you’re gonna turn it into a rock’n’roll town now?

Yeah, I don’t know if it’ll work but we’ll see what we can do.

That’s good. Did you do any shows when you were in Detroit?

Yeah, we played there the weekend we recorded the record. We played with Bantam Rooster. That was a lot of fun. They’re real good.

Yeah, really good and great people.

Yeah, they’re real nice too. They’re fantastic people. They played real good. They played here before too. They played here in september, October somewhere. They played with the Baseball Furies so they kinda knew us a little bit.

What do the Baseball Furies sound like?

They’re kinda like a fast punkrock band kinda thing. But garagey as well. But more punk than garage. Screaming and jumping around. That kinda thing. They’re a lot of fun.

Are there any other bands you’ve seen or heard lately?

Uh, around here there’s pretty much nothing. I really haven’t heard any other good bands around here quite honestly. There’s us and them. That’s about it around here. And I don’t know… I haven’t really heard anything else that’s good. I saw Servotron when we mixed down our record. They were really good. I like Devo a lot so they were fantastic. They had some band opening up for them that was really good, uh Operation Reinformation. They were kinda like Kraftwerk except they were really fast. And they all played computer keyboards. They played the Nightrider theme song.

Any good records?

Uh, I don’t know what I got lately that was any good. I don’t know, nothing really too exciting lately. I got the Urinals CD.

Urinals?

Yeah, they’re from California. They played in 1980, 81, something like that. They do a song ”I’m A Bug”. They just play one chord for like a minute and a half. They’re pretty good. What else did I get… Nightmares On Wax. It’s the guy from Dead Or Alive. Sounds kinda like the Damned or something. That one’s pretty good, there’s a lot of cool organ on it.

You’re pretty inspired by this horror theme or something for the blowtops I guess

Yeah, we just kinda fell into that. We were trying to… Well, initially our plan was to sound like Pussy Galore, at least my plan was to sound like Pussy Galore a lot. You know like the Birthday Party and like Scientists. You know, swampy and noisey and whatever. But we all listen to a lot of garage like the first couple of Guitar Wolf records. That kinda stuff, the Mummies and all that stuff so that’s why we sound garagey as well.That’s a good mix.So, that’s what we did. And then like, the guitar, all that noise is all my guitar. That is just like… I just tried to steal from the first Jesus and Mary Chain record. I really like the guitar sound on that ’cause it’s a lot of noise. You can’t understand what the guitar is doing. So, that was the point behind that. It’s all kind of a mixture of stuff like that. That was our whole plan.

You like the Necessary Evils?

Yeah, I did like them. I liked that Buzzaw record, the single on In The Red. They’re just screaming and shit and the riff was real cool. The album I liked but I don’t know if I liked the production as much on the album.

No, me neither.

I thought it kinda let me down. The songs seemed real cool but I didn’t like the production much on it. I saw they had a new single out but I haven’t heard it.

Yeah, it’s really cool.

They got a bassplayer now?

Yeah. It sounds better. It’s a good single definitely.

That’s cool ’cause I liked the Beguiled a lot. I think they’re fantastic. So yeah, I was real excited when the first couple of things came out. Did you hear the Crypt 7”, the Necessary Evils?

Yeah.

I can’t get that around here. You’ll be surprised, Crypt’s distribution in America is terrible. I can hardly get anything. To get an Oblivians record it takes like three or four months to order it and get it over here. I try and go outta town about once every couple of months and that’s when I buy my records.

You don’t have any good record stores?

There’s a couple supposedly good record stores. But they’re mostly that indie rock stuff. That’s also kinda big around here. Like all that college rock stuff. So that’s what the alternative record stores carry around here. There’s really no garage bands within probably like three states on either side. Maybe in New York City or something but that’s pretty far away. So there’s not really this huge garage scene around here.

Do you play in New York City?

No, we’ve never played there yet actually. We’ll hopefully play there soon. But as far as Buffalo goes there’s not much going on. You have to go out of town or if Bart can convince them to play at the bar. Like, we had the Revelators and Bantam Rooster play at different times and the Drags are supposed to play here. We lost money on both shows, we had maybe 20 or 30 people there. We had Nashville Pussy play three weeks ago and we played with ’em. That was the first show that made the money back at the door. But, I really think that was because it was Wet T-shirt night at the bar too. That was a really good show actually.