Comets On Fire
10/22/04
I hate it when canon-keeper VH1 mugs talk about how rock 'n' roll was, is, or should be dangerous. Rock 'n' roll has never been dangerous. Throwing bricks at tanks in the Gaza Strip is dangerous. Stage mishaps involving inattentive pyrotechnicians notwithstanding, playing electric guitar is not risky business. And on the receiving end, even emotionally fragile high school freshmen survive repeated spins of Marilyn Manson records for the most part. Want danger? Skip the skull tattoo and cut the seat belts out of your Jetta or some shit.
Anyway, I don't recall Comets On Fire purporting to be dangerous, but they make a pretty respectable bid for wild (at least that's how my mom would probably describe them). The San Francisco quintet hurls hammering psychedelic rock that manages to be at once concise and chaotic. Meaty riffs, heavy drumming, and jam-kicking vocals lay the stoner metal bedrock, while prog-flirting organs and vintage knob boxes steer things skyward. If the MC5 all-starring it with Blue Cheer, Pink Floyd, and Yes sounds like a righteous pile-up, you're gonna wanna get your hands on Blue Cathedral, the Comets' recently released third album.
I spoke with Noel Harmonson, the Comet in charge of the Echoplex and other devices set for sonic mayhem. Here's what he says about old hippies, beat-up gear, and famous arch druids.
You're the Echoplex guy. Tell me about your role in the band.
My rig and stuff is just a textural supplement to what would already be a kind of wild rock band. I put in textures of noise and feedback to kind of battle against what everybody else is doing and also to just mix things up. There's Echoplex -- a lot of feedback and stuff -- and then there's some tone generator and some effects too. I just kind of create another level of chaos, or uncontrollable sounds.
Are you manipulating the vocals on the fly?
Yeah, the vocals go through the Echoplex, which I put so much or so little delay on. There's still signal and feedback going through there, so it's just kind of a constant feedback circuit that can go in any direction.
So what you do is pretty improvisational?
Yeah, you could say that. Well, it's kinda half and half. It's improvisational in the fact that sometimes I can't predict what it's gonna sound like, perhaps, but I know what I'm gonna try to do.
What sounds do you hear in your head that you want to try to execute with your devices?
Like distortion and... it's really hard to describe. You've heard it on the record. I don't know what to call those sounds. I've created my own vocabulary for those sounds in my head, but I can't really describe 'em.
This is a unique role. What have you done in other bands?
I played drums for years in this band from Santa Cruz called The Lowdown. It was kind of a more No Wave-y kinda band. I've played guitar over the years too. I had gotten the Echoplex box years ago and was using it mostly for guitar stuff. When Comets were working on their first record, [guitarist/lead vocalist] Ethan wanted to do some vocals, and before that he was using some cruddy little digital delay box to put delay on his vocals, and I kept telling him that it kinda sounded like crap, so we tried the Echoplex, and in my instinctual tinkering discovered some other things that I could do with that unit.
You guys added a second guitar player at some point.
He's been kind of a musical friend and ally on the periphery for a few years. He played a little bit on the second record, and now he's full time. There's a lot more going on now. Everything was so dense already, but now we've got another maniac guitar solo guy going the whole time too.
Not too many bands are doing what you're doing. The only one that comes to mind is maybe Dead Meadow. You both have a cavernous, bottom-heavy sound. What was the creative decision behind that sound?
I don't know. At this point I feel like we're working from our own rulebook. I guess it was kind of an inspiration from certain '60s stuff -- like the Elevators or certain Japanese bands like High Rise and White Heaven. It's hard to say. It just sounded right to us and we kept going in that direction.
You guys use analog tape and older gear for the most part?
Yeah, a lot of gear that stands on three legs and fizzles out and spits out smoke and shit like that. Ethan has an old '60s Fender Jaguar and an old Fender Twin Reverb amp. He's got some weird little '60s and '70s pedals. Everybody seems to use big solid-state amps, but our bass player still uses some big, old Ampeg V4 head. None of our stuff is in great shape, and there's always an element of surprise or ambush every time we go to the practice space or play a show. Something can always not work right, but it's part of the territory.
You moved to San Francisco from Santa Cruz. The Bay Area would seem like a good place to be making your kind of music.
Yeah, it seems to be. It's kind of fun to have that legendary history of the West Coast psych scene here, but the move basically just came out of the fact that it wasn't very helpful to be in Santa Cruz any more. A lot of us, we'd been there for years and just needed to get into a different, more stimulating environment. The Bay Area is a great place right now, musically. Santa Cruz is older hippies who've settled and who are just layin' low, and then really young college kids who are only passing through town for a couple years, just partying their balls off and then leaving.
Do you think there's a stylistic thread running through what might be lumped together as West Coast psych?
It seemed like there used to be. At this point I don't know. I don't know who's West Coast psych and East Coast psych. I think of Quicksilver Messenger Service or Jefferson Airplane as West Coast psych, but I don't really see us sounding like them very much. We're kinda heavier and crazier. It's kinda coming from all over. Ethan does a lot of Quicksilver, John Cipollina whammy bar playing. It's hard to say.
Are you on tour? What are you guys doing?
We don't have any big stuff coming up, but we're gonna do the West Coast in November with Wolf Eyes. We'll do five dates in the middle of November.
Do you draw a pretty stoney crowd?
Yeah, but it kinda comes from all over. We've got stoney people, we've got bar rats, we've got noise people.
Do you sense a loyal niche community for your kind of music?
In a way, but it's odd because in the Bay Area we don't really fit in with any other group of bands. There aren't a handful of psych bands. There's more of a garage rock scene up here, so we're always the odd man out. I think that's only working for us rather than against us, being in that kind of environment.
Who are some of those bands?
There's this good band called Killer's Kiss. And there's actually kind of a more psych band, The Gris Gris.
What are some of these songs about? I can't make out the lyrics, 'cause there's so much going on.
I can't really explain it, 'cause that's Ethan's stuff. He's drawing on all kinds of tales of space travel and time travel, but also tales of love and travel -- happy, sad, loss and regret, but all with a weird, psychedelic, Italian horror movie kind of sneer to it all.
Do you guys use mind-expanding drugs at all?
Not too much. I think we've all, when we were younger, done that, but we're relatively a Bud Light and Bourbon... We're ridin' that kinda train right now [laughs].
Comets On Fire is the type of band that causes rock writers to break out all kinds of mystical prose. Is that the best way to describe music like yours -- with subjective, evocative language?
Yeah, I can agree with that. It's just weird to read things about records that you put out -- on so many different levels. I certainly appreciate the ambitious, mystical approach, rather than using cookie cutter language or whatever. We're opening the door to some far-out interpretations.
Julian Cope has championed your music. Is that cool or is he pretty much crazy these days?
[laughs] I think so, but in a great way. We haven't met him face to face, so it's all through email. We send each other music and stuff, and he's dying to get us out to England, which I think we're gonna do in January. So we'll finally be able to meet up with the old arch druid himself. And I think that we're gonna do a split seven-inch with him.
Jello Biafra picked up your first record for Alternative Tentacles?
The first record we did, we did from Santa Cruz, and we just printed 500 LPs ourselves. Shortly after the second LP, Field Recordings From The Sun, came out, he reissued that self-titled one on Alternative Tentacles. He just kinda started showin' up at our shows and would chat us up after every show and say really great things, and before we knew it he was gonna reissue that first album that nobody at that point could get, 'cause they were long gone.
How'd the deal with SubPop come about?
We had played a few shows with their band Kinski, and by the time we got up to Seattle and played this big show with Kinski and Earth, the whole SubPop office was hangin' out over there at the show, 'cause their band was playing. And we were meeting a couple of the people that worked there, and they were like, 'Aw man, your last record, everybody in the office loves it. It's the only thing we agree on. We're jammin' it all the time.' That surprised me. And when we went on a national tour last summer, we met up with a couple of SubPop people in Detroit and Chicago and talked about doin' a record, and the more we talked with them, the more we just got to be friends with everybody who worked there.
Seems like things are taking off for you guys.
Yeah, they certainly are. We're not really able to do a lot of touring right now, just because of work stuff and this and that, so we kinda have these weekend warrior trips.
So you're still holding down day jobs?
Oh yeah, indeed. [laughs] Indeed.
Subscribe to Feed
