What's up rock n' rollers. Today we're pleased to share with y'all an in-depth interview with Ross from Santa Cruz revivalists The Snogs. Check out their phenomenal new tape
charmless. We got the scoop on the projects influences, the secrets of Santa Cruz, and whats to come!
Hey there! Introduce yourselves and tell us about your role in The Snogs.
Howdy, I'm Ross. I've been recording music as The Snogs since I was a teenager. In the beginning, I wrote and recorded all the music myself on my dad's old portastudio, with no intention of playing live or releasing it. I invented The Snogs as an imaginary pop group, the last of its kind, who only wrote 2-minute songs, and rocked shabby mop-tops, moth-eaten sweaters, and torn jeans. I always thought The Troggs snagged the grooviest band name, and I wanted the music to emulate the UK C86 scene - a la The "Snogs". Once I went off to school and was hipped to the fact that there was a small cassette resurgence going on, I started putting out tapes and would tap friends to play live when the rare opportunity presented itself. Typically, a few members of the group won't know how to play their instruments, which keeps live Snogs shows nice and messy.
Your newest tape charmless is such a jammer! Tell us about how it came together!
I wrote and recorded 'Charmless' sporadically throughout 2019. Mostly in my bedroom, sometimes in this Town Hall that used to let folks use it as a practice space (R.I.P.). A few of the vocals that my friend Sequoia did, on songs like "Stick Around Awhile" and "Strange", were recorded in this dilapidated old rec room up on campus. I wanted there to be a tension between the songs on this tape, both sonically and lyrically, so on certain songs, I tried to keep things as acoustic as possible, while on others I tended towards fuzz and feedback. I think that sort of "vinegar and honey" approach is what made groups like The Jesus and Mary Chain, Beat Happening, and The Velvets pack such a wallop. Like, on one hand, the Mary Chain will have these real noisy songs with all this swirling feedback, but will actually be singing these sappy love songs, and on the other hand, Beat Happening will sing these cutesy nursery rhymes that are really about sex and death and junk. So that's the sort of thing we were trying to do on this tape. My roommate Natalie sang on "Red Wheelbarrow", and my buddy Albert who plays with us a lot did the bass on a few tracks. So The Snogs were a 4-piece for this outing. The day I released the songs on my bandcamp, we went to a friend's housewarming party up in San Francisco, where we ran into the folks who run Discontinuous Innovation (a seriously hip SF tape label
https://discontinuousinnovationinc.bandcamp.com/ ). They're members of The Umbrellas (a seriously hip jangle-pop outfit
https://discontinuousinnovationinc.bandcamp.com/album/maritime-e-p) so we started geeking out about twee, planned a Valentine's Day show together, then got quite drunk and danced all night. I shot them an email a week later and "Voila!", the tape had a home.
Any stories behind the songs?
I have a lot of tender memories associated with the songs on this record. 'Quiet Violet' is kinda an unrequited love letter to a girl who was in the same lecture as me once. On the first day of class I got her name at roll call, Violet. She would wear these big Pippi Longstocking braids in her hair, and I would daydream about what she was like during boring lectures, but I never got up the nerve to shatter the illusion and talk to her. When I sing about Violet hiding her head in silence, it's really just a deflection of my own feelings, which is something I do a lot in my songwriting. 'Little Sally Walker' is based on a schoolyard sing-song some of the Snogs girls learned at camp when they were kids. They taught it to me on a long drive in my old car when the radio was out. When you have to rack your kid-brain for the ways you used to pass the time, back when the days seemed endless, you can dig up some really groovy stuff.
You have a unique sound. Who might you be influenced by? Any songwriting heroes?
Make no mistake, The Snogs is a revival group first and foremost, at least on this tape. We sound like we're ripping off Beat Happening because we are. Moe Tucker of The Velvets taught me how to drum standing up, Calvin Johnson from BH and Stephen Pastel of The Pastels assured me you could sing in a tone-deaf monotone, and Daniel Johnston showed me that you didn't need to know how to tune a guitar to play one. These groups, along with countless others, practically dared me to start a band, they proved that anyone really COULD do it themselves. These days I think being a "true" original means less than it ever has. There's so many great groups that get labeled as "devo-core" and stuff like that. They'll be the first to admit their influences, so who really cares? I didn't see the kind of music I loved getting made when I was a teenager, so I started making it myself. The Snogs' only goal is to inspire other young folks creatively. Dig that!
Tell us a little about Santa Cruz. What's the music scene like?
On the surface, Santa Cruz is a sleepy sea-side college town, but if you stay here for a few weeks you'll start to figure how weird it really is. It's like Twin Peaks here I swear to god, there's this really gritty underside to the idyllic landscape, and there's a magnetism I've never really been able to put my finger on. It's the kinda place people get sucked into for life. There was a serious hippie scene here in the 60s/70s, the fallout of which was punctuated by an earthquake in '89 which bulldozed our downtown, erasing a lot of cultural history. Since then, techie-fascists from over the hill in the silicon valley have started buying up the land and rebuilding Santa Cruz in their zombified Amazon vision, prompting one of the country's worst housing crises. Now, the leftover hippies are divided between gregarious old deadheads who own multi-million dollar homes and acid casualties who have been forced onto the streets. Because of the University, there is a seasonally disproportionate amount of young folks here for the size of the town, but the wicked forces of techie neoliberalism have left most feeling artistically impotent - a nationwide affliction it seems.
For bands, there's not really anywhere to play (at least not where you can get drunk), so house shows are how it goes around here. Most groups aren't worth noting - ignorantly confident jam bands, slowcore shoegazing twerps, and some misguided emerging "dj's". The young crowd have their hearts in the right place though, they just wanna dance and are looking for any excuse. There are a choice few bands with some grit, and I think things are trending in the right direction, but most are new and unrecorded, so look out for stuff from "snowball fight" and "mud". We get some good metal shows every now and then, these local highschoolers who go by "
Sepsis" who are probably the best group in Santa Cruz right now haha. My bandmate sequoia put out this
solo e.p. last year that rules too.
We're based out in Detroit. Have you ever been? Any bands you like from out here?
No I've never been out to Michigan but a lot of the state's music has made a big impact on me - groups like MC5, Half Japanese, and Destroy All Monsters. Because of those groups I've always associated the Detroit scene with a real raw energy. I'm pretty bad about keeping up with modern music but someone from The Waterheads got in touch with me from the phone number I put on an old tape and they real nice about it, and they're pretty good. My buddies at the tape label OJC recordings outta L.A. have put out some stuff for Quilt Boy, who I think is from Detroit. He rules. I'm pretty sure he runs the label All Gone too.
What's next for The Snogs?
Good question! Hmmm well we got songs coming out on comps for the aforementioned OJC recordings soon, and for one being released by LA riot grrrl zine Spew. Work on the next Snogs tape is coming slowly but surely, I just bought a bootleg rickenbacker 12-string so the new stuff is gonna be a lot more jangly. I've been listening to some darker, brooding jangle pop stuff for inspiration, like Salem 66 and even R.E.M. We really wanna do a 7 inch if we can swing it!
Thanks for listening!
