na: crystal stilts

This past February while preparing Susu and Hands on Heads for the March installment of eMusic Selects, Alex Naidus, our newest editor, came to us with a band called Crystal Stilts. They needed something like Selects, he explained, because not only were they great, but all of their gear had just been stolen, and they had no idea what they were going to do. Joe and I immediately began spinning the handful of tracks Alex had collected, and fell in love. Clearly this was a band we had to support.

Ultimately, getting everything together for March proved to be too much; instead, we present Crystal Stilts for month three of eMusic Selects. They are our only pick this month, in part because we find them so special and so compelling. The Stilts are Brad Hargett (vocals), Frankie Rose (drums), JB Townsend (guitar) and Andy Adler (bass). Last week Alex and I spent several hours with them getting drinks and hanging out. Below is the full-ish transcript of our night. In addition, we put together a little DIY photoshoot in front of a gravestone store nearby. You can peep those pix here.

BTW, we love these people. A lot. We want to thank them for participating, and we hope everyone digs their music. Also, if you are in NYC, they are playing TONITE at the Knitting Factory with Rob from High Places and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. We will be there! Come check it out.

YANCEY: What’s it like being from Florida?

BRAD: [Laughs] It’s good to not be in Florida.

YANCEY: I’m very scared of people from Florida.

BRAD: [Laughs] I’m scared of him [points to JB]. You’d be surprised how many people up here are from Florida. I’ve met a load of people up here that I didn’t even know were from Florida that are. Lots of people from Tampa. It’s kind of like, where else are you gonna move? California is a big jump. And it’s on the east coast. And you gotta get out of Florida.

YANCEY: Where are you from in Florida?

BRAD: South Florida. Boca Raton.

YANCEY: Did you grow up on a boat?

BRAD: [Laughs] Yeah, I did. I was born on waterskis. [Everyone laughs]

YANCEY: You didn’t even learn left and right until you were ten, you just knew port and starboard.

ALEX: So are you guys [Brad and JB] from the same town, though, is that how you met?

JB: Yeah. I was born in Los Angeles, then moved to Florida in 1986 or so.

YANCEY: Did you guys meet in high school or grade school or…?

BRAD: Actually out of high school. There were probably seven or eight people in that town that knew who the Velvet Underground were, or the Stooges, or, like, anybody besides…I don’t even know. We sort of grouped together – a bunch of us.

JB: There was one cool club in Miami.

BRAD: Yeah there was one place that would play decent music.

JB: I used to DJ there from time to time.

ALEX: Did you have a band there, too?

JB: No, I played music with – do you know that band For Ex-Lovers Only?

ALEX: Yeah, from Orlando, right?

JB: Yeah. I used to play music with the drummer, Tick. It wasn’t really a band, we didn’t play shows. We’d just record on 4-track.

ALEX: Did you both decide to move here together, though?

JB: Kinda – we both just decided to move here at the same time.

BRAD: Yeah, he got here a week before me.

JB: I went to France for a little while, ‘cause my parents live there.

ALEX: Whoa, that’s crazy – what’s the story there?

JB: Yeah that’s wacky.

BRAD: [Laughs] Yeah he’s got a big family there. What do you have, six brothers and sisters?

JB: Yeah.

YANCEY: Really? Are you youngest or oldest?

JB: Oldest.

YANCEY: Do you like your brothers and sisters?

JB: [Makes noncommittal face]

[Everyone laughs]

JB: What is this, an interview?

ALEX: Do you go to France a lot now?

JB: I try to go there once a year. I went there last summer for awhile.

BRAD: He’s lucky, he can get root canals for like three bucks over there.

JB: Yeah it’s like eight dollars or something.

ALEX: Oh you have dual citizenship?

JB: Yeah.

YANCEY: So when did you guys move here?

BRAD: September 2002. Moved up into the Bronx, which was extremely cheap. I had a room as big as this patio for like four hundred bucks a month. But nobody would go there. It was like another planet up there. But it was really easy to get to, except at night. During the day the 4 was running express, but yeah it was pretty isolated up there.

ALEX: Or anytime there’s a Yankees game.

BRAD: Yeah. I was actually here when the Marlins beat them, I got a really big kick outta that. There are all these forty-five year old guys who are bald and fat and live with their mom and are like, “We don’t take second place! We don’t accept that!” It’s like, you live with your grandma. You’re fifty-two.

ALEX: How long did you live in the Bronx?

BRAD: Two years.

YANCEY: So when you moved, was it just like “Florida fucking sucks, I need somewhere else to be,” and New York was the obvious option?

BRAD: Well my sister lived here about two years before I came. And also my girlfriend at the time went to SVA [School of Visual Arts]. You know, I think everybody down there starts thinking about moving to New York when they’re in their twenties. It just takes people more or less time to get up here. We had a friend named Mike down there who had been planning to move before me and I think he just got up here last year.

ALEX: So Andy, where are you from? Not from Florida…

ANDY: No, I’m from Boston.

ALEX: That’s cool, I guess. [Laughs]

YANCEY: I’m still fascinated by the Florida thing.

BRAD: Lay it on.

YANCEY: Where did you first hear indie rock? Was there college radio? Was it Alternative Press, was it Spin?

ANDY: It was all 2 Live Crew, all the time.

BRAD: No, I was actually into gangsta rap ‘til I was 15 or 16. Well not gangsta rap, but, like, rap.

YANCEY: What kind stuff? How old are you now?

BRAD: I’m 30. I thought I was into super obscure rap. Hieroglyphics, Black Moon’s first record. That time, early ’90s.

YANCEY: I mean, for that age –

ALEX: If you’re 13 listening to Black Moon, that’s pretty obscure.

JB: I just listened to MC Hammer all day.

BRAD: I listened to MC Hammer when I was in 7th grade. I actually went to school with the kid in Dashboard Confessional –

YANCEY: Chris Carraba?

BRAD: Yeah, he was two years ahead of me and he was the king of the skaters.

YANCEY: Was he the coolest kid in school?

BRAD: Well, he was king of the skaters. He was the king of his genre.

YANCEY: Right.

BRAD: His girlfriend had crazy tattoos, which was really wild.

YANCEY: And she was in 6th grade… So what was the first record and how did you get to it? Moving from Black Moon…

BRAD: My sister got into Joy Division and the Smiths. It wasn’t even indie rock, I first got into British post-punk and new wave stuff, I guess. I was realizing that listening to rap was kind of a compensation, too, for kind of being a pussy and not wanting to be. At some point I was buying records I knew I should like but it wasn’t quite doing it for me. Then I had friends, once I got to college and turned 18, I met a lot of European kids; an English friend turned me on to a lot of stuff. But indie rock did not really factor in, in high school.

ANDY: [Mock scoffs] Backwater Florida. Not enlightened Boston. [Laughs]

BRAD: Yeah, this guy has the Clean at age nine. [Everyone laughs]

JB: Yeah, didn’t you get Psychocandy when you were like five years old?

ANDY: Yeah, I asked for it for my birthday. [Everyone laughs]

BRAD: [In nasally kid voice] “Mom, there’s this new record. You gotta import it, mom.” [Everyone laughs]

YANCEY: What was your first job here?

BRAD: Rocks in Your Head, on Prince Street, which was a great first job. You know the place?

ALEX: Is that the record store?

BRAD: Yeah. It was on Prince Street in Soho. It was old and dingy, it had been there since ’78 or something. It was great. I mean, it was eight bucks an hour, but still. [Laughs] You can’t fully appreciate that fact until you have a real job afterwards, but it was still a great job. Plus, the owner – used records, he wouldn’t even keep track of them. When he was showing me how to keep track of what’s been sold, I said, “What about when we sell used records,” and he was like, [in grumpy voice] “Oh, pffff.”

ALEX: [Laughs] Forget about it.

BRAD: Yeah – “don’t even keep track.” So there were a plethora of records stolen.

YANCEY: I was gonna ask how much you stole.

BRAD: Yeah – making no money was kind of subsidized by my record collection growing exponentially.

YANCEY: Then would you sell the records back to him?

ALEX: So what happened with that place – it moved to Williamsburg?

BRAD: It moved to Williamsburg, it was a total debacle. He was over it, he was burned out. He looked at like two places, didn’t do any research, put no effort into it. We ended up getting this spot on Roebling, right where Oslo is. That place was like a bunker. We didn’t even have sign for two months. People would literally walk by it and not know it was a record store.

JB: Yeah you guys sold like three CDs a day, maybe.

ALEX: Oh my god.

YANCEY: Would people come in and ask you if you knew where any record stores were around there?

BRAD: [Laughs] Exactly. You’d have people come in for at least a few months and be like, “I didn’t know there was a record store here.” “Mystery” does not really help businesses too much. So that totally collapsed – and he got really lucky actually, getting a buyer. He was totally fucked. These guys were starting a record store in South Carolina and made him an offer which was more than he even hoped to get. They offered him forty-five grand for all the merchandise and sorta bailed him out. It would have been a really bad situation for him. And I was almost kind of upset that they bailed him out, because he handled it so stupidly –

ALEX: You wanted him to get burned, a little bit.

BRAD: [Laughs] Yeah, I wanted him to feel it. Like, you’re a moron. He’d always blame it on “my generation.” [In grumpy voice] “You’re generation doesn’t appreciate a record store. They’re just in their own world, they don’t care about anything.” And it’s like, they don’t know the store is here! [Everyone laughs]

JB: Andy worked there, too.

BRAD: He was a character, yeah. He was also the least charming person you can imagine. People would come in and ask if a record was good and he’d say, [grumpy voice] “I don’t know. I’ve never heard it.”

JB: I would walk by the store and peek in and if he was there, I’d just keep walking. I remember one time he tried to suggestively sell a CD to somebody and they were like, “Well what does it sound like?” and he said, “I dunno, I’ve never listened to it.”

BRAD: He’d have Top 10 lists at the end of the year. It wasn’t even really what he thought. He would have slots for like an old classic rock guy, “Ok, gotta put Van Morrison’s record in there” and he’d have slots for “indie” bands. One time, me and my friend said, “Did you even hear the Kings of Leon record?” [Laughs] And he just said, “No, but I just needed one more new indie band on my list.”

ALEX: Didn’t seem like that was gonna work out.

BRAD: I mean, his location…he just coasted for like 15 years on that store’s history and location. The fact that guy ran a successful business for 30 years is out of control. He was the least organized –

ANDY: I closed the store myself on the first day I worked there. He copied my driver’s license, but still.

BRAD: He didn’t even take my driver’s license, that reminds me. The first day I worked there – he would get money orders to send to the record companies – he gave me twenty four hundred in cash. On my first shift. I was like, “Hmm, twenty four hundred…eight dollars an hour…this is like six months or work right here.”

ANDY: He had a ridiculous interview process.

BRAD: [In grumpy voice] “So…compare Stereolab to somebody.” “What album is this from: ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’”

ANDY: He’d do this annoying thing where he’d have records to restock and would hand them to you in the most condescending way ever, like, [grumpy voice] “Bob Dylan, this goes in ‘60s. Pavement, this goes in indie rock.” No shit, dude.

BRAD: I worked there for four years and he’s still do it! [In grumpy voice] “Miles Davis, that’s jazz.” [Everyone laughs]

ANDY: That place would always get good celebrities.

BRAD: Benicio [del Torro] would always have two girls with him.

JB: Didn’t he buy a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he came in?

ANDY: [Laughs] Yeah, I was really confused by that.

YANCEY: This is after the movie is out…

ANDY: Yeah. I don’t know why he had to buy it. I dunno, I’m not gonna attempt to guess what he was doing. James Gandolfini came in one day.

YANCEY: What’d he buy?

ANDY: He bought a stack of records this big [makes arms wide].

YANCEY: All Sinatra?

ANDY: Classic rock mostly, and yeah, some Sinatra and stuff like that. He was pretty nice.

BRAD: Anthony Kiedis would make out with 20 year-olds, while you were ringing him up. Literally.

ANDY: Yeah that place had better celebrities coming in than Kim’s [popular NYC record store]. Actually Roberto Benigni came in once, that was pretty awesome.

YANCEY: Did he just knock over all the CDs?

ANDY: [Laughs] I hate that guy actually, I think he’s horrible. My friend Matt I was working with said, “Good to see you, man” and he goes, “A-good to see a-you!” [Everyone laughs] Also, that guy Adam…Goldberg? Is that it?

YANCEY: Yeah.

ANDY: I had to tell him he couldn’t return his Polvo CD. [Everyone laughs] Strict Kim’s return policy.

++++

ALEX: Can we talk about the van? What happened – you got it back…

BRAD: Yeah, I will talk about the van. [Laughs]

ANDY: It’s been enough time. [Laughs]

ALEX: What was the practice space situation? All the equipment was in the van.

BRAD: Yeah. We were practicing at [Brooklyn practice studio] Flood, but it was a really small space. We were in between spaces, really – [the other band] said “You guys can practice here, but we don’t want your stuff here.” It was one of those things, we were being lazy. We should have gotten another space, put our gear in it, you know. But it was free most of the time, we’d go in, maybe pay twenty bucks. But we were getting increasingly paranoid about all our stuff being in the van. We kinda knew this was a really bad idea.

So anyway, I woke up some morning –

ANDY: I think the precursor is that it got side-swiped.

BRAD: Yeah, I was walking outside on the way to practice in Bed-Stuy and someone had side-swiped not just my car but two cars in a row. They were just crushed. The rearview mirror was hanging off and from front to back there was a huge swipe across it. So I ended up getting tickets for having no sideview mirror – which, I even got a ticket while it was parked.

YANCEY: [Laughs] Yeah, I was about to say –

BRAD: I swear, they gave me a ticket while it was parked. Also, I had a few parking tickets…whatever.

JB: He had like six or seven parking tickets.

ALEX: Incidental. [Laughs]

BRAD: That was my first hope, though, that it had been towed. I had outstanding parking tickets. I get to work, freaking out a little – this is three days before [playing] Bard [College] and ten days before South by Southwest. All our shit was in it. But I figured, it probably got towed.

So I call the police station. They were like, “Lemme check. You’re car has not been towed, call 911.” Fuck. So I call 911, report it stolen – even checked on the New York City government website where you can see if it’s towed. I actually have a printout from a month later saying, “Your car has not been towed” from the New York City Police Department, the City Marshall. So anyway, we figured it was stolen. I had given it up. I thought I had gone through all the options. The Police Department didn’t tell me that maybe, you know, they have no communication. So anyway, we were supposed to leave on a Monday morning for SXSW. The car has a Florida license plate, so my mom gets a letter and calls me, [in mom voice] “I got a letter, it says your car’s been impounded!” This is 6pm on Friday and they’re closed all weekend.

For one, I was furious. They told me it had not been towed. They could have at least said, “Maybe it’s been towed, we have no idea,” but they told me it had definitely not been towed.

ANDY: And that it was gonna be auctioned off the next Friday.

ALEX: Oh my god. With everything that was in it? [Everyone laughs]

BRAD: That was the question! Would they advertise that? “Start a band!” [Everyone laughs]

JB: Vox Jaguar organ.

ANDY: Bob Dylan bootlegs. A pair of pants.

BRAD: Some books on drugs. [Laughs] So then, we needed to try and get it out. We couldn’t – it would’ve been smarter to rent a car, drive down there, play the shows and figure it out when we got back – but the car would’ve been gone by then. So we had to get the car back. I tried to get up early and go over there, but it was such a runaround. You had to go to three different places; I sat around for eight hours while they got around to bringing it out. When the guy finally pulled the car out of the lot, he pulled out with the tow truck and just dropped it without slowing down. The car bounced back about five feet, then he just gave me one of these [points fingers].

ALEX: Like, “See ya.”

BRAD: Yeah. So we stilll, at that point, had a chance to start out for Texas right then. But considering the step-daughter treatment it received, I got in there and it was like “Click-click-click.” Nothin’. So then we waited another three hours. Got a tow truck from the biggest psychopath ever to be in a tow truck. [Everyone laughs]

YANCEY: How many does was it that you thought everything had been stolen?

BRAD: It was three weeks!

YANCEY: Three weeks?

BRAD: Yeah. I thought it was gone.

ALEX: Before your mom got the letter.

BRAD: Yeah.

YANCEY: So what were you doing for those three weeks?

BRAD: Crying. [Everyone laughs]

ALEX: Were you like, “We can’t even be a band anymore?”

BRAD: Well yeah, there was that thought initially. But honestly, we don’t have that much equipment. Maybe fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars worth of equipment. It was like we had twenty grand worth of shit.

JB: I actually bought a guitar the day we found out it was towed [not stolen].

BRAD: [Laughs] Yeah. The thing was, everyone was really cool with borrowing equipment, everyone was super helpful. I almost felt bad when we got the stuff back. [Everyone laughs] Especially because I feel like it looks really stupid. It sort-of looks like, “You didn’t even call to see if it had gotten towed?”

YANCEY: [Laughs] Right.

BRAD: I feel like people that don’t know the story – which, I would think the same thing. You know…”idiots.” [Laughs]

ALEX: “They’re probably from Florida.”

BRAD: [Laughs] Yeah.

++++

ALEX: Is that what you guys are thinking, you want a label for the full-length?

JB: Yeah I think so.

BRAD: We always wanted to try and do it on our own, but just realized that no only can’t we do it, but we don’t want to do all the stuff you gotta do. We’re just not that good at all the stuff you gotta do –

ANDY: Yeah it’s just the money and infrastructure that exist of getting it places.

JB: Yeah, I sent out like six EPs today and it was a hassle, you know?

ALEX: And what about when it’s 600? You’d be totally fucked. [Laughs]

BRAD: Yeah and you’d be dealing with your band so much that you almost becomes sick of the idea of your band, when you’re doing everything for it. I get tired of it.

YANCEY: What do you mean? You just want someone to take over for a bit so you can be like, “I’m gonna go watch the game?”

BRAD: [Laughs] Yeah, just to not be like “Crystal Stilts, Crystal Stilts,” thinking about band stuff all the time.

ANDY: Mostly with the stuff that’s not fun. Like “distribution” – that’s not, like, a hoot to do.

BRAD: Yeah, exactly.

YANCEY: How much money have you lost being in a band, you think?

BRAD: I don’t wanna talk about it. [Everyone laughs] I dunno.

I went to grad school to basically get loan money and I would take these ghost credits. The school had a thing where you could take “equivalency credits” – it wasn’t actually a class, it was basically for students to maintain full-time status even if they didn’t take that many classes. But the loan companies just saw them as credits, so I would get a few extra grand every semester and that’s how we did a bunch of the recording and put out the single. All that stuff.

YANCEY: Have your parents heard the band? Any of you?

BRAD: Yeah, yeah.

JB: My dad has.

YANCEY: What was the reaction?

JB: My dad said it sounds like “the best new Beatles.” [Everyone laughs]

ANDY: In a French accent, nonetheless.

JB: [In fake French accent] “That sounds like the best new Bettles.” [Everyone laughs]

BRAD: My dad said, “What the hell is that? Are those actual words or are you just mumbling?” [Laughs]

ALEX: What’d you say to that?

BRAD: I said, “They’re words, dad!” [Laughs]

YANCEY: They’re about you.

BRAD: [Laughs] Yeah.

YANCEY: So do they view it as legitimate at all?

BRAD: No.

YANCEY: Do you view it as legitimate?

BRAD: Yeah! To my dad, me being in music is a huge joke. My dad’s also old – he’s almost 80.

YANCEY: Really?

BRAD: Yeah, he had us when he was well into his 40s – me and my sister. In the ‘60s, he was in his mid-30s when the Beatles hit, so for him, people that play music are like jazz [musicians]. You have some sort of musical education and talent. I don’t even play an instrument, so it’s a joke to him.

YANCEY: What would it take for him to view what you do as being legitimate? Was there a path he wanted to send you on?

BRAD: I think he would view it as legitimate if I ever, like, made money from doing it.

ANDY: Opening for Tony Bennett. [Everyone laughs]

BRAD: He’s come to accept it.

++++

YANCEY: Do you guys get nervous live?

BRAD: I get drunk.

YANCEY: That’s your singer’s secret?

JB: I get less and less nervous now.

ALEX: Well you used to play the kick drum while you were playing guitar, right? That must have been nerve-wracking.

BRAD: He worked really hard.

JB: No I didn’t. [Laughs]

YANCEY: [To Brad] Do you help load out or are you “the talent”? [Everyone laughs]

BRAD: No!

YANCEY: There’s a scarf around your neck…

BRAD: I feel like I at least load as much –

ANDY: You pitch in. We don’t have that much stuff anyways. I try not to look at the audience.

JB: Yeah, tell me about it. [Laughs]

YANCEY: Do you play with your back turned to the audience?

ANDY: More to the side. Forty-five degree angle. [Laughs]

JB: Sometimes I will, it depends. If there’s someone I know in front of me, I’ll kind of look out and give ‘em a wink. [Everyone laughs] But if it’s mostly strangers, I’m kinda like –

ANDY: If you’re on the same level as them, like if you’re playing a party, then it’s fine. But when you’re on a stage, I find it really weird.

JB: It is weird.

YANCEY: What’s the biggest show you’ve played?

BRAD: The biggest stage we played was Galapagos. That stage is high.

ALEX: It’s so awkward too, with the stairs right in the middle.

JB: I think the biggest show as far as capacity was the Long Blondes show.

BRAD: The Knitting Factory, yeah.

JB: There were a bunch of people – I remember looking out and everyone was just stoic. No one was moving.

YANCEY: What was the reception at the very first show?

BRAD: There’s a good story behind that, actually. It was at Free 103 and the Mad Scene played and Hamish Kilgour [of New Zealand band The Clean] was there and he said, “You guys were fantastic, the most interesting of the night – it reminded me of when I went to England in ’83 and bought the first Jesus & Mary Chain single.” Which was the best. I was like, “We’re quitting.” [Everyone laughs]

ANDY: Yeah, all downhill from here. [Laughs]

JB: At that show, Brad was sitting down behind the stage.

BRAD: I was sitting behind everybody. I sat in a chair behind the drummer. The first two shows, I sat.

YANCEY: Had you decided beforehand that’s what you were gonna do?

BRAD: Yeah, yeah.

JB: Also, when we first started, we weren’t like, “Oh we’re gonna play shows,” we just kind of stumbled into shows.

YANCEY: I mean, you had seen shows before. You were aware how people acted. [Everyone laughs]

ANDY: You saw the Fall when Mark E. Smith had a broken leg and were like, “That’s awesome!”

YANCEY: [Laughs] “That’s the only show I ever saw!”

ANDY: “I thought that’s how you do it – you beat up your girlfriend, then you sit in a chair.” [Everyone laughs]

BRAD: I wasn’t really comfortable with what I would do with myself. I had a pedal for the vocals and I sort of used that as an excuse – “Yeah, I really gotta fiddle with this thing.” [Everyone laughs] Which – I wasn’t ever really changing it.

YANCEY: [To JB] Did you give him shit? Were you a fan? Were you like, “Yeah, we’re gonna be the chair band?” [Laughs]

JB: I didn’t really care, I was stoned out of my mind

BRAD: The first several shows I was very nervous. I remember the show we played with Psychic Ills at Tonic. It was our third or forth show. Just the combination of that, thinking they were good and playing at Tonic – which was a pretty good place to play – I was so nervous.

YANCEY: So the first time you stood up…

BRAD: The third show, I stood up.

YANCEY: What was the impetus to stand up?

ALEX: There had to be a moment.

BRAD: I mean, I realized I can’t really get away with this for long. [Everyone laughs]

ANDY: You can only look like a douchebag for so long.