By Brian Baker

If you begin to read this story about a group of New York friends who start an elemental Punk band that exhibits the possibility of becoming the next big name in the Garage wave sweeping the country at the moment and feel that it's all too familiar, you'll be forgiven for thinking it's just another tip of the tube amp to The Strokes. Oddly enough, the oft-told tale of The Strokes' rise to media scrutiny intersects in several meaningful ways with the heroes of the story at hand, The Mooney Suzuki.

"We've had a high turnover rate with our rhythm section, (guitarist) Graham Tyler and I, and it's funny now, because it's reached the point where so many people have been a drummer or bass player for The Mooney Suzuki that when we need a new one, one of the old ones is ready to play again," says Sammy James Jr. (the stage handle of Sam Buonaugurio), guitarist/vocalist for The Mooney Suzuki.

"We knew The Strokes, and they used to come to our shows. I remember a couple of shows where there was nobody in the audience except a couple of guys from The Strokes. I'll always have good feelings about them just for that. In one of our times of needing to get a bass player for a tour, Nikolai (Fraiture) came in and hung out for awhile, and he was into it, but things started rolling for them. He ended up turning us onto the guy that we played with on that tour. And the other person that we played with was their manager, who is like a member of the band. He was great, and I would have loved to play with him, but he had to choose when things took off for them. And we're like, 'Let's go out and sleep on people's floors.' It's understandable."

James and Tyler formed The Mooney Suzuki four years ago while both were art students, James at New York's School of Visual Arts and Tyler at Parsons School of Design. James had posted a flyer in some hip downtown record stores canvassing for musicians to join him in a band, and Tyler answered the call.

"A lot of bands had that as an element of their approach," says James of his art school background. "The Velvet Underground is an obvious example, but The Who, The Kinks, The Pretty Things were all art school kids. Everything I know about music, I learned in art school, except how to play the solo to 'Whole Lotta Love.' "

For the better part of the next two years, the members of the Mooney Suzuki -- James, Tyler, and that rotating cast of rhythm sections -- doggedly pursued gigs in New York and the surrounding environs. For awhile, the band experimented with a number of different names for the band, until one fateful gig when James combined the surnames of two of the singers from Krautrock legends Can (Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki), a band that James counts among his favorites.

"When I was in my 'fuck Blues' stage, I got a lot of satisfaction from Can," says James. "At the time, every show was just me getting friends together to play my songs, and we'd come up with a joke name. So it was a joke -- 'Mooney Suzuki ... it sounds like Milli Vanilli but with Can.' But it instantly started getting us attention and gigs, and it's so hard to get a gig or a write-up in New York, so we kept it. A lot of people hate our name and come to the shows just to tell us that." (How do they feel about the band after experiencing the raw beauty that is Mooney Suzuki live? "Who cares?," says James with a laugh. "They've already paid to get in.")

The Mooney Suzuki's relentless tour ethic paid big dividends in 1999, with plum opening spots for The Pretty Things and The Zombies and an invitation to New York's 1999 Cavestomp! festival, making them the youngest band on the impressive bill.

Not long after, the band made the momentous decision to drive cross country to play a showcase for Dave Grider, head of esteemed Garage label Estrus Records, with absolutely no guarantee that he would even see them. Luckily, he attended and was impressed enough to hook them up with veteran indie producer Tim Kerr for their 2000 debut, People Get Ready.

"It took a lot of justifying," says James. "We had really wanted to do something on Telestar Records, Todd Abramson from Maxwell's label. We had played Maxwell's two or three times, and Todd never said a word to us, and we figured he didn't like the band. Then finally he said, 'Do you guys want to do a single?' So accepting the fact that somebody can see us for the first time and not be interested, we kept telling ourselves, 'If Dave's not there, at least we're having a fun road trip,' and 'If he sees it and doesn't like it, it doesn't mean anything.' We got out there and played the show, and I'm looking in the audience for some person with their arms folded and scowling, thinking 'Whaddya got?' I didn't see that person, so the whole set I'm thinking, 'Well, he didn't come, but we had a great show.' But right after, I get this tap on the shoulder; 'Sam, Dave Crider.' It didn't click. I'm like, 'Oh, hey,' and I keep moving my gear. All of a sudden, it sunk in. To have a record on Estrus was the fulfillment of The Mooney Suzuki mission at the time. That's why we toured so much afterward. We were like, 'Well, we have the record on Estrus. I guess there's nothing to do now but tour forever."

For The Mooney Suzuki's latest offering, Electric Sweat, they switched to newly formed local Gammon Records, but James says the first album's Garage ethic is intact.

"When I love a band, I want the next record to sound exactly like the record that I like, just more of it," he says. "I want an album-length extension of the album that I love. I felt obligated to create that for other listeners that feel the same way. On the other side, people feel cheated when they get a record from a band that sounds like a rehash of the last record. I personally like that, but I know that people want growth. We had to find a way to excite ourselves and move forward, get worse, and go absolutely nowhere at the same time. I think that we, astoundingly, pulled it off."

For Electric Sweat, the Mooney Suzuki enlisted the help of respected Detroit producer Jim Diamond (known for his work with The White Stripes, The Go, and The Dirtbombs), who had heard the band's debut and offered his services for any future needs. James and the band were only too happy to accept when Diamond contacted them again last summer.

"We had been big fans of The Go record and The White Stripes record, and we had a friend from Detroit who was friends with Jim, and we knew that something was going on there," says James. "This was a couple of years ago. So when we toured there around March of last year, we met Jim, and he took us on a little tour of his studio, and we just said, 'We've got to come back here.' "

The cynical listener might be tempted to believe that The Mooney Suzuki has adopted their Garage style in the face of its recently raised profile with the success of the Strokes as well as several Garage-minded outfits. James is quick to point out that The Mooney Suzuki has been working this corner for a good long while.

"When I first started playing music, this is exactly the kind of music that I wanted to make," says James with emphasis. "That's weird, because it's only in the last few years that it's the music that I was making. You get a guitar because you love The Who and Jimi Hendrix and you get your guitar and learn the Blues scales and learn to play 'Sunshine of Your Love,' and you do that high school Blues guitar thing. After awhile, you say, 'Fuck this, this is bullshit, this is so Classic Rock, Hard Rock Cafe,' and you start looking for inspiration elsewhere, and obviously there's so much music out there.

"Then I was making a lot of music that was very un-Blues-oriented and very non-'60s. When we started this band in '97, we had a lot of different sounding stuff, but live, it was still doing what we're doing now. We started playing these Mod '60s nights, and people were coming to the night. And we thought that if we made it sound a little more like The Who, maybe these people will come to see us at a real club or help support us and build a following. Then you think, 'You can't change your sound, you can't mold your art to fit your audience, that's terrible.' But then, I'm like, 'Wait a second -- the reason I picked up the guitar in the first place was to be in The Who.' It's really not that much of a fucking artistic compromise to start playing like Jimmy Page again. Once I tiptoed in that direction, it quickly reconsumed my life again, and it's even better this time around, because as a kid you can only appreciate things to a certain level. Now I feel I can get a lot more out of those records. I put on a Led Zeppelin record I haven't played since high school, I'm hearing it through different ears. It's like a new record, and that fuels what we're doing now."

E-mail Brian Baker

Completing the Circuit (March 7, 2002)
Deep End of the Pools (February 14, 2002)
Dust in the Wind (February 7, 2002)
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