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Status Magazine has published an interview with Tom Harpel of Onalaska as conducted by Seth Brown. Here it is, in its verbose glory. Thanks to Seth for the opportunity.
by Seth Brown
Onalaska are a mystery. Not many know the band (yet) and for those who do know them they are still an undercover mystery. Which is odd since the band members involved are just down to earth nice people. Maybe the mystery behind this band is the main reason I wanted to interview tem. Of course helping out a great band with some promo is part of the reason also. But I digress. Onalaska released an amazing debut record last year through Dim Mak called "To Sing For Nights". I highly recommend this great release. I interviewed Tom Harpel via email recently and he was the first person to ever write a lot in an email interview. And that's a good thing. For those who wanted to know the history of the band read on. God knows Tom can tell a story.
So I've done enough road trips from Portland to Seattle to think I know where the name comes frm, is Onalaska from the freeway exit on the way to or from Seattle?
Yeah, Onalaska, Washington is a small town about 100 miles south of Seattle where my father lived for a few years during the 1980's. My sister and I would spend weekends down there. It's a small--think one stop sign--town with no industry (the mill has been shut down for a long time), a video store, a chiropractor, a gas station and a small post office. Oh, and a high school. I think their football team won the state championship one year. There was nothing to do there but play with the television antenna to get decent reception. We watched a lot of Buck Rogers (the one from the early eighties with Erin Grey) and Twilight Zone reruns. There were no radio stations, and my father didn't really like music too much. He would play the Steve Miller Band quite often. I count them among my key musical influences.
Please give your name and those who are in Onalaska. And for scenepoints name drop the "current members of" and "ex members of" tag.
I am Tom Harpel, lead vocalist, songwriter and guitarist. My previous musical engagements are too boring and obscure to list. Brian Cook, bassist, also performs with Roy and These Arms Are Snakes, and once performed with Botch. Cory Murchy, keyboardist, performs with Minus The Bear. He once performed in Kill Sadie as a bassist. Stephanie Snider, violist, once performed with Sharks Keep Moving. Jake Snider, guitarist and backing vocalist, performs in Minus The Bear. He once performed in Sharks Keep Moving, State Route 522, and before that, the seminal Pillow. I mean to say that Pillow was a seminal band, not that the band was named Seminal Pillow, which would be a terrible band name, and a little tasteless. Erin Tate, drummer, performs with Minus The Bear and Amy Blaschke. He has appeared on recordings by Minneapolis outfit Askeleton, and once performed in Kill Sadie.
How did the band come together?
Jake Snider and I grew up about two miles from each other, but school district boundaries prevented us from meeting until after high school. This despite the fact that my best friend, Adam Steinberg, whose house I was constantly hanging out at, lived just five doors down from the Sniders. I know now that Jake was always into music. I do remember on time, when I must have been 18, Jake hanging out at Adam's when I was there. I remember his terrible haricut. He had brought over his new Les Paul red sunburst guitar to show off. This was just when I was learning to play the guitar, and Jake was pretty good then, so I was a little intimidated.
Fast forward a couple of years, like to 1995. The Old Firehouse in Redmond, which is still going strong--Brian Cook works there, in fact--was just establishing itself as *the* all ages venue for local and touring acts coming through Seattle. Jake was in Pillow, one of a number of Eastside high school bands that could drum up two, three or even four hundred kids for a show at the Old Firehouse. I lived in a shack in Redmond at the time with Danny Adamson, who was also in a high school band (called The Green, later renamed to Waffle Stomper). Incidentally, Derek Linniman from YKK played bass in Waffle Stomper and was a close friend of mine. Most of my friends were in bands, so I got the bug and started writing songs. Soon, I was erforming solo at the Old Firehouse under the name Tornado Tom, it seemed like weekly. My songs were horrible, but people were so genorous and encouraging that I kept at it. At this time, I knew who Jake was, but I didn't share a word with him until the summer of 1996. Jake's band Piillow had gone through some changes, and was now playing as State Route 522. I remember getting that first State Route 522 cassette and just thinking, "What did this Jake guy do, sell his soul?" That music was head and shoulders above anything that anyone else was doing in our little scene.
God, this is a long winded answer. This is Eastside history, people. It is what it is. Jake had some recording equipment, and was very interested in recording bands. The first song I recorded at his house was "The 12 Days of Christmas," which was sadly never released. Jake and I did a few more demo sesssions for a Tornado Tom LP at the time that never panned out. We probably would have fostered our friendship then if it had not been for my bad car wreck in Montana and subsequent move to Seattle in the summer of 1997. Carless and the only kid from our suburban sene who had moved to the city, I dropped out and just focused on my job. After a year of that, former Eastsiders started turning up in Seattle. I started hanging out with people again. There were parties. The straight edge kids were drinkers now. Thank God. Things were fun.
At one such party, a Halloween party, in fact, I ran into Jake Snider. This was right around the time that Sharks Keep Moving was getting their act together, definitely pre-Desert Strings and I think they had just played a show at the Black Cat Cafe in Seattle's University District that had knocked my socks off. Really great band.
Back to hte party. It was actually hard to miss Jake. He was wearing a pink Playboy bunny outfit. No pants, just legs. It was terrible. He and I struck up a conversation. I complimented him on the band, and he mentioned that he was still into recording. By this time, he was living in the infamous Aurora Family House in north Seattle, and he had set up his recording gear in the basement. It was here that he had recorded the Vade and Jough Dawn Baker split twelve inch, and some Sharks singles and emos, the stuff that was released on the Henry's Finest Recordings label. A the ssame time, my friend Mike Bayer and I had been playing a little music together, along with Adam Steinberg, Jake's afore-mentioned boyhood neighbor. Seattle is a small town. Mike and I experimented with home recording, four tracks and stuff like that.
So at this party, with Jake dressed in the revealing pink bunny suit-did I mention he was wearing the ears and the fluffy tail?-he and I started talking. I tol him all about my recent trip to Spain, the one you hear euologized on "To Sing For Nights." Then we started to talk about recording. We talked and talked and talked about recording. Since then, we never really have stopped talking about recording. We agreed to collaborate on some future project. In December 1997, the project presented itself. Scott Rankin and I were going to make a record label, and our first release was to be Amy Blaschke's "Red Letter." Jake and I rented a bunch of fancy gear and a Mason's Hall in Seattle, and recorded each song live. We were and are very proud of the result, and planned to do other projects soon.
Meanwhile, there were Monday night bowling parties. There were Friday night pajama parties. Stephanie started hanging out. Jake and Stephanie and I went up to San Juan Island for an overnight. By the time we were back in the city, they were a couple. I needed to move out of my apartment. Jake had a free room at the Aurora Family House (AFH). A few weeks later, I moved in. Another room freed up and Stephanie moved in. This is where Onalaska comes in. Mike Bayer and I played music along with Larry Biely and Dave Martin at the AFH once every couple of weeks. We were going to make a record of the songs that I wrote about my Spain trip. Mics and gear were always set up in the basement so the Sharks could demo their practices, and when we practiced, Jake would twiddle knobs so we could get demos.
We decided to do a recording session for my music at the same Mason's Hall where we did Amy's record. Again, we rented great gear and a couple of days at the hall. Mike brought his drums down, and I, my guitar. He and I were going to track basics, and then do overdubs back at the AFH. Things were going weell. We tracked a few songs. Jake was very happy with the sound. We were all feeling good. This is the moment that I consider to be Onalaska's formation. For the first time, Jake expressed an interest in performing on the record. We were good friends by this time, but still, all the same, I respected him very much as a musician and felt humbled and honored that he would want to play on my songs. So I said, yeah. And he wheeled in his Fender Twin and learned five songs in about as much time as it took to play them.
When Stephanie got off work later that day, she came by the Mason's Hall with her viola, and played some parts on Entrada that I just loved. Things were feeling great. Unfortunately, Mike had serious commitments to music school, so we needed a drummer. Well, at the same time, Kill Sadi moved to Seattle from Minneapolis, and they brought the great Erin Tate with them. We had our drummer. Over dinner, Jake and Stephanie and I chose the name Onalaska and we had a band. Man, that's a long answer.
Yes, that was a long answer, but a good one. So Onalaska seems to be one of the few bands where people who hear the band are way into the sound but the fact that you haven't toured means not many people know of you yet. Can we expect a tour soon?
Thanks. We haven't toured yet. As you know, the only way to get fans and to sell records, to get your music out there, is to tour, so it is something that we definetely must do. We'll probably head out after the release of our next album, sometime in the early Spring of 2004. That being said, I have always been jealous of my friends in touring bands, and have always wanted to tour. It is just that, what with my professional commitments, and everyone else's other projects, it is ahrd to pick out two or three weeks where everyone is free. But we will definetely tour after the release of this next record. Oh, and here in Seattle, we manage to play about a show a year.
I love this question and I love it hwne bands don't avoid the answer. Some people think its rude to ask but all bands sound like other bands, so don't avoid it buster! So with all of that hype on this question here we go--Who do you think Onalaska sounds like? I say Onalaska is the Weakerthans meets Willy Nelson.
I'll take the Willie Nelson comparison. His Teatro album is what I think making records is all about. Same goes for other Daniel Lanois productions, like Wrecking Ball (Emmy Lou Harris) and certainly Dylan's Time Out of Mind. I want our next record to have the feel of those records: soft, low, dark. To me, if we were perfect at what we did, we would sound something like a low-rent version of Steley Dan, with the jazz tendencies replaced with simpler American rock stylings. Not glossy, just simple. But also not lo-fi. We try to keep our guitars in tune.
Mark Lanegan's first solo album, The Winding Sheet, pretty musch inspired me to start writing my own songs. Listening to that record over and over, with its sparse sound, and the low tempos...I was just really into it. Soon, I figured out the songs on guitar. I would sing along to those songs in the car. That was how I figured out I could sing (can I sign?). So I guess that really influenced what I did with songrriting for a while, as did the Wildflowers record by Tom Petty.
What band or bands could you see Onalaska touring with? Or hope to tour with.
I hope to tour with Amy Blaschke. She has a new record (it's amazing, by the way) coming out soon on Lucky Horse, so I imagine there could be an opportunity to tour together. I also want to tour with The Long Winters. They put out a record called The Worst You Can Do is Harm on Barsuck that pretty much never leaves my CD player. I saw them play a few months ago and it was one of those perfect shows, where they just rocked. John Roderick owns the stage. I would love to open for them.
I saw on the website that you are working on a new record. Tell us a little about it.
Minus The Bear has spent the last six months touring, so I have had a lot of time to write new songs, sort of in a vacuum. So far, all of the songs are about the Alaskan fisheries. It isn't that I set out to write a concept album. It's just that the subject is really fascinating. These people up there on the boats, especially the ones on the crab boats, are doing some of the most dangeorous work in the world. Obviously, this is already a well-covered subject, but that doesn't mean that I don't like writing about it. I've made some demos of the new songs, and we have played them together a few times. There is still a lot of work to do.
Do you know what label will it be released on?
Dim Mak, I'm thinking, though I have been a total ass about keeping in touch with Steve. Sorry about that, Steve.
So this will be my third time asking this question, but I always like hearing the answers on your musical mecca known as Seattle, Wa.? I have interviewed a lot of great bands from Seattle in the last year alone. What is up with talent up in your neck of the woods? Why does Seattle have such amazing bands?
Everyone in Seattle is crazy, and crazy people make good art. Everyone is crazy because of the weather. We have more cloudy days than sunny days, probably more cloudy days than most other places on the planet. Our winters are cruel and long, not for their harshness, but for their consistent mildness (fifty degrees and cloudy for six months straight). You people in California have it good, and it makes you lazy.
War, what is it good for?
I wish it wouldn't happen, but I'm also not running around int he streets tearing down Niketown signs and smashing Starbucks' windows. You know, I guess the war is good for getting me to pause and remember just how fucking lucky I am to live where I love, to love who I love, and to do what I do. You know, it's almosot like the best response I can have to the war, or to whatever crap that goes on, is to just go on living, being myself, and enjoying my time.