Interview: Drink Up Buttercup
MYATS: Hey Ben! So what’s new?
Ben Mazzochetti: Well, I just bought a new bass. Well, old actually – it’s an old 70′s Gibson.. only weirdos like that kind of stuff. We’re heading up to Upstate New York for a college show, and then the fifth we are heading up north to Canada. It’s going to be our first time, we’re really psyched.
MYATS: So how did you guys get together? What is the Drink Up Buttercup story.
BM: Well, I was living out in buck county on a horse farm and had a bunch of skeletal vocal melodies and bass chords. Jim (Harvey) was introduced to me from a mutual friend Chris. He played me what we had, and I gave him all my input. We absolutely loved each other’s stuff. Jim’s younger brother is in the band too, which is probably the spawning element of the vocal harmonies. Being actual brothers, they can harmonize really well as they have genetically really similar voices. He was only 16 at the time when we found him, and he had a really unbridled creativity that you only have at that age. Which I miss and love because im almost 25 now.
MYATS: I have heard a lot about the incredible energy and originality of your live shows. Can you tell me how they came to be?
BM: I kind of re-imaged the band into what it is now – I kind of introduced all the crazy things you’ve heard about our shows. Being a carpenter, I was hearing concept sounds at work all day, everyday. We all have some theatrical background, and for us whether it be acting or performing, we are all really into the idea of putting on a show. Percussions, rhythm and beat and sound is really important for our live shows. We don’t really believe in playing the same thing on three different guitars over one another, but rather emphasize the punch and the beat by hitting a mailbox or something.
MYATS: So how do you find the Philledelphia music scene? It’s not as crazy and overwhelming as say New York, is it?
BM: Well you can’t say not like New York because everyone there really is talented. All the bored kids in the suburbs with nothing really interesting happening ended up leading to experimentation. It’s just such a saturated scene, and it’s much more close and familiar. We actually caught on in New York before Philly.
MYATS: Really? How did that happen?
BM: Well in Philly there’s the Thursday-Friday-Saturday crowd, but not earlier during the week. People simply won’t come to a show on a Tuesday night in Philly while we could sell out on the same tour the next day in NYC. Philly is just much more intimate. There are so many great bands coming out of Philly like Kurt Vile and the Man Man crew, but it also has such a great underground circuit with a great network of friends. Sometimes we would have more people at a house party gig than at a nice little rock venue.
MYATS: What do you think of comparisons to other bands, especially The Beatles?
BM: I don’t listen to it. I find that when people compare bands, it’s simply because they don’t listen enough. We are a band that is influenced by bands that are influenced by The Beatles! Yes, we are a band with pop vocals with weird undertones. It is an awful tightrope we are trying to run from, and should have stopped a decade ago. I am influenced most by Queens of the Stone Age and Jeff Buckley. It was really Josh Homme who taught me to be rock and roll through everything he does. Oh and I’m ridiculously obsessed with The Unicorns. They changed my life, and showed me that the possibilities in music are endless, and it is what you want it to be.
MYATS: What’s on your iPod nowadays?
BM: I am really into the whole California stoner rock metal scene, with other bands like Seattle’s Big Business. Recently, I am also really into my movie scores. I’m obsessed with grindhouse cinema more than The Beatles. It’s basically back and forth from Dirty Harry to Queens of the Stone Age.
MYATS: So how do you guys keep yourselves entertained on the road?
BM: Well we have this conversion van that we pimped out and put an old VCR and Nintendo in. We like super underground Kung Fu that you can only get on VHS. And it can’t skip on bumpy roads! We really are old school dorky gamers, and we play a lot of Super Nintendo Baseball. I also fix and repair nintendos and sell them afterwards.
MYATS: What was the most inspiring concert you went to in your younger years?
BM: The most inspiring show? Id have to say.. hmm that’s a tough question! Haha I think it was when I was senior year in high school when I started to see shows that really blew me away. Being a bassist, underground acts like Death From Above 1979 and of course Queens of the Stone Age. When I saw QOTSA for the first time, I was like “This is rock and roll if I’ve ever known it to be personified”. At The Drive In at the end of their career.. much punkier than what theyre doing now. Oh and The Unicorns of course.
MYATS: So how did you guys take the plunge, and decide that this was what you wanted to do?
BM: Well, I found Jim and he already had his songs that he wanted to work on, and he was trying to figure out what to do. I was given his demos, and absolutely loved them. He brought a very beautiful element to the table with his classical pop structures that I really liked. But I was a very aggressive person, very abrasive, and wanted some more hard edge. I had a bit more of an aggressive element and brought that to the band. People just have to be open minded, and a lot of them are sort of droning through the scene – make album, play album on stage like on record, over and over. So we said this is a fucking show! Our shows are wild, and lets perform them in a way that deserves to be performed.
MYATS: How are you dealing with your newly-acquired rock star/touring lifestyle?
BM: It’s definitely something that we just adjusted to…I don’t buy things anymore. I used to have a place and actually OWN things. Its something that was kind of shocking to us. Our first tour was definitely the worst tour. It was really rough since we didn’t really know what we were doing. But now it’s great and simple, were working and having a lot of fun.
MYATS: What was the most memorable show you guys have played to date?
BM: We played a spot called The Bottle Cat in Birmingham, Alabama. They had these old air stream trailers that they bought as a pair from NASA that used to hold the astronauts sitting out in the back. The trailers were all pimped out sitting in this really fake nuclear 50′s family backyard with big fake flowers and lawn chairs, and let us stay in them for the night. Inside, there was a huge movie screen instead of a curtain covering the stage so that everyone was watching Ninja Turtles in between awkward band changes which was really cool.
Interview Conducted by Amelia Robitaille
–
A big thank you to Ben Mazzochetti of Drink Up Buttercup for taking the time to chat with us. Don’t miss the band live in Montreal this Sunday at Green Room. Tickets are $10.00 and can be purchased online here.
