Officer May
by Mike Baldino
Last Week’s Minutes from the Meeting
of the Secret Society of Your Friends
Who Actually Hate You
“Being young and seeing The Year Punk Broke was huge,” says Officer May singer/ guitarist Chris Warren. “That’s what made me decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. That looked like a good career, you know, breaking shit and drinking beer in Europe and everything’s fucked up and all these people are thrashing about, and you’re failing 10th grade or whatever and are guaranteed to be a fuck-up, and these people looked like they were doing really well, and they look like fuck-ups too. Seemed like the only option. There’s been no plan B.”
When Officer May takes the stage, it’s like there was never even a plan A. Their confrontational sound combines the abrasive but catchy approach of Unwound, Sonic Youth, and particularly In Utero-era Nirvana. Officer May doesn’t deal in choreographed rock kicks. They’ve mastered the art of breaking strings, throwing instruments against walls, and making beautiful mistakes while playing with the sort of wild abandon that would make a lesser band collapse under the weight of its own intensity. Chris and drummer Jared Croteau grew up in small- town New Hampshire and have been playing together for years; Smoking in A Minor marks bassist Mike Sanders’ recorded debut with the band. “They basically called me up and told me I was playing bass,” he says. “The first time I met Mike was when I picked him up for practice,” says Chris. “My friend told me he was a standup guy, so I called him up and said, ‘I hear you’re good at bass and you’re a standup guy,’ and he’s like, ‘I don’t know if I’m a standup guy, but I’m good at bass.’ That was all I needed to hear. He was pretty confident.”
“Officer May was a cop from me and Chris’ hometown,” says Jared about the band’s name. “Not a good guy. We were in high school and we’d go somewhere with the best intentions, like we’d go to the store to buy milk for our moms, and Officer May’s squad car would be behind us the whole time. He was a real ass. Naming the band Officer May was kind of a fuck you to him.”
“We needed a name at the time and didn’t intend for it to last, but there it is,” says Chris with a shrug.
Smoking in A Minor, their first for the rapidly up-and-coming Ace Fu indie label (Ted Leo and Pinback are also on the roster), shows dramatic growth from 2001’s full-length Helping Others Help Themselves, an album that opened with the declaration, “I want to be the leading cause of cancer.” Smoking is the sound of a band synthesizing their influences and developing a distinctive personality. Their control of dynamics and shifting musical textures is impressive, and Chris’ guitar playing is particularly stunning; his playing aesthetic is similar to Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller, The Wipers’ Greg Sage, and Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison-players who filled space in jarring and innovative melodic ways. Better still is that Chris pulls off the scrapes, slides, and harmonics while throwing himself wildly around the stage. “I think on a good show, it’s awesome. I can just feel what we’re doing and feel it in the room, like a little buzzing going on, and you’re not thinking about anything, you’re just there in the moment and it’s awesome and you’re sweating and you don’t get tired-there’s something going on. Someone that’s at one of those shows is gonna be psyched that they’re there, it’s something special. It’s not gonna be like that every time, ’cause shit’s usually fucked up-but it’s usually fucked up in a good way.” They tell a story of one of their worst gigs opening for Skeleton Key at The Middle East, which involved them throwing their instruments against the wall out of frustration. “The worst show ever,” says Mike, “and when we got offstage all these kids were hugging us and going, ‘Oh my God!’ It was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
“We were psyched to be on a show with a touring band that people have heard of, like our big break, and everything just sucked. We’re throwing stuff around, Jared’s drum kit’s all over the place ”
Officer May’s live show has won them a rapidly increasing number of loyal fans in the past few years, many of whom one might guess were college students because of the band’s age (early twenties), but no. “Why is it that a third of the city is college students, and so few of them go out to see local bands?” I ask.
“I don’t think anybody really tries to get to them,” says Mike. “The kids don’t go looking for The Noise to try to find out what’s going on, and us as a band, we don’t flyer B.U. or anything.”
“Why don’t you?”
“It’s out of the way,” Chris deadpans.
Chris writes with a dark sardonic bent: “If I’m such a witty guy then why are all the jokes on me?” he asks in “My Heart the Boomerang.” “My lyrics are about walking to work day in and day out, again and again, and you live once and you have to waste all this time to maybe get a little time to yourself, but you never get any time to yourself to relax or think or do anything,” he says. “So this bad mood starts small and just kind of balls up and results in frustration. I just want to have progress and I want to be creative, but jobs are all the same and they get in the way of that. I want to play music and feel like I’ve said what I have to say.”
“What is it you want to say?” I ask.
“Well, I’m really disappointed that we don’t have jet packs,” he jokes. “I really thought we’d have jet packs by now.”
“I know, 2003, right? What the fuck,” says Mike. “We should at least have flying cars ”
“All we have is war and high gas prices,” says Chris. “I don’t know. I write about frustration and not having any time and everything being disposable and trash being everywhere. You walk to work five days in a row and it’s hard to breathe stepping on cigarette butts and banana peels and lottery tickets that didn’t win, there’s cars everywhere, everyone’s miserable, everyone’s frowning, like on the T nobody’s talking to each other, and we’re just defeated by this thing, this feeling, this awful machine.”
“But at the same time, I think of how awful it must’ve been to live in the 1600s-can you picture how shitty it must’ve been trudging to work every day back then,” asks Mike. “Everybody lived ’til 40; it seems terrible going to work these days, but…”
“So Mike’s basically saying you’ve got nothing to bitch about,” I tell Chris.
“But that’s the beauty of being a musician,” says Mike. “We can see the miserable shit in everything and bitch about it and write it down.”
I ask Chris if he’s happy with his life, or if he feels negative about the way things are going. “I don’t know, up and down. I feel progress sometimes, I feel happy, certain things make sense, like all the friends and decisions I’ve made make sense for that time and place, and then on the bad days I feel like all my time has been wasted,” he says. “There’s like this fold of skin in your head that prevents you from expressing what’s really on your mind. I’ll have a song in my head and an idea for lyrics, and what comes out isn’t what I had in mind. A lot of it gets scrapped. But with a little time and a little pain, the good stuff and the good songs come out in five minutes.”
“I think it comes from having a certain amount of pain in your heart to make you keep trying and trying,” says Mike. “Anyone who’s ever written a really good song has written 150 shitty songs first, and you’ve got to lose the feeling of being scared of what you’re writing about. You have to lose the fear, and then songs will come out. I think that’s key.”
“I just don’t think that life should have to be drearily predictable,” says Chris, “and you get spoiled when you play a show and everything goes great, ’cause you’re not thinking about anything and you’re escaping from time and everything about yourself, from your body and your face and what you ate for breakfast. You’re just not thinking, and it’s great to escape from everything and just live. There’s clocks and cameras and time everywhere and time is always bearing down on you, like ‘Three hours ’til I can go home, two hours ’til I have to go to work,’ and all that shit-it adds up to frustration. You see people on the subway looking down, and I don’t want that. That’s why music seems like the only way to go, because you can be free and express yourself at the same time – just rock out, you know, that’s the only way to live, and that’s why there shouldn’t be any plan B.”
Officer May plays Charlie’s Kitchen on 4/7 with The Vexers and The Middle East (upstairs) on 4/18 for Nicky Kuland’s leukemia benefit with Roadsaw, Lamont, and Elgin James. Visit acefu.com and officermay.com for details and MP3s.
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