Long Beach natives Crystal Antlers are a long way from home, and unfortunately, the Chicago weather is not very accommodating. It’s pouring rain when I arrive at The Empty Bottle for my interview with the band, and I am soaking wet by the time I reach the doors.
Lead singer/bassist Johnny Bell shyly greets me at the bar, and we head downstairs, away from the soundcheck, in order to be heard. Sitting on a ratty couch littered with cigarette burns, I’m surrounded by the Antlers collective: guitarist Andrew King, organist Victor Rodriguez, drummer Kevin Stuart, percussionist Damian Edwards, and guitarist Errol Davis.
Half the guys are snoozing, and the others are waiting anxiously for food, which has been massively delayed. Water drips from the ceiling, and the couch is soaking wet in patches. Johnny plunks down next to me and wipes a hand over his face, his mane of brown hair a tangled mess.
I suddenly wonder how old these guys are, as everyone barely looks a day over 20. Thinking about the Antlers’ massive European tour, it occurs to me that I would make a lousy rock star. As the ceiling water drips on my notebook, smearing the ink of my questions, I realize that after only a few minutes of being in that basement, I want to go home. For the Crystal Antlers, there is no turning back.
“[If] you think this is bad, you should have seen the storm we caught in Madison last night,” Bell tells me in his soft-spoken cadence. “For some reason, I started thinking about when I did Sea Scouts a few years back. I was 15, and I worked on this old Coast Guard boat from the 1920s, and we did trips to all the different Channel Islands, delivering cargo.”
Bell pauses and someone lights up a cigarette. “Was it like Deadliest Catch?” I ask. Everyone in the room laughs when I bring up the fishing documentary series.
“There were a lot of moments that felt like that, and it could get pretty scary,” Bell says. “I remember driving the boat at 4 a.m., after being up all night, and all the captains and everybody were asleep. The only tape we had on deck was Van Morrison’s Moondance, and I remember being up there in the captain’s chair, just rocking back and forth to Van Morrison.
“It was pretty surreal. I think about that a lot because I haven’t done anything like that in a really long time and I kind of miss it, even though being on tour is our life now.”
Following its self-released, eponymous EP in 2008, produced by The Mars Volta’s keyboardist Ikey Owens, the Crystal Antlers made quite a buzz in a short amount of time. The band’s sound, a unique mix of psych fuzz and layered chaos, won it a spot on the Carson Daly Show.
“It was the first time in a long time that I almost just stopped playing because I got nervous,” guitarist King tells me with a laugh. “I took a minute and thought, ‘Wow, this is some pretty intense stage fright right now!’ I hadn’t felt that way since the junior-high-school talent show!”
The band quickly caught the attention of seminal indie label Touch and Go Records, making the Antlers the last band to be signed before the label announced an indefinite hiatus from distribution.
It’s hard to pin down the Antlers’ sound, a frantic hodgepodge of influences containing the idiosyncratic mania of The Mars Volta while not really sounding anything like it. The organ lends the sound a touch of bluesy psychedelia, yet the vibe is distinctively punk. When asked to describe the sound of the new record, Tentacles, Bell bristles. “I just don’t ever try and describe our sound,” Bell says. “I just ask people, ‘What do you think?’ Because I don’t really know what our sound is like.”
Tentacles was recorded at lightning speed. “We laid down the tracks and mixed the album in about a month,” Bell says. “We do work at a hectic pace. Originally, the idea was to go on tour a month before, and then go into the studio and hammer it out quickly but be really focused on it.
“It turned out to be a lot more intense than I thought it would be. Not all of the parts were finished beforehand, and it was just way more work than I expected. We hardly slept at all, especially in the last few days. I think Errol and I were only asleep for a few hours. We’d sleep on the floor, in the booth, with the engineer. We didn’t leave the studio for more than 15 minutes at a time for the entire week.”
For such a dense record, it’s amazing that the band was able to combine the challenging musical arrangements with aggravated intensity in such a limited time frame.
The Antlers live are a sweaty and raucous bunch, with Bell’s voice fluctuating between croons and harsh yelps. The band creates a wall of sound, capturing the intricacy and intensity captured on record.
It feeds off the audience, with percussionist Edwards dancing like a man possessed. By alternating the tempos from calm plateaus to wailing feedback jams, the crowd is brought to a religious fever pitch.
“I guess we kind of play shows like a punk band,” Bell says while laughing. “It depends on where we’re playing, and sometimes it feels that way. We played at this bar in Reno, and there was no PA and only one mic, and the sound was really awful and loud. But the crowd was really excited, so that felt like a punk show, and it was my favorite show of the tour.
“It really has to do with the energy and the interaction between the crowd and us, and I think that’s why we get described as a punk band. I think it’s funny when the audience goes crazy. We played at University of Southern California, and there were kids doing stage dives and trying to start a mosh pit. We were just standing up there laughing. Some fat guy got up on stage and mooned the audience. But I don’t encourage people to beat themselves up.”
Along with its punk energy and spirit, Crystal Antlers shares the DIY mentality of The Minutemen, its punk brethren of the past.
“Yeah, just like The Minutemen, ‘we jam econo,’” Bell says, borrowing an expression from The Minutemen. “As we are gaining popularity, some of the DIY stuff that we do is getting harder to do now. We made all of our own shirts up until this tour, and we still made some of the ones that we’re selling.
“We were sitting in the garage silk screening, and somebody came up to us and said, ‘Can’t you guys hire someone to do this now?’ We were like, ‘I guess, but why would we?’ We still make a lot of our own merch and try and do as much as we can, the same way we have always done it, even though it’s not as much a necessity as it used to be. We still like to do it. That’s why we started doing everything ourselves. I always want to make different, interesting, handmade things to sell and give out to people.”
Along with a commitment to DIY, Crystal Antlers is also involved in the green movement.
“The bus we traveled on last summer for the Fuck Yeah Tour ran on vegetable oil,” Bell says. “None of us had any experience running a bus like that, and it was really complicated. There were a lot of problems — a lot of problems, as they’re still working out the technology.
“The second tour we did on that bus was with Fucked Up and Strange Boys, and they just kind of sent us out on that one because they were like, ‘Oh, you’ve already been on this bus, so you know what’s going on.’ They just named us the tour managers.
“When we got out on the road, the vegetable-oil system stopped working and we didn’t have any money for diesel. There was algae growing in the tank and it caused all sorts of problems. So we ended up trying to take all this shit apart. We broke down about two or three times a day. We coasted into town on fumes each time. But, even after all those problems, we got a van and converted that to a veggie-oil system.
“It’s a little bit easier to maintain a veggie-oil system in a van than a school bus. We’re really passionate about being green. We did a 10,000-mile tour right when we got it, and we didn’t need to stop at a gas station once.”
While talking to the band in that moldy basement, it becomes clear that despite the problems, the group is suited to this lifestyle. There is laughing and name calling as old stories are dredged up, and the band slowly begins to psych itself up for the show.
This is its life, moldy couches in dank basements, and with the future of Touch and Go indefinite, the band is a free agent, with a future that is unwritten.
“With the changes at Touch and Go, we’re kind of in a weird place in terms of labels,” Bell says. “If a label doesn’t allow us to do what we want, then we’re not going to go with them. There’s no question about that. We’re just looking for whatever opportunities are out there. We’ve been on the same trajectory for a long time. I don’t think, regardless of what happens with or without labels, that anything is going to change that.
“But, personally, things can get difficult. It’s hard keeping up with friends with our lifestyle. I lose at least three friends every time we go out on tour. But this is the life that we’ve chosen, and I want our band to go straight to the top and for the popular-music industry to conform to whatever it is we’re doing.”