A Moment in Time with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players

After trying in vain for two weeks to secure a specific time for Andy to interview Jason Trachtenburg at their show at Blueberry Hill with the TFSP’s PR folks, Andy and I just went to the show to rock out and review it. Rachel got us in to the show after we had been expunged from the list. With no recording equipment with us to do an interview, due to the non-settlement mentioned above, we managed to snag some time with Jason while he was packing the stage after the show. What follows is a non-quoting, non-verbatim but generally the gist of a fifteen-minute discussion with Jason (and a bit with Rachel) about the band and music in general; all of which could genuinely be contested.

On playing “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959”:
They don’t always play the song during their sets, more or less because it was their first known song and they want to expose people to other material.

On Long Island:
After I said I was from there, Jason responded with ‘I’m sorry.’ And he further explained that they recently played a show in Stony Brook and came away with bad impressions of the people and general existence on LI. Given the mass consumerism of the place and TFSP’s stance towards it, this connection makes sense.

On Dylan’s new record:
Amazing. Andy concurs.

On the prevalence of bands in the world:
After talking about various shows in STL, like the great sound at the Duck Room for the Constantines versus the terrible sound at the Creepy Crawl for Quintron, Jason essentially thought there were too many bands around. Or, more like, too many bands doing the same thing, as well as bands’ monikers that make no sense. Exhibit A – the Artic Monkeys: neither from the artic nor monkeys. Exhibit B – Gnarls Barkley: what’s the deal?

On music in general:
This divulged into two avenues. The first was that Nirvana may have set music back from progressing to new sounds and that it was a sin to say that. The second was that indie rock was the future of music. Now that last statement was at least partially tongue-in-cheek and belied a certain feeling that Jason was just fucking with me, particularly since he said that he really likes Christine Aguilera’s songs. Jason’s final statement on how he conceived the direction of music was: ‘if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.’

Soon after this statement, Tina and Rachel came out to the stage, Jason left to finish packing, and Andy and I had talked to Rachel for a couple of minutes. We asked her about Meg White being her favorite drummer: apparently Meg White is not (at least not anymore). Rachel is into both Zeppelin’s John Bonham and Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss as her current faves. Also, discussion moved to various kinds of Kettle Chips – of which Rachel had a bag of salt and vinegar – and pictures of dogs. Yeah!

Read our recent live review of TFSP

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