Tone Glow 117: Black Eyes
An interview with the Dischord punk band about their roots in DC, the permissive nature of their collaborative process, their favorite live shows, and the group's initial run from 2001-2004
Black Eyes
Black Eyes are a Washington, D.C.-based punk band who released two albums on Dischord Records: a self-titled record in 2003 and Cough in 2004. Having played in other bands together such as Trooper and the No-Gos, Black Eyes officially started playing together in August 2001. The group has always consisted of five members: Dan Caldas, Mike Kanin, Jacob Long, Daniel Martin-McCormick, and Hugh McElroy.
Having felt that guitar-forward music had been thoroughly explored by other groups, Black Eyes found a breakthrough early on by forming a two-bassist, two-drummer, one-guitarist lineup that allowed for flexibility in their songwriting process and live performances. The members soaked in a wide array of music from local scenes and CD reissues—from dub to hip-hop, jazz to Afrobeat, queercore to go-go—and the result was a singular take on frenzied dance-punk, leading to memorable, high-octane concerts in small clubs and living rooms. Martin-McCormick and McElroy’s scorching vocal interplay also held potent lyrical force by touching on racism, sexual assault, gun violence, queer experiences, and more.
Black Eyes announced they were reuniting in 2022 and played a string of shows in April 2023 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their self-titled debut. More shows are lined up for this year, with details mapped out on the band’s Substack. A comprehensive zine titled Speaking in Tongues was also released last year, and features in-depth interviews and various ephemera from the band’s initial run from 2001 to 2004. Recently, various live shows and demos have been published on the group’s Bandcamp page. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with all five members of Black Eyes on November 26th, 2023 via Zoom to discuss their musical backgrounds, touring with Q and Not U, how passion and antagonism spurred on the band, and looking back on the band’s impact on the rest of their lives.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I wanted to ask all of you about your respective childhoods, before you started playing music together. Was there a lot of music in your house? Were your parents very supportive of you pursuing music?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: So I was born in DC in 1983. There was definitely music around the house, although my parents didn’t super actively follow music. It was kind of a hodgepodge of different stuff—some Beatles, but it was also the era of Windham Hill. They were both busy professionals, and I think they enjoyed having some chill music around—jazz and stuff like that. I wouldn’t say it was a heavily music or arts-focused environment. Although, at times, there were efforts made to expose us to cultural stuff. For three years we lived in Belgium—my dad was working at NATO—so we went around and checked out museums and historical sites.
Then at a certain point, I was encouraged to take up electric guitar, maybe as an outlet for teen angst. My mom found a guitar teacher in the neighborhood who was like, “Don’t learn all that dumb stuff, I’ll teach you how to play Nirvana and Green Day.” She was like, “Alright, you want to do this?” And I was like, “Yes.” So we got a Crate amp that had the built-in distortion, and a Yamaha quasi-Stratocaster guitar, and I started with that. It was kind of off to the races. It was very exciting. That was in ’96, maybe early ’97.
Do you feel like your guitar teacher was pretty instrumental in terms of getting you excited about stuff?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I was excited about alternative rock and things that were more on the aggressive side. So I definitely loved Nirvana and Marilyn Manson. Antichrist Superstar (1996) was big at the time. Stuff that was on the radio that had a little more bite to it—that was exciting to me. My guitar teacher was definitely instrumental insofar as it got the ball rolling. He was sort of down to show me whatever. When I found punk, I would bring in Minor Threat or Teen Idles and other stuff like that. It got me going, and it didn’t make it feel like I had to ascend the mount of rock history. It wasn’t like, “First you’re gonna learn ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ and then in three years you’ll learn ‘Stairway to Heaven.’” It was just, “Start now,” and that obviously aligned really well with punk. At a certain point, I didn’t care much for lessons anymore and I stopped going—I was in bands now.
Mike Kanin: I was born in Boston, grew up in DC, and I grew up with a lot of music around me. My great grandfather was actually a drummer. For a minute, I think he played with Count Basie—that’s the family story, I have no idea how to vet that—but I do know that he was a drummer. He actually wrote a paradiddle textbook at one point, and he was a drum teacher for high schools. My mom had played when she was a kid, and my uncle too, but not seriously. They were definitely super into music though. Growing up, my mom brought a lot of music into the house. I think she had booked some concerts when she went to George Washington University. My dad would take us to the symphony and that kind of thing because DC is so accessible for music. There’s so much of it. I started playing drums in the fourth grade. I got a kit when I was 13, played in shitty high school bands, that kind of stuff. And then I started playing music with friends around DC. I think that’s how I met all these folks. I think we were all playing in the same circles.
Did you ever meet your great grandfather? Did you ever learn drums then from the elders in your family?
Mike Kanin: I did meet him, but the short answer is no. The more complicated answer is that I think it was in my head. The way I got into playing music myself, formally, was in fourth grade. There was a school band and you had to make a choice about an instrument. I think I made my choice because of the history that I knew. I think there is a connection there, at least one forced by myself, but it feels like that sometimes.
Hugh McElroy: I also grew up around DC, in the suburbs, but I was born in DC. Music was around in my house. My mom was born in Port-au-Prince, her mom was Haitian and her father is American. I grew up listening to a lot of Haitian music and dancing to a lot of Haitian music at family parties and stuff. And then my aunt worked for the Smithsonian, and was heavily connected with the Folklife Festival programming and stuff like that. [Musician and Folklife Festival co-founder] Ralph Rinzler from Folkways was around a lot. When I was a kid, my aunt used to go pick up [bluegrass singer-songwriter] Hazel Dickens at her apartment to drive her to performances. I didn’t know this until I actually came back from a Black Eyes tour with some Hazel Dickens records. I mentioned it to my aunt and she was like, “Oh, but of course you knew Hazel when you were a little kid.” And I was like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that.” I used to ride along, I guess, dropping Hazel off to her performances when I was a kid. I wasn’t super aware of that aspect of it—these were just the people who showed up to my aunt’s parties, who were kind of around.
I realized there was really exciting stuff happening right around me when I started getting into punk records. I would see bands that were blowing my mind that had a DC P.O. box mailing address. I went through a really nerdy period when I was about 16 where I started looking people up in the phone book. To me they were like these remote, distant people, but actually, a really shocking number of people from the records I liked were just listed in the local phonebook. You could just call someone in the White Pages. Not that I did; that would be weird.
With some friends of mine who all worked together on zines and went to shows, we decided to start a band with very little gear. We had my friend’s uncle’s jazz bass and a little practice amp. And then we had a tambourine and a hand drum I bought in Turkey. A friend of ours who was older, in her 20s, who worked at the [National Institutes of Health] as a temp and had a salary—or at least wages and money—bought a little RadioShack microphone and speaker that she just made feedback with. Our first band was a pretty chaotic affair (laughter). We played one show when I was 17. Two if you count going over to a friend’s house who had mono—they couldn’t come to our show in our living room.
And then I just started playing with other friends at the end of high school and then college. In college, I had a band with Jake, and I had recorded Mike’s band that he was in. I was just playing with various friends. I met Daniel towards the end of college, when the four of us—everyone except Daniel—were all playing in The No-Gos together, and then I went off to grad school. So the ones who weren’t Dan played in Trooper with my other friend Paul. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it (laughter).
The Haitian music thing and the Folkways connection is awesome. I’m immediately thinking of the Frantz Casseus album, Haitian Dances (1954), which I love. Do you feel like those parties and being exposed to Haitian music informed your own approach to music?
Hugh McElroy: I don’t know. It was just in the background, and I wasn’t really conscious of what it was, specifically. My father was Irish, and I definitely look more like the Irish side of the family than at least some of the Haitian side of the family. I think there was this degree to which I wasn’t even really conscious of the Haitian music as being like something particular. When you’re growing up, there’s stuff where you’re not aware that it’s like, “Oh, this is just what my family does—not everyone has parties where they dance to Haitian music all the time.” I just didn’t really have any context for it.
Also, apart from my sister, it was quite a long time before I met any other Irish Haitians, and there’s still very few that I have met. But I think dancing was a big part of it—growing up in an environment where people were dancing all the time. I think when I became a teenager, I wanted to learn a little bit more about it in terms of a cultural connection. I got into Maya Deren’s work, and I had found some Lyrichord cassettes related to her work, of voodoo music but also other Haitian music that wasn’t in my parents’ record collection. As I started to learn more about it, it suddenly made sense, why we as a pretty white family had all of these paintings of Black people all over the walls that have voodoo imagery in them. It was just something that I wasn’t aware of, and then at a certain point, it started to make more sense in terms of a bigger question of cultural background. I just started to get more and more into it, and I found a lot of the music really fascinating. Particularly, the music that had subversive political elements and commentary in it. But I also found it deeply cool just as music, apart from the content.
What about you, Jacob?
Jacob Long: I was actually born in Arlington, Virginia, but I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I started playing violin at the age of five, and then I played that up through high school. I took piano lessons in fifth and sixth grade. And in sixth grade I got super into metal. Then there was an acoustic guitar around the house. I was more into that than piano—I was not really into playing that, but it was there. I probably convinced my parents that I was not interested in piano at all, and that I was more interested in having a guitar, so that happened at some point. I took guitar lessons later in high school, but at first I was just trying to teach myself. I’m trying to remember my lessons… it was some rock guitar guy who had been the music teacher at my school for a year or two. We probably did a mix of songs he wanted to do and stuff that I brought in. It’s insane to remember that, because I don’t ever think about the guitar lessons as being very impactful on me or my playing, but I did take them for a couple of years. After I graduated, I moved to DC to go to college. I had played in a couple of shitty high school bands, and in DC I started playing in bands right away. Like Mike and Hugh said, I met them along the way and we started playing music and then met Daniel.
Dan Caldas: I was born in New York but grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. My parents were big classic rock fans, so I grew up loving the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, etc. I was kind of an MTV addict by the time I was 9 or 10, so all of the hard rock, hip-hop, dance hits that were in heavy rotation, I was there for. I started playing guitar around 12—I took lessons from this local hard rock player and learned a bunch of classic rock songs. In high school I started playing with friends. The music was usually punk related, although a friend who introduced jazz to me opened me up to a kind of improvising, which was fun. I moved to DC for college, met Jacob through mutual friends and we played in a band with two other friends, my freshman year. The next year he introduced me to Mike and Hugh, we started No-Gos and that led to Black Eyes.
Was there a point at which you all recognized how much history and richness was in the DC scene? What was it like to grow up in that environment? Or is it just something you realized in retrospect?
Jacob Long: Personally, since I didn’t grow up there, when I got into Fugazi, Dischord, and other stuff going on in the DC area—Simple Machines, that kind of music—I was very excited to have the opportunity to move to DC. That’s sort of the outsider’s take on it. But if that hadn’t been there, I don’t know if I would have been so gung-ho to go to college in DC.
Dan Caldas: I also didn’t grow up in DC but was a big Dischord fan, so moving there was a big deal for me. I was definitely in awe of seeing members of various bands around town.
Once we started No-Gos and were actively playing shows, it was thrilling to feel part of the rich history that you’re referring to.
Mike Kanin: It’s funny hearing you say that, Jacob. I didn’t go to school, actually. I didn’t get my bachelor’s degree until after Black Eyes had ended. One of the things that really kept me wanting to stay in DC and focus on the city—I don’t know if focus is the right word, but at least from a self-centered perspective—was all of the music that I’d encountered in high school. I don’t know that I fully appreciated the history, because you’re so in it and it's so easy to become part of it. At least that was my experience. But then you look back it’s like, “Oh wow, there’s all this stuff.” Even as part of discovering it, the story became really solidified in my own head. I’m not sure if I quite had the perspective to understand the full meaning of it, but the story was totally there growing up.
Hugh McElroy: I think for me, I also came to some understanding of it over the course of high school. I’d started going to shows my freshman year of high school and the 7-inch I bought the day before high school started was Outpunk’s There’s a Dyke in the Pit (1992), which had Bikini Kill on it. That was when they were living at the Embassy and were in DC; I think they just moved right when I got the 7-inch. I was just going to shows and I was heavily involved in Food Not Bombs and the anarchist collective down on U Street. It just became such a big part of my life. At the beginning of high school, to the extent that I was thinking about college, I was like, “I gotta get out of here, DC’s boring.” But then by junior year I was driving down at the top of Meridian Hill on 13th Street, seeing this panorama of the city, which is now obscured by shitty high-rise condos. I think I was listening to “Aspirin Kid” by The Nation of Ulysses as I crested the hill and saw the view on a shitty monophonic portable cassette recorder, because my grandmother’s Toyota Celica didn’t have a tape deck. I just had this moment where I was like, “Oh, I think I’m staying here. This is where I want to be.”
I was also starting to appreciate certain things about my family. Growing up, I had just been like “Ugh, old people.” I had a lot of grumbly thoughts as a teenager. And then finally I was like, “Actually, I like it here and I kind of want to know more about my family and hang out with them some more.” So I stuck around. I think part of it was also that I had gotten to see some really great shows in high school. I got to see Fugazi more times than was reasonable. But even seeing Chisel and Slant 6 and Make-Up playing together at the Washington Project for the Arts at some weird show where everyone had costumes. There was some really great stuff going on. But there were also cool hardcore matinees at, like, a bar on 18th Street. Seeing Universal Order of Armageddon and Maximillian Colby and Bubble Jug and The Vestpocket Psalm all at the same show. Stuff like that.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: For me, growing up, I found out about punk my freshman year of high school by doing this school project on the history of rock and roll. I sort of stumbled on it. I think the late ’90s was a time when there was maybe a higher level of canonizing punk history. Rollins’ Get in the Van (1994) was the decisive turning point for me wanting to become a musician. But also, that book Banned in DC (1988), the photography book, was available at Tower Records and I fucking pored over that book. I was like, “This is exactly what I want.” It was living proof. It just totally blew my mind. It felt like this map forward. I knew that these books were documenting something that happened 15 years before, but some of these musicians were still performing—this was not necessarily all in the past.
The all-ages show culture and free shows at Fort Reno and stuff like that really gave me an entry point. Also, my friend Paul who played in Trooper with Mike, Jacob, and I—his dad was a member of Half Japanese. There was just this feeling of proximity and access that was really special. In ’98, I started going to shows. I went to see Mudhoney, and I went to see Rollins do spoken word, Boredoms, stuff like this. I was able to check out a lot of cool stuff because it was all ages, at places like Black Cat and 9:30 Club. I started going to more local shows in ’99. It was just like immediately tapping into something that felt very vivid and real. When it was time to graduate high school and go to college, I had looked at a couple of colleges outside of DC and I was just like, “Well, what the fuck? We got it made here. I can practice at my parents house, I have these collaborators, there’s a scene that’s happening.” It just seemed so obvious that it was the right thing to stay and not upend all that.
The Black Eyes zine that came out earlier this year is crazy. It’s one of the most comprehensive zines I’ve seen about any band. I was amazed by that.
Hugh McElroy: And that’s just the stuff that made the cut.
That’s what I was thinking. I was like, “Oh my gosh, they’re asking about every single thing in the world. This is amazing.” In that zine, you say the first practice session that you guys officially had as a band didn’t go well.
Hugh McElroy: The first half.
Do you remember a moment when you realized that it could work?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: To me, one thing that stands out is we were pretty locked in at that point. Before I showed up, all these people had been playing shows with each other, and then No-Gos formed. And then Hugh left and Trooper formed. Then Hugh came back, and we started Black Eyes. I don’t really ever recall it being like, “Oh, maybe we’ll not play together, we’ll play with other people.” And then the fact that I was the youngest—and that I was going to be in DC for college—just took away the expiration date that was the death knell for so many projects. That set a different tenor from the start. I don’t recall any moment where we were like, “Oh, we’re not sure if this is serious.”
I think the moment of ditching the second guitar and switching to two drums and two basses generated a lot of excitement and creative ideas and very fertile energy. I think making the guitar the minority was cool, because it just suddenly wasn’t a guitar band—it was a drum band and a bass band, and then the guitar could do its thing. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I felt a lot of liberation from that. With Fugazi, and all these post-hardcore groups, it felt like guitar bands had been done. Those groups had accomplished at such a high level with two guitars and guitar-forward music. It felt like time for something new, and the new setup really got that going.
Hugh McElroy: I was also going to mention something, with regards to coming back to DC and that switch from the two-guitar format to two drums, and then adding in a second bass. In the time before I left for grad school, Jacob and I had been living in a house together and playing music, and we’d been tracking down stuff that was on 99 Records and weirdo post-punk stuff that was artier and maybe a little funkier. And then when I was living in England for grad school, Jacob was sending me tapes of stuff and I was trawling UK record stores—I could get down to London pretty easily on the weekends. I was going really deep into UK reggae, but also strange stuff that joined up with UK reggae like Suns of Arqa. You’d have records where a bunch of people are backing Prince Far I at one point, there was and then making a record with a very young Talvin Singh on tablas. And then there’s an Irish reel halfway through the record. There was On-U Sound. For me, that was stuff that I definitely knew from Jacob and me driving around to do various things and listening to different records. We were sort of headed that way.
The time I spent in the UK, I spent a lot of time pretty miserable over there in grad school until I found the sound systems in the pubs in the East Side of Oxford. I spent a lot of my weekend time just dancing to reggae and hanging out in that realm. For me, it just changed my focus a lot. When we started No-Gos, I was listening to a ton of Sonic Youth and The Jesus Lizard. It wasn’t like I wasn’t listening to other stuff, too, but that was very much where my head was at. Even though I was already primed by other stuff I had been listening to for a long time, something about that year in England really shifted me.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: You became a hippie (laughter).
Hugh McElroy: Oh no. I became a hippie way earlier than that. I just hid it very well (laughter).
Jacob Long: From my perspective, it was kind of a combination of those two things. I didn’t have much of an interest in being in a “rock band” at that point. I was probably listening to some, but it certainly wasn’t the priority of my music interest then. Obviously the lineup was a shift, but the big shift was this realization that we had the space, in terms of playing with each other, to play whatever kind of music we wanted to. We were figuring out what that was instead of just being like, “This is the lineup for a band.” Dan switched from playing guitar to playing drums, and Hugh added bass instead of just singing. But also, what each of us does, song by song, is incredibly fluid. We all have main roles, but we all do a lot of different stuff. The beginning of that openness was just being like, “We have these interests we should follow.” It was realizing that we all have the ability to do various things and follow them, to create the music we want to create and not be confined by the idea of what the lineup of a band is.
Hugh McElroy: It brought me back to this teenage excitement about picking up instruments for the first time. There was a sense of, “Oh, maybe I don’t have to already be good at this to try doing it in the band. If I have some interesting ideas, my reach can exceed my grasp a little.” There was room for that. That was really exciting.
Mike Kanin: For me, as Daniel said, we had this history of playing together, so it was familiar. It was comfortable. It was not always easy, certainly, but it was a meaningful experience. And I think that as we continued—we talked a little bit about this in the zine, too—the cross-pollination of ideas about music that was happening in and around the band… that was just amazing. I learned so much just from hanging out. That was really important as we grew as a band, and I think that experience helped keep it what it was. And to Jacob’s point about the boundaries that were never really there, it just allowed for all of this exploration and all this thinking that was—and is—really great.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: There’s a couple of concrete things from that era that I think are worth citing. A few of us went to see that band !!! (Chk Chk Chk) play an early tour in DC. They came through a couple times, but there was this amazing show they played at the Marvin Center, which is a university building of George Washington. Seeing this collective, multi-percussionist, flowy set was really eye-opening. And I think we were all intrigued by go-go, which has this big percussion quality and long extended performances. And then the Fela Kuti CD reissues were popping off at that time, and those are of course long jams. And then there was dub.
This was the birth of CD reissues. There was probably a big wave of soul jazz or dub compilations, and also they were doing some post-punk. Obviously we—especially Hugh and Jacob—were actively seeking out stuff beyond the reissues, but those, to me, were the easy-to-access catalysts or instigators of these ideas. Like, listening to Fela Kuti and discovering this back catalog of many, many 20-minute jams with long, flowing percussive sections… we don’t sound anything like that but that definitely planted seeds in our minds.
Hugh McElroy: At that point, I think Jacob picked up some records, and that was, if not the first time I’d heard it, probably an early experience of being really turned on to qawwali and hearing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—speaking of someone with an extensive back catalog. But there was just a lot to let in, and a lot that was very exciting. It didn’t feel like there were a lot of boundaries on what was permissible or potentially compatible.
Dan Caldas: It’s funny. I was thinking about this the other day—something that made me more comfortable with switching instruments is the late ’90s Chicago scene, especially Tortoise. I saw them in high school, and they switched instruments like every song. In terms of me switching to drums, I always kind of liked messing with drums. But in hindsight, I don’t know why I felt so confident being like, “Yeah, I’ll play drums, it’s cool” (laughter). I feel like with how I am now, I would not do that. It’d be like, “I don’t play drums properly.” I don’t know if I knew we were going to have me do that for every song, or if there would be one song where I play drums and then I go back to guitar, but we didn’t do that.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: There was no way we were gonna bring a second kit for just one song (laughter).
Dan Caldas: Probably not.
Hugh McElroy: We had to bring three hardware bags from the loft to our van.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I feel like we definitely added and shed various extraneous items over the years.
I love hearing all these different artists come up. Given that so many of those mentioned had long-form jams, was there a specific reason that you guys decided your songs would be compact and not stretch into 15 or 20-minute territories?
Jacob Long: It’s interesting. Not that any of them were that long, but the original form of many of the songs that either made it to the first record or were discarded was much longer than what they ended up being. Probably more in the five to seven-minute range rather than 10+. When we were writing songs to be played live, they were longer, whether that was a bigger intro or just—jammy is the wrong word—but stretched out.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I think we were still coming from this songwriting space, and stretching things formally and then adding sections where we were queuing so they can be shorter or longer. But the way we played was not very jammy. It always slightly annoys me when I hear people being like, “They’re just jamming! They’re making it up!” Especially because I think they may be targeting me, specifically, with that (laughter).
Hugh McElroy: Who’s the hippie now? (laughter).
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I know, right?
Dan Caldas: But I feel like jammy can mean a lot of different things.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: Well I guess when I think of jamming, I think of the spontaneous generation of structure. Like, “Jacob’s introducing a funky reggae pocket here, and we’re gonna riff off of that.” But we move through the songs very deliberately. Personally, I didn’t have the chops to jam properly, and probably still don’t. Everything we did was extremely specific, and it felt sort of alchemical. We have these different skill sets and we have these different interests, and the way it came together was really specific.
Jacob Long: Not to speak for Daniel’s guitar playing, but certainly for some of my sax playing, there are parts that were written and then an idea that wasn’t written. And with a lot of the auxiliary percussion, there are parts where it’s like, “Okay, this syncs up with this,” and others where it’s just adding texture. It’s an interesting thing because stuff may be written but it was not precise. With all of our songs, we definitely took a long time to structure what we wrote, but sometimes that structure would include something like, “This part is meant to sound like it’s falling apart.”
Hugh McElroy: Another thing is that the composition of the songs involved a lot of iterative improvisation just among ourselves. When we were live, especially after we’d been touring so much in 2003, we definitely started doing sort-of improvised transitions. I think there was a period where we hit something… not quite go-go-esque, but weren’t stopping all that much between songs during a set. The composition process was not totally conventional or linear, but it didn’t lack intention.
In the studio, would you ever intentionally cut down or tighten-up songs that had maybe been longer when performed live?
Mike Kanin: I don’t know how y’all feel about this, but I feel like the studio really solidified a lot of the work. It doesn’t mean the ideas weren’t clear going in. In fact, the one that comes to mind is “Speaking in Tongues,” where we trimmed a good bit at the beginning when going from the demos to the actual studio version. But I honestly can’t remember what the process was around that.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: It was more in pre-production. Between recording demos, sharing them with Ian [MacKaye], getting some pretty simple, pretty spare, but noted feedback, and then making adjustments to the songs for impact and concision.
Hugh McElroy: With Cough (2004), too, we’d made so many arrangement decisions in the process of playing those songs on the road before we got into the studio with them. We did a little bit more practicing to go into the studio, pretty intensively. But often, by the time we were actually in the studio, certainly for Cough, and maybe not to the exact same extent on the self-titled (2003), a lot of those arrangement calls had already been made.
Dan Caldas: It feels like the first album was a little more about getting into the studio and experimenting with these ideas, but I feel like Cough was like the Ramones. We already knew exactly how the songs went and it was like bam, bam, bam.
Hugh McElroy: Yeah, like, “We are here to make this very specific record.”
Daniel Martin-McCormick: One thing I’ll say about that is, with both of those records, I remember doing overdubs. With the first record, on songs like “Nine” and “On the Sacred Side,” I remember messing with processing and mix techniques, but I don’t think we did anything where we recorded the take and then said “chop out this section” or “extend this.” The take is the take as the song was written. And then it became more about trying studio things that enhance and build on that. Both records were done in a week or less. We did not spend a lot of time in the studio considering structure. The studio time was pretty deliberate.
I wanted to ask about the lyrics for your songs. They’re very pointed about various political topics and the things that you guys have seen and experienced. I’ve talked with so many artists who tell me something like, “Music provides a way for me to say things that I wouldn’t be able to say if I were just talking in person.” But Hugh, you mentioned earlier that you were part of an anarchist collective. What was it like for you and Daniel to write these songs in the context of the style of music you were making? You mentioned the lineup changes opening up a sense of freedom, which seems to work in tandem with the lyrical content.
Hugh McElroy: A lot of what was happening both on the instrumental front and the vocal and lyrical front was me trying to scratch an itch for music I wanted to hear but hadn’t necessarily heard yet. There were things to be articulated that I didn’t feel had been articulated in ways that landed with me. A lot of my early exposure to punk came through riot grrrl and through a radical feminist lens, and that, to a certain extent, tied in with queercore. I found that a lot of the queer women were, to me, producing much more interesting and compelling music—and certainly lyrical content that I could identify with, or that landed with me—than a lot of queer men in punk. A lot of my lyrical process was writing what would have helped my 16-year-old self make sense of the things he was dealing with, or what he was going to be dealing with imminently. It wasn’t all gender and sexuality stuff. The zone of what was permissible to incorporate felt so big, and I felt this for a while. There were these ideas about religious ecstasy and possession and literally speaking in tongues, like glossolalia.
I’ve also been super influenced by some really dope Patti Smith bootlegs that I still have. These are from relatively early on, around Horses (1975) and Radio Ethiopia (1976). She’s clearly stoned out of her gourd, but they’re these songs that become these grooves. She’s doing this trance-like intonation of poetic, trippy, vaguely mystical, intense, and sometimes a little sci-fi things. It made such a huge impact on me as a teenager. I just wanted to pull all of this stuff from my ADHD brain and put it into words. I wanted to carve out the stuff that isn’t useful and file it down until it’s this thing that would have helped me as a younger person. And obviously, it was clearly helping me as an adult at that point, just making it. I would think to myself, “But if a 16-year-old kid heard this record… what would that do for them? There probably is some 16-year-old kid who needs this record and, well, what does that look like?” That was a weird guiding impulse for me.
Are there any specific queer women artists who come to mind, who were important for you at this time?
Hugh McElroy: It’s funny, the thing that comes to mind first is so not adjacent to our stuff musically. It was so much more crass, raunchy, and punk rock. Like I saw Tribe 8 when I was 15 or 16 and it was a mind-blowing experience. Just this incredible group of dykes on stage channeling Darby Crash (laughter). And all kinds of other shit. Just the energy of that was really inspiring, even if I wasn’t necessarily going to sing songs about femme bitch tops or anything like that, but I loved the vibe. And the performance was so electrifying.
Daniel, do you mind sharing something about writing lyrics?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: A couple things come to my mind. First of all, we wrote by jamming a lot or just playing together. So all the vocal parts emerged first as sonic structures, and that’s still how it works today. Anytime I’m writing vocals, it’s not a situation where I sit down and I write lyrics and say, “Okay, these are the lyrics and these are the vocal parts on top of the music.” It comes bubbling up from below, as phrase and rhythm and pitch and gesture. Words evolve in, to fill out those structures. What comes up is a sort of map of your consciousness that is auto-generated by this process. Phrases pop out, and you don’t really think much of it, but then you realize that there’s an interesting resonance. Or, as you build the word structure, the ripple effect of the words that fill out that structure becomes apparent. There’s this process of discovery.
Personally, I would also say that I felt really skeptical of anthems and taking a very didactic or declamatory position in my lyrics, like saying, “George Bush, fuck you” or something. I felt like that kind of finger-pointing, condemning lyrics usually left me feeling hollow. There are exceptions, but I felt like it would be more fulfilling and appropriate to just describe my experience moving through the world. Or to storytell experiences. In a sense, my views are less important than the experiences. I didn’t want to tell people how they should feel or how they should think; I just wanted to present a lived experience.
You asked, “How did it feel to marry these political themes to this music?” I have no idea. It certainly didn’t feel like we were partying with cowbells and then Hugh and I scurried off and wrote our manifesto, and then wove those things together. It was a much more organic thing, and the lyrics reflected what was on my mind. I think that perhaps the intensity of punk and the intensity of the band created a safe and welcoming space to explore more fraught emotions, but I really didn’t have much interest in talking about more banal life experiences or goofy things or whatever. It’s funny, because there isn’t anything wrong with that. I was a big fan of Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Wu-Tang where there’s a lot of humor and play. Obviously, Wu-Tang is very intense and dark, too. But I enjoy a lot of music that has more fun and play and levity to it. When we would go and try to refine our songs, it was a matter of refining that which had already emerged, rather than trying to steer the ship in a new direction.
I spoke with members of the Hated earlier this year, and they have political lyrics in their songs. They said they were surprised, when they played live shows, that the audience was receptive to that and knew that their songs were about these things. Do you feel like some of the messages in your songs were received well by audiences? Did people ever talk to you about that?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I think once the lyrics were printed, more so. Probably not much before that (laughter).
Hugh McElroy: (sarcastically) But we only played with the finest PAs! Where people could understand all of the words! (laughter).
What was it like to first play shows together as Black Eyes? Do you remember the very first show that you guys had together?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I think it was September 21, 2001.
So a week and a half after 9/11?
Hugh McElroy: There was a guy with a bunny suit.
Dan Cardas: That show was a house party thing. We played five songs or something?
Hugh McElroy: Yeah, if that.
Dan Cardas: I think half of the people were still coming downstairs, and we were like, “Thank you, bye!” (laughter).
Jacob Long: It was a house party, but it wasn’t like a house show, really. Who was it a party for?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: It was my coworker Cleve from [DC Bookstore] Politics and Prose. He was throwing a birthday party and was like, “Do you guys want to play?” It was sort of a soft launch.
Hugh McElroy: “Sure, we’ve had six practices.” (laughter).
Jacob Long: It’s crazy to think. We must have been playing together for a month. Maybe less?
Mike Kanin: Because when did Hugh get back here?
Hugh McElroy: I got back in June, but then Trooper went on tour.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: You were there? (laughter).
Dan Caldas: I do have one comment about what you’re asking. I feel like for the first six months, it felt a little bit out of control, but in a good way, in a fun way. It was like, “Okay, we’re gonna set up all this shit and fit it in whatever space and then just go for it.” It always felt like an unstable ship but, again, in a fun way.
Jacob Long: I think that certainly was part of the dynamic of what made it exciting for us, but what made it exciting for audiences, too. Most of our first handful of shows were actual house shows. It was like fitting all this gear into a living room, playing very loudly.
Hugh McElroy: Trying not to knock beer off amps.
Jacob Long: But then also, this sort of rhythm-section-heavy vibe was kind of perfect for playing house shows.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: Definitely. And I think there was a strong “fun party” thing. I think that our setup was exciting. In Trooper, we had really been going hard—Mike just reissued the tape—but it was a pretty noisy band. In some ways, I feel like we were more lean because we didn’t have the two guitars—it wasn’t just a wall of guitar noise. But it had this kind of precedent of chaos that we were building on. It was a sort of pocket where, obviously, the Dischord universe and assorted labels like DeSoto and Slowdime and other stuff was all around, and it felt very significant, but it kind of felt like that era was tapering a bit, and there was this new generation of people who were young. It felt like this little pocket of space, and a lot of the people we were playing for were our friends, or friends of friends. It had this sort of looseness. In retrospect, that was really rewarding and useful. It sort of felt like we could just do our thing and enjoy it, and from that, this very profound collaboration was able to grow in a healthy way. I think that being in these off-the-cuff, small house-party venues—I think of that venue, The Galaxy Hut, how when we played that, we probably took up half the space just with our gear—that just gave it a little room to breathe and grow on its own terms.
Mike Kanin: To echo what Daniel and Jacob were saying, the excitement of the chaos, the show part of it all, having people watch you do this crazy shit—not that it was all that crazy—but squeezing all the gear into a living room, playing loud as fuck… I think we had three Sunn heads and two kits and it was just ridiculous. And it was amazing to roll up with that and then just go all out and have people reflect that back at you. There’s nothing like that. That is an amazing feeling.
Was it a little strange that when you guys played your first non-house show, or played at a larger venue? Were you worried that you wouldn’t have that contained energy that exists in a house show situation?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: It’s hard to remember. I guess there were some venues we would play on tour occasionally that would seem notably pro or industry. I remember being sort of bemused by those spaces. A lot of the places we played… if it wasn’t a house, it was a bar. If it wasn’t a bar, it was a punk venue. And if it wasn’t a punk venue, it was a punk loft. It wasn’t like we suddenly ascended and we were playing these more Bowery venues. I feel like there was a brazenness to the whole presentation.
Jacob Long: The interesting thing with DC was that there were only a couple of actual venues that we played. One of them was this place, The Galaxy Hut, which was basically a house show but it was a bar. And then the Black Cat, which was kind of the main rock club we played. It had a small stage and we played there for a while, but then enough people were coming to see us that we started to get asked to play the big stage. It was never a big step, because it sort of just happened. I feel like it wasn’t until way later, maybe when we went on tour with Q and Not U, that we played places that were different. Even when we did our own tours, it was a lot of smaller clubs and smaller DIY places.
Mike Kanin: I think about that Denver show, with the space that had the Grateful Dead carpet, and the guy who was blitzed out of his mind doing the lights, that whole set up. That was a rarity. Joshua, when you asked this question, that’s exactly what I thought about. But we just didn’t do a lot of that.
Dan Caldas: It is kind of amazing how great Black Cat is because it’s a real rock club, it’s a legit place, but the environment doesn’t feel very separated from small shows in DC because it’s a lot of the same people anyway—they’re just taking care of this bigger place. Transitioning that way made it feel natural. I never felt a stark contrast, really.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: We hung out there a lot to see our friends play shows. A lot of people we knew worked there. It really was just part of the web.
Jacob Long: Yeah. One thing that’s special about that place is that it’s the indie punk rock club in town, but it’s all run by musicians. And almost all the employees are musicians or people who are part of that scene. There isn’t an outside entity running it, which makes it very different from a lot of clubs.
Dan Caldas: Yeah, it’s not just some sports bar (laughter). We did play one in New Jersey. What town was that in? I live in New Jersey now but I don’t know what town that was.
Jacob Long: I think it was in the New Brunswick area, but I could be totally wrong.
What was it like to go on this tour with Q and Not U? And what was the reception to you guys like? I know you went overseas too. What was the response like there? Did it feel different to what you had felt throughout America?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: We toured with Q in the States. That was a six-and-a-half week US tour in the fall of 2003, and then immediately after we went to Europe on our own. The tour with Q was great. It was us and them and then they had three separate DC bands in the opening slot, for two-week legs each. It was just like being on the road with your close friends and friendly acquaintances and labelmates and repping our community on a national level. People were pretty receptive. I remember the shows were very good.
Dan Caldas: For Q and Not U, it was fun. At the end of their set they would bring some of us out. Not necessarily every night, but a lot of times we would do some percussion jam type stuff.
Mike Kanin: They were doing “Vertigo,” this song by the Screamers, and we’d come out and join them for that. That was my memory. But to echo what Daniel was saying, on one of the live recordings from that show, Hugh says, “Thanks to our friends and neighbors.” And in that case, it was a literal truth. I can’t remember if John, Chris, and I were living next to you and Jacob, on Thayer Avenue at that point. But like Daniel was saying, it was just like rolling around the country with our friends and neighbors. It was amazing.
Hugh McElroy: Yeah, it was a really good time. People seemed psyched. It was fun to see different crowds react to your friends’ band playing. I noticed that everyone just loses their shit when Chris pulls out the melodica at the end of “Soft Pyramids.”
Daniel Martin-McCormick: They also had certain patterns of banter they would do. It got to this point where I knew when one was coming. I still feel kind of bad about it, but I remember this one show. Chris would do this thing where he’d be like, “Positive!” I think it was a shout out to PMA or something like that. I was like, “He’s about to do it.” And in the millisecond before he did, I just yelled and tripped him up, right in the middle of it. I could just feel it coming (laughter).
Hugh McElroy: It was sort of the obligatory thing, like when someone’s playing Glastonbury and every three or four songs they yell, “Glastonbury!”
Daniel Martin-McCormick: Our minds fused with their minds on that tour. I will never in my life see a band as many times as Q and Not U. Every night for six and a half weeks, plus probably 20 or 30 times before and after that, too.
Dan Caldas: Europe was a mix of all kinds of different reactions. I don’t know how to summarize that so much. Italy, they were super into us. This guy came up to me and was like “No reference! No reference!” I remember London being really good. Some of the places were sort of standoffish, but I expected that. Somebody pulled Jacob’s beard at some point.
Jacob Long: That show was sick though.
Dan Caldas: Slovenia, right?
Jacob Long: Yeah.
Dan Caldas: With Europe, it was a whole range of different reactions. Some really good, some fine, nothing bad but just kind of different.
When did his beard get pulled? Was it mid-show?
Jacob Long: Yeah. While I was playing saxophone.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: It was a pretty rowdy crowd and it was this crust punk dude who I remember being like 6’5”.There was this whole crew of people. We had been searching for the venue for hours. It was like a one-stoplight town and this was before GPS, so our driver had this direction that was like, “At the lights, turn up the hill and look for a building,” or something like that. So we were driving back and forth, like, “Where the fuck?” and we were circling and just couldn’t find it. And then we realized it was in this… I don’t even know.
Dan Caldas: Community center, right?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: It felt like an airplane hanger or something.
Jacob Long: I think it was some sort of community center, but it definitely was this hanger-esque, cavernous, metal-roof building.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: We drove by it probably like six times and were never like, “Ah yes, the venue.” (laughter).
Hugh McElroy: They said, “Drive up the hill until you see the signs,” and when we finally got there and they were like, “We’re sorry, we never were able to get the signs” (laughter). We were asking some guy standing on the side of a potato field.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: So there was just this crew of rural punkers, and one of them was like, “Ahhh!” pulling on Jacob’s beard while he was playing.
Is there a specific show that stands out in your memory as being the best, or the one where you received the best feedback?
Mike Kanin: One of the ones that I remember—with apologies, Dan, because I think you were sick right before we played it—was Bologna in Italy. It was really fucking amazing. And one of the North Six shows in Brooklyn that I remember. It was probably the Q and Not U tour. It had really positive vibes for me. But I can’t put a finger on that. At the Bologna one, I just remember people singing along in English and feeling like, “Wow, holy shit.”
Dan Caldas: That was the “No reference!” show.
Hugh McElroy: Dan, I think that’s also the show in which you threw up in a trash can during the set (laughter).
Dan Caldas: I didn’t, thankfully, but I put the trash can next to my drum set because I was having a migraine. I was just being prepared for it.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: Europe was a cool experience overall because there were a couple stops, like Zagreb and Krakow and London and a few other places, where we were just so locked in. In that year we played over 100 shows. We were just on a mission to destroy, and it felt completely telepathic. With the songs, I think the performances compared to the record had just gotten so amped up and blown out. And the footage of us is faster, louder, harsher, crazier, more, more, more. Playing those shows… the performance and the audience and everything synced up, it felt so sick.
But one early one was also in New York. We played this place called Happy Birthday Hideout, and it was in early January 2003. It was right after we recorded the first record, but a couple of months before it came out. At that point, there was a roving pack of homies that would just come to our shows, up and down the coast. We played in rural Philadelphia and wherever. So we played this show and it was during the peak electroclash era. There was generally a level of antagonism in the band toward that trend, and it was also this early Vice era. I felt like we were sabotaging this indie sleaze party or something. 15 or 20 or 30 friends came up. The show’s on YouTube and it was just very fun. We just played the record. We had just recorded the record so all the songs were locked in, in our minds.
Hugh McElroy: The poster and the t-shirt for that was a naked lady with a sword on top of a penis dragon, fighting it. It was one of those things where I’m like, “This isn’t our usual vibe, but I’m going to try and have a sense of humor about this.”
Daniel Martin-McCormick: Yeah, I think the contempt for New York was real.
Hugh McElroy: There was also a lot of cocaine at that show. Not with us. But I remember going backstage looking for a hoodie and Jay Reatard’s band was sitting there with a sandwich baggie full of cocaine with a straw stuck in it. They were like, “Do you want some?” and I was like, “I need my hoodie” (laughter).
Jacob Long: One thing that Daniel sort of mentioned is that there were two opposite sides that sort of drove a lot of how some of us thought about what we were doing. One was being very excited about all of this music that we were discovering and hearing, and the other was a feeling of antagonism towards a lot of what was going on around us in the underground music world at large. It’s not even necessarily towards New York, but there were just bands where we were like, “What’s this fake shit?”
Daniel Martin-McCormick: 100%. I think there was just the right amount of hater vibe in the air.
Dan Caldas: I don’t know if I felt that so much, I have to admit. Maybe I’m just misremembering certain things. I certainly can be a hater of things, but I don’t remember being that specifically antagonistic.
Hugh McElroy: At the Happy Birthday Hideout show, a band that was pretty electroclash played—subsequently, I’ve listened to their records, and I kind of like them now—but Daniel just gets on stage between songs and goes, “Electroclash—it’s never gonna die, huh?” I think sometimes we were subtly confrontational, and sometimes there was a little bit of open antagonism.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I feel like Dan, you maybe recused yourself from some of these cultural wars (laughter). But I feel like the presentation was still a bit in your face, overall.
Mike Kanin: It’s interesting talking about this, at least for me, personally, because I was also going to mention the last three shows that we played—the ones in April [2023]—which were amazing, but for entirely different reasons. Just to come together and play with these folks again, but also with a roving pack of homies. Chris came to, I think, every show. Did Sean McGuinness also come to every show? I live in Texas now, so I’m a little further removed, but I hadn’t seen these people in 20 years. Reconnecting with them and feeling that love and sharing that love was fucking amazing and cathartic in some ways. New York, DC, and Philadelphia—each of those shows was fucking amazing.
Dan Caldas: And seeing teenagers singing along to Cough songs… I don’t know how old they were, but that was kind of shocking. I felt like I was watching a movie while I was playing. I was like, “This is crazy.” I was gonna bring that up too, Mike. These shows we just played were definitely a huge highlight.
Hugh McElroy: It’s funny because they were great for some different reasons, but it was like actually a lot of the same reasons. It was just like, “Oh, I’m with my friends that I love, making music that I love, and all these other friends that I love have shown up to see us.” And then all these people who I don’t know—who I have no right to expect would care about me in any way, shape, or form at all—they seem super invested in what we’re doing. That’s incredibly soul lifting to just be in the middle of something like that, where it’s not like, “Here we are here to present you with our art. Consume. Eat.” It felt a lot more like, “Hey, we are all part of this thing, let’s do this together.”
Mike Kanin: Totally, Hugh. And for me, just to be clear, I did not feel as antagonistic.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: Okay, alright (laughter).
Dan Caldas: I was sort of thinking the opposite. I was like, “Wait, wasn’t Kanin the most antagonistic?”
Mike Kanin: Well, I think I was trying to own that. Definitely, back in the day, I was a little bit antagonistic. I think I wasn’t feeling that at all when we were playing in April.
Dan Caldas: Oh, sorry. I meant 20 years ago. I didn’t mean this spring.
Mike Kanin: I definitely had some opinions, and I definitely shared them.
Hugh McElroy: Mike, you might have been the most intramurally antagonistic member of the band (laughter).
Mike Kanin: Perhaps.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: With those shows in April, we set them up, we picked the artists, and we worked closely with the venues. I think that if, in 2003, we set up our own show and invited our friends to play at a venue where we were comfortable, we would have had a great time in pretty much the same way. What I remember about that time was feeling very passionate about our art, and feeling very inspired by the people who inspired us, including the forebears in DC, but also other radical artists. We wanted to align ourselves and our values with art that we thought was important, we wanted to run our band in a way that felt good to us and really artistically valid. There was this strong drive. And you encounter all these dipshits on the road and it’s like, “Fuck you.” You’ll encounter a lot of stuff that rubs you the wrong way, and then you’re on fire.
We started the band when I was 17 and I was like, “This is my world, this is my life.” And probably, if we were in that same position now, my hot takes would be pretty similar. I would probably be a little more chill about it, because having more lived experiences tempers your disdain for other humans’ artistic choices. But I think a lot of the values we had in the group are values I still hold today. A lot of the things I didn’t like in the group, I still don’t really like that much now. With other things, my opinion has softened or broadened. I don’t think that antagonism is a definitive aspect, but we were really driven and we really felt passionate about making music. Even though each of us had our own influences, and maybe our goals were at cross purposes, I don’t think that anybody was like, “Oh, I just do this for fun.” We were unanimous in our conviction.
You guys went on tour with Q and Not U, you mentioned go-go earlier, and now I’m wondering if you felt that you were representing this real lineage of DC music when playing shows. Did you feel like that was integral to your identity as a musician in this band?
Hugh McElroy: I didn’t feel like we were flying a Dischord Records flag or anything. I think we were bringing all of that as part of the primordial soup we came out of. I do think there was some hometown pride coming into it, especially when we toured with friends from home. We toured Canada with Et At It and felt a little bit of that. For me, I think it was more about the people we chose to play with. It was more like, “I want to share the really rad stuff that’s happening in our hometown and that’s part of our community.” Maybe I’m remembering it differently with distance, but it didn’t feel like, “We want to show you how cool DC is.”
Jacob Long: It’s interesting to think back on. We had been doing this series of bands in DC. And our friends Q and Not U had gotten on Dischord, but we had been playing in bands for years, and there hadn’t been any interest. I feel like the biggest DC-related thing was just that we had a group of friends who were in these various bands that were not even directly inspiring us musically, but were part of a world that was a really inspiring community. I had been doing this for long enough in the same space that this group of bands felt like our community. I think Daniel may have mentioned it before—it’s not that Dischord felt passé, but it was sort of tangential to what we were doing in some ways. Obviously once Ian asked us to do stuff, it was great to go out and be like, “We’re a band on Dischord. This is rad.” But I didn’t feel like we were carrying on a lineage of anything. I never felt the weight of that.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I don’t think I felt the weight of it, but I think that the lineage of that label and punk… like when I heard Fugazi’s End Hits (1998), I was probably 15. It was a eureka moment: music can be experimental. So there was a lot of music I was inspired by, and a lot of music I was inspired by after that. It’s almost like that David Foster Wallace This Is Water thing. The entire environment we came up in—the stamp of that label, those bands, and that lineage—was so strong. In a way, I don’t think it was some crusade to be representing DC, but I did feel like we were coming directly from that environment and this was kind of our ancestral lineage. We never discussed working with another label. There was an off-project we were considering doing with another label, but we never said, “Let’s switch labels.” And the way we ran our band, we were never like, “Oh, we need to make a music video.” I don’t ever recall talking about moving to another city to be closer to the industry. This was our world. And so when we went out on tour, we were just playing our music. But I think we were extending a way of being a band that we learned from those people, just by osmosis and exposure.
Mike Kanin: I definitely feel like that. But to what Jacob was saying, it didn’t feel like a weight—it felt like an honor. Growing up in that scene—and one that I idolized as a kid—it felt really good to be formally associated with it. And this definition of DC, Joshua, is more than just Dischord, right? There’s go-go, there’s hip-hop, and there’s all this other stuff that was happening. I’m proud to be of that lineage.
Hugh McElroy: I also felt very strongly that I just wanted to show up and do what we do, and have that be what we do. I didn’t want to put labels on it. It was kind of the same way I approached certain things in the lyrics. It wasn’t like, “This is the queer song.” It was just like, “I’m going to show up and this is going to be what I’m doing, and this is what I’m talking about.” I didn’t feel a need to draw attention to any aspect of it other than what it was. But I do think even trying to do that, some elements are inescapable, like people saw us as a Dischord band. I always think about the person in Santa Monica who saw me having a beer before our show who was like, “Does Ian know you’re drinking?” And I was like, “Do you mean right now? At this very second? We don’t have transponder communication where there’s a light in Dischord that goes on when I’m having a beer.” (laughter).
Dan Caldas: Father MacKaye is always watching (laughter).
Hugh McElroy: But it’s interesting because people see you that way, even if that’s not necessarily how I was consciously stepping into it.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: One thing I thought about—much more after the fact—was that in DC at the time, there was a way of being a band. For example, we never talked about what outfits we were going to wear. You look at an artist like David Bowie or something, who lots of people in DC would probably admire, but no one’s going for this kind of theatrical presentation. There’s a sort of just-the-facts quality to it. The Fugazi template that a lot of people either adopted or absorbed had a very unadorned, direct stylization, which is great, but also not all the music could be. It’s interesting to me that a lot of the music we liked did a lot of things super differently than the DC template, and we still funneled all those influences into something. If we were operating in the ’70s, we might have had different art direction or a different aesthetic presentation while still doing the same thing. We watched Butthole Surfers videos, and they look like a totally alien group. Or we’d watch Can videos and Holger Czukay’s playing with white gloves. I see a lineage in the non-frivolous, non-adornment of the group.
Jacob Long: To Daniel’s point, obviously we were consciously aware of some of that, but subconsciously, I think the biggest influence—and the thing we were repping—was this way of being a band. Obviously it was influenced by talks with Ian or Dischord about doing stuff, and they would have their suggestions if we had questions about things. But it also was just by osmosis. It was like, “This is how you run a band, you book your own shows, and you do this…” But it’s interesting, from the outside. I think the reputation is a little stronger than maybe it was. But there was a certain kind of seriousness to bands from DC. Without intending to be a serious band, you took what you were doing seriously.
Hugh McElroy: Trans Am was pretty funny in certain ways. But they took being in Trans Am very seriously, including the funny parts.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I was a huge Public Enemy fan, and I know Fugazi was too. Neither of us were like, “Let’s have a set of people in paramilitary costume hanging on stage” (laughter). Having this really theatrical presentation of our work—that was never discussed. We never talked about wearing certain types of outfits to look like we’re a potential terrorist organization. Even though that band was directly influential on Fugazi and directly influential on me, the influence was filtered through this M.O. of being a raw punk band. It’s interesting seeing that in the rear view, because I didn’t even clock it at the time. But now that we’re looking at it again—after 20 years, after doing a lot of musical exploring and listening—you see how much that community and that M.O. was present.
Cough felt like an expansion of what had already been done on the first record, and then there were offshoots afterwards with the band breaking up. Thinking about that record, and how the band was continually evolving, what are things that you feel you couldn’t bring to the band that someone else could?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: It’s so vast. I think that our history together is basically familial at this point. I feel such a bond with these people that when we get together, it feels so familiar. We never considered replacing a member. When we broke up, the initial catalyst was Jacob’s partner at the time moving to California for a graduate program, so he was leaving. And it was never considered that we would continue without him—it was the five of us as a unit. It’d be harder to say what somebody didn’t bring. Returning to it now, Hugh has all the hooky vocal parts. I never noticed it as much before, but the numbers don’t lie, every singalong is from Hugh (laughter). More singalongs per pound than ever before. I’m like, “God damn, this is wild.” So a lot of credit there.
Hugh McElroy: “Hooky” being a relative term in this context (laughter).
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I’m just saying, when people sing, they sing with your parts. And I give credit, it’s amazing. I think the vocal interplay is crucial to the band, but I tip my hat.
Dan Caldas: Maybe this is a cop-out answer, but I think the five of us are all pretty different. We bring fairly different things to the band. It’s funny, we have a mutual friend that I was playing with for a while, and I remember one day he was like, “I can’t believe you guys were in a band together. I know all of you, and you’re all really different.” I was like, “We are, but we just get along.” In terms of playing music, maybe every band feels this way, but I feel like we all bring something fairly different because of who we are.
Hugh McElroy: I could probably do one of these for everyone else in the band. I could say, “So-and-so thinks about music in a way that doesn’t feel like how I process and interpret things, but what that does is allows me to take a step into their musical brain space and respond to what they’re doing. And that lets me stretch myself out into something I might not have been comfortable with or have been able to get my head around myself.” Whether that’s a structural thing, I don’t know. It’s really tough.
I have the tiniest bit of formal musical training. I can sort of read music, but it’s really, really hard. And it’s really challenging to translate what’s in my head to an instrument in a lot of ways. I can see different ways that other members of the band relate to that stuff. For example, I would say Jacob has a compositional sense that works in a bigger picture way than mine does. Or if my lyrics or my vocals are sort of hooky, Daniels has the really awesome, borderline rap-rhythmic thing going on, where his vocals are functioning like another rhythm instrument in these fascinating, rich ways, and they take the songs to a different place. All of us have impulses and instincts that not everyone else in the band has, and that pulls us all along into new areas.
Dan Caldas: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it.
Daniel Martin-McCormick: It’s interesting, too, because when we were really working, it was that sense of exploration and permissiveness and openness to try things. So Jacob switching to sax obviously changed the dynamic in a big way. But also, then, Hugh’s basslines adapted to now being the only bass player… there’s very cool, heavy basslines on Cough. With Dan’s drumming, Mike is a real slammer, and Dan’s drumming is not as hard hitting, but they evolved this very cool mesh of drumming where they were able to write beats around each other.
I felt like I had a lot of permission. I never played a single chord in the band. I have a student who was recently like, “Oh, I checked out your band. There’s not a lot of notes in your guitar playing.” I was like, “Correct!” (laughter). I was not interested and didn’t have to. That was very liberating to just be like, “I don’t have to play any fucking way that I don’t want to.”
I think when we struggled at the end, it was probably a mix of road burnout and just fundamentally disagreeing on where we wanted to go and how we wanted to get there. A lot of hardheadedness on many sides—many sides (laughter). As older and more relaxed people, we’re able to navigate around that and return to that sense of permissiveness and interest in what each other are doing. That was the mood that our work was able to come out of. We kept trying stuff and finding ways to make it work. I can’t think of one song that was like, “This is the Black Eyes song that unlocks them all.” There are so many pockets. When I was working with our sound engineer, Katie, to map out the set, I realized there’s almost no two songs that have the exact same instrumentation. We all have our two or three things, but it’s literally every possible combination of, “On this one, I’ll play percussion and I won’t play guitar, on this one Hugh puts on the bass…” It just keeps shifting. It never settled into something where you could be like, “That one is the quintessential one where they’re all doing their thing.”
Mike Kanin: I’d echo what everybody was saying. And I think that the familial feeling, looking back on it with the perspective that 20 years brings, and thinking about how everything came together, I can’t pull it all apart. It’s all this whole thing—it’s incredibly gratifying and, I think, rare.
With decades of hindsight and the reunion shows, what do you feel like being in Black Eyes has helped you with? This could be with how the rest of your life has panned out, or anything specific. Did it shape your understanding of certain things, music-related or otherwise?
Daniel Martin-McCormick: I think it just really solidified my identity and self-belief as an artist in a really fundamental way. Trooper was a really fun band to be in, and the band I was in before that, Epson Energy, was really fun to be in, and I was passionate about music and excited to participate in music, but this was us really doing it. We were really working together, really being ambitious, making something that we felt strongly about, working with a label that was an honor to work with. Ian would ask you to print out your lyrics in the studio, and that was scary, and that pushed me, majorly. And then we did it in a way that was hardworking with a lot of conviction. We grew a lot, our ideas formed a lot. I left the band more certain than ever that music was the only thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and that hasn’t changed at all. It’s such a deep experience to play with other people at this level and give it so much energy and dedication, to work as hard as we did. I think with all the ideas I had going into the band and hopes about what my life might be like, I walked out being like, yeah, it’s not just a fantasy about the future, it’s not just a distant dream—I lived it, period. And that shaped the way I live the rest of my life.
Mike Kanin: I totally feel a lot of that. And I think also at the very base level, it made me a better player. It challenged me to expand my musical horizons, not always willingly (laughter). But in hindsight, thinking about everything that I learned about music from being in this band, there’s nothing to compare it to. It has been an incredible experience. And I think this is mostly a hindsight thing for me, but I learned how to create collaboratively. I think each of the folks in this band, who I’ve now known for just about half of my life, has opened my heart in different ways. I’m incredibly grateful for that.
Hugh McElroy: For me, especially when we were recording Cough, it gave me this—I don’t want to say ideal, but really cool reference point for what it can feel like to be doing something creative, where you feel like you’re stretching out as far as you can at that moment, and feel like it’s going well. You’re pushing yourself but also feel confident in landing it, which was a really good feeling. It’s adjacent to a flow-state feeling. That was really cool. I also learned that I can sleep almost anywhere. Not comfortably or well, but I can get through the night (laughter).
Jacob Long: I’d echo what Daniel said. With the bands that we had done before this or that I had done, to varying degrees, it felt real and serious or whatever, but I feel like this was the first point where music was able to be—and continued to be over a period of time—the primary focus of my life. It hasn’t always been since then, but it certainly is a guiding point for what it can be. Making music in various forms is still fundamental to me as a person. It certainly was the jumping-off point; it was both the model and the inspiration.
Dan Caldas: The only thing I’d say is that, for me, it was just the most intense experience I’ve had with music in my life, the most “live, breathe, play music” experience. And also the most freeing, and maybe most comfortable I’ve ever felt in a collaborative, artistic environment. It’s something I’ll always look back on fondly.
Black Eyes are playing shows this year, including dates this month in Austin, TX and Highland Park, CA. They are also playing two shows this March in Chicago. Their music, including their studio albums and demos, can be found at Bandcamp. The Speaking in Tongues zine is also available at Bandcamp. Updates from the band can be found at their Substack.
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