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Chris on his back patio | June 2017 | Jersey City, NJ | Pentax 67

Because my interview with Chris Leo involved a nice bottle of wine on a pretty damn nice summer day, our discussion meandered and maybe went longer than we initially expected, a fact that led to a hasty conclusion and us speeding off on bikes -- him on his and me on his wife’s -- to his work at the last minute.

Also, Chris is as generous in conversation as he is in his lyrics, and he’s willing to let things drift to wherever they may go for as long as they go.

What follows is the second portion of our talk, which is concerned mostly with his band The Van Pelt, a musical group that began performing initially in 1993 and disbanded in 1997 after releasing two full-length albums on an independent record label. Chris played guitar and sang, and Brian Maryansky, Neil O'Brien and Sean Greene performed with him. Also, this interview is very much in the spirit of the way interviews run long in fanzines, with very little editing and condensing so as to offer the reader an accurate, non-embellished portrait of either their favorite band or a band they wanted to know more about or a band they know absolutely nothing about. Those are the interviews I grew up reading, whether they were in Maximum Rocknroll, HeartattaCk or a million other zines. That transparency is also in the interest of letting the artist’s thoughts run in their full and proper context. So a majority of this discussion below is as we had it, with very light doctoring for cohesion. I hope you enjoy it.

The Van Pelt have had several reunions, which first began in 2009, and they will continue this month with a small string of live performances. Go see them.

You can read the first portion of our chat HERE.

Thanks for inviting me over again. How has your day been so far?

I’m a little overworked. There’s the coordinating with wineries, how to get my wine from Italy to here. Then there’s the distribution part. I only import from Italy. Then there’s all these companies that I distribute wine from, but I don’t import their wine. That’s during the day. And then I have to find new people to sell it to and then I have to get it to those people. So I’m also the delivery man.

When do you sleep?

I don’t sleep much because at night I go and I’m doing this wine bar in Downtown Jersey City. The problem with New Jersey is it’s not for outside thinkers. It’s a place to breed outside thinkers that then get the fuck out of here. It’s a great place to create expats.

Well, let’s flip the record a bit as it were, because this is also partially based on what you’re doing with music.

At this moment, Charlie the dog interrupts the proceedings for a few moments. But it’s cool because he’s stopped barking and now he’s being friendly.

Is he young, how old is he?

He’s actually almost seven. We’ve had him for three years. He was in the pound for three years and he was on the streets of Los Angeles for a year. That’s why he’s all tough guy.

Did you get him in Los Angeles?

Yeah, we got evicted because of him barking like crazy.

I believe it. So what year did The Van Pelt begin?

I think we began in the fall of 1993 or in the spring of 1994. It’s hard to say because there were many iterations of the band. I started out on bass.

Did you?

Yeah. And we made these two albums, and the second album -- which was our more popular album – we had issues with the mastering. So, not only did we want to get it back in print and we wanted it remastered for our own sake. And so we did.

Is it more fun for you talking about wine or the band?

There’s definitely more joy in wine. Music isn’t pure joy. Music is pain. But also amazing. I also like talking about music because it’s so hard for me to articulate.

You’ve remastered these records again because you want them to sound better. But you’re also doing what you don’t like to do, which is play shows. Why are you doing that?

Except that I feel like I’m in a cover band.

Oh, that makes sense. But does that fact make it any easier?

Yeah, because now I’m singing the songs of this pretty cool kid from twenty years ago. And I’m playing a part; I’m trying to get into his mindset. One common theme of the band is disillusionment with the left, this civil war amongst Democrats and progressives in America.

What left are you talking about?

I’m talking about an eighteen-year-old’s idea of the left. I’m talking about an eighteen-year-old who is coming from an all-boys Catholic high school who created his idea of the left and was dying to leave this and find my people in the Lower East Side. The huge mistake I made was that to me the left meant open dialogue and the right meant closed dialogue. Where I really wanted to go was where you could sit at a bar or table with anybody and you could throw out any topic. What I found was the left was not about open dialogue. It was ‘The right believes ABC; we believe XYZ.’ And I didn’t think that was the way it was going to be. I thought it was going to be ‘The right believes ABC, and we believe everything else.’

So, lyrically that is what the band represents to you now? When you look back on it that’s how you see what you were doing?

Partially. In the sense that it’s one of the themes I’m excited to revisit because I think it’s so relevant now with the Democratic Party not see what was really coming with the progressives and Bernie Sanders.

The other thing I like revisiting is Chris Leo apriori optimist versus Chris Leo the empirical optimist. These things have changed quite a bit, but I love playing the role of the apriori guy. For example, if I was kind of hip to Monsanto when I was nineteen or twenty, I would have thought it was way cooler than I think it is now. I would have thought this idea of fucking with nature down to the bare bones is the coolest idea ever. ‘That’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re part of nature. If we don’t admit we’re part of nature then we don’t really understand nature. We’re part of nature and us fucking with it is the coolest thing ever.’ That’s Chris Leo the apriori optimist in the nineties. Let’s take this to the extreme; let’s take on nature. Yes, so many times we’ve done this we’ve failed miserably but let’s keep doing it. Chris Leo the empirical optimist now, twenty years later…if Monsanto had this little lab in Nebraska where they did all the same things and they live streamed it to us and said ‘Hey, we’re going to make this crazy square tomato and we’re going to feed it to dogs for twenty years and see what happens and we’re going to do all these other experiments but inside this hyper-controlled environment. But that’s not what Monsanto does, so therefore now I will get on board with the left of the early nineties and the left now and march against Monsanto.

You did write a lot about food in your songs. Hang on, let’s see what did I write down in my notebook? Here are some examples: An unseasoned meal, before the meat turns toxic in our tubes, feed me bread, lychee pits, gathering bread for your plate, more apple pie than I’ve ever been.

I guess I’ve been heading down the food and beverage path forever. And with The Lapse I had ‘Buffet.’ [’Buffet’ is a song from the 2000 album ‘Heaven Ain’t Happen’ where Leo proclaims ‘We make meals out of condiments.’]

I’m assuming you like to eat even though you’re very thin. Damn you.

I do like to eat.

What else was on your mind then?

Sex. Love. Politics, yes. Mortality always.

Even at that age?

ALWAYS. I always think about it.

Do you see yourself as a musician, songwriter, arranger? What do you see yourself as?

I’m not a performer. I’m terrible. I’d like to believe I’m a musician, but again, I feel like there’s this reciprocity that comes with being a musician, and I can’t say that I’m a musician. I don’t feel confident saying I’m a musician, but I like playing music.

What is your relationship with music like now?

It’s starting to find a real nice sweet spot, 43 years deep into my life. When I was making music with The Van Pelt and even The Lapse, sometimes I was just a little too close to it to appreciate it in its fullness, particularly with The Lapse. I almost became less of a fan boy than I was before I started playing music. I was just too deep in it. Too heady with it. Then, after the Vague Angels [Leo’s band from the aughts], I stopped playing music entirely. So, I haven’t written anything new for eight years or so. And the first year was amazing. I became more of a listener in every sense of the word, and not just with music, but with wine too. It was so helpful. I had this burst of interest in music, just as a listener. I was a super fanboy.

Of what?

I was just sucking everything up. At the time, I was living in Italy, and I was trying really hard to find good Italian music. I was really digging deep into Italian music. But then my music muscle atrophied. Not playing music, I realized that all these other things I was investing my interest in co-opted my brain. It was this really weak music muscle. Then I would go years picking up one or two bands a year.

What were the genres that you began liking as you got older?

I’ve always loved pop and dance. In the eighties, they used to call me a poseur because when I would write band names on my shoes, I would have like R.E.M., Erasure and Cover Girls. Kids would be like ‘You can’t put Cover Girls next to R.E.M.’

Who were the Cover Girls?

You don’t remember them?

I know the Weather Girls and Mary Jane Girls.

[Chris sings to me] Show me, show me you really love me. Actions speak louder than words.

Is it freestyle?

Yes, I love freestyle. We should do a freestyle night. [Chris frequently has friends and patrons play music on the bar’s sound system]

Oh, you know more than I do about freestyle.

We can get people to help us out. So, this is also during the glory years of 120 Minutes, so I was just discovering late-era Wire, but listening to Silent Morning. It’s always been a thread in my life, dance music and freestyle and pop.

I would get that listening to The Van Pelt.

Ha. Ok, remove yourself from the situation a bit. You gotta know what you do, and that’s not always what you listen to. I just don’t do certain things. There’s plenty of music I just don’t do. With The Van Pelt, I was hyper-restrained and I loved it. When we broke up I didn’t want to do anything restrained. I wasn’t feeling restrained. Now I’m stoked to do a lot of that. I wanted to explode because I was just so sick of the punk environment being so sterile. Music is supposed to make you abandon all inhibitions; music is supposed to take you from, if you walked in sad and watched a happy band then you leave happy or if you walk in happy and watch a sad band, then you leave sad. You’re supposed to lose it, and punk was so not about losing it.

Can you contextualize for me what The Van Pelt were? What world did you fit into?

So, we had two albums. The first album was a real fanboy album.

What does that mean?

Like young kids who are sucking up as much music as possible.

What were you sucking up?

Everything from Seam to Gastr Del Sol to Kraftwerk to whatever cassette was really cheap on tour at a gas station in Kansas, which might have been Procol Harum, and who knew they had other songs? So, absolutely everything. But we were all in agreement that we wanted to make anthems, we really wanted to kick out the jams. And this is a contextual thing because nineties New York were not about bands. That was for the rest of America. You had Jon Spencer and Sonic Youth and you had bands like that but they were in a whole mega league; they were not DIY. We would have aspired to their sales and notoriety but we were DIY [do-it-yourself or independent] through and through, to a fault.

That’s one of the reasons sometimes people would call us emo. Your choices were to go indie and work the 21-and-up circuit playing all these bars and you have a booking agent and everything is pretty legit. Or continue with DIY and do the 18-and-up circuit or play anyone’s basement anywhere and also play bars but book it yourself and hop in the van, make everything happen the way you want it to happen and just because you’re doing it that way, they want to call you emo because that was the predominant DIY genre at the time.

So you don’t feel like you fit into that or you were that?

I don’t feel like we fit into that at all. What, you do?

I don’t know, maybe a little bit.

Maybe a little bit, sure. But not exclusively. We just wanted to make music. The second album was after a bunch of lineup changes; we’d just finished college. There was a huge blizzard in New York. We’d all just broken up with our girlfriends, so that was really pure. That one was like ‘This is what’s happening. No one is going to like it, but this is what’s happening. And it’s a bummer and this music sucks.’ Of course, that’s the record people like. So, who were we? We were just kids figuring out who we were.

Were you punk? Did you think of yourselves as punk then or no?

No. We thought of ourselves as DIY.

What’s the difference?

Punk has constraints.

So does DIY by its definition, no?

There’s no aesthetic or sonic restraints.

Oh, I see, I see. Where were you playing and who were you playing with? Who were your peers at the time?

We were playing at Brownies on Avenue A and 11th Street all the time.

RIP. [Brownies, an East Village rock/punk/indie club, closed in 2002].

I know, RIP. We never played Brooklyn. There was nothing there. Where else were we playing?

Did you ever play in New Jersey?

We played a Knights of Columbus in Wallington on the Passaic River, which was great. We would play colleges. We played The Cooler, all the time.

Who were you playing with? You were playing with emo bands, I’m guessing, even though you were not.

If we weren’t the booking agent. If it was a bill we booked, we would play with one of my brothers’ bands, Chisel or Radio Saturn. We’d play with Garden Variety. We played with Dahlia Seed. Their new band is playing with us in D.C.

Promise Ring? Texas is the Reason?

We didn’t play with Texas too much. We were all friends, but we didn’t cross with them much musically.

This isn’t the first time The Van Pelt has reunited. How do you feel about it now?

Great. This is basically the third time.

What made you reunite the first time in 2009?

Because an old friend of ours from Austin was like ‘Hey, I’m putting together a nineties bill for SXSW this year, please play.’

The Van Pelt perform in June 2009 at Coco 66 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Had you entertained the idea before that?

It never really crossed my mind, honestly. No one even asked us, really. So, we all agreed to do it, and it was really cool. But it was a year after I stopped playing music.

Didn’t you write a novel in there somewhere, too?

I wrote five.

Didn’t you write five novels in there somewhere, too?

So, we did it. My relationship with music in general was weird. It was more about meeting these guys that I shared so much with back in the day. But when bands break up, it’s like breaking up with a girlfriend; it’s never perfect.

So you had no real misgivings about reforming?

I did. But for me on that tour, I had misgivings about playing music and playing Van Pelt music, but I wanted to play with those guys. I wanted to get back on track and bury every and any hatchet that could possibly be still hanging out there for no good reason. And we succeeded in that. Sonically the theme wasn’t clear to me in my head.

Does it fit sonically with who you are now or what you’re interested in?

That’s one of the things I love in revisiting these songs; some of it really does.

Would you listen to that now as a man your age?

The second album yes. The first album not so much, but I have fun playing those songs. And some of them we’ve kind of done adult contemporary style and we’ll be doing some of them that way for these shows. The point is, that was really cool in 2009, but it didn’t bring everything together in my mind that I was hoping it would. So then, we release what was supposed to be our third album, and in doing so we get offered to play this huge festival in England. It was one of the ATP festivals [Jabberwocky, 2014]. By that point everything is cool between The Van Pelt guys, thematically everything is settled in my head. We go and play these shows, and it was fucking amazing. We were really good.

The beauty of your vocal style is that your speaking voice doesn’t change that much.

It’s a little deeper now.

With the exception of maybe ‘We Are the Heathens’, you can kinda do most of it, right?

I can do most of it better.

I assume your upper register is gone though.

Yeah, it’s gone. I think sometimes it sounds better now though. So musically those shows were great and it was super fun. So then, the record label that releases that was like ‘Ok cool, that was a success. Let’s re-master and release your first two records. But you gotta play more shows.’ And we said, ‘Ok, cool.’ So, in the sense of like, do I need to keep revisiting old Van Pelt songs? No, I don’t. But, when we were rehearsing in 2012 and playing old songs, it was really hard to not write new songs.

So you’ve written new songs.

Yes, and we’re going to play some of those.

What do they sound like?

I dunno. We’ve only written three so far. We all have these little pieces we’re tinkering with.

So you have songs that are now five years old?

No, basically in 2012, in between playing old songs we would tinker with stuff and a song would come together and then we’d say ‘Oh fuck, we can’t do this right now. We gotta get back on track with relearning these old songs but my god it would be so much fun to flesh this out.’ So then, that’s the way we rationalize these new shows. So, now let’s spend some time fleshing these things out.

What percentage of the set will be new material?

Maybe we’ll throw in one or two for the shows. And hopefully we’ll have a new album in 2018.

You’re kind of like Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy. Every decade you do something.

Maybe. I love playing with those guys.

Do you find it bizarre the music you were doing then can live beyond its initial time?

No, because back in that time I was digging deep into the racks looking for stuff from twenty years earlier, and it fit the context of that time.

What were the primary sources? Sonic Youth, Velvets, Galaxie 500?

I didn’t listen to Sonic Youth much, only because that was such the sound of the time you almost didn’t need to listen to it. I didn’t listen to it a lot, but yes, I love Sonic Youth.

With the first record, we really wanted to make anthems because we were living in this time where the guitar players were no longer making anthems. And there weren’t many guitar players. They were all going the route of the deejay. So, it was like all the guitar players are getting weird as fuck, and we liked it. But we wanted to give a go at making an album of anthems.

I was listening to a lot of the Dustdevils. An interesting thing, we discovered a lot of bands by who people said they imagined we were listening to. People would say we must have listened to a lot of Bedhead, and we said no. And then we’d go listen to Bedhead. And even The Fall. I didn’t listen to The Fall until everyone said we sounded like The Fall. Which could bring us to Parquet Courts.

How do they relate to you?

You don’t think they sound like us?

Ooh, yes. I do.

So many people are like ‘Are you going to sue them or what?’

They seem very knowledgeable in what they’re doing. I think they’re very steeped in music history. [Full disclosure: I once saw Andrew Savage at a DS-13 show in Brooklyn wearing a Turning Point shirt. The Hi-Impact Turning Point shirt. That is fairly legit to me. I also like them a lot, probably because they remind me of The Van Pelt.]

Maybe that’s the case, and if it is, then they should give us a shout out. If it’s not the case, the world is so weird that I can believe it not being the case. Anyhow, I love it. I do love them.

You kind of got me inebriated. Who else were your influences?

Eric B. & Rakim were a huge influence, to the idea of speaking and saying intelligent things and putting it to a repeating riff.

Can you estimate how many shows you played when you were around?

It had to be over a hundred. We were just talking about this.

Did you enjoy being in a band?

Everything about it except the actual show. That part I wasn’t so into. Traveling, late-night drives, post-sound check hanging out at the bar during happy hour when no one’s there. A sticky, stinky bar. I loved that stuff. Meeting people from all around the world. I loved being in a band and touring.

When it comes to the music and the recording, was the intention to have the music serve your voice? To me, the music is behind you on the recordings.

I rarely write the lyrics with the music; I can’t do that. I’ll have a bank of lyrics. Even right now I have tons. That’s constant. When we start to tinker with a song, I’ll think about what lyrics will fit with the mood of the song.

Do you care what people take from your lyrics? Do people ask you what your lyrics mean?

I do get asked from time to time. I hope people take something from them. When people usually ask me, I like to say in the least snarky way possible, if I could articulate them in another way, then I wouldn’t have made lyrics out of them. This is the art form. It’s not a redundant art form. The reason poetry and lyrics exist is because it fills an articulation gap.

Did you put a lot of emphasis on them at the time or are they quick musings?

No, I sweat them out. To write lyrics for The Van Pelt, I would get on my bike, and I would have pen and paper, and I would loop Manhattan. I would go from Wall Street all the way up to Hell Gate Bridge [near Astoria, Queens]. And anytime something would come together, I would stop and write it down.

Do you recall ever having people really wanting to know exactly what you meant? Punk commonly demands black and white lyrical subject matter. How did you deal with it?

Yes. I probably dealt with it poorly, but I don’t remember. It can’t fit into a perfect dialogue; if it could, it wouldn’t be music or lyrics. It’s not regular dialogue, it’s an art. For example, when I go to a museum, I want to take the lengthy explanations off the wall and throw it in the trash. I hate the idea of a little placard telling me what a painting is supposed to resemble. I want to look at the painting and enjoy it, period.

Sultans of Sentiment…this is a Dire Straits thing?

No, it came from Twin Peaks. By the way, one of the things you asked before, I don’t think I answered it fully. What do I want from these shows? I really hope we can reach a few kids. That would make me so happy. Like if the version of us that was flipping through records at Kim’s in the early nineties, just finding obscure shit from 20 years earlier, if that kid finds us and we’re part of some thread.

Is The Van Pelt considered obscure now?

I think we’re super obscure, no? We don’t make any lists of bands of the early nineties.

Hmm. Did I not ask you anything? Oh, I know, are your lyrics about any real-lived events?

Yes. ‘Do the Lovers Still Meet at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial?’ I was dating a girl who was half-Irish and half-Chinese and her Irish dad died, and her Chinese mother remarried a Chinese guy and they lived in Taiwan. And so I went to Taiwan a couple times during college, and I was not ready for the culture shock at all. It was really a lot for a kid in his twenties to take. Sometimes I would just need a break from the family and all the cultural things I just couldn’t accept, so we would meet at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial. It’s a huge giant white-and-blue pagoda, and old people would do ballroom dancing outside of it. And we would meet there, and we’d go out to clubs there and escape the madness of the culture clash that eventually proved to be too much for us. Eventually I left Taiwan with her prematurely on one visit, and I had a big argument with her family. I said ‘I’m done with this; I’m taking her out of the country. I’m done with this.’ It was just a huge battle. Pretty intense times.

Well, I’m glad I asked that. Ok, we’ve talked forever. Let’s end it. Thanks Chris.

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