Travis speaks to NATN in 1999
»
 |
He hates television, but likes the show “Friends,” especially Chandler. He doesn’t believe artists should write autobiographically, but admits that he writes about his own experiences. He loathes many of the attitudes he grew up around in the lily-white suburbs of Washington, D.C., but likes the southern atmosphere he found there.
At a time when the average twenty-something appears to be generally confused, Travis’s contradictions don’t seem that out of place. Like the rest of us, he wonders why he went to college, gets tired of his temp jobs and doesn’t have any idea where he’ll be this time next year. But, unlike most of us, he’s the lead singer of a band -- the Dismemberment Plan -- that’s on the brink of releasing its first major-label album on Interscope Records, and he’s arguably a true standout of the D.C. punk-rock scene. To top it off, he kicked ass in his high school Math meets.
So on a typical evening in Washington, Morrison and I sit down with a shovel and some salt and an extra-thick pad of paper, to sift through the contradictions.
"You don’t know it, but I know that you’re scared"
A little background info is in order. Morrison is the frontman of the Dismemberment Plan -- a four member rock band that has been firmly entrenched in the D.C. indie/punk-rock scene for more than six years. Although Morrison says the Plan has "always had a very questionable status to kind of the taste makers around Washington,” the band is able to sell out the 500-capacity, standing-room-only Black Cat in D.C. on a Friday night in December. Well, would have sold out, if only 13 more people had shown up. If only.
The Dismemberment Plan first pricked up ears outside of Washington D.C. with its 1995 debut album, distinguished only by an exclamation point as its title. An arresting marriage of post-punk hyperactivity to Morrison’s rare lyrical wit, the band (Morrison, bassist Eric Axelson, guitarist Jason Caddell and then-drummer Steve Cummings) had hit upon a sound right at home on D.C. label Desoto. Desoto’s owners, ex-Jawbox members Kim Coletta and Bill Barbot, helped the young band along by taking the Plan on the road as an opening act. Robbins also recorded and produced the Plan’s already-in-the-can major-label debut.
Powered by A-plus cuts like the stingy breakup ode “If I Don’t Write” and frenetic opener “Survey Says,” ! was certainly a solid debut that belied a debt to DC influences Jawbox, Shudder To Think and Fugazi. But it was bettered significantly by 1997’s astonishingly good The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified.
Benefitting from better studio production, more confident playing (namely, from new drummer Joe Easley) and the willingness to indulge in pure-pop gems like “The Ice Of Boston” and “This Is The Life,” Is Terrified was not easily forgotten. Band members’ diverse listening tastes have a lot to do with the Plan’s hodge-podge sound.
After all, this is a band with a lead singer that likes Janet Jackson, John Cougar Mellencamp, Smokey Robinson, De La Soul, Vanessa Williams, Gang Starr and George Jones and can merrily hum the tune to one of his favorite ‘N Sync songs. Morrison’s a singer whose musical influences, in the ears of many, would bang together rather than flow. Indeed this is a band that, during any given song, can reference Slint, Kool And The Gang and XTC without batting an eyelash. Highly unusual.
Morrison also draws lyrical inspiration from some unlikely source material.
I got a greatest hits album of Gladys Knight -- you don’t really think about soul music having great lyrics,” he says. “You don’t really think about country having really great lyrics, but it’s really honest and emotional and intelligent. I really like lyrics that don’t set up bad guy and good guy.
I write about things that happen in my life and, more importantly, things that happen in other people’s lives because I still have to go out with the person after the album comes out,” he says. “I think a lot of young artists make this mistake. They tend to write autobiographical stories and lyrics about things that are going on in their own lives. On our new album we look at other people’s experiences and write about them. You shouldn’t really write about other people as much as you should write about themes and variations -- what is everybody else doing?
Contradiction alert.
But, you still have to write about other people’s experiences. I picked up Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints. There are about a million lines that completely nail the idea of a relationship falling apart. I hope I get there at some point. I think I’ve coughed up some lines that people will say "hey I know how you feel," and that’s the point anyway.
If that’s the point anyway, Travis is doing a pretty good job. The Plan’s latest EP The Ice of Boston is in such high demand at shows the band can barely keep enough copies around. Only time will tell if majorlabeldom will be more kind to the group than it has to Jawbox and Shudder To Think, Jawbox broke up in 1997 after two excellent but unheard albums on Atlantic Records, and Shudder To Think has moved so far away from its earlier DC-centric sound that it’s almost unrecognizable to newer listeners.
About 13 years ago, when Travis first picked up the guitar, the idea that fans would ever be clamoring for his album probably would have made his classmates laugh. Travis certainly was no rock star in high school. He was pretty much just like you, or me, or that dorky kid with glasses who sat next to you in Algebra class.
"I know someone just like you"
Short, scraggly black hair, glasses, jeans, red shirt, black jacket, crazy laugh, Travis banged on every musical instrument around when he was a kid in the northern Virginia suburbs of D.C. When he was 12 or 13 he started taking guitar lessons and, not too long after, started getting bands together.
By the time he hit high school, he was probably just like some kid you knew - smart, funny, a little bit odd. Maybe a little bit more motivated than the rest of us, maybe a little bit more complex. Maybe a little bit just like you -- annoying his mom with his music, holding the fate of every insecure 15-year-old in his hands as he edited stories for the newspaper, enjoying the pure ecstasy of a good win.
Before I had an amp, we would rehearse and I would plug my guitar into the stereo and it just sounded terrible. From ninth grade on, I was continually trying to get bands together. The same problem was always trying to find a drummer. My mother didn’t want me to play the drums. I don’t think she knew you could get pads to dampen the noise.
Fairfax is the ultimate in competitive kids. Not only do you have football, but also you have Math meets -- these big competitions where you compete over math problems. There would be like 100 of us in there because everyone wanted extra credit. That was the big thing -- Math meets and English meets. We beat T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) for the English meet. Usually in Fairfax County T.J. won and then there was who won among the normal people. But, we beat them in the English meet. I was really pathetically happy about that.
Although Travis "made it out of Fairfax," he didn’t travel that far. After spending three years at William & Mary college in Williamsburg, Virginia, he dropped out because he "wanted to be in a band and it wasn’t practical to be in school." The only instruction he received there worth mentioning he got from working at the college radio station - WTJU.
I think it was the first comprehensive music education I got. They had old 7"s -- Otis Redding, the Beatles. Anything I wanted to find out about from John Coltrane to German art rock. That was worth tuition right there. But I don’t spring that on my mother.
After leaving school Travis returned to the Northern Virginia area, but this time moved into a D.C. neighborhood where he says he "stuck out like a breadstick in Nutella," but felt more at home than in his white-bread hometown. From suburbs to city, the experiences Travis chooses to talk about run from growing up next to a prison to the outrageous price of alcohol at bars to getting mugged by a man who only ended up stealing a bag of fruit. In the end, you’re still left wondering if these are really the experiences that shaped his life.
In Travis’s story, much like a Mad Libs game, the individual words often don’t make any sense, but when you put them together they’re usually pretty telling. That is until you flip to the next page and are forced to dive in blind once again, having no idea where you’ll end up.
"I lost my invitation, and I don’t know where I’m going"
After 26 years in the shadows of D.C., Travis isn’t sure just where he’s going. Tomorrow he could be at another graphic design temp job, or drinking coffee at the trendy New-Yorkish bar Trist, maybe doing yoga, or seeing a movie at the Upton Theater, probably humming. There’s no way of knowing if he’ll ever know any more tomorrow than he does today.
As far as the band goes, the Plan may soon find themselves dropped by Interscope records due to a buyout and restructuring, and instead releasing its third album on Desoto. Your guess is as good as theirs. Either way, Travis isn’t too concerned about where he, or the band, will go.
Touring has satisfied my jones to move somewhere else. There are advantages to staying in one place. There are plusses and minuses to everything in life. There’s not a lot tying me down here. I think it’s what you’re doing not where you are. You’re a lot more open to the world when you’re happy with what’s going on in your own way. So many people, they’re looking for happiness -- like happiness USA -- like there’s a dot on the map called happiness USA. When you live in a city as small as Washington you tend to find people like that all the time.
We’re getting older, we don’t really know what’s gonna happen with the band. Washington is nice -- it isn’t the most exciting city, and I can really concentrate on my art. I like the fact that as an artist in D.C. I’m so isolated.
I like the zoo here. If I leave, I’ll miss the zoo. I’ll miss the incredible cultural options here. I’ll miss the South. You forget there’s Southern culture here. There’s more Southern culture in Alexandria than Fairfax. I realize that I am a Southerner. It’s definitely in my genes. In the South people can waste time like no where else in the world. I’d visit my friends in Williamsburg, and I’d sit on the couch and say I’ll have a Bud. And we’d lie in the yard and drink.
"So I guess the party line is I followed you up here. I don’t know about that. Mainly because knowing that would involve knowing about some pathetic, ridiculous and absolutely true things about myself -- I’d rather not admit to right now"
The contradictions dancing around Travis’s head snake their way into his music, revealing not only his perplexities but also those of the people around him. It’s the relativity of those words that make his lyrics click inside the listener’s head and probably made an Interscope marketing executive’s wheels roll a little faster. It’s that general state of confusion that makes the Plan so appealing to so many.
Travis’s thoughts, like the group of Asian kids who break dance and yell the names of video games at the Plan’s shows, prove that sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense. But, somehow, he is relating to those "video game pygmies," to those 5’4" Asian kids who unify around his music. And he says that’s the point -- to relate to how we feel, to make us say, "hey, I know what he’s talking about."
In the future, whether we’ll find it under the guise of a major or indie label remains to be seen. Perhaps it’s that gray area that makes Travis’s lyrics so easily attainable - he is just as bewildered as the rest of the kids shuffling through the racks in the record store.
After an evening in Morrison’s company, I’m tired and confused and can’t figure out my place in the world -- if Travis has really captured what we’re all feeling, we would lie back in the grass and drink a Bud and linger. I think I just might.
DANA MYERS |