It's about 11:30 p.m., and Tim Baier and I have probably both had about enough to drink. I'm sitting with the Tim, the bassist in the Baltimore "homegrown" indie rock trio Slow Jets, at the black counterop of the Ottobar, trying to figure out how a guy can be as fiercely passionate about his music as he is but at the same time so hopelessly apathetic. He just gave me a tirade--his eyes closed, hand on his Yuengling and his forehead bobbing up and down, pointed towards the bar--about how it's a shame that the music industry "used to be about quality" but isn't anymore. Then he said, "We don't care too much about getting famous. I've long since given up trying to do anything."
The problem with a guy like Tim is that he does his routine, both on the stage and off, so convincingly that it's hard not to just accept his conflicted feelings as perfectly normal. The Slow Jets, who started playing in 1996, are made up of three early 30-somethings: Greg Preston (guitar and vocals), Marc Berrong (drums) and Baier (guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals). Their latest album, Remain In Ether, was recorded in the basements of various band members' houses in Waverly and Hampden, produced and mixed with a punk-loving do-it-yourself ethos.
That ethos is one that you can hear all over the record. The jangly guitars that back up "Last Lights" sound as raw and amateur as Kurt Cobain's did when he struggled to pound out coherent versions of songs like "Pennyroyal Tea." Other times -- "Country Under Canada" and "Ether Remains" for example -- the Jets are a happy medium between 90's indie-punk like Superchunk or Washing Machine-era Sonic Youth -- and the late-'60s psychedelia of 13th Floor Elevators and Love.
On stage, the Jets are compelling. Their set is loud enough to fill the place, and often even danceable, as some of the more mod teenagers in the audience demonstrated earlier tonight. The band just played it straight, thrashing away at their Rickenbacker and classic Fender guitars, not really too conscious of what specifically should be regarded as the image they are planting in the brains of their fans.
It's DIY, alright, but at the same time it's clear sometimes that the band knows full well what they are doing. They know what kind of garage-like sounds are coming out of their home-made production. They know what a telecaster, stripped of any effects and beaten over and over again in a punk-chop rhythm, will do for your indie street cred. But again, something (Tim) tells me that they just don't care. "It doesn't matter what the "thing-of-the-week' is--whether it's time for Wilco to be cool or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Interpol to be cool -- whatever. We don't give a shit about trends."
It's easier to believe this kind of statement, however, after hearing 2002's Good Morning Stars, a sophomore release on which the Jets sound distinctly Strokes-like, complete with muffled vocals and a rhythm section that leans on the bass more than the drum kit. "We have the same influences as the Strokes do," said Baier. "I take the same influences everyone else has, and I write music that appeals to people who like those bands. If you look at bands and you say, "Oh, he just sounds like them,' I think you ruin a lot of music."
Ether is definitely a departure from that style, "It's got "more weird instrumentation, more keyboards and weird guitar sounds. The overall sound has more layers," said Baer. All this is true, and perhaps one should say that the band has fallen away from such strict punk rhythmic conventions as were stuck to on Stars. There's a bit more Tom Verlaine guitar nuance, and Preston's voice can sound as dark and abrasive at times as Frank Black's. If anything, the Slow Jets are moving backwards chronologically when it comes to style.
So why is Baier longing for some sort of good old days? Why does he remember to me the day his older brother first brought home a Sex Pistols album: "We listened to it, then just got our skateboards and started skating, like "Yahhhh!'" It's a type of nostalgia, and my hunch is that it's just something that happens to guys around his age. All are in their early thirties with steady jobs -- Baier is a physics teacher at Loyola High School--and the way Baier talks about the Clash and the Damned, it must be that he's repressing some sort of serious punk withdrawal.
Baier says that he took a job after college doing software programming, and that it "sucked the life outta [him]." Since he quit, his band has been something that he fervently doesn't give a shit about to the point that it's obviously his main, or only, outlet of angsty expression. And so it seems that as rockers grow up, the cynicism sets in, and it's not pretty. Fortunately for the Slow Jets, the music usually is, and that's what really counts, I guess.
