Interview: John Colpitts.
Percussionist/noise rocker John Colpitts on DIY in NYC, rejecting the chaos of formalised venues and the music industry machine, and his spontaneous creative process.
John Colpitts welcomes us into his Queens studio, the space where he both practices and teaches drumming. Having worked around New York City's underground/independent music scene for almost 30 years, Colpitts’ oeuvre is expansive, ranging from Moondog-like marching-band percussion and ethereal chanting, a sound which is as unconventionally holy as a bible tucked away in a motel cabinet, to the rolling fills that skim up and down the spine of his more typically punk/noise projects.
In 2017’s Play What They Want under the alias Man Forever, Colpitts places himself firmly in the vibrant, tumultuous fabric of New York’s artistic community. The record is centred around his circular, entrancing, layered approach to group percussion – building spiritual jazz bent for the 21st century. His web of collaborations - including Yo La Tengo, Laurie Anderson, Chris Brokaw of Codeine, and even a stint with post-punk band Ex Models - sews a breadcrumb trail, a smoke line of Colpitts’ presence in the city.
Collaboration has been a solid feature of Colpitts’ work for some time. The influence of David Shrigley on Oneida’s 2022 album Success is something we discuss, alongside various means of creating music collectively – the process of building Expensive Air from a series of demos, and the technique of channelling the movement of a waterfall to “include other people easily” without the need for high levels of technique in his track ‘Surface Patterns’.
Despite his many collaborations, some of Colpitts’ more recent projects speak to something a little more walled-up. Music from the Accident (2022), written during Colpitts' recovery from a serious car accident, is a solo project. The melodies are subdued, repetitious, and dreamy, like hours spent sinking and turning beneath one’s bedsheets. Expensive Air (2024) speaks to this isolation flipped - a creeping, asocial paranoia. Surreal, militaristic semantics of attack and disillusionment pervade the hyper-caffeinated, punky sound, which Colpitts drives with his hypnotic hammering.
Colpitts began playing in bands in the early 90s. We discuss Oneida’s early DIY approach, and how this allowed them to break from the scant, nightmarish organisation and dog-eat-dog ethos of formalized venues in NYC. Oneida’s choice to reject a “system that made a paltry living off of people’s dreams” led them to play in largely abandoned industrial warehouse spaces scattered across Brooklyn. We also touch on Colpitts’ experience of how Brooklyn and its reputation have changed since the 90s, reflections on the music industry machine and its relationship to artists’ aspirations, and the potential future of DIY in the city now that Brooklyn’s warehouse spaces have been largely filled.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
EA: It’s interesting being in New York because we’re used to different music spaces, coming here we found it very different. The music is similar, but it’s almost uncanny because of the way people interact with each other. Some of the music cultures are a little more exclusive here, some spaces are very interested in how you look, or how you come across.
JC: Maybe that’s true, I have less experience with that world. There are so many massive worlds here, I don’t really intersect with that. I would say that with rock ‘n’ roll I’ve never gotten a sense that you needed to be a certain way to participate. Maybe I might be wrong, but with the stuff we [Oneida] do, it’s pretty open. That’s how we started.
EA: I read about when you and the band were coming up at first and there was the ability to be DIY in Brooklyn specifically, and maybe other places in New York too, because of the hangover of industry and there being spaces like Warehouses available. I was wondering if that has changed, and if so, how it has changed?
JC: I mean, Oneida started 28 years ago so things have changed for sure. When we started it felt like kind of infinite, in a way – I mean the space here. I think this is hard for people to believe, but in Brooklyn as a rock band you would never say, “I’m from Brooklyn.” You would never say that. It was not considered cool or hip or a place desirable to be, right? Of course, where we ended up was like the centre. It was where Biggie Smalls was from, Clinton Hill in Brooklyn was where we ended up in’96. But in terms of rock, there wasn’t a scene in Brooklyn. When we would go on tour in the early days, we would say, “We’re from Brooklyn” almost ironically, like we were making a joke. I think that’s pretty hard to understand now because Brooklyn is a brand. Maybe it’s even evolved since the mid-2000s when it was like a worldwide brand, that somehow suggested hipness and coolness and whatever. But that’s not exactly what you were talking about.
EA: I think that’s interesting though, I would agree.
JC: Yeah. So it wasn’t that way – I mean, when we said it people laughed. They’d be like, woah, why are these guys saying this? It was like a joke. And that didn’t make us defensive, I mean we were in on it. It would be like saying, “We’re from Slough” or something.
EA: Yeah, like somewhere you wouldn’t expect, and it’s kind of like why are you mentioning it.
JC: Totally. Back then it was like, “Yeah man, we’re from New York City.”
EA: I suppose a kind of hype and an aesthetic has risen around it [Brooklyn].
JC: Well, yeah. I mean, in the late 90s and early 2000s, so we’re just talking about a short window of time. But anyway, it was open. Where are you guys staying?
EA: We’re staying in Bushwick.
JC: Well, let’s talk about Bushwick. Bushwick, in say 2004, it felt, and this is from my [perspective], it’s not like no one lived there, but it was on the L train which is a very fast, good train, that goes from Manhattan to Brooklyn immediately. There’s no other train like it. The artists and the musicians were living in the east side of Manhattan, then they would be on Bedford Ave. It would be like, “I can’t afford Manhattan, but right over the river I can get a place in Williamsburg”, and then Bushwick was the next place that had warehouses and people were doing shows. It was a neighbourhood where there wasn’t any industry left, there weren't many small businesses catering to young people or nightlife or whatever. This was the case when Oneida started in say, like, Williamsburg. We didn’t live there, but that was where things were happening. There were big spaces that people rented and would throw parties. For us it was like, we would much rather do than that like, play a club. And the clubs – there would be a bar.
Let’s say a famous example – CBGB's. The Ramones started at CBGB’s, Patti Smith, Television, they all started there and it was just like a little hole in the wall in the Lower East Side. This was in the 70s, right, but when the mid to late 90s were happening CB’s were doing like 7 bands a night just trying to book whoever. There was no aesthetic, there was no attempt at trying to present something beyond just trying to pay the rent. It’d be like 7 or 8 bands, bring your friends, you have to get this many people in the door. Point is, it wasn’t really interesting to play that on a Tuesday night, say. “Oh we got a slot, we’re on third, it’s at 8:20, we gotta bring all our friends!” At the door they would be like, “Who are you here to see?” There’d be like six bands playing, and they would mark you down next to the band and then you’d get paid that way. It was super mercenary and it wasn’t fun. I played one of those places with another band when I first moved here, and I was like, “Wow, this sucks.” There’s always this assumed path that you would be expected to take – you've got to play these venues, and you’ve got to do a showcase for the labels, it was all bullshit. It was all this industry idea of success that didn’t really appeal or interest me or Oneida.
EA: Was it kind of promised that if you follow these steps, you will get somewhere?
JC: No one was promising, I mean there was nobody in charge. But I think many people would see it that way. There was a lot of people who would make a paltry living based off of people’s dreams, let’s say. It was a part of that system, and we just weren’t interested in that.
EA: It sounds like they were selling a dream, in quite an exploitative way.
JC: Totally, I mean they are and they aren’t, right? Because you go there and it just sucks. There’s nothing cool about it, there are no promises. It’s just a nightmare. No one’s really selling it to you, you’re kind of trying to conspire with these venues to create a fantasy.
EA: I suppose because music is so driven by passion it’s easy to play into that.
JC: Yeah, yeah. So we were like, “This doesn’t interest us.” But, you know, we love to play.
EA: I think that ties in well to the themes on Expensive Air and the album before that, Success. I wonder if you could talk a little more about the themes on the album Expensive Air, what that means to you, and how you’ve approached that as a musician.
JC: You mean, lyrically?
EA: I suppose thematically. I think the lyrics help establish a solid sense of, to me, a kind of disillusionment with the way things are valued, and what it means to be successful and the path to that.
JC: I don’t want to sound faux naive, but we’re not really thinking about themes in that way. It’s so hard to make a record. Maybe it doesn’t seem like it. The performances have to be good and the songs have to be good, you hope. But thematically, maybe we’ll look at it when we have something together. As we’re putting it together we’ll look at it and assess - how many songs do we have, is it enough, do we have enough time?
EA: It seems to be quite a spontaneous process, from what you’re saying. You’re making music together; I imagine you do a lot of jam-based composing.
JC: Well, we have. It’s definitely been that way. You know, we’re approaching 30 years, we’ve kind of done it all, in a way, in terms of what you could do regarding how to write – the process. Those two records were actually built off of demos that one of the other guys, Bobby Matador, wrote. It was like little seeds that we would build out live and in the studio. The name Success, it’s a long story but I don’t know if it’s that interesting. I got a drum head painted by David Shrigley. He’s a British artist. He’s quite well established, I think he moved to Brighton. He did this project where he built all these instruments and he had people play them, and I was one of the people that played them. He did a series of drum heads, and I was like, “Hey man, could you make me one?” I always just try to ask, he’s very nice, very generous, super successful. And he was like, “Yeah, sure!” He sent me like 50 sketches of different ones to choose from. The one that said ‘success’ I thought was cool. He painted it, sent it to me. So, it was on my drum. We had this record and we had these ideas, and we were like, “That’s a cool name for an album.”
EA: So that’s how the album came about?
JC: Yeah, and of course it felt like – at that point it had been like 25, 26 years as a band - what does success mean?
EA: Was that something that you decided not to fully engage with? Was it that you thought, “This idea of success is not really worth our time”?
JC: Maybe back in the beginning. But it was hard. I mean, you still feel like, I don't want to pretend, I mean at the time it was hard – you don't have a sense of what even it is that you want. You think, it would be so cool to make a living doing this. But it’s just so impossible that we don't really think about it. We had some small successes back in the early 2000s, certain things here and there. I think at the time you’re just naïve and you don’t see the machine. You just think, you know, “We’re good!” You see other people making what seems to be really good money, or they’re touring and there’s like a hundred people paying to see that, and you’re like, “Thats fucking crazy, woah, maybe we can get there.” But it’s really not – we didn’t have the charisma, or the – I don’t know. I don’t mean that even disparagingly, but there are so many factors that we didn’t have.
EA: I suppose there is a type of success that’s not mainstream. A lot of your music has been very well received. It’s interesting, being from Bristol, there’s such a wealth of good musicians who make great music but not all of them are well-known or written on, so people outside of that area, people who haven’t seen them play, don’t necessarily know about them. It’s a very almost mechanical thing, in like, if nobody’s written about you or seen you at a gig then nobody knows who you are.
JC: Interesting. I’m sure it’s changed, but there used to be so much press [in the UK], so much music press that it was like they were digging in every corner of the UK for bands. It was like, as soon as a band formed, if they had any kind of hook they would be on the cover of NME or something. I don’t know about Bristol, but a lot of big bands are from there. It’s not like a backwater.
EA: I would agree. London definitely gets the spotlight in that regard, and there are bands from Bristol who have entered the public eye, or at least mainstream music journalism. There’s a real big focus on independent music in Bristol, too, though. There are bands that stand in as, like, historical points in the development of music in Bristol – like trip-hop in the 90s, and before that you have, for example, The Pop Group, and there’s still a real residue of both of those styles – the no-wavey jazz especially is still around, and with trip-hop there’s still a lot of that same kind of mellow electronica going on. It’s easy for people to fall into the shadow of these things.
JC: Oh, yeah.
EA: Maybe that’s a negative of the way that mainstream press works to push these narratives. And the way that success is given an image. Something I find interesting about American cities is that there are such distinct districts, I would say in Bristol musical activity is mostly concentrated in the centre of the city. It’s interesting to see how here, maybe, there’s an ability for music to be localized to particular districts. I don’t know if that’s your experience?
JC: I think that’s not wrong. There’s a new book about New York scenes, This Must be the Place by Jesse Rifkin. But yeah, I think it’s still all very localised. It’s all about where you can afford to live, where there’s a place to play. It’s a little bit hard for me to get a handle on it now. Now there’s more formalized venues. There wasn’t a venue in Bushwick for a while, that’s always the case – there's a place to play like a bar and they have all the permits. There’s a few now, but not back then. Williamsburg, as well, didn’t have it. And it's fun to play near where you live, it’s easier than schlepping somewhere. So that’s cool too, and it’s like, “Oh, it turns out a lot of people are living in these places that are less expensive, near the train.”
EA: I read that you’re inspired by movement when you approach drumming, I was reading about your track ‘Surface Patterns' and about trying to channel the feeling of water moving along a river and then descending over a waterfall. Is that something you still engage with, and what draws you to that?
JC: Not as much, I was going from idea to idea to idea in terms of percussion stuff. That was one of the things I went with and messed around with. I could probably go further with it. It was something that seemed very simple and it worked, there was a way of building on it and including other people easily. You didn’t need to have a high level of technique, at least that’s what I thought when I started the project. I think it’s better if somebody has some [technique].
EA: I know you’ve done a lot of collaborative drumming; do you think it’s particularly important for a drummer to be skilled in order to engage both with that collaboration, and with making a textural drum piece more generally.
JC: I don’t necessarily think you do. I think you need to be committed, if you’re playing the solo drums you gotta fully commit. I really enjoy seeing somebody with a lot of technique, but that doesn’t mean it will be good. So, no, it’s not about that. It never really is, I don’t think. I don’t think you need skill.
EA: One of your tracks I really enjoy is ‘Up and Down’, I like how asynchronous it is. I can imagine how hard that kind of music would be to bring to a band situation.
JC: Yeah, I’ve never done it live. It's two drum takes; I played it with myself. It’s not impossible. I think you could, it would just take a lot of rehearsal. [Laughs]. You’ve got to pay people. I mean, you don't – I know people who don't, but it would be hard to find somebody who has the time to be in to [it]. In New York City, just to be in to doing something and not get compensated – I don’t think that’s fair. Here, in this kind of city, it’s so hard. You can do it, people do it, it happens in history - bands can do it, it just takes a massive amount of commitment. That would also require an inexpensive living situation.
EA: I suppose we’ve talked a lot about money and the relationship between money and making music. Do you think there are any spaces where you can truly be DIY anymore in New York?
JC: I do think so, yes, for sure. I think there’s a way – you have to look a little. I mean, New York is so big – it's massive.
EA: It’s hard to talk about it as a monolith.
JC: Yeah, but you could [be DIY]. Jamaica Avenue, near there, there are so many empty storefronts. With the retail collapse and office space collapse, I think you still could. I do really think you can. Maybe I’m wrong – there's a certain element of can you afford to live and not really have to work a lot. I think there’s probably ways, but you’d have to not live in Williamsburg, I mean nobody lives there who’s an artist anymore, but you wouldn’t live in Bushwick, or Ridgewood, you’d live somewhere like Jamacia, NY. Long Island, or something – there's lots of areas where you see empty malls everywhere. You could probably do it.
EA: That would be such a great place for a gig.
JC: Yeah, there’s plenty of parking. [Laughs]. Totally. I’m probably not the guy to do it, I’m over 50, you know what I mean? It’s probably not where I should spend my energy now, I have a kid and I just don’t have enough time.
EA: As a final question, are there any projects you’re thinking about or that are on the horizon?
JC: Oneida is going to be working on a new album soon, which is cool, we’ll have to gear up for that. I do have a solo thing I’m working on, its percussion based. I’m trying to finish a record. It doesn’t feel close to being done, but maybe next year.
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