CHAVEZ: seagreen serenades

Hobby Rock. That's what Matt Sweeney calls the music of his band Chavez. Maybe that's a reaction to the major-label careerism of so many groups, or maybe it's just a lingering case of shell shock left from the former bands of Sweeny and fellow guitarist Clay Tarver: Skunk and Bullet LaValota, respectively.

"When we started playing together," says Sweeney, "both our bands were over, and we barely felt like being in a band. We didn't know what to do, but we knew what we didn't want to do."

Two-and-a-half years down the road, Chavez's Matador Records debut album Gone Glimmering sounds like they did the right thing. The stopless 30-minuite mini-opus agitates classic '70's pop melodies (Big Star to Cheap Trick) with prog-rock solipsi sm, post-punk textures and almost Albini-esque guitar scree and explodes in several directions. Much credit seems due to the bands rare modus operandi.

"It's a guitar-based band that hates guitars," says Sweeney. "Not like we 'want to dee-stroy the guitar,' but we've heard and played a fuck-load of riffs in all our bands. We just try to have every song have a point, not waste time." Which also explai ns the intentionally brief album length.

"Th efirst year and a half of rehearsals were like, 'That's great,' and the next, 'That's horrible,'" explains drummer James Lo (ex-Live Skull), who offered his services after playing with Sweeney in Wider. "It was really confusing to me, and i like t hat feeling."

Replacing impermanent bassist David Hoskins with Sweeney's Northwestern University buddy Scott Marshall (a.k.a. Scott Anthony Masciarelli, a.k.a. the one in the flashy pants), Chavez wasted little time in getting rave reviews, a difficult issue to han dle for the group's frontman. Sweeney had been biding time as an independent rcord publicist, a fact necessary to mention onlt to underscore how inevitably a writer's teeth clench when hearing a flack mention his own band. Audible sighs of relief echoed in the cannons of rock journalism [sic] when Chavez's single produced two sides of melodic noise sentiment well worth replaying (quoth AP's Jason Pettigrew, "Where's the box set?"). The guitarist now works for a record company in a less public position.

Interestingly enough, Tarver and Marshall are also in the industry, employed by MTV as producer/directors for those "Cab Driver" spots, one of which they're off filming during this interview. That means, yes, Chavez are practically swimming in high le vel music-biz connections.

"It's only going to hurt us," Sweeney figures, "because everybody will go, 'Who's this asshole that works for this company and is trying to get over?' It doesn't affect the band one whit, except that we have jobs that pay our rent so we can afford to do this."

Conscious not to be self-conscious, Sweeney raves, "I feel relatively free to do whatever the hell I want in this band," though Lo counters, "I've never been in aband that edits this much." That mild difference of opinion underscores the variety of in fluence that bands hold (GBV to the Beatles to film composer Michael Nyman) and dissagreement on something as simple as wheather or not Mission Of Burma and Wire are worth mentioning.

As for the band name, Sweeney explains, "Clay wanted to have some sort of a Mexican sounding name, because he's from Texas, and as a joke he said Chavez, because that's the most commonplace name, like Jones, in Mexico."

"It's highly charged for some people, and meaningless to others," Lo elaborates, "so to tie that in with trhe cover of our single, a Vietnamese lounge band playing to American soldiers, it makes it even more meaningless."

"I like things that are knocked out of context but somehow evocaticve and really wierd," says Seweeney. "I hate to sound pretentious, but to play in a band, you've got to be a little different, or believe what you're doing is... worthwhile. Satisfying , that's the word I was looking for, we want to be satisfying."

-- by Eric Gladstone, Alternative Press, September 1995.