Mickey Melchiondo hates it when you call the Moistboyz a side project. “I get it, I’m in another band that’s more popular,” the Ween co-founder says. “But the Moistboyz have our own identity and we’re going to keep making records for a long, long time until we can’t do it anymore.”
Five albums and 20 years into their career as New Hope, Pennsylvania’s other reprobate duo, Melchiondo and singer Guy Heller have a discography and backstory to rival pretty much any band out there. “I’m so proud of the fact that we have our fifth album coming out,” Melchiondo said recently from his home on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. “Most bands don’t even get to five albums, and we did it while making music with other bands.” It is (dare we say) their most mature yet, though that doesn’t mean the lyric sheet shouldn’t come with a NSFW tag.
There are a bunch of tunes on the new album that seem to get away from the usual Moistboyz pedal-to-the-floor vibe.
The Moistboyz have a sound and a thing, but Guy is super super talented and he’s super flexible, and can do so many different things other than just yell through a distortion pedal. On this record, there’s almost no distortion on any of it. On the last record, we had a song called “White Trash.” You don’t even really need to know the words to know what it’s about. But the stuff that he did in his old band, the False Front, was way more autobiographical and meaningful to him. For this record, that’s the thing I’m most proud of. He gets the game ball on this record. His lyrics are just tremendous. Moistboyz are a rock and roll band. It doesn’t have to be metal.
Guy and I, it’s like Aaron [Freeman] and I with Ween, we don’t listen to new music, really. At least, the stuff that inspires us is an old point of reference, musically. Guy and I have very much the same tastes. We wouldn’t even know how to make a new sounding record. We like classic rock and roll. It’s just very much a reflection of what we like, what our tastes are.
I think the worst crime you can commit as a band—and I’ve never done it—is intentionally trying to replicate something you’ve done because you think that’s what people want. So we just followed our instincts. It led us to this. We could’ve put together a song that was in fifth gear with the foot to the floor the whole time, we have those songs, but we were using the best songs, and the best songs were more dynamic.
The only thing that’s intentional, for any project I’ve worked on for multiple records, is a logical progression. There should be growth, visible growth, between records. It’s neat when a band returns to an old sound. I’m sure Ween fans would shit if we ever made an album on a four-track, but we’d be cheating ourselves. We’re too good to record on a four-track. We need at least eight now.
Moistboyz records seem to happen every few years, which I’m sure is partly a function of you and Guy living in different places, but when do you know that it’s time to reconvene?
I hate to say it ‘cause it’s negative, but I think the Moistboyz are doing people a favor. I think the state of rock and roll is so sad and pitiful out there, and so wimpy, that every so often the frustration builds up for us. That’s not our only inspiration. We do it because we want to do it. You’ve got to come see the Moistboyz live. Guy is one of the more compelling lead singers that there is. He’s on the A-list. He’s up there with Jim Morrison or Iggy. He hates these comparisons, I hope he doesn’t see this, but he is. He’s what a million guys pretend to be. He is that guy. He’s an outlaw, he lives an outlaw lifestyle. Rock and roll is like a religion to him. It’s very, very serious. You get 110% when you see that dude. He’s like a Nick Cave or something, he’s the real thing.
Moistboyz live shows are very straight ahead. You just get an hour of a lot of sweat and a lot of Guy jumping into the audience and crawling all over, and us trashing our gear. It’s like running a marathon. After a Moistboyz show, all your clothes need to be changed, including your underwear. It’s like we’re just saturated. It’s almost like you have to train for the season before a Moistboyz tour, or at least try to eat one meal a day.
You’d posted last year that you were making a solo record, with a bunch of different musicians, including Guy. Did that turn into a Moistboyz record?
Ween broke up in May last year. I’d been writing some songs just ‘cause that’s what I do. I don’t need a Ween record to do it. I’ve always had some kind of home studio, office studio, or a rental space, and if I feel inspired, I do it. I was writing some of my songs, and I was going to try to do a Moistboyz record and a solo album simultaneously. And then at one point, I was having Guy sing on a lot of my solo material, and I thought, “wow, let’s just combine this and make this one big record.” I posted that, and then I backed away from the idea. The Moistboyz have too much of an identity, and these songs weren’t going to fit into a Moistboyz record. The songs that I write by myself don’t sound like the Moistboyz. Guy is just one of the most incredible singers and lyricists I know. He’s just so talented. So, we decided to work on the Moistboyz record and just focus.
Guy was staying with me here for three months at a studio I rented. It took us exactly one year to make the record, but not consecutively. We worked on it in September and October and then Hurricane Sandy was a real buzzkill. He was living at the studio. It was a great place. It had three bedrooms and a retail space. It had a lot of space, too much space, and too expensive. We lost power up here in New Hope for around 11 days and it completely stopped the momentum of our record. He had to stay at someone’s house with a generator. I had a plan to stop around that time anyway and start striper fishing. That’s when my fall schedule as a charter boat captain kicks in. It was devastating on a number of a levels. A lot of my friends lost everything. My one friend’s house burned to the ground in a gas fire and washed away with the hurricane. All of our attention just turned to complete sorrow, helping people get back on their feet. I did a benefit concert in Asbury Park for my friend. We stopped and Guy went home, because it was getting to be around the holidays.
You can’t be creative every day for too long. Getting together and writing new songs. I’ve found that with Ween and the Moistboyz that you can do it for around two weeks, every single day, but then you need a break of about a week, and then you can do it. But really after a couple of months of it you’re dry of all your ideas and you start to hate the sound of your own guitar and your own words. It all sounds the same.
So, Guy, went home and it gave us time time to live with the material, and I realized that we’d finished the record. But there were four or five songs that were standouts out of 10, so I decided to go back to Austin, where he lived, in February, and try to write three or four or five more songs that were as good as the best songs that we had done. Overdo it. Instead of making the record great, make it Back in Black great, not a wasted second. We did it and it worked. Some of my favorite songs were done in the second batch of writing.
So you guys over-record, like Ween?
Yeah, we have a ton of material. A ton. If people are interested in it, we’ll put it out. We’ve been very good about making our shit free and accessible on the internet. You can tape, you can film. If there’s something I don’t want people to have, I make sure they don’t. I keep it under wraps. The best Ween unreleased stuff, no one has ever heard. For all that stuff I’ve put out there, the best stuff, we keep that sacred. It’ll come out some day.
How did you and Guy meet?
We met when I was probably 14 years old. We had a mutual girlfriend. When Aaron and I moved out of The Pod, he and a couple of his friends got a farm, Brookridge Farm, which is on the back of Pure Guava, and I moved in with my wife. I was 21 years old. Guy’s band, The False Front, lived at the farmhouse, so there were two bands at that house at once. That’s where I started four-tracking with Aaron. That and my apartment. It was a great brotherhood thing going on between the two bands. Very incestuous. They’d open for us a lot. Then we got them signed to Shimmy Disc, who put out our record The Pod, so they signed False Front, too. Kramer produced their first two albums.
I would go over to the farmhouse every day and night and I would four track with Aaron. We were writing the songs for Chocolate and Cheese. Aaron wouldn’t always be there, and Guy was always there, since he was the singer in the False Front. So Guy and I started recording together, and it had this real identity to it. It was punk rock except for the drum machine. We started doing it at my house and we were getting better and better and refining it. Our first real breakthrough song was “Carjack,” the first song on the first record. And it was so much better than the other things we did. And it set us in motion, and the identity of it focused us.
I’ve known Guy since ’84, something like that. We go way, way back. We’ve been through a lot together as far as births and marriages and divorces and life and death of a lot of our close friends. I have a very brother-like friendship with him, much like I do with Aaron.
New Hope seems like a pretty fertile place.
People are blown away when they come and see what we have here. We have our own little CBGBs, John and Peter’s. It’s this little bar in a tourist town that holds 100 people, and it’s the only dank, dark bar where the tourists avoid it. Every other bar is mobbed on the weekends. We have our own club where we’ve played 8 trillion times. You’ve got Andrew Weiss, Ween’s producer. You’ve got Claude Coleman, Glenn McClelland, Dave Dreiwitz, Chris Harford and the Band of Changes. We have our own scene here. There are a lot of other bands. We have this music scene in this tiny little town, that’s one square mile on the Delaware River, of top notch musicians. There’s a rotation of around 100 different guys that we’ve been in bands with that we’ll continue to be in bands with. We have a jam night on Wednesday night at John and Peter’s, and see the amount of talent that’s in this one little town. It’s incredible. It has a lot of history to it, and there’s a lot of great music here.
New Hope was founded as an artists’ colony. There were a lot of impressionist painters. If you go to Amazon and search “New Hope, Pennsylvania” or “Bucks County, Pennsylvania,” there are coffee table books of art going back centuries. It’s just always that place. If you go 20 miles away, you get to high schools with football teams with 1,000 people in the graduating class. Aaron and I went to the public school, as Guy did in Lambertville, on the Jersey side [of the Delaware River] and we had 50 people in our graduating class. It’s not a place where you grow up where the jocks are more popular. Everybody’s weird and strange and accepted. Charlie Parker lived here during the final years of his life. It’s sort of like what the Hamptons are to New Yorkers, or Fire Island or something. You’re not out of the picture. A lot of people commute to New York every day. It’s only 67 miles. You have Princeton and Philadelphia. So you’re in the country without removing yourself from the advantages of living in the city.
Oh, right, and there was that weirdo folk scene in Bucks County in the ’60s, with Michael Hurley and [Holy Modal Rounders co-founder] Steve Weber. I’d never connected that Ween and the [drug-taking weirdo-folkies] Holy Modal Rounders came from the same place.
Yeah, we went to school with Hurley’s kids. Weber’s still here, if he’s alive. I haven’t seen him in a few years. I used to see him at the bar every night.
