By Rachel Beth Ahrens
Wilbur and McGowan relax with a conversation during They Might Be Giants’ set. Photos by Rachel Beth Ahrens, Apr 6, 2013.
Shockwave: How did you guys start out?
Mike Wilbur: We started in New York City, just playing on the street. And… can you help me?
Wenzl McGowan: How did we start out? I can’t quite remember, actually. (Wilbur laughs, begins picking up a flute) Let’s see, we started…
Shockwave: Is that a flute?
Wilbur: It is.
Shockwave: I used to play flute in elementary school, believe it or not.
Wilbur: Really? Awesome. I know a lot of people who played flute in elementary school. I’m just picking it up now.
Shockwave: Oh. Are you just starting out, learning it?
Wilbur: Yeah, like, three days ago… four days ago. I’m sorry… you asked…
The band performed at Ram’s Head Live last Saturday night to a packed crowd. Their music is similar to dubstep, with influences of John Coltrane and Parov Stellar. (4/6/2013)
McGowan: Yeah, I’m sorry. We’re just extremely exhausted. We just played a show and we’re really rushing and tearing everything down.
But the way we started is we were playing on the subway platform, just to make money. Not to form a band, or anything. We didn’t think anything of it, but people started dancing and asking what the name of our band was. But we had no name, and we had no band, we were just playing to make money.
And then one day, Mike came up to say [we were] ‘Moon Juice’. I said, ‘That’s a cool name, let’s check it out.’ But we found there were four bands on the Internet called Moon Juice. So, we decided to make a ‘first amendment’, that’s what we called it, and then we turned it into Moon Hooch. So since then we’ve been calling ourselves Moon Hooch.
And yeah, the snowball just started rolling from there. One thing happened after the other… We got seen by a talent scout from an Australian television show and we were house spent for two and a half months. And then after the tour in the subway, we went on a national tour with him, and his management team signed us and put us on tour with They Might Be Giants. Now they’re re-releasing our record. We booked another festival in the summer and last summer.
We’ve been getting a lot into local farming, local food corps, local economy… We bought this book here today, actually, and we started studying it intensely. It’s called Local Dollars Local Sense, which is about the concept of bringing the power back to the people, essentially. Not trusting our life’s savings and the irrational stock market where you can lose your entire money within seconds.
We studied that and seeing how we can fuse that with our position as musicians and the growing fan base and maybe start a garden in Brooklyn. And yeah, just spread the good word and be happy. And live peacefully, and have some goats when we get a chance.
We’re actually going to play a farm on Monday.
Shockwave: Oh, wow.
Wilbur: It’s called Polyface Farm.
Shockwave: Polyface Farm. I’ve got to remember that.
Shockwave: I know there are a lot of videos on YouTube with you guys, and there’s also a video on there that’s gotten 3 million hits. I’m wondering if that’s tied into you two guys, especially with what’s been going on. There’s a saxophone battle…
McGowan: Jesus.
Wilbur: So f**king hilarious. They’ve got 3 million hits and we have like, not even close to that. We’ve been doing this for, like, a year.
McGowan: They got 3 million hits in a week!
Wilbur: It’s like the stock market crash.
McGowan: Or the stock market spike…
Wilbur: It’s spontaneity.
McGowan: Yeah, it really freaks me out sometimes.
Wilbur: Not like it had something to do with us. To be honest, when I first saw it, it sounded like you on the bari. It sounded like something you’d play on bari.
McGowan: I have no idea, man. I’m sure they’d know us. And we were playing South By Southwest in Boston and we met these two saxophone players playing dance music. We were like, “What the hell, the two saxophone players playing dance music?”
And then we set up a couple street corners away… We look, and the two sax players come and they were watching us with mouths open. And we stopped and they were like, “Oh my god! You guys are Moon Hooch! We’ve seen you on YouTube and we’ve built these tubes just like you did!”
And they played this tube song they wrote for us, their version of our “Tubes” song, and we just jammed out the four of us and the drummer. It was hilarious.
Wilbur: It was awesome.
McGowan: So saxophone players know us, on YouTube. Definitely.
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