Les
Maniacs
This article originally appeared in NFH#18 in the
winter of 1990.
European bands seem
to have quite a struggle to work their way into the consciousness of the average
American independent rock fan. I've seen several reviews of European records that
start out with a generalization about most European bands being shit and then
voicing surprise that the particular record under consideration fails to meet that
bill. But despite great bands like Les Thugs, Loveslug, the Nomads, the Shoutless,
the Dogs, and Fixed Up people just don't seem to be getting it that there are some
really cool bands over there.
Switzerland's Les
Maniacs are one of these. I first heard them through their second lp, Can Also
Use Fruit which was produced by 4-Eyed Thomas. And the presence of the guy who
has produced most of the Nomads records is logical enough, because Les Maniacs'
sound is very close to theirs. Not that Canadian born Armenian bass player and
singer Alain Croubalian would agree that the comparison is very apt: "They're
Swedish and on stage they're really heavy looking. Our greatest thing is that on
stage it really moves. I mean, studio albums don't come near to what we do on
stage in fact; that's what most people say."
Les Maniacs started
around 1982 playing 60s covers, punk rock songs, and two or three Sonics songs as
well as things like "Gloria". Alain confesses that they weren't very good
then, but by 1986, when they recorded their first four track ep "Les
Maniacs", they had developed a pretty solid hard edged guitar sound. The ep
and their subsequent lp Bring Back The Night (released in 1987) were both produced
by the Barracudas' Robin Wills. Both are long out of print, and I've had a chance
to hear them only by the graces of Alain's cassette deck. The title track to the lp
was a rewrite of a song that Alain heard on a vacation trip to the US that brought
him to Detroit, where he saw the girl group The Vertical Pillows doing a song Robin
Tyner (ex-MC5) had written for them called "Take Back The Night", a sort
of feminist song. Alain rewrote it into a tongue and cheek sort of macho song. The
rest of the lp is a pile of guitar powered rock songs of which the best is probably
"Evil Ways", a manic piece of r'n'b flavored stuff. It's a hot record.
In 1987, the band met
4-Eyed Thomas (house producer for Swedish based Amigo Records, the label that puts
out Nomads, Pushtwangers and Sinners records, among others) at a concert in Zurich,
and they asked him to help out on a few songs with them. They went into a Geneva
studio to record some tracks, but the local engineers didn't work out too well and
the tracks weren't what they had in mind. Only a cover of the Sonics' "Goin'
Home" from those sessions has made it to vinyl, on the German pressing of the Can
Also Use Fruit lp.
But 4-Eyed Thomas
talked Les Maniacs into coming to Stockholm where he could work in a familiar
studio with an engineer he could communicate with, so next summer they all got into
their van and drove up to record for 15 days. "We didn't have a lot of money
though it was an old studio and not so expensive, but like to live over there it's
very expensive, so we just had to sleep on the floor in the studio and make our own
meals and we couldn't buy any beer...that was the hardest part, because beer was so
expensive! But we recorded like 13 songs in 10 days, mixed them in the same ten days, and
they sounded very live because we didn't have any time to be finicky about them, so
we just recorded them straight on."
"4-Eyed Thomas
really is a funny kind of guy. He's a real fun producer. We went to his place and saw his
records. In fact he doesn't have many lps; he has mainly a singles collection,
because he says the best songs came out as singles, so you can't miss anything if
you just collect singles. He does have a bunch of them. I think that's the only
thing he cares about. That's what's incredible about him."
The result of their
trip north is the lp Can Also Use Fruit, which has a very Nomads-like sound
to these ears and even includes a guest appearance by Nomads guitar player Hans
Ostlund on two tracks, "It Means Hate" and "Don't Come My Way".
Says Alain: "It was the first time, he said, that he was the "guest
star" on a record; it was the first time he'd played with anybody else. It is
funny to us, because on the new Nomads record the Nomads play with Johnny Thunders,
and we played with the Nomads. I guess that's the generation gap."
The Fruit lp
features a big drum sound, some good fuzzy guitar work similar to the Nomads' Hardware
lp and a batch of rock pop songs that draw heavily from Detroit rock tradition, but
also blends in some r'n'b feel, a feeling that's accentuated by the presence of
Patrick on harmonica. The record sports two guitar players, Thierry and Alex, who also
sings, and has Stephane on drums. But despite the live and punchy sound, Les
Maniacs wanted to go a step further with their next record. "It's very hard to
get even near what we do on stage, and that's why we've recorded a live album this
May which may come out in September; it's a live album recorded in a radio studio
in fact, and we brought the guy that recorded the album in Sweden, Mickael
Herrstrom, who is a swell engineer around 20 or 25...quite young, and really a hell
of an engineer as far as guitar sounds and drum sounds. He recorded a lot with
4-Eyed Thomas, and we got along well with him so we asked him to come use the
studio we had at our disposal in that radio show to record the concert, and in
August he took it up to Sweden and mixed it over there, so it might come out in
September as a live album with around 15 songs on it with covers and stuff, and
we'll see how that comes out."
Alain sent me a tape
with some of the stuff from the live lp. As he promised, it's punchier sounding
than anything they've done yet. There's no harmonica player; Patrick had ambitions to play
guitar, and as there was no room for a third guitar player, he left the band.
"Too bad, he was very good. Kind of crazy on stage, too" says Alain.
Drummer Stephane subsequently moved back to his home in the south of France, and
has been replaced by a Moroccan drummer named Abdel, but Stephane plays on the
live record. It includes a great rocking cover of the Soft Boys "I Want To
Destroy You" and remakes of several songs from their previous records, like
"Don't Come My Way" and a bone-crushing take of "Nobody Knows".
Absence of harmonica tends to make the songs rock harder and have less of an r'n'b
flavor.
Being based in
Switzerland presents a difficult situation. The country is small and only has a
limited number of places to play. To expand beyond that, you have to get out into
France and Germany, with all the associated problems with paperwork to get paid.
Switzerland doesn't have much of a reputation as a source for good bands, but Alain
says there are quite a few: "There are a lot of bands; Les Fester, Sunday
Drivers, Young Gods; tons of them, but the problem is it's so small a country, 400
kilometers long; it's nothing. In Switzerland, rock and roll is something quite naughty,
not so nice to be doing. So naturally you travel to France, then you're getting
into a new country again, even though it's not so far. But you have to start all
over again. French people are quite self-oriented, and they never thought a good
band could come out of Switzerland, and we got a lot of trouble convincing them
that the best band in the world (tongue in cheek) lives in Switzerland."
"And then you
can go to Germany, but then again, you have to start everything over again, and
Germans don't have a good idea about Swiss music either, so I don't know if we'll
get anywhere, but we try to convince people that we can play music everywhere, and
it doesn't mean that because you live in Switzerland you can't, even though it's
very difficult. A lot of people don't even know what it's all about and they prefer
working in a bank. Because that isn't just an image; there's a lot of banks around
here and other business related stuff, and you can get a job and that's what usually
people do. That's nothing new. And there's no music market, because who buys
records around here? We're one of the biggest selling bands in Switzerland, and we
sell 2,000 records. Well that isn't bad, but it's not yet enough. You can sell 5
times more in Germany if you're a German band, and that's what slowly we are trying
to do."
"We are quite
known in Switzerland because we've been playing here four or five years, so we got
to be known even though it doesn't mean much. We get to play in festivals around
Europe and we've played in front of 5,000 people but they don't remember your name
afterward, it doesn't matter. Maybe a few do. In Switzerland, we've played in Zurich;
that's the biggest town, We get about 1,000 people at a gig, so that's very nice,
but you can only play once a year in Zurich. Otherwise you get about 200 people in
small towns. It's not bad, but Switzerland is small as I said. You get 15 gigs
a year; more if you want to play in village feasts."
The band have worked
hard over a long time to build their following. Since they started they've run
their own sort of parody of a fan club called The Sect Of The Maniacs. "You
got this membership card and autographed photograph, and an invitation to a
mushroom party and stuff like that, and it still exists. Maybe I'll send you a
card. There are 350 people around the world who are members of The Sect Of The
Maniacs. From the beginning they've liked being part of the Sect because every time
we see them we buy them a drink, so that's how you get people to be members. Paying
members, that is. You have to pay to be a member, to get your card. And 300 suckers
did it. Ha, ha! Well, they still get a little fanzine called Maniacs News; ten
numbers were produced...we're running out of time to do it, but it's full of
everything except about the band. Just stupid stuff in French and fan club stuff
that we make fun of."
Les Maniacs are
reasonably well established on their home turf now, but they've got bigger goals
ahead and they're trying to figure out how to proceed: "That's one thing we'd
like to do this year is try to get to the United States. Not because we think we're
going to get all of a sudden really famous by playing over there, but because it
would just be kicks to go around all those myths and record stores and towns and
we'd just like to see around and play as much as possible over there just for the
fun of it. Just the same as American bands come to Europe and they can play because they
are American. And I think a lot of people would like how we're doing, and how we
are on stage, and the fun we give and take. But we don't really know how you do get
over there. People always say you can't get any distribution anyway in the states,
so you might as well just get your records to mail order places like Midnight and
Venus, but the Les Thugs experience with that single off Sub Pop and the consequent
tour this summer in the states seemed a nice adventure, and we're very good friends
of Les Thugs because we've been touring together for like three years; us with them
in France and we make tours for them around here in Switzerland. So we know each
other very well; they've been sleeping at my place for the last three years when
they came by. And they've been telling us that that's the best way to do. So we
don't know who to ask and how to ask and so on, but maybe there is a way to find
gigs so that we could come over. We could get a little money by playing around here for
plane tickets and stuff like that, but we would need help booking gigs."
There's also plans
for a new studio lp; the band was scheduled to go into a studio in December and
record a new record which they are hoping to release in the late summer.
So Les Maniacs are
primed and ready to go on their end of the world, and all we need over here is for
some label in the mood to license a couple records of butt-kicking basic rock and
roll music and it would seem like just a matter of time for the fans on this end to
be ready too. Let's see what happens.
