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JEFF LEWISinterview

May 1st 2003:

Antifolk Online's

With Jeff Lewis

The following EXACT same questions appeared in R.S. issue 921 and were asked to Jack White.   Antifolk Online gave them to Jeff Lewis with the instructions to answer them however he would choose to.  And to have fun with em.  Here are his responses:

RS: When did you start playing Music? Jeff Lewis: Hmm, I took some piano lessions when I was about 13 but I wasn't too interested in them.  Then in high school when my friends and I discovered that music could be awesome if it was 60s music instead of the lame modern top-40, I picked up piano again so I could play with them, doing Led Zeppelin and Grateful Dead songs etc. I haven't really played any piano for years though.  RS: And when did you discover the Blues? Jeff Lewis: My dad's a big blues fan, there's always been blues records in the house, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Champion Jack Dupree, Freddy King, also 60s white blues like Canned Heat and the Rolling Stones. He didn't listen to records very frequently, but if a record was played in my house it would usually be something like these.  He plays blues too, old acoustic country blues, finger-picked, that's I guess where I learned my first chords from. RS: Were you ostracized at school because of your taste in music? Jeff Lewis: When I started college my first roommate was a giant skinhead and I was a skinny, long-haired, tye-dye wearing devourer of 60s music - we met and immediately both thought "this is gonna be disastrous!"  But we became really good friends, and both of our musical horizons were vastly broadened by the stuff we introduced eachother to.  I was considered sort of dorky for being a hippie I guess, but i was never a stoner and although i did go to about 40 Grateful Dead shows I was never one of those people who listened to nothing but Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs.  All my ostracizing always came from being an awkward dork, regardless of music tastes! RS: Growing up did you listen to Motown? Jeff Lewis: No, unless it was on the radio.  Certainly i didn't know what "Motown" was until mid-high school or so. RS: And you're not a hip-hop fan. Jeff Lewis: Says who?  That was one of the big things the skinhead and I bonded over, NWA and the Geto Boys, I'd previously disliked gangsta rap because it clashed with my non-violent hippieness but somehow this stuff was so over-the-top violent I had to like it, same way i love horror movies and anything over-the-top.  And of course i loved rap as a kid, it was the coolest thing on the radio by far; first album I ever bought was Whodini's "Escape", I still remember every word.  That's a fantastic album!  RS: Have you always felt outside of what's going on in popular music? Jeff Lewis: Yeah, except for that brief time in high school in 1992 when Nevermind came out and it was so cool; all the 16 year old hippies and punks had something they could agree on, it was like "grunge" united us into one big thing for a few months, like suddenly we had the community numbers that really amounted to something, now that the Dead Kennedys kids and the Grateful Dead kids could all be into the same clothes/lifestyle, etc.  Jane's Addiciton fit this category too, and so did Faith No More to a smaller extent.  It felt like a really cool thing was happening.  RS: So what do you dig right now? Jeff Lewis: Since 2000 I've been totally enraptured with the Fall, I haven't had that kind of crush on a band since my friends and I discovered Ween in college, but this time I'm on my own and don't have a group of people I can relate to about this in the same way.  I also since about 1998 have been in love with the songs of Mike Rechner, both before and after he started performing as part of Prewar Yardsale.  Prewar is a great band, but I do miss a lot of Mike's solo songs which never came out on albums and are no longer performed.  Other current things I've been heavily digging: the late Ian Dury (with or without the Blockheads); Roky Erickson (someone in England made me an incredible CDR compilation of rarites and interviews); ESG; 60s punk comps like the Back From the Grave series, and late70s/early 80s punk/hardcore, esp. Crass, Husker Du and Minor Threat.   RS: Do you remember the first White Stripes gig? Jeff Lewis: Nope! RS: What's the best live show you've ever seen? Jeff Lewis: Impossible to pick one, but here's some memorable ones - Dufus's "Fun Wearing Underwear" shows, first at Purchase then at Surf Reality - Yo La Tengo at Tramps - Ween at Tramps - Mike Rechner at Sidewalk Cafe - Peter Dizozza's "Prepare to Meet Your Maker" at Baby Jupiter and "Doping the Blood of the Poet" at Sidewalk Cafe - various Grateful Dead shows - Mr. Bungle in London, 1996, and Stereolab in Prague, 1996 - Ish Marquez & the Lonesome Crew various shows in NYC   -  I'm sure I'm leaving out other great shows that will come to mind later. RS: What impressed you? Jeff Lewis: The element of surprise, the above-and-beyond brilliance of concept and execution, blah blah blah. RS: Which musicans do you identify with the most? Jeff Lewis: I guess all the ones I'm friends with. RS: Who do you think you'd like to hang with? Jeff Lewis: Oh I'd just be embarrassed.  I'm embarrassed to hang out with my own friends half of the time. RS: Why? Jeff Lewis: I'm too self-conscious.  Low self-esteem.  Although this has massively improved since school days, I somehow still can feel like the most uninteresting, uncharming, homely, hopeless character in most rooms I'm in.  All this art and music stuff is a desperate, misguided attempt at constructing worth.  Not to say I don't also feel like the coolest, luckiest person on Earth on occasion.  What a dope!    Jeff Lewis Instant Expert    1) Lifelong love of comic books, fostered initially by having no TV in the house for the first dozen years of his life - currently this love is kept alive by comics like Peepshow, Eightball, anything by Chester Brown and Alan Moore (whom Jeff wrote his Senior Literature Thesis on). 2) Has been known to spend months living in a 12 X 12 wooden box in the woods of Maine. 3) Lifelong Lower East Sider. 4) Fond of frogs, zombies, pistachio ice cream; generally attracted to green things. 5) Dearly loves his only brother Jack, who was born five years after him.