Eggs Go Over Easy

You probably didn't say Eggs at the Middle East last Sunday. Your loss; this Arlington, VA trio--singer/ guitarist Andrew Beaujon, bass second guitarist/trombonist Rob Christiansen, plus a rotating corps of helpful temporary drummers--has been touring up and down the East Coast for a couple year now, wowing tiny rock clubs (or at least the people who stand around in them) with an ever-varying mixture of instrumental comedy and soulfully complicated pop. They've also been releasing records, largely on the DC label Teen Beat; their latest is a multifaceted opus called Exploder. We (the columnar "we") caught up to them in their cramped yet snazzy van Sunday night.

fM: Tour stories? Best, worst, craziest shows...

Rob: Um. Craziest show we've done...the show at Princeton was pretty amazing....I guess it was particularly crazy because we were wearing these togas...

Andrew: And wreaths.

Rob: We happened to be wearing these togas and acting out a sort of half-baked rock opera thing we had done.

fM: The new album. Were there models, were there big structured records you were thinking of when you were putting together this one?

Rob: Have you read the Masonic Code?

fM: No.

Rob: We've been into the Masons lately, we've been studying the Masons. We were noticing the Masons have this all-encompassing plan for the world and they manipulate the various media to further this. And we were thinking along the same lines when we did the album.

fM: Musical precedents? The Masons not being a rock and roll group. As far as I know.

Rob: The Masons are behind a lot more popular culture than you think.

fM: About the song "Saturday's Cool": I was listening to it this morning, trying to go through and see whether the idea was to have a catalog of things people might have listened to growing up who are now listening to the Eggs record. Because one line is from a Blue Oyster Cult song, "Burn out the day..."

Rob: That's not a line in the song!

fM: It is! About 2/3 of the way through..

Andrew: That is a line in the song. Heck, I don't know--I wasn't thinking Blue Oyster Cult.

fM: The whole idea of an encyclopedic set of 70s reference packaged to surprise people in the middle of the song is just totally wrong?

Rob: That kind of brothers me actually. There's a vast majority of people our age who don't listen to any new music. I'll be at a party and they'll pull on Blondie records, just `cause it's funny, and nobody has any new music they like at all. I really don't want to encourage that in any way. I don't look at our music as a catalog of what has already happened at all.

Andrew: I don't think there's anything new. I think we're just retreading a lot of stuff.

Rob: To set the scene, we just played at the Middle East Cafe, on a Sunday night, and we're in this van, in our little van that we rented to get around for a week, and I'm crouched over the cooler.. My name is Rob.

Evan: He'll be doing most of the talking tonight.

Rob: I'll be doing most cooler between driver's seat and passenger seat and it's cozy.

fM: What do you listen to? You've got this van driving from show to show every day--what tapes get a lot of play in the Eggmobile right now?

Andrew: Out tape deck stopped working, but mostly we listened to old music , trying to figure out how we can rip it off.

fM: Seriously!

Andrew: I'm really glad Steve hare is calling our bluff, because I want a journalist to get on our case and encourage us to think. And we just have these snide answers. We all listen to whatever we can get our hands on that interests us. I guess everyone who's listening to music has a collection of interests they're pursuing, ideas that they look for, different bands that might be attacking these ideas in different ways... and we all have totally different ideas of what bands are doing creative things.

fM: The trombone thing. Do we know of any other bands that try and integrate a trombone?

Rob: We're definitely on the first: people have been incorporating brass instruments since--

fM: Not a horn section, just a trombone.

Andrew: Pink Floyd.

fM: Really? Who else?

Andrew: The June Brides....I usually think about Men at Work. Remember they had that little guy who played keyboards and saxophone" A lot of times we'll be playing and I'll look over and I'll see you [Rob] switching from guitar to trombone and I'll think, that is just that guy in Men at Work.

fM: What's an ampallang? [This is not idle curiosity, exactly, but refers to the fifth song on Exploder, which begins "Ampallang I know was wrong..."]

Andrew: It's piercing.

fM: A kind of piercing" An object with which you can pierce yourself.

Rob: I think it describes the style with which the...

Andrew:... willy...

Rob:...thank you--is pierced.

fM: Oh....I found myself wondering where all the heterogenous parts of Exploder came from--there's this one 70s song, and there's this one song that has all these experimental electronics. Do you just get together in a studio and do something and then," Hey, Andrew, this is the experimental electronic piece that's going to be on our album and now let's do some songs?"

Andrew: I had to really push to get those on the album.

Evan: Those were homework assignments for this class I'm taking, was taking, but those are things I'm doing now, and I don't know if they'll ever be on albums again. I don't know if that's really pertinent to Eggs. It fit in with Exploder.

fM: You play "March of the Triumphant Elephants" live with guitars. But on the record it's not that; you wrote it as a synth thing and then learned to play it live?

Evan: That's Rob piece.

Rob: That was a synth piece to begin work, but the thing we like about it now--I like about it now anyway--is that it was sort of set up as a jazz format, which we have no experience with. It was something called a head--none of us are jazztrained--and then each person gets a solo section and is allowed to improvise, and then it comes back to the head again and ends, which is totally different from a pop song. Which is great for me. and it's kinda funny because if you all end it together you're successful--there's no measure of "did the distortion pedal turn on and cause the right noise you wanted? It doesn't matter--it's different thing. I'd like to play more with that stuff in the future.

fM: On the more serious, "song" side: "Evanston, IL." Andrew?

Andrew: That was about the first time that we nearly died in a van....we were just driving, it was last year and we were driving to Kalamazoo, Michigan and we got in an ice storm and the van was sliding all around the road and we pulled off and went down this scary exit; we were slipping and sliding all down it. It was the first time we realized that we could possibly die doing this. And we thought that was a big deal until we wrecked the van the next tour.