Courtesy of Daniel James
On record and in live performances Indonesian Junk tosses elements of punk, power pop and high-energy glam into a blender. The trio’s unrepentant rock and roll is serious enough to acknowledge plenty of humor. In an April livestream, James’ solo acoustic performance found the front man wearing his heart on the sleeve of his leather jacket, recalling the balladry of Johnny Thunders and Marc Bolan.
How has the lockdown affected your creativity?
I definitely wasn’t ready to start working on a new Indonesian Junk album when the pandemic hit. We had just sent our third album Spiderbites off to the pressing plant and were waiting for it to come out on vinyl. My main focus was on trying to play as many shows as possible to promote the record and the idea of working on songs for a fourth album was the furthest thing from my mind.
We had a pretty full schedule ahead of us starting in March and were planning our first ever trip to the West Coast. We only played one weekender in Chicago and Carbondale before everything stopped. We had a great local show we were looking forward to with Rexxx, Flesh Panthers, and Hughes Family Band the next week and then all of a sudden everything got real scary and that show got cancelled.
Our LP got delayed by two months, but it didn’t matter because we had no way to get out and play shows to promote it anyway. I’ve got like a million of these things sitting in my spare room now and I don’t know what the hell to do with them!
I wound up doing an acoustic live stream, which was pretty awesome. I managed to sell a lot of albums and get some donations to help recoup some of the money that we had spent on the record.
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I didn’t really want to do the thing that I saw a lot of my friends doing where they were going live once a week, though. I kind of felt like if I was gonna do one of these things it should be special. I wasn’t just gonna stick a camera on myself and sing “Mean Christine” every Thursday for the same 25 people that watched me sing it last week. No offense to the people who are still doing live weekly streams. It works for them. I just don’t think it’s what I want to be doing—I’ll probably do another one at some point.
In July, Indonesian Junk released Life of Crimes (Singles and Rarities 2009-2018). What is the backstory on that compilation?
We recorded a couple of covers with Shane Hochstetler (at his Howl Street Recordings studio) when we made our second album, Stars In The Night, a couple years ago. One of which was “Pill Box” by the Joneses. I always wanted to do something with that song, but we never found the time to get it mixed.
Since everything stopped in March and I knew that Indonesian Junk as a band wouldn’t be doing anything for at least a couple months, I hit Shane up about finally getting it mixed. I was just gonna release it as a single on Spotify and Bandcamp, but then our label hit me up about wanting to do a rarities disc.
Our first single “Crimes” had been out of print for a while and people had been asking for it to be released on CD since the band started. So, it seemed like a good time to finally rerelease it. We packaged it all together with the songs from a pair of 45s from my old band The Daniel James Gang, which was sort of my first attempt at what would eventually become Indonesian Junk along with some outtakes and other rarities to make it a full length.
Do you have a routine or schedule for staying in practice or working on new material?
I don’t necessarily have a routine. I work on stuff when I can. I kind of got started working on the new album when I was rehearsing for the live stream. I figured it would be cool to have a new song to premier, so I wrote a pair of tunes “One More Try” and “Tracy.”
That got me in the habit of writing, and since we weren’t playing a lot and I had nothing else to do I just kept writing. It wasn’t easy all the time though. The stress from extra demands from my job, plus the isolation of the pandemic, and the fear of how dangerous this whole thing is can really take a toll on a person.
I feel like there’s this idea that everyone needs to be writing The Great American Novel or something while we’re all stuck home with nothing to do, but there would be days that I was just mentally and spiritually exhausted and I wasn’t going to work on anything.
That being said, I feel like I got an awesome batch of songs all worked up and I can’t wait to share them with the world.
Are you making plans for when you can resume playing in front of people again?
We’re not worrying about that right now. We’ve gotten some offers to play, but we don’t want anything to do with that, at the moment. We did start having masked up, socially distant practices recently, but our main focus has been on working on our next album. I figure when the album’s done we can reassess the landscape and decide what we want to do then.
As our recording date approaches, I’m kind of getting the vibe that it still won’t be cool to do live shows yet though. I don’t really know what we’ll do after we finish the record.
We’ll probably want to do another livestream at least, this time with the whole band. After that I’m not sure. It certainly wouldn’t bum me out if we had to just start working on the next album right away. My favorite part of being in a band has always been writing and making records. As much fun as touring and playing shows can be, it kind of gets in the way of getting to do that sometimes.
To read more stories of Milwaukee musicians dealing with lockdowns, sheltering in place and more, click here.
To read more stories by Blaine Schultz, click here.
