This summer marks the third iteration of Duke Performances’ now annual Music in the Gardens series, a string of concerts in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens that allow showgoers the opportunity to come sprawl out on a blanket and enjoy live music in the great outdoors. Carrboro’s Max Indian will be performing July 21, and Recess’ Kevin Lincoln spoke with the band’s Carter Gaj about the Carrboro scene, identity crises and getting snowed in at the Coffeehouse.
Could you give me a little history of Max Indian—how you guys got together, how long the band’s been around, that kind of thing?
Yeah, basically, Max Indian formed probably about two or three years ago, three years ago sounds about right. It started out as just James Wallace and I, we wanted a band but we didn’t have a band, we were just two guys and we decided we’d start making the record at his house. That was a really interesting time of us starting to record... you know, we were recording drums like one at a time, and doing all manner of painstaking pursuits to try and make these sounds the way that we wanted to. Once we got a little momentum going on that recording project and we knew what we wanted to call it and everything then we formed a band. The band has been through a lot of different incarnations over those three years, there’s never really been a period of consistent membership; it’s always kind of been a rotating cast of people that James and I were close to, who would come in and out. We eventually released the record, You Can Go Anywhere, Do Anything in December of 2008, I think. That has been our only release.
And you guys put that out yourselves, right?
Right. I borrowed the money to press like a thousand copies, sold it online, sold it at shows.
You guys are stationed out of Carrboro. What’s it like being immersed in a place with such a living music scene, both past and present?
I mean, it’s changed a lot in Carrboro from my perspective. When we came to school at UNC we found ourselves hanging out in Carrboro pretty quickly. The overall music scene at that time was just different, there wasn’t really a scene that we fell into; we sort of sequestered ourselves off in our own world. And then one day, it just seemed like everything had picked up momentum and there were all these people that were our friends that were living in town and making music that we really liked. I guess it’s just bizarre the way that happens to you. It wasn’t like we arrived in Carrboro and they handed us our scene membership card and then we were like, “It’s awesome here, thanks for inviting us into this club.” It was just like, over time, slowly, the more that we played out and the more that we expressed ourselves, the more we were aware of other people expressing themselves. It’s really coalesced of late into a real scene of people really enjoying and believing.
<p>When were you guys at UNC?
James and I graduated from high school in 2001 so we went to school at UNC the following year, and we were in the jazz department there for that first year, Jazz Studies. That was an interesting thing about the duality of living in a place that has its own music scene but also being connected to the music department of the university. It put us in contact with a lot of different people that, over the years, have helped us to figure it all out.
Going a little bit further into this being from Carrboro, are there any current acts that you guys feel a particular kinship with?
Yeah, there’s a lot of different bands that we feel kinship with. Max Indian is a part of the Drughorse Collective, and through the Drughorse Collective we’ve come into contact with lots of different bands that all helped us to see what kind of music we wanted to make by inspiring us.
Are there any older bands, either Carrboro or Chapel Hill, that you guys grew up with and are influenced by?
Well, there’s a lot. All the bands of the sixties, the British Invasion bands. The whole category of soul music. There’s a lot of pop from the seventies and eighties, new wave stuff. James and I also listened to a lot of hip-hop when we were in high school, and when we met each other, when we were younger. There’s a small but often overlooked element of that kind of music and that sort of beatmaking culture in what Max Indian tries to do. I wouldn’t say that it’s like our foremost objective to make hip-hop influenced music, but it definitely happens. I mean, you can’t listen to as much hip-hop as we’ve listened to and have it not come out in some way in your conception of how to make a hook, or how to go from a verse to a chorus with a drum fill.
I know that when I was listening to You Can Go Anywhere, Do Anything, I couldn’t stop hearing a lot of a Wilco sound, particularly Summerteeth. Does that sound on-point to you?
Yeah, I went through a period of my life where I listened to that record a lot. I think where we were at as far as trying to find a way to say what we wanted to say about that point of our lives, that seemed like a pretty inspiring piece of work, and more than I even realized I was trying to create a work in that vein. Because that was just one of those records that ended up kind of seeping into my consciousness slowly over time; I was in a band where they were all real big Wilco fans, they played those records around me all the time and over the years it became sort of like a nostalgic thing. Then, all of a sudden I was in a band that was making a record that was being compared to that band, it probably had something to do with it.
I definitely get the Beatles vibe too, particularly in the group harmonies you guys have.
The Beatles were a particular obsession for us during that period of time. We would argue about the Beatles, talk about the Beatles, it was just a constant pursuit of knowing more about them and figuring out how they had made all this music that we thought was so inspiring. I think we were considerably more overt in how we decided to take from that kind of music. That’s just how crazy for it we were, we were like let’s just make something that sounds kind of like this, or let’s just capture that kind of a feeling. It just goes back to the inspiration thing: I think that 90% of a creative endeavor is ripped off from some other creative endeavors, but that’s just the nature of all creative endeavors, it all builds on itself; it’s like a shared language among all people. The extent to which [my songs] sound like the Beatles is the extent to which I’ve listened to the Beatles and the Beatles have been thrust into my world. There’s also just an... aspect of wanting to find a road through the artistic wilderness that was a little less derivative. It gets tiresome when people say like, “They sound like the Beatles!” and it’s like, okay, I don’t feel like the Beatles right now.
It’s a balance of trying to take that sound and make it your own and not be like a Beatles cover band, that’s obviously not what you’re going for.
Yeah, we live in a time where people cover acts, do it really well. And you find yourself questioning what the merits of being in a band that hearkens back to another time, what does that really mean, what have you really carved out for yourself? Is that what you want? I think we went through something of an identity crisis after the release of that record, because people’s reactions were so, like—people would say things to us about it that would put us off guard in a way, like, “It’s just like my favorite stuff, like the Beatles.” We’d be like, well, I don’t know what direction we should go from here, if people have associated us with this nostalgic thing of our past, are they going to be upset when we decide that this is not a kind of music that we particularly want to make for the rest of our lives.
How have you guys tried to, as a band, get yourselves outside of that box of people thinking they know exactly what you sound like?
Of late, it’s basically just been about gathering people together that have the ability to instinctively play through the song and—not exactly improvised, but give it a different flair every time, do a different reading of the work. That shows nowadays that it’s not always completely known until sometimes the last minute what people are going to be playing and what instruments they’re going to be playing.... Now it’s all about mixing it up every time and hoping to be surprised, in a good way, by the result. If you put yourself in a situation of that little comfort, you can’t make it sound like the Beatles; I’m not a good enough copycat to just, on the fly and in the heat of the moment, make things sound like certain bands. I can throw some stuff together that’s going to sound interesting if I’m in the heat of the moment just because I’m under the gun. When you’re deciding with each part, how to best feature it, that’s how you sometimes just wind up like, well let’s just do it like our favorite band would do it, it solves arguments.
What got you guys involved with the Duke Performances series, and Music in the Gardens?
I think what happened was, we played at the Coffeehouse, and somebody saw it and asked if we would perform, I think Aaron [Greenwald, the director of Duke Performances]? We played a gig at the Coffeehouse on this day where it got totally snowed-in, and it was a really fun show, because people were apparently walking around and heard the show and then walked in. We thought that because it was snowing there might just be nobody there at all. But it turned out to be a really fun show. And then they asked us if we would play [Music in the Gardens]. I was definitely flattered to be asked, I knew that the Love Language had played the year before and they had said such great things about the gig in general. So yeah, I was ecstatic. I’m looking forward to it.
Max Indian will perform in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens July 21 as a part of Duke Performances’ Music in the Gardens. Tickets are $10 for general admission and $5 for Duke students and employees; children 12 and under are free.
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