The men of Taxpayer are popular fellas.  In the hour and a half we spent with them sitting at a back table by the side door of the Middle East, a handful of moms clad in Taxpayer t-shirts and other excitable friends came over to say hi to the West Newbury natives before their headlining gig at one of Cambridge’s most popular venues.  Jared, Rob, Mike and Maclaine were stoked about the Saturday evening performance ahead of them, and it’s no wonder why: As an established Boston indie act, they’ve bonded with several bands in the area including the Good North, and the guys were especially excited to see their friends reuniting for the first time in four years on stage at the Middle East just before their own set.

With two members of this band of buddies getting hitched in the coming months and no concrete plans to tour in the immediate future, it’s a good thing that Taxpayer’s latest album, Don’t Steal My Night Vision, has substance to spare so that fans can stay happy well into winter.  Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for gigs the fivesome will play in the Greater Boston area through the end of the summer, as their hit “We Have Arrived” has fans flocking to the city’s favorite live joints in droves.

-Hilary Hughes

OPENING ACT: THE TEAPARTY 10

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Jay: I’m gonna go with the choice I had when I was a kid, Fruity Pebbles.

Mike: I don’t know man, the fruity milk…

Rob: Honey Nut Cheerios!

Maclaine: I don’t know if I have a specific favorite, but I like anything with clusters in it.

R: Like… Clusters?

Mc: … Yeah.

M: I’m taking that one, too.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” or Mouth from “The Goonies”?

J: I like both of them! If I had to, I’d punch Mouth.

R: I like both of them too, but I’d definitely punch Mouth.

M: Mouth.

Mc: Mouth.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

Mc: As a kid I used to love digging around in the utensils in my grandmother’s kitchen and she had this amazing thing that was a meatball maker.  It was basically a pair of scissors, but at the end it had two cups.
R: I like that!  I’ve never even heard of such an instrument.  We are a meatball press/meatball maker.  We like well-formed meaty balls.

You go to bed, wake up the next morning, go to brush your teeth… and you realize that you’ve morphed into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

R: ANIMAL!  What other Muppets are there?

Mc: Aw, man, that’s cliché.  Little known fact: The first season of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels asked Jim Henson to do Muppet sketches.  This is before the Muppet Show and back when Henson was only doing Sesame Street.  Michaels asked Henson to do some more adult humor with these Muppets, so he did this series of shorts called The Land of Gorge.  Every once in awhile you can catch them on TV, they’re really awesome and depressing because all the Muppets look like My Pet Monsters, and they talk about how they drink and beat their wives and shit and they’re living in this weird volcanic landscape, so that’s what I’d want to be.

J: I’d be Beaker.  Meep.

Mc: When you get on a roll that’s actually what you sound like…

M: I’m Rolf.  That’s me.

R: I see it.

After a raucous night out, you wake up at some point the next day and you realize that in your fit of crazy you got inked.  What tattoo did you wake up with?

J: I would probably get Michael J. Fox tattooed on my ass or something like that.  I love that guy.

M: Jay idolized Marty McFly.

J: I AM SHAPED BY MICHAEL J. FOX AND BRUCE WILLIS.

R: I’d get Maclaine’s name tattooed on my wrist.

Mc: I’d probably get “JAY” and then get a big “X” tattooed over his name.

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

Mc: I feel like being a really fat sumo wrestler is a lot more prestigious than dressing up as a clown and getting kicked in the face by a bull.

J, M, R: Yeah!

If you had to be a kind of cheese, which cheese would you be?

M: Gorgonzola, with walnuts and strawberries.

J: Pepperjack!

Mc: I was gonna say that, but since YOU said it… I don’t want to say it now.  I’d either be provolone or Gouda.

R: I’m gonna go with cheddar.

If you were a style of facial hair, what style facial hair would you be?

J: Magnum P.I. mustache!  My dad used to have that.

Mc: I’ve had every style of facial hair except for the sideburns that connect to the mustache, so I don’t know.  I think the mustache, the kind that just kind of hangs down like Sam Elliot’s.

R: I’d probably say sideburns.

M: Probably sideburns or a mustache, I guess.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY UNDERWEAR AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

J: I know exactly what that song is for me: “P.Y.T.”  RIP, Michael.  It’s always been “P.Y.T”, that song makes me go fucking crazy.

R: A song by Mary J. Blige that I don’t know the title to, it was in a commercial, I don’t know, I never dance to it but I like it.  I dance funny just when I’m with my fiancé.  We’re gonna play it at my wedding.

Mc: “American Girl”, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  It’s a great rock song but it’s also really danceable.

M: I have no idea.

Mc: “Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson?

M: …. No, any song on Beck’s “Midnight Vultures”, but especially “Mixed Bizness.”

What’s your favorite word?

Mc: This is a really good question, I’ve actually thought about this.

J: Oh, Jesus.

R: You can answer for the band, then, because I have no idea.

Mc: Okay!  So, there’s this really good show on Saturdays on BBC radio called “My Word”, and it’s this really great crazy word game show with all this urbane English people, and they know a lot more words than anybody has a right to know, and I learned a great word from them, and I’ve heard it a lot since then: Picaresque.

J: Not “picturesque”?

Mc: No.  Picaresque means “of or pertaining to the adventures of rogues or scoundrels”, and I think that’s a great word.  It’s like, “Is there a word to describe a swashbuckling, sexual Casanova?” Turns out there’s a word for it!

R: Fuck!  Shit!  Fuckshit!

J: Whatever, I like the word “J.MARCH.”

M: That’s one word and it’s copy written.

THE MAIN EVENT:  THE TPB TAXPAYER INTERVIEW

Hi, guys!

Everyone: Hi!

So, how do you guys meet and how did you come to make music together?

J: Let’s get beers first!

[Chaos ensues as we table hop at the Middle East.  We sat down and then the waitress got mad because we were only ordering drinks, regardless of the fact that we were sitting with the headlining band and had asked permission from the hostess… Weird.]

J: So, I was born, Rob was born, and we don’t remember meeting each other because we met then.  Our parents were friends and we met Mikey very soon afterwards in first grade-

M: -Second grade.

J: -Oh, that’s right, you stayed back.  He was looking outside too much at trucks while he was at school, so they kept him back.

M: It’s true.

J: So, we were always friends growing up and we were always into the same kinds of bands.  Eventually, we decided to form a band for ourselves and we’ve been doing that since we were 14 or 15.  We met Tim Peters, the bassist, at UMass, because he was listening to a Sunny Day Real Estate record, and I was like, “Hey, I like Sunny Day Real Estate!”  And then he became friends with us, and then joined the band after that.  Fairly recently, about a year and a half ago Maclaine joined us, so now we’re a five piece.

Mc: We’d started before that, because we knew each other- So, I used to be in Bang! Camaro.  Jay used to sing for them very early on and I played guitar so we knew each other, and then the two of us had talked about doing something outside of our respective bands as a duo but that never happened.  Summer of 2007 you guys did the EP and asked me to play the trumpet on it, which is my first instrument, actually, but it had been a long time before I played one.  That session was like, “Play keyboards!  Play this!  Play that!”

(Laughs)

So you’re a jack-of-all-trades, basically.

Mc: I guess, yeah.  So then eventually what happened was I left Bang! Camaro, and then it was like, “So!”

R: We were like, “Oh!  You played in a band!  You can play with us for awhile!” (Laughs)

Let’s talk creative process: In terms of how you write and how you are in the studio, does someone take on the bulk of the writing or is it entirely a collaborative effort that you all contribute to?

R: Jay writes all the lyrics.

J: Usually, I might start with a skeleton of an idea, and then I’ll like a melody or something like that, but it ends there in terms of my part of the collaboration.  Everyone then takes it and writes it up to where they’re comfortable with it, and nothing really makes it up to the stage of the lyrics until it actually works as a band.  There’s also times where Mikey will come to the table with an idea and I’ll really like it, or before Rob or Maclaine or Tim come into the space, and I’ll say “Keep playing that!” and it’ll inspire me to write a melody, but it’s still very democratic.

In terms of in the studio, do you guys record in Massachusetts as well?

J: Yeah, at Camp Street Studios with Paul Q Kolderie, he produced Radiohead, Pixies, Courtney Love, and Hole… Anyways, it’s a huge dream come true to get in touch with him.  Radiohead is my favorite band of all time.  He’s super cool and we’ve recorded the last three sessions with him.  We did Modes and lungs back in 2005 with him and then a split EP in 2007, and then the latest record, “Don’t Steal My Night Vision.”

How was that experience, recording Don’t Steal My Night Vision?

R: The thing that was different about this record was that before we had Maclaine we rented a house in Maine or New Hampshire to demo all the songs we had written with a little crappy 16-track thing that we have.  We got to sit on the songs for a while and got to listen to them before we went into the studio and paid for time.  Once we were in the studio I felt like we were more prepared, so it felt like everything we were doing we meant to do instead of being like, “Oh, it’s fine.  We gotta be out of here in 10 hours.”

J: There were parts that changed quite a bit from that first chord until we actually went into the studio.  It was just fun to mix down our own songs first, to fall in love with them that way and to figure out how you wanted them to sound, which parts needed to be cut and half, which parts needed to be extended, that sort of thing. A lot of that still happened in the studio, but we got something out of it right away.  So we did that, and then we went in to record four songs, and then Maclaine joined; it was after the first session that he joined because we sort of had to write him into those four songs and then we put the rest all together.

Mc: So, the whole record was done in three weekend sessions, right?  And it was like, three or four songs for a weekend.  The thing that’s amazing about the guys at Camp Street is that you’ll sort of sit around for two hours and be like, “What’s going on?” Being in the studio is like, so much sitting around.  That’s the dirty secret about being in a band: It’s a lot of sitting around without doing anything.  Once these guys would get ready and set up, another two or three hours would go by, and then you’ve got three songs completely tracked.  The way [the songs] are on the record is pretty much how we got them after a handful of takes.  Most of the drums and bass are first or second takes; the vocals are first or second takes.  The only thing that took a lot of work after the fact was the guitar stuff because we like to hear ourselves play. (Laughs)

J: We didn’t spend a lot of time on something and then not use it, so that was kind of cool.

Mc: Yeah, it was really efficient.  You know, perfection, you can’t rush it.  The tracking went from January of last year up until May or something like that.  It was pretty slow, and then we’d go back and mix the record a couple of times.  It wasn’t really done until October.  We were playing the songs live and rehearsing them a lot.  You don’t settle into a song until you’ve been playing a song six months to the year.  Even though we’re still playing some of the stuff on the album differently, it’s closer to what it sounds like live, I think.

How is this a departure from other recordings and material you’ve worked on before this album?  Is there anything on or about “Don’t Steal My Night Vision” that you’re particularly excited to share with your fans?

J: First of all, having three guitars was much different than having two, just because to compose the song is so much different when you have to throw another instrument in there-

R: Not HAVE to; GET to!

J: GET to throw another instrument in there, that’s right.  You want it to be so that they’re not all playing the same thing and you don’t want it to sound cluttered.  So, that was one thing that was pretty cool about it.  As we played as a four piece we always wanted another part of it: Whether Mikey came up with two guitar parts or I would think of two guitar parts or something to throw in, like keys…

R: Well, you would go into the studio and record that guitar part and then when we were playing live we wouldn’t be able to pull off everything.  Everything we wanted to be able to do in the studio [for this record] we did it, and we now can do it live.  With that, I feel like we’re coming into our own as a live band.  This record did more for us playing live and getting better sounding live, whereas before I think there were certain songs we’d write that sounded awesome on the record and then we couldn’t really pull them off onstage.

Are there any songs in your catalogue that you feel particularly connected to or that you really enjoy playing live?

Mc: I have a really unique position where I feel objective about this new record only because, even though I was there for the recording of it, all the songs were written before I joined.  I was a huge Taxpayer fan for years before I ever joined the band, so for me, being in the band is more like, I’m the #1 fan and I get to play stuff with Taxpayer.

R: You don’t treat us like that! (Laughs)

Mc: You don’t deserve it!  That’s what I learned after the fact!  Talk about shattering the illusion, Jesus.  (Laughs)  I still love the music.

R: We’d see Maclaine drunk at parties and at the end of the night we’d be like “DUDE, you gotta join!” and he’d be like “JUST ASK ME.”  (Laughs)

Mc: For me, I love the whole record; I don’t think there’s a bad song on it, but I especially love “We Have Arrived”.  It was one of those things where I was like “Jay wrote a hit!”  Part of it was that the melody was so unique and something I had never heard from Taxpayer before.  Then, I love “Settle Down Ghost” – that was one of the songs on the split EP, but I don’t think you guys liked it the first time around?

J: I was the one who didn’t like it.

Mc: I remember recording it and being like, “Dude, that’s the shit, that song is awesome.”

J: There was something about it that rubbed me the wrong way.  It grew on me, and now I love the song.  When we first started playing it… Now I look back and “Settle Down…” is probably my favorite one of those.

R: I think those two are my favorite to play, too.  And “good silent king” because we usually play it at the end of the set when I’m normally really tired, and that one is really easy for me to play, at least the beginning of it, so it gives me a chance to wake up a little bit.

Mc: That’s also the first and only Taxpayer song that we’ve written together as a band.

R: That’s right!

Is that why it’s the best?

R: (Laughs) Yeah.

J: I like the more obscure ones.   I like “The Less We’re Impressed”-

M: -Yeah, that’s my favorite song on the CD-

J: Just because that song is NOTHING like us whatsoever and that song began because Tim was just playing that bass line.  Going into practice is when we get to hang out anyway and a lot of the time it turns into us playing jokes on each other.  So, that song started off with Tim doing that bass line at the very beginning and the whole song evolved out of that.  It was just weird how something that seems so simple can make your mind go so crazy.  It was the most anti-Taxpayer song we’ve ever done, and the way it got recorded made me love it even more.

Do you see yourselves going in that kind of direction now, towards a more collaborative process?

J: I feel like I pounce on things more when somebody else comes up with an idea, because I just endlessly try to come up with chords and put a melody over it. It’s so nice to have somebody else come up with the chord progression and then I can think of a million different things to sing over it.

In terms of touring, what’s it looking like in the next couple of months with Taxpayer for shows?  Do you have any crazy stories from past adventures in the tour bus so to speak?

J: Ever since Maclaine joined the band our tour bus disintegrated. (Laughs)

M: We lost our van.

What?  How did this happen?

R: Tim, our bassist, used to live in Quincy in this apartment complex with a parking lot.

M: It was a GMC Rally Wagon.

J: Nobody wanted to keep the van in his driveway.  It was this old, gigantic beast.

R: So, Tim moved to Foxborough, but he would keep the van parked in the parking lot in Quincy, and it was really sketchy.  Tim would have to wear a suit at work, and he’d pull up to this parking lot in Quincy where he doesn’t live, in a suit, in a nice car, and he’d get in the super sketchy van, drive away, come back at two o’clock in the morning with different clothes on… So, it eventually got towed.

M: It went on for about a year.

J: We used to joke that the van was the loudest vehicle out there, so it must have woken up all the neighbors whenever Tim got back, and we would just picture all these wives running to the windows being like “THERE’S THAT SON OF A BITCH IN THE CREEPY ASS VAN!  HONEY, CALL THE COPS!”

So, the Rally Wagon got towed?

M: It got impounded for a month and we owed a bunch of money, so we just told them to keep it.

When it comes to promoting this album and hitting the road, take me through the next month and where you’ll be six months from now.

J: I guess we’re kind of old men.  We have a really busy summer.  Rob and Mike are getting married… not to each other.  There’s so much crap going on for the summer that we haven’t really planned anything to go balls to the wall and make this big record where we’re all going to retire early and that sort of thing.  It’s more like, we take shows where we know we can play for a lot of people and make an impact.  We have this show, which is special because we’re playing with a lot of friends.  The Good North is reuniting so we HAD to play this show. So, we’re doing this show because it’s awesome.  We just did Harpoon Fest, we just played for like, two thousand people and it was ridiculous.   We’re doing the Provincetown fest at the end of next month, but beyond that we don’t have anything planned.  When fall comes around we’ll try to plan some kind of road trip on a weekend.   We make it work with the lives that we have.

Mc: The thing about this record is we’re not like, 20 or 21, but at the same time I feel like none of us have any illusions about what being in a band holds for us.  We’re doing this because we love it.  This, for me is the best thing I’ve done, and for me that’s enough.  When we get together to rehearse it’s partly a chance to play music and practice but it’s also partly just to hang out.  We do nothing but laugh for two to three hours straight and sometimes at the detriment of getting anything done.  You get to a certain point where “making it” becomes so sour to you because you’ve had your heart broken so many times.  We just don’t give a shit.  We just wanna make music for our friends because we love music and we love hanging out with our friends.  So few people ever get to experience that.  Why ruin it with money?

J: I feel that unless you have some kind of a push behind it that touring and leaving your jobs and girlfriends and families behind is a formula that’s totally dead unless you’re between the ages of 18 and 21.

Mc: We have our lives, which we like, and other jobs and other stuff, and then we get to be in this band that we love with our friends and we get to play really cool shows. The Middle East Downstairs?  Bands would kill to play this show, and we’re lucky enough to just be able to do it and be with our friends and play.  I would never want to sacrifice this to get that.  I don’t give a shit about being a rock star.  I just want to rock.

R: That was like a speech from a MOVIE.

Mc: But it’s true!  I’ve seen every angle of it, and I know people who are really successful and people who are really talented who want to be really successful and aren’t and are really bummed about it.  I would hate to have everything fall apart at 35 and have to start over.

In cases like that, too, I feel like people wind up resenting the project or the band or the music and it’s just really unfortunate.

J: FRIENDS FOREVER!!!

R: Whether you like it or not, J-Dawg.

You mentioned that you’re playing with friends tonight.  Who are some of the bands that you really love that happen to be from Boston? How would you explain your identity as a “Boston band”?  It’s kind of interesting, the loyalties and expectations that come with what city you’re from.  How has that affected your music?

J: Yeah, I think of that question too.  I think about it as if I were to rewind back the clock to 2002 or 2003 where we were just playing any show we could and begging to play shows, and thinking of the progression of why things got good is because of the connections we made in Boston, so that, in a sense, is very much indicative of the Boston band community.  When I think back to just weird circumstances, like, if you didn’t meet that person where would we be?  Paul Kordelie, for instance: If Paul hadn’t known one of our girlfriends and come to see us play, we wouldn’t have got on the 4×4 and we wouldn’t be where we are.

R: But do you feel that that couldn’t have happened if there was a community in Portland?  Does that feel “Boston” to you?

J: Yes.  New York is just, there’s so many clubs, but as far as Boston I feel like …

Mc: I’ve been in more than one band in this town, and in multiple genres.  The thing that makes a Boston band a “Boston band” has nothing to do with the music; it has to do with the camaraderie of the community.  The bands that I like, the ones I play shows with, I like them and I like their music and they’re fun people to hang out with, and THAT aspect is what makes Boston bands stick together.  The fact that you would call your friends and play a Saturday night show at Great Scott, you know, we’d call the Everyday Visuals and we’d call the Bon Savants because we want to play with our friends, you know?  The music between our bands kind of fits in some sense, but if you get nitpicky it doesn’t really, because it doesn’t really matter and that’s not the way we do it.  Whether the music ever leaves Boston or it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter; it’s about helping out your friends.

So, the Boston scene is more so made up of people who dig music but it’s more about familial connections between friends who happen to be in bands as opposed to bands who happen to be friends?

R: Yeah! Because, well, when we go to New York, it always ends up being fun, but we’ll play a place in New York and they’ll have 10 bands play from 8pm to 4am, and bands play, and they leave.  I feel like in Boston you play a show and it’s a show: There are four or five bands and everybody’s there the whole time, and you know all the people in the bands, or you’re gonna meet all the people in the bands.  It’s a totally different vibe.

How do you feel about the crowd in Boston?  Do you feel like you’re received better in Boston?  How’s the vibe with your fans?

J: Only because we have a history here, yeah, but as long as we play in front of a crowd I feel like we get a pretty decent response.  We’re kind of likeable (laughs)

R: Yeah, I’ve never felt a cold shoulder.

Mc: A lot of people in Boston kind of stand there with their arms folded looking really solemn and pretending that they don’t enjoy the music because they think people are watching them, I’ve even been that guy in the crowd, and I feel like that’s really a Boston thing.

Ha, not us.  We dance around like idiots ALL THE TIME.

Mc: I mean, people go to see live music because it’s fun and they want to dance or jump around, but it’s a Boston and New York thing, so I don’t think any one is innocent of that kind of attitude.

Which venues do you really love playing at as opposed to seeing shows at?

R: The Middle East is always great and they’ve always treated us fairly.

M: Great Scott’s great!

R: The Paradise, they’re very fair.

J: We tend to be respectful at these places, too.

Mc: Yeah, we don’t trash the green room or throw up on stage or get in fights with bouncers.

Not yet…

Mc: (Laughs) Right.  We’re just now entering into our belligerent rock star phase.

Oh, goodie!  We’ll document your downfall. (Laughs)

Jared Marsh and Mike Jones of Taxpayer. Photo: Gabrielle Petraglia