“Good music is good music, regardless of genre.”

This quote, which also happens to be the closing note of our interview, describes the all-inclusive and laid back attitude of Boston’s own Televandals to a T.  The dance/new-wave/electronic/indie/punk foursome with a sound impossible to define has been making waves on both sides of the river while recording their new material in Allston and playing for packed houses in Cambridge, and they’re ready to hit the ground running with “Good For Nothing”, the single they’ll be celebrating with a soiree at Great Scott on September 4th.

Jared, Nico, Nick and Ryan are all friendly, grounded guys who are grateful for the support they’ve received from the Boston music community and their fans. After hearing about their silly food fight antics on the road (Nico may or may not have shoved some mashed potatoes into someone’s car air conditioner) and the intuitive shenanigans behind their creative process (which, at times, may involve running keyboards through the stereo of an automobile), we’re just as stoked to see this Boston band on the rise as they are to be making music in a city they’ve grown to love.

-Hilary Hughes

THE OPENING ACT: TELEVANDALS AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Nick: Cocoa Puffs.  It’s been my favorite since I was two years old.

Jared: Cracklin’ Oat Bran: It looks like dog food but tastes delicious.

Nico: That makes you poop, doesn’t it?

Jared: … Doesn’t it make everyone poop?

Ryan: I’d say Frosted Flakes.

No: Rice Krispie Treats Cereal.

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

J: It would be a pleasure – no, an HONOR – to punch Corey Feldman in the face.  He came to Boston a year or two ago for some cause, I forget what it was, and he was just a total douche bag the whole time.

Nk: I’m gonna go with the offensive stereotype with Long Duk Dong.  I’ve never seen “Sixteen Candles.”

No: I’ve never seen “The Goonies…”

R: Yeah, I’d punch Mouth.

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

No: I want to be the old toaster oven that short-circuited and melted our stereo.  That was like, a Jedi toaster oven.

…It melted your stereo?

Nk: They melded together!

No: Yes.  I want to be that toaster oven/stereo.

J: I think I’d be a blender.

Nk: I’d be a coffee machine.

R: A microwave!  I’d get to melt shit. [Ryan grins. Broadly.]

You go to bed, wake up, walk into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you look in the mirror and you realize that you’ve turned into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

R: Animal! Duh.  Or maybe Louie, the dude who threw around those boomerang fish.

J: I’d be the Swedish Chef! Yes!

No: I’d be either one of the two old guys who sit up in the balcony-

Nk: YES! ME TOO!

No: Yeah.  Nick and I would be the two old guys. [Statler and Waldorf.]

Say you have a crazy night, you black out, and you wake up feeling like crap the next morning and you realize… you got a tattoo.  What’d you get inked?

J: I would get the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” all over my back.  That would be a LOT of words.

No: When I was drunk one night I thought up two tattoos, and then I got them the next day when I was sober.  I think I would have architect’s lines on my back, so that it would look like an architect had designed the human body.

Nk: I have no idea.  If I was drunk, I have no idea what I’d go for.  It’s really hard!  I’d probably get a can of PBR on my chest or something.

R: I’d get two sleeves.  I’ve always wanted sleeves.

No: What you SHOULD do is get sleeves of sleeves of a shirt.

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

Nk: Sumo wrestler.  I am scared of clowns.  And mad animals.

J: Rodeo clown.  I don’t want to be that fat, I’m sorry.

No: Rodeo clown.  I already like garish clothing.

R: Me too. Rodeo clown.

No: What if you could just be a really fat rodeo clown and then you’d have the best of both worlds?  Or a sumo wrestler with a cowboy hat…

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

No: 19^th-century handlebar mustache.

R: Mutton chops!

Nk: Sideburn.  Just one.

J: I’ll be some kind of real bushy, bushy beard.

If you were a type of cheese, which cheese would you be?

No: Parmesan.  It’s good on everything.

R: Extra-sharp cheddar.

Nk: Ricotta.

J: I love cheese but I like so many of them!  I’d probably be feta: I’m half Greek and one of these days I’m gonna just crumble and fall apart.

What’s your favorite word?

Nk: Word. Haha.

No: Tomfoolery.

J: Hope.

R: Wow.

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

Nk: Dancing with myself, Billy Idol.

No: That was mine!  Actually, no: Mine would be “She Drives Me Crazy” by the Fine Young Cannibals.

R: Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me.”

Nk: Jared, I know which was the last song you danced on top of a van to…

J: What?!

Nk:  “You Can Call Me All”, Paul Simon.  His answer is “You Can Call Me All.”

THE MAIN EVENT: THE TELEVANDALS TPB INTERVIEW

Hey guys!  Real quick: Names and ages from the members of Televandals for the record, if you please.

Jared: I’m J-Restless, also known as Jared Savas.  I’m 28 and I live in Allston.  I’m the singer and guitarist in Televandals.

Nico: I’m Nico.  I’m 27.  I do guitar, keys, synth, mixing and things that go “beep!”

Nick: I’m Nick, I’m 27, and I’m living in Medford right now.  I’m the bass player.

No: Our missing drummer is Ryan.  He’s my roommate in Allston, actually.  He does drums, beats, and a little bit of mixing, too.  He’s 19 (laughs).

J: He’s older than the rest of us.

[Editor's Note: Ryan was caught in traffic on the way back from Vermont for the majority of the interview, but was able to join us in time for the TeaParty Ten.  Stupid New England summer traffic! Rahhh.]

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

J: It’s kind of a funny thing.  Nico and I knew each other way before Televandals even happened.  He was actually the last one to join the band.  Thank God for Craigslist!

No: Yeah, we put up almost identical posts at the exact same time-

J: – Looking to start a band of the ilk of what we kind of do now.  We hit it off right away, and ended up working with a bunch of different people over the course of a year and change, basically.  We played a few shows with a fella under the name Televandals, even though it’s very different than what we do now.  Same general idea, but we’ve evolved since then.   He left to pursue other things and we met Ryan.  At that point we started doing shows again and writing new songs.  A buddy of ours was a temporary bass player for sometime before we could find someone permanent, and then Nick moved to the area, and we asked him to join.

So how long have you been playing music?  Were you children banging on pots and pans and whatnot?

No: I started when I was fourteen, I guess; I just bought a guitar and went at it.  A few years later I was like, “Why on earth am I not doing this?”  I’m from Miami, actually, and so I packed my car and drove up to Boston to be in a band.

Nk: I started playing cello in the fourth grade and I went to upright bass in the sixth grade, but I also started playing guitar when I was twelve.

J: I started writing lyrics when I was like in middle school and of course at that time I thought it was the greatest thing ever, and it was totally, looking back on it, it was total bollocks but it was a good place to start, anyway.  I didn’t start playing guitar until maybe I was, I don’t know, 16 or something like that?  The funny thing is, this is the first really serious band I’ve ever been in.

No: Likewise.

J: Just recently, I’ve been dabbling in synths and that, for me, is in the formative stages, but I do a lot of songwriting.

No: He does awesome synth.  My favorite line of the whole album was your synth. (Laughs)

Let’s talk influences: Who would you credit for the cultivation of your creativity?  Are there any artists whose sound you just love that have helped shaped you as musicians?

Nk: For me, I started out with West Coast Punk, like NOFX and all that.  I retroactively got into The Clash after that.  When it comes to newer stuff, I’m into Radiohead.

No: Yeah, I’d say Radiohead was the band that really kicked me into music.  With Kid A they got into electronic stuff and that got me into electronic stuff: The Chemical Brothers, Apex Twin, and more recently I’ve gotten into some electro-DJs and UK-based indie stuff like the Wombats.  I’m kind of a big fan of Plush Gun and Passion Pit.

Passion Pit always comes up in our interviews!

J: (Laughs) For me, my whole outlook on music changed when I started listening to The Clash.  That was really the big turning point for me in terms of music.  They like, changed me in a way that I never expected to be changed by one single band.  Not that that was my only influence – I love Massive Attack’s dark sound, and Bloc Party’s been a big influence.  What Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead does with sound manipulation has been very influential in and of itself, too.

No: One thing we try to do a lot of is to make an instrument sound like another instrument; like, we’ll run our guitars through filters to sound like keyboards, we’ll make our keyboards sound like string sections and then we’ll mash it all together.

It sounds like Televandals has got a good “Mad Scientist”-y vibe going on.

No: Yeah!  Ryan is very good with playing dance music from a live [drum] kit.

Nk: Yeah!  He’s got a great dance beat.

J: Well, we do all this with a sense of familiarity and cohesiveness, too; it’s not just a bunch of sounds and, you know, sounds for the sake of making sounds.  We’d like to think that there’s a core to it.

No: Yeah, a foundation.

We can definitely appreciate the difference between fucking around with equipment and experimenting with sound.

Nk: Yeah, our songs take a loooong time. (Laughs) Maybe too long.

No: One of the most frustrating things for us is that we’ll record a song, like the songs for the EP or the songs for the album, and by the time we print it we’ve changed it again.

I guess this is a good point to segue into the creative process behind Televandals.  Is is completely collaborative, or is there someone who heads up the lyric writing and compositional quality?

Nk: Lyrically speaking it’s pretty much Jared.

J: It depends.  Most of the more recent stuff, we’ve been fully collaborative and writing parts and arranging stuff.  There have been a lot of times where I’ll come in with ideas, but just as often these guys will bring in something to work with.  There’s definitely no front man.  It’s a band, and we strive to be a band in the truest sense of the word.

No: It’s definitely like controlled chaos, I guess.   Sometimes we’ll just be jamming and that’ll become a song.  There was one instance where we were trying to write the ending of one song and it became another song.

J: We have another song on our album called “Arch Nemesis”, and when we were working on the arrangement for that song, I don’t know, at least two other current songs and several other song ideas came up for us just working on that one song. One of the bands I think all of us would mention would be Does It Offend You Yeah.  The way they kind of have blended rock with a whole different electronic aesthetic has been-

Nk: Well, not jut the aesthetic, the songwriting, too.

J: Yeah.  Their concept in general is very intriguing to us.

No: It’s kind of that sense of a DJ found a guitar and learned how to play it.

Yeah, I think that people are really receptive to that kind of vibe.

No: A lot of the best electronic acts do that already:  When we saw LCD Sound System at Austin City Limits, they had a live drummer and a live bass player.  It’s that more organic feel.  When you look at the premier electronic bands, too, it all goes back to analog.  You’re trying to get that organic dance sound.

J: That whole direction that electronic music is going in is really inspiring, and it’s also something where, like, the lyricism of going back to Dylan or something like that.  There are no limits or boundaries to the elements you can bring into the creative process.

Do you feel particularly connected to any of your songs?

No: I like playing “Silence in the City” because it’s very balls-to-the-walls.

Nk: I always love playing “Molotov.”

No: I love playing keys on “Endor.”  I have a lot of fun with that.

J: In terms of songs in our catalog, that new song, “Endor”, of the songs on our album it’s the most recent we’ve written and I feel like it’s very strong and a very full arrangement.  I feel like “Endor” kind of embodies what we’re all about.

No: Yeah!  It’s a lot of fun.

In terms of playing live versus spending time in the studio, does your creative process change? Let’s talk through the process that was behind recording your latest LP.

No: It was … long.

J: Yeah.

Nk: Very long.

How long are we talking?

No: Ten months?

J: Yeah, nine or ten months, yeah.  We all have jobs so it’s not like we can all just go and dedicate this many weeks or months to just recording it straight, so it was kind of intermittent.

No: I was saying how we can change songs constantly; by the time we came back to finish recording it we had new lines added.  All of our songs have so many layers that it’s never a matter of just recording the guitar line.

Where did you record the album?  Did you record it in a Boston studio?

No: Yeah, right down the road at Cease and Assault.  It was actually funny because our manager is in the same building.

When it comes to touring, you’re planning on doing a big push behind this new album.  Take us through what the Televandals are going to be up to in the coming months.

No: We’re looking to book more gigs in New England and then we’ll branch out to father-reaching things.  We’ve got a new mix contest out right now with the new single and we’re trying to bring the DJs in Boston into it.

J: I think the goal for us is to not be the follower of a trend; we kind of want to be the trend.  We want to do something unique and in of its own right something inspiring in its own way.  Who knows if we’ll get there?  I hope we will, but that’s sort of the idea behind what we’re doing.

Where do you want to be with Televandals six months from now?

Nk: In a van.  I want to be in a van. (laughs)

No: In a van.  Driving on the left side of the road.

Soooo you want to be touring in England, then?

J: That would be awesome.

No: As much as people find it hard to settle into this lifestyle, it’s basically just living on the road and going from show to show to show to show.  I don’t like sitting down for very long.

Do you have any crazy stories for us from Televandals’ tour bus? Or van?

Nk: Nico thinks it’s fun to throw food at my car when I’m driving.

No: I have to.  I have to attack it, and he’ll retaliate.  It’s gotten to the point where we’ve almost damaged our cars.

Nk: You HAVE!  You HAVE damaged my car.

No: There may or may not be KFC mashed potatoes in his air conditioner.

J: We did this one show in Providence where someone threw a beer can at the other person’s car, and it hit someone else’s van on accident, so that was fun.

No: There was another instance where he was stopped at a red light and I jumped out of the car with a 100-yard roll of duct tape and I duct taped him into the car.

Red light shenanigans are the coolest.

No: Yeah, especially when you don’t get hit by other cars…

J: Once, we were playing this gig in New York, and our van was broken into and robbed, so that wasn’t fun… The only equipment they stole were two of my guitars, which sucked, but they stole a lot of our personal things, like bags and stuff like that.  We have this guy who usually goes on the road with us named CJ who’s 6’7” giant of a man, huge, huge guy, so he had his bag stolen which had a portable DVD in it.  The police come, and a female police officer was interviewing all of us to get a record of what had been stolen, and CJ said, “Oh yeah I had this bag stolen, personal DVD player and … some DVDs… of an adult nature….” (Laughs) It wasn’t fun at the time but looking back on it it’s very amusing.

No: Coming back from SXSW, Ryan and I actually drove the van.  He fell asleep and the GPS went out, so I just kept following the road we were one and I only realized that we weren’t in Tennessee anymore when we wound up 100 miles into Kentucky.  Yeah.  That was a funny four-hour adventure.

J: Meanwhile, that same trip, Nick and I are flying back and we flew out at like, four in the morning, and we had been downing tequila all day long as it was the last day of SXSW.  We fell asleep on the floor of the airport.  We had to do a connecting flight from Austin to Houston and they upgraded us to first class, so we sit down, and we’re like …

No: We actually wrote the keyboards for “Endor” driving back from SXSW.  I traded this gigantic setup using a cigarette lighter to power my keyboards and my laptop and running everything through the car stereo.  I was riding with the laptop and me with the keyboards in the back seat blasting the stereo.  It was fantastic!

Let’s talk about Boston. What are some Boston bands that you would love to bill with, or are there any Boston artists that you really happen to enjoy?

Nk: I really like You Can Be A Wesley.  They’re another band that can really write songs, and they’re cool people.  They put on a good show, too.

No: I’ve been getting into a lot of Boston DJs, like Die Young, Volvix,  they’re all really good.  Thick as Thieves won my heart when they covered “Just” by Radiohead at one of the last Aloud shows.  They’re pretty sick.  I’m always a fan of Aloud since Henry and Jen moved up here, and I’m also really into Herra Terra, who we actually played with two years ago.  Amazing, amazing hybrid band.

J: Both those bands, Herra Terra and You Can Be A Wesley, were on the bill with us at Middlesex a month or two ago.  It was very interesting and a very solid avant-garde lineup.  It was unexpected and very cool.

How has it been for you guys as active members in the Boston music community?

No: It’s totally a family.

Nk: I don’t know anything else to compare it to…

J: I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but we’re a band who happens to be from Boston but it’s not like we want to typecast ourselves, but at the same time we’re proud to be from here, too.

No: It’s a very, very fertile ground, too: I mean, if you look in New York right now, all these clubs are closing down and here, you have a bunch of really good acts and really good clubs.

J: It really is burgeoning: there’s a lot that’s come out of here recently so hopefully we can come out of that and do our own thing.

No: I feel like there’s been a big resurgence lately in Boston music.  I mean, this was kind of a dead spot for a while, but Passion Pit, Wild Light, labels and the people in the business are starting to take notice of Boston again and it’s really showing.

Let’s talk venues.  Where are your favorite Boston venues, both to see shows and play them?

J: Great Scott is fun.  TT’s, we’ve had a number of good shows there.

No: I loved Middlesex just because it wasn’t a normal venue.

J: I was skeptical about the show, but having the crowd right there and in your face was cool!

No: We’re into interactions.  We hate that space between the stage and the audience, so the closer the audience can get to the stage the better.  There should not be dividing lines.

Yeah, we love that about Middlesex, too!

J: Earlier in June we played Harpoon Fest, and it was a huge stage, right?  It was kind of the opposite of Middlesex.  A bigger stage, it was great in the sense that we got to play for a ton of people, but on the other hand, there’s also the intimacy that you need to make up for, so we invited a bunch of people to dance up onstage with us to get that.  Normally, when I’m playing, Ryan is thisclose to me, but on that stage his drum kit was so far away.

No: Yeah, I actually ran out of guitar chord at one point.  It was like, “I can’t go farther?! Shit!”

Well, most of the Boston venues have small stages.  I can definitely see how you’d get used to working with not a lot of square footage.

No: Yeah.  We really like the Paradise Rock Club, too.  The sound there is fucking awesome.

What about the differences between Boston and New York as musical cities?  We hear a lot about the changes you see city to city when it comes to band-club relations and the business aspect of that.

No: New York right now is, I mean, for lack of a better term, is overloaded: There are so many bands and relatively so few venues that it becomes kind of cutthroat.  More so than that, people have trouble getting any kind of draw because if you’re a fan of local music you have 10,000 bands to go see.  Draws get split up, it’s hard to build a following, I mean, it’s definitely a place for already established bands.  Trying to get started, it doesn’t matter how good you are: You’re still going to get lost in that giant pile.  If you’re good in a place like Boston, you’re not gonna get lost and you’re going to be heard.  I think that New York offers a lot of opportunities, but I think you have to know when it’s your time to go after them.

Do you see yourselves as being a Boston band for a while?  Do you have any plans to move onto another city in the near future?

J: I mean, we very well could move, depending on what happens in this coming half a year or year.  Maybe we’ll be on the road and coming back here.  It’s just tough to say.

No: We definitely have allegiances here, though.  Even if we’re living in a different city, it’s not like we’re ever going to forget that Boston is where we started and Boston is what made us.  I hope that we’ll be able to play massive shows elsewhere at some point and then be able to come back and play secret shows at Great Scott.

Do you find the Boston music scene to be clique-y?

No: I don’t know if I’d call it clique-y.  People go after the kind of music they like and they befriend the other people they see congregating at these shows, but I mean, we see a huge variety in the people who come to our shows.  We draw everyone from Boston punks to fans of the Boston DJ scene.  I think cliques only exist to people who want to be in cliques, and there are a lot of people around here that don’t really acknowledge that.

J: I think that goes back to why we hesitate to classify ourselves.  I’d say we’re a punk band or a new wave band or whatever you wanna call it; we try to play with a wide variety of bands and venues.  It’s not like we’re being clique-y.

No: Good music is good music, regardless of genre.