Interview Alpha Consumer takes a bite out of music

If you’ve checked out Dosh, Andrew Bird, Fog, Fat Kid Wednesdays, Happy Apple, The James Buckley Trio, or about a dozen other local bands, chances are you’ve heard at least one member of local quasi-supergroup Alpha Consumer. Jeremy Ylvisaker and Michael Lewis have logged some serious miles this year in Andrew Bird’s backing band, and J.T. Bates is a drummer for several Twin Cities projects, but the trio’s first passion is this loud, cocksure rock band. Alpha Consumer’s second album, Gary Victorsen’s, was released in 2007; this fall it releases a follow-up, Kick Drugs Out Of America. Before headlining on Friday at the 501 Club, the band talked to The A.V. Club about the smarmy politics behind its band name, the real-life person behind its album title, and the longest, loudest cover of “Crimson And Clover” you’ll ever hear.

The A.V. Club: How did Alpha Consumer get started?

Jeremy Ylvisaker: A bunch of us played in the band Fog with Andy Broder. I helped him do a lot of the recording, but it ended up being him playing almost all the instruments on the records. So I had a recording studio where I wasn’t coming up with anything, so I assigned myself things to do. That became The Interferents, which Dosh asked to open for him in January 2005. We changed our name [to Alpha Consumer] a couple of days before that show.

AVC: How did you arrive at that name?

JY: It was just that time in America when everybody was arguing a lot, and I was seeing “W ’04” stickers on Humvees. There’s something about the pride in that, I guess. I would call it a caricature. [The "alpha consumer" is] always the villain in an Adam Sandler or John Hughes movie, a dude who’s tan from golfing and being on a boat. That’s my guy. [Laughs.]

Michael Lewis: The “best American”—the smarmy take on it. It’s not specifically one exact thing so much as it was like, “The solution to all of our problems [was to be consumers].”

AVC: Gary Victorsen is a real person—what's the story behind naming your album for him?

JY: I am the son of [John Ylvisaker], who came up with Christian rock in the ’60s, [and] who, while Reagan was president, built an earth shelter and solar house for his family, and then left. His friends, who helped build that house, were named Phil Buck and Gary Victorsen. For some reason, I had this vision of a haunted car dealership, so I made this giant head [for the CD-release show], and we had these streamers, and too much fog. And then we had to name the head, so it was like, “Phil Buck! Yeah, car dealer! Phil Buck. … Or, Gary Victorsen.” We couldn’t decide. Gary Victorsen sounds a little less … successful. [Laughs.]

AVC: Your songs are often quite tongue-in-cheek. Do you avoid overly sentimental lyrics?

JY: We’ve got pretty overly sentimental ones too. They’re all there. Maybe my biggest influence in terms of trying to have a band is Stephen Colbert. I’ll never be as smart as him. He accepts all this information, makes fun of all of it, has a complete understanding of all these viewpoints, filters it through himself, and it comes out funny.

J.T. Bates: The songs and the band could be really dark. But it’s not, because we love playing music. We love the world. Not to belittle it, but it’s joyful. To me, that’s how the humor connects back to the music. We’re going to sound mad and sound like we’re having fun.

JY: It’s the anti-Brian Wilson, because we are so happy. The part that we deal with in our art is the part that needs expression the most, which is frustration and sadness. Brian Wilson needed love so much that he became masterful at making the love he needed. So we make time for ourselves to reflect on things other than being together and playing really fucking loud. You know, going home to see my daughter and see what she drew while I was at band practice.

AVC: Gary Victorsen’s features an eight-minute massively reworked cover of “Crimson And Clover” by Tommy James & The Shondells. How did that come about?

JY: I had been obsessed with the band Sunn O)))—how they slowed time down and turned sound into an object. The first record I bought was Joan Jett, I Love Rock N' Roll. And I was thinking about ’50s rock, and I had this idea. I suddenly heard “Crimson And Clover” with that treatment, that wall of detail, and to my ears, it’s really soothing, to take that sad-but-sexy moment and just freeze it. I started to cry in my car when I thought of it. It was another one of those rehearsals where that’s all we did that day, was learn how to play slow. Even on the recording it speeds up a lot. That performance, as disastrous as it is—we actually made a couple of mistakes in it, and things were not going well—but it’s perfect.