TOM: At the time it seemed like such an abrupt event, but looking back on it now, it actually was quite a smooth transition. The Ominous Seapods' journey never really had to change course. It was all just another step in our mutated evolution.

DANA: About a year and a half before Max split, he started to lose his interest and dedication. Although he still played great, his lack of energy really started to bring the band down. There can't really be any dead weight in rock and roll. It is about energy. So when Max left, despite the fact that it pissed me off and left me feeling betrayed by my friend and companion, I look back and think it was the best thing he could have done because his heart was no longer in it. Two years ago, when we asked Todd to join, he was the one and only person who could fill the bill. The dude has a rock and roll heart. Todd has given the Ominous Seapods a new life and has brought us together as a band. We are all having a blast again.

TOM: When Todd first joined the band, the rest of us all knew we had to take it up a notch to keep the intensity while Todd found his place. It basically forced us to get better and grow as musicians and adapt. So as Todd really found his niche, it was within a slightly different environment from what Max played in. The result I think is a more integrated band sound. Also, when the time came to write new music we all took a more active role in that as well, so many of the songs now are written by two or three people or the whole band as opposed to just one, which was almost always the case in the old days

TED: We also listen to each other a lot more now. Any member of the band can lead a jam in any direction at any time, and we really respond better to each other's ideas. I think the Ominous Seapods now have cohesion, whereas before it was a Max song, then a Dana song, and so on. When I listen to the new album I hear a much more unified expression. It has more of a flow than it used to.

TOM: It's like we lost the lungs we needed to breathe underwater, but we gained the ability to live on land. The Ominous Seapods organism didn't change, but it adapted to its new environment the only way it knew how: by playing rock and roll.

TODD: Since I wasn't in the Max-era, all I can say is we rock harder. No more "jam-till-the-Gobis-come-home" shit. No offense, but I always liked the Pods' songs more than the freak-out comedy, before I was in the band. Fuck, I loved the song "Jet Smooth Ride" the moment I heard it. Yeah, it's got a bit of a jam, but it always went somewhere. It still does. We're still goof-ball people, but we take the songs more seriously now. I think we actually have something to say.

BS: You guys have, in fact, always maintained the importance of good songwriting. Why is solid songcraft essential in a genre (Gobi music) that mainly promises extended improvisational excursions into the nethersphere?

DANA: You need a jumping off point. I believe that the song is the jumping off point no matter what genre of music: Jazz, Rock, Funk. The great composers and bands all had great songs where you would walk away and the melody would still be in your head. Melody and lyrics trigger memories and emotions that exist along a non-linear continuum. The song ties us into a place in our soul where we feel emotions and memories past- present-future all at once. It describes, circumscribes, and circumnavigates the human spirit.

TODD: We can do the jam-thing; I'm certainly not putting it down. I love seeing a tune in the set where we get to GO, get to freak out as a unit, not know where the fuck it's gonna go, how long we're going to be on the journey--Are we going to stop over here and have a bite?-- and finally get together on an idea and bring it home to the song. I love it. BUT...if you don't have a good song to leave from and come back home to, what the hell is there to hold onto? Or maybe that's the point of the jam. I don't know. For some bands it's about, "Let's jam so long the people forget what fucking song we're playing and WE forget what song we're playing."

TOM: There are definitely differing schools of thought on this subject. People want to be moved by music, especially in this genre, where the music is not driven by one or two radio hits. Now to me this whole movement starts and ends with the song itself. The jam may be very expressive in its own right, but to me if it doesn't start and end with a good song, it has only achieved part of its potential. Coming back from a jam to a good song is like ending a journey by meeting up with an old friend and spending some time visiting with him as opposed to just constantly launching from one trip right into the next.

TED: It's amazing to me how many bands there are out there that simply do not write good songs. Sometimes we feel like the black sheep in the Gobi community because songwriting is our focus. We attempt to craft songs that will stand the test of time. Whether we achieve it is a matter of opinion, of course, but that is our sincere aim. Sometimes a song just cries out for an extended jam, and we go for it. But sometimes an eight bar solo is just as compelling; it really depends on the vibe of the song. But fundamentally, for us, there has to be a good song to fuel a jam. There's a certain sub-genre in the Gobi scene wherein the ride itself is what is emphasized and not the song it stems from, and that's fine because many people like that. I myself grew up listening to groups like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the like. All these bands had wonderful instrumental sections, but they all were nestled within brilliant songs. And you can prove this by the fact that many of the songs written by these bands 20 and 30 years ago are still as alive as they ever were. All you have to do is surf the radio for a while and eventually you'll come to a classic rock station playing one of the bands I mentioned. A jam is a great moment that happens, but a great song transcends the moment. I kind of doubt that very many of the bands in today's Gobi scene will have songs that have a shelf-life like the bands I mentioned.

BS: Where do the lyric ideas for your songs come from? Do you have a process for collecting images and turning them into songs?

DANA: Lyrics come from a perception of reality through the twisted filters of personal experience. I have about 7 notebooks scattered around the house, my briefcase, and the van, in which I'll write things down that pop into my head, daily observations, mutations, emotions. These thoughts are usually triggered by something going on in the moment and strike just as fast as they are ready to leave me.

TOM: I generally wait until something inspires me and then blabber for a while into my journal. What inspires me could be a person I meet or a bizarre event or just a line that seems to pop into my head. Sometimes weird things trigger it.

BS: Can you provide an example or two of "weird things"?

TOM: One time I had been up all night driving home from a gig. It was about 7:00 AM, and I was driving this RV we used to have that was constantly breaking down. This particular morning it was backfiring and sputtering progressively worse and worse. I didn't think it was going to make it up this last hill, so I started to pull into this Stewarts parking lot, but about that time Marty (our soundman/road manager/general savior) woke up and started yelling at me that we would never be able to get out of there if I pulled in all the way. So I started to back out, but backing a 34-foot RV with a 6-foot trailer is no easy feat, and cars started getting blocked and honking. Eventually, Marty, who's much better suited to handle those things, took over and managed to get us home. By the time I got into my bed the caffeine from the night's drive and the adrenaline from the morning's events had my head reeling. I was nowhere near sleep, so I picked up my journal, and words just rushed out of me. Those words ended up being all of the verses to the song "It's Good To Be Alive (For A Change)." Another example is one day when we all lived together in the house we called "The Grunge." I heard Dana working on a new song in his bedroom, which was adjacent to mine. At the same time I was cleaning up my room and found this piece of scrap paper with some lyrics I had written. The only half-decent line on there was "I'll reach my final destination on foot." I couldn't even remember exactly when I wrote it, but I started singing it over the chords Dana was playing in his room. It fit really well, so I sang it for him, and it ended up being the chorus to the song he was working on: "Final Destination." A more recent example is 'Too Much Fire on the Brain," which Dana had written when he was like 17 or something. We always liked the song, but felt like it was missing something. When Todd joined the band, he had some ideas for a musical bridge that we put together, but then it needed another verse. Dana didn't seem to be inspired, so I decided to give it a try. I started at the verse and chorus he had for a while, and a second verse using the same phrasing and even some similar sounding words came right to me.

TODD: When Dana started working on "Tornado Rain," I woke up in the RV laughing. I don't remember what the hell was so funny, but we ended up using that freakout in the song. It just worked. But that's pretty surface. A song like "Thought About It" is pretty fucking personal to me because I felt so down about something I always felt so good about: Music. You know, how the hell can one thing in my life make me so fucking ecstatic and put me through complete and utter hell at the same time?

BS: What about the song "Imaginary Money?" That comes from your last West Coast tour doesn't it?

TED: We were in Hollywood of course when that song surfaced, so you can see where the imagery came from.

BS: "Traffic on the five . . ." Yes. The good old Golden State Freeway. "The" Five. Here in California we attach the definite article "the" to our highways. We elevate them, we have a romantic relationship with them, we worship them.

TED: That tour was very stressful because the RV was on its last legs. About every fifteen minutes or so it let out this incredible bang that I think we all have Post-Traumatic-Stress- Disorder from hearing for six weeks.

BS: Let's shift gears for a moment to the jamming side of things: What is your mind doing in the middle of a long "out-there" jam?

DANA: Sometimes I think about mowing the lawn, old girlfriends, people in the crowd, what's on TV back at the hotel. Mostly I'm not thinking much at all. Mostly I'm feeling my way along like a ferret in a gun barrel.

TOM: If it's a really good jam, your mind is on nothing at all except listening to what everybody is doing and feeding off them.

TODD: I think the best way to approach a jam is not to think at all and just listen. And let me tell you, it's tough. If it works, then we know it works, and the crowd knows it, too. They know we took a risk musically, and they appreciate it. I like when people get pumped when the jam sets in because it's like we know they're on board with us. They're ready for the journey.

TED: As a drummer, first I'm making sure I'm locked in with Tom and that the groove is tight, and then I settle into it. The conductor of the jam could be anybody. Little dynamic shifts by Dana or Todd or me can make the jam step up a little or a lot. I'm generally thinking, "Is this rocking as hard as it can? Are we ripping the audience's faces right off?"

BS: And how do you know when it's time to bring the wild beast back home to the original structure of the song?

TOM: When you start thinking about what there might be to eat after the gig or wondering who won the Knicks game, that's when you know it might be time to wind things up.

TED: Most of the time it's whoever is soloing or I who gives the musical cues to end a jam. And generally speaking you just know when the right time is. It reaches a fever pitch and you think, "We've reached the peak of this jam, and it's time to rope it in before it loses steam." I'd also be lying if I didn't say that sometimes I'm thinking about anything BUT the jam: I'm thinking about watching TV in the hotel room later or that I can't really hear anybody onstage, etc... We call those off nights!

BS: How do the Ominous Seapods create arrangements? Once a song is written, how does it evolve into the epic jam one hears on the stage?

DANA: Songs evolve in a very Darwinian way. We beat the shit out of them until they stand up and breathe on their own or until we just have to leave them dead on the side of the road.

TED: The rehearsal process is very cool. Someone will come up with a song, and we generally set to work arranging it together and trying out ideas. Sometimes the song is written with a jam in it, and then we decide to edit it out because it seems superfluous, and occasionally we will struggle with a sixteen bar solo that just isn't working and someone will say, "Hey, why don't we just open this sucker up!" And presto... One thing we try to do is not practice a jam in a song. We find that kind of kills it. If we rehearse a song and this great jam happens, we tend to say, "Okay let's move on, and save that for when we're on stage."

TOM: Actually, most of the evolution happens right on stage. We'll sit in the practice room or at a sound check and hash out ideas, but when we play it on stage is when it's clear whether it works or not. The jams usually just stem from someone trying something one night and it works really well so it keeps happening and eventually kind of becomes a built in part. An example of that would be the jam on the Kingfish song "Jump For Joy." It started out years ago as a very straightforward guitar solo but different parts just kept forming out of it, and now it's like a four or five layer jam.

TODD: The other day I told someone that we were like a pit crew at a race. The car is the song, and each one of us has got that crazy gun that whirrrs, and zippppps, and stuff. We put it together till the song runs right. There's a certain magic a song has once it works. It really does have a life of its own.

BS: Discuss the changes you've witnessed in the Gobi scene in the years since Jerry Garcia died and the Grateful Dead disbanded, both musically (the bands) and culturally (the fans). How is it now compared to older days?

TED: We have seen a tremendous turnover in the Gobi scene over the years. It seems to chew bands up and spit them out! When the Grateful Dead stopped touring, it left a vacuum that was quickly filled by Phish, and young musicians began to be influenced by Phish in the same way that we were by the Dead. The Dead had beautiful, poetic songs that painted great pictures and told great stories. Phish's songs for the most part are a bit more sophomoric, and so, as a matter of course, we have a glut of Gobi bands with long jams and not much else. There are exceptions of course--moe. being one of them--but there are so many bands that have all chops and no soul. It's tough for me to be moved by them.

TOM: I don't think the specific event of Jerry's Death directly changed anything. It did, however, accelerate certain things already in progress. Phish of course got bigger, but they were already getting bigger and would have continued either way, maybe just not quite as quickly. More of the "Third-Generation jambands" started popping up, but they were popping up before as well. To me, the Dead, musically, had said all they had to say several years before Jerry's death. I used to go to a lot of Dead shows, but I stopped going in the early nineties because it seemed like they were just rehashing at that point. So already there were a lot of younger bands taking on the psychedelic torch of what the Dead had started. When Jerry died it was kind of an historical landmark that made things official, closing a monumental chapter in music, but, like I said, I feel the genesis of this whole scene was already underway.

BS: Let's talk about this great new record of yours. Did you go into "The Super Man Curse" sessions with a particular sound and feel in mind?

TOM: Basically we just wanted to make a great rock-and-roll record. Rock-and-roll is culturally and aesthetically at a low point right now, and we want to be one of the bands that helps to bring it back around again. We knew that no matter what we did it would sound like the Ominous Seapods. We can't really help that even if we try.

TODD: We wanted a rock album, plain and simple. We wanted a sound that was real, not polished, not glossy, not slick. We played live. The five of us, all in the room. All of the solos are the take, no overdubs. We just played the songs and that was it. Yeah, we overdubbed vocals and extra parts and shit. But all the basics were it. It really helped capture the energy and emotion of the tune because we all had to step up, be in the moment with each other, as a band, and make it happen.

TED: We did the pre-production at Todd's house last summer. We just spent the summer recording on Dana's four track. A lot of stuff we would start by just recording drums and an acoustic guitar and then would layer stuff on that. The recordings were super low-fi but they sounded great, and in general we wanted the album to sound like that: gritty rock sounds but with a nice shine to it. The important thing was the energy, and we wanted to have fun with the studio and use it as a tool. We added some classic sounds like the Mellotron to a couple of songs. Dana played trombone on a tune. I played Marimba. We got to play like kids in a music store.

DANA: When we made "The Super Man Curse" we lived in downtown Woodstock NY for 5 weeks in an apartment that had once been the summer home for the Piels Brothers of Piels Brewery fame. Tom discovered that all the hippies in Woodstock actually worked for Disney and went home at 10:00 PM. A bus would pick them up, and the town would be deserted until the next day, when the first tourists arrive bright and early to experience the thrills of Woodstock and all the craft stores selling candles and overpriced jewelry and burritos. We ate at the sushi place "Wok and Roll" every night.

TOM: We had made plans to sublet this very rustic house/cabin up in the back hills of Woodstock. When we got there it was not only rustic but had no electricity, no heat, and no hot water. It was late fall at this point and getting pretty chilly in the night. We were prepared for rustic but not THAT rustic! So for the first 3 or 4 days of recording we would come home at night and stumble around with candles and matches in the dark and then huddle under any sleeping bags or blankets we had around, and if we dared take a shower we knew for damn sure it was going to be a cold one. When we tracked down the landlord, he didn't even know we were staying there, and he wasn't too happy about it because the guy we were subletting from owed him money. We ended up spending like the first two weeks of any spare time we had trying to straighten the whole mess out. And that was for a place we were only staying in for at the most 5 weeks. But who knows, maybe being forced back to the basics kept us hungry enough to give us just that edge we needed. Although, on second thought, I think I would have preferred the Hyatt!

TED: The first day we got to the studio there was a big tree branch hanging from a power line blocking the driveway. The studio had no power, and we had no idea when it was going to be back on. The studio owner had a killer Rotweiller that we lived in fear of the whole time we recorded, it spent most of its time in the lounge where we were supposed to hang out when we weren't working. We didn't go in there much.

BS: What was it like working with (producer) Glenn Rosenstein? What did he bring to the project?

TED: Sobriety! One night, after a long day of tracking, the band went back to the house and drank a bunch of beer. The next day we were not performing up to snuff, and Glenn had some harsh words for us. He was right, we learned our lesson.We had a good working relationship, and he knew how to get us to play better, He's also a very funny guy, and we spent a lot of time laughing. But he did demand a high level of professionalism and performance. So we weren't allowed to goof off as much as we probably would have.

TODD: Glenn was very cool to work with. He taught us how to hear which take was an "album" take and which was just a good bootleg. You'd be surprised, but when we heard it, we all knew that was the take. He also kept the pace of recording smooth and fun. I'd love to work with him again. He's a funny motherfucker!

TOM: Glenn was a freak just like us. I think the best thing he did was to get us each to play at the very top of our game. He just had this way of bringing the maximum potential out in us. I listen to "The Super Man Curse" now and am very happy with my own playing.

DANA: Glenn is also a totally sick mutant.

BS: What makes someone a "totally sick mutant?"

TED: The totally sick mutants are the ones who are blissfully unaware of their own mutation, as well as anyone who can be easily impersonated or caricaturized because their personalities are that distinct and memorable.

TOM: Some of our hardcore fans choose to call themselves mutants. It kind of goes along with the whole Seapod Sci-Fi theme. Originally, though, we used the term mutant to describe any freak we came across on the road that was just so out there that they made US look normal! "Left of the bell-shaped curve," our old tour manager Bob Kelly called these people. Not the left side of the curve, mind you, but left of the whole damn curve altogether. These people don't even register as a part of the curve. One of the joys of being on the road in a traveling rock band is that these people seem to pop up constantly in one form or another. Whether it's a fan , the drunken local at the end of the night with vomit-breath who wants to sit in on harmonica, the alcoholic club owner, the escaped mental-patient merch woman, or just some weirdo who happens to be in line in front of us at a quickie-mart in, say, Boise, Idaho.

TED: We used to play a game called "Mutants of the Road." Somebody would do an impression of a mutant, and we would have to guess who it was and where we encountered him or her. Being on the road as long as we have, you get to meet some of the strangest people on earth, and, like I said; the less they know they're strange, the more of a mutant they are.

TOM: I think this game came up on stage during a song once at The Monopole (a club in Plattsburgh NY), and we had different fans come up on stage while someone was singing about them and describing them as "mutants of the road." It was talked about on Pod-Net and adopted by our most mutated of fans. One of our oldest mutant fans, the Bourbon Cowboy, even has a web site dedicated to the band and its fans called Mothra , an acronym for Mutants Of The Road Atlas.

BS: Why do you think your music attracts such a psychologically warped fan base?

DANA: It's because we dare to be different. We are mutants ourselves, always have been and always will be. We don't really give a fuck what anyone has to say about that. There is nothing worse than being a sheep led to slaughter. I think in this day and age "psychologically warped" can mean that you think for yourself and you challenge the dominant paradigm. Fuck it, be yourself! Be a freak! Don't let others tell you what you should like and how you should act. That is the attitude that attracts the mutants, I think.

TOM: Our music has definitely always appealed to a certain "outside" element. I think it's because we ourselves have never quite fit into any category. We're considered a jamband by many, but quite a few of our songs have no jams whatsoever. When we do jam, it can often take on fairly dark overtones. We have some fans in Syracuse, who shout out at shows for us to "Get Dark!" One day, they brought flash cards rating just how dark we got. I think the range was from "limo-tint dark" on the lighter side to "total eclipse" on the darker extreme. That's an example of the kinds of fans we get. Sometimes our humor over the years has been pretty twisted to say the least, and that may have reached out to certain fringe types. Sometimes we've gone for a rip-your-face-off rock and roll assault that may have been a little too much for the ears of the non-mutated. This album, "The Super Man Curse," however, I think can appeal to those folks we may have scared off in the past as well as the true mutants.

BS: Speaking of mutants, do you think Al Gore would enjoy your music?

TED: I'm confident that the Ominous Seapods would be Al Gore's guilty pleasure.

BS: What about Tipper?

TED: Tipper would react to the Ominous Seapods in Al's stereo the same way she would if she found a Hustler Magazine in his suitcase.

BS: Are you prepared to perform at the Inauguration if you get the call?

DANA: We are prepared, and we're rehearsing for the Inauguration Ball.

BS: What song would you open with?

TED: There could be only one opening number . . .

DANA: . . . "Bong Hits and Porn."

BS: Heh. I shouldn't have had to ask.

DANA: It's got a little something for everyone.