Shmuck or Rock God?: Talking With the Guy from the Makers, West Coast Garage Rockers

Mike Maker: It’s based
on the world of rock ’n’ roll. It focuses on one character that we
refer to as the rock star, who is basically just a composite of all of us in
the band. And it chronicles this character through a semi-mediocre rise. He
has to deal with the untimely suicide of his girlfriend midway through the album,
and goes through a lot of strange situations involving sex and drugs, and then
the album kind of reaches its boiling point and drifts away into a nice little
lullaby, and it ends on a semi-optimistic note… The album kind of explodes
at the beginning with exciting rock ’n’ roll pop songs that are optimistic
in nature, and then it twists and turns into something that’s much more
abstract and unorthodox. The song structures change.

The difference between the
concept of this album and something like The Wall or Ziggy Stardust
is that they were aiming high, and we’ve always tried to take the sincere
approach and only write about what we know. We’re not science-fiction writers.
We make music about our lives. The album is not about somebody who is a rock
star in the grand sense, not a David Bowie-type character or something like
that. It’s about real people. In everybody’s lives they have their
own rock stars and their own heroes and their own villains. It doesn’t
always have to be somebody famous. We all have our stories to tell. This is
our story.

There definitely are elements
of that. We go by different names on the album, and we do try to make it seem
like a production, with a cast and players. But that’s only so that we
can tell our story. It’s just a strategy that artists use to tell their
own tale and be able to tell it a little more intensely.

I think so. Like I said,
it’s a strategy that we have to use sometimes just to do battle with our
own insecurities. I think through the concept we could be a little more honest
and be a little more self-effacing. A lot of the time it’s harder to always
be revealing yourself, and referring to "I" as myself. Sometimes that
forces you to be a little more on guard than you’d like to be. When you
disguise yourself as somebody other than yourself, it actually frees you up
to tell your story and to be more revealing by using this person to realize
your vision.

I want it to be taken as
something that is the Makers. It’s not like we’re writing about anything
that we don’t know. All we can do is tell you what we are, who we are,
and try to find some understanding with the people listening… I think the
album stands on its own. I think the songs are good, and the concept definitely
doesn’t get in the way. It’s just a story. It’s no different
than if you were to watch a movie or read a book; there’s a concept behind
all those things. I don’t see why an album has to be any different.

I think so. When you’re
telling a story, you create certain scenes in your mind, certain settings and
arrangements–a visual. And when you create music with a visual in mind
it tends to be bigger, and somewhat exaggerated. Which is what I think glam
rock is all about–exaggerated rock ’n’ roll.

There was a lot of time
spent on it. We definitely wanted to have that theme there all the time, the
glory of rock ’n’ roll, the bittersweet tragedy of living that lifestyle.
We’ve dedicated our lives to playing music. So there is a story to be told
there. You don’t have to be the singer from U2 to have a story to tell,
to have glory and tragedy and depth to your life. You can be just a small person
from a small town.

I think the lifestyle kind
of tears away at your soul. Like all the reasons you get into it. It’s
hard to hang on to those small reasons that force you to make music. Like the
passion of it, the need to just be onstage and to scream. It’s easy to
lose that through all the business and the bureaucracy of trying to put your
album out and trying to do a show and not get ripped off and get out on the
road and make a little bit of money so you can pay your rent. It’s a tough
life. You have to give up everything to do it. There are sides to it that are
amazing. You can’t give up. It’s like a drug. You just can’t
let it go. But you’re always thinking, this is ruining my life and I’ve
sacrificed so much just to do this. And therein lies the tragedy. We’ve
all sacrificed so much, and we’ve lost so many people. And you can’t
help but think it has so much to do with the lifestyle we’ve chosen to
live.

The story is all there.
It’s all the Makers.

The album is pretty much
the story of one year in the life of the Makers. I don’t want to get too
in detail about it, because I think the album is as far as we want to go with
it without saying too much.

Well, that’s the big
difference between the traditional concept album of the 1970s and also that’s
what’s responsible for the stigma people have toward the concept album.
It’s just that the concept is usually so absurd. And it’s only because
it happened to be something that was overdone in the 1970s. But for us it means
something completely different. And I would probably approach the album with
a little bit of skepticism, because I too remember 2112 and that’s
what comes to mind when I think of concept albums. But I mean, we’re modern
people. We’re not trying to revive anything from the past. We’re not
nostalgic people. We’re just totally modern men. We don’t want to
hand people any sort of phantasmagorical cosmic bullshit.

The difference is that with
us, what you see is what you get. I don’t expect everyone to understand
that. You’re not gonna really know who we are. We’re not high-profile.
But the way we look, we look that way all the time. A lot of people take that
the wrong way, that we’re some sort of elitists. We’re just freaks
who like to dress up. We’re not real eccentric people. We live normal lives.
We scrape by every day. We live hand to mouth… But there’s one thing
that anybody can get from our albums: honesty and sincerity. And as absurd as
it may sound, it’s exactly who we are. From the stupid clothes we wear
to the stupid stories we have to tell, it’s us.