{"id":1349,"date":"2014-02-27T05:46:41","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T05:46:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.modernfix.com.php72-4.lan3-1.websitetestlink.com\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2014-02-27T05:46:41","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T05:46:41","slug":"preston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernfix.com\/interviews-2\/preston\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Preston School of Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

(this interview originally appeared in issue #41 of Modern Fix Magazine in 2004).<\/em><\/p>\n

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by Gordon Downs<\/b><\/p>\n

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Scott \u201cSpiral Stairs\u201d Kannenberg named his band the Preston School of Industry after a former correctional youth facility located in Northern California. At a golf course not far from the now shut down school of industry, you can see the ghostly buildings still standing in plain view from the sixteenth hole. Having parted ways several years ago from the most seminal and important group to emerge from the nineties, (Pavement) Spiral Stairs has embarked out on his own yet again with the release of his second album \u201cMonsoon.\u201d I had the chance to talk Scott about his new album, his record label Amazing Grease, Mike Azerrad\u2019s writing, and the mystery behind Pavements strange set on the main stage at the very first Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival.<\/p>\n

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First off, I have to ask why the release date for \u201cMonsoon\u201d was pushed back?<\/strong>
\nSpiral Stairs: Well, mostly because of the music industry\u2019s ever-expanding Christmas holiday. (laughing) So it\u2019s like, you say you\u2019re going to put a record out in January and it\u2019s like, no one\u2019s around to work on it in January. So we had to push the release date back.<\/p>\n

\u201cMonsoon\u201d is a great record, who else plays on the album?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019ve got a friend of mine named Matt Harris, who actually came up and played the drums on the record and helped engineer it. Dan Carr is the bass player, and Chris Heinrich played pedal steel guitar on the songs where you hear some pedal steel guitar. (Laughing) Then the rest of [the album] is me. The members of Wilco played on \u201cGet Your Crayons Out!\u201d and Scott McCoy from The Minus Five and Young Fresh Fellows plays mandolin on a couple of songs as well.<\/p>\n

So this is like a whole new line-up for Preston School of Industry? It\u2019s a much different crew from your first album \u201cAll This Sounds Gas.\u201d<\/strong>
\nThe guys from the previous record didn\u2019t even…(pauses)…we played a couple of live shows together, then they had other projects that they went to. So I\u2019ve had kind of had a changing live line-up since then. Just getting friends and people who have the time and who want to go and play live. It\u2019s just been constantly changing over time, until this new line-up. I actually have a new drummer now, Matt\u2019s not playing live, he has another band he\u2019s in. So I have another drummer from Seattle.<\/p>\n

Preston School of Industry played with Mission of Burma at this year\u2019s SXSW festival – how fucking cool was that? How does it feel knowing that your band is now on the same label as Mission of Burma?<\/strong>
\nYou know, listening to those records – I heard them when I was really getting into music. There was that time where there were so many records that I had never heard. And when you heard those Burma records, it was exciting! Gerard and Chris (Co-Owners of Matador Records) lived in Boston when Burma was going on [in the eighties]. Gerard I think even booked a couple of early Burma shows? So they\u2019ve always been on the pulse with that band.<\/p>\n

How come you\u2019re releasing \u201cMonsoon\u201d through Matador instead of your own label Amazing Grease?<\/strong>
\nJust because those guys are friends and it\u2019s a much better distribution situation than Amazing Grease. Amazing Grease is just small. We don\u2019t really have any distribution or anything; and I wanted it to be separate. Even though we did do an EP on Amazing Grease. It\u2019s just better to be on a separate label.<\/p>\n