Limitations? Bob On Blonde can tell you all about those. Not only are they struggling to play shows and mix a new record while frontman Bob Hershberger nurses a messed up shoulder and collarbone, but their way-better-than-it-oughta-be low-fi debut album All We Got was recorded as cheaply as possible on home equipment. Equipment that saw Bob selling everything he owned to acquire, mind you. Working closely with multi-instrumentalist/muse Waylon Thornton, Bob and newly recruited bassist Kyle Raker are hard at work on beating insurmountable odds… inbetween watching television, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and ritually sacrificing drumkits onstage. Ahhh, the trials of indie rockers. Sitting somewhere between early Pavement and the first Blinker The Star album, Bob On Blonde are some of the best unheard tunesmiths out there today.

We at RetroLowFi are pretty crazy about the band, so we were happy to sit down with Bob, (shortly after his previously mentioned shoulder issues had forced cancellations of a road gig or two), to have him fill us in on the past, present and future of Bob On Blonde. Here’s some Bob-isms pulled straight from that conversation:

Bob on meeting Waylon/the formation of Bob On Blonde:
The first time I showed up to play with him he had a snare, three racks, two floors, twelve cymbals, a set of rototoms, a piccolo snare and a double bass. I remember playing with him thinking “Wow, he’s too good”. So what I did in order to get him to call me back? I stole one of his cymbals. Like, he’d have to call me to find out what happened to his cymbal. I didn’t just take a little splash cymbal either, I took his eighteen inch ride cymbal. Like, he was gonna know that shit’s gone, no matter what, he had to call me the next day. He called and said “Did you steal my ride cymbal, man?”. I said “Depends, do you want to play or not?”. He said “No, I really like it, I want to play”. So I’m like “Alright, I’ll give you back your ride cymbal if you promise not to use it and like twenty other things on your kit”.

Bob on the songwriting process:
We commence just to sit around and watch The Simpsons and get hammered until neither one of us can walk. It’s like two in the morning and (Waylon) is like ‘Do you want to play?”. Sure, let’s play and piss off the neighbors. I think we set up like four or five mics. We played (the song “I’m Tired”) for like forty minutes… and all I kept was a two and a half minute snippet. That’s all we sang for like forty minutes: “I’m tired of writing songs”. I’d say that probably half the record was done that way. Just bored of trying to write.

Bob on the low-fi nature of All We Got:
I don’t know any better. I started out on a boombox and learned to record by panning… it’s more of what the song needs rather than what the listener needs to hear, if that makes any sense. I remember the first time I hit fourteen tracks for a song, and I was like that’s way too many tracks. Completely unneccesarry. I grew up listening to Motown, Chess Records, stuff like that. They were all binural recordings with like one mic in a room and it was just placement of where you put each instrument. Ultimately, it was one mic going into one track and it was the performance that made those records.

Bob on performing as a two-piece unit on stage:
The first couple of months were really tough, took a lot of wind out of the sail. You put out this record and you’re feeling pretty good about it… you think “God, this is the best band ever”, then you go and play a room that only holds like thirty to fifty people - which is a huge difference from like an 8 X 10 room - and then you discover: wow, we kinda sound like shit. It has nothing to do with the playing, it has everything to do with lacking so many parts… and that’s why you end up having interesting things happen like setting drumkits on fire, diving into drumkits, keyboards on fire. We just do it. If I’m feeling particularly agitated with something that night then it’s gonna be ten times worse. Not necessarily in a live performance, but as far as the climactic ending of it… it’s more liberating for me and Waylon because we don’t feel like we’re abiding by so many rules.

Bob on his non-drumkit-jumping-related injury:
I was riding my Vespa, which I love dearly, it’s the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever owned. The tires were kind of old on it. I went around a turn the wrong way and it kicked out from under me. I fell and hit my head and my shoulder on a curb. I’ve been laid up in a sling taking painkillers for awhile… but the bike’s okay.

Bob on being sidelined from recording/performing with an injury:
I can’t work that way. If I’m working for some guy I don’t like, I can miss that, I’m not able to go into work right now. But I can still mix and do some mastering. You know, work on a record with one hand. That’s fine.

Bob on the bands shared influences:
(Waylon and I) really like metal. We’re both complete metalheads. If we’re on the road, a lot of the time we listen to Cannibal Corpse and Slayer. We both are truly and completely in love with metal. I think as far as the recording prcoess goes, we both have a huge respect for Smashing Pumpkins, and I think that’s where the layering comes through with recording. But on the opposite end of that, the bands I was into when I was young that really got me to play music was like The Wipers, The Thrown Ups, The Fartz, Big Black, Scratch Acid - really bad punk bands that really had no business putting out records. Bands… that threw out three chords and played really fast, those were the bands that I really liked. Waylon was a metal head. The first drumming book he got was like Metallica’s Ride The Lightning or some shit. I’m not exaggerating, when I met him he had hair down to his ass and he always wore it in a ponytail.

Bob on the addition of new bassist Kyle Raker:
(Our record) sounds like the Polyphonic Spree but there’s only two of us, it’s just not gonna work… he goes to pull his bass out, and he’s kinda got his back turned, and you can see the duct tape holding his strap on. So before he even played a note, Waylon looks over at me and gives the ‘head nod’… like this guy is our speed, he’s gonna fit. He did end up playing very well, he catches on very quick, he’s a nice guy, but ultimately what sold it to me was the duct tape. It let us know he’s one of us. He didn’t pull his bass out and wipe it down to make sure everything was perfect, you know?

Bob on the next record, The Upgrade:
A lot more production. Not as low-fi as the last one. So much production that I kinda feel like I’m making Chinese Democracy. It’s a ridiculous amount of strings and keyboards, but still guitar-driven song-oriented verse-chorus-verse structure… honestly, I’m comfortable with the equipment.

And yes, they’re sounding a lot more confident nowadays, despite the lucite-slick production. We’ve got a sneak preview of the new album, The Upgrade, right here:
Bob On Blonde - Come On!.mp3

For good measure, here’s a few songs off their first record, All We Got:
Bob On Blonde - Emotocon.mp3
Bob On Blonde - I’m Tired.mp3

The official Bob On Blonde MySpace page!