Rubber Soul books Mike and the Moonpies for March concert here

Editor’s Note: This interview of Mike and the Moonpies frontman/guitarist Mike Harmeier by Peter Lindblad appears in the February issue of Out & About in Wisconsin. Excerpts are reprinted with permission. The band’s concert in Wittenberg on March 10 is the first of a series of shows this year by Rob Wyman of Rubber Sole Productions.

Q: I understand you’re somebody who really loves being out on the road, and you guys had all those shows last year. What do you like most about it?
A: I mostly like meeting new people, and there’s always stories. Every tour, there are some stories that me and the guys will talk about for years, that when we’re old men we’ll talk about (laughs). So, to me, it’s kind of like writing our book, collecting all those stories over the years.

Q: You had the live album, Live at WinStar World Casino and Resort, that came out before your newest release, Steak Night at The Prairie Rose. What was the reasoning for putting out a live album?
A: People had been telling us for a long time that they really liked our live show even more than our records. I always thought that was a backhanded compliment, but I kind of understood it. And we do so many live shows – we’re doing over 200 dates a year – that I thought it was a pretty good way to accurately represent what we do and maybe to sell what to expect at our live show, rather than just hearing our record. And I also had a lot of older songs that were on older records that … we didn’t have a big budget for making records back then, and they sounded kind of not up to par. It seemed like a good way to me to re-release those older songs and have them sound better, and people can maybe want to listen to them more than what they were before on those older records.

Q: It seems like some of the things that you learned doing the live record informed your new record. Is that true? Did all that affect what you did on the new record?
A: It did. Working with that producer, Adam Odor, for that live record, made me feel more comfortable with doing a more live approach to a studio record. He did such a great job with mixing and stuff with that live record that I thought, “Man, we could do that in the studio and basically go in the studio and just cut a record like it’s us as a band and not do a whole bunch of overdubbing, and just cut it until we get it right.” So, we just tried to make that record be as live as we could possibly get it in the studio, and I think it worked out perfectly.

Q: What was the most difficult part of handing over the production reins to somebody else?
A: Well, I was kind of a control freak before about records. But over the years, it’s gotten to be where I’m way more comfortable just kind of letting things happen, because I’ve seen the results of it just a little bit [more] these days. And it’s more fun now to me to just let it happen than just to have this certain idea of what I really want, because I know what that’s going to be. The craziness of letting it happen is appealing to me these days.

Q: In what ways was this more of a band record than you’ve done in the past?
A: Because everybody got to play what they wanted. I think part of doing that live record was to get people comfortable with hearing what they did live, so I think everybody took that approach to this record and said, “Let’s just play whatever we want to play, and we’ll keep what we want.” All the decisions made on the record were full band. It wasn’t just me making decisions, or Adam or the band. We all kind of made our own decisions and had our own say in what everyone did in our own parts on the record.

Q: It sounds like the title track took a little time to write. Talk about your history with the Prairie Rose and how it dates all the way back to spending time with your dad.
A: Yeah, he took me there when I was a kid for a lot of years, and then, when I was 14, I had maybe three years of OVERSET FOLLOWS:guitar lessons under my belt, so I started to play there every Wednesday night. He got me that gig. And that was kind of the thing for me. I did that for about three years in that club, and some other clubs around the area where I grew up … and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what songs to play and what works with the crowd. And I kind of tried to hone my showmanship level in those shows, and it was a fun experience and it gave me the bug I’m still chasing now.

Q: Do you remember what your first performance there was like?
A: Nobody really paid attention to me (laughs). There was a football game on every night that I was playing, and there were only probably five or six regulars in the bar every night that I played, and I knew all of those old men. They were all friends of my dad. So, they had their songs that they liked. There’s always requests (laughs). There are always people that like certain songs. So, that’s how I built my first set – it was just what those guys wanted to hear and the songs that I’d learned.

Q: What was the inspiration for “Beaches of Biloxi?”
A: We’d done our first kind of Southeast tour to Florida to play a festival, and when we were coming back, the midway point was Biloxi, back from where we were in Florida back to Austin. So, we stopped there to stay the night. And we had been playing a lot of casinos the past few years, so we know our casino game. And our bus driver, he goes there a lot, too. And so, we stopped there, and he’s a songwriter in his own right, and he had that line, where he said something about, “We’re going to sail on the beaches of Biloxi tonight.” And I said, “Yeah, it’s probably going to get the best of me again.” And then we proceeded to lose all of our money that we made at that Biloxi show (laughs). So, we came home with nothing. We came home with a song. That was about it.

Q: It sounds like the emphasis for your as a songwriter this time around was to keep things simple. Why did that appeal to you so much?
A: There’s a lot of reasons. I wanted the band to become more comfortable with everything we were playing and not just me writing singer-songwriter songs [but] things that could be open-ended. Jams that could be open-ended, chord changes that could be open-ended. You know, I’m playing 24 songs in like a 90-minute set, and I wanted it to be more like I can play 12 songs in a 90-minute set, and we can jam on those songs for a long time and I can let those things breathe. And I kind of just tried to write the record in a way that I knew that I could make the live show expanded, rather than be typed and tied to the singer-songwriter song.

Q: You’ve been quoted as saying this record has an ‘80s feel to it, with all the Wurlitzer on the record. Was that intentional or just happened?
A: Well, that’s a good question. I mean, it definitely just happened. Like, the way the record sounds, we never intended on making a record that sounded like that, but the instrumentation that we had at the time and the places where we were doing it and the songs that we had all kind of created this ‘80s kind of layer of sound, which I love. A lot of people have compared us to that era of country music in the first place, so it only seems right that our record sounded that way, but definitely, we didn’t intend on that. It was just the way we sounded at the moment. And it’s the way we have sounded most of our career, but we’re always up for changing it up.

Q: People have often talked about the authenticity of your music. Do you feel like your music and your band fit into a certain era or is it its own thing?
A: Well, it is its own thing. I mean, we definitely get that ‘80s, ‘90s country thing a lot, which I understand. I grew up listening to that, and that’s just going to happen. The way that I write songs and stuff like that, it’s just going to happen because of the influence of what I’ve listened to in the past. At the same time, as a band, we really don’t want to be tied to any of that. We try to go out of way to be ourselves. Getting tied to a certain era or genre of the country music realm, it’s frustrating for me a little bit. I can definitely see why people would say that, and we definitely aren’t opposed to those opinions (laughs), because we do love that music.

Q: What was the inspiration for “Road Crew?”
A: “Road Crew” … this was the first maybe couple of years where we had an actual somebody go with us on the road, and somebody that’s not in the band taking care of the driving or selling merch or things like that. And we went through a few of those people … .they kind of come and go, just because the road lifestyle is difficult and we were always trying to find somebody who just didn’t really have a job who could go with us or just would do it for very little or no money. So I kind of wrote that song as a hodgepodge of all those characters put together into one song.

Q: What’s next for the band?
A: Well, we have a new record in the can already. We’re going to keep our tour schedule up and do probably more dates than ever before. So, we’ll probably break 250 dates this year. Our thing this year is releasing this new record and national touring and building markets we haven’t really built yet. I mean, we’re doing really well in the Midwest area, and I think we’re going to build a lot of West Coast markets this year, a lot of the Northeast. We’re doing that in March, too. We’re doing all that area up there … so, it’s all about national touring for us and making a name, like I said, in places we haven’t really been to so far.

AT A GLANCE
WHAT:
Mike and the Moonpies concert
WHEN: 4 p.m. March 10
WHERE: Auditorium, Wittenberg-Birnamwood High School, 400 W. Grand Ave., Wittenberg
FYI: Tickets are $20-$30 and available at rubbersoulproductions.com.