Interview: Jon & Troy – Salt For Slugs #1

A few questions with Chokebore

G: Aren't you guys from Hawaii?

Troy (singer): Yea, we all grew up in Hawaii.

G: So how did it all come together?

Jon (guitarist): We all grew up in the same circles.

Troy: We were all into punk rock music and the skate scene. Johnny Kop was a big skateboarder (sponsored by Vision) and he played drums. We were in different bands and we just got together and started playing. He was my idol. After a while, we found out that being in Hawaii there's only four clubs to play at.

Jon: Nothing was happening on the other islands, so we didn't go there. But, we all spent the majority of our lives there.

G: That's gotta be kinda twisted living there.

Troy: Well, it's a beautiful place man. It's like a paradise you know, except that it's sort of stifling in a weird way.

Jon: We all like water.

Troy: Yea, we all like water.

Jon: I think it would be really strange to live inland.

G: Yeah, like living in the Midwest.

Jon: At least up in Chicago and in that area they have the great lakes which are pretty. Damn, I mean Kansas, I don't know what goes on there. I think it's near the Mississippi River. But that's just a river... In Indiana I used to go to the rock quarries and go swimming.

G: So, do you guys smoke a lot of pot in Hawaii? After all, Hawaii is known for its quality buds.

Troy: Our share. Our quota.

Jon: Not anyone else's share?

G: Do you think that attributes to your sound? You have a pretty unique sound.

Troy: No.

Jon: Sound just comes about from sitting there listening to it. And if something sounds kind of interesting, we just try to make it more interesting.

G: How did you get to that point?

Troy: We really just started at random.

Jon: I've got a tape of the first time we ever played. Two thirds of it is instrumentals. We basically started the band without having any idea of the sound. We just wanted to play and write songs that we had fun writing.

Troy: That's how you find your true sound, by experimenting with everything and finding that thing that everyone agrees on.

G: Is someone still fucking Chandra?

Troy: Someone else, I guess.

Jon: Hopefully someone, she's a young girl.

Troy: I guess someone else probably is?

Jon: Someone you know?

Troy: Well, er, uh, ... I don't know. She's my ex-girlfriend. You know, "the" girlfriend.

Jon: I guess that was your "the" huh?

Troy: Uh huh.

Jon: So that was Troy's "the".

G: So does it suck being recognized everywhere you go? Like this mob that's running you down here?

Troy: Yea

Jon: Yea, always dealing with a barrage of people.

G: I have the same problem.

Jon: (tells a story about Kevin from The Cows)

G: Do you have any good disguises?

Jon: We dress up as a popular band.

G: Who?

Troy: Led Zeppelin.

Jon: We dress up as the backup musicians in the Plant/Page reunion. We just blend into the background. We have been stockpiling costumes.

G: So what is a chokebore?

Jon: A chokebore is a mechanical device. I was looking for graphics in a book and I stumbled upon this story of the man who invented the chokebore shotgun, a device to make the shotgun shoot further and more precisely. It sounded nice, and it was a nice little story.

G: Didn't you live in LA for a while? I lived there and always thought you were an LA band.

Troy: We've been living in LA for like two and a half years now.

Jon: Cuz I was going to school there. Those guys actually went to San Francisco for a while and realized that was no fun. They would come down and visit me and realized that LA was a nicer place.

G: You didn't like San Francisco?

Troy: LA's sunny, it's just warmer. We come from Hawaii and San Francisco just felt really cold and gloomy.

G: I couldn't live anywhere where it is cold a lot like New England or Chicago.

Jon: Our label (AmRep) is based in Minneapolis and they just loved the fact that we're weather sensitive.

Troy: I'm freezing right now.

Jon: Other bands on the label have told us stories about riding their bikes to work in the winter, and by the time they get there they have icicles hanging off their eyelashes...that's not our idea of fun.

Troy: You'll never see us in any of those towns.

G: Do you think you'll stay in LA?

Jon: There's no telling what we'll do.

Troy: We'd like to move to Europe. We have plans to get a big castle in Spain.

G: Led Zeppelin!

Troy: A big old castle with a studio and bats flying around outside.

Jon: If there weren't bats indigenous to the region, we'd have them shipped in.

Troy: Yea, and trap doors.

Jon: Twenty saunas.

G: Like in those spooky Bela Lugosi/Boris Karloff movies.

Troy: Except all of our trap doors would lead to saunas.

Jon: All of our guests would get confused going to all of the bedrooms, and they'd end up in the saunas where we'd be waiting... in white towels. Hopefully, there'd be more female than male guests.

G: But Europe's cold.

Jon: We liked it when we were in Spain.

G: Where?

Jon: Down by the Mediterranean. We'll move around the world, always staying near the tropical regions. We had a friend in Hawaii who got into trouble and his mom sent him to live in Guam.

Troy: The end.

G: Now he's probably putting messages in bottles and throwing them in the ocean. Brett from Nasty Little Man said that you guys made a pussy record. What do you think about that?

Troy: Yea, lots of little kittens and pussy cats like it. Cats are good.

G: On the feline tip.

Troy: A lot of girls remind me of cats.

Jon: In a pinch, what about cats that remind you of guys?

Troy: Maybe in a pinch.

THE END