'DC Supergroup': in conversation with Jim Spellman (Foxhall Stacks & so many c.)

foxhall stacks are a new-ish band from WDC. they play guitar-based pop with a punk edge, big guitars, and just all the hooks (seriously, this band makes some catchy fucking music).

foxhall stacks comprise jim spellman (interviewed below), bill barbot (interview coming shortly), brian baker, and pete moffett (interviews coming...?). with a deadline fast approaching, i'm not going to bother listing members' previous bands, but there are a fuck-ton. their new album, 'the coming collapse' is available from all fine outlets (probably some of the not-so-fine ones too) beginning today.

i caught up with jim spellman (he’s the gent on the far left in that photo below) just shy of a month ago. he was on vacation, and i had just driven a buddy's car through my neighbor's fence. regardless, we had an illuminating talk about making music after an extended break, the joys of making music with lifelong friends, and the challenges (and joys!) of making music in DC.

[the following interview has been edited in ways that have fuck-all to do with you, the reader, but i felt i should mention it anyway; any mistakes are mine (or bad reading on yr part)]

c - so we're here with jim spellman. so many bands, like, i don't even know where to start with introducing you.

j - sure.

c - foxhall stacks, velocity girl, high back chairs... i'm sure i'm missing a bunch of bands, and then yr work as a journalist. this is the first musical project of yrs that i've heard in a while. when you were doing the tv news thing, did you still play music? did you still have bands going during that time?

j - yeah. so i lived in denver from, roughly--i'm quite bad with dates--but roughly 2008 to 2013, when i was CNN's reporter there. and i wasn't really able to get anything going there, i was travelling a lot and stuff, but before that i had a band from, i dunno, 2003-7 called julie ocean, with alex daniels who was in swiz, and this guy terry who was in a bunch of indie pop bands and... basically terry and the bass player, hunter, are now in this band called dot dash, which... they sort of configured when i left, and they've had a couple different guitar players. so i did that. and i really like that record. i would humbly suggest tracking down the julie ocean record. we did one record, and then basically the band broke up because i had to move. and then when i was in denver, i played with some people but nothing really came together. one of the guys i played with is chuck coffey, who owns our label that the foxhall stacks record is coming out on, snappy little numbers. and he plays in a band called spells and has played in a whole bunch of bands. and so that sort of connection came back here later, but that's sort of what i've been doing the last few years. the foxhall stacks thing has been very slow to come together because brian obviously is in bad religion and that crosses whole months after months at a time off of the calendar. and pete moffett, our drummer, is the drum tech for kelly clarkson's drummer--a cat named lester; i forget his last name--so he goes out on tour for months at a time as well. so things have been kind of stop-start over the last few years.

c - it's really easy to work on a project really quickly and be really dedicated and involved when you have nothing else to do and you can practice eight hours a day. but then when everybody else has lives and families and jobs...

j - yeah, dude. tell me about it.

c - and if you're lucky to arrange a two-hour practice once a week, it slows the process.

j - yeah, so the way foxhall stacks came together was, i've known the rest of the guys for literally like thirty years. i lived with pete moffett at the end of government issue and the beginning of velocity girl, we lived together in two different band houses. and pete and i were also bike couriers together in the late-80s. so i 've known pete forever. and i've known brian almost as long and [he] and i, i think, had wanted to play together for many years and at various times we would play each other demos we were working on and stuff like that but, you know, he's so busy and we've never really had much of a time to do it. and when i came back from denver, i immediately was like, 'these are the two guys that are like my dream rhythm section.' and pete wasn't really playing with anyone, and i think he felt pretty excited to come out of retirement. he's now playing in a couple of bands too and has had this real creative rebirth in the last year. and brian is just an incredible musician and also a very good and dear and close friend. so we started playing and they were very supportive of all these songs i had and really put a lot into them. and we played one gig calling ourselves 'french horror,' but then there was this big terrorist attack in paris and we decided it was a weird name. also, after that one gig, i was like, 'you know, in julie ocean, i sang half the songs and i'm just not a good singer. and i want a proper singer.' and i've known the jawbox guys forever because i went to middle school with adam wade, their original drummer, and i was the roadie on the first jawbox tour in... i don't know what year that was. '89, '90, something like that. it was called the rust belt tour, when the band was j and kim and adam. and then i was the fourth person and we did this tour through the midwest. and that was the first time that i had gone on tour or anything like that, being their roadie. and so i went way back with them. and then bill came into the band, into jawbox, and i got to know him then. and one of the things that always stuck in my head was at some of these parties at the jawbox house or whatever, somebody would grab an acoustic guitar and sing along to kinda silly 70s songs or classic rock songs. and i always remembered that bill had a really nice voice and that he shared my love of punk rock, but also 70s hard rock.

c - big power-pop. cheap trick and stuff like that.

j - cheap trick, for sure. but also like ac/dc and thin lizzy and stuff that's pretty square, i think, to a lot of people.

c - i dunno, i always think that if you don't like thin lizzy then you suck.

j - [laughs] yeah. so i mean, there are like...i could walk you through our record and point out, like, the very first riff of the very first song is me trying to do mid-period ac/dc, like 'problem child,' or 'jail break.' and then there's like little moments and guitar solos that are straight thin lizzy. like the solos in 'cowboy song' are some of my favorite guitar solos ever. so trying to get some of that vibe in with the basic power-pop stuff. but that said, i think the sonic architecture at the genesis of the band was probably, like, the replacements' 'tim' and the clash's 'london calling,' especially like 'the card cheat' or 'four horsemen,' that's a little lesser known. or even stuff like 'lover's rock.' i hardly think of that stuff as an influence, though, because it's so baked-in. like, everything i ever do will have some paul westerberg chords and, all the power-pop like cheap trick and stuff like the records and the only ones. the band i did right after velocity girl--so i played drums in velocity girl, but then i switched to guitar in starry eyes and all my other bands--starry eyes... that band was named after this really great song by the records. and so all that stuff is so baked in that i hardly even think of it as an influence. on top of that, trying to bring some of that kinda 70s rock stuff to it, bill barbot came to mind for it. so i called him up and was like--i had gotten together one time with mark sullivan, who's the singer in kingface, and he didn't really think that he had the time to do it--with bill, of course, bill's a phenomenal guitar player, much better than i am. and we get the added thing. so in the beginning we played all my songs that i had already written for the band, but then bill brought all these great songs in after we got the initial stuff going. we did this record over several recording sessions over, i dunno, a year or more. and it's great. so we have this album that's coming out 20 sept called 'the coming collapse,' and we have a whole bunch more material too, so there'll be an EP coming out a couple months after that as well, with stuff that wasn't the right fit for this album. the music part is pretty easy. the schedule part is not at all. [laughs]

c - so then foxhall stacks came together more collaboratively? i was operating under the mistaken impression that bill had marshaled it together. i don't know why. but you and brian and pete were all together before he came in?

j - yeah, so it was me first and we just played all my songs pretty much but then bill came in and what was really great was that a couple of songs, including the song 'turntable exiles,' which i'm very happy with on the record, was a song that i had kicking around for a couple years--it's actually about some other DC band dudes--but i couldn't quite ever get an arrangement for it. and i gave bill a demo of it that we made at practice and he rearranged it and really brought what the song needed to it. so it's not like, 'hey, sing these songs,' or whatever. he really took ownership of a lot of them. and brian and pete too. like, there's a song on the album called 'the old me,' which i really loved working on and it came out really well, but that was a song where brian had some riffs and kinda had a song structure and i was able to take it and kinda 'song doctor' it a bit, get rid of one part and punch up another part, and do the vocal for it, write the lyrics and the basic vocal stuff and then bill kind of wrote the second verse and, uh... besides that it was playing my stuff. but those guys are so great. they're super supportive even when i'm like, ' oh, i don't know,' they're like, 'lets work it, come on. let's do it.' but also can go, ' no. that song's no good. throw it away.' which is what you really need in a band and a lot of people have trouble hearing. but one of the things that's great about having known these guys for so long, not only as musicians, but as friends, and going through life stuff together, good and bad and all that, is that you have that comfortableness with each other. so if brian says, 'no. that song sucks,' i know it's an honest assessment after really hearing it in a way that i might not be able to. and that kind of relationship you have with people, as musicians and as human beings, is something that's hard to get when you haven't known somebody for a long time, which is one of the great pleasures of this band.

c - exactly. if one of them says, 'oh, i don't like that song, i don't like that riff,' they're not trying to be an asshole, you've just known each other long enough that the sometimes the conversational niceties can fuck off and you can just be honest with each other.

j - exactly, totally.

c - you didn't go to georgetown day as well, just bill went there?

j - no, i went to a borderline crappy, poor-kid public school.

c - it's ok, so did i.

j - geographically, close, but worlds away from georgetown day... georgetown prep. it's a little confusing because there's a school called georgetown day, where i think brian might've gone, and guy picciotto went, and a bunch of people went. then there's this other school in DC called georgetown prep where bill barbot went, and kavanaugh went, where federal reserve chairman jay powell went, another supreme court justice went. john roberts, chief justice. it's crazy. but that's a total sort of like, suit-and-tie. has a golf course. just to be clear, though, bill was not... bill was a day student. like, so he didn't live there the way some of them did and his parents were not by any means wealthy. they lived in silver springs, not bethesda. which means nothing if you don't live in the area, but silver springs is much more sort of working class than bethesda, which is where georgetown prep is. and where i actually live now. but anyway.

c - as far as the songwriting process goes with foxhall stacks, it's fairly collaborative or are you the genesis of a lot of the material and then you guys kick it into shape together?

j - well in the beginning, i had this group of, i dunno, 10, 11, 12 songs. something like that. and so bill came on with those songs. and we must've abandoned a couple on the way. bill took over those songs, like, on a couple of them, bill might've written a final chorus. but a lot of process on the arrangements and... i feel like, especially with the singer, they have to have the flexibility to express it in their own voice. so there's that. but then it's a real free-for-all, everybody comes up with ideas for overdubs, and especially like harmony vocals. pete does a lot of the harmonies, and he's really great. and our producer, geoff sanoff--who's a great guy; he was in a band called edsel, and another guy that i basically grew up with--he's in new york, and he works for little steven van zandt, at his studio. he was instrumental to this whole thing. he also produced the julie ocean record and he's been a long-time collaborator of mine. he plays a guitar solo, and he sings backup vocals. and pete plays, like, a six-string bass riff on one song. and brian plays one guitar solo and one rhythm guitar thing, and brian plays slide guitar on one song, and i play slide guitar on another song. and there's eBow, and there's keyboards. and a friend of ours, renee, sang on it. like, once we get the basic thing, my approach is that whoever's got a great idea for it--including if the idea is, 'no, don't do that'--so the songs have been wide open. like, this one song, called 'worried', which is a little bit of a big change-up from some of the other songs... renee, this woman who i only met--renee lobue, she's in a fantastic band in new york called elk city--but we were friends on facebook, and she came by the studio while i was doing an overdub session at little steven van zandt's studio. and she heard this song 'worried,' which had an electric guitar solo at the beginning and a whole thing. and she was like, 'you should lop that whole part off and just come in with acoustic guitar,' which is what we did. and it radically transformed the song for the better, where it shows off bill's voice. so to me, once the basic song comes out, nothing is precious. bill's songs came later chronologically as we put the things together and he had a similar approach too. his great song 'law of averages', which is on the cassingle, is one that we worked on the arrangement part a lot together and i think a big part of that is that bill hadn't actively been writing songs for a while. [so there] was like a lot of that 'no, that part doesn't work, that other part doesn't work.' there were whole other parts to the song, and i think once he found it, it really came together well. and then some of his other songs are very detailed; others came together in the studio, more just again chronologically they came into the mix later. but i think overall, we hold songwriting as the most important element of the band, but it's not precious in any way. and i think... i don't know if you've ever heard the beatles demos. like of 'strawberry fields', where they work it out. or like, have you ever seen that jean-luc godard movie 'sympathy for the devil'?

c - yeah, where the song goes from like a slow dirge to, over the course of the film, becoming the version that we know.

j - yeah! exactly. so i figured if the beatles and the stones can be flexible then it's probably smart for us mortals to be like that with where the song goes. but also i thought a lot about my favorite records and things like the replacements' 'let it be', or like 'exile on main street' by the rolling stones or clash records where they're really assembled albums that... they have two sides that speak: they go up and down, and they mostly have songs with totally different vibe of instrumentation, and quiet songs. so we really tried to assemble the album like that so... like when the EP comes out in a few months, there are two really upbeat catchy rocker songs with big choruses and hooks and stuff and they're great but we wanted the album to have a quieter song, and have a looser song, and stuff like that. we try to picture the songwriting not just within that one track, but how it fits into the larger statement of the record lyrically, and how it feels as the record goes up and down as you listen to it in chronological order; a little bit of a lost thing in the digital age. but you know screw it. i like albums so that's how we made it.

c - there is the idea that you don't want to be precious about yr art. if something sucks, you should be detached enough to get rid of it.

j - i think that whenever someone starts to write a song, it's trying to express a certain thing, and ultimately that's the goal. and the person who began the song i think has a kind of veto power; or if it's venturing too far away from what they were trying to accomplish, i think that person is going to win any arguments about where the song is trying to go.

c - as far as guests on the album, i saw in one of the studio videos that you had gideon from priests come in and play on something?

j - [so] he plays on one of the songs that's gonna be on the EP, an instrumental, which i actually really love. but [it] began because i went and saw the cult a couple years ago and billy duffy's guitar sounded really great; they're kind of a cheeseball band sometimes, but his guitar sounded great, and i wanted to write like a cult kind of riff that was kind of like dark new wave or something and it kind of ended up sounding maybe as much like motley crue... but it seemed like another thing that bands used to do that they don't really do anymore is have instrumentals on a record. so i really wanted to have an instrumental, but i felt like it needed one more thing, so gideon came in and played, like, chaos guitar all over it. it's quite good.

c - nice.

j - i love priests, and taylor's band--who used to play bass in priests--flasher, they're really great. there's all this really great stuff now, flasher and snail mail, she's more from baltimore, but there's this whole great new thing happening in DC which is very exciting. it reminds me, sort of, like when velocity girl was starting and there was, to me, a lot of exciting stuff that was NOT dischord kind of band stuff. so it was great to have gideon come and play. he's got all these great guitars and all these great stories, too. he's a great dude. i think in DC, the core dischord stuff like minor threat, rites of spring, fugazi, maybe bands that weren't as popular... my favorite record is the embrace record. but all that stuff, which ever sort of direction you veer--dag nasty or whatever--the old school dischord stuff is kind of the thing around which so much rotates, so i think people are either drawn towards it or they sort of purposely want to move away from it. so for me in velocity girl, i grew up going to all these hardcore shows but also loving the smiths, and the replacements, and x, and jesus and mary chain and a lot of other stuff that was happening, as well as i pretty much went to every dischord show possible--like i saw the first fugazi show and i filmed fugazi doing ‘waiting room’ at this place called wilson center. it's got like a zillion hits on youtube. so i went through all of that and getting to know all those guys, and, like i'm a good several years younger than all of those guys, brian even. which is significant when you're sixteen and they're 20. but i was around all of that, in the middle of it, and loved it, and was inspired by it, learned a lot from it. but also i think i instinctively knew like, 'what am i gonna do? be a more minor threat than minor threat? no.' so i was pushed to go in a different direction and bring some of that ethos of that music into a more pop or noisy-ish pop music like in velocity girl. and so to me that was a counter... i was pushing back against that. believe me the last thing anybody needed in 1990 was another fugazi ripoff band.

c - so you went to denver and you moved back to DC six years ago you said?

j - yeah, yeah.

c - so, what are some of the pros and cons of making music in DC?

j - it's a very good question. i'll start with the biggest negative to DC now versus other eras is it's so incredibly expensive. in the late 80s [and] into the 90s, every band had their own house that they rented and could practice in the basement. in velocity girl, we had a spare house out in the suburbs that was just our practice space, and like one person lived there because everything was so cheap, you could rent the whole house for $600 a month or something. and it's just impossible to do that now, i think that's one reason why there's a lot more sort of project bands where things get going but then it's hard to maintain, because you have to work so much and everything's so expensive. so those are the downsides. upside, i think, is you have this really deep pool of musicians that really see things eye-to-eye even if the sonic aspects of the music are different. there's this shared DIY ethos, there's this shared 'no rock stars: we are doing this from the same level as the audience'-type of approach that is not a universal, so i think that a lot of that is what makes it relatively easy to collaborate with people here. for this band specifically, i was housemates with pete for two-to-three years. we both have gone through terrible up and downs in our personal lives as friends and kind of drifted apart and came back together. and the same with brian, you know. like, i'll tell you a little anecdote: so, i'm in recovery, and i've been clean for 18 years now. and brian was, like, the only person who visited me in rehab. so there are bonds like that that just kind of go way beyond, you know, just music. and you can't replicate that shit when you're in yr 40s. it just doesn't happen the same way. so for me, DC is home [even if] some of the times i hate it/some of the times i love it. but it's home, and that's where it's most comfortable to make music.

c - and it's gotta be nice having that built in community where there's a certain level of... like, i don't know that i would have even heard about you guys had they not had the single out on the jawbox tour but then i was able to use that as a selling point, like, 'this is a DC supergroup!'

j - yes! that should be yr headline. 'DC supergroup.'

c - this is capitol rock royalty, right here!

j - one of the things i wanted to mention [that] i think is interesting is that you have someone like brian baker who's been a professional musician his whole life, and he's always got two or three side bands and projects, and he’s the best musician i've ever played with. and he knows intuitively so many things, and we have a lot of shared vocabulary in music. so like when i say, 'this part needs more tommy stinson,' he knows that i mean to be kind of cocky and like, play to the hot girl in the front of the crowd as opposed to like, 'play the major fifth over the third,' or something like that. but for most of us, like bill, pete, j robbins, something like that, we got in and out of playing and writing songs to different degrees over the years, and i think right now there's this amazing groundswell of creativity. like, i don't know if you've heard j robbins’ new solo record, but it's fantastic. and i don't think bill barbot did any music for like ten years or something, and he’s a great musician who absolutely should be doing music. i'm not sure what the future holds for jawbox, but it’s obviously been rejuvenating for them to do that music. and then j's solo stuff, and guys like chris richards who are just constantly in there fighting to be heard and keep being creative when the rest of the world says, 'hey you can stop that now. that's just a hobby,' is an exciting thing. that's how it feels to me anyway.

c - that j robbins solo record, i've kept up with his bands over the years, but that solo record had the same impact on me that [yr single] did, where it was all i listened to for like two weeks.

j - there's this life cycle that people perceive where in yr 20s you do loud, noisy rock, but then you're supposed to mature into like some sort of singer-songwriter acoustic guitar guy, or some home recording project, and that's happened with countless artists and i think that, perhaps some people, certainly me, are like, 'fuck it man, i wanna play marshall half-stacks and be loud and fill the fucking room with loud rock music, because this is my natural voice.' and i think with j's record, there's clearly no hemming and hawing over whether he should be playing loud rock music. ian mackaye, who frustrates me sort of eternally as an artist--and i love the guy, and i consider him a friend, and i'm a huge fan of him as a musician--the fugazi records are like just great rock and roll records; you could go on and talk about a lot of stuff, but the songwriting, the big intros and stuff: it's just fantastic, and i yearn for him to do that again. but he has a new band and it's... so they don't have a name, but it's him and amy [farina], and joe lally playing bass. and they played two shows that i'm aware of, and they've also been playing weird secret shows at, like coffee shops in rural virginia or something, and ian told me that they've recorded and stuff. but that has a hint of what i'm talking about about embracing yr natural self and yr natural voice, in that it's a little bit louder. he's standing up when he's playing, so that's encouraging... i don't know if that makes sense, but it does feel like people are re-embracing being what their natural voice is which is often just playing loud rock music; and maybe people feel like it's dumb to do that, but i think it's as exciting to me now to hear a loud guitar amp and drums as it was when i was 14 and first started going to punk rock shows.

c - this last year has really been encouraging with the spate of new DC music. it seems like DC is really coming back on the map. with everyone in the band having families and jobs and lives that get in the way, does that limit even the promotional push you would give an album?

j - oh, god yes. it's a huge problem from both angles. brian, obviously, does bad religion for months at a time. he also moved out of DC a year or so ago, to asbury park, NJ; near there. which is not that far really, but it adds another wrinkle. and pete also goes away for months at a time. that's an unconventional version of the family issue, but bill has two little kids and he has a kid who's going to college. so the dude not only has two little kids but this one older kid. i can't even imagine what all that brings. i have one 12-year-old daughter, which is relatively easier than it was when she was younger to do this stuff. and i just moved. my partner julie and i just bought a house, and i have a basement where i can play. and things like that are huge hurdles, because DC doesn't have and has never had a lot of rehearsal spaces where you can pay to go. there's this one great place that this guy named richard runs, but a lot of bands have it locked out, so when you add all those constraints and then you have to line it up with when richard's place is available, [it has] been, at times, a nightmare. but we played last weekend at my house and it worked fine so that's encouraging too. but it does present challenges, no doubt about it.

c - it's that thing of, when you're in yr twenties, 'yeah we can go spend 8 weeks in a van not showering to play some shows!'

j - yeah, like, 'sorry boss, i can't work i have band practice' in yr twenties; 'sorry band i can't practice i have work' is the version in yr forties. it is what it is.

c -well, jim, thanks so much for taking the time to chat.

j - thanks chris, later.