ENDLESS BOOGIE
The rock riff as atavistic prayer, as mastered by an über-record junkie and his pals. “It’s crude,” they tell David Fricke, “and very difficult to do.”
IN THE LATE ’90s, THE HOTTEST ROCK’N’ROLL SPOT IN NEW YORK CITY WAS ALSO THE best-kept secret in town. Once a week, a tight gang of record collectors and day labourers in the indierock side of the music business convened with instruments at a practice room on the Lower East Side to jam for hours in the letter and spirit of their name: Endless Boogie. It was “not a ‘band’ band,” guitarist Jesper Eklow recalls – more like an improbable dream come true.
A few years earlier, Eklow and Johan Kugelberg – Swedish natives and rare-vinyl fiends working in the New York offices of Matador Records – decided that what the world really needed was a combo “that sounded like Neu!-meets-AC/DC,” as Eklow puts it. They had the name, borrowed from a 1971 double album by John Lee Hooker, and the ideal front man, if only they could get him out of his apartment.
Paul Major was a legendar y elder of collecting, a genial, reclusive dealer in high-end psychedelia and small-pressing outsider rock with an encyclopaedic passion for music and an epic cascade of dark hair. “He looked amazing, and I knew he played guitar,” Eklow says. “But we had to come up with schemes to get him downtown, have a beer. Finally, we started rehearsing, 7pm every Tuesday” – starting in 1997, at a rehearsal space loaned from Matador band Chavez.
Friends and hipster-scholars cycled through the line-up, anchored by Eklow and Major, and hung out at the jams. Informal recordings, later issued on maddeningly limited LPs and CDRs, revealed a hypnotic riot of infinite stomp: guitars laden with Blue Cheer-weight distortion and the progressive-blues assault of the Groundhogs; improvising in the Scandinavian-Fillmore spirit of Träd Gräs Och Stenar; Can’s German heartbeat fused with the rollin’ and tumblin’ of Canned Heat; and on top, Major’s cornered-animal growl suggesting Captain Beefheart with Lou Reed’s monotone.
“Jesper would have a riff and we’d mess around it,” Major explains. “When it was clicking, it was easy to stay there. We’d get locked into that zone – one big thing, swinging all around.”
“We weren’t trying to get signed,” Eklow insists. “It wasn’t like we were going to be Pavement.” In fact,
it was erstwhile Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus who coaxed Endless Boogie to play their first gig, opening for him at New York’s Bowery Ballroom on January 25, 2001. “We panicked,” Eklow admits. “Suddenly we’re going to be in front of 500 people. Malkmus was like, ‘Dude, you got this.’”
Major recalls that after that show, “We had to ask ourselves: Are we a band that does gigs now? And the decision was do it, don’t pursue it. If people ask us to play, we’ll say yes. But we weren’t climbing the ladder. We were friends.”
TWENTY YEARS ON, ENDLESS BOOGIE ARE STILL A band of friends on their own contrarian terms. They have no manager, booking agent or crew, touring more like backpackers than a rock group – in Europe, for example, by train pass. “We can come to any environment and play on whatever gear they have to offer,” Eklow notes proudly. “It’s easy to play great on good gear. On shit gear, that takes skill.”
Endless Boogie also have a remarkable discography for a group with no career objective and few conventional songs: nearly two dozen releases in various collector-driven formats, including a FLAC-file set containing all three hours of a 2013 live broadcast on New Jersey’s WFMU. “I’m still in awe of the band,” says guitarist Matt Sweeney, once of Chavez, who has played on all their studio LPs from 2008 debut Focus Level. “It’s crude,” he says of Endless Boogie’s sound, “constructed out of this deep shit we all like. Yet there is something profoundly musical about it and very difficult to do.”
That mystical simplicity is all over Admonitions, Endless Boogie’s fifth album for the No Quarter label, both the most expansive and reductive album they have made. The Offender and Jim Tully run 20 minutes each and were cut by Eklow, Major, Sweeney, bassist Mike Bones and longtime drummer Harry Druzd in February 2020 at a former 19th century carriage house in Brooklyn. “We were actually in a sub-basement,” Sweeney says, “probably used for grain storage – literally the endless-boogie hole.” By contrast,
Eklow’s nine-minute solo piece, The Incompetent Villains Of 1968, is a simple, low-end hook in thunderous amp drone.
The rest of Admonitions comes from a 2019 stay at Träd Gräs Och Stenar’s studio in Sweden that was supposed to produce an album. “It was fine,” Eklow says of the sessions – a low-key way of summing up the desert-blues menace of Disposable Thumbs, which sounds like it fell off the reels for Beefheart’s Mirror Man, and the dark, tangled jangle in Counterfeiter with guest overdubs contributed later by Kurt Vile. “But it wasn’t really gelling,” Eklow goes on. “Sometimes you have ideas and it comes together real easy. Or it’s brutally hard. Sometimes it’s a bit of both.”
“The usual deal is Jesper will have basic riffs or grooves,” Major says, “and we’ll record four or five hours of stuff, see what emerges. There’s not a lot of talking about it, more of a semi-conscious thing – not trying to calculate effort, just capture the thing.”
Major, 67, freely describes Endless Boogie as “Jesper’s aesthetic”. Eklow, 52, brings the riffs and names the tunes, putting long hours into editing and mixing the performances – so secreted that Major didn’t know Vile was on Admonitions until he got the test pressing.
“It goes back to why the band exists in the first place,” Sweeney says. “It’s Jesper’s vision of what Paul should be doing. He’s got this thing on guitar – I saw it in the Chavez space – where it’s one riff for hours but he keeps coming up with these turnarounds in the way he plays it, like he’s restarting the sentence in a new way. But it has to flow out of him,” he adds, “and you can’t ask for it. Jesper’s take is that Paul is the purest person. And we want to get this purity out of him. But how do you do that? I’ve seen it a lot. Jesper is trying to pull this thing out of Paul, and Paul is like, ‘You mean like this?’”
“JESPER’S TAKE IS THAT PAUL IS THE PUREST PERSON. AND WE WANT TO GET THIS PURITY OUT OF HIM. BUT HOW DO YOU DO THAT?” Matt Sweeney
GROWING UP IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, MAJOR felt like an alien from the start – “completely weirdoisolated,” he says, “always the last one picked for the team. Kids chased me around, but I was the second-fastest guy in my school.” Music became his lifeline as soon as he heard Count Five’s Psychotic Reaction in 1966, quickly followed by Revolver and Are You
Experienced. That others did not value that adventure and salvation as much as he did hit home when he spotted The 13th Floor Eleva
tors’ Easter Everywhere in a Louisville record store for 29 cents.
Major began dealing in earnest in 1978 when, after stops in St. Louis and Los Angeles, he moved to New York, where he played in bands such as Walkie Talkie and The Sorcerers, and worked in Bleecker Street shop Village Oldies. He remembers “seeing a Moving Sidewalks album for 50 dollars and thinking, ‘Oh, I had that.’’’ By the mid ’80s, Major’s sales catalogues were famed in collecting circles for his colourful, impassioned arguments on behalf of then-obscure acidrock pioneers like Fifty Foot
Hose and private-pressing wonders by Kenneth Higney and Peter Grudzien.
Eklow was living in Sweden when he first encountered Major – over the phone at Kugelberg’s house. The latter got Major’s catalogues in the mail and “called Paul from time to time,” Eklow says. “Paul would play these records over the phone and tell us all this stuff about them.” After Eklow and Kugelberg moved to New York, they often visited Major at his apartment where he was “such a gracious host, one of those rare collectors that wanted to share everything he had.” Kugelberg, a music historian/archivist who played drums in Endless Boogie for a while, returned that hospitality by co-editing Feel The Music: The Psychedelic Worlds Of Paul Major, a 2017 coffee-table tome based on the catalogues and graced with Major’s tales of Manhattan’s underbelly – like the time he visited Genovese crime boss Vincent ‘The Chin’ Gigante, owner of the pinball machines in Village Oldies.
“If those catalogues hadn’t happened, there would have been no Endless Boogie,” Major says. The band came at the right time as Major “burned out on the intensity of the record-collecting thing” and customers with “pathological hoarding qualities”. After Endless Boogie started, Major met people who argued that “you can’t be a record collector and have the authentic thing to play in a band – like there was some intellectual distance. My answer would be Canned Heat: insane, obsessive record collectors.”
As the pandemic plays out, Endless Boogie remain suspended as a touring band. “I can’t wait to do something,” says Eklow, who moved back to Sweden. “I want to go to New York just to rehearse and see those dudes.” Major is holding tight in Queens, along the ocean in Far Rockaway. “All the way, this was about the live experience,” he says. “I’m sure when we get back, it will be ‘Oh yeah, we’re still there.’”
For now, Major has turned his collecting focus on little-known pop-psych 45s which he has played at DJ gigs on the beach this summer. “It’s mostly families, the general public,” he says. “They’re hearing Fifty Foot Hose songs and asking, ‘What’s that?’ It’s pretty awesome.”