Creeper Lagoon

Creeper Lagoon

“All I really care about are the real, deep problems people have. That’s the root of entertainment,” says Creeper Lagoon frontman Ian (pronounced EYE-an) Sefchick. “I don’t want to talk to someone about how their plane flight was; I wanna talk to people about the shit that’s hurting them deeply. I want to involve myself in, constantly dive into, drama. If there’s no drama in my life, I’ll make it. I’ll find the craziest girl out there. I’ll get drunk beyond belief and climb her house to get in, break in. I might end up dead doing this shit, but at least all the drama that surrounds me adds excitement to peoples’ lives.”
Indeed, high drama, by design or happenstance, has surrounded San Francisco’s Creeper Lagoon for the last two years. During that time, the band crafted their second full-length album and first for DreamWorks Records, Take Back The Universe (And Give Me Yesterday), released April 17, 2001. Thank inconceivable chemical intake, romance, heartache and the confrontation of untold demons for a deeply reflective album of rich textures (“Sunfair”), dreamy atmospheres (“Naked Days”), longing (“Lover’s Leap”) and self-destruction (“Wrecking Ball”). It’s the sound of a band peaking (sometimes literally), fulfilling the pop promise they made with 1998’s I Become Small And Go, an album that earned them Spin’s Best New Artist accolade and an avid fan base.
Anchoring the Creeper ship mid-tempest are two childhood friends and former schoolmates from Ohio, Sefchick and fellow singer-guitarist Sharky Laguana. Sefchick’s breathy, intoxicating voice guides most of the new album’s tracks, while Laguana’s dark and deep pipes handle “Lover’s Leap” (he co-wrote a number of songs as well).
The son of a turbine engineer for General Electric, Laguana played piano as a lad before falling in love with something slightly cooler – the guitar. “I was just bumbling around on the guitar in the courtyard outside the public library in Cincinnati in the middle of summer,” Laguana recounts. “A friend and I were tripping acid. I was 15. I was just so happy. The guitar sounded so beautiful. I just thought, you know, I really wanna do this; this is what I like. There’s only six strings, unlike the piano, which has over 200. So in a way, it was really simple, but it seemed more expressive. You could really dig into the strings and bend them any which way. You had more control in a weird way.”
Sefchick’s father was an architect whose basement full of “shit to take apart and reassemble” afforded Sefchick ample opportunity to hone his tinkering skills (the singer hand-builds Creeper Lagoon’s amps). His family closely followed the teachings of Baba Hari Dass, a master Indian yogi who has not spoken since 1952 but instead communicates by writing on a small chalkboard.
“My dad was more of a philosopher than a disciplinarian,” Sefchick explains. “He was an artist stuck in an architect’s suite. My grandpa was in World War II and worked for, like, 50 years making drill bits. He was hard on my father, so my dad was soft on me. My dad caught me trippin’ acid when I was 14 or something. He put me in my room and gave me this book. I opened it and the first thing it said was: ‘The nature of the universe is that it wants to do exactly what you want it to do.’ And now I play in a rock and roll band and drink with a big heart.”
A decade ago, Laguana, then 20, fled suburbia and migrated westward to San Francisco, driven to make music or die trying. Years of hardship followed, punctuated by his tenure working the desk at a downtown hookers-on-crack hotel he dubbed The Creeper Lagoon. That period, however character enriching, is, in fact, one Laguana would rather forget. “I wouldn’t go back to that time for a million dollars,” he says. “It wasn’t really that fun. I’d rather my brain be full of pleasant memories than gnarly ones. But it was by necessity, and you do what you’ve got to do. All I really wanted to do was play music and all that other stuff was in the way; you had to slog through it to get to where you wanted to be.”
Where Laguana wanted to be was immersed in a world of sound, surrounded by knobs and keyboards and shimmering strings. Refuge was a guitar and some home recording gear. Under the heavy influence of proto-swirlists like My Bloody Valentine and My Dad Is Dead, he cut a series of 7″ singles and eventually lured Sefchick westward to join him, cementing the band’s nucleus. 1997’s self-titled EP on a local indie showed unmistakable signs of ethereal pop genius. Looped beats and twinkling pianos collided headlong with thick guitar textures and memorable melodies. Reaction was instant and overwhelming. One year later, four of that EP’s five tracks (some remixed) would find their way onto the Dust Brothers-produced I Become Small And Go.
Months upon months of touring followed with the likes of Archers Of Loaf and Rocket From The Crypt. Sefchick, Laguana and Kostiner, then with bassist Geoffrey Chisholm, were thus formally introduced to the many dangers of the road, to the idle hours and deviant means by which one might pass them. The Archers tour, in particular, was marked by dark days and one very anxious Canadian border crossing. The writing was splashed on the wall, clearly legible to all but those who most needed to read it.
Flash-forward, aprés tour madness, to 1999. Having recently parted ways with Chisholm, the temporary three-piece parked themselves on an ostrich farm in remote north-central California to begin writing their DreamWorks debut. There, armed with more than a pound of mushrooms, they jammed for hours on end, hoping to congeal bits and bobs into pop gems. Laguana recalls, “They weren’t really psychedelic mushrooms, but they made you feel weird, oily. The jams were a little too elastic.”
It was slow going on the farm. Sefchick and Laguana were forced to alternate on bass, which stunted their twin-guitar dynamics. Countless ideas drifted off into the ether, unrealized. Clouds of swirling pollen sickened and subsequently depressed Laguana, sending him into a hideous, two-month wheezing fit. “That was a real low point for me,” he attests. “We went to a nearby town to see ‘The Phantom Menace’ the day it came out, and on the way there I was coughing so bad I thought I was gonna die. Dave thought I was gonna die too. I said, ‘I’m not gonna die – I wanna see this movie!’”
Rumors of fruitless sessions and psyloscibic mischief filtered back to the Bay. Soon enough, the band packed up and went home. Of the 13 songs on Take Back The Universe, only three, “Under The Tracks,” “Here We Are” and “Cellophane,” were carried to term on the farm, and they would later be re-recorded.
Once back in the city, Creeper Lagoon filled their vacant four-string slot with Dan Carr, formerly of grossly unappreciated prog/pop outfit MK Ultra. As the songwriting crept exponentially forward, certain band members were seen about the city looking less than groomed and somewhat dazed. In an insular scene hurting for gossip material, their shaky ways were all the rage. Sefchick sightings were a hot topic of discussion, his antics alternately amusing and horrifying.
Laguana sightings were rare, but, he says: “Pretty much everybody in the band, with the possible exception of Dan, is guilty of overdoing at least one substance or another. I think that’s eventually gonna have a result. It always does. I see it on VH1 every night. It’s kind of scary to think about what the result could be. Usually, right after I wake up in the morning, I’ll have a massive anxiety attack about any number of things happening – myself dying, the other people I share my life with dying. To live like that all the time wears you out.”
Eventually, the band would enter Marin’s legendary Plant to lay down proper tracks for Take Back The Universe with former Talking Head Jerry Harrison (Live, Stroke 9) – their first of many studios and many producers. What immediately emerged was the sweeping sound of a band in comfortable transition from indie rock to big pop. Classic structures were employed and given new life with keyboard blips, shimmering piano runs and rumbles of undulating rhythm. Nostalgic imagery and cosmic heartache dominated the landscape of songs, turning difficult memories into colorful abstractions.
“I was afraid of not being able to find something relevant to say in the traditional rock band format. But we decided to embrace it,” Laguana states. “We made the decision – we’re a pop band. We’re a pop band, a rock band, a thinking-pop band, an art-rock band or whatever you wanna call it. We’re trying to be artistic, but at the end of the day, we want you to listen to the melody and we wanna be there in the back of your head singing along. That’s where we wanna be, in the back of your head.”
Further sessions followed with occasional breaks for shows with X or Built To Spill. Then Creeper Lagoon headed to Fredonia, N.Y., to work with producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Weezer), later returning west for sessions in Hollywood with prodigy composer/producer Greg Wells (Crash Test Dummies).
Hours became days and days months. However productive, the extended, bi-coastal recording process was exacting a steep toll on the band. Dysfunction had become an unofficial fifth member by the end. Besides the strain of sonic perfectionists grappling with the existentially complex nature of translating emotions to fragile reels of tape, there was the issue of certain Creepers’ increasingly altered states.
Whereas some shirtless, tattooed wankers might treat chemical indulgence as a glamorous, historically mandated tradition of the rock lifestyle, for Creeper Lagoon, the experience carries a different sense of urgency. Drugs have helped them to forget a few things, perhaps a few years, too painful to confront. They’ve offered curious windows into a kaleidoscopic microcosmos of sound. They’ve thickly clouded judgments and made for long evenings of repeated, irreparable errors. In sabotaging friendships and love affairs, they’ve filled the fodder tank and powered the inspiration mobile. Put another way, this isn’t party ha-ha stuff.
“Most people don’t understand getting loaded,” Sefchick says. “They understand ‘recreational drinking.’ Drinking to me is like getting on the Internet; it makes it easier to communicate with more people and have fun doing it. When I get a little tipsy, it’s like 56K, and when I’m fucked up, it’s like DSL. You forget about things, and I’ve got a lot of ugly shit to forget about.”
The exhaustive process that resulted in Take Back The Universe taxed all involved, emotionally, physically and spiritually. As things came to a close and Creeper’s second album finally approached in-the-can status, Sefchick took a much-needed, one-month hiatus from rock and roll. He headed into the mountains near Santa Cruz to a hilltop retreat where followers of Baba Hari Dass live and study. More than 10 years before, as a directionless teen, Sefchick had been sent to school there. Many of his old friends greeted him on arrival. He brought his guitar but never played it. Instead, he played basketball and built rock walls and “felt what it feels like to be a real person in a real setting.” Then he came back and the band went on tour with The Dandy Warhols, which doesn’t do much for the old “cleansing of the system.”
Still, despite all the alcohol-driven antics, missed opportunities and drug-induced confusion that threatens Creeper Lagoon at every turn, they somehow always manage to find their way back to what really matters: writing great music.
“There are times,” Laguana says, “when someone writes a song that, for whatever reason, transcends the fact that it’s a song and that it’s on the radio and that somebody recorded it in a studio for money. The lyrics and the melody remind you of things that happened or make you look at things in a different way. Maybe a relative died and you didn’t get a chance to say something you’d wanted to say, whether it’s ‘I’m sorry for blowing up your mailbox last summer’ or just how much you loved them. Out of that internal conflict you might write a letter to yourself in the form of a song, to try and explain yourself to yourself. Maybe the song would take the form of a letter to the person who died or maybe it would be more abstract. What you’re left with is something true and reflective of reality. Then maybe someone who’s in the same position as you might be in an elevator or driving their car, and they might hear the song and it could have the same cathartic effect on them.”
“That’s the effect I hope these songs have on people,” he says in closing. “Our songs collapse and grow and learn like children,” Sefchick concludes. “People adopt them and learn to love them. They take care of them and defend them against people with black souls.”


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