Taste Test: Jesper Eklow

27 March 2013 | 8:47 am | Staff Writer

We have a chat with Endless Boogie guitarist Jesper Eklow.

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FIRST ALBUM I BOUGHT WITH MY OWN MONEY WAS…
Revolver by The Beatles. I'd brought some kind of psychedelic garage rock singles before that, but that was the first album. This was pretty quickly followed by stuff like the first Doors album, the second Jefferson Airplane album, things like that, but that was the first album. This was just the kind of stuff we were exposed to back then. I guess it kind of set me off on the right track right away. I was kind of a science nerd as a kid, but then I heard a fuzz guitar on the radio and then that was it. It just changed my life.

ALBUM I'M LOVING RIGHT NOW IS…
Hmm. Right now? Let's see. Because I'm coming over there, I've been playing Ball Power a lot. I've also been getting into a guy called Whiskey David, who's this Scottish guy who made this album in Spain in the mid-'70s. It's extremely raunchy rock'n'roll. That's the one that's in rotation right now. Every couple of years it just sits on the turntable for two days and I can't listen to anything else.

MY FAVOURITE PARTY ALBUM IS…
I'd say Kick Out The Jams by MC5 or possibly Fun House by The Stooges. Probably the best time I've ever had at a party was with Kick Out The Jams. It was the first time I'd ever drunk too much that I was on the floor, spinning. I thought 'they've got 40 singers in that band'. It just sounded like a massive invasion in my mind.

MY FAVOURITE COMEDOWN ALBUM IS…
Wow. That's a tough one. I'd say it's probably not a specific album, but my favourite comedown music is country blues. Charlie Patton and people like that. To me, when I hear that music, I feel like there's some kind of voice coming out after some kind of storm you don't quite understand. There's this calm, resigned vibe to the world. It's like these guys understand deep sorrow and the heaviness of life. You know, I'm hanging around in my apartment in New York and just the mood that comes out of these records is like I'm down in the woods smelling the trees; there's these strange figures lurking around and I don't really understand their lives.

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FIRST GIG I EVER ATTENDED WAS…
That would be when I was a kid at my high school. I was really isolated back in Kentucky. But then when psychedelic music came out there were cover bands and my high school had one play. They were called The Vanguards. They were just playing covers of Hendrix songs and stuff like that. The first famous band I saw was probably Grand Funk Railroad around the time of the I'm Your Captain album, but they were playing stuff off that second album. It was astonishing.

WEIRDEST GIG EXPERIENCE I'VE EVER HAD…
Probably the weirdest ones I've had are the ones I heard about the next day that I don't remember myself. That's happened a couple of times. But there's been other weird, disorienting things. Like when we were playing in Spain recently, we did a great sound check and then when we took the [stage] they reversed the guitars so I couldn't hear what I was playing. So I'd have to run over to the mic and sing and then run back over to my guitar amp just to hear what the fuck I was playing. That was a weird experience.

THE BIGGEST NON-MUSICAL INFLUENCES ON ME HAVE BEEN…
I would say some of it would be writers and stuff. You know, Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft are sort of influences on my sense of imagery and things like that. I like Gothic, small-town weirdness. That kind of feeling you get when there's a stranger in town and you don't quite know what's up with them, but you know it's something creepy.

THE COOLEST PERSON I EVER MET…
That is a tricky one. I've been fortunate enough over the years, being into obscure psychedelic garage punk and strange music, but one of the coolest people I've ever met would have to be this guy named Peter Grudzien. God, I've got a hundred stories about him, all right out of The Twilight Zone. He was from Queens in New York and in the late-'50s his family took a trip down south. He was this gay kid from Queens who heard country music for the first time in the south and he came back to New York and started a rockabilly trio, kind of modelled on Johnny Cash's sound. He'd be doing songs with lines like “Don't come feeling up my doorknob anymore”. Later on he heard Bob Dylan's lyrics and his songs got even stranger: lyrics like “You walk into a room and meet all your childhood toys”, stuff like that. It's just amazing music. He had this thing of not wanting to record his music because he thought the government was intercepting it and ruining his career. He'd ring me at like three or four in the morning and tell me he knew that I wasn't really a musician and that I was working for the FBI and things like that. Like I said, right out of The Twilight Zone, but he's just such a lovely guy and definitely the coolest person I've ever met.

THE BIGGEST CELEBRITY CRUSH I'VE EVER HAD IS...
Okay, I don't know what the cool factor would be nowadays, but when I was a little kid I saw Linda Ronstadt on TV and she was wearing this mini dress and bare feet. I got just a massive crush on Linda Ronstadt right then. It was, like, 'Wow! This is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I think I'm having a sexual awakening. Now I know what everyone is talking about.' And you know what, now that I think about it, those records she made, they're eternally cool. I don't care what anyone else says.

IF I COULD HANG OUT IN ANY TIME AND PLACE IN HISTORY IT'D BE…
When I was 12 years old I would have said I wanted to be in San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury. I was so fascinated with LSD and all these kids in crash pads listening to rock and all that. Now I would say I probably wouldn't go too far back in history. I'd say probably New York circa 1965, when The Velvet Underground were getting going and that kind of thing. They were one of the other bands I first got into in Kentucky that all my friends couldn't understand. All my friends were saying 'this isn't music' and I was kind of saying 'yes it is, are you kidding?' While it did sound like a whole lot of noise being made by a bunch of degenerates, there was still some kind of blend of the creativity that was going on in the art world at the time there with the music those guys were making that somehow encapsulated the spirit of rock'n'roll.

IF I WASN'T MAKING MUSIC I'D BE…
Listening to it.

Interview by Tony McMahon

Endless Boogie will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 27 March - GoodGod Small Club, Sydney NSW
Thursday 28 March - Brisbane Hotel, Hobart TAS
Friday 29 March - The Tote, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 30 and Sunday 31 March - Boogie 7 Festival, Tallarook VIC
Wednesday 3 April - Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 4 April - Barwon Club, Geelong VIC