Speaking The Language Of Pop: An Interview with Roger Joseph Manning, Jr.

Posted in Current Faves, Interviews, Music |

Popshifter: It’s interesting you brought up those two being able to do stuff on their own. I’m also a fan of Jason Falkner [who was in Jellyfish for the first album] and I’ve read a lot of interviews with him where he’s said that sometimes he finds it easier to do stuff by himself because it’s hard for him to translate that into working with other people. Do you ever feel like that?

Roger Manning: Absolutely. It’s very frustrating. I have to be careful when I work with others. You kind of tie one hand behind your back. You’re so used to working on your own and having your own way, you don’t have to exercise a lot of patience.

TV Eyes (L – R):
Jason Falkner, Brian Reitzell,
Roger Manning

Everybody has a different way of getting to the finish line. Everybody arrives at that finish line in a great way, but how they get there is something we can’t judge, and I’ve learned that you kind of just have to let the process take care of itself. You’ve got to be patient to do that. I totally understand what Jason was saying; you don’t want to be patient. You just want to get in there and do it.

So that’s why all of the different sessions I do are great practice for that. It was very sad to voluntarily walk off the Beck tour in 2001. I basically wasn’t making enough records. I mean, I was working on his records (laughs), but that was about it. I wanted to play on all kinds of records, including my own, but that wasn’t going to happen from a hotel room in Omaha, Nebraska.

As sad as that was, I’m really happy I did it. Because I’ve had so many incredible experiences since then with such a wide variety of music-makers.

Popshifter: Obviously the projects you’ve done with Jason Falkner and Brian Reitzell [formerly of Redd Kross] have worked out really well. There is the Logan’s Sanctuary thing and TV Eyes. I know they’re both incredibly busy but have you talked about getting together on any other projects?

Roger Manning: Part of that conversation was that we were all so busy and happy doing our own individual things—Brian is incredibly busy doing film scores [Lost in Translation, etc.]—that we knew that we had definitely tried our best to get the TV Eyes thing off the ground and we’d all spent so much time and it just didn’t happen at the level we wanted it to. So we were like, at least we got to do the one record and get it out in Japan. If someone wants to put it out in the States, that’s fine, too. But there is an EP out now which has three previously-unreleased songs and four remixes.

I can’t believe it, but it was eight years ago this summer that we. . . well, the idea came from Brian Reitzell in 1999 when we were working on the second Air record [10,000 Hz. Legend]. It was the summer of 2000 that we all got together at Jason’s apartment and started swapping song ideas that became the [TV Eyes] album.

There was a period when we were working on it every day and the live show, which I’m very happy to say, I’m going to be releasing on DVD from my site pretty soon—

Popshifter: That’s great. I really wanted to see those shows at the time.

Roger Manning: We only did three [live] shows and they were mostly for the purpose of inviting record company people to check it out. Now, we knew there was going to be a huge live video component to the show, but it was going to be extra-involved in that all the video was going to be synced to the music. It was all going to be locked rhythmically. And that is much easier said than done.

Especially Jason and I spent a good four months in front of the computer, chopping up all kinds of video scraps to make background videos that you could sync live. And the DVD will ideally showcase that. So people like yourself who couldn’t be in attendance will get the next-best-thing to what that was all about.

Popshifter: One thing [of yours] I really like, which I show a lot of people, and which universally gets a lot of positive reaction is the YouTube video with Ross Angeles.

Roger Manning: Yeah, that’s good stuff.

Popshifter: It’s so hysterical. Now, who is he and how did that video come about?

Ross Angeles

Roger Manning: Ross is a very interesting family tree member, so to speak, so you’ll get a kick out of this, knowing a lot of the history of different bands.

When I first moved down from the San Francisco Bay Area, before I moved into L.A. proper, I lived in Ojai, which is close to Santa Barbara.

Popshifter: Yeah, Ojai’s pretty small!

Roger Manning: Yeah, it’s very small and that’s where my girlfriend and I lived for three years. It was right after Jellyfish had broken up and I was basically waiting for Eric Dover to get off the road with Slash [in Slash's Snakepit] so we could finish the Imperial Drag record. I was so depressed over Jellyfish breaking up, I was so anxious and frustrated with Eric disappearing when we were in the middle of Imperial Drag, that I kind of went berserk and started buying and selling a lot of old music gear. Now the good part about that was that I found a lot of good equipment that I could make a lot of cool, crazy sounds with.

The bad part was that, that’s all I did. I didn’t write songs, I didn’t jam in bands, I didn’t go to shows. I just became a gear addict. It was during those travels that I met Ross. He was interested in buying a keyboard I was selling in the paper.

And he came over and I was like, “Who is this freak? And why do I get along with him so well? He’s really cool!”

Popshifter: (laughs)

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Click to read more from Roger Manning on. . .

Bill Bartell and MST3K
Playing well with others: new TV Eyes EP!
Jamming with Beck and Ross Angeles
The importance of humor
Where does Jellyfish fit in?
Movie soundtracks
Favorite kind of music
The music mafia model
“Just do what you’re passionate about. . . “
A reason to get out of bed in the morning
Speak my language

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