Southern Records' five piece, Check Engine, recently made a stop at Madison's Club 770, leaving the audience with pounding hearts and throbbing ears. Incorporating two members of Sweep the Leg Johnny, Check Engine gives off more energy than a snorted pixie stick with their swooping hooks and pounding beats demanding attention. The Daily Cardinal recently spoke with lead vocalist and guitarist Joe Cannon about Check Engine's rock style and song writing, the Chicago music scene and the definition of pop.
Do you consider Check Engine to be a Sweep the Leg Johnny side project?
It's not a side project. Whether or not Sweep continues, [Check Engine] is another band that Steve and Chris are in. It's hard to call it a side project since the other three of us don't play in Sweep. I was friends with Steve and Chris in college ten years ago. Check Engine is a resurrection of a little project in Illinois that Steve and I had back in '93. It's a band Steve, Chris and I formed and then found Paul and Brian for.
Do you feel like you get compared to Sweep a lot?
Steve's sax playing and singing and Chris's guitar playing are signature enough that of course you're going to hear echoes of what they do in Sweep. But the way we go about writing songs, I don't think they have much resemblance to the way Sweep writes. Sweep writes long sprawling songs almost in a classical style. We write rock songs and pop songs that are sort of weird because we all have a different take on rock and pop.
How do you feel your sound has developed since you first played together in 1993?
We have many differences of approach going into it. Of course Steve and Chris have spent the last seven years doing Sweep the Leg Johnny, so that way of thinking about how a guitar works and how a sax works and how vocals work kind of crash against my own way of writing things. Steve's a lot more into things like Elvis Costello and American Mountain Music and I'm always approaching things from the standpoint of a folk song or a three-minute pop song or a post-punk song. So all of this kind of crashes together into a very odd sort of pop song writing, which nobody seems to be able to recognize as pop judging from some of the reviews we've gotten. We often get called math rock which doesn't seem at all like what we're doing. But I'm not licensed to judge my own music.
I saw your show in Madison. Do you think maybe the fact that your music is heavier that people don't characterize it as pop?
That may be. Especially with someone like [the drummer] banging away like an irate gorilla. I guess whenever I think of math rock I think of things that feel antiseptic and sterile. As soon as something gets loud people aren't going to call it pop partially because a lot of people who play loud music would be offended if I called them pop to their faces. They would take it as a term of abuse, but when I say pop I mean, hey you've got good song writing. A lot of bands hear pop and think, hey are you calling us wimpy? When I say pop I mean adhering to certain conventions of song writing and thinking in lyrical terms.
Since you guys live in Chicago, what do you guys think of the Illinois music scene?
It's odd. The thing that immediately gets us upset is the kind of way Chicago is as culturally segregated as it is racially segregated. We have all these little band cliques and music cliques. It turns into things like who hangs out at which bar, who's on who's team and that gets really dumb. You find yourself in a situation where you start getting identified outside of Chicago with bands that won't give you the time of day in Chicago. I would really like to see that clique-ish mindset vanish. A lot of people in the music scene here get really pigeonholed and they support bands that all sound like one another. I think this affects creativity because you end up getting stylistically sealed off from other things. The cliques become ideologies about how music should be played and cuts people off from good collaborations and that sort of thing.
How did the name Check Engine come about?
I had an Oldsmobile and the check engine light never went off.
I like your song titles. Is \Don't Make Friends with Salad"" a ""Simpsons"" reference?
Yeah. We're big Simpsons fans. Chris can quote chapter and verse every episode. The song titles don't have anything to do with the song lyrics and we're under strict orders from Chris that the song titles all have to be stupid.
Do you guys like playing in Madison?
I like Madison, but I don't like playing in student union buildings. I'd much rather play in a dingy bar or an-all ages space where people feel a little bit better about getting rowdy. I played at O'Cayz back in '95 and I remember enjoying the hell out of that place. A freak show opened for us chewing on glass and pounding nails into their heads. We were thinking how the hell are we going to follow this, but people were way into us.
Your live shows are pretty energetic and I was wondering where that energy comes from.
A combination of six years in grad school and my cowboy boots ... um I don't know. That's where my energy comes from sort of half joking desperation. Chris's energy probably comes directly from AC/DC. God knows where our drummer's comes from. He's the youngest member of the band and by far the most experienced. He was playing when he was 16 years old. We played in New Castle, England in January and someone came up to me after the show and asked, is your drummer the front man? I thought that was great. I'm in a band where neither of the two singers are the front men, the damn drummer is the front man.
What are your plans for the future?
Long term we don't know. We're in the process of writing songs for a new record. We're going to record sometime in the summer, and have another record out in winter. Aside from that we may be together five years from now, we may only be together another year. But we're definitely going to put one more record out, and keep touring in the East, Midwest and Europe.
