Tom Greenwood - Jackie O Motherfucker - Interview

Jackie O Motherfucker are a powerhouse of experimental tone, texture and poetic freedom as their discography sprawls over a near 3 decade landscape. From pure chaotic arcs of chaos, to poetic melodies, JOMF is a collective that transcends as they engulf it’s listeners in psalms of praise and meditation. It was a true pleasure speaking to the great Tom Greenwood, who’s work I’ve admired for years about growing up in North Dakota, what inspired to begin creating music, his ecstatic and prolific career, multi genre surfing and much much more!

I’m from the Midwest originally, I grew up in North Dakota with my parents and sister Anne - My dad did research on migratory birds, and we lived out by the research center, near Jamestown. There was a lot of music around my family and their friends, lots of folk stuff, popular and obscure. When I was in high school I started going up to the Winnipeg Folk Festival with friends of our family. Also there was lots of heavy metal around my high school, some of us had a band together, we’d play sometimes at street fairs, and other high schools around the area. I got into photography in high school, and got some kind of award from a Kodak contest that I entered, which opened the door for me to go to art school when I was 18. I was in Fargo ND for the first year. Fargo had a very fun little hardcore scene in the mid eighties, and I played in some bands there, we’d do shows at this biker bar called Kirby’s in Moorhead, and hang out across the street at Ralph’s corner bar. The bands Hammerhead and Godhead Silo eventually came out of that scene. I started seeing Minneapolis bands while I was there, the Replacements and Husker Du, etc. I moved to Minneapolis in 1986, and got a job at wax museum record store on Lake Street, they were a kind of regional chain I guess. I had some friends who already lived there, and I joined their band, The Gyrones, playing Bass. We played a kind of acid-hardcore, not unlike the Hickoids and Scratch Acid from Austin, but longer songs, more jamming haha.

Eventually I started going to the Mpls College of Art+Design, and did an internship in art direction at Twin/Tone records, at the time they were at their most successful point, with distribution from Rough Trade, and Amphetamine Reptile was also distributed by RT, so everyone was in one big office. By this time I also had a different band happening, Jonestown, it was around this time that I learned how to design and press records, mostly learning from Tom Hazelmeyer at AmRep, who I also ended working for. He was extremely motivated and prolific, it was a great time to be involved in that label, so many great bands- The Cows, Helios Creed, Halo of Flies, and also all the Seattle stuff, Mudhoney, Nirvana, the Thrown-Ups, Melvins, Gas Huffer and the U-Men. Lots of that stuff came out on the AmRep 7” series Dope, Guns, and Fucking in the Streets. In 1990 I went to NYC, I moved into my friends painting studio on Forsyth street just south of Houston in the Lower East Side. I eventually moved into an apt on Ludlow street, and started doing more art directing for releases on Roadrunner/Roadracer records. I knew some of the early Matador bands from doing shows, and going out, and ending up joining Railroad Jerk right as they were starting to record Raise the Plow for Matador. We recorded with Martin Bisi over in Brooklyn, and that was amazing, I’d record layers of guitar, slide guitar and feedback, and he’d composite it into some great noisy solos, etc.

I think I only played one, or two live shows with them, but I still like that record a lot. Living in New York during this time was total sensory overload. It was pre-Giuliani, and the streets were totally lawless and chaotic, Hip Hop and club culture were mixed in with avant-garde, scum rock, Cinema of Transgression, and high/low brow arts culture. I found two amazing old two track reel to reel tape machines outside a dance club on Ave B somewhere and hauled them back to my apartment. I started recording stuff on them, cutting the tape into loops and I had them going all over the apartment, depending on how long they were. I was mostly interested in looping beats that I’d grab from various sources, and then record those loops onto the second tape machine, making these collages of beats and sounds that I saved on reels of tape. Sometime around the end of 1993 I moved out to Portland, Oregon where my sister was living. She introduced me to Nester Bucket aka Dwayne Hedstrom, who was living in a big house with a bunch of friends, and they were putting on gigs, and running a small DIY label called Imp Records. Dwayne had come from Bremerton Wa. and had spent a few years at Evergreen, in Olympia. We hit it off immediately, and have been close friends ever since. He already had the name Jackie-O Motherfucker, I think that some of the ladies in the SF band The Mudwimin had come up with it while he was there hanging out with them. By now I was living in North Portland above a boarded up drug store, there was a basement rehearsal space, and Nester and I started playing there, practicing during the day when no one was using the room. The set up was a reel to reel tape machine playing those tapes I made in NYC, going through a bunch of stomp boxes, me playing guitar, and Dwayne playing tenor saxophone. We would just jam over whatever was on the tape, when it was done, put on another one, or rewind and play over it again. This is the material that eventually was recorded by Mike Lastra and issued on the first Imp LP “Alchemy, Shit to Gold”. 

Dwayne and I both had some theories we wanted to test out, after having found a lot to be inspired by in the ‘85-‘90 post-punk/art damaged/DIY hardcore scene and the subsequent dead end to that inspiration post-Nirvana. We wanted to make a band that had more open-ended song structures and membership like a lot of the Free Jazz records we were listening to, but we didn’t know anything about playing jazz music. We started using shadow puppets and creating these narrative puppet shows that we would present around town, Wolf Brothers Blues, from the Flat Fixed LP is one of these soundtracks. Dwayne and others went on later to create the Winter Solstice Shadow Puppet Theatre. Jeff Fucillo was up in Olympia and Dwayne and I would go up there sometimes, he was working at Rainy Day Records, playing in the Irving Claw Trio, and releasing cassettes on his label Union Pole, all of the stuff he released was experimental, sound art, improv, and low-fi songwriting. He agreed to release the first two JOMF LPs on cassette, and those got sent out all over the place, he was prolific. We started adding musicians to the group, all friends who were interested in the lack of pressure and direction, and the possibility of experimenting. John Flaming, who was the co-founder of Imp Records, Icky, Jim, Honey Owens and Pauly.

Honey had recently moved to Portland from the Bay Area, and she was interested in a lot of the ideas we were trying to get into her vocals and guitar playing are amazing and she stayed with the project, on and off for years, as well as creating lots of other projects, Valet, Miracles Club, and others. We were playing shows in portland and seattle and I was also working at a little club in downtown Portland that had a resident DJ, and also brought in lots of tech/house DJs from out of town. One night the DJ didn’t show up, and they knew I had a lot of records, so they asked me to do it haha. It worked out, and I ended up doing a lot of week night DJing at that place. I Bring that up because I found the techniques 1200 turntable and mixer to be really fun to experiment with, and used them a lot in JOMF down the road. Honey had met Jef Brown at Old Town Music where he was working, and introduced us, we immediately found a lot of common ground, and he started playing with us. Jef had moved from Baltimore to Portland. With some friends, Barry Hampton and Jack Denning, all of them incredible musicians. Meeting them, and all of us hitting a stride together musically was epic, and the beginning of the band doing 2 US, tours, and recording in Baltimore at ACR Studio with Craig Bowen.

In 1998 the band finished a tour in NYC, and I visited an old friend who happened to have a room for rent in the old Alleged Gallery space on Ludlow St., so I decided to take the room and stay out there for awhile. Everyone else went back to Portland, but we agreed to keep working on the momentum we had built up while touring. We had done a bunch of recording in Baltimore, and I was able to go down there on the weekends and do more tracking and mixing. We started getting some really great gigs at the Knitting Factory, and The Cooler, so everyone Would fly out east, and we’d do little runs of shows, then spend more time tracking at ACR. Craig Bowen was the owner of ACR studio, and he had acquired an Ampex 2” tape machine, and a bunch of other great analog gear, and he had it all set up in this old supermarket in SW Baltimore. It was a wild neighborhood, he had a 9mm pistol on the mixing console, and there was all kinds of mayhem going on outside at all hours. We would work for hours upon hours in there, Craig was totally dedicated to the project, and so skilled- an absolute pleasure to work with. The record that emerged from those sessions was The Magick Fire Music, which Thurston Moore released on the Ecstatic Peace imprint as a 2xLP. It actually was released after Fig.5 even though it was recorded before, due to hold ups at the pressing plant. The Magic Fire Music, Wow, Change, Fig.5, and Liberation all came from this period between 1998-2002. We rented a big house in north Portland, I was back living there, and we had a studio in the basement, Jef Brown set it all up, and did all of the engineering, as well as playing and writing.

It was basically a pair of vintage Neumann microphones, placed really well, tracking onto quarter inch tape. We had regular Tuesday night sessions, sometimes just playing around and practicing, but more often than not we were rolling tape, and listening back during the week, picking out bits to keep working on. Doing the regular sessions really worked for us, also it meant that our community of friends always knew what was up, and to come over on Tuesdays! That’s really about all I can say about how those records were made without going into too much detail, it was just kind of a period when all the pieces were in place, and Jef Brown did an amazing job of capturing it all on tape. Mike Hinds was running Roadcone records at this time in Portland, and he was essential in getting the music out to the world. We worked very closely together on all the editing and artwork, and he just did a great job with both of the JOMF releases he did. We also started working with Textile Records in Paris, France, doing a split LP with Vibracathedral Orchestra, and the full length LP, Change. Fabien and Benoit were partners in the label, and they eventually booked our first big European tour, which was an incredible experience, Benoit was a beautiful and charismatic fellow, really passionate about underground music, and super supportive. He passed away in 2006 from cancer, but lives on with all of the people he helped with the label, and festivals he started. Fabien is still a close friend of the band, and continues to support our work whenever possible.

At some point around 2002, we got a message from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, they reached out and asked us to support them on some shows, at this time we were starting to do a lot of stuff with ATP (All Tomorrow’s Parties) from the UK- they had started a label, and were releasing some of our music... I had moved to the east coast again haha, this time in the Hudson valley north of NYC. We did the shows with Godspeed, and had a lot of fun with them, very much kindred spirits, and then David Bryant came along with us on a big JOMF US tour playing guitar. The music on this tour was amazing- Craig Bowen was doing the live sound, and we did these long, stretched out, slowly building pieces, fragile and chaotic improvisations based around old Hymns and Blues. After the tour, we decided to keep working, and rented an old barn right next to the Hudson River in Red Hook, NY and recorded hours and hours of music with all the Montreal musicians- Set Fire to Flames, and the JOMF crew. This has yet to be released! I’m hoping it will finally come out sometime. It was a kind of pirate ship utopia, that project. Something I will always remember as a kind of milestone of creative, collective improvisation.

In 2005 ATP gave us an advance to make a new record, and it was enough to book a studio for awhile, and stretch out a bit. I had connected with Rich Wells, who had done some work with Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 in SF, and was starting a studio in Portland. He was just getting it if the ground, and so we booked it for the summer, I think it was the first project he recorded there, so he was testing out all the equipment, which was perfect for us. We had a lot of musicians working on that project, and we’re able to just keep everything set up there over the summer, recording in different formations, working out the arrangements for a bunch of songs, bringing in people for overdubs, and also doing long improvised pieces. The idea was to record the song-pieces in such a way as to keep them open to improvised, and experimental elements. In terms of a unified concept and recording, I think it’s one of our most successful, in that we delivered pretty much what I had hoped we’d create, and then some. Also, the mastering that Mark Bell did on the recording was just phenomenal. I feel similarly about Ballads of the Revolution, which we recorded later for Fire Records, it continues on the same trajectory, but has its own character entirely. There are more stretched out psych-rock elements, that we had developed playing live.

Both Flags and Ballads are very much studio creations, it was really difficult to manifest this music live. Especially with the constantly changing band personnel, and cross continental travel. We always had more offers to tour in Europe, which was super fun, but also very challenging without any real band management. We accomplished a lot in those years, but there were a lot of failings as well, mostly all coming down to mis-management by myself haha, but I should’ve had more help, it’s just that our record sales never really were enough to bring in proper management. From around 2009 until the present, the focus has been more diffused, JOMF is still very much a functioning project, which I am really thankful for- we work out of the SF/NorthBay area now, in 2018 we released the studio record - Bloom, as well as a 2xLP version of Flags of the Sacred Harp. Feeding Tube Records has just released Manual of the Bayonet this year, which is archival recordings from 1999-2001, which I’m really happy with. We’re also trying to get some new studio recording started this summer, and have been doing some live gigs as well. This has been a difficult history to try and express, It’s long and goes all over the place! So, thanks for bearing with me. Also, it’s been tough to properly cover and include mention of all the incredible musicians who have been a part of this collective effort over the years, so if there’s one thing I’d like to end with it’s that when you listen to this music, just know that it is the story of many and it’s a very deep and varied community that has created it all…