John Roderick is a talker. As a musician and Seattle scenester
for the past 20 years, Roderick has accrued many insights into
making music, getting along in bands and what makes a city like
Seattle such a hotbed for musical talent. Luckily, he was more than
happy to divulge these secrets before he went onstage at Off
Broadway with his band, the Long Winters, on Tuesday in support of
the Pernice Brothers.

Roderick said he got his start in music because of his
ineptitude at guitar when he was younger.

“All my friends in high school wanted to be guitar players, and
so I got a guitar. I realized really early that I had the skills to
be a good guitar player,” Roderick said. “All my friends were
playing solos, and learning music, and I wasn’t interested in any
of that. I had a guitar, but it just sort of gathered dust. I
learned a few chords and I realized that I could sing and play the
guitar at the same time. I didn’t learn anything complicated, just
four chords, but I could play and sing, which is something none of
the other guitar players that were all trying to be Eddie Van Halen
could do. So, the fact that I could sing and play the guitar
suddenly made me a hot commodity. As time went on, I realized I
could write my own songs, and didn’t have to rely on other guitar
players to come up with cool riffs.” Roderick went on to say he
became a good guitar player almost by default because he wanted to
play more complicated songs, so he had to get better to do
that.

Before taking on music professionally, Roderick said he had a
slew of odd jobs, including being a VJ for a UHF, 24-hour music
television station in Anchorage, Alaska, when he was
16-years-old.

“It was an idea they had in the ’80s, like ‘Oh, MTV is popular,
we’ll start putting 24-hour music television stations everywhere,
like it’ll be the new radio.’ They started broadcasting in
Anchorage, which was one of the first two or three cities where
they tried this out. I was 16, and I thought I was made to be a VJ,
so I went down to the station every day and begged for them to make
me a VJ,” he said. After a while, he said, they gave him the
country and western show and the rap show, both of which took up
the time slots on Saturday and Sunday morning.

Roderick went on to talk about why Seattle has been such a hot
spot for rock bands as of late, and even back in the grunge
era.

“It is because Seattle is so far away. It’s a three-and-a-half
day’s drive from [St. Louis] straight, through pretty much empty
land. Seattle is as far from San Francisco, which is the next
biggest city closest to it, as Chicago is from New York. They are
exactly the same distance–810 miles. In an 800-mile radius from
Chicago, you have all the cities of America. In Seattle you are
very isolated, and that means that you’re forced to make
entertainment for yourself,” he said.

His banter continued onstage, as he dubbed the current tour with
the Pernice Brothers the “Grad-core” tour, because of the high
percentage of doctoral students coming to the shows, as well as
telling stories of the rampant stop-sign problem in St. Louis and
of his acquaintance with one of the Bush kids.

When he and his band did actually decide to perform, they put on
a brilliant show. Mostly sticking to material from their latest
release When I Pretend to Fall, the band created a sound much more
raw, but far more exciting than what was on the record.

The most surprising thing about this opening set was the
knowledge of the crowd; more than half of the songs played were the
result of audience requests, even delving into the band’s older
material. As much as this may still be a small band in the great
rock pantheon, it is always nice to know that such bands are still
appreciated by someone.