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The stench of Molasses >> Scott Chernoff, country-bad ballad man, in his own words Interview by CHRIS YURKIW
"I had played for years in shitty little punk rock bands in Vancouver and fuck bands and joke bands. It's weird, because in a sense Molasses is really my first serious musical project--if you can even call it serious. I got to Montreal with a suitcase and a guitar and nowhere to go, and somehow I hooked up with these characters. I played for a year or two with the Royal Mountain Jamboree--all these old punks playing traditional bluegrass music--and that's how I met Joellen [Housego, Snitches fiddlist]. "I was writing these little songs and I played them for Joellen one day, and she said, 'Wow. Those are slow and sad as molasses.' And I thought, 'There's a nice band name,' and I started recruiting people." Handwritten: "Mike Moya: organ, guitar, banjo, piano. Thierry Amar: upright bass, chord organ. Norsola Johnson: cello, vocals. Joellen Housego: viola, vocals. Fluffy: percussion, bowed banjo, musical saw. Sam Shalabi: guitars. Lisa Gamble: drums. Scott Chernoff: guitars, banjo, piano, harmonica, vocals." "There's an element of blues music and there's an element of country music in Molasses, but there's also an element of experimentation and discord and dissonance, which I think are really important roles in the band. Personally, I'm as interested in John Zorn or Edgar Varèse as I am in Blind Gary Davis or Jimmy Rodgers. "If you wanted a description of Molasses, I would say you take a Depression-era one-man band that's loaded up with pots and pans and banjos and guitars, stick him in the middle of a huge cathedral with a drunken string trio, get the organ player to compose a score for a '50s horror film, drop a player-piano on the whole lot of them and then invite the panhandler in from the front stairs to tell you some sob stories for a nickel. It can be really ugly. "Molasses stinks of liquor. It stinks of fuckin' fatigue and poverty. It stinks of cigarettes. It stinks, but it's kinda that stench of springtime when the dog shit is thawing, and there's something beautiful about that smell." Molasses open for Smog this Friday, March 12 at Jailhouse Rock Café, 9pm, $8
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"I was living on a ranch in California before I came to Montreal. One day I got sick of the mountains and I hopped on a train, went out to Los Angeles for a bit, over to New Orleans and hung out there for a while, up to Chicago and into New York. That whole trip was like, 'Where am I going to stop?', and this is where I stopped. That was three years ago. I'd visited here on several occasions before that, but I had never made the decision that this was where I was going to hang out and drink.