On our second day on tour with the Teeth, we spent the whole afternoon and evening following their huge gunmetal grey van as it creaked and hauled up steep winding roads into the mountains of western North Carolina. Our car struggled on the inclines, and while I was being cut off, passed, and hollered at, by angry, hairy fist-waving locals in hulking 4×4s, the Teeth’s fifteen-passenger sliced steadily through the semi-darkness, passing a huge strip mall and then miles of nothing but dusky pine forest.
Suddenly, the town of Boone popped up, out of nowhere- a brightly painted, slightly eerie hippie-themed college town loaded with coffee shops, record stores, bars, and a giant rock wall that the Teeth wanted to climb as soon as they saw it. The venue for the night’s show featuring the Teeth, along with their label-mates National Eye and a sweat-soaked, ham-fisted local punk band called James Dean Werewolf, was a tiny burrito bar with rickety mismatched chairs and exposed brick walls. The stage was doubling as a set of booths so drums, guitars, and amps were directed onto a ramp in the back to wait.
The punk band played fat and shirtless, dipping into their crowd of thirty already-drunk students, screaming and pushing, riling up the mob, making me wonder what would be left when the Teeth took the stage. I was hoping for more than just a few disheveled stragglers and a pile of crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon cans. In the back corner of the room, Teeth bassist and venomous singer, Peter MoDavis, sat bathed in neon light, fixing his spiky stare on the backs of the jostling students as if he was daring them to leave and regret it later.
Less than a second after the Teeth plugged into the amps that took up more room on the stage than the previous band, as the skeptical party-goers started to gravitate towards the door and the bar, away from the stage, the first razor-sharp chords of “So Long” grabbed them like a lasso around the throat, yanking them back into the room. Even the most apathetic drooling drunks were dragged to the edge of the stage, feeding off the energy of the Teeth’s manic performance like flesh-starved zombies. By the time guitarist Brian Ashby threw his gravely vocals into a scat and scream cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “High School Confidential,” the whole venue was in a kick-dancing frenzy.
It was the same phenomena in nearly every venue, regardless of size or location. Over the course of the two-week tour, I saw the Teeth passionately attack hundreds of people in a dozen venues with their slew of compulsive and wise three-minute low-fi opuses. They never had trouble finding places to stay; at the end of each night offers of couches, floors, beds and more beer piled up at Peter, Brian, Aaron and Jonas’s feet, as if to the people of Boone, Shreveport, Houston, and other points west the four reticent Philadelphia musicians were gods who rewarded these sacrifices through divine performances.
In Boone, an after party was already set up by a member of a band that opened for the Teeth on a previous visit to the burrito bar. It raged until a stray soccer ball hit the neighbor’s back door and the police helped us make the decision to go to sleep.
The next morning, in a fierce dichotomy to their vital, crowd-demolishing show the night before, the band members slowly woke up, gathered their sleeping bags and wandered silently to the coffee shop across the street. Aaron, the other half of the MoDavis twins played a studious game of chess with Jonas Oesterle, the Teeth’s cerebral, meditative drummer while Brian and I cracked a Sudoku puzzle and Peter read The Brothers Karamazov alone at the counter. By day, the Teeth were a strangely peaceful scene.
Most days in the van, while Ashby resolutely ticked off hundreds of miles behind the wheel, Peter would stare out the window at the highway, Aaron would sleep or read and Jonas scoured whatever newspapers he could find. The boom box that replaced the broken car stereo bled grizzly Tom Waits tracks and solemn, acoustic Neil Young. With the exception of some early Bowie, very little of what played on the long drives shared the Teeth’s energetic propensity musically. Aaron admitted one morning in Raleigh after a lackluster crowd at the show the night before failed to respond to his rabble-rousing, that he wants to write slow songs. The songs just come out fast. “When I’m writing, I always think, ‘this one’s going to be my ballad,’” he mused.
The Modavises shared the responsibilities when writing the hard-edged and gritty Carry the Wood, and the brothers’ labors are fundamentally modally equal. There’s a distinct effort on both Aaron’s and Peter’s parts to write that dark, subterranean ballad. “Wake,” an organ and tambourine based track from Carry that trails into the moody beginning of “Mercy, Mercy, Pudding Pie” is along the vein of what the Teeth would choose for their band’s image, as a confession of their intellectual pursuits, (Peter would be working on his Master’s Degree in English if not for music), and of their emotional sensitivity.
The Teeth’s lovable vulnerability comes as a surprise to those who know them only from live shows, where they reel around the stage, staggering and ripping at their instruments brutally, exposing themselves to the unpredictability of rowdy crowds, faulty sound systems and free-flowing drinks. I even hear a story about a punk crowd hurling candy and trash in Peter, Aaron, and Brian’s faces until all three guitarists had to hit some of the kids. “Well, Brian more like pushed him in the face,” Peter reminisces.
The loud, upbeat live shows are built on top of the Teeth’s slower, detailed dingy recordings like the classy, upscale building that sits on Brian and Peter’s dark, crooked-doored basement apartment. Peter’s only condition when Brian was apartment hunting, since he didn’t care what the place looked like, was that it had to be in a safe neighborhood.
The recording process is a garrison the Teeth use to protect themselves from the menacing city musicians’ lives that they have been fighting back against with vicious spitting stage personas. In the studio they can pay close attention to detail and nurture their songs, ensuring that every shadowy harmony is perfect and every crashing drum hit fits. When Peter and Brian play the rough mixes of the album they’ve been working on for their manager, former Dr. Dog member Andrew Jones, their faces light up and they seem childishly excited in a way that they never are during performances.
All four musicians take an incredible amount of pride in the hard work they have put into their albums and planning the grassroots tours that have built them a devoted national fan base. Since their marathon 40-day tour last summer, the Teeth have kept in touch with dozens of people in different cities, including bands who opened for them. Those were the people who gave them places to stay, fed them, and danced wildly to their music nightly on their trip to Austin in March.
Back in Philadelphia, Jonas is off to the couch he calls home, then to his bartending job, and Aaron is eager to get home to see his girlfriend. Brian piles them back into the van, leaving Peter and I alone on his Rittenhouse stoop. I ask him what his plans are, and he says he might go see if his friends are home and maybe get some coffee. Tomorrow the three Teeth front men return to their pizza jobs.
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