Interview Upbringing: Michael Stasis

One of my dad’s. He played at a hotel up on the Delaware river and I slept under a phone booth in the lobby. Now that I think about it, I wonder who was watching me?

There were punk shows at the VFW and at this one church. We would play in driveways and on porches until my brother started taking me downtown (Philadelphia) to see heavy hitters. Then my high school bands started sounding more like Pavement or The Kinks, according to some old guys, though I wasn’t aware of those bands yet. I saw Anti-Flag and U2 in the same month, so I might have been a little confused. I remember smoking a fat bowl in 8th grade and seeing PJ Harvey but my little brain was so stoned that I thought for a good half hour that I was at a Rammstein show. That was the best.

‘Everything I do (I do it for you)’ by Bryan Adams. I would listen to it alone on my little Play Skool tape deck and cry. It made me a romantic.

Honestly, I was given so much music by my older siblings and my dad that I can’t remember when paying for it became part of the equation. Then Napster came along. I might have bought a Ween album when my sister’s CD got messed up. I definitely bought the Smashing Pumpkins ‘1979’ single when I was in third grade so that might have been it. I saw their poster on the wall at the home of my dad’s guitar student, and I remember thinking James Iha looked like a beautiful woman but was a man. That was intriguing.

My first gifts were always little plastic guitars because I wanted to be like my dad. Then one year I got Wally Bear’s Big Band Circus drum set. The kick pedal got detached, and I remember my mom was busy talking on the phone, so I took out her seam ripper and started gauging holes in the drum head. I thought I was fixing it. Then later my sister wanted to take guitar lessons from my dad (she has a different dad) and I got really jealous so I sat in on the first lesson and absorbed it for the sole purpose of surpassing her. That was her last lesson. I got a really jumbo sized red guitar and my dad taught me the blues. It was way too big for me and the steel strings hurt and the action was horrible. I think his thinking was that if I could play on this nightmare I could play on anything. Then I got an electric guitar at fourteen and started my first band. We were called PlenopticVox for about a week. I got the name from a Windows visualizer. Then we were called Lunarface, and that was my first real band.

I can be very lazy. I might wait around too much for inspiration to strike.

Reading was my first love. I was always more of an “indoor kid.” I grew up in a shoebox apartment, so the floor of the living room became a breeding ground for fantasy by necessity. Books and movies have remained a source of replenishment when I go too deep into one mode of thinking. I am lucky to have an imagination, because so many people don’t get to develop theirs and they try to fill their lives with stuff. I value freedom of thought above other forms of success. I also find new people incredibly inspiring. You’ll think you’ve met every kind of person and then here’s someone who’s a weird hybrid of twenty people you know but they’re none of them.

My dad always told me to slow down when I was trying to shred on the guitar. Slowing down is good if you want to build a firm foundation for anything. I no longer care about shredding, but slowing down taught me how to approach a lot of things…

I would never be a band. A band is a group of musicians taking music seriously. That sounds horrible. One ego is plenty.

Michael Stasis’ ‘RIP III’ album is out now on Arbutus.

Tags: Michael Stasis, Upbringing, Features