When you listen to the Fever's first EP Pink on Pink (Kemado Records) something wreaks havoc with the depths of your inner ear, creating the altogether-not-unpleasant feeling that the world is tipping and you are about to fall off the edge. And should you go and see the Fever perform, lead singer and lyricist Geremy Jasper exacerbates the vertiginous effect by lurching back and forth, lank hair flopping in his eyes as he uses his microphone for support, until ultimately he keels over into a clattering heap of equipment on the floor with his feet waving in the air. The off-kilter feeling is kind of a nice one though, more like when you were a kid and used to spin around and around until you fell down than the time when you drank that bottle of tequila all by yourself.
It could be that Pony Stapleton's Rickenbacker bass or J. Esquire's rollicky organ or the concordance of salvaged remnants of the '70s and '80s have inspired the press to repeatedly use the word "spastic" in describing the music. Rolling Stone referred to Jasper as a "slightly fey Iggy Pop" and it's no surprise to learn that Jasper's first live performance was a rendition of the Dead Kennedys' "California Uber Alles" in, of all places, a New Jersey auditorium. The Fever (yeah, it's a stupid name, but that's what made them choose it -- "It could be anything...") seems poised to join the ranks of the cool-as-can-be New York band explosion -- though perhaps, with half the band from Connecticut and half from Jersey, it's really a Tri-State phenomenon.
When I speak with him, frontman Jasper is slightly breathless, having just put a tour behind him that included dates with the likes of Hot Hot Heat (just imagine the cute puns) and Cursive, and with the prospect of going back into the studio just ahead. As an opener I ask Jasper about the title of the EP Pink on Pink, which has been getting almost as much attention as the band's party-punk concert persona. Is it a reference to Dylan's Blonde on Blonde? "Yeah, you are the first to say that -- everyone else thinks it's something incredibly perverted," he sighs. "It's just innocent riffing on one of our favorite albums, but you wouldn't believe the things people think."
But being misunderstood is the plight of any band that reaches a certain level, emerging from the garage and into the auditorium perhaps, or simply the point where there are fans listening whom you didn't go to high school with -- people who have an idea of who you are and it has nothing to do with anything you ever did, said or thought. "I'm not really afraid of selling out," Jasper says, but "it would get a little weird if the audience became suddenly all teeny boppers or frat guys, and that does seem to happen to some bands. We saw it when we were touring with Hot Hot Heat and they've had some degree of mainstream success because their songs are catchy as hell. With the radio play you start to attract these young, young fans and not the ones you've developed over the years."
The joy of playing live isn't replicating the recorded moment for Jasper so much as engaging in a performance where things might go awry. "I think of it as high drama," he says, "a kind of comedic sense of things going completely out of control." Maybe, he admits, the fact that he doesn't play an instrument on stage allows him to feel a little less possessive about equipment. The drums he knocked over when I saw the band perform weren't his, but the effect of the turmoil did inspire enthusiasm in the crowd. "I kind of break a lot of stuff," he says, and I ask him if that's a plan. "Orchestrated breaking? Oh, no, that would be bad. There's something about the band that's twitchy, loud and full of nervous energy. We just have trouble keeping still. We're not an emo band or an intellectual affair -- when we're playing a rock and roll show, we provide a release people enjoy on a visceral level that you don't get anywhere else but from rock and roll."
About the Sheila E cover "Glamorous Life" Jasper explains, "we wanted to do a song that had originally been dong by a women since a shift in gender automatically creates tension. But the weird thing about 'Glamorous Life', which is a song sung by a woman written by a man (Prince), is that the lyrics are incredibly bizarre. Each time I sing it, I still have kind of hard time understanding the story -- whether she's trying to live some kind of fantasy, or whether she's actually having an affair." Though part of the trouble with understanding might have something to do with the fact that, as Jasper freely confesses, the lyrics he sings aren't quite the right ones. "Yeah we decided to sing the song and I just did it by memory really really quickly. None of us really knew the song that well and so as we did it we just sort of translated it. We picked up all the wrong changes. Sheila E's version is really more complicated than ours."
"Bridge and Tunnel", with its lilting "Darling I wanna get to you" chorus and the hunger to be out and about in the big city -- "Bridge and tunnel, baby, bridge and tunnel tonight" -- may be an autobiographical reference to New Jersey youth; and one has to think "Ponyboy", with its infectious chorus, probably has more than a coincidental relation to the bassist named Pony and perhaps some passing relation to S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. But "Ladyfinger" is Jasper's favorite because "it is the most fun to play, and it's the one that's the bridge [or does he mean tunnel?] into what we are writing now. The earlier songs happened when we first got together and we were just figuring our sound. I think that is the one which represents our direction and now we've evolved into playing."
With the prospect of a new record to be made in the middle of October, out of material that's half done, Jasper is still working out the lyrics alone. He then brings them to Sanchez so that they can together create "a sketch of something or other to put before the band. It always changes though, they all put their fingertips all over... until we get it right." Which means? "You just feel it, everybody -- all five of us -- clicks somehow. The chemistry is right and we're all on the same page. It's amazing when it really works because it's unanimous." And the overall goal in the music -- to create a balance between "the angular and melodic" while creating a song "that's repetitive at the same it's kind of fragmented" -- seems a rather apt description of the dramatic tension of the Fever's stage presence as well. It's that tension, too, that what creates the delightful sense of disjointed, mind-bending dizzy.
— 25 September 2003
