Fangs for the Memories

Jeff Jones, the band’s founding member, showed up fashionably late for an interview with the Syracuse New Times
on Oct. 23, sharing the true story of the band that has developed a
lore of its own in the local music scene during the peak of the 1990s
indie and alt-rock bump. “This Halloween is a special gig,” Jones says,
“because it features all the guys that we started the band with, which
is myself, drummer Bob Hubbard, Sean Trinkhaus on bass, and Dez Ordez,
my guitar-playing partner and songwriting guy.”

 The musician and sound engineer
currently gigs around town on a weekly basis with his most recent
gathering of mates, the Legendary Jones Gang. Savvy rock fans also saw
Jones perform some kick-ass guitar and vocals with the New Times Banned
at last April’s Rockin’ the Red Cross fund-raiser at the Landmark
Theatre. With Jones’ help, The New Times’ employee-operated band beat the pants off of The Post-Standard’s uncool coterie of feebs.

 Jones continues to work at the Dinosaur
Bar-B-Que, 246 W. Willow St., as a stand-in for sound guy Scott
Sterling, the Dino’s consummate booking agent, as well as a sometime
performer with the Dino’s newest act, an improv freak-off of local
“talent” dubbed the Naughty Little Pig Show. You can check out the
experience at the Dinosaur every month, when Jones performs with the
faux-bluegrass band, Hillbilly Theater, in which Jones banters with his
drummer about commonly held redneck stereotypes.

Admission to the Lost Horizon reunion is
$15 for ages 18 and older, and $10 for ages 21 and older. For more
information, call 372-0030.

From where did Dracula Jones himself spawn?

I’m from a town outside of Utica called
Oriskany. I lived in Oriskany for 18 years and I graduated from
Whitesboro High School. When I went in to the service my mother moved
and sold the house; when I came back they lived in Clinton by Hamilton
College at that point. It was kind of a way station while I was trying
to figure out what to do, because when I came out of the Army I didn’t
have any money. I thought maybe I’d go to Syracuse University when I
got out, but it didn’t really seem to work out.

How did the Dracula Jones band start?

We started in spring 1991. {Dez Ordez} is the first guy
I met when we started this band. I was staying at my mom’s house,
living in the basement. Then I met Dez at an open mike, playing the
guitar with a violin bow, and he ended the show with a huge mass of
feedback. Then he tore all the strings off his guitar with his hand and
broke every one of them. People were just cheering and freaking out,
and I was like, “Man, I gotta play in a band with that guy!” {He}
didn’t sing a freaking note, but he just came out and made sounds and
noises, kind of like karate guys breaking bricks.

 So he was failing out of Mohawk Valley
Community College, and we started playing some music together, and then
I said, “Hey, let’s move to Syracuse.” We moved to the university area,
and we got sublets for the summer. Those other two guys {Hubbard and
Trinkhaus} already had a couple sublets for the summer. We came out
here because it was so small {in Utica} that there wasn’t much to do,
so we lived up near the university in Westcott and just started playing
as much as we could where we could.

 We just thought we were going to be
the shit from the get-go. It was like two guys in their early 20s with
massive egos and we just were like, “We’re the shit. Let’s just rock
it.”

 We played the Lost Horizon like every
Thursday night for almost a year and a half. We would change the name
of the band every two or three weeks when we would play there. Every
time we went out on stage it was like we wanted to be better than the
last time. It’s funny to think about how we did things then, before the
Internet. We didn’t have e-mail, no cell phones. We had to play. You
had to give people cassette tapes so they could hear what you did. They
weren’t even making CDs; they were too expensive.

Jonesing for a fix: Jones, second from left, poses with bandmates Dez Ordez, Sean Irinkhaus and Bob Hubbard.

What was the Lost Horizon scene like at the time?

It was great. Scott Sterling was
booking bands there for a long time, and he had a great staff. It was a
place where people wanted to hang out. You can talk about how dirty it
is all you want, but there’s a certain element of people that like it
dirty like that. They’re more into it. In the 10 years that he was
there, {Sterling} had really put it together as a business. It was a
good scene, and there were a lot of good local bands that were drawing
people. When people go to see live, original music, it’s different than
Under the Gun or something like that, because you know what you’re
going to get. They’re going to play music that’s on the radio. At the
Lost Horizon they were instilling {the fact that} it was a live,
original music venue, plus they did quite a few national acts. I worked
hardcore matinees exclusively for years, mixing bands; that’s how I
learned to work the consoles and how to mix.

So you were also working at the Lost Horizon at the time?

When I moved to Syracuse we started playing there, and I started working there with Scott Sterling. My whole thing about music is that I’d been in the theater arts since I was 6 or 7. When I got out of the Army I had done a lot of productions in school and community theater, and I had played music and sang. Then when I got to the Lost Horizon it was like an extension of having a show, you know? I always thought to myself that if I wanted to have a show, I wanted to know how the whole thing works so I would know what it costs, and because I would know what everybody’s doing. I wouldn’t be just a guy standing around stupidly, not understanding why the monitors don’t get any louder, or why the front end sound like it does.

Where did the Dracula Jones band go from there?

After doing all the Thursdays and a lot
of local shows we started working with Scott because he was already
booking the Lost. He was kind of working as an agent. Then we recorded
the first EP, Heavy Pop {1991}, and we started getting a pretty
good response. We released everything independently, man, you know? The
first EP was on cassette, and then the second EP is called Speak
{1992}, and now I sell those as CDs or together. The way the digital
media is going is crazy; I would send them to somebody’s phone if they
wanted me to! Then we made a full-length album, Prepare to Unload {1993}, the last album we released. We made another record, {The Last Supper, recorded in 1994} but we never actually put that out in any kind of format. It’s for sale online now.

 The first two records we recorded with
Steve Feldman at Penguin Studios. It’s no more {now}. Steve Feldman
moved a long time ago. He was a real popular guy. He did the big Earth
Crisis record {Last of the Sane} that got them known. Then we
did the full-length CD at Acqrok Studios in Utica. Bob Rock is the guy
who runs Big Apple Music in Utica. He had a studio, another place
that’s gone. He moved that to his attic.

 Then Scott {Sterling} started pimping
us a bit. We started doing a lot of mailings to people, and things
started picking up. We started running the Thruway circuit, and then
the Northern and Southern circuit: Albany to Buffalo, Boston to
Buffalo, and then like Watertown down to Syracuse, Binghamton and in to
New York City. In Pennsylvania we did a lot of colleges. We played one
great Halloween show at Brown University. The band is rocking and we go
to take a break outside and they have a fireworks display that they
probably spent $10,000 to $15,000 on. Then we went back inside and
cranked it back up.

 So we played all over the Northeast
for a couple of years, always with Dez and I as the mainstay of the
band. The original drummer and bass player dropped off about a year and
a half in, and we had a couple of different bass players. Then the
original guys came back. We went in and out with people for a long
time, and then, like any kind of relationship, you just get burned out
with what you’re doing. We had several record deals that didn’t pan
out, deals that cost us money to have lawyers look at, and we never
signed the deal. We tried really, really hard to really get someone to
invest in what we were doing at that point.

Jeff Jones: Syracuse’s own version of Scott Weiland will get his
band, Dracula Jones, back together this Halloween.

Did the deals come especially from hitting New York City?

They were from companies and people that we had met. There was this guy from Ithaca, Alex Perialas, who owns Pyramid Sound {Recording Studios} now. He worked for a company that is now defunct. You know, they’re just like mortgage companies or banks. They have a bunch of money to try to invest and make it bigger, and then they don’t. We had a couple of sweet deals, and then we had nothing.

 

With the first deal the lawyer pissed off the guys he was negotiating with, and it was for a lot of money, too, but he was like, “You can get more. If they’re offering this, you can get this.” Here I was like 23 or 24 {years old}, and now in hindsight I would just sign it and be like, “Give me the money!” But then we were like, “Oh, it’s eight records and blah, blah, blah.” If you sell one record for a million copies you can do anything you want. You hold all the cards, but {we didn’t} think about it. Everybody was getting nervous. We should have just signed the freaking thing. So they got tired of negotiating with us, and then they signed somebody else. Then we had a great deal with Caroline Records that was a much smaller budget, but it was only for two records and it made a lot more sense. We were totally psyched, but we were just trying to figure out how much money we could spend on someone to produce the record. It was like the end of the month, and I’m lying in my bed, and the phone rings. I answer the phone and it’s my A and R {artist and repertoire: a talent scout for record labels} guy. He’s like, “Dude, I’m so sorry to call you and tell you this, but I just got my paycheck, and it has my pink slip in it. They fired me!” I was like, “You’re kidding me! You just got fired? What does that mean?” He was like, “I don’t know what that means for you guys, but it’s probably not looking good.” 

Why did they fire him?

 

They were just cutting staff. It was Caroline Records, and I think Lyle Preslar, who was the bass player in Minor Threat, was the president of the company. They had just done the Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish record, so that was a huge album for them that they had worked on. They also had the Hole record at the same time. Probably just before they got absorbed into {EMI}, but it’s like one day you think you’ve got a record deal and you’re going to sign this thing, and have a real company promoting what you do. The next thing you know you’re back at zero. We met a lot of guys, like the guy who signed Kid Rock, Jason Flom. He’s a huge music guy, and he was big then. He had signed a lot of bands in the 1980s, and then he came to see us at CBGBs, and at the end of the show he was like, “I really liked the lights!” For the longest time we contemplated what that meant, because it was like, “Does he mean he liked the band?,” or was it his way of saying, “I didn’t like the music, but I liked the lights?” We tried pretty much everything we could possibly do back then. We had the newsletter that we put out, The Impaler, and we did 10 or so episodes. The last one that we sent out was 1,800 folded pieces of paper, folded three times, bulk mail, stamped and grouped by zip codes. It took like six of us eight hours to do it, and I think that was the point where it was like, “This is killing us!,” but people loved to get stuff in the mail and that was how we communicated with people. We’d send one monthly or every spring or the fall. A couple of guys wrote it. It was funny.

So what happened to the band in the end? Did you split up?

When you get very high on things, and
you think something’s going to happen, and you spend a year working so
hard toward it, and it looks like it’s so close, and then when it
doesn’t happen, sometimes it’s hard for people to go on in that
situation. Everyone wants to blame someone else. So we just decided not
to play as much. Dez started singing for the Electric Chick Magnets,
the disco band. Those guys were my roommates at the time. We all lived
together, and they said to me, “We need a singer,” and I was like, “Ask
Dez, man, he’d be great on it.” That kind of freed me up to work on
acoustic stuff. I just started writing on my own from there, and then
we would play sporadically once or twice, when it made sense, you know?

At the end of the day, what we ended up
with was a really tight group of friends who still adhere to playing
original music. We loved what we did then, and we still love what we’re
doing now. Like the Legendary Jones Gang doesn’t play any of those
Dracula Jones songs. Those songs are reserved for when we get together,
myself and the guy I wrote most of those songs with, Dez. You might
catch me playing one of those on the acoustic guitar, but I’ve written
six records since then.

What did Dez do in the meantime?

One of the reasons that we only get
together at select times is because he’s been at law school in St.
Paul, Minn. He’s in his last year now, so he’s flying here for the
weekend for four or five days. The joke is that we made a deal: One of
us had to go get a law degree to figure out how we were going to get
back in this game, and he flipped a coin and he won. I had to hold the
torch for rock, and he had to figure out how to out-maneuver these
chumps.

What’s going on with the band now?

I have a really busy schedule with what
I do entertainment-wise. The Legendary Jones Gang is really busy. I’m
playing one or two times a week. Plus I have a monthly gig at the
Dinosaur for Rock’n’Roll Tuesdays. I’m running a recording studio
(Moletrax).

What I realized was Halloween was
always our holiday. We always had a great time at the Lost Horizon and
we did a lot of good Halloween shows there. Since Halloween fell on a
Friday this year we’re like, “Let’s put something together!” We’ve
gotten really good response. People are coming in from out of town. I
know a couple guys who are flying in from Florida, planning a little
vacation to come rock with the band. Scott {Sterling} ran in to some
people at the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Rochester, and they started talking
about the Dracula Jones band. They’re coming out to see it.

The Dracula Jones band is responsible
in a lot of ways for a lot of original bands. Guys that play with me
have all gone on to other projects. Gregg Yeti has actually played with
the Dracula Jones band and he played with me in the Ghost Monkeys.
There’s a huge tree that branched out since 1991, and it just spread. 

What’s interesting to me is people who can stand the test of time. It’s like, yeah, you have a great band now.
Where are you going to be in six years? People will say to me, “There’s
this great new band. This is their third show.” I’m like, “Call me in a
year. Are they giving things away?”

You guys were playing at the peak of a particular scene, but a lot of people talk about the music scene around here sucking now.

 

And even then people said the same thing!

 

Do you think the scene has gone downhill since then in any way?

 

I think that because the bars cater to radio music -- cover bands -- that it creates that. When that’s what you’re giving people, that’s what they’re going to think. It’s kind of a weird dichotomy to me. The bars pay ASCAP {fees} for bands to play those songs just like they pay the jukebox. You don’t copy things out of books and tell people you wrote it. Comedians don’t stand up on stage and tell jokes from other comedians. That is a huge no-no. Music is the only thing where you can get up on stage and perform music for people even if you didn’t write it. There’s a big difference between being an entertainer and being a guy who actually creates music, or a group of individuals who create stuff.

 

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

 

It’s a matter of somebody who has some friends and who start a movement. Everything goes in cycles. Look at Brand New Sin, an original band that draws quite a few people. I don’t know where they are in their cycle, because they’ve got a new singer. Before Brand New Sin there were a lot of indie bands playing around, and they come and go. It’s weird. I think that having a venue like the Lost Horizon that caters to live original music, that’s the first part of having any kind of scene. It inspires people. People have thought that {certain} cities suck since forever, but we were always like, “Man, you know what? As long as we’re here things don’t suck. We’re here: How could it suck? We don’t suck!”