MOTHERLESS: Just Listen To The F*cking Music

 

Photos by Jenny May Stringer, Courtesy Earsplit PR

Stavros Giannopoulos talks MOTHERLESS, anti-image, affordable merch, broken touring economics, the strength of hardcore and why CDs are coming back.

Stavros Giannopoulos does not want you to know what he had for lunch. He does not particularly care whether you know what he is wearing, what he is doing between shows or what carefully curated version of himself might perform best on social media. He would much rather you put on a MOTHERLESS record, turn the fucking thing up and decide for yourself what it means.

That attitude is not an incidental part of MOTHERLESS. It may be the closest thing the Chicago band has to a governing philosophy. After years of playing in bands during an era when increasingly elaborate visuals, production and constant online engagement became part of the expected package, Giannopoulos wanted to go in the opposite direction. Strip away the fog machines. Strip away the mythology. Strip away the content treadmill. What remains should be able to survive on the strength of the music.

The same instinct runs through nearly everything else Giannopoulos discusses: selling a $15 shirt instead of a $40 one, giving a kid his first piece of band merch, questioning the economics that have made modest club shows increasingly expensive, watching hardcore rebuild the kind of accessible local culture other corners of heavy music have lost and seeing young listeners discover that a $10 CD can be a far more inviting doorway into music than a $50 record.

In a wide-ranging conversation with THIS ROCKS!, Giannopoulos talked about the unlikely origin of the MOTHERLESS name, the band’s deliberate anti-image, touring economics, physical media, hardcore and why sometimes the best thing a musician can tell an audience is simply: Go listen to the fucking music.

THIS ROCKS!: We talked before about just how heavy the name MOTHERLESS is. There’s something primal about that word — being without the person or thing that is supposed to represent your first source of safety, protection and belonging. What does the word actually mean to you, and why did you choose it?

STAVROS GIANNOUPOULOS: To be completely honest, let’s pull back the curtain here. All four of us really love The Sopranos. Junior Soprano, in the first couple of seasons, calls people “motherless fucks.”

We had this huge list of possible band names. I actually ran into the list on my phone the other day, and I was scrolling through it thinking, God damn, we had a lot of names. I might never need another song title again. Anthony brought up MOTHERLESS while we were at practice. He said, “How about MOTHERLESS?” I thought it was just such an abhorrent thing.

It sounded gnarly. I don’t want to say “edgy,” because that word always sounds stupid, but it sounded confrontational, and confrontation has always been the spirit of this band. When somebody on The Sopranos gets called a motherless fuck, you imagine the loneliest piece of shit on the show. There was something about saying, “Yeah, we’re going to own being that lonely piece of shit, and we’re going to make you deal with it.”

I start most of our shows with, “Hey, we’re MOTHERLESS. Fuck you.” That’s how the band feels. It fit then, and it still does.

THIS ROCKS!: The band has this really stripped-down ethos — no fog, no giant light show, no elaborate production. It feels almost philosophical, like you’re intentionally removing anything that can stand between the band and the music. Where does that come from?

GIANNOUPOULOS: With THE ATLAS MOTH, everyone kept trying to push the visual side of the show. And it wasn’t just us. A lot of bands from that doom, post-metal, whatever-the-fuck-you-want-to-call-it era were doing it. We started running lights. We had fog. We had all this stuff. We were always trying to give you a visual aspect.

MOTHERLESS was supposed to be the opposite. To me, MOTHERLESS was just: Put this fucking record in and turn it up to 10. That’s all you need. You don’t need to worry about how we look. You don’t need to worry about what we’re wearing onstage. You don’t need all of this other shit surrounding it. What’s here is the music.

That was very much the point. It’s stripped down and raw. At the time I started the band, I also felt like I had personally been reduced to my bare minimum, and I think the band represents that.

THIS ROCKS!: It’s almost an anti-image.

GIANNOUPOULOS: It literally is an anti-image. I keep stripping more things down, too. I just put out new merch and it’s all one color. I’m starting to think, “Maybe I strip it down even further.” That’s become part of what the band is.

THIS ROCKS!: But your merch is also really creative. You’ve done things that reference different eras and aesthetics without the band itself becoming visually overproduced. Where do those ideas come from?

GIANNOUPOULOS: A lot of it is just us having fun. I find inspiration everywhere. I was at this occult bookstore in Chicago that had taxidermy and all kinds of stuff. My girlfriend is really into that world. I’m basically a nonbeliever, although I also don’t fuck around with that stuff.

There was this skull on a pedestal with this elaborate headdress and beads on it. It looked cool as fuck, so I took a bunch of photos of it. Later, someone said we should put some kind of skull on something. And you can never really go wrong being in a metal band and putting a skull on a T-shirt. I started going through my phone, found those pictures and that became inspiration.

I’m constantly taking photos because you never know what something might be useful for later. I draw, too, but for some reason, heavily illustrated stuff doesn’t feel right for MOTHERLESS. I like that old late-’80s punk-rock and early-’90s hardcore aesthetic where the shirt was almost just a box with an image or some words on it. Something blunt. Again, it comes back to stripping everything down.

THIS ROCKS!: And you’re also intentionally keeping the prices down.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Absolutely. We’re trying to bring our merchandise prices down to the bare minimum where we can make enough money to continue producing it and hopefully turn some profit to help pay for touring, gas and everything else. But our CDs are $10, our vinyl is $20 and our T-shirts are $15.

THIS ROCKS!: There can’t be a huge margin on a $10 CD.

GIANNOUPOULOS: There isn’t, especially because we initially had them manufactured in smaller quantities because we didn’t know how well they would sell. Now I want to order more because I can get a better unit price, but I haven’t wavered on what I think the price should be.

I feel like this band has to be for people. It has to be for everybody who appreciates it. I don’t want to charge somebody $50 for a fucking record. We’re doing cassettes. I’m trying to do black-and-white shirts because I can make them cheaper. I want to sell as much as I can for as little as possible.

We had a kid come to one of our shows recently, and it was the first show he had ever seen in his life. I gave him a shirt and a CD for 20 bucks. I hope he remembers that forever. That matters to me.

THIS ROCKS!: The hard part is balancing that accessibility against giving somebody a product that is actually good.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Absolutely. I love Comfort Colors shirts. Whenever I see a band selling Comfort Colors, those are some of the best shirts on the market. They feel great. They don’t shrink. They’re actually true to size. But they’re too expensive for me to justify selling them.

I honestly don’t want to charge people $30 for a shirt. I would rather you buy one of our shirts a size bigger, wear the hell out of it, shrink it, cut the sleeves off and still have the fucking thing 15 years from now. The entire idea is not to overcharge people, especially right now. How do you justify it?

THIS ROCKS!: I think one thing that helps is giving people a range. Somebody who only has a few bucks in his pocket should still be able to leave the show with something.

GIANNOUPOULOS: One hundred percent. I have $5 patches. I have free stickers. I made prayer candles and sold those for around 10 bucks. My sister made us trucker hats in her kitchen. I’m trying to do everything I can to minimize the price while maximizing the amount of stuff we can have on the table.

Accessibility is the most important thing. People have to be able to afford your shit. If you want to see people wearing your T-shirts, you better figure out how to make an affordable T-shirt.

THIS ROCKS!: That connects to a bigger problem you were talking about earlier: the economics of touring.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Absolutely. I think people are charging too much for everything. Maybe if you start charging less for shows, you can get away with selling a $40 shirt. But you also have bands demanding thousands of dollars from promoters when they aren’t drawing enough people to justify it. You have bands carrying a driver and a tour manager while drawing 50 people a night. How does that work?

When I started touring, I was 23. Somebody would call and say, “Do you guys want to tour with this band you’ve always loved?” We didn’t know how the fuck we were going to do it. We figured it out. Maybe I’m more resourceful than the average band member, but that’s part of doing this.

If you need to be coddled to go on the road and play music, then maybe you don’t fucking want it enough. I’ve bled for this. I’ve thrown my life away for music over and over again, and I’ll do it again. I realize that now. If I want to do something, I’ll find a way.

THIS ROCKS!: The promoter is caught in the middle, too. If the band guarantee goes up and the room costs money before anybody even walks through the door, the ticket price has to rise.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Exactly. People forget the promoter has overhead. Say the room costs $1,000. Now calculate how many $20 tickets you have to sell before anybody gets paid. How many at $30? How many at $35?

Maybe now you only have to sell 40 tickets to cover the room and the guarantees because the ticket is $35. But guess what? Only 30 people come because they can’t afford the ticket. Now those 30 people are inside looking at the merch thinking, “Man, I’d love a shirt, but I’m going to buy a beer.” Or maybe they buy the CD instead of the vinyl.

Bands go home carrying boxes of merch because the audience cannot afford all of it. The math doesn’t magically work because you raised the price.

THIS ROCKS!: That’s where the DIY world seems to be doing something fundamentally different.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Absolutely. The DIY scene in the United States right now is incredible. They’re bringing all-ages shows to kids. They’re bringing bands into places where tickets can still be $10 or $15. Kids can scrape together 25 or 30 bucks, go to the show, buy a shirt, buy a CD and actually participate in the culture.

That’s important. I grew up seeing shows like that, and I think heavy music as a whole needs to look at what hardcore is doing right now.

THIS ROCKS!: I see hardcore scenes packing rooms all through Pennsylvania and upstate New York. There’s scene unity. They’re organized.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Everybody should be looking toward the hardcore scene because there’s something there. Hardcore is giving kids $10 shows, and they’re smart about it. In some places, those shows are outdrawing conventional 200- or 300-cap clubs because those clubs are fucking eating themselves.

There’s also this whole new wave of grunge-influenced bands coming up through those scenes, and the kids love them. Those scenes are open. People in other parts of music are sometimes too far up their own asses to realize what’s happening.

THIS ROCKS!: You also said something earlier that caught my attention: MOTHERLESS is currently selling more CDs than vinyl.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Yeah, and I think that’s something people aren’t talking about yet. CDs are back. I think people are starting to give up on streaming as the only way they interact with music. People want something physical again.

There’s a younger generation now that sees CDs the way my generation saw vinyl when I was a teenager in the mid-to-late ’90s. I worked in a used record store throughout high school. I was making basically nothing, but I could walk out of there with a stack of $3 vinyl — BLACK SABBATH, JOHNNY CASH, LED ZEPPELIN, all this old music I was still discovering.

My friends might have been buying new PEARL JAM or SOUNDGARDEN CDs, but the cheap vinyl gave me access to this entire world. Now kids walk up to merch tables and see vinyl for $40, $50 or $60. That’s absurd to me. Sitting right next to it is the $10 CD. So guess what they’re buying? The CD.

THIS ROCKS!: There’s also an enormous amount of old music available cheaply on CD now.

GIANNOUPOULOS: Exactly. Go into a Salvation Army or almost any thrift store and you can find CDs for 99 cents. You can find a world in there.

A lot of these kids grew up without really having anything physical. The generation before them became so focused on screens that a magazine or CD or record or comic book stopped mattering. Now this younger generation is looking at those things and going, “This is cool. I can hold it.”

I completely understand that. When I was growing up, I loved being able to get a magazine and find some interview with a band I fucking loved. There wasn’t information everywhere. Bands used to have websites they updated when a record came out. Maybe somebody updated the tour dates. Then the album cycle ended and you might not hear anything. You had to wonder whether the band even still existed. There was mystery.

THIS ROCKS!: We’ve almost moved to the opposite extreme now. Artists are expected to constantly feed the machine.

GIANNOUPOULOS: And I’ve always resisted that. People have told me, “You need to update your social media more.” No. You don’t need to know what the fuck I’m having for lunch. You don’t need to see me holding my phone while I’m walking down the street talking nonsense at you. It’s unimportant.

What matters is right in front of you. It’s the fucking music. Do you have the record? Are you streaming it? Did you bootleg it? Go bootleg it. Steal it off the internet. Just go listen to it. That’s all that really matters.

You don’t need to care about us. We’re just some fucking guys doing something. My personal life isn’t for you. Listen to the music and get whatever you want out of it. Whatever that song says to you, that’s what matters.

For more MOTHERLESS, visit the band's official Bandcamp page.