The Rise & Fall of LUSTRA: An Extensive Mega-interview with Jason Adams On "Scotty Doesn't Know," Seventeen & Old Grey Horror's THE TOWER (XOFF Records)
We would venture to guess a musical artist has effectively "made it," achieved "mainstream" success, and/or reached "legendary" status once they've been quoted, referenced, or name-checked within a piece of digital or print media. It happened to LUSTRA (formerly known as Seventeen) when Marvel Comics issued Deadpool #41 in 2012, which, for whatever reasons, took place primarily in The Middle East. Deadpool #41 was penned by Gerry Duggan and actor/Metal musician Brian Posehn with cover art executed by Mark Brooks and artist Salvador Espin. One particularly striking panel showcases Deadpool listening to, of course, "Scotty Doesn't Know" on an MP3 player with a bubble nearby inscribed "SCOTTY DOESNT KNOW SCOTTY DOESN'T KNOW-OOh-OH!" LUSTRA's "Scotty Doesn't Know" was notoriously featured as a quasi-primary character within and showcased throughout 2004 Sex Comedy film EuroTrip being billed across its home video box as coming "From The Producers of Road Trip and Old School."
"Scotty Doesn't Know" was later released on LUSTRA's album Left for Dead (2006) and again as "Scotty Doesn't Know (The Second Coming)" on What You Need & What You Get just two years later in 2008. Plus, with all that said, "Scotty Doesn't Know" just went Gold as recently as August 2021 after nearly 20 years of a slow, yet steady, burn up and down the music-tracking charts. LUSTRA's Bruce Fulford, Chris Baird, Nick Cloutman, and Jason Adams were, actually, featured as "Lustra, Donny's Band" within EuroTrip alongside Scott Mechlowicz (House,) Jacob Pitts (21, Limitless,) Kristin Kreuk (Smallville, Chuck,) Michelle Trachtenberg (Buffy The Vampire Slayer,) and Matt Damon (Ben Affleck, Jimmy Kimmel Live!) We've been emailing, texting back-and-forth, and chatting on the phone with LUSTRA/Seventeen's long-time guitarist Jason "J." Adams over these past few months. Adams has been diligently working on his long-awaited solo album, now known as THE TOWER, since about 2013; with one specific track, "Franz Ferdinand Must Die," actually, having been recorded just in time for the 100th anniversary of World War I.
Old Grey Horror's THE TOWER is a sprawling 12-track concept album about World War I with sugary guitar riffs akin to "Scotty Doesn't Know," but steers away from LUSTRA's beloved brand of Rock/Pop-punk making a swift right turn into Heavy Metal, Prog Rock, Doom Metal, and Stoner Rock. Old Grey Horror's newly-minted Bandcamp page describes THE TOWER as being "less a Metal album than a symphonic manual of destruction—roaring, experimental, loosely-constructed, and yet strung together by razor-thin filigrees of hard-driving precision." We were lucky enough to conduct a lengthy mega-interview with J. Adams about all things Old Grey Horror, LUSTRA, Seventeen, the tedious processes behind the making-of all of it and much, much more. Feel free to peruse our conversation down below, which has been lightly edited for general clarity, while you listen along. Old Grey Horror's THE TOWER is now available on digital streaming services, limited edition cassette tape, and precisely packaged 140 gram vinyl through XOFF Records/Vinyl de Paris.
I. When, where, and how did LUSTRA begin?
Jason Adams: I'd say the kernel of what, eventually, became LUSTRA came into being around 1997 when Chris Baird & Nick Cloutman took a film class together at the University of Massachusetts Boston and decided to form a band as the focus of their film project. They'll hate me for saying this, but neither of them could really "play" at the time. Still, there's something about their creative ethos and personality, even at this early stage, that seems like the blueprint for the band in its later form.
I knew Chris through his older brother, Jon Baird. In college, Jon & I had played in a band, which dissolved when everyone graduated. Jon & I had become roommates. We were totally broke and had few prospects, so rather than ["spending the] summer abroad" or whatever, we had declared it our mission to find the "seamy underbelly" of Boston. We started going to The Rathskeller (affectionately nicknamed "The Rat") a bunch and got really into seeing bands there. We, also, frequented The Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub and T.T. The Bear's Place in Cambridge. I remember feeling really envious of those bands and thinking, "I can do better than that." I'm sort of a hater like that. I think hate plays a bigger role in forming bands than anyone wants to admit.
Anyways, about the time, Chris & Nick had their "meet-cute" in film class, I had formed a band with a couple of other friends. One of them, Rich, had bought an old Ludwig drum kit, in the hope someone might learn to play it. I had been trying to convince Chris to play drums for us, but he wasn't really into our "sound," if you could call it that. I gave him a key to our rehearsal space—a dank basement room, rumored to have once belonged to The Pixies. Water would gush out of a manhole in the floor and flood the room when it rained. I never really saw Chris there much, but you could always tell when he'd been playing the drums because there'd be blood all over the snare. He'd play so hard his hands would blister and bleed all over the place.
Fast-forward a bit: Nick & Chris had to finish their film. We filmed a rehearsal on Super 8 for their film project to augment some mockumentary-style footage they had. They asked if I could help them do a better recording—I was the gear nerd who had access to a studio. I dimly recall that they led me to believe they had songs ready and that Jon was involved, etc., so I booked this little studio with an 8-track TASCAM reel-to-reel tape recorder. When they arrived, they didn't really have any songs, just a couple of riffs, and Jon hadn't yet played with them at all. We ended up arranging their riffs into simple songs and writing lyrics on the spot. Primitive as these songs were, they sounded amazing to us coming off that 8-track. I think they got an "A" on their film project.
The music interested Jon enough that he joined Nick & Chris and they started writing songs and playing gigs. This is the first incarnation of LUSTRA. While my other band was fracturing, those three started getting traction. They were tall and handsome and had this great rapport with a lot of artsy professional women. Their shows started to be kind of a thing—the songs were a sort of a dark, cryptic, clever, sexually-charged jacka**ery/tomfoolery thing. They'd do wild stuff. They played at Jacque's Cabaret (in drag, of course) and had a friend escape from a straitjacket during one song. They all three had mics and their stage banter—a sort of jocular, mutual antagonism—was really fun and disarming.
II. Who was part of the primary line-up of LUSTRA and what was each member's role within the band?
Adams: This is a difficult question... the line-up has shifted a few times. We didn't change the band name to LUSTRA until 2001 when we moved to Los Angeles. The early roster was just those three guys: Chris, Nick & Jon. I joined in '98 when my other band split. That was the line-up when the band was called Seventeen and recorded Breakfast At Tammy's: Chris - drums, vocals, Nick - bass, vocals, Jon - guitar, vocals, [and] Jason (me) - guitar, vocals.
Then, Nick left to attend college in New York City right as we started getting interest from Scott Benson at XOFF Records. Chris, who sang a bunch, switched from drums to bass and we hired Jason Sutter to play drums on our first real studio session at Q Division Recording Studios. We went through a few drummers, eventually, settling on Tony Mellace. Tony was our drummer while we were picking up steam in Boston and touring regionally. He played on about half the tracks on Bikini Fight. We were a really solid band and built up a lot of momentum at this time. We got radio airplay, played a festival or two, and opened for Primus, Staind, and Queens of The Stone Age.
Then, we got sued by PriMedia Corporation (parent company of Seventeen Magazine) who demanded that we stop calling ourselves Seventeen. The attorneys told us that we should. We decided to move to Los Angeles. All our success in the Boston area never seemed to translate into notoriety outside the region and LA seemed like higher ground; but Tony, who was married, couldn't make the leap. Nick, however, had expressed interest in returning to the band.
We moved to LA, plus Nick, but minus Tony, and took on drummer Bruce Fulford. It was at this time we took the name LUSTRA. Bruce arranged a tour of South Africa opening for his friends, Just Jinger [Editor's Note: later, known as JUST JINJER], who are quite famous in South Africa. This was another exhausting shoestring tour, made more frantic by taking place in a foreign country on the other side of the world where they drive on the other side of the road. During this tour, Jon decided he'd had enough and left before our final stop in Capetown. We dropped him off at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere.
Jon's departure left the line-up that recorded "Scotty Doesn't Know:" Bruce - drums, Chris - vocals, Nick - bass, [and] Jason - guitar. This is the band you see playing (with Matt Damon) in EuroTrip.
III. How did you guys initially get approached to write and record what eventually became known as "Scotty Doesn't Know," which infamously appeared within EuroTrip?
Adams: I recall this happening just after our return from South Africa. We returned to Los Angeles and we were facing a collapsing music industry and an eternity of these exhausting, tiny, money-losing tours. I have a vague recollection of drunkenly running into the EuroTrip writer-directors (Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer) at some party during this time and related our difficulties, basically, begging for help. Jon & I knew these guys from college and they had clout, having written for Seinfeld, among other things. At some point, they wrote EuroTrip, sold the script, and got hired to direct it.
Early in 2003, they handed us a script for "Untitled Montecito Project." I think they approached Jon first, as Jon was closer with Berg/Mandel/Schaffer. He declined to be involved, referring them to Chris. The script has this enormously generous slot for a Rock band to write a song. The song first appears to humiliate the story's protagonist, Scotty, with the singer bragging about banging his girlfriend; the chorus was to repeat "Scotty doesn't know." Then, the song keeps showing up over and over again throughout the script. This was the best thing we could have asked for. Those guys gave us such a massive opportunity here and we will forever be grateful to them.
IV. What do you recall from this process, as well as the making of the movie with Matt Damon and the rest of the featured cast on-location in Prague?
Adams: We spent like three days writing and recording three demo songs for them on our Roland VS-1680 Digital Studio Workstation. Our landlord (who, incidentally, was famed Irish composer Patrick Cassidy) agreed to let us track Chris playing the drums in his garage. I mentioned before how Chris played so hard, his hands bled, right? Anyways, our neighbors were furious at the noise and yelling for us to stop. Eventually, someone came BANGING on the garage door and we said something like, "F**K OFF! WE'RE ALMOST FINISHED!" and they answered, "OPEN UP! THIS IS THE WEST HOLLYWOOD SHERIFF!" We sheepishly opened the door and apologized. They were, actually, super-nice about it. The deputy said something like, "it sounds great, but you're gonna have to wrap it up." I think we played another 20 minutes and had to do some kind of tricky edit to the drum tracks later to fix the rushed recording.
We managed to record three different versions of the song. The first was, basically, the "Scotty Doesn't Know" everyone knows today; fully-formed, except a bit slower, and the lyrics were only preliminary. I remember Nick really started us off on the right foot. He showed me a couple of chord progressions and the basic riff on acoustic guitar in the kitchen. We tweaked the riff to better track one of those chord sequences and kicked around some song structure adding a bridge and refining the [segues] between sections. The second version sounded kinda like Greg Kihn or Joe Jackson or, maybe, Stone Temple Pilots. The third version was terrible... I don't think we bothered to send it to them. We did send them Techno & Muzak renditions of the first version, though.
We put the MP3 files up on our website and emailed them a link. They told us that they liked the first demo, but we had competition: there was another guy (Matt Mehaffey from sElf,) who had done a pretty good demo.
We were scheduled to play a showcase in New York City a few weeks later and were, of course, quite anxious to land this amazing movie gig. Scott Benson, of XOFF Records, decided he'd set us up to record a proper studio version of "Scotty Doesn't Know," even before our song had officially been chosen for the movie, to try and give us that little extra boost. We booked studio time at Sound Techniques in Boston with Scott Riebling, who had recorded our first EP. We then moved to Hedgehog Recording & Rehersal Studio South of Boston to overdub vocals, some additional guitar, and finishing touches. Riebling is a really talented producer and great to work with. At the directors' request, we had punched up the lyrics to reinforce the gag, but were tweaking right up to the last minute to smooth out some melodic and metric issues. Chris did a fantastic job making the rather prosaic narrative feel properly lyrical.
We returned to Los Angeles and decided "Scotty Doesn't Know" needed a bit of punching up. Riebling sent us some stems from the recording session and I tracked a few extra chuggy guitar bits to fill in some of the empty-sounding parts of the song. I think we snail-mailed Riebling a CD-R with the ProTools session on it. I remember this seemed so "modern" and "amazing" at the time.
Our improved song was chosen for the movie. I think they sent us an email. They told us Matt Damon (who we knew from college) had agreed to lip-sync the song in the scene, playing Donny, the skinhead dude you see in his cameo. We flew to Prague to film the scene in June 2003 and for a week we had to stay awake all night long shooting and sleeping all day. We were sorta confused that Matt was nowhere to be seen for days, but, then, one night, he showed up to film the scene and the cameras were on us and everything was completely electric and everyone's hair was standing on end and we were hamming it up and jumping around like apes. Matt Damon is a good dude. I think he killed the spot. He just morphed into this sleazy Punk, like G.G. Allin played by Marlon Brando.
Somehow, during all this, we managed to drink a LOT. The hotel ejected us from brunch for dining in our boxers and bathrobes. The last night, we went to some night club and partied. I remember dancing with Michelle Trachtenberg and, then, getting thrown out for pounding on the bathroom door too loudly because somebody was taking waaaay too long, probably blowing drugs or something. The bouncers frog-walked me out and one of them gave me a sort of slapstick parting kick to the bum. We've got pictures of Nick in some bar with his shirt off, then, passed out asleep with his jacket half off because he was too bombed to even close his hotel room door.
V. What did "Scotty Doesn’t Know" do for LUSTRA's career after EuroTrip?
Adams: Basically, nothing for years. We returned to Los Angeles, in wild anticipation of the movie coming out, but it was a very quiet six months or so. We kept approaching major labels, hoping to acquire promotion, representation, booking, etc. The phone started to ring a bit. Someone (DreamWorks?) did a regional ad buy for EuroTrip during The Super Bowl on the West Coast. We were eating nachos and watching The Super Bowl with Dave Mandel when the ad came on, playing our song. Pretty surreal. Despite all this, we saw no uptick in sales of CD's—remember, this is before YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Bandcamp, or SoundCloud.
In February 2004, the movie premiered. We attended and played the song at the after-party. I met Larry David & Herbie Hancock. EuroTrip disappointed at the box office. Our moment came and went and nothing had changed. For two years, I'd mention I was in this movie playing this song and nobody had heard of it. File-sharing was just destroying the music industry. XOFF called it quits, saying it "could no longer continue to fund" us. The heady days of living on the label's dime ended. Bruce, the drummer, quit. This was a bleak moment for me, personally. I quit the band and worked to make ends meet as a freelance web developer.
Chris & Nick continued playing, God bless 'em. They did a bit of West Coast touring and managed to tour The UK. They released a couple more records. I started playing with them again, circa 2009, but it was all pretty slow burn by that point.
Then, slowly and strangely, EuroTrip and “Scotty Doesn't Know” started growing more popular. It has taken on some weird afterlife. It's more popular now than it's ever been. Rolling Stone ranked us at the top of one of their lists a couple of weeks ago. It's, obviously, the only reason anyone has ever heard of us. Its popularity is something of a mystery to me. It's pleasant enough in that Pop-punk way, but I think we've written better songs. There's a lesson on the value of exposure here, certainly. I hope fans of the song will look deeper into our catalog.
VI. How long after EuroTrip did LUSTRA fizzle out and when was the last time you were all together in the same room making new music?
Adams: "Fizzle out?" When did your mom fizzle out? No, of course, this is a fair question. We recorded some pretty decent songs in our rehearsal space with our last drummer, Gant Frink, in 2016. These tunes have not yet been released. I would say LUSTRA stopped functioning in any active way when Chris moved back to the East Coast a few years ago.
VII. What can you tell us about your latest non-LUSTRA musical exploits as Old Grey Horror?
Adams: THANK YOU FOR ASKING! Old Grey Horror is my solo project! While I take a lot of pride in the popularity and success of "Scotty Doesn't Know," my heart, musically speaking, lives in a darker, more reflective place. I have been working for years on my solo record, THE TOWER, which is a concept album about The First World War. It's the most ambitious thing I've ever done in my life and I've poured everything into it. I've found some truly talented musicians to help me. I've recorded it, one song at a time, one track at a time, over a span of about 10 years. I've hired some of the best mastering engineers alive to polish the sound. You might say it's my magnum opus. I'm enormously proud of it.
THE TOWER is a concept album in the grand tradition, free from the constraints of a Comedy set piece, pressed on 140-gram vinyl in Paris, and packaged in a lavishly illustrated gatefold jacket. I've finally seen the LP sleeves and I'm really pleased. They look fantastic.
VIII. How does Old Grey Horror's music differ sonically from that of LUSTRA's and how was it influenced by your time spent with LUSTRA?
Adams: Firstly, THE TOWER is a concept album. It's 45 minutes of music about a coherent theme—The Great War—rather than an ad-hoc collection of Rock songs. Listeners have described it as muscular, haunting, and stylistically prismatic. It still has that guitar-forward, melodic sound you have in "Scotty Doesn't Know," but it's a different beast entirely. Folks who've heard other LUSTRA songs might recognize some similarities, but I've tried to stretch my chops as far as they'll go and I think I've covered some fresh territory.
I think it's a fun, psychedelic record—sorta like a 3:00a.m. Creature Feature with stop-motion monsters—but it's about real events, distilled from extensive research and reading, which lend a lot of gravity. I'm obsessed with World War I (WW1) and have read thousands upon thousands of pages of Non-fiction and memoirs. I've probably seen every WW1 movie under the sun.
I was always the "recording nerd" in LUSTRA. I engineered Breakfast At Tammy's in a basement in Somerville. I knew a little bit about recording back then, but I learned so much working with the guys in LUSTRA and our various producers (Scott Riebling, Sylvia Massy, Joe Barresi, Ron St. Germain.) We discovered all kinds of tricks: which mics to use, hard panning the guitars, the importance of drum tuning, amp selection, pick-up and pedal choice, etc. I like to think THE TOWER is the culmination of years of learning, most of it while recording LUSTRA songs. It's impossible to quantify, but I feel a tremendous debt of gratitude to everyone involved with that band.
IX. Who or what would you readily cite as some of your greatest sources of personal inspiration and influence while creating Old Grey Horror's debut album, THE TOWER?
Adams: Oof, this would be a long list, if I was thorough. The first time it dawned on me that I should make a concept album was when Jon Baird introduced me to the album Dead Sailor Acid Blues by the Boston band Orangutang. I was really into that record and we went to see them live at The Rat and they were amazing. Before them, it never would have occurred to me that I could do something so extravagant as record a concept record.
Pink Floyd is an obligatory influence, of course. I love Dark Side of The Moon shamelessly and unironically. I, also, sorta consider Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction to be a concept album and a potent inspiration. In recent years, I have had my life changed by seeing Napalm Death live. The loudest tracks on my record are but a pale imitation of their righteous glory. I, also, love High On Fire & Sleep and whatever else Matt Pike gets up to.
And it may sound pretentious, but I was really hoping to get a sort of "cinematic" thing going with my record. I wanted something that evokes visual imagery. I've found a lot of inspiration in numerous Classical composers: Gustav Holst, Modest Mussorgsky, György Ligeti, John Williams, Benjamin Britten, Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy. I made playlists full of their music. When you spend so much time on a record, you have lots of time to crawl down all kinds of rabbit holes.
X. What did the writing, recording, production, creation, etc. processes behind the creation of Old Grey Horror's debut full-length, THE TOWER, typically entail?
Adams: With one exception, I wrote the songs in the order they appear on the album. For coherent song transitions, you need to know how the prior song ends before you write the next one. I'd start with the song premise first and look for inspiration in the vast amount of WW1 reading out there. Once I found a compelling, evocative passage, I'd try to imagine a suitable musical mood and atmosphere; this usually [led] to some kind of tonal palette and phrasing.
For example, First World War discussions always start with Franz Ferdinand's assassination. The great irony of WW1 is that this orgy of destruction visited on the human race started with one guy getting shot—his wife is rarely even mentioned. Distilling that irony to its essence, you get this idea of a secretive, tip-toeing, whispering conspiracy. In my reading, I stumbled across a first-hand account from one of the conspirators, Borijove Jevtic, related in the book, We Were There: An Eyewitness History of The Twentieth Century by Robert Fox. Jevtic describes the arrival of a newspaper clipping, the gas lamps, etc., in this kafana (or tavern) in Belgrade called The Golden Beluga. So, you have this narrative, this tremendous atmosphere, basically, writing itself.
And we have a location—Belgrade! I started Googling "Balkan Music" and am suddenly hearing all this Turkish music with these war-like davul drums. I, then, asked a brilliant musician I know, Brian O'Neill, what scales or modes might be useful and he suggested a Bhairav raga.
When you have some rhythms, some lyrical phrases, and a tonal palette, you can start fiddling with them on an acoustic guitar. Once I found a couple of riffs, I would start to script up some MIDI drums or a click or something and started recording rough drafts in ProTools. The result was usually right on-target. Came back a few days later and tweaked the structure, if something sounded off. After a few iterations, it started to sound fairly complete.
For the more heavily orchestrated songs, it got quite involved. I'd start off recording a little Honeytone battery-powered guitar amp to a click track. Then, I'd spend hours scripting specific sympathetic drum patterns to try and get things fairly exact. This would give me a fairly complete demo of the song, which I could send to a drummer to learn the tune. Then, they'd come down to our rehearsal space and we'd record live drums—usually early in the morning, so other bands weren't blasting across the hall. Once the live drums were in there, the song started to really come alive. I f***ing love the sound of a drummer in "beast mode" smacking real drums with a bunch of microphones around.
Then, I'd go back in and play bass a few days later. I could usually track one song a day on bass. Then, I'd come back and track numerous tracks of guitars; that might take a couple of days. Always a mic'ed amp. Most often a Marshall head guitar amp and 4x12" Mesa speaker cabinet, cranked up loud. This was pretty exhausting. I don't have any kind of control booth, and it's hard to be in a room with a full stack blasting for four hours, playing the song, and operating the recording equipment. Most of the recording work was completely solitary.
Once those guitar tracks were in, it sounded like a Rock band and it's such a rush to hear all the drums and guitars banging away. You need that thrill, that frisson of excitement from the music to get you pumped to sing.
The singing is where the song gains its final dose of emotion, that finishing gloss. I don't claim to be anything special vocals-wise, but I think most people identify emotionally with the vocal track more than any of the dozens of instrumental tracks.
Once I had everything recorded, I'd take the ProTools project to my dude, Brad Dumovic, who is amazing. He is a musical force multiplier, and he can make your music sound great.
XI. What can you tell us about the vinyl packaging, layout, and design for Old Grey Horror's THE TOWER?
Adams: A good concept album needs a good cover. I have a book of album covers and the British design firm Hipgnosis has done the best album covers ever. I bought Led Zeppelin's Houses of The Holy on vinyl just to see its amazing gatefold and cover art again. I thought, "I must have a cover like this." I knew what sort of image I wanted and a good idea of what it should look like. I started doing basic sketches myself.
I began talking to my brother and another talented artist I know, Bradney Evans, about cover designs. They each sent me a sketch and I got very excited, but I quickly started to realize it would be unreasonable to expect them to really crank out a good design unless I could pay them. I just didn't have the money, so I decided to take a stab myself.
I'm hardly an experienced illustrator, so I took a very technical approach that makes up for my shortcomings. I downloaded Blender (3-D modeling software) and cooked up a mock-up of the front cover image, so I could play around with lighting sources and composition. I wanted the cover to look like the tarot card of the same name, the tower, but instead of the Medieval tower struck by a cartoon lightning bolt, I wanted the Ypres Cloth Hall struck by an artillery shell. I fiddled with it forever until it started to look right, then, I did trigonometry for, like, a week to figure out how to take some photos of a soldier, so the lighting looked correct. My friend, Dave, and I went to a parking lot in Griffith Park and I put on an old WW1 uniform I bought on eBay and Dave took photos of me under a really bright light.
I took the photos and used carbon paper to trace all the outlines in those photos and in old war photos and made a montage of them in Photoshop. It looked pretty awesome, so we bought some German WW1 uniforms and did the same thing for the back cover.
The gatefold has another drawing, a bit less trigonometry involved. The photo of the poppy field is one I took in Antelope Valley, California. The poppy fields there are amazing.
XII. Would you mind telling us a little bit about the storylines, concepts, and themes that can be heard across Old Grey Horror's THE TOWER?
Adams: It starts quietly, with a quiet song about plotting to kill Franz Ferdinand, of course. The second tune introduces the first use of Morse Code on the record and features recordings of Margot Asquith & Kaiser Wilhelm. The third tune is where the distortion and Rock music starts. These three songs cover the mobilization of armies, the German atrocities in [Belgium], and the first skirmishing encounter between the British & German forces, in which Charles Beck Hornby becomes the first British soldier to draw German blood near the village of Casteau in 1914. Side A finishes with a tune about the Christmas Truce of 1914, meant to sound like a creepy Christmas carol—because all the good Christmas songs sound creepy.
Side B is a bit less historically-specific. The themes get more personal and immediate and the guitars are tuned lower. The first tune on this side is the title track and considers fate and fortitude. The second song, "Trommelfeuer," is meant to evoke the ghastly horror of an artillery bombardment. The third song, "Over The Top," depicts the sprinting terror of a trench raid across no-man's land. Here, the record makes a big sonic U-turn and we have a mellow tune about the widely-documented relief and bemusement men would feel heading away from the danger of the front line. "Le Claque" is a seedy trip to a brothel or opium den to seek some amusement and distraction. The final song, "Crawl In The Bottle," is an ode to the mental oblivion found in drinking.
Thematically, I hope Side A can be seen to tell a story of the war's beginnings, leading [to] the breakdown of diplomacy with a few historical narratives of conflicts, hopefully, made more vivid by a first-person perspective. Side B relates a more personal arc: the progressively greater shocks of seeing the front, getting shelled, and, then, attacking across no-man's land, followed by the relief and emotional fallout of the retreat from danger.
XIII. In addition to or aside from yourself (credited here as "J. Adams") who else can be heard playing and contributing across Old Grey Horror's THE TOWER?
Adams: Brad Dujmovic (La La La Birdtime, Invitro) - trumpet, piano, ehru, vox, synths, and [effects], Jimmy Lee (Slant, Evol Walks) - drums, Zac Morris (Ugly Kid Joe, HU3M3N) - drums, percussion, Evan McEneaney (Ancient Enemy) - guitar, Gant Frink (LUSTRA, Happy World) - drums, [and] Mike Bolger - accordion.
There are, also, a variety of folks appearing in sort of "cameo" bits: Lia Trinka-Browner (my wife) - backing vocals, Alisha Dujmovice (La La La Birdtime) - backing vocals, Patrick Cates - shouting, foley, [and] David Pitcher - shouting, foley.
XIV. How likely is it that we'll eventually see LUSTRA get back together and share some of their vaulted as-yet-unreleased music?
Adams: With the 20th anniversary of EuroTrip's release approaching, I think there's a very good chance we'll see some tunes shake loose in the next year or two. We don't currently have any plans for a reunion show, but it might happen...
XV. What's planned next for Old Grey Horror and/or LUSTRA?
Adams: I hope to organize a live performance of THE TOWER this year, but I probably need to reel in my ambitions for the stage show a bit. I, also, hope to film some trippy music videos with the help of my talented friend, David Pitcher—just as soon as we can scrape together some budget for props and production. I have done some recording with Nick Cloutman quite recently and I hope he can release his record soon. He's got some cool tunes, but he's, also, got a couple of kids now and they're a handful.
