Q&A: The Macks on Slinging Tricks and Treats With the Making of ‘Bonanza’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY NICO CHODOR ☆
Photo Credit: Ian Enger
PORTLAND-BASED QUINTET — The Macks have been hard at work together since their early beginnings in high school. Their first record came out in 2017, but it’s their most recent album Bonanza that feels most true to the sound and direction they were shooting for at the beginning of their career: raw, intriguing, miscellaneous rock that directly questions the soul-sucking nature of the grind. It’s deliberately chaotic and objectively fun. These guys never fail to impress me.
I met bandmates Sam Fulweiler (lead vocals), Ben Windheim (guitar), Aidan Harrison (bass), Jacob Michael Perris (keys and vocals), and Josef Windheim (drums) four years ago at a show in Oakland, CA. Since then, we’ve crossed paths in their college town, Eugene, Oregon, as well as Ballard, Seattle, and now, on tour with Japanese rock band Acid Mothers Temple.
The Macks joined this 30th anniversary tour with intention, in the same way they did with Bonanza. Fulweiler and Ben Windheim tell me the band hit a bit of a crossroads after their solo tour in March, and the call to join Acid Mothers Temple for 38 shows in 39 days helped put things into perspective. Hard work pays off, so long as you can differentiate between working hard and overworking to the point of musical burnout. Bonanza is the most authentic version of their ethos, the epitome of hard work with intention.
The opening track “Strict Patterns” is mildly existential, as well as softer than most other songs on the record. It warms you up to the chaotically brilliant kind of rock and roll that follows. Fulweiler’s vocals start loud, crunchy and foul-mouthed on track 2 “Bluto,” until the instrumental flair of Perris, Harrison, and the Windheim brothers catches up with him. Their writing and sound are dynamic, spanning the full range of the voices in their heads with lyrics that range from Lara Croft in a tank top crop top and Evel Knievel weasels, to colder hands still folded in fear and good boy tricks—anything to make sense of the conundrum that is moving through life when up is down and good fortune perpetually befalls those least deserving.
Bonanza pulls you in and spits you out over and over again. This record demands to be heard for its vulnerable, creative, and devastatingly skillful presentation of what this band can, and has always been able to, do—Bonanza is The Macks in raw form.
Read Luna’s interview with Sam Fulweiler and Ben Windheim below, as they reflect on the color green, woodworking, mutual respect and their shared desire to keep playing for 10 years and counting.
Photo Credit: Ian Enger
LUNA: Talk me through making this album. I feel like when I first met you guys, you had just released Yup or possibly Rabbit.
FULWEILER: Did we meet you in Oakland? That Halloween show?
LUNA: Yes!
WINDHEIM: Yeah, we were right about to release Rabbit.
LUNA: I’ve kind of been able to catch you guys live at each stage of your career.
WINDHEIM: Pretty much, yeah.
FULWEILER: Even in Eugene, right?
LUNA: Yes! A couple of years ago. Wow Hall, I believe. But tell me about Bonanza. What’s brand new about this direction?
WINDHEIM: I think it’s pretty true to us. Just a lot more realized than a lot of our old work. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge departure in terms of our style. In fact, it’s maybe even closer to what we were trying to get at in the beginning.
FULWEILER: Exactly, yeah. We were saying that this album’s so cool because when we started the band in high school, this is the album that we wanted to make, but we just weren’t good enough at it yet. We just didn’t have the ideas yet. For the one before it, we were like, let’s just write as many songs as we can. That’s how we’re gonna get the good stuff. Just pick and choose what’s best out of that and what fits together. But with Bonanza, we really just wrote the album. We have two other B-sides that will come out….We kind of understood what the order was gonna be really early, what the name of it was gonna be really early.
WINDHEIM: Yeah, we knew which tracks were gonna be B-sides.
LUNA: It just came together naturally then.
FULWEILER: I would say we were a bit more particular and just a bit more careful with this album.
LUNA: That makes sense. I think you can definitely hear the care with which you handled this record, especially live.
WINDHEIM: Yeah. To Sam’s point, things fell into place even when the songs were little babies. We just knew how they were gonna turn out, roughly.
LUNA: And what’s with the green theme? You have green undertones on the album cover, plus the little green bird dude at the bottom of it.
FULWEILER: I always try pinning a color scheme to each album.
LUNA: Orange was last, right?
FULWEILER: Yeah, I try and refine it each time, because that’s kind of just how I see the albums. They just have a glow to them. It’s kind of like how I catalog eras of our life: by albums and by colors. I thought green really fit the record. And, the bird thing on the front is actually a free-standing sculpture that I made.
LUNA: No way.
FULWEILER: He’s my height.
LUNA: (Laughs) What did you make it out of?
FULWEILER: Plywood and feathers.
WINDHEIM: He’s wearing people-clothes.
FULWEILER: I bought clothes for him, yeah. He’s wearing real pants that you can zip.
WINDHEIM: He’s got like a 9-inch waist, so he’s pretty snatched.
LUNA: Where do you keep him?
FULWEILER: He’s in Portland. He’s too hard to bring around (laughs). He’s really wide.
LUNA: Maybe he needs heelies or something for tour. The colors thing is really cool, though. Does that track for individual songs, too? Do they glow, too?
FULWEILER: Yeah. So, I just kind of pick the overall hue, like when I step back from the album. “Dually Of Man” was the one that was really green from the start, which is the lead single. That was kind of the track that made us feel, like, “okay, we got an album.”
LUNA: How did you know “Dually” was the one?
FULWEILER: Honestly, just because of the overall rhythm of it. We feel cool playing it.
WINDHEIM: Yeah, my guitar part is very addictive to play. It’s something that stuck with me for a long time, and I was really excited to finally use it. It felt like a pretty obvious choice overall. We tried to give other songs a chance.
FULWEILER: We asked different friends what the single should be, and pretty much everybody agreed.
LUNA: What is Bonanza saying that your previous records have not?
WINDHEIM: There’s a certainty to it and a confidence to it that I think we could have only made now. So, I think there was a lot of kind of wishful thinking in Sam’s attitude before. You would talk about how you were less confident at times, and now it feels like you are very self-aware.
FULWEILER: Track to track, I mean, they all say something different. Some of them are a bit more about self-assertion. Some are about understanding, you know, your lane and staying in it, understanding why you are the way you are because of where you come from. “Dually” is sort of just a criticism of the suburban upbringing that we had. We grew up together in a suburb of Portland.
LUNA: I didn’t realize you grew up together!
FULWEILER: Yeah, we met when we were 10.
LUNA: That’s crazy. You guys have stuck together for such a long time! I feel like most bands that stay together for this long are constantly rotating people in and out of the group.
WINDHEIM: I think you met us right after we made our last change. We really locked everything down in 2021.
LUNA: How do you not get sick of each other after this many years?
WINDHEIM: I mean, I think, unfortunately, it is tied a little bit to progress and success. You know, we have this shared need to see things grow. But it’s always been slow and steady, very head forward for us.
FULWEILER: As far as how we all get along, we all have a lot of respect for each other as musicians and as people. I’ve known Ben since the fourth grade and we’ve had a long history of being friends prior to music. So we have that foundation, and Ben and Josef are brothers, so there’s that. But with Harry and Jake, we were really good friends with them for years prior to them joining the band. We had already seen them play in other bands. Jake was in another band with me and then just being around them so much, and enjoying them as people, before relying on them as bandmates, became another way to establish mutual respect.
WINDHEIM: We spent a lot of time when they first joined the band really trying to lay equal ground, just to get everyone contributing, everyone feeling like they’re really a part of the band. I think what we have is pretty hard to build, and it’s important to hold on to.
LUNA: It comes through on stage, too. During your last song tonight, I couldn’t help but smile because again, I’ve seen you guys through so many stages, and at the end of the day you guys are just having fun up there. You’ve just been having fun side by side for so many years, and it comes through in how sharp your set was tonight. Not that it ever wasn’t.
FULWEILER: We always want it to get better, right?
LUNA: How’d you land on the title?
FULWEILER: Kind of an inside joke, but it is based on the old TV show, Bonanza, the theme song of it. We were listening to an NRBQ record, and randomly, there’s just a horrible cover, purposefully so, just out of tune, grating, but it’s hilarious. It comes on out of nowhere, and you’re like, “what the fuck is this?”
WINDHEIM: In the middle of this really pleasant, kind of hot rock album.
FULWEILER: We thought it was funny, and then Joe had the aux, no, Harry had the aux, but it was Joe who told him to put it on repeat. We just essentially played chicken with it, because it’s only like a minute long, but it’s awful, to see how many times we could get through it before somebody broke.
WINDHEIM: It was like 27 times.
FULWEILER: It was fucked. But it was just kind of the running joke, and then we ended up covering that cover in the album, and that’s the title track that nobody’s listening to right now, according to our statistics.
LUNA: It’s gonna be me listening to it, just to see how long I can last now that I’ve heard this story (laughs).
WINDHEIM: As Harry said earlier, the people who listen to Bonanza are the ones that we’ll take into battle with us.
LUNA: Oh, 100 percent. Did visuals just kind of come to fruition naturally for the record?
FULWEILER: Yep, yeah. I had this idea, and I sketched out roughly what it should look like frame-wise. I wanted it to be a photo. And Ben and Joe’s mom is a very talented photographer. We brought her to the spot that I wanted to shoot at, and she fucking nailed it.
LUNA: Had she done projects like this for you guys before?
WINDHEIM: Yeah, I mean, she used to do a lot for us, kind of when we were starting out.
LUNA: What do the parents think of Bonanza?
WINDHEIM: I think she loves it. I mean, she’s been a very strong supporter. Our parents are down. It’s cool. They’re at all the important shows.
LUNA: What about Harry’s grandparents? I remember you telling me once about how much they spoil you whenever you stay the night along tour.
FULWEILER: We’re staying there tonight. Harry’s grandfather is here at the show actually!
LUNA: What! That’s awesome.
