This interview was originally published on Frontier Psychiatrist on March 25, 2014
Since January 5, 1980, Michael Grego and Travis Dobbs have been the sole constant members of the band Ono. In that time, they’ve played with Glenn Branca, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Lydia Lunch, Snakefinger, and a slew of other experimental acts. They were contemporaries of Swans, Sonic Youth, and Suicide. They were on a label with the Minutemen, the Birthday Party, and Flipper. They have just released Diegesis, their fourth album. And yet, outside of those committed to Chicago’s underground music scene, very few people know about the legend of Ono.
Ever since I first saw them, in the same Wicker Park art-space that introduced me to Brain Frame, I’ve been captivated by the band. That night, Dobbs, with grey dreads, a white dress, and dark skin, roared a version of the Velvet Underground classic “All Tomorrow’s Parties” with a voice kinkier than even Nico’s disconcerting baritone in the original. The band around him, led by Grego on bass, was making noises that all but deteriorated from the original version. It was intimidating, abrasive, confrontational, and absurd. Yet, underneath, there was a sense of humor, too.
Despite the noise they create on stage, the two are some of the hospitable people I’ve met in Chicago’s music scene. Dobbs invited me to his home on the Far South Side of the city, where he offered me baked chicken, grilled veggies, fresh sliced fruit, and wine. He, Grego, and I hung out for about four hours as the day light faded quickly from an already short December day. Dobbs and Grego meet every Sunday for band practice, which sometimes are just days like this: talking, reminiscing. “We don’t really exist as a band; it’s almost like we’re the Flying Dutchman on an electric ghost ship of doomed people,” said Grego in a high-pitched voice and laid-back manner at the dining room table, betraying the intensity of the noise he creates on stage.
Flyer for an early show at the Cubby Bear Lounge. Photo by Mickey
Stanzler.
Grego has Italian and South American roots, and comes from a Chicago-based musical community: his dad played sax, and he grew up in same neighborhood where Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Mary Wells, and other musical legends lived (coincidentally, Dobbs’ father built a house three blocks away from where Grego grew up). Grego played keyboard and guitar in a series of R&B groups before Ono began. Dobbs, on the other hand, was born in Mississippi, but grew up mostly in Ohio. He has a flamboyant, dramatic, and melodic flair for story-telling and a penchant towards tangents. “I don’t have a musical background,” he said. “I was not interested in the music as such, but I was interested in the feeling of it, especially in Mississippi where the feeling just keeps building and building, and suddenly, you find yourself falling out on the floor…now, see, that is a side of music that I think most of us don’t really think about that much.”
Dobbs served in the military for six years. During the interview with me, he briefly mentioned a traumatic experience in which he was accused of sodomy, but didn’t expand much on the topic. He left the military in 1969, where he then coped with the stress left upon him by writing poetry and studying the martial art of Kundalini. [He is still coping with the trauma today through both another noise project, DJPTSD, and his artwork which can be found (with a more personal and vivid description of the accusations and interrogations) on his tumblr.] In the 1970s, Dobbs got close to Cleveland radio personality Billy Bass and lived four blocks away from Pete Laughner of Pere Ubu (who at one point asked Dobbs to perform with Pere Ubu). For Dobbs, it was an introduction to an unknown music scene around him. When Laughner performed a cover of ‘Heroin,’ Dobbs called it the “most dynamic performance I’ve seen since leaving the military” and that for Lou Reed, “it was a nice song, [but] for Peter, it was an experience.”
Dobbs had decided to move to an ashram in New Mexico, but on the way to New Mexico from Cleveland, he stopped in Chicago to see his father. He eventually decided to spend the summer in Chicago and got a job as a secretary at Northwestern’s School of Law. It was here where Ono started. The daughter of one of Dobbs’ coworkers saw one of his poems and gave it to Grego, who said he wanted to start a band. Dobbs was hesitant to get into music, but Grego convinced him they were going to do noise, not music. Since then, Dobbs was hooked. “I couldn’t leave,” he told me. “It was fun. It’s still fun – I haven’t gotten over it. I’m like a kid in a candy store.”
Flyer from 1983.
Dobbs is known for saying to the audience before
playing, “If you came for music, leave now,” and offering money
back to displeased paying customers. “Art for me is taking people
somewhere they haven’t been before. It is a responsibility of the
artist, I think,” he told me. The band’s name is short for
Onomatopoeia. “Onomatopoeia lets people know I’m not just going
to create poetry or prose or a song,” said Dobbs. “I want it to
go somewhere else because of my limited knowledge of language as
well.” Early on, Grego told Dobbs to go to a pawn shop, find a lap
steel guitar, and “buy it; don’t get lessons.” Aside from the
R&B greats Grego grew up around, and the art scene in Ohio of
which Dobbs was a part, the two drew inspiration from seeing live
performances by Klaus Nomi, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Captain
Beefheart, and churches from around the city.
At another show at the University of Illinois-Chicago, a group of students threw pennies at a music professor that was playing before Ono. So when it was time for them to play, Dobbs came out in a wedding dress with chains and garbage can tops, like a medieval drag queen. “I made it clear: you want some action, I’ll put your ass in traction. I got chains, I got instruments. I’m heavy metal [laughs]…You wanna get violent? Honey, I’ve been to Vietnam. You wanna get violent? Shiiit.” Dobbs dressing in drag is a tradition that continues to this day (from Dobbs’ blog: “30JUL84 Ric & Mrs. Stanzler strongly object to Travis’s dresses, gowns and costumes (again).”) It’s almost an immediate litmus test for who will and who will not love the band.
Case in point: they had also played a few shows with punk rock band Naked Raygun, during one of which the crowd was so shocked or confused that they threw objects at the band on stage. Ono got their revenge however: a month later, they opened for Naked Raygun again and decided to have some fun. Dobbs was laughing the whole time in the background as Grego told me the story: “So we opened the show with a microphone to the computer singing ‘Ground Control to Major Tom,’” a video of Grego in drag eating cherries was projected, “and then Travis was singing this blues song about slapping you across the face with his big black dick. And that was the show! And the audience was like [opens mouth in shock]. They had never seen anything like that. I said ‘This is punk rock’ [laughs]. I gotcha’ punk rock for you right here.”
And yet, those weren’t even the most dangerous shows they’ve played. During the Peace Festival in 2009, Ono played on a metal stage via a portable trailer. It took place outside in Lincoln Park. Inches of rain fell within minutes, but that didn’t stop the band from playing, or the kids that came to see them from playing in the mud. “The sound just matched the weather exquisitely,” said Dobbs. “Not just the rain. There was lightning and thunder. It was a scene…it’s filmworthy. Everybody that was on stage remembers it.” “I remember looking at my pedals with water underneath ‘em,” added Grego.
Flyer from 1983.
If Ono ever got a ‘break’ when they were starting out, it was through Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, who was first in the band Special Affect. He was the one who introduced the band to Joe Carducci of SST. Ono got signed to Thermidor and put out their first album Machines That Kill People in 1982 (reissued 2012 on Priority Male). Their first review came from Aeon magazine; it described the album as having “aspects of avant ritual theatre in the vain of Harry Partch’s classic ‘Bewitched.’” Steve Albini had actually reviewed it for Matter Magazine, but wasn’t a fan of the album, which proved in Grego’s mind that Albini was just a normal guy and not that weird. Ono’s second album, Ennui, never got an official release when the label dissolved in 1986, but it’s also planned for a reissue on Priority Male later this year.
After a hiatus for the majority of the 90s and mid-2000s, during which the members focused more on individual projects, Ono has been making waves again consistently for the past few years. They play consistently around Chicago, in galleries, clubs, benefits, basements, lofts, and wherever will have them. “Each show is a different show,” said Grego. “It tells a story in the samples, and there’s no talking. Each show is based upon some moment in our lives; you’re getting a glimpse of a story being told, of a true story that actually happened. It’s something we have witnessed or seen.”
“’Heroin’ for instance has changed,” Dobbs added. “It related to experiences in Michael’s life and related to experiences in my life.” Sometimes, they dedicate the song to veterans that are going through the hell of addiction, but the meaning changes with each performance. “[After one of our shows] this suburban white kid comes up to me and puts his needle on my steel guitar,” revealed Dobbs. “Transformative moment for me. ‘Heroin’ has grown from that moment as well. When I do it now, that now adds to the landscape that is going on in my head. And the desperation.”
Flyer promoting limited edition cassette, “Kate Cincinnati.”
As far as what attracts the two of them to noise, the
answer is simply that music is too abundant in the world already.
“It’s difficult to get outside of music when you’re a
musician,” said Dobbs. “It’s difficult to un-think and let your
emotions have some play. There are a lot of emotional musical pieces,
but then over time, very often they become structured and the emotion
of the player gets lost. This [noise], you’re engaged. You are
forced to listen.” Moreover, according to Grego, “The drummer
never practices with us, so he has no clue. He doesn’t know the
material. He only knows the material that he’s played before. So
whenever he plays with us, it’s always like it’s the first time.
So he’s got to listen.” Even when Grego during our time together
reveals what one of Ono’s shows was recently about, Dobbs is
shocked that that’s what Grego had intended. At a show last fall,
Grego used a sample of Walter Kronkite interrupting a Doris Day song
announcing that President Kennedy was shot, which Dobbs recalls
hearing about during an episode of As the World Turns. “And
this is now injected; you have to then make it a moment, it is
performance,” Dobbs said. Dobbs has an additional job in the band
as well: “When it gets too musical, my responsibility is to fuck it
up. Who knows what I’ll do? I’ve got a whole suitcase full of
electronics and you’ll hear all of this WAHHHHkunf and it forces
everybody to get outside [themselves].”
While Ono’s general sound may be captured by their influences and contemporaries—a mixture of R&B, gospel, proto-punk, and no wave—trying to convey what they actually sound like is very difficult. They’ve been called art-damage, outsider art, art-rock, and post-industrial gospel, but they prefer just noise. “What I wanted to do wasn’t musical. What I wanted to do fit more into noise,” said Grego. But their new album, Diegesis, recorded by Cooper Crain of Cave, may be their most musical (or least noisy) yet. The fun thing about the album is that, like on 2012’s Albino, some of the songs are new, but some are songs from the Eighties that were never recorded. Diegesis offers a live drummer, mellotron, strings, trumpets, and overall, a bigger sound than previous albums. Crane’s production wondrously exposes both the musical and non-musical elements that define the band.
Flyer for show in Wilmette, 1982.
Just like Iggy Pop used to hold a blender to a
microphone, Ono often use unconventional instruments and even create
some of their own. When they opened for Lydia Lunch at the Metro in
the early Eighties, they only had three garbage cans as their
instruments (contrary to my expectations, Grego described Lunch as
“sweet”). At the last show at the
Mopery, a Logan Square DIY venue that shut down in 2010, Ono used
floor buffers and power tools. They’ve built instruments out of
Contadina tomato cans and ball bearings, amplified kalimbas, and
violin bows out of steel and wood. Dobbs has been known to hang
sheets of steel from the ceiling. “I love the sound of steel,” he
said. “If you take a sheet of steel and just wave it you get this
wonderful [sound]…I was not thinking of conventional or not when I
was doing it or when I do it. I think more of how can I get sonic
values out of what I’m doing.”
Moreover, at this point for Ono, the concept of noise has become philosophical rather than just aural. “What is the efficacy of noise in our society?” Dobbs asked. “If you don’t have noise, you don’t have music. One justifies, in a sense, the other. Why can’t noise be as valued as any other form of sound? Well I extended it in the Ono tradition by using sonic noise and visual noise as well. Because a lot of the things that I do in terms of works on paper are equally disturbing. They’re not nice. They’re not art. It’s noise.” Dobbs’ artwork deals with much of the marginalized members of society (who he deems “noise”), primarily black youths. “You won’t see my work displayed,” he said. “You’ll see all the drama with black kids in wheelchairs, with death and dying. Black youth are actually rare in [art in] America, comparatively…I go to funerals. I have a whole series of art dedicated to black males between the ages of 18 and 25.”
Perhaps it’s because he’s rooted in these social projects, but for an artist who’s worked with so many musical luminaries, Dobbs humbly considers himself “just an ordinary person.” Even having spent over three and a half hours with the band, I can’t track down where the answers to my questions end and where my conversation began. We rummaged through a large plastic bin full of the band’s fliers and old clippings from newspapers and magazines. Dobbs was quick to find tangents to my questions that somehow brought us from talking about former bandmates to Moms Mabley to Twin Peaks, while Grego would be quick to get things back on topic. Which makes sense when considering: Grego is there to provide the structure and the main themes and ideas, while Dobbs will go in his own little world and just fuck it up or bring things in a new direction than anyone (including himself) expected. “Our interviews are never very conventional either,” joked Grego at one point.
In 1983, the Chicago Reader called Ono “Chicago’s best kept secret.” For P Michael Grego and Travis Dobbs, they seem more than happy that the same could be said in 2014. As Dobbs reiterated multiple times, there is one thing for Ono that still hasn’t changed: “When I’m out doing what I do, I’m going to have some fun and hope that you can come along too and have some fun with me.”
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