What really never ends is Endless Boogie's supply of awesome flyers. If you already know what's what, go to the show. If you are unfamiliar with the Boogs, read our Gen F from F33 (our most slept-on issue ever?) after the jump, then go to the show.
Rock For Ages
Endless Boogie just jam socially
By Will Welch
“Maybe it’s not a good thing, but we’re pretty jaded,” says Jesper Eklow of his band Endless Boogie. It’s a strange comment. When I think of Endless Boogie, I think of frontman Paul Major standing at the front of the small stage at New York’s Mercury Lounge as a 15 minute jam winds down. His guitar hangs free from his neck, his hair is cut across his eyes like Cat Power in the front and it hangs below his waist in back. He’s at a slight angle to the audience, one foot forward, just looking out over the cheering club crowd, nodding his head and smiling, almost egging everyone into more applause with that slow, confident nodding. No band has ever seemed so joyful; no band has ever seemed less jaded.
Of course what’s fantastic about Endless Boogie is that no band has ever needed to play rock & roll so little and so much simultaneously. “The only older band collectively in New York is Sonic Youth,” Major says. All four members of Endless Boogie have music industry-related day jobs, including bass player Mark Ohe and drummer Chris Gray. Eklow works at Matador Records. Major is one of the preeminent record collectors in the universe, and has supported himself as such for two decades now. The band’s first rule is that they never play a show unless they’re asked to. They started the band in 1997. Their first gig was in 2001.
Whatever rock & roll fantasies Eklow had as a 16 year-old record store clerk in Sweden—or whatever flights of fancy Major had when he was a kid buying acid rock records in the bins at a K-Mart in Kentucky—are now smeared with too much experience. They’ve all nine-to-fived and buy-sell-traded too many records worth too much money to believe in the romantic ideal of The Dream. If 18 year-olds starting a band are like excited kids trying to get to sleep on Christmas Eve, the guys in Endless Boogie are like weary parents who have to set their alarms and get up to stuff the stockings. “It was just supposed to be an old man hobby,” Eklow says. “Get together on Tuesday nights and have fun.” It still kind of is, but they just put out two limited, hand-numbered 12-inches. They’ve been asked to play more shows. And there they were onstage that night at the Mercury, jamming a single murky riff for minutes and minutes on end, grimacing, nodding, buggalooing like Beefheart and soaking up every last bit of the applause.