Lifeguard

Published in HERO 34

There’s a certain frequency in Chicago right now – a deliciously gritty hum echoing from underground venues and DIY spaces, from cracked amps and cracked voices, from kids who grew up on lo-fi classics but are making something entirely of their own. Lifeguard, the trio at the centre of this, aren’t revival- ists. They’re restless. Urgent and impatient, their sound leans and lurches, tethered to wiry guitar lines, blown-out speakers and hooks that don’t let go. Formed from the wreckage of high school bands and college days bleeding into soundchecks, Lifeguard signed to Matador before most have graduated, and with the release of their debut record, Ripped and Torn, they’ve set their sound to wax and are taking it on the road – headlining tours that feel like basement gigs turned inside out. Elias Bender Rønnenfelt has been there and nailed it, as the frontman of Iceage, Marching Church, and under his own solo moniker – in-conversation, Rønnenfelt offers some left-field wisdom to the new kids on the circuit.

Elias Bender Rønnenfelt: Good to see you. How’s life, how are you guys doing?
Kai Slater: Good man, how are you all [Lifeguard are currently in different locations]?
Asher Case: I’m doing good, I just went to New York because I had a solo show and I’m leaving tomorrow.
Kai: We’re all doing solo shows right now.
Isaac Lowenstein: I’m not doing solo shows, no one will book me. [all laugh]
Asher: You’re graduating high school though.
Isaac: I’m graduating high school, it’s true. I had the worst test of my life yesterday.

Elias: What were they testing you on? Isaac: Like, vectors and coordinates. Elias: Vectors, what’s that?
Isaac: It’s early calculus stuff.

Elias: Math?
Isaac: Yeah, math.
Kai: How were you in school, Elias?

Elias: I dropped out of high school, so I’m not a very educated man. Kai: Me too. I dropped out second year, when did you drop out? Elias: When I was seventeen. I had a couple of years of high school before I dropped out. But math, I was so lucky because I don’t know how it works in America, but here when you finish a course, it’s kind of a draw on which subjects you have to go into a full exam for – some you just get a grade depending on how you did during the course. I guess it keeps people on their toes throughout the year. I was finishing math and didn’t get picked out to go to exams, so I was having an evaluation with my teacher and he was this really sweet, kooky guy called Keith – he was also the head of the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ society at school. [laughs]. I went to this kind of anarchist, loose school, which was where all the squatters and stuff went in the area. Keith sat me down and said, “You’ve barely been to any of the classes, you never turned in any homework, you never said anything in class, you’ve been mostly asleep when you were here. So on that basis I don’t feel qualified to judge whether you know math at all.” And then he gave me the second best grade.
Isaac: There you go. He said, “Well, if you join my society...” [all laugh]
Kai: In Chicago it’s super screwed up because it’s this selective enrolment shit. The grades you get in seventh grade kind of judge what high schools you get into. It’s very competitive, and obviously there’s this whole social universe to it. In seventh grade I got expelled because there was a kid beating me up so I kept playing hooky and they were like, “You can’t come back to school.” So I had no grades from seventh grade. Then my dad moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I went to the high school where The Stooges formed. But then Covid happened. So I was like, “I’m just going to do music.”

Elias: How’s Ann Arbor? I went there once, it’s kind of a weird place in juxtaposition to Detroit.
Kai: I mean, it was the first place I’d ever been that had nice houses, close to a downtown area, if you know what I mean? Everywhere I’d been before and where I’d grown up, you could find big houses and stuff, but you’d have to drive out far. But in a small town or college town like that, there’s not really a middle ground.

Elias: I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Detroit. I remember I went to see a show in Ann Arbor, and at least on the drive we made – we went from Mexicantown, Detroit – before you get to Ann Arbor, you drive through a stretch that’s really bummed out, just derelict houses, property burned down, and then you get to Ann Arbor, which is this hippyish, Midwestern, little college utopia, it’s such a, you know, that American thing of right and wrong sides of the track.
Kai: Oh yeah, definitely. I think in the 60s Ann Arbor had a hippy scene, and then Detroit was like, you know, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, Motown, rock ‘n’ roll. I would always go to Detroit to watch basketball games or concerts with my dad. There’s a really good Bangladeshi pizza place where they have ghost pepper pizza, there’s like six spots in Detroit. Everyone I’ve met from Detroit has this great musciality too – all the great music from Detroit, you can tell it’s from there.

Elias: Yeah, and electronic music too. With Iceage, at least three of us were kind of stranded in Detroit because we were hanging out there and then we spent all our money and started working in deconstruction.
Kai: You worked in deconstruction?

Elias: Yeah, we had to knock down buildings with big sledgehammers, put on hazmat suits and clean up debris from all these fucked up basements with asbestos. Then we’d get paid like 100 bucks at the end of a ten hour day and just go to the bar. It was actually kind of a sick time.
Isaac: In Detroit?

Elias: Yeah.
Kai: How come you were there for so long?

Elias: I think it was like a month or something, we were meant to go back but I voluntarily missed my plane. [laughs] It’s such an origin city for so much music, and we ran into some of the Underground Resistance guys.
Isaac: What the fuck, really? You just like, saw them?

Elias: At a party.
Kai: Wait, who?

Elias: Underground Resistance, they’re like the godfathers of techno music. I think I was drunk and mouthing off because there was a techno festival going on and I was kind of sick of it, but one of the guys from Underground Resistance started explaining how he was into James Brown and started by getting a drum machine... You know funk has that whole thing of ‘the one’ [a rhythmic structure in funk]? He was basically trying to recreate James Brown’s grooves on these machines he gathered. Sitting with some guy, hearing straight from the source about how he basically invented a massive music genre... Detroit is trippy like that.
Isaac: And those dudes still play around town all the time. I have friends who go over there often to see parties and stuff, and the amount of legendary technoheads who are just playing shows in basements every weekend...

Elias: Yeah, like backyard shows.
Isaac: I think in the face of such a destroyed city, people keep the music alive at the very least. The music has always been strong there.

Elias: Even fucking bar music is cool there. Are all of you living in Chicago?
Asher: Yeah.
Isaac: Yeah.
Kai: Yeah, but I live on the road, man. [laughs]

Elias: [puts on American accent] You live on the road, man. [all laugh]
Kai: I’m kidding, but this summer is crazy, dude. You know once you start touring a load, you have to really start to consider your time at home and the time you spend there. Touring is so social, but it makes you so anti-social at times, too, it affects your brain.

Elias: For sure. How would you say you guys cope with the psychological aspects of what touring puts you through? Do you know how to talk smack? Can you make each other laugh?
Isaac: We goof off more than we talk seriously. If we could better articulate gripes when they happen maybe our touring would be smoother-sailing.
Asher: And our organisation would be better. [laughs] We definitely make each other laugh.

Elias: That’s such an important mechanism of survival. With Iceage, people are like, “You like books and stuff,” but if people were to listen to the general conversation that goes on throughout the tour, just the sheer, reptile stupidity that is constantly ongoing. Reducing brain level down to a soup of nonsensical...
Asher: ...Shit that only makes sense to each other. [laughs]

Elias: That’s the best way of coping, when you have to spend so much time together, you have to throw away all sorts of intelligence and just make each other laugh. Being on tour with people all the time and trying to remain serious, that sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Isaac: The situation is too absurd to be normal. The whole thing of performing every night, doing the long drives and never having a break from conversation, if you tried to have a meaningful conversation all the way through, it’d drive me crazy. Sometimes it just needs to be dumb. Kai: If we have a tour manager I like sitting up front, they always have good stories.
Isaac: You were only sitting up front because you had a broken leg.
Asher: It’s true.

Elias: It’s nice in the front seat, but you’re obligated not to pass out the entire ride or put on headphones.
Asher: You have to be a co-pilot.
Elias: Front seat is co-pilot, yeah.
Asher: Elias, when you guys tour do you do the driving ever?

Elias: I don’t even know how to drive.
Asher: This is our first one where we’re splitting it up between us. It’s going to be interesting.

Elias: How long is the tour?
Asher: Five weeks.

Elias: So a hefty one.
Isaac: It’s our first of that kind, we haven’t really done that [before]. Elias: It’s kind of cool being an entire unit where you can take care of that factor. Just make sure you split it up, because driving all those hours relentlessly every day and then also having to find it in yourself to bring it on stage, it’s tough.
Isaac: Early on, were you guys at each other’s throats all the time when touring? Our first run, even though it was only a week or so, I feel like we were bickering the whole time. [laughs]

Elias: Not so much bickering, it was more... sort of cold resentment at times. But we always managed to stay really great friends. There’s been some moments where members have had grudges that rubbed each other the wrong way, and eventually it erupts. But I can count that on one hand. There’s no time for petty shit when you’re on tour and you have that come-and-go. I’ve seen bands that hardly even like each other tour heavily because they’ve had some success and that’s the common dream so they continue on this track, but they hardly speak or like each other. Whereas if I played in a band with someone I didn’t fucking like or want to spend time with, I’d quit that shit in a heartbeat. Life is too short to spend time with people you don’t care about.
Asher: Just to fool yourself for two months or so at a time. I don’t think I could play a show with people I didn’t feel super close to.
Isaac: The week after tour, I always have that feeling of, “Oh wait, what do I do here? I’m home and there’s nothing to drive to, and I don’t need to cram everything in.”

Elias: Yeah, like you’ve been babied with a sense of purpose. Somebody wakes you up and they’re like, “Get in the van,” then you stumble out, carry a few amps, make soundcheck, find a bit of food, and then it’s show time. It can be a mindfuck to stand still after something like that, and be the sole instigator of your own day.
Isaac: Yeah, right. Once you start dedicating your whole day to like, an hour when the show actually happens – we’re driving out here, we’re setting up, we’re doing all this shit to get to the point of playing. The sense of purpose is very strong and different to regular life.

Elias: If you go on a five-week run or something like that, it’s most likely a new city everyday, and all the new experiences and crazy shit that goes on, you can come home and tell stories to people but it’s kind of hard to describe to anyone who wasn’t there.
Asher: Yeah, if you have a big tour and you’re home for five days before going back out, you’re not really living in those five days, you’re in limbo. You have to be resuscitated by your friends or something. That’s what I mean about it being a completely different social thing. Being in the city with your friends and not in this party van, you really have to take a second to adjust, to get your mind back to normal.

Elias: It’s like being in this really sloppy, debauched version of the army. [all laugh]
Isaac: Tour is just the army. We closing on that?