Maritime interview!
Maritime
Is This Thing On?
There’s an Internet outage at Davey von Bohlen’s house, and the downtime could save the 32-year-old Maritime frontman the burden of trudging through the day’s blog roll. He wouldn’t miss much. No new comments on the band’s Myspace page. No new Pitchfork review arguing “the man can’t sing” (like a 3.2 slam of Glass Floor did in 2004). No Wikipedia-lifted retrospective on his former emo-pop act, The Promise Ring. Not today.
Appearing: November 15th at Subterranean in Chicago.
But as this lackluster Wednesday unfolds — well before the October 16th release of Maritime’s sweetly anthemic Heresy And The Hotel Choir (Flameshovel) — the singer/guitarist succumbs to the lure of the nearest Milwaukee hotspot, laptop and cell phone in tow. “Indie now,” he says with some regret, “it’s all about being blogged about.” Playing Mr. Fixit can wait an hour. The promise of Google rings louder.
He casually ponders the situation back home: “There are so many possibilities of what could be wrong that I’m not really sure what it is, but once we nail down what it is, I think it should be no problem.” A slowly blinking cable modem, a wireless router glowing the wrong color, a PC unknowingly needing a reset — infuriating to most, but these possible ailments pose no immediate concern to von Bohlen, a survivor of one brain tumor and three related surgeries in the early part of the decade. He says, sharing a clean bill of recent health, “There’s not a whole lot to talk about now.” For years the opposite was true.
In May 2000 the frontman collapsed before TPR were to tour Europe in support of an EP on the heels of Very Emergency, the follow-up album to a genre-defining best seller, 1997’s Nothing Feels Good. Doctors discovered a lemon-sized mass in von Bohlen’s brain. A tumor was removed and was found to be benign, but TPR had to cancel their trip overseas. Medical complications from the brain surgery further idled progress.
“A staph infection on the inside part of my skull forced me to have a piece of skull removed that October of 2000,” he recalls. “And then when you have, you know, a brain infection, they tend to wait [before replacing the removed piece of skull].”
For a year and half, the man functioned with “nothing there” to protect an exposed section of brain. Amazingly, his condition didn’t prevent TPR from touring North America, though he acknowledges a full-length between Very Emergency and TPR’s 2002 swan song, Wood/Water, would have been recorded if he had never gotten sick. “We certainly wrote the songs,” he says, briefly entertaining the idea of a “huge, famous, My Chemical Romance” level of success, which TPR never approached.
Self-administered antibiotics were key to the recovery TPR did have, he says, recounting elaborate steps to keep an IV dry and properly snaked into his body during shows. “It was in my arm, and then up across my chest, and into my heart. So I had to wear one long sleeve,” he chuckles. “So that was a fashion statement I made for a while.” For TPR fans, it was no laughing matter. “People seemed at the time really freaked out by it. No one wanted to get near me for fear that they would accidentally trip and kill me or whatever. You would almost have had to hit me purposefully to do any real damage . . . so I stayed away from balconies, I guess.”
— Mike Meyer
For more on the recovery of von Bohlen and Maritime, find the November issue of Illinois Entertainer, available free throughout Chicagoland.
