When last we saw you guys, you were waging war with your gear at last year’s Vegoose festival. I’m guessing the angry version of “Nowhere Nothin’ F--kup” that ensued was not originally in the plans?
Yeah, you know, every once in a while when things are going so shitty and you get all pissed off, you definitely are able to channel some of that and make the music a little more exciting. It was tough. We had all these technical things. Brett broke his guitar, I broke my Echoplex [delay processor], all this shit was really going bad. We
took advantage of it, but I’d rather just have a nice, mellow show.
Your setlists have varied considerably each time I’ve seen you. Do you guys have a massive repertoire of songs at the ready?
We actually don’t; we just try to mix it up [tour to tour]. We maybe go out with 30 songs, and we play 15 a night. If we’re in a place for three days like San Francisco, I’ll work on setlists for a couple of hours. Like, I have this complex mathematical system: which songs we’ve gotta play every night and trying to mix the tempos and making sure there’s enough from each record and all that kinda stuff. I’m a little bit obsessive about it. But we can’t just whip something out. We’ve done it before, where we were in a weird mood and didn’t have a setlist or someone shouted something out and we tried to play it. But so much of our stuff depends on things being pretty tight, so it’s pretty disappointing, at least to me, when we blow a song.
How's it been sharing bills with Camper Van Beethoven, one of your longtime favorite bands?
We did a tour with them last fall, and it was really great. They were amazing to watch every night, and they were really sweet personally, so we’re doing it again. They’re definitely a favorite, and a lot more of an influence than I knew till I saw them play and started realizing how much we got from them, not least of all the fact that they do a lot of jamming, and their songs are kind of intricate and weird. They were one of the bands that kind of took punk rock and pop and psychedelic classic rock and mixed them together, which was a huge thing for us, that there’s no limit to what you can do musically.
With Camper Van Beethoven, The Delusions. September 10, 7 p.m., $17. House of Blues, 632-7600.