Samuel Fraser Windmill–or SFW for short, is more than just a bored kid messing around with with guitar in his room. One listen to his wealth of songs on his Bandcamp page, and you’ll hear a one kid Black Flag.
“I thought that just crediting it to “Samuel Fraser Windmill” was kinda boring, and that the name “SFW” made it sound..(like).. an early ’80s hardcore band like D.O.A. or D.R.I.”
A lo-fi blast of punk rock that recalls The Germs, Adolescents, and The Wipers. But don’t mistake SFW for a one trick pony, as his musical vocabulary runs deep, and finds him whipping out the occasional folk tune and Neil Young cover.
How would you describe your music to someone who hasn’t heard it?
I usually don’t know what exactly to call it myself. Most of the music on what you guys heard from my Bandcamp page is of course punk/hardcore, but that’s only one part of my vocabulary.
I can’t really ascribe any one catch-all description to my music as a whole because it’s so wide-ranging. The best stuff I’ve written has yet to be properly recorded.
Where are you from, and what is the music scene like there?
I currently live in Coralville, Iowa, but the music scene I consider myself a part of is centered in Iowa City, the so-called City of Literature, which is pretty much connected directly to Coralville.
The scene is relatively small, but quite healthy, and very diverse due in large part to it being a liberal college town. There’s a few distinct segments of the music community as far as I can ascertain, including a bevy of pop-punk bands, post-hardcore groups, lots of indie rock, and folk acts, and a lot of experimental noise music.
Not all of it is worth a shit to go out and listen to, but there’s a handful of really great bands that have gotten recognition from the wider underground community. Many of the best artists in town are also friends of mine personally, and are incredibly smart, funny, talented individuals offstage as well as on.
“The Ills are another fucking great band…Every punk fan on the goddamn planet needs to see them live..”
What are some of the cool venues and cool bands there?
Gabe’s (330 E. Washington St.), a long-standing bar located in downtown Iowa City that has previously been known as Gabe’s Oasis and the Picador, is one of the central venues among my musical friends and associated scene people.
Just as important is Public Space One (PS1), or Public Space Z (PSZ), a well-established music and art collective located a few blocks away from Gabe’s that has gone through a number of buildings over the years and is currently housed in the basement of the Wesley Center (120 N. Dubuque St.), which is a part of the University of Iowa’s United Methodist Campus Ministry. It’s a strictly all-ages venue where alcohol consumption inside of it is prohibited, at least as far as I’m aware. This allows it to get around the flawed, back-asswards bullshit liquor laws in Iowa City.
Lipstick Homicide
The most successful local band that I know would probably be Lipstick Homicide, a long-running pop-punk trio featuring bassist/vocalist Rachel Feldmann, her girlfriend guitarist/vocalist Kate Kane, and drummer Luke Ferguson. They’ve been touring nonstop lately and even opened for Green Day when they played at New York City’s Irving Plaza last fall. I might add, they’re also fabulously kind and unpretentious human beings who I’m proud to call good friends.
The Ills are another fucking great band with a sound that’s equal parts Bikini Kill, X, Bags, Germs, Stooges, and Misfits. Every punk fan on the goddamn planet needs to see them live, and they don’t play out all that often. At the very least, they need to get their hands on one of their excellent records, like the “Get It!” seven-inch or their album “Tuning Out” which are available on various formats.
Who plays on your recordings–is it just you, or do you have a backing band?
“As far as Chuck Berry goes….He stands as the real and still-reigning king of rock & roll..”
Okay, first of all, SFW was never a band. I’ve actually never really had a stable band. I never actually hid the fact that I played all instruments on the “Annie’s Fed Up” and “So Sick of You” extended plays except for the drums, but I thought that just crediting it to “Samuel Fraser Windmill” was kinda boring, and that the name “SFW” made it sound more along the lines of a record by an early ’80s hardcore band like D.O.A. or D.R.I.
The drums were played by a dude by the name of Stu Mullins, who is the engineer for pretty much all recordings produced at Iowa City’s United Action for Youth center, which is where everything on my Bandcamp page was recorded free of charge and where I was hanging out as often as possible at the time I made them.
For the record, I don’t really hold any of those recordings dear to me anymore. The EP’s sound like shit for the most part to me now.
What about when you play live, who plays with you then?
Of the sporadic live gigs I have played over the past year, I’ve been solo every time save for one time that I played on my 18th birthday earlier this year where I played with a female drummer.
We called ourselves Suck It, anticipating that we’d actually have something of a future as a band, but it ended up being a one-shot thing because she was pretty much never able to rehearse. We were pretty shitty the one time that we played anyway.
Tell us about your previous bands, and what did they sound like?
My first band with lead guitarist Detrell Smith and drummer Max Bills (later joined by a bass player named Martin Herrera) was horrible and never really did anything in its three or so months of existence, aside from two ill-advised recording sessions.
Honestly, I would call it more an attempt at forming a band far more than a real one. It was called The Tea Party Fascists first, then renamed The No. We hardly rehearsed and never played a gig.
“(John Lennon’s) “Working Class Hero”…is actually more nihilistic than a lot of the punk music that came later.
My next attempt at forming a band, about a year later, was even worse and rehearsed even less. It was called The Percolaters and the only guy I really liked personally that was in it was a guy named Dylan, who played guitar at first and then switched to bass.
The original bass player wasn’t very proficient at his instrument and was into some awful fucking music, not to mention being kind of a dumbass all around.
The drummer was even more of a dumb, dumb, dumbass motherfucker whose hip-hop derived style did not fit the songs at all, and he was talking some silly-ass bullshit about knowing record people in L.A. or some other such garbage at all times.
One of the first things we attempted to do in our very loose four month or so existence was cover The Beatles’ “Nowhere Man”, which we couldn’t even really play all the way through and got so horribly wrong that John Lennon probably spun in his grave about ten times in succession if he overheard it. Thankfully the planned recording of it fell through.
I’ve still never really had an actual band aside from those two dreadful failures which hardly count as far as I’m concerned, oh and I guess that Suck It thing that I mentioned earlier counts sort of.
What is it that’s so liberating about playing a three-chord Punk song?
Well there sure as hell ain’t a science to it, but I mean punk rock was founded on among other things the principle of throwing out the rulebook and just doing whatever the fuck you want no matter what anyone else thinks of it, and in a post-Bush, post-9/11 world this mentality is as liberating to so many people as it was 20 or 30 years ago.
It seems like society is progressing at a snail’s pace in this country, not to mention for the most part around the world. This is without a doubt a very big part of the reason punk has had such a surprisingly long lifespan. The ghastly, bloated ghost of itself that the music industry has become in the last 10 or 20 years is reason enough to rise up and crank up your guitar, or bang your drums, or whatever else.
‘You Grew Up Listening’ is a collection of covers by Neil Young, John Lennon, Lou Reed, and one Chuck Berry song, how important are these song-writers to you?
As far as Chuck Berry goes, there’s nothing I could say about him that hasn’t been said before. He stands as the real and still-reigning king of rock & roll as far as I’m concerned, and is unquestionably the supreme architect of the music.
Neil Young
Neil Young is one of the most amazing and influential talents that popular music has ever known, and his album Tonight’s the Night is to me one of the great rock albums of all time. It’s also definitely one of the darkest and least compromising.
John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, his first real rock solo album, is even darker and quite confrontationally so, and nowhere is that more in evidence than in “Working Class Hero”, which is actually more nihilistic than a lot of the punk music that came later.
Lou Reed stands as one of the very biggest influences on my writing and singing, and was without a doubt one of the greatest and most influential songwriters that ever lived even though he could be very hit-or-miss in that long solo career of his. He also appears to have been at least at one time in his life kind of an asshole, but who really gives a shit ?
It’s a titanic shame that I’ll never get to meet old Mr. Reed, and told him all this stuff. I never knew him personally of course, or saw him live or listened to his more recent music, but I know I miss him.
Could you tell us about ‘The Worst Album Ever Recorded’?
Nothing much to say. It contains most of the stuff from the two hideously awful attempts at recording embarked upon by The Tea Party Fascists/The No. The second one was particularly bad. We were fucking clueless. That “album” need only be listened to for its comedic properties.
What do you mean when you say that you were a song-writer in one form or another since you were a toddler?
Well, I came up with the first thing resembling a song of mine before I could actually write it, at the age of maybe three, which was about a neighbor’s Jack-O-Lantern that I could see from my bedroom window.
Disney’s Halloween town, an early musical influence
Because I had recently seen Disney Channel’s Halloweentown, I was obsessed with those things. So I came up with this thing called “I Saw a Pumpkin Outside”. The title is also the only lyric in the ‘song’. There were also no real chords to it of course, although I attempted to play my toy acoustic guitar along with it. I used to think that you plucked the strings with both hands.
It wasn’t until I was a young teenager that I became a full-time music man, and really knew anything about music, but even as a younger kid, music wasn’t far from my life in some form or another.
It probably has something to do with the fact that my maternal grandparents, who both died this year, were Iowa Rock & Roll Hall of Fame members as part of a group they played in called Freedom Road in the 1960′s and early 70′s.
My grandfather gave me a lot of practical advice on music and the music business, and I’ll never forget it.
You also described yourself as an author, filmmaker, and artist, could you tell us about that?
I occasionally write album reviews among other things on a Blogspot site called The World’s First Internet Baby.
I also write fiction from time to time, although the only full-length fictional work I’ve really finished so far is an experimental work called Send Your Curse Words to Hell.
“It’s a titanic shame that I’ll never get to meet old Mr. Reed..”
As far as film-making goes, I made a documentary for the teeny punk scene/social group I was involved in about a year and a half ago in the form of the essentially no-budget Kill Your Sons, which can be found on YouTube either in its full form or just in the form of the individual live performance sections from the four bands featured in it. The footage is quite awful at times and all the performance footage was filmed on my cell phone so the audio is absolutely shit, but it’s an interesting bit of amateur film.
Besides music, what other projects are you working on?
Right now? None, really. I’m always writing music. Fiction, not so much. It just doesn’t come as naturally to me.
And I probably made a mistake by labeling myself as a film-maker. It’s not something I normally do. I’ve had a few film projects in the past, and I’m very interested in such projects in the future, but it’s not really something I’m doing right now, especially because I don’t own a proper camera.
Is there anything you wanna plug, where can we hear your music, and see your other projects?
Well I’m going to be playing another one of my few and far-between solo gigs at Gabe’s in Iowa City November 26, with two other singers. Anyone who is able to come is encouraged to do so, since more people out there need to hear me play. Don’t expect to hear anything from the recordings that I’ve made though, except for a rendition of old man Mr. Reed’s “Satellite of Love”.
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