 by Steve Mcpherson
John Solomon of Friends Like These has a new dog: a beagle puppy named Lou Diamond Phillips in the Role of Chavez Y. Chavez from the Popular Movie Young Guns (Louie for short). And stopping by to feed Louie has made him late for our interview, but it’s the kind of responsibility that he feels all right shirking a press commitment for. “Even though it’s only been since August, it’s totally changed the way I look at my life,” says Solomon, who shares singing, songwriting and guitar duties with Adam Switlick in FLT, along with bassist Steve Murray and drummer Matt O’Laughlin. “I mean, that’s why I got the dog; I want to come home and know that I’m responsible enough. I mean, I still fuck up. But it’s totally changed my mentality about the band and what I’m doing.”
 What
he’s talking about is rehab, but this isn’t a salvation story or
a sob story. Life knocks you around sometimes, and if you’re lucky, you
get back up. Solomon’s been singing about down-and-outers long enough
to see the irony in his own story. Friends Like These make music that’s
more than the sum of its parts, seeing as how it’s mostly one half rock,
one half roll. It’s swaggering and self-assured stuff layered over with
a slinky, dirty and sloppy veneer. Solomon and his band have been on the verge
of breaking out for a while now, and so I was a little surprised to get an e-mail
from him explaining that a company had bought the friendslikethesemusic.com
domain name while he was in treatment. He continued, “So, yeah, I went
to treatment, that’s why FLT was messed up for about a year. We’re
all about the rock clichés minus all the trappings of success.”
How do you become a rock cliché?
“Bandwise, shit was going really well,” Solomon begins. “We
had just put out the [Deliver Us from Evil] EP over the summer, and that
was doing really well. We’d go into Cincinatti and play for like 200 people.
We were talking to labels and we kept thinking, ‘We’re almost out
of this hole. Somebody will pay for our next record at least.’ But then
our drummer [Matt O’Laughlin] was playing for the Hopefuls and they really
took off. We were gigging a lot out of town, the Hopefuls were gigging a lot
in town and they were making way more money, because we were putting all our
money back into the band.”
How many musicians out there have been caught in this trap before? Especially
here in the Twin Cities, everyone plays in everyone else’s band and these
kinds of conflicts happen all the time. As for waiting for the big break, it’s
pretty much the standard M.O. for anyone who’s ever picked up a guitar,
and when you’ve been buzzing as hard as FLT for as long as they have,
the build-up mounts almost unbearably, with good money being thrown after bad
and stock taken in the belief that all you need is the right person to hear
you. “O’Laughlin then said he was gonna quit the band,” Solomon
continues, “and join the Hopefuls. Then we had to audition new drummers
and that makes any band rethink what they’re doing and that’s when
I started. At the same time, my wife had left for grad school and so I was living
alone and I started getting into drugs. And our album was done. It’s been
at the same point for a fucking year. It’s just been sitting there and
we don’t have the money to finish it.”
There’s a special kind of frustration that comes along with having something
you love stymied. The collective faith that goes along with pulling together
to take over the world is delicate; when those bonds fray, they’re hard
to repair. After Eric Fawcett took his place in the Hopefuls, O’Laughlin
returned to FLT, but things had changed. “By that time I was fully involved
in drugs,” Solomon says, “and I was always the guy who pushed the
band and made decisions, talked to the labels and got us on tour. And then I
actually became homeless for a while because my wife came back and kicked me
out.” He couch-surfed through the bulk of the summer, squatted in an unrented
apartment and even spent a few nights sleeping in his car. “Then everything
kind of came to a head at the end of summer when Adam [Switlick] finally threw
me in his car and fucking screamed at me. It was after I played a show at the
Hexagon—the Elliott Smith Tribute night—and I was yelling at the
Hexagon staff while I was onstage. So this whole year went by where we faked
like we were doing something.”
 He
continued going to his job every day, but only after “waking up in the
morning and shooting a half-pint of vodka so [he] could stop [his] hands from
shaking.” He was a regular speed user, sold his guitars and after someone
broke into his car and stole his jeans, he sold that. So Solomon went out to
San Diego for treatment, discovering along the way that he’s bi-polar.
It’s changed his life, but he’s hesitant to talk about it since
so many of his friends have fallen further and worked harder to pull themselves
up. But I’m just glad he’s still making music and that Friends Like
These are back. Maybe not all the way yet, but they’re getting there.
“We’re still trying to work it out,” explains Solomon. “Adam
and I have gotten into a lot of fights lately. It’s tough because I see
it like siblings fighting because we’ve been together for so long.”
There are a lot of metaphors people use for bands: brothers, a family, a marriage.
But in a band there’s a complicated dynamic because these are people with
whom you are deeply connected through music, but that very connection can sometimes
make it difficult to just talk to them like regular people. It’s more
like someone you went all the way with too soon. And when you play in lots of
different groups, it gets hairy.
“But I don’t feel bad at all,” says Solomon about everyone’s
involvement with other groups, “because our new mentality is if somebody’s
not handing you a gold Rolex, you’re gonna be around town for a while.
We were all OK with each other doing our own thing, and we realized that we
get along way better with each other than we do with any of the other bands
we’ve played in. Like last night we had a rehearsal and—we’re
total dorks—we ended up shutting off the lights in the room and playing
40 minutes of just loud noise. I’ve been with those guys so long, I know
what O’Laughlin’s gonna do, I can feel where he’s gonna break
down, where Steve is gonna break down. And all the side projects: the more you
dabble in them, the more you realize who you work with.”
One of the illusions most cherished by filmmakers is that all the hard times
can dissolve away in a slow-mo shot of a tender embrace, that the degringolade
of your life can be turned around in a moment. It’s not often that you
see what happens in the months that follow a critical turning point, but that’s
just where Solomon finds himself these days. It’s all a work in progress,
but now that Friends Like These are back full-time, hopefully he can go back
to just singing about the dissolute lifestyle, and not living it. ||
Friends Like These perform Sat., Dec. 16 at the Varsity Theater with Kubla
Khan and Action vs. Action. 9 p.m. 18+. $6. 1308 4th St. SE., Mpls. 612-604-0222.
For more information on Friends Like These, don’t
go to FriendsLikeTheseMusic.com.
Try MySpace.com/FriendsLikeThese.
And head on over to pulsetc.com to download an mp3 of their song “Bombs
Away.”
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