The Moguls
An interview with Madison Pop-Punkers The Moguls
by Ryan Schremp
April 2013
Interviewing The Moguls is a bit of a challenge, and it’s not just because half of them live in Milwaukee while the other half live in Madison. However, I sat down with the Madison half—Riley Henninger and Kyle Jaco—while we Skyped-in the Milwaukee half—Patrick Talaska and Dustin Schramm—to talk a bit about their past, their present, and their future. Each of us with a 40oz bottle of a beer that rather resembled champagne, the interrogation began.
Maximum Ink: You’ve had this current lineup for about a year and a half now, tell me a bit about how you got here.
Kyle Jaco: Well, Patrick started the band with some dudes in ‘98 and they didn’t really do anything. Pat wrote a couple of songs - one of them is, “Why Won’t They Leave Me Alone?” - Then I played in a band with Dustin and Riley in High School.
Riley Henninger: Called, Everything Diet.
KJ: Yes. It was really bad. We knew Nick Woods before he was cool.
RH: And Davey before he was Fortune & Glory.
KJ: And then I started playing with some other dudes and then we started playing as The Moguls…
Patrick Talaska: This guy is so bad at interviews.
RH: Yeah, he’s talking so slow, here, let me take it over. Kyle and I were playing as The Contraceptives, and Dustin was in Twin Cities. Kyle kept wanting me to play in The Moguls, but Kyle and I kinda hate each other sometimes. So Dustin moves back, and I told Kyle I’d probably play now, because Dustin was back.
KJ: Then we started to be really good. We were really awful for a little while.
MI: What was the cause of that awfulness?
RH: Bad Gas.
KJ: Smoking. Lack of stamina.
MI: Legitimate Grape is the name of your new EP, how was that recording process?
KJ: It took us way too long to record because we’re really lazy, we don’t schedule things well, and we have a tendency to drink way too much too quickly, so most of the time we were there, we ended up messing up a lot.
RH: I got my tracks done in one.
KJ: Yeah, Riley was like “one and done” to a click track without having to have any scratch tracks.
MI: So, you recorded Legitimate Grape with Joe Cushman…
RH: Yeah, at 5 to 9 Studios.
KJ: Yeah, and Cush did some of the mixing, I did some of the mixing, and we sent it out to Moathouse in Gainesville, FL and had Roger from Less Than Jake do all the Mastering.
MI: From beginning of recording to completion of the mastering, how long did the album take to make?
KJ: As long as it took to record and mix St. Anger.
PT: Nine Months.
KJ: Yeah, nine months start to end. Which is way too slow. We’re going to be much quicker with the next one.
MI: So what’s in store for the future? Do you have an idea of when you want to release your next EP?
KJ: I would like to start recording it in May, if possible. We’re hoping to do either an EP and a split, or just another 5-song EP and want to release that sooner than later. Then we’re hoping to start recording the new stuff in May or late Spring some time and get that out by the end of the summer.
MI: Is that a schedule you’d like to keep moving forward? Releasing a couple EPs a year?
KJ: Eventually, we’d like to do a full-length some time within the next year, but we’ll probably release a couple EPs before we release a full-length.
MI: Has it been a challenge for half of the band to live in Milwaukee while the other half lives in Madison?
RH: For us (motions to Kyle), it doesn’t really matter much because Dustin and Pat have to drive.
PT: We drive a LOT to Madison.
Dustin Schramm: Not everyone would do that, but it’s totally worth it in my book.
JK: Other than that, the band is tight enough at this point where we could probably go three months without practicing and still snap right back in to it.
DS: At one point, they wanted me to drive all the way down from Twin Cities to do this, and I was like, “No fuckin’ way.”
MI: Thanks a lot for chatting with me today! Any last words you’d like to leave us with?
KJ: Sparklefuck and The Moguls are going to do a split.
RH: We’re playing the Battle of the Bands for Maybash on April 20th at The Frequency, so everyone should come out to that.
KJ: And our EP release is on the 26th at The Inferno with Sparklefuck, The Spastic Hearts from Ohio, and Infinite Signal from Minneapolis.