Mika Miko

The doorman at Sneaky Dee’s will not let me in under any circumstances.  I’m supposed to be here to meet up with Los Angeles punk band Mika Miko for an interview, but the rather large and imposing man standing in front of Toronto’s near-legendary bar slash music venue will not have anything to do with it.  He wants to see some piece of ID that shows I’m nineteen years old, which of course I don’t have (alas, my birthday isn’t until one week after North By Northeast).  I plead with him, try to reason, attempt to pull the “I have a media pass, so you have to let me in” card, all of which are in vain.  After introducing myself to the band – who are at the venue tonight for their first of two performances at this year’s NXNE – and explaining my situation, we decide to do the interview on some park benches outside a nearby elementary school.  Its around suppertime and the neighborhood is alive with the sound of streetcars grinding to a halt, pedestrians soaking up the day’s last rays of sunshine, and the outdoor festivities from the nearby Taste of Little Italy Festival, which has closed off a good portion of College Street.  Not the most perfect location for an interview but it’ll do in a pinch.  After some hemming and hawing over who will do the interview – the quintet (who have been joined by No Age’s Dean Spunt and Randy Randall) are hungry and they want to go out in search of pizza – guitarist and keyboardist Michelle Suarez and bassist Jessica Clavin somewhat reluctantly agree to answer my questions.  Unless you are a hardcore Mika Miko fan, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any of the band members, even in broad daylight.  Clavin is soft-spoken and wears her punk love on her sleeve, and is glad to share stories of growing up in California on bands such as Black Flag and Social Distortion.  On the opposite side, Suarez – who grew up in South America and has plans to one day become a fashion designer – was quick to set straight the inaccuracies so-called media-types have printed about the band.  Both were kind enough to talk to me about everything from the myths around the band, their relationship with No Age and LA music scene, and how their latest album <b><i>We Be Xuxa</i></b>, came to be named after a former Brazilian kid’s TV host-turned-pornstar.

Myth #1: Mika Miko are an all-girl band.

“Every interview usually starts out like, “What’s it like being in an all-girl band?” says Suarez, “We never saw ourselves as being that.  I feel that some people just don’t understand.  I think a lot of people see us as a gimmick or a novelty band because we are girls.  So many journalists will call us an all-girl band, but we do have a boy in the band.”  The boy is drummer Seth Densham, who along with Jenna Thornhill (vocals, saxophone, and keyboards), Suarez, Clavin and her sister Jennifer (vocals, guitar, and keyboards) met each other during high school and formed the band in 2003 or 2004.  “Some of us were still in high school,” says Clavin. Suarez tells me she attended a “very religious” Christian school until Grade 10, while Clavin attended the Hollywood High, both LA-area schools.  The five of them had no real previous musical education but they decided to start a band nonetheless.  Besides, it had never stopped lesser bands, so why not them?  “We were friends and my sister and I were living together and playing music, and then Michelle knew how to play guitar,” says Clavin.  “It was like, ‘Oh, you can do this and I can do this, so let’s do it!’” adds Suarez, “And we had two singers, because they both decided they wanted to sing, which is kind of different.  Not a lot of bands have two singers except for like The Blood Brothers.  Mostly its just singer, guitar, bass, drums or singer, guitar, drums.”  Okay, but who came up with the decidedly non-English band name?  “We made it up,” says Suarez, “It doesn’t mean anything, we just put some letters together.  Other people told us it meant things, like slang for ‘vagina vagina’ or ‘storytelling’ ” In what dialect, I have to ask.  “I don’t even remember.  I know that the ‘storytelling’ one was in Japanese, but I think the ‘vagina vagina’ one was something South American, which is funny because I’m South American and I’ve never, ever heard that term. So it could have been just very regional, someone from a small town that came up with it.”  Today, the band has came a long way from their first show together and no one is more surprised than the band themselves, Suarez tells me.  “I remember our first show was down the street from our high school,” she says, “I think there were like ten people and we didn’t know how to tune our instruments.  I don’t think we ever expected this.”

Myth #2:  Mika Miko play rrriot girl music.

“We weren’t like ‘oh, girl power!’”  Suarez and Clavin are talking about the bands’ influences, and is eager to distance the band from the tag that many have given the band, a tag that many bands have fully embraced.  “In seventh grade, I started listening to more punk. I was really influenced by The Germs, and that’s what really inspired me to play bass,” says Clavin, adding that in her school, “being a punk wasn’t a weird thing at all.”  A more recent example of how true to their punk roots the pair are when they met members of a band they idolize – and fellow NXNE performers – while in the elevator of the hotel they were staying with in Toronto.  “The Stern brothers from Youth Brigade were in the elevator with us which was awesome,” says Suarez, “We used to go to Youth Brigade shows all the time when we were younger, like five, six, seven years ago even.”  Listening to the pair talk about the bands that they listened to and/or influenced them when they were younger, its easy to understand the different strains of punk all over the band’s tenth recording We Be Xuxa, an album which is both a blessing for journalists to talk about and a curse to pronounce.  “Xuxa is from Brazil.  She’s a popstar.  She used to have a TV show that I used to watch religiously as a child and my parents didn’t want me to get addicted to MTV, so they put on Xuxa instead.  She also is a porn actress and a model but she started out performing for kids,” says Suarez, “Jenna actually saw her in the flesh with her Jewish community centre to go see a live taping when Xuxa was taping live shows in the U.S.  I think one day I said something like, ‘Jennifer, you look like Xuxa’ because she has blonde hair and something she did was maybe a little bit Xuxa.”  What does an album named after a former children’s television program hostess-turned-pornstar sound like you ask? We Be Xuxa features twelve, often loud, usually messy, but always fun punk tracks that suggest what might have happened if The Ramones had grown up in SoCal and wrote songs about turkey sandwiches and um…sex jazz instead of  girls and the KKK.  Suddenly, the media started paying attention to the quintet and as Suarez tells me, they became a “touring machine”, building a reputation for their gloriously noisy and ruckus-filled live shows.

Myth #3:  Mika Miko are mainstay at Los Angeles’ infamous all-ages art/performance space The Smell (for more about The Smell, read my interview with No Age below).

This one is also not entirely true. While there once was a time when Mika Miko were regulars onstage at the LA venue – Suarez tells me that they once played there four times a week – the band now consider themselves lucky if they get to play The Smell two or three times a year.  “Now we all have jobs and are really busy with the band and we don’t really have the time to get back there much.  The Smell is booked up for the next two years,” says Suarez.  But both are happy to acknowledge the venue’s importance in their early beginnings, and their friends and occasional tour mates behind The Smell – No Age’s Randall and Spunt.  “We love them, we just get along so well, its just like going on vacation with your friends and having to play music,” says Suarez, when asked if she felt the description of Mika Mikobeing No Age’s “little sister band” was an apt one. “Like soundwise, I think we’re totally different but we’re a good pairing,” she says. In fact, it was because of No Age, that everyone in the band paid their dues helping out at the venue  before they were given the chance to play there. “Dean and Randy were in a band before No Age called Wives. When they were going on their insane long tour, we took over their duties at The Smell, because Dean and Randy used to do sound at The Smell and work the doors,” says Suarez, “So Jennifer learned how to do sound and I would work the doors, Jessie would work door, and we’d all help Jim [Smith, co-founder of The Smell] clean up after.  So we were there a lot.” “It was like our school,” laughs Clavin. “When Jim asked us to play The Smell we were so fucking honoured,” says Suarez.  Certainly long days and nights of volunteering and than playing the venue, helped Mika Miko hone their live show, something that the band takes great pride in.  “Some shows that we’ve played on this tour and I’ve seen the kids freaking out or going crazy or just dancing a lot,” says Suarez, “I’m like “Wow, I’ve never even done that for a band I liked.”

Myth #4: All the members of Mika Miko live at home with their parents.

“False.  None of us live with our parents, except for Seth,” says Suarez, “We were, like five years ago.  That’s what I hate so much about the media, in quotations, because a lot of them don’t know what the fuck their talking about and their looking at their sources from 2003, 2004.  Like one person was like, ‘Oh Michelle, do you want to go to hair school?’ and its like, ‘actually that’s when I was 18′.  We all live in duplexes.”  Though the band are grateful for the opportunities they have been given to tour and play their music to crowds all across North America, both women admit that the five of them can’t see them doing the band their entire lives.  “I don’t think any of us want this to be our career. We’re doing this because its fun for us now,” says Suarez.  “This is a once in a lifetime chance,” Clavin chimes in.  So by admitting this, are Clavin and Suarez acknowledging Mika Miko certainly do have an expiration date?  Throughout our conversation, both women tell me that over the past few months there has been more discussion about the band members’ individual aspirations for “normal jobs” (doctor, mechanical engineer, teacher and fashion designer are all mentioned) which they all want to pursue.  But for now, the band will continue “as long as our bodies and minds allow us to”, says Suarez.  In true rock and roll fashion, the band don’t where this road they are on will take them and where they will be next, but they say that’s half the fun. When I ask what’s next up for Mika Miko, Suarez and Clavin can’t really give me a concise answer.  After a few minutes thought, touring is mentioned, and “some music festival in Calgary” [Sled Island].  “All I know is that we’re going to Columbus tomorrow,” says Suarez.  After that, its anybody’s guess.

For more Mika Miko:

MySpace