Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman has described her band’s genre as “local music,” and that makes total sense—not in the “inexperienced band honing their chops by playing every club in town” way, but as a sound inspired by geography and the people and places that give a location character. By that definition, Moviola falls squarely into the “local music” category. The band formed—and, for the most part, remained—in Columbus, Ohio, a capital city known as much for being a cowtown as it is an academic, political, and economic hub. Columbus may not have the roots that Cleveland or Cincinnati does, but the affordable cost of living and the draw of Ohio State University have made it a place where many students wind up settling down and making the city their home.
Jake Housh and Ted Hattemer started Moviola in the early ’90s after playing in a few local bands that may have been campus-area regulars but never aspired to take the next step. As the lineup came together, the sound evolved but always remained steeped in lesser-known indie rock with shades of folk and Americana. I witnessed Jerry Dannemiller join the band, initially on bass, since the ’zine he and I edited, MOO magazine, was headquartered in the same rehearsal space and recording studio where Moviola practiced. With everyone under the same roof, Jake and Ted even took on graphic design responsibilities for MOO. Of note, the ’zine and the band name had nothing to do with each other; it was just a happy coincidence.
When labels came sniffing around Columbus in the wake of Nirvana’s success, bands like the New Bomb Turks, Watershed, Gaunt, and even the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments (which Ted also played in) signed deals. Moviola, however, remained just outside of that bubble—their music not quite the kind that would move the units labels were chasing. Instead, they released material first on their own Spirit of Orr label and later on Anyway Records, run by Columbus stalwart Bela Koe-Krompacher. Tour dates were really just one-off local shows, and even those happened infrequently. Moviola never dreamed of major-label stardom or an endless run of globetrotting. Instead, the members, including Scotty Tabachnick and Greg Bonnell, have always seen the band as a working collective of friends making music inspired by the artists who shaped their lives. That independence has allowed Moviola to record and release music at their own pace with minimal promotional effort. Nobody is chasing a viral hit or padding a bank account. For the band, it’s a chance for friends to come together every year or two and unleash a creative side that might otherwise be dampened by families, mortgages, and day jobs.
In the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, Moviola released their ninth full-length, Scrape and Cuss, their first album in thirteen years. Little did fans know that the band was entering a creative renaissance, and perhaps even Moviola didn’t realize what the next five years would hold. Broken Rainbows followed in September 2021, and instead of playing club shows during a still-uncertain time, the band staged a one-night-only multimedia event. On the Wexner Center stage at Ohio State, Moviola performed the album in full with additional musicians, spoken word interludes, and visual accompaniment. The performance remains one of Moviola’s most memorable and is available both as an audio release and as a full-length YouTube video—something like a mix of The Last Waltz and an Austin City Limits session, in both sight and sound.
Thirty-plus years after its earliest incarnation, Moviola has released another gem, Earthbound. As with every entry in their catalog, it’s “local music” that captures the laid-back, liberal vibes of Columbus: the intersection of academia and rural life, the hidden gems found in the city’s record stores, and the enduring friendship and brotherhood that define the band. The album is the band’s first for Dromedary Records, an independent label with as long a history as Moviola, located in upstate New York.
Ted, Jerry, and I met at a local corporate pizza place (which doesn’t quite fit with Moviola’s aesthetic but was conveniently located for all of us) to do what guys our age do—reminisce about the past, wonder how we ended up where we are now, and talk about Moviola’s new album and their distinguished catalog, which now includes eleven albums.
While Moviola’s been around and releasing music since the mid-90s, you took a break between 2007’s Dead Knowledge and 2020’s Scrape and Cuss.
TED: We didn’t break up or anything, we just got busy with kids. We all had kids around the same time. I think Jake’s kids are a little older and Greg’s kids are older but then he had a third child right around the time the rest of us had kids. We all got super busy and it’s not like there was anyone asking, “Why doesn’t Moviola play a show?” No one was putting our records out except for us, so we just put things in low gear.
You returned in early 2020 with a new album that was recorded before the global pandemic but released a few months into what would be a two-year lockdown.
TED: We had finished the album probably in December 2019 or January 2020.
JERRY: And then we released it right when COVID hit. Really good timing there.
As Scrape and Cuss was your first new album in 13 years, did you have big plans that got canceled because of the timing of the release?
JERRY: We didn’t have big plans. We were just getting back in the swing of things, figuring out a new way to work. Jake had gone through all of our back catalog and digitally remastered it and Ted put everything up on Bandcamp. It was like, “We’ve got this whole catalog if anybody wants to peruse it. It sounds better than it did when we originally recorded it. And, we’ve got a new record to accompany it.” I think everybody just enjoyed doing it again. It’s not like your responsibilities as parents ever really stop, but, for us, they slowed down a little bit. It was a little less intense.
TED: Also, Jake and I both got divorced so it was a lot more free time.
JERRY: We played at South by Southwest in 2005 or 2006, and after that we sort of put things on hold to become parents. My son was born in 2004, Ted’s kids were born in 2003 and 2006, so things just started heating up family wise. There wasn’t anything stated about taking a break, but we all had other priorities.
And it’s not like you guys were giving up playing 150 shows a year or anything, so you didn’t have to make huge adjustments.
JERRY: Around that time, we were maybe playing one show a year.
TED: But we got together a lot and recorded a lot up until 2006. We would get together weekly but that kind of drifted off for a while.
Was it Jake remastering the older stuff that got you back together to start writing and recording?
JERRY: That was definitely one element of that, for sure. Weirdly enough, it kind of also has to do with where we live. We always record ourselves and practice in attics and warehouses and things like that. We all were in places where it just didn’t make sense or we couldn’t really make a ton of noise. Then Jake moved into a house and set up all this stuff there to do the remastering and it was like, “Oh, we could record here.” We started to record there and that’s when it kind of kicked back into gear. That was like late 2017 so there were some lean years there.
I can remember Moviola before Jerry joined the band. I know you didn’t do a lot of touring so maybe didn’t have the same problems bands that were always on the road did, but you’ve got a big catalog of music, a lot bigger than people might know. Earthbound is your eleventh album and you’ve also got a live album. That’s impressive.
JERRY: First and foremost, we’re all really good friends. That helps. I think we’ve gotten a lot better in a number of different ways: in playing, writing, recording, and communicating. We all matured a little bit more, as you do. Having a thing like this in all of our lives to be able to do, a creative thing, it’s the best. And to do it with your friends and push each other a little bit and have a real democracy about things, it’s something we can’t take for granted. It’s sort of weirdly democratic in the sense that everybody writes, everybody sings lead on the songs they write. You really never see that. The precedent for that is obviously something like The Band, but you don’t really see that that often, especially with current bands.
TED: Another band that does that is The Mekons.
JERRY: We’re probably not helping ourselves when it comes to giving the audience one person to focus on. Like, “Ted, he’s the lead singer.” Nope. There’s four more. We want to do it that way. It’s fun. We went through periods where Jake wrote most of the songs early on. And then I started writing a few. Scotty started writing a few. Ted started writing a few. And then Greg started writing a few. And it was just like, “Let’s just keep the songwriting somewhat balanced among each member.” If I came in next time and was like, “I don’t have any new songs,” that’s fine too.
So there’s no pressure? Each of you aren’t committed to bringing 3 or 4 new songs for each album?
JERRY: Not really. It’s always just what everybody wants to do. If you’re feeling it, and you want to write a song that you’re proud enough about showing to four other people, then go for it.
TED: Sometimes we get excited about somebody else’s song and encourage them to push harder. “Work on this one, man, this is a good song.”
When it’s time to think about a new album, do you each come bringing songs you’ve written or do you spend a lot of time collaborating on ideas once you’re together?
TED: It’s a combination of both.
JERRY: It doesn’t happen any one set way. It’s very organic. There’s no pattern to it.
TED: It never starts out one way and stays that way. There’s no way you could do that because everyone’s going to bring something else to it. We’ll change up parts or we’ll put the chorus first or we’ll rearrange it so that it’s a new kind of thing.
JERRY: We had a record a while back called Dead Knowledge. That was the only one where we sort of followed a songwriting cycle. There were bits and pieces that we connected so that it all flowed together as 45 minutes of music. The last three records – Scrape and Cuss, Broken Rainbows, and now this one – it’s more like, “That feels like a record.”
TED: There’s no concept of parity or something like that. Greg has four songs on this one. He had two songs on the last one, and that’s okay. We all don’t need to have the same amount of writing credits on each album.
Knowing that everyone can write – as you mentioned, Jake wrote a lot of the stuff early on and Ted has released some solo albums – is it less pressure knowing that you don’t have to bring 12 songs into a session, that you can bring just 2 or 3 songs and the other guys will bring songs too?
TED: It’s not about the pressure because you still have to come up with a part and you have to write your own stuff. Jerry writes his own lead parts for almost all the songs. That’s a lot of lead writing. So you end up doing bits and pieces of that person’s song, even though they wrote the lyrics and the melody.
Adam from The Mommyheads jokingly told me that he wished he would have started writing music for the first time in his 40s and skip all the bullshit that he and his band went through in the early days. Do you feel that way? You seem to be happy with where you are now.
TED: There was a moment where major label interest was kind of pecking at us but not anything serious. It was never a decision like that for us. I don’t have any regrets about past stuff we’ve done. I’m proud of all the records we did. I think they all occupy a nice space of, “Oh, that’s what we were into at that time and here’s where we were living.”
JERRY: I’ll listen to stuff off our first album, Frantic. There’s choices we made musically or mixing where I’m like, “What the fuck were we thinking?” but in a good way. I’m like, “Where would you even ever come up with that?” It could have been the weed talking, but there was a lot of learning as you go. Jake wrote all the songs. Ted was playing drums, I was playing bass, so it’s inherently going to sound a little skewed. When we go back now and play early songs, it feels fun, but it’s also odd.
Having been around Moviola in those early days, even 30 years later, I still think of you as the bass player and Ted as the drummer.
JERRY: Well, Ted was a good drummer, but he’s like 10 times a better bass player.
TED: Plus, we wanted to get Greg in the band.
JERRY: Greg was really a welcome addition in many ways. He’s just got such good taste in terms of what he plays or what he doesn’t play, and he writes really good songs. Why wouldn’t you want him in your band?
Ted, you mentioned how listening to your older stuff, you can tell what was influencing you and what you were listening to at the time. The most recent albums really sound to me like ‘60s style of music. It’s simple – not in a negative way – and not overly produced. It’s about the songs and letting them shine. And I even hear a little Grateful Dead in the music. You never go off on extended jams but there’s some freewheeling, sort of folk-inspired stuff on the album.
TED: I love the Grateful Dead. Scotty loves the Grateful Dead.
JERRY: It’s not an insult at all. Your taste evolves. The whole kind of ‘60s thing, when you bring a song in and you’re starting to put it together with bass and drums and whatever, it’s like, “Give me a jumping off point for this. What are you thinking?” And it’s like, “Okay, think of Roxy Music.”
TED: Or On the Beach by Neil Young.
JERRY: Or James Jamerson, the bass player who played on all the Motown stuff. That’s not a bad thing at all if you’re drawing influence from that kind of stuff.
There are times when I’m listening to Earthbound where I think I could play it for a friend and say, “This is an unearthed ‘60s album that inspired Dylan, the Dead, the Beach Boys,” and they might even believe me.
JERRY: We all don’t live in a bubble. We all have influences and things that impact us in different ways. And sometimes things that Ted likes might not be what I like and things that I like might not be what he likes. There are little Venn diagrams of where we overlap or Ted will pull a song in a direction where I’ll be like, “Oh, I never thought of that.” Or I’ll do something and it’s like, “That’s not what a Motown song would do, but I like that.” So it sounds like us, but there’s reference points to it. Sometimes within the span of one record, you’ll get multiple reference points as opposed to all the songs having the same vibe. You’re not going to get that with Moviola. I’m happy about that.
What I appreciate is, in its entirety, it sounds like a Moviola record but from song to song, you each add your own unique flavor. It’s almost like listening to a well-curated mixtape.
TED: I never thought of it like that, but I like that.
JERRY: We will intentionally say, “This part needs some real Simon and Garfunkel harmony” or something like that.
It seems like there’s a lot more harmonies on more recent releases.
JERRY: We definitely have all stepped it up, where we would previously maybe do a harmony. Now it’s like there’s a three-part harmony or there’s this choral thing going on. It’s more interesting to me and to us that we’re doing stuff like that rather than shredding.
It’s obvious to me that you’ve evolved into a “professional” sounding band.
JERRY: In the broad range of rock and roll, when we were younger, I think we covered up a lot of our mistakes or insecurities with fuzz and noise and feedback and space echo. It sounds cool as shit, but you want to do that for 11 records? It might get a little tiring, so we all try to improve in every way we can and get better. The bar gets raised a little bit with every record. We might not go from here to here, but we’re going from here to here to here to here, and I think that’s the most rewarding thing about it. We know if we’re phoning it in and it doesn’t feel like we phoned it in. We’re continually getting better in all aspects of it. This guy in New York is running a label and we sent the record to him and were like, “Would you be interested in putting this out?” and he was like “Yeah.” And now we are going to go play some shows like, weirdly, we never did when we were in our 20s or 30s. It’s kind of a weird backasswards way to do things, but I think we’re all like, “Hell yeah, let’s go play some shows.”
You never did a ton of touring so I have to imagine, with all the music you’ve written, there are songs you’ve never played live and maybe never will.
TED: A lot of songs you just can’t replicate live and you probably wouldn’t want to.
JERRY: For the last record, Broken Rainbows, we did do a special live performance where we played every song, had these interstitials in between, and video.
There’s also a lot of bands who will go out and tour an album’s anniversary and play that album from start to finish, sometimes even in the order in which the songs appear on the record.
TED: We did one of those for Bela’s 25th anniversary of Anyway Records. We did The Year You Were Born but we kind of cheated a little bit. We didn’t play absolutely every single song.
Would you ever consider going back and re-recording some of your early stuff now that you’ve got so much more experience under your belts?
TED: I think the fact that Jake did such a good job remastering everything, that was enough.
JERRY: We’ll play a couple of old songs live. But, that’s a great memory of 1994. Nobody’s really clamoring for us to do that. I don’t think we’re at a level that that would apply to us. If, for some reason, Frantic got used in a movie or something, maybe. But, it would be a weird set of circumstances to make us want to do that. We don’t have a manager or anything like that. It’s usually managers that get you those kind of deals. If something like that would happen, a new or old song would get used in a movie, that’s awesome.
Do I ever think songs on the Earthbound record could be in a movie? Of course. I think there’s plenty of great songs on there that completely set a mood or give off a vibe, but I don’t know how that works. One of our songs got used on a website one time and we got three grand for that.
TED: This was back when websites had music on them when you first loaded them up. No one would ever do that now.
Besides putting the album out, what’s exciting you these days?
TED: Jake’s built a new studio in Hillsborough, Ohio. He bought a car repair shop type place, a standalone, concrete block building. I’m excited to have a new place to check out and see how it sounds and what we can get done there. That’s what I’m really excited about.
What are your realistic hopes and dreams for Earthbound and, if you could rub a genie bottle and get a reasonable wish to come true, what would that be?
TED: I don’t think we’ve ever sold out of a record. So that would be amazing. I think Al [at Dromedary] does about 500 copies of the vinyl pressing and CDs. I doubt we’ll sell out. I think getting a couple of DJs at WFMU to play it would be a success to me.
JERRY: I think making enough of a blip or a dent so that we get to make more records and have somebody spending their money to put out our music. I think we’ve already had a successful enterprise with this.
TED: Getting to play more live shows and having it worth our while would be an unrealistic thing, because I think it’s hard to get shows. It’s really hard.
JERRY: An unrealistic expectation would be maybe opening for somebody for two or three shows in the Midwest or along the East Coast or something like that. I think we’d all be over the moon. We’d quit our jobs (laughter). We’d figure out a way to make that happen. It’s not out of the realm of possibilities, but I’m also realistic. We don’t have any juice in that regard. It’s a pipe dream. It would be really fun to play bigger shows and that kind of thing. As a younger band, we had, maybe “charmed life” is the wrong phrase, but we got to play with some really amazing bands.
TED: We opened for the Flaming Lips at the Newport Music Hall.
JERRY: We played with GBV and Flaming Lips a couple of times, Calexico and Califone and Bettie Seervert. We played on a lot of cool bills. We were really fortunate to be able to do that. And now there’s bands like Golomb and Big Fat Head and villagerrr that are playing those super cool shows and it’s like, “Good for them.” But, it’d be nice if we could do that once again, like bringing the old timers out on tour just for old time’s sake.
