Bon Mots

It must have seemed a strange combination to Chicagoans in-the-know. Eric Chial had come to Chicago from Athens, GA (by way of East Lansing, MI) and worked the Chi-town club scene with an outfit called Mitch. On at least one occasion, the local press suspected that Chial might have been harboring Elvis Costello within some deep recess of his home. Meanwhile, Mike Coy, who splits writing duties with Chial in The Bon Mots, had carved out a reputation for high-energy performances with his Pixies-cum-Big Star outfit Big Angry Fish. “Every song had the squealing feedback, drop down to your knees in front of the amp solo,” says Coy, who landed in the Second City in the mid-90s with his Mount Pleasant, MI-born outfit.

What brought the guitarists/vocalists/bassists/songwriters together was a series of meetings over a series of years, first at the headquarters of Beluga Records in Chicago and then in various social climates. Chial remembers that although he and Coy were interested in seemingly disparate music's, he was taken with Big Angry Fish's approach.

“ I decided to go out at 11:30 one night and caught one of the Big Angry Fish shows at the Double Door. It was great show - very entertaining. I think it was during the cover of a Mudhoney tune... and I said, 'This guy's fantastic. Why haven't I ever played music with him?'”

Later, as Fish began to do a slow but imminent dissolve and after Mitch had gone the way of Rockpile, Chial showed up at Coy's apartment with plans to run through a few cover tunes. The result? “We ended up playing four or five hours,” Chial notes with enthusiasm several years later.

			The Bon Mots really want you, baby. by: Jedd Beaudion
It must have seemed a strange combination to Chicagoans in-the-know. Eric Chial had come to Chicago from Athens, GA (by way of East Lansing, MI) and worked the Chi-town club scene with an outfit called Mitch. On at least one occasion, the local press suspected that Chial might have been harboring Elvis Costello within some deep recess of his home. Meanwhile, Mike Coy, who splits writing duties with Chial in The Bon Mots, had carved out a reputation for high-energy performances with his Pixies-cum-Big Star outfit Big Angry Fish. “Every song had the squealing feedback, drop down to your knees in front of the amp solo,” says Coy, who landed in the Second City in the mid-90s with his Mount Pleasant, MI-born outfit. What brought the guitarists/vocalists/bassists/songwriters together was a series of meetings over a series of years, first at the headquarters of Beluga Records in Chicago and then in various social climates. Chial remembers that although he and Coy were interested in seemingly disparate music's, he was taken with Big Angry Fish's approach. “ I decided to go out at 11:30 one night and caught one of the Big Angry Fish shows at the Double Door. It was great show - very entertaining. I think it was during the cover of a Mudhoney tune... and I said, 'This guy's fantastic. Why haven't I ever played music with him?'” Later, as Fish began to do a slow but imminent dissolve and after Mitch had gone the way of Rockpile, Chial showed up at Coy's apartment with plans to run through a few cover tunes. The result? “We ended up playing four or five hours,” Chial notes with enthusiasm several years later.
			Coy brought drummer Kevin Hoetger (later replaced by Jason Styx) from his previous outfit and the new unit began building its oeuvre slowly but surely, though none of the members were really sure where it was going. “It was more for just a gas,” Chial recalls. “We were kind of approaching it as a post-rock avocational thing, something to hang out with.” “ I don't think that either of us thought much about putting out records and trying to get national press and national play,” Coy adds. “As it evolved, we'd look at each other and say, 'Let's keep this going. Let's see what we can get from this.'” With keyboardist Chris Frantisak in place, the band eventually recorded and released its debut, Le Main Drag, to much critical acclaim. A favorite on many critics' end of the year list for 2003, the record affirmed that the band had done the right thing, even if some of its friends didn't always agree. Coy recalls that the outfit's early shows were sometimes met by polar responses. “We had friends and you might say colleagues come out back then,” he recalls of the band's birth circa 2000. “It was funny because some of them came out once and that was it. And it was pretty clear that they were not into the sound at all. But the vast majority of them were into it and could really dig it.”
Chial remembers that the early reactions were, indeed, mixed. “We're friends with a lot of musicians in town and many of them came out to see what it was and said various things, ranging from, 'Sounds exactly like I thought it would,' to, 'Hey, I don't dig that at all.'” One thing that is clear on Le Main Drag is that Chial and Coy have an affinity for the craft of songwriting, delivering tracks that have garnered the band comparisons to acts such as REM, the Church, Guided By Voices and, yes, Elvis Costello. Along with fellow Chicagoan Wes Hollywood, The Bon Mots have gone backward in order to push music forward.
			Musical trends are cyclical and Chial cites the band's sound as an extension of that. Post-grunge, people are looking for different (and often more subtle) melodies to wrap their ears around. “After about eight or ten years of really heavy music, I think a lot of people were really getting tired of it. I think that the most observable difference is that back then you wouldn't have caught me dead with a keyboard in my band. If you did that back then you would have been summarily dismissed as '80s or wimpy. Now, you see a lot of bands employing keyboards,” Chial notes. “I think that everything goes in a twenty-year cycle. You see rehashes of the era before grunge, where it's a lighter touch, a little more emphasis on melody, or whatever. And it's cool 'cause we started doing something where... everybody knew how to play heavy but everybody knew how to loosen up and explore dynamics.” It also helps that the band also writes about subjects listeners can penetrate, even if that penetration's not immediate. And if the band's writers can't always immediately do the same, that's OK, too. Chial recalls with fondness Michael Stipe's early lyrics, of which he says, “You could honest-to-God listen to that stuff hundreds of times and not know what he's saying,” but adds that he also appreciates Costello's writing. “He's just pyrotechnic in his verbal ability, especially early on. There's a lot of wordplay, double entendre and that sort of thing,”
Coy, on the other hand, doesn't always draw such highfalutin distinctions in the lyrics department. There's something to be said, he adds, for the round-to-the-nearest-word approach. “I remember seeing an interview with Chris Cornell where somebody was asking him about his lyrics,” Coy recalls. “He said, 'I don't like to define 'em. I like to leave that up to personal interpretation.' As much of a cop-out as that might be, I kind of like that. So there's definitely an aspect of that, of throwing out some images and letting people fill in the blanks a little bit. At the same time, I think that we're both a little bit too much of control freaks to let the song be somebody else's entirely. We feel a little bit of an obligation to focus it on a point somewhere.”
As for the subject matter, there's lighter fare (the hipster critique, “Get Heavy”) and then the less-than-lighter fare, including Chial's “Touched by a Robot.” While Coy says that he and the others didn't immediately give the song much weight (“We laughed at the title for weeks”), it was a track that its writer had labored over for a while and would only finish when he had an unexpected day off. “ I'd recently gotten back into office work. It was really bumming me out, because, other years when I'd done construction, I was able to take time off in the summer, go up to the lake. I had this idea about writing about how there was no summer. One of the lyrics, which was one of the first that I came up with was, 'Summer is gone forever.' I had maybe a third of the tune written with that pretext,” he remembers. “ Then 9/11 occurred. I distinctly remember going home from work in downtown Chicago from my skyscraper building because they'd closed the office, thinking that more attacks might happen.” Listening to others around him talk about hitting the golf course and catching up on personal business proved disturbing and what had started as a requiem for summers of yesteryear became a carpe diem piece.
“There were people killed in their offices that day who may not have seen their families for three weeks because they'd been working until eleven o' clock at night. That seemed to be one of the more tragic aspects of that particular incident,” he says. On disc, that track is followed by one of Coy's tunes, “Ghetto Falsetto,” which serves as a kind of foil to its predecessor. “Something that freaked me out with “Touched by a Robot,” was, 'My God, there's a lot of chords. There's not a lot of the I-IV-V thing that I was used to doing.' “Ghetto Falsetto” was the basic three-chord rock song,” says Coy. Having come back from a then-recent Breeders show inspired him to write something basic, he recalls, and before long “Ghetto” had come to life. Whereas Chial emerges as studious, someone who works an idea out with a certain degree of calculation, Coy seems to work more reflexively, viscerally. He says that capturing the emotions he has while hashing out a tune is often first and foremost in his mind. “ There was the free association with “Ghetto.” I think a lot of my lyric writing happens with what sounds cool and if I can string together enough images that are OK enough, where I can say, 'That'll buy some time,' that's good. Later on, I'll look at it and say, 'Wait a minute, that actually means something.' From there I'll construct the verses to fit with the chorus. That's where that song came from. I'm not sure why I was talking about Vegas. The car,” he adds. “There's a lot about being... if you look at the lyrics, 'Looking back/how lame it seems,' there's a little bit of the feeling out of the loop in the music thing because I was dissatisfied with the big rock scene that Chicago had become. I was like, 'I'm not into playing those big meathead songs anymore. So now what? What then?' It's about looking back and saying, 'It wasn't all that great in the first place.' and other things. Personal interpretation kind of stuff,” he adds.
Chial is quick to sing the song's praises as well. And display the contrast between himself and his band mate. “That lyric in its whole is, 'The downside to every scheme/Is thinking back when you were in it for a minute/And in retrospect how lame it seems,'” Chial recites. “That's a good example of Mike's skill with rhyming. It's got internal rhyme, it's a very tasty couplet and I know for a fact it's our keyboard player Chris' favorite lyric. It's one of my favorites too.” Then he adds, “It's not, 'I really want you baby.'”