Prison Interview: “Everyone in the band has something that only they can bring to the table”

Prison are a band simply not born for these times. It’s exactly the reason what makes them masters in their own right, and another why more people should be listening to them.

The band, consisting of Paul Major (Endless Boogie), Matt Lilly, Sarim Al-Rawi (Liquor Store) and Mike Fellows (Mighty Flashlight) began in 2017, which also included the late Sam Jayne (Love Is Laughter, Lync).

His spirit remains, etched in the Prison DNA. A band that is the new voice of reason in what is a ramshackle of punk-inspired outlaw psychedelia. A wicked brew for lovers of everything from The Stooges and Spaceman 3, to those Grateful Dead lost souls who have spent the last 50 years scouring the ends of the earth for the ‘vibe’.

That vibe? Look no further than Prison’s debut album, Upstate. Recorded by Kevin McMahon (Prewn, Pile), Upstate comprises of five long-form jams that is 90 minutes of locked-in lunacy, deeply entrenched in fundamental outsider grandeur.

Starting with the opening gambit, Hold the Building Up / The Prison Within – a loose, Iggy-inspired technicolour yawn that is purely designed to blow minds. Hold ’Em Up / Comin’ Down on Me sounds like the offcuts of a Loop session circa 1987, however Prison spin the remnants into utter gold.

While Low Hangin’ Disco Ball / So Alone begins as a slow-paced meander akin to the come-down anthem of 2023 (“Smoooke ‘em ouuuut”), the composition unravels into a howling cascade of space-rock madness that catapults you into orbit. And that’s where we stay, firstly with I Always Get What I Want / Playin’ Pool with the Planets, then on the barnstorming finale, Destroy/ Cookin’ With Heat – arguably the pinnacle moment of Upstate as Prison save their best for last.

Upstate is the kind of album you gravitate towards during a certain time of the day. Where that window of opportunity for something more expansive seems like the only one to go through. There’s no better record to indulge than Upstate. Prison provides the rhythms of choice in something that completely opens the mind to new possibilities. An off-kilter, out-of-body experience through the portal of acid-mangled punk.

While the band are currently touring in support of Upstate, Lilly, Major and Al-Rawi took some time to answer our questions about the history of Prison, and their debut release.

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Sun 13: Given there is so much room to manoeuvre in your music, is the Prison live experience totally different to what we hear on record?

Saram Al-Rawi: “Things break less live, but there’s more room for danger. We sing more doo wop. More doo wop and more danger.”

Paul Major: “Prison live is a new toss of the dice at every show and influenced by in-the-moment factors every time we play, we are into engaging with the audience and creating feedback between the band and the crowd. We think of live shows as setting off on an adventure where no one knows the territory in advance. The Prison studio recordings are similar minus the crowds of people along for the ride, we did do minimal overdubs and mixing on the Upstate LP with people listening at home in mind. Either way, we take that room to manoeuvre and run wild with it.”

Matt Lilly: “The live Prison experience is quite different from what you hear on the record. Each show is unique. The record has a lot of layers, lots of overdubs which can make for a fun listening experience, but it’s different from what you would hear at a show. The band line-up is a little different at almost every show, too. On the record, it’s Paul, Sarim, Mike Fellows, Sam Jayne and myself. Mike Fellows isn’t always available for shows, so that changes the vibe a bit. Sam is and will always be with us in spirit. I think of him every time we play. I put my heart into my playing a little more when I think of him because I know that would make him happy. Short answer: our music’s fully improvised; you never know what you’re going to get.”

S13: While you’ve all played in various other projects over the years, can you tell us how Prison came together?

SA: “Groovin’ in the dark to the blinking lights making boombox overdub tapes after midnight, teaching Lilly how to play drums.”

PM: “Matt covers this in more detail, I would add that moving out to Rockaway about five years ago was awesome for me as it came with a beach and a new band! Being in Endless Boogie, which is primarily a live band with like 90 per cent in-the-moment improvisation on stage and getting into a band named Prison is ironically a bullseye as Prison is 100 per cent in-the-moment… totally free despite what the name of the band suggests!”

ML: “The last band I was in, I was a vocalist in a very short-lived (any not very good) covers band when I was in the eighth grade. I met Paul when he would frequent the bar I worked at in the lower east side of New York City. The bar was called Max Fish. I owned a van at the time and his band Endless Boogie started asking me go roadie for them. Naturally, I said yes.

“I got to know Paul well on our travels on Endless Boogie tours. I was booking and promoting a lot of shows in Brooklyn between 2002 and 2015, one of those shows was a Liquor Store show (Sarim’s band). Sarim and I became friends and we started jamming once a week for about a year of two. Some friends started to join us (Marc Razo, Mike Bones, Sam Jayne, Paul, Mike Fellows, Ryan Sawyer and a few others). Our friend Dom (manager of Rippers in Rockaway Beach) heard about us jamming and asked us to play a show at Rippers in 2017, and it kind of took off from there.”

S13: To me at least, Upstate is one of those records that you remember exactly where you were when listening to it for the first time. While it’s an epic psychedelic trip, I actually think it’s a punk record! What would you say to that?

PM: “You nailed it and thanks for the props along the lines of the classic ‘everybody who was alive when JFK was assassinated remembers where they were when they got the news’ vibe! We all are freaks for both psychedelic and punk rock and I think while our jams go way long like an acid trip our attitude is totally punk, even when we’re into a tranced-out zone there’s a phantasmic fist coming at you.”

ML: “I’m happy to hear that your first experience with the record was memorable. I’d say it can be whatever you want it to be. It doesn’t matter to me how you’d like to categorise it. Everyone in the band has an appreciation for both psychedelic rock and punk rock, so it makes sense that that’s what you’re hearing. We’re just trying to have fun and make music that we wouldn’t mind listening to ourselves. Hopefully people dig the record and the shows and all of it is fun and inspiring to them in some way.”

SA: “I used to be a punk but now I’m just a freak.”

S13: There are so many influences in your music, and given that you’ve all come from slightly different backgrounds, do you think this lends itself to how the Prison experience has evolved?

PM: “The fact that we create in real time without pre-configured structures allows each of us to share in the emergence of the music and bring our own varying angles into the mix organically. It certainly flavours the sounds in a natural way rather than a self-conscious attempt to blend together.”

ML: “Absolutely. Everyone in the band has something that only they can bring to the table.”

SA: “We all really dig ‘The Hanky Panky’”

S13: Was it recorded live in a room together? I only ask because there feels like there are very few overdubs which gives it an organic and very authentic feel.

PM: “Upstate was recorded live in a room with no roadmap just like our live shows. We did run the tracks back to record a second set of vocals on top so there would be more action to mix down. Even our overdubs are improvised in the heat of the moment, and I’m gassed that you picked up on that organic authentic feel, no agenda for us except to cut loose without a master plan.”

ML: “All the tracks on the record we are originally recorded live in a room together, all in one day. We jammed for hours. All day, taking short breaks after each jam. Kevin McMahon, the sound engineer who recorded the jams at his studio Marcata in Upstate, New York (hence the title of the record), helped us sift through the hours or recordings. We chose a handful of our favourite moments and came back a few weeks later for overdubs.”

SA: “One room one take one day.”

S13: It also sounds like you guys are having so much fun. Is it a case of friends first, band second?

PM: “Totally friends first, having fun being the most essential ingredient. Whenever somebody can’t make it to a show, we just call another friend. No auditions necessary to get locked-in to our thing!”

ML: “We had a blast making that record. You can hear Sarim cracking up (probably at something that Sam did or said) at the beginning of Destroy. We’re all very good friends, and we are, more often than not, cracking jokes when we all get together. Aside from Paul and I being roommates, all of us are busy enough and live far away enough that we don’t see each other too often unless it’s to get together and do something band related.

“But in so many ways, our friendships always have and always will come first. None of this would be any fun if we weren’t friends. I can’t speak for the other guys, but I try to remember to make fun the number one priority; if I do that, everything else will fall into place.”

SA: “We all met on the inside. That shit stays with you forever.”

S13: How much do you think your immediate surroundings of Rockaway Beach played into how Upstate sounded?

PM: “Well, we recorded Upstate in Upstate, New York away from the beach, so we had to haul some Rockaway vibes along with us, unconsciously of course. Our next double LP Downstate out next year was recorded in Rockaway with an expanded cast of characters, so we’ll have to wait for feedback if anyone detects more beach flavours. We’re probably too inside it all to notice that ourselves.”

ML: “Living near the beach has played into every aspect of my life. The vastness of the ocean is very humbling. It’s a reminder that I am not in charge. I am not the source of life. I’m not sure what that is, but I believe it’s where music comes from. Especially when it’s improvised, being in the presence of the ocean on a daily basis has affected the way I carry myself through life and while playing in Prison.

“Mike Fellows lives Upstate and Sarim lives in The Bronx; out when we made that record, Sam and Paul and I were all living in the same apartment in Rockaway. If their relationship with the ocean is anything like mine, I’d say our surroundings had a lot to do with how the record sounds; mix that with the streets of The Bronx and the solitude of Upstate, New York, and there you have it.”

SA: “The tin tube to the beach makes me preach to the breach.”

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S13: With a band like Prison that are steeped in the long-form aspect of expression, once you enter into the creative state, do you think certain aspects are taken out of your hands?

SA: “It’s all in your head, baby.”

PM: “Ideally everything is taken out of our hands, when the jams are best is when we are creating 100 per cent in the moment. We let the overall sound call the shots intuitively, we’re not aiming to create something outside ourselves as a presentation, we’re letting the dogs off the leash entirely. It can only work that way for us. We create an invisible hand with the groove, and it could shift gears unexpectedly at any time. That’s why it is so much fun.”

ML: “I feel like there are certain variables at play that were never in our hands, and never will be. When a group of musicians are improvising, sure, their minds are telling their bodies how to ‘control’ the instrument, but when everyone is in the zone, you are kind of mindlessly playing your instrument surrendering to an energy that’s channelled through you and ‘the music plays the band’ so to speak. When listening back to recordings of Prison, there have been many moments within a jam that we find the most magical and we don’t even remember playing it.”

S13: Have your songwriting methods changed over the years?

PM: “We don’t do pre-configured songs, the bits that could maybe be termed a song arise out of the jams and disappear again. We have an uncanny sense of evolving and staying in the same place simultaneously. Occasionally some riff or lyric from earlier jams will seep into the current ones and even that is without plan.” 

ML: “We don’t write songs; they write us, I’d say our personal and musical connection with each other has grown an evolved over the years; therefore, giving us more potential to stumble upon magical moments within a jam more often than in the years passed. Paul and I were just saying recently: perhaps it sounds cliché, but every show we play becomes our new favourite. That’s a good sign. I hope it keeps happening.”

SA: “I have like a whole set of raps I can pull out depending on the groove and what fits. They’re mostly known to me, though. Usually I just remember weird thoughts that come to me down in the tunnel on the never ending train ride to the edge of the sunset.”

S13: Being veterans of outsider culture and having exposure to the demands of physical product in the ’90s/’00s, did you ever expect art to be boiled down to the point where streaming platforms seem like the go-to medium for people to engage with music?

PM: “Streaming sucks since the musicians get peanuts out of it, but I guess being available to everybody is useful for some people. Instant gratification by being able to access anything you hear about immediately does take the mystery out of things and dilutes the pleasure you feel when you have to actually make an effort to hear something, I recall well the days when it could take years to finally hear something you had a curiosity about and how exciting the hunt was… whether or not the music turned out to be worth the wait didn’t diminish the sense of adventure seeking it out.”

ML: “I certainly never saw it coming. I still prefer physical media. I know I’m not alone in that mindset. I’m not sure what the future holds for sharing music, but as long as there are turntables and tape decks (and pressing plants and cassette manufacturers) and people that enjoy using them (and we are still a band), we will continue to make records and tapes.”

SA: “If I wanted to mess with money, I would’ve gotten a CPA and not an SG.” 

S13: Finally, upon some research, I found the term “crime blues” which I think might be the “genre” of 2023. Did you guys cook that up?

PM: “Matt has the lowdown on that… featuring another Prison alumni, Mike Bones. Now that you mention it, yeah we do have some twilight zone crime blues ambiance going on! If we cooked it up, we did it without any recipe!”

SA: “Mike Bones minted that dime. For our first show. At Ripper’s on the beach. He’s a lifer and a strifer. Check him out in Weak Signal, the sickest band.”

ML: “From what I understand, our friend Mike Bones was the first to use that term relating to a style of music he was making one day when Sarim walked in, it was like, ‘Oh hey, what’s up, Mike?’ [He responds] ‘Oh nothin. Just been in here workin’ on some crime blues.’ Sarim then repurposed it a few times when referring to some moments during a Prison it fit nicely with our on-going Prison themes: Jam. Getting ‘locked-in’. ‘No short stints’, etc. Perhaps Bones heard it from someone else, but I’ve always given him credit for the term.”

Upstate is our now via Drag City. Purchase from Bandcamp.