Band of the Week: Everything, Now!

Hometown: Muncie, Ind.
Members: Jon “Crafty” Rogers (pictured above) – guitars, arrangement; Drew Deboy – keyboards, percussion; Chad Serhal – guitar, bells; Jared Cheek – keyboards, percussion, experimental noise; Dick Knapp (a.k.a. Richard) – bass; Erick Sherman - drums
Why They’re Worth Checking Out: Surf music, punk, reggae, psychedelic rock, synth-pop, experimental noise—Everything, Now! is influenced by so many vestiges of mid-20th-century musical genres, there’s bound to be something you’ll like.
For Fans Of: Franz Ferdinand, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Stomp!, Pink Floyd
Fun Fact: Cheek has always wanted his own record store. Now that he owns one, Rogers and Deboy live in the back of it with him, and work there on the side.

“Everything, Now!” pulls double duty as a band name and an accurate description of what the group’s music aims for. Chief sonic experimenter Jared Cheek says it’s like tea kettles and house fires, Brian Wilson, Captain Beefheart and “hijacking a bus filled with kids on their way to space camp and making them listen to Bowie records backwards until we get back to Indiana.”

The band’s members are psychedelic-influenced noisemakers, but their new goal is to add definition to the sound by using more deliberate arrangements of their often layered instrumentation. “I was really into the idea of putting as much sound into every song that we recorded,” says mastermind and primary songwriter Jon “Crafty” Rogers, “but we’re moving away from that now.”

Rogers started writing songs during high school in his hometown of Athens, Ga., but Everything, Now! didn’t begin until he relocated to Muncie, Ind., to attend Ball State University. It wasn’t long before people who wanted to join his band started turning up, whether they could play or not.

“I’m not much of a musician,” says Cheek, "but Crafty needed someone to play some parts, and a judge ordered him to allow me into the band in order to meet county affirmative-action regulations in which a six-person band must have at least one member wearing flannel at all times.”

It’s possible that half of Muncie has played in various incarnations of Everything, Now! since the band’s inception. But lack of stability has been a strength rather than a weakness. Rogers’ guidance anchors the style, but the fluctuation of members is what fuels the group's creativity. An always-changing lineup ensures a fresh approach and keeps audiences interested. “People come out to see what’s going to be different about it,” points out Rogers. “[If it turns into] the same thing every time I’ll probably get bored of it.”

Since the music is largely experimental, live performances can feature madcap improvisation (like former band members hopping onstage to smash plates or add a little off-the-cuff flugelhorn). “We always try to have the biggest party we can have,” Rogers says. “Most of the people who come to see us have been seeing us for the last two years, it’s like one or two hundred people, and they have the CD, and they sing along. And we have about 20 instruments and they play along with us."

In the last couple years, Rogers has had Bowie and T.Rex on heavy rotation, but says “I’ve always been interested in Brian Wilson’s arrangements.” Since he and his bandmates live and work in a record store, there’s an endless amount of music to soak up. “Between all of us we probably listen to hundreds of records, just absorbing it and spitting it back out.”

You can hear the grandiose Bowie aesthetic fixed with T.Rex’s vocal onslaught and rimmed with Pink Floyd’s cinematic vision in Everything, Now!’s more recent efforts. Rogers is really interested in the big picture. He recently started writing scores for local Indiana filmmakers, and the influence shows. Expect more strings and re-worked instrumentation in addition to more complex arrangements on the band's forthcoming record.

After releasing Police, Police in 2004 and recovering from a few self-booked mini tours, Everything, Now! is getting ready to go back into the studio. Twelve-plus songs are on the schedule, and for the most part, the band’s got its ideas mapped out. With its new, loftier goals, the Rogers and co. are excited about spending as much time as possible fine-tuning the album, and about working again with friend and Standard Records labelmate Tyler Watkins of Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos. Watkins engineered Police, Police in his and Rogers’s basement, and they plan on working on the new record in the same fashion.

Rogers says with Police, Police he had a plan for every song, knowing what parts were going to sound like a marching band, and which needed to replicate ritualistic jungle drums. With the upcoming project, he says, “there’s a little bit of that, but I’ve learned to get comfortable with the spontaneity of recording [instead of being] afraid that if I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do it wouldn’t work out.”