Band of the Week: Thee Oh Sees

Hometown: San Francisco, Calif.

Fun Fact: John Dwyer picked up his guitar style in Providence, R. I. playing on a daily basis with Brian Gibson, the current bassist for Lightning Bolt.

Why They're Worth Watching: Thee Oh Sees specialize in the kind of no-frills garage rock that's free of pretension and full of psychedelic goodness.

For Fans Of: Black Lips, The 13th Floor Elevators, Nuggets

It started out as an innocent dispute. A few years ago, John Dwyer was waiting for his band Thee Oh Sees to go on stage at San Francisco's Cafe du Nord. Outside, a friend got into an argument with a bouncer, and—long story short—the whole band got kicked out of the club. Not to be deterred, Dwyer and his bandmates dragged their gear down to a nearby bus stop, plugged in, and continued the show. "Everybody from the club just left the club and they were really pissed," Dwyer says, adding with a bit of rock 'n' roll swagger, "That's what you get for kicking the band out who brought all the people."

There are two types of rock musicians: those that play rock 'n' roll and those that live it. Dwyer finds himself entrenched firmly in the latter camp. Whether he's playing pickup shows at bus stops, getting kicked out of London clubs, or beating hecklers in the head with his guitar, Dwyer has earned a reputation as a San Francisco Iggy Pop of sorts. A veteran of bands like The Coachwhips, Pink & Brown, and Yikes, amongst others, Dwyer has specialized since the late '90s in writing the kind of fried psychedelic garage rock that would make Roky Erickson proud. Even after venturing into spacey acoustic territory with an earlier incarnation of Thee Oh Sees (at the time recording under the name OCS), he couldn't keep away from garage rock. "When I sit down to play, I can try to steer myself away from [garage], but I always end up going back there," Dwyer says.

The results of his devotion to all things garage is apparent on the group's newest record, The Master’s Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In. Dwyer returns to his garage roots with Master’s Bedroom, penning some of the best material of his prolific career. The album, recorded in a day and a half in San Fran, is a fuzzed-out, reverb-drenched record that teems with the kind of ramshackle tunres that sounds like they were written a few minutes prior to recording. That last part makes a lot of sense considering that the band recorded most of the record live.

Still, even with the new record, Dwyer says he's still not satisfied with what he's written. With the self-destructive confidence that only a rock musician could have, he quips, "I just want to write the record that I feel like it would be okay if I killed myself the next day. I'd just be like, 'Okay, I'm done. There it is. Boom.'"