For better or worse, most people know about the Blisters for reasons other than their music. The teenage quartet boasts some local rock royalty — drummer/co-founder Spencer Tweedy is the son ofWilco’sJeff Tweedy and Sue Miller, co-proprietor of the legendary rock club Lounge Ax. But, once that bit is out of the way, it is a rock band like any other — which is to say it’s skating on its own steam, worthy and fun, parentage be damned. Sixteen-year-old Tweedy spoke about being a Blister.
Q: Tell me about the inception of the Blisters.
A: Well, I started it about 10 years ago, with a friend who is no longer in the band, when I was 7.
Q: Obviously, being around your parents you knew what a band was, but at 7 how did you have a band?
A: It was nothing like today. We thought you could just take two instruments and throw them together and it would be a band. I played drums, and my friend was going to play turntables, be like a DJ. But then we went online and found out that turntables were really expensive and that you had to learn how to use them. But then Henry (Mosher, singer/songwriter) joined, and everything sorted itself out. For a long time we were a novelty — a kid band — until it became the serious thing that it is now.
Q: What did that change involve — from novelty to serious?
A: It was a pretty recent thing. For a long time, Henry’s dad was our band coach because we needed help to actually practice, or get together and do anything. We stopped having him help us. When we were 12, we stopped doing covers and started doing our own songs. I think the turning point was in the last year when we decided we weren’t going to play anymore, like, children’s birthday parties or block parties. No more playing for toddlers. It’s nice playing to adults, people who understand and are interested.
Q: The Blisters are more musically mature than most adult bands — do you think you parents influenced that?
A: I’m just the drummer, not the frontman, so I am not that kind of a leader in the band — I can’t influence that. But, my dad is a huge role model in my life and in the solo music that I make. Henry, who writes the songs, he grew up with a lot of the same influences, his parents playing music from the same eras and the same genres. In that regard, I think it’s given our songs the kind of dynamics and arrangements teenage bands do not usually have.
Q: Do you hope to eventually do music full time, once you are done with school?
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A: I would really love to do music, but everyone knows it’s kind of a crapshoot.
Q: You recently wrote about the differences between perceptions of kids and adults making music, making art. What inspired you to think about that?
A: Being on the cusp between the kid and adult mindset — the contrast between the two (is) more apparent. I have been thinking about the cliches — about how a child’s mind is innocent and pure, and the experience of leaving that, and the idea of that when a kid is supposed to make art it’s natural, it’s easy — visceral. But lots of times, we don’t think of the art that kids make as truly being art — we don’t judge their art as art. But it is.
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When: 7 p.m., Sunday
Where: Mayne Stage, 1328 W. Morse Ave.
Tickets: $10; maynestage.com