Chris Slusarenko is a bit of a renaissance man. The singer/guitarist fronts the Portland, Ore. indie rock supergroup known as Eyelids and he hosts his own podcast, Revolutions Per Movie, which focuses on music-themed films, documentaries, TV shows and music videos.
The podcast's theme makes perfect sense when you consider that aside from being a musician, Slusarenko is a film buff who co-owned Clinton Street Video in Portland, Ore. for 23 years before it closed in 2018.
"It's a total meeting of my life performing in music, my life producing music and meeting people in it, and my former life of over two decades running a an indie video store," he says. "So, to now talk about music films with people, it's like I was made for it."
Revolutions Per Movie launched last September and has since racked up an impressive number of guests, including Peter Buck to discuss the documentary R.E.M. by MTV, Gary Jarman of The Cribs, to talk about Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!, Hedwig & the Angry Inch star John Cameron Mitchell to weigh in on the Mayles Brothers' Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter and more. (It's available for free on all the major podcast platforms. A Patreon version features exclusive episodes.)
On top of that, Eyelids recently released the 26-track opus, No Jigsaw, a two-LP vinyl set (also available via streaming and download) that celebrates the band's decade-long career of "lopsided rock" with an odds-and-sods collection of rarities, new material and choice covers, including Echo & the Bunnymen's "Seven Seas," The Cars' "Good Times Roll" and Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence."
Along with Slusarenko, the band features singer/guitarist John Moen, guitarist Jonathan Drews, drummer Paulie Pulvirenti, and bassist Victor Krummenacher, current or former members of Guided By Voices, The Decemberists, Camper Van Beethoven and Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks.
"We've been going at a pretty intense clip of releases and touring for the last 10 years, minus the pandemic," Slusarenko says. "With John and me working with Robert Pollard [of Guided by Voices], we definitely got into [the habit] of, 'Hey, we have a couple of good songs. Let's just get them out on a single right now. Let's do it before it's overplayed or we're sick of it.' And a lot of those singles are just hard to find and out of print, but it's some of our best stuff and we still play them."
Slusarenko says he occasionally had fans asking him where they could find "Bound to Let You Down" from the band's 2016 Buck-produced self-titled EP, only to inform them it was no longer available. That changed with the release of No Jigsaw, the band's 20th vinyl offering, including all their albums, singles and EPs.
"It has unreleased stuff, things that are hard to find, but I really worked hard on sequencing it," he says of the album. "It feels like a kind of White Album-y weird trip. Like each side has a different feel. Even Peter Buck singing an Elmore James song ["It Hurts Me Too"] feels like the Ringo 'Don't Let Me Down' part. It's like this is the folky side, this is the rock side. It was fun to put together."
The variety of material stems from Slusarenko and Moen's diverse musical backgrounds. "He's in the Decemberists and he played with Stephen Malkmus. We've known each other since we were 19, but we're so different musically," Slusarenko explains. "I was always into these really angry, more Bob Mould-y kind of things. And he was kind of into more R.E.M. type of pastoral and prettier things, but we're friends and loved each other's bands."
They found a middle ground with the mix of covers featured on No Jigsaw. "Some of those songs are super cinematic, even some of the songs we didn't put on the record," Slusarenko says. "We've done a cover of the Stone Roses' "I Wanna Be Adored' that just builds and builds. It's kind of dreamscape-y and kind of psychedelic and repetitive. The Depeche Mode song is very much like that. I found the same kind of choir samples that they used and the horn samples they have and we really tried to lean into that."
On the flipside, the band's cover of the Fall's post-punk raveup "Fantastic Life" is also included on the album, with special guest Paul Hanley, on a second drum kit, just like he played on The Fall's 1981 original recording. "It was amazing. It's just so fun to work with your heroes and be like, 'You were 16 when you made this and now you are in your late 50s. Let's revisit it.'"
The band's take of the Moles' "Bury Me Happy," also has a unique twist. Inspired by the Richard Davies-led group's tendency to release different edits of songs in its catalog, Eyelids jammed in another Moles' song repeatedly into "Bury Me Happy."
Aside from Guided By Voices and spinoff Boston Spaceships, Slusarenko was also a member of Death Midget, along with his drummer brother Nate, as well as '90s Sub Pop signing Sprinkler.
"We got signed the year before [Nirvana's] Nevermind so it was a pretty exciting time to be in the Northwest." he recalls. "Sub Pop was a really small label still, but they were beloved and they were putting out cool stuff. And we were really honored to be a band outside of Seattle that they're going to sign. But then during the time between us signing and recording the album, Nevermind blew up. We played with Nirvana the day their album went gold and just the expectations changed, Sub Pop changed but we didn't change."
A lifelong music fan, Slusarenko says his first record purchase was Big Brother & the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills "because it had a Robert Crumb cartoon on the cover" but at 5 or 6 years old, he "didn't really like it much. It was too bluesy and soulful," he says. From there he got into Kiss, Cheap Trick and Devo.
"By the time I got to Devo, it was like all bets were off," he says. "I found something that really kind of made me change my worldview a bit at a really young age, because I saw how much people hated the band I loved. And if that meant like a PE teacher being like, 'Hey Devo, get out here.' And I'm like, 'Screw you.'"
Through Devo he got into more experimental acts, such as the Residents, Tuxedo Moon and MX-80, but it was R.E.M. that brought him back to loving guitar bands.
As a teen, he became pen pals with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, who answered his fan letters. "He was the one who was like, 'Check out Mission of Burma, Pylon, the Feelies, the Dream Syndicate and the Minutemen.' It was 1983 and I was off to the races. There's this whole world in the underground that I didn't know yet."
Slusarenko discovered R.E.M. through the IRS Records-produced TV show The Cutting Edge, which ran on MTV in the '80s, and started writing the band letters after discovering the address on the Chronic Town EP.
That pen pal relationship lasted for more than three years and culminated with the band inviting the young Slusarenko and his family to an R.E.M. gig.
In the episode of Revolutions Per Movie that featured Buck as a guest, Slusarenko read some of his old fan letters to the band. "I was so confident at this point to be in their camp that by the time [R.E.M.'s second album] Reckoning came out [in 1984], I was like, 'Michael your vocals have really improved.' I meant it. 'You're even better than ever.' Like they needed to know this," he laughs.
Now with Buck producing Eyelids and occasionally performing with the band as a sixth member, Slusarenko is living his teenage rock star dreams. "It so touching that Peter and I have become great friends as adults," he says. "I never would have thought."
