I spoke with Sergie Loobkoff, guitarist of Samiam, back in 2010 as the band was about to hit the road for a string of East Coast dates.
During the interview we talked about the band's upcoming show in NYC, which at the time was their first in close to a decade, new music, and more. Read on!
How did Orphan Works come together?
It wasn’t our idea to do. We played at The Fest in Gainesville. We had a really cool show [but] it was a total disaster because our bass player didn’t come so we had to teach the guy from Less Than Jake and Chris Wollard from Hot Water Music how to play Samiam songs five hours before we went and played in front of a couple thousand people. It turned out well but it was crazy. I didn’t really have that much fun because it was so crazy. They both did a fantastic job. I could never learn that many songs in a few hours. Regardless, after the show, I reconnected with Var [Thelin], who owns No Idea Records who I met on our first tour back in the 1800s [Laughs]. We sort of kept in touch a little bit. We put out a 7-inch when No Idea was actually a fanzine and not a label. They put out 7-inches every once in a while and we did a split with Jawbreaker. For the last fourteen years or so, every once in a while, I’d be in Europe and see some graffiti on the wall. He’d be on tour with some band like Small Brown Bike and he’d notice that we were playing three weeks later and he’d go,” Hey Sergie, what’s happening?” When we played The Fest and I saw him, it was like, “we totally known each other for years but we haven’t been face to face in fifteen years.” But we talked that night and the next couple days about maybe recording a record. Which is kind of a big, hard ordeal with Samiam because we’re such a ragtag group of assholes. The more realistic thing was to put out our two 90s records that were on major labels, that were out of print for the last decade or so. We hired a lawyer to deal with that. We were talking and since making a new album fizzled a little bit and it’s obviously going to take a long time to deal with a major label to try and weasel your records back, [No Idea thought] “why don’t we put something out in the interim.” It was actually just my idea just to do outtakes and live things. There’s two songs were from Clumsy that we recorded then but they never came out. I thought it would be kind of cool to limit the songs to be songs from that era of Clumsy and You Are Freaking Me Out. So when those [reissues] eventually came out, it would be a trio of records that documents that little time in history. It’s not going to sell a million copies. It’s not like “let’s try to squeeze some cash out of some dorks that buy everything.”