Wanna rock & roll all night?

OUT OF THE SHADOWS After 11 years, Endless Boogie hit a studio and made on album.

Photograph: Stix Stuart

Here’s a hot tip for you: Endless Boogie has a show on Tuesday 17. Seems like basic information, the sort of thing that’d be easily found on the Internet, right? Not in this case; not unless you guessed that the gig was at Mercury Lounge. As a band, Endless Boogie has no Web presence. Until this week, which sees the release of Focus Level, its first studio album, this backwoods-psychedelia quartet has had hardly any presence at all, at least by today’s standards for bands. Give these guys some time, though; they only got rolling in 1997.

You might think an 11-year journey to a first album would indicate a road filled with obstacles. Again, not so. “I think the only struggle for us has been to get everybody together at the same time,” says guitarist Jesper Eklow, sitting around a table with his three bandmates (success!) at the Ludlow Street bar Max Fish. Heading into a studio was never the plan for the group; for that matter, neither was playing gigs. “Endless Boogie was meant to be an old-man hobby,” he continues. “Getting together to jam every Tuesday, have a couple of beers. Get Paul out of the house.”

That would be lead guitarist Paul Major, who’s also the group’s singer (when he remembers to sing, that is). Major, in his midfifties, is a friendly but enigmatic gentleman of few words, epic hair and an instinctive mastery of his instrument. Having left NYC sometime in the ’80s, Major—a legend in record-collector circles—returned around 1990, roughly when Eklow and bassist Mark Ohe (who both work at Matador Records) arrived in town.

For four years, that was Endless Boogie: a band that played for the joy of it, for themselves. An associate brought that to an end in 2001. “Stephen Malkmus basically demanded that we open for his first solo show here, at Bowery Ballroom,” says Eklow, the kid of the band at 38. “And we freaked out a little bit.” Ohe elaborates in his calm baritone: “Because we didn’t really have songs, and we realized we had to turn these jams into something a little more solid.” And so, the only real philosophy to Endless Boogie was born: Never once has the band solicited a gig. It plays only when asked—and it tends to honor all such requests. “And through that experiment, we’ve played some really bad shows,” Eklow says, the others cracking up.

The band had turned a couple of its many rehearsal tapes into small-pressing vinyl-only releases a few years ago (“They go for as much as $250 now,” Major informs me with a hint of satisfaction). But like an Endless Boogie show, Focus Level would never have happened if the band hadn’t been asked by Mike Quinn of the Brooklyn-based No Quarter label. “I had no idea who he was,” Eklow recalls, “but he gave us money up front, so we were like, ‘Sure.’ And then…we just didn’t do anything. He kept coming to shows, being really nice, and finally, after 18 months or so, he was like, ‘So anyway, um, we’ve really got to get that album together.’ ”

The ten elemental slabs of rawk eventually recorded and chosen for Focus Level gloriously reimagine the Velvet Underground as a biker band. Musically speaking, the organizing principle of Endless Boogie is simply Major himself. “Paul is just mind-blowing,” says Matt Sweeney, the producer-slash-cheerleader for the recording (who also played guitar on Neil Diamond’s new album). “There’s no agenda on his part; the utter egolessness of his approach is just so cool. I wish there were more like him.” A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Major, who improvises all his lyrics, opens Focus Level with the vibe-setting declaration: “In the backyawd we’re gonna have some pawty tiiime, don’tcha know. Gonna get down real fine, yes we awww.”

Getting down means serious jams, which the guys in the band—including drummer Harry Druzd, who joined last year—envision almost as immortal entities. So what makes a jam worthy? “It’s a definite feeling—when I want it to just go on and on, and I almost get mad at Paul for wanting to end it,” Eklow says.

“There’s a song on the record, ‘Low-Lifes,’ that could’ve ended early on,” Ohe says. “But we just kept going, and it went to all these different places yet stayed in the pocket the whole time.”

“To this day, though,” Eklow concludes, “it all depends on the vibe—any night we could have a couple of great jams or a couple of really bad ones.”Afterward, the band invited me to its practice space a couple of blocks away to listen in on a rehearsal. Two long jams were knocked out. The vibe was right: Both were great.

Endless Boogie plays Tue 17 and Glasslands Gallery Jun 20. Focus Level is out now on No Quarter.