The man in shades

A vivid conversation with Ryan Kattner, better known as Man Man’s lead singer ‘Honus Honus’

By Brenna Ehrlich

On the day of the Man Man show, I find an e-mail from Ryan Kattner, aka Honus Honus, in my inbox: “just hit us up at the show. we’re the dudes with mustaches and beards. word.”

So imagine my response when I enter Logan Square Auditorium and behold the motley collection of furry-faced hipsters shambling through the gym-like interior. It’s like “Where’s Waldo?” only without the stupid striped shirt.

Finally, I find Kattner among the masses, and he directs me up to the liquor-loaded green room and hospitably offers me a beer. Honus Honus is the frontman of the Philadelphia band Man Man, who recently sweated with the rest of the indies at Chicago’s Pitchfork Festival. Presently, they are touring the country in tennis whites, sweatbands and face paint, introducing America to their sophomore album, “Six Demon Bag.”

Famous for their facial follicles and manic music, Man Man pied pipered out all the alternative children when they returned to Chicago on Sept. 21.

Up in the green room, Kattner shows me to a dark alcove, pulling out two metal folding chairs and commenting, “This should be just sketchy enough.”

He hunches down in his red plaid shirt and waits for me to turn on my tape recorder. Without his stage suit of tight white tennis gear, Honus Honus looks like the average record-store lurker, aside from his Charles Bronson mustache, which clearly marks him as a genuine member of Man Man. His pseudonym also sets him apart from the crowd.

I ask him why he and the rest of his bandmates have chosen such interesting names, and he responds with a shrug. “I mean, do people really question ‘The Itch’ about his nickname? Or ‘Ghostface (Killah)?’ ” he questions. “If anything, I think the names — at least the name I picked — was probably the dumbest name.”

Apart from rechristening himself, Kattner generally shies away from the recent whimsical trend other bands like The Decemberists embrace. “I’m not into the whimsy,” Kattner says. “Yeah, I prefer to make a point and then leave. I just think it sticks a lot better. I’m not putting down those bands exactly, it’s just, you gotta draw a limit at how many words you use. I think some bands use too many words, and it just kinda glosses over everything. Because unless a fan is a diehard fan, in a live setting, they’re not gonna hear what people are saying anyway. All you’re really experiencing is a gist of the energy that’s going on.”

Unfortunately, sometimes Man Man finds themselves teetering on the edge of the whimsy pit. People get so caught up in the “crazy” aspect of their music that they ignore the words to the songs. For example, Man Man’s “Engwish Bwudd,” a madcap melody with the chorus “Fi fie fo fum, I smell the blood of English man,” might seem like gibberish at first. Still, as Kattner says, “If you dig into it, the content of that song a little bit at the base of it is a dysfunctional relationship. … I mean, that song, it’s playing with the notion of the childhood story of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and then kinda mixed with a more, you know, the feral man, the feral child ‘Jungle Book’ thing introduced back into civilization by a woman. And how it destroys him. All the songs, I think at the heart of them, they’re relationship songs.”

Recently, the video for “Engwish Bwudd” was aired on Nickelodeon, an event that Honus Honus looks at wryly. “I couldn’t believe that video was on there,” he says. “It’s kind of perverse. I think it’s great, but I think it plays up too much the whole crazy thing. … I wish I could have seen it through the eyes of some kid who stumbled across it.”

I point out that Nickelodeon bleeped out the f-bomb when it aired the video, and Kattner laughingly replies, “Yeah, but they didn’t bleep out one particularly dirty reference, which I thought was awesome.”

Even though Man Man’s songs have a carnivalesque quality attractive to the Nickelodeon crowd, at their basis lurks something much deeper. A lot of the tracks on the album offer a twisted kind of advice. For example, the song “Spider Cider” advises that “You should always run with a loaded gun in your mouth.” Kattner denies the existence of any real advice in his lyrics and amends that most of these lines are “nihilistic.”

“Well, I think if anything hopefully there’s some experience, if you can glean it, from the chaos. You know, it’s like going into a situation that you know is gonna be… bad. But you want to experience all the good before everything kinda implodes. It’s like falling in love with someone, and you know it’s just not, it’s not gonna work out. But is that gonna scare you, you know, keep you away from maybe having a wonderful period in your life? If there’s any advice, it’s that kinda stuff, although it’s a little self-destructive. I mean, it’s actually... completely self-destructive.”

Kattner is no stranger to self-destruction. In his song “Ice Dogs,” he bemoans the people he has known who have rushed and squandered their lives. “Yeah it’s like just ‘burning through your beauty,’ ” he sighs, quoting the song. “I’ve known too many people like that, too many girls like that. People who live in the moment, they just age way too fast, all the good stuff that was there is gone. I feel that way sometimes, just like I burned through some good periods in my life. I think (the song) is mostly about too many awesome girls that I’ve known who have just totally self-destructed.”

Regardless of the past, and despite the heavy content of some of his songs, Kattner wants to entertain. Although he and the rest of his crew are currently ill, and even though he has just spent days sitting in a van and sleeping on floors while touring the “rest stops of America,” Honus Honus came to Chicago to play a show. When he looks down at the crowd, he sure as hell doesn’t want to see a throng of the living dead staring up at the stage with glassy eyes. No, Honus Honus wants you to “to freak the hell out, but I want you to do it because you want to, not because you want to prove that you’re this super fan. Just do it genuinely. We’re trying to do it genuinely. … No one’s judging. I’ve seen photographs taken of me playing live, and I don’t ever want to see them. I look like a total maniac. They’re not the kinda photographs that my mom wants to see.”

Definitely not Christmas card material.

So far, though, Man Man has had no trouble with their audiences. Kattner smiles enthusiastically. “What’s great is that our demographic is great right now,” he says. “I feel like it’s pretty diverse, and I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for the demographic we have right now. I mean, there’s nothing better than artsy dudes, regular dudes, hot, artsy girls, hot, normal girls, old heads, young heads. It’s great. All I fear is the white hat invasion. I would hate to just have, like, a lot of jocks moshing. That’d be a nightmare. I don’t mind having jocks at our shows, but I just don’t want it to be 100 percent dudes.”

If there’s anything that such a masculine band disdains, it’s an overabundance of dudes. Kattner and his boys like the ladies, even when the hot girls in question steal their stuff. Apparently, on the West Coast, fans got “caught up in a demon takeover” and thieved Man Man’s props at the end of the show. Kattner isn’t too fazed by the blatant theft though, musing, “If it’s a cute girl taking my stuff, I guess that’s better than a ponytail dude. Can’t really complain too much.”

Ryan Kattner presents himself as a man who loves music and loves (if not a little cynically) love. When I ask him what he’d do if he only had 24 hours to live, he pauses very briefly before replying, “I’d try to play an amazing show and then shack up with a girl that I’m in love with. I guess that’s what I would do. It’s good on all emotional bases. And if I didn’t have someone who I was totally crazy about, I think I’d just wanna play a 24-hour show.”

I smile and tell him, “That’d be awesome. I’d go to that show.”

Honus Honus sits back in his chair as the opening band rages below.

“Yeah, I would too,” he says. “I guess I’d have to.”

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