My Favorite Merch: Jamie Woodard

Both on stage and online, Perfume guitarist and vocalist Jamie Woodard wears his influences on his sleeves. His Instagram stories regularly include reposts of ‘90s alt-rock concert footage and the walls in Perfume’s first music video are plastered with posters of those bands. I figured this would make this recent Kansas City transplant a prime candidate for inclusion in My Favorite Merch. Read below about a few of his favorite tees, his (very sick) first piece of band merch, and how his band’s first piece of album art came together.

What was your first piece of band merch you remember being excited about?
Probably like fourth grade, elementary school, I was obsessed with Slipknot. Iowa came out, Vol. 3 was about to come out. So it's in between 2000 to 2004. I was already into Linkin Park and P.O.D. and all that shit. I begged my parents to get me Slipknot shirts and they would never buy them for me. And then I think my fourth grade birthday, like 2004, they bought me a Slipknot chain wallet. It's technically the first piece of merch I got. I was like, this is the sickest thing ever and I was so, so stoked about it.
 

Do you still have it?
I do. It doesn't have the chain on it, it doesn't clamp anymore, the buttons are off, but it's in a drawer somewhere.

That’s not a wallet you want to lose.
It's at my parents’ house in Michigan. I think I know where it is. But it's just tucked away. It's been there for like 15 years.

When did you move from Michigan?
Well, I bounced around between Ohio. Technically, I moved here from Columbus, but I lived most of my life in Michigan.

When did you get to Kansas City?
January 2019 -- like two years ago. Or two and a half years ago.

Is there any way you would characterize your personal style?
Yeah, but there's so many things that are influential that I don't know what to pick or what to do. Because I could watch the movie Hackers and be like, man, they look so sick, like this weird ‘90s rave shit that’s totally outrageous. Or I could watch Reality Bites and they're all in the grunge stuff and I love that too.

So it's like, I kind of just kind of try to find a middle ground like, well, I like this shirt, I like this style of pants, and sometimes I'll like to switch it up. And sometimes, just depending on my mood that day, it's like, I try to have some kind of style that I can express. But at the same time, it kind of comes from a lot of different places. So it's hard to just narrow down to one even though it might seem like I'm narrowing down to one. I don't know. It's hard to interpret.





Are there any musicians or celebrities or people in your life that you've kind of looked to early on as people that you found really fashionable?
Yeah, watching those Linkin Park videos growing up, Chester and Mike from Linkin Park, they would always have -- one of the first things I ever wanted to do is have bleached hair, spiky hair, like Linkin Park, and it's so stupid, but that was like the shit to me when I was a kid was. The Dickies and the spiked hair and chokers and whatever, you know, like that kind of nu-metal [stuff].

And then you get into Deftones. Chino Moreno would always wear the Dickies with the Adidas Campuses all the time. Same with Fred Durst, that was the thing, but it was mostly not about musicians. I like that the musicians were doing it because I liked that style, but where I really got the eye for it was because of skateboarding and BMX and they were wearing the same stuff that the skateboarding and the BMX dudes were wearing, and kind of vice versa even though the music side was a little more extreme with the hair and everything, but that whole world, how it comes together, that's where I was the most influenced stylistically when I was a kid and still am to this day, because I love it so much.





Your hair’s kinda short and pink right now. Have you tried a lot of different colors and styles with it in the past?
Well, it's supposed to be red, dark red, but you know how it goes. It always washes out to a lighter color and it's always hard to get exactly what you want. But yeah, I've had different lengths and different colors all that. My hair is never just dark brown. Like it's at least like blonde, you know? So I've been changing styles and colors for the last however many years I can remember.

You mentioned the Adidas that you noticed in the videos and stuff, but it's kind of funny because a lot of people are into sneakers as a hypebeast thing right now, but I feel like there are maybe are some like just very specific sneakers from like the ‘80s or ‘90s that you care about that hypebeasts couldn’t care less about.
Yeah, ‘cause I never was much of a sneaker head and I didn't get really into sneakers because for the longest time I didn't even know what sneakers I liked, so I’d just wear Converse. I was never into crazy sneakers and shit. I like ‘em, but most of the sneakers are just what I see in the BMX videos from the ‘90s or like all the ‘90s bands I would see, like in the music videos, kind of like the Adidas Campus twos. The ‘90s Adidas Campus is a distinct shoe that everyone was wearing during that time. That and Air Walks. That's pretty much as far as it goes.

You want to show me the shirts you picked?
It was very hard to narrow them down, so I just closed my eyes and picked three that I thought were important. Well, let’s talk about this one first because it's already been shown in the music video.

Deftones’ Back To School tour. This is 2000 around October to maybe late summer/early fall to about late/early winter of 2000. It doesn't say so on the shirt, but Incubus and Taproot were supporting that tour. Incubus was just coming off of Make Yourself, going into Morning View and Taproot just came out with Gift.

I obviously wasn't there because I was like eight, but it’s a sick shirt and has all the tour dates on the back. And I got it maybe six months ago. I've been trying to track this one down for a while and I was messaging a guy about one a couple years ago and he was gonna trade it to me for pretty cheap and I don't know why I just didn't do it. But I was like, I can't let this one slip through my fingers again, because Deftones shit is hard to find because maybe it's out there, but a lot of the designs I don't like and it's hard to find really good shirts from either Around The Fur or White Pony, or like the era I would want, you know.

I love the cheerleader illustration on there. Have you seen Deftones live before?
No, I haven't. I was supposed to see them in 2012 ‘cause I've been listening to them since I was a kid. Like, eight years old. I was like, what the fuck is this? I was supposed to see them in 2012. That time I was just about to graduate high school and I was at home and I think it was in the summer or something and I had just gotten in a bunch of trouble or something and I didn't have a car at the time and my mom had said she was gonna take me for months and then a couple days before, I'm like, hey, you're still taking me that show, right? Like,the Deftones -- I love them. This is my favorite band. And she's like, no, you're not going and I'm like, are you serious? Please? And she's like, nope, you can’t go. And I'm like, man, this sucks.

And there's been opportunity to see them before, but this is in Michigan, they were playing in a suburb of Detroit and basically they're playing this venue, this kind of theater, which is like general admission. Every other time I've seen a tour of theirs come around, it's something at an amphitheater with a lawn or supporting a band like Avenged Sevenfold, so I'm just like, I don't care. I don't want to see them unless it's in a room. You know what I mean? So kind of always missed the opportunity.





What’s next?
We can talk about the Orange 9mm. This is a great one. It’s ‘90s Revelation Records. Longsleeve. I thought it's such a cool shirt and I love Orange 9mm obviously. They're my favorite band, but I love all those hardcore-adjacent bands that kind of happened in the ‘90s because Orange 9mm was started from Burn and he had all those other bands like Farside and Quicksand and all that stuff and Rival Schools.

I just love like the style of those hardcore-adjacent bands, whether it's a band like Seaweed or a band like Quicksand. It's very different. All those bands that started out of the hardcore scene in the ‘90s are really cool. And the whole Orange 9mm thing kind of bleeds into Quicksand and Helmet and those types of bands and kind of the heavier side of stuff, and obviously Deftones being in there somewhere based off the earlier stuff, but just that whole era, it's just awesome. I just like the shirt because it's cool that I have a piece of history from that scene or whatever, you know, and I love that, man. And obviously I love the band and I wanna wear my influences.





I don't know if there is like, a period where it stopped, but maybe like five or so years ago, it wasn't as common but like there definitely are a lot of hardcore-adjacent alternative bands right now like Higher Power and Narrow Head and all that stuff.
Oh yeah, that band Eyeball, Soul Blind. There's so many right now. There's just too many to list. Fake Eyes.

A lot of ‘90s/Y2K nostalgia is popping off right now.
It's just going crazy right now. I don't know what the hell’s going on.

But you’ve been ready for it. This has been your niche for a minute.
Well yeah, I've been trying to do this type of stuff for a while, like I don't know how well I'm translating or interpreting my influences into my own style or whatever, and I don't know if the music's that evolved yet, or that interesting or that original or amazing, but I feel like for the first EP, we're starting to get there and it's like, okay, we've evolved it a little bit and we got something down on paper and now let's build from here and really, really bring the colors out and really, you know, kind of make it into our own style.

Yeah, I was also impressed with the album art and the Perfume’s first tee. Deighton made that, right?
The album art itself, which is basically the same thing as the shirt -- I had some ideas and were floating around with them and I'm like, man, this isn't working. And it was gonna be kind of like that black background and I wanted the border to kind of be holographic stars around and then three pictures of us in the middle and then Perfume in the Suissnord font and then Charlie's Angels in parentheses in the Suissnord font as well, but orange instead of white and I just had that -- I always had that for months, but the picture with us wasn't really working and I'm like, I slept on it and I woke up like I was like half asleep and I call Deighton and I'm like I know what it needs to be, dude. We need to fucking make the pictures to just be like three cool-looking graphics that kind of look a little bit weird. And just have that and I found these pictures and I just kind of kept editing them and thinking of what kind of vibe I wanted and it's hard to imagine something. But it ended up working, like just thinking, editing, glitching together these little pictures and then saying, okay, Deighton, here's the pictures, use Photoshop and make it an album cover. Because I don't know how to do that. I just fucked up the pictures. I gave him the pictures. He put it together.

Do you have ideas for where you want the merch and graphics to go next?
I've had this idea for a long time and me and Deighton actually designed this before we even had our cover for our next merch. I don't know if it'll be our next mech. I kind of want it to be a limited time or only for a specific show or something. But we have a Bjork rip coming that's really sick.

What’s your last shirt you brought?
Well, here’s a classic. Cranberries’ No Need To Argue tour shirt. Tour dates on the back. ‘94-’95.





Ah cool, it came to Kansas City.
Yeah, this one's like, every time someone asks me a ridiculous question like, Jamie, what would you do for this amplifier? Would you sell your Cranberries shirt? They always point that out as my number one bargaining tool. I don't know. It's just an awesome shirt. I've had it for years. And I just love the band. Shirts like this, people sell them for so much fucking money. And I'm like, man, there's no way I'm gonna ever have another one. You know what I mean? So it's like, I just really love The Cranberries and I really value that band. And this album in particular is great. Their first album, Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We, is really good too. And that's probably my favorite, but this is right up behind it. It's great. It's an awesome piece of history. I don't really wear it often because it just means a lot. But it's funny because every time I wear it, no matter where I go, I always have at least one mom come up to me and say, that was the first tour I ever saw. That was my first concert. Like several times, like, every time I wear it, there's a story of a mom saying that was the first concert I've ever been to or I love your shirt.




 

So it’s good for picking up MILFs is what you’re saying [laughs].
[Laughs] Well, yeah, kinda. I can notice that it’s getting their attention from like, anywhere like, like, anyone from like, 35 to like 49. Whether it's a bank teller, or at the DMV, or someone at the store. But every time, moms are like, I love your shirt, that was my first concert!

How did you first get into The Cranberries?
Man, I can’t even remember. I mean, like all these bands, you know, I probably heard a lot of the stuff like Deftones and the bands are meant to like, that kind of sound like Perfume, like, whatever you want to call it. Like, I call it snowboard-core, just because like, I grew up with ‘90s snowboarding and BMX videos. So it's like, I heard this stuff as a kid and I'm like, man, this is sick, but I was a kid, how am I supposed to get ahold of it besides like hearing the songs and videos and playing over and over. And then later in life, I'll go back and rediscover it, because my music tastes will just evolve. And I'll just kind of revisit it. And then it just kind of sparked new life from there.
 

So maybe in high school, right out of high school is when I started really getting back into a lot of these bands again. After going through several musical phases. Cranberries, probably around the same time. Straight right after high school or something.

Where do you usually shop for your band merch?

I rarely even shop unless it's something that's cool, that's not crazy expensive, like 30 bucks, like, for a Linkin Park shirt from the Hybrid Theory era. I'm like, okay, not that, you know, but like, I don't really look for it anymore. I used to, like years and years ago, but every once in a while I'll see something, whether it's just me popping up somewhere into a shop and I just happen to have something I'm like, h, I gotta have it or me seeing something online in a Facebook group or something and be like, oh, I gotta trade for that, I've been looking for that for a long time, but I don't really look for stuff like that anymore. It's just like, sometimes it'll pop up and I'll be like, I gotta have it. But for the most part, I'm not really on the hunt as much as I used to be.

Perfume’s debut EP, Charlie’s Angels, is available to be streamed on all major platforms.

 

[This article first appeared in Issue 4 of Shuttlecock's free monthly print edition. Click here to order a copy online, or pick one up for free at locations around KC/Lawrence/JoCo.]