Urge Overkill Interview

Urge Overkill released one of the great albums of the 90’s with Saturation containing ridiculously great rock songs like Sister Havana, Positive Bleeding, Tequila Sunrise and Bottle of Fur. They appeared in Pulp Fiction, had a huge hit with a cover of Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon and toured with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. And before all that they had a series of very cool albums on the independent Touch and Go label. In a lot of ways Urge Overkill represented all that was great – a few parts that went very wrong – from that so-called, ‘alternative rock’ era.

The band split after their album Exit The Dragon proved to be prophetically titled, and it wasn’t until the mid 2000’s that band leaders Nash Kato and Eddie ’King’ Roeser could play together again.  It took until last year for them to release a new album, the impressive and distinctive Rock N Roll Submarine.

Now Urge Overkill are returning to Australia for a short tour and Ed Roeser provided me with a wide ranging and detailed interview about then, now and tomorrow.

HHMM: Great that you are coming back to Australia again. Do you find this is a country that seems to understand and appreciate the bands entire history, rather than just one album and an appearance on Pulp Fiction.

ER: It all depends. Maybe we have constructed it in our minds. Everybody loves Australia but we like to think we have a special affinity, ‘a special relationship’, as President Bush said. There are people that are wholly unaware of our early catalogue everywhere we go, and we are stunned to the degree that many people will not know who you are talking about until we say, ‘Well, we were in that movie Pulp Fiction”, and they’ll say “Oh you’re that band!” You get all kinds. Not being ubiquitous, you don’t know what to assume. Most people who end up writing stuff have a sense of the history and all that and certainly we’re very proud of that. We broke into the game, right before there was a game as it were.  We do have plenty of history to talk about and it makes interviews tough because there is so much scuttlebutt from the past, so its tough to do short interviews.

HHMM: With the new record, some people have commented that it picks up where Exit The Dragon left off, whereas other people say that it reminds them of the Touch and Go albums. Where do you see it fitting in with your catalogue?

ER: It wasn’t something that we noticed or really thought about, but we did get a lot of comments where people said it picks up where Dragon left off, and on top of that, Dragon was my favorite Urge record. It was a very dark time for us, but we’re very happy with what came out of the Exit The Dragon sessions – but it was fractious time.  It was a honest record I think. Some of the devil may care fun, was missing on that record and we couldn’t manufacture it, but some of the positive things that we have on this record – when people talk of it reminding them of Touch and Go – we did have a less smoothly organized experience, it wasn’t a corporate product and we felt like it didn’t have the polish that a major record would have – and that was fine too. Of course you got that on Exit The Dragon too. It wasn’t polished but it was very much me or Nash isolated on our own projects whereas this record has the feel of a bunch of guys just kinda having a good time. And that feeling I associate with the Touch & Go times. Maybe our sunniest record was Saturation but we were very conscious of bringing self-consciously glossy production elements on that. We didn’t have the means or the desire to do that on this record but I wouldn’t rule it out in the future. What makes me happiest is that after this amount of time between records there is a something that people recognize as us. It’s like pornography, you know it when you see it. With Urge, they know it when they hear it and that’s what brings the smile to the collective face of the band. I don’t know what that quality is, but I think our true believers were happy with the record and we didn’t have any illusions of coming back and taking over the world, but for those who waited and told us they were anticipating this for a long time, most of them were very pleasantly not let down. That’s the last thing you want to do. We were doing a record to follow what I think was a very weird, interesting progression of records . We put it together over such a long period of time that I think all the ineffectual elements feel out and we go a properly eclectic mix of songs. It was hard to narrow it down from the various ideas we had over the years. We’d been at it for quite q while on and off. Not living in the same town anymore had a lot to do with the eclectic nature of it. There were tracks taken from various different sessions we had and it can be a slippery slope to do a record like that but I think in the end it came together in a way that we are happy with and I think takes some of the pressure off. We are very much looking forward to continuing in this vein now because I think we made it a little harder on ourselves than we had to. This is all supposed to be fun and we were getting a little revved up over the years and probably judging a little too harshly what was going to go on there. We like to think we have a high bar for songs, but sometimes putting on things that are ideas that are not polished or finished or not conceptually realized is more interesting as well. Guided By Voices is one of my favorite bands and you see them with ideas sketched out and they are good and they put them out.

HHMM: I find this record really creeps up on me. Songs like Effigy and She’s My Ride are very immediate and you love them straight away, but other songs like The Valiant or Touch To A Cut creep up on you a bit more. Is that the way you look at it?

ER: We sat with these cuts for a while. We had other songs that didn’t make the record. These were songs that already stood the test of time for us, even though they were unfinished, They were in a demo form that we came to believe were done. The Valiant has a lot of production ideas on it. We knew it was a strong song but we fleshed it out quite a bit and there are a lot of instruments on it. We had a stripped down version of it that was cool.  We were pretty hard on ourselves and we thought that we had a record that would reward people who spent some time with it. It would be something where people weren’t reaching for that CD fast forward button. In the end its an interesting journey I think and that’s part of the fun and the challenge of the way we see putting together a record. We want it to flow. It doesn’t have to be a concept record but we all know that classic record enjoyment of the days of yore. That doesn’t mean the kids today don’t appreciate it. Being a dad myself I hear that the kids are still up with the classics like us, so that’s cool.

HHMM: Looking back at Saturation, it’s amazing that there are actually a number of people who think it’s their favorite album ever. That’s a pretty extreme reaction to have but there are some people who feel that way. Does that strike you as an amazing thing.

ER: At that time there was an optimism that bled into the record and I think all the anticipation of us thinking, “Wow are we going to be big rockstars” and that excitement came through. We had these big producers The Butcher Brothers who were really good at keeping things fun. Those guys had been producing hip-hop records for the longest time but they had grown up with The Beatles. They were veterans in the recording studio but they had gone into this niche of doing mainly hip-hop records which frankly isn’t that interesting to do. We were all just kinda amazed at what was coming out of the speakers. I think the record had no sense of disappointment and no sense of us being under the pressure cooker of expectations – which is kind of how it ought to be. We weren’t questioning our choices at all and we just happened to have the right amount time and the record wasn’t over-thought. We were able to do some things with production that we had always wanted to do and it was the first time that we had enough time to perfect things but not too much time. The technology didn’t exist yet where you could sit and perfect things. We were using tape and they had a legendary Neve board that sounded great and they were able to bring that sound to the tracks. But I do hear people say that a lot and I do have great memories of it. It was a real weird stroke of luck that the guy that signed the band hooked us up with The Butchers. They were like these mischievous little Italian guys who had that really rude Philadelphia sense of humor, but they were really smart guys. They were not the stereotype producer. It does flow and it goes down easy. The way that it ends with Heaven 90210  – that was the very first thing we did with them, just to check out the studio. It was a very straight-forward song but for the first time we had the time to put some production touches in there. I think another reason it worked out that well is that we did have time to prepare. We had done quite a bit of demoing at home in our basement studio, that we kept. If something sounded really crazy that we could never recapture we’d just keep it. For being a major label they understood that we weren’t trying to do something to be taken that seriously, but still was serious music from an aesthetic sense.

HHMM: You mentioned the word ‘mischievous’ when talking about the Butchers  and its funny you should say that because to me that’s the spirit of Saturation, and its something that it shares with bands like Cheap Trick or Mott The Hopple or Thin Lizzy. Were you aware of being in the tradition of those kinds of bands?

ER: I think so. It’s not a manufactured thing. It’s just something that happens in the everyday of the recording of the record. You get some in-jokes happening and some fun and it filters in. You are not going to get that when you have a whole lot of animosity in the band. We had less of that at that time. After that record the recreation was more from drugs than from good clean fun, which was what Saturation was all about.  In a lot of ways we’ve been lucky in our career to be recording at the right time and with the right amount of preparedness. I think that something you create when you have limited time and recording is an event. Now everything is digitized and you have everything at your fingertips. You don’t even need to remember the day some guitar track was recorded. It’s all kind of not real. If your guitar is out of tune a bit, ‘no problem, we have a machine for that.’ We still had mixing that was not automated so if you wanted to change something in the mix somebody had to stand there and run that fader so that no two mixes were exactly the same.

HHMM: At that time guys like me in the media and guys at record companies and people in bands, we were all talking about the ‘alternative scene’ and ‘alternative rock”. What the hell was that all about?

ER: I don’t know. I think it came about as a way to separate what was supposedly new from everything that had come before, but I don’t think there was anything new about it at all. I don’t think it was any different to what happened in the punk rock years when you had bands that were actively at odds with the record companies about what was acceptable and what was good. The term ‘alternative’ did indeed have a couple of years of currency and the dream was over pretty quick as I remember it. It really didn’t take very long for those stations, at least in Chicago to go to pop commercial stations, and they are all out of business now. I don’t think anything was being re-invented but for a few years it was better than having the new Michael Jackson album as the main point of interest. For a while it was a welcome change to have that happen.

HHMM: From that era when Urge Overkill were ubiquitous and everyone wanted to be your friend was it a time when you made life-long friends out of your peers or did everyone kinda just drift away when the dream was over?

ER:  By that time in my life I was maybe 27, 28 and I didn’t get as caught up in it as some did. I had more a stable relationship and life and I probably didn’t get as burned as the other two guys did. With Blackie, he probably had an opportunity to get deeper into the life of drugs than he would have without being a rockstar for a few years and that was a life-destroying event for him. The thing that was most disappointing thing was that the band itself didn’t survive those expectations and I do feel that there were people who depended on the scene. Things were working just fine for us thank you very much but because we weren’t as big as Pearl Jam it was decided that somebody was doing something wrong. All of a sudden we supposedly needed a whole new team and that kind of factionalism really fucked us up. Like you said, there was a big element of that. When you’ve got it going on, you are never wrong and everybody is going to be your buddy, even though they are the last person who knows anything about music and about how we got our brand of music to taken seriously. There was some elements from the Hollywood establishment and elsewhere that did foul things up and are any of those people around now? Certainly not!

HHMM: I understand that you are quite well advanced on the next record.

ER: Well, we haven’t done that much writing, but we have plenty of ideas from the last one. Before we did much thinking about it, we did go in for a couple of days and were able to put down some stuff that came about really easy, compared to how slowly the last stuff went.  I think its going to come out pretty quick and its going to be an easier project. I’m all in favor of less thinking about it and more moving ahead. It ends up being the most interesting music to listen to.

 

THURSDAY 8TH MARCH: MELBOURNE, THE ESPY Tickets $45 + bf from www.espy.com.au, ph: 1300 762 545 or in person at the Espy Bottleshop and all Oztix outlets

FRIDAY 9TH MARCH: BRISBANE, THE ZOO Tickets $40 + bf from feelpresents.oztix.com.au, ph: 1300 762 545 or in person at the venue box office and all Oztix outlets

SATURDAY 10TH MARCH: SYDNEY, THE GAELIC Tickets $44 + bf from feelpresents.oztix.com.au, ph: 1300 762 545 or in person at all Oztix outlets

 

Also playing the Golden Plains Festival 2012