HHMM: Congratulations on the album. It’s a great record, but I’m not the only one who thinks so. There’s been a really good reaction to it. Are you thinking that maybe this is the right band for the right time?

TT: Yes I do. I know it’s the right band for the right time. Whether its successful or not – we’ll see. There’s absolutely nothing in the way of us understanding that we’re supposed to be together. That’s what we use to determine how right it all feels. You can never control who is going to like what, but for us, what id really great, is that will be the cherry. We are already successful because we found musicians that gell; we found each other. That’s the biggest part of the success for us.

HHMM: The sound you have seems to be the right sound for the time. We recently had Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears down here, and they are in the same ballpark as you, and they did real well also. That soul rock mix is sounding good right now.

TT: We are in a time, when its after when things got so fluffy for a while and then after the fluff, it got so indie and dark, so I think the rock element of what we are doing as opposed to a straight rhythm & blues or straight soul sound is letting people connect to something that doesn’t feel to light hearted, but also lets people get out of their heads. I definitely feel like the music we are creating now is part of the zeitgeist…but…what I love about what we are doing is that there are people who are die-hard vinyl spinners, people who didn’t just get their record players two years ago – they come up and say they love the band and they compare us to people who are my heroes. That’s when you feel like some credibility is getting to you. These are not just people who are listening to records because someone told them it was cool, these are people who have a real idea about what might be cool, as far as a real retro sound is concerned. And then its even better when they say that we are not just doing a mock version of it, but we are adding something new to it. Because that is the fear – when you are doing something that is so inspired by your past heroes that you end up sounding like a replica.

HHMM: It’s good that people don’t think that the band is just an invention of a smart manager.

TT: Exactly. I’m glad that there are so many videos that show who we were before we got a big manager, so people know that its authentic.

HHMM: With You Tube, now it’s very hard to hide your past, and in your case that’s a good thing.

TT: You Tube is huge. Whenever I hear somebody complaining now that they don’t have a major record label or something like that I just think, ‘well everything you need is at your hands right now’.  I’d like to find out how much money a record company would have to put into a band to get them the same amount of exposure that you can get in one week doing it independently now. I can reach 7 million people this week, if I want to. Twenty years ago what would a record company have to do to have a new band reach 7 million people. That would have required a major television appearance and them having to pay a lot of radio stations… It’s amazing to me what we can do now as independent artists.

HHMM: As I said to Black Joe, it’s nice to see a black guy out the front of a band of white guys showing them how to groove.

TT: (laughs) I like to stay away from statements like that. (laughs) But so long as there are people like you that don’t stay away from it, means I don’t have to say it!

HHMM: The video for Blues Hand Me Down is kinda like a wild house party. Is that the vibe of the live shows?

TT: Oh completely. It was our idea to make sure the first video came out like that. We didn’t want to be put in some big setting. We chose instead to be in  a small setting, and we wanted to have the audience so close with us, because we don’t like to do shows, we like to have parties. That’s the most important thing, that people come and participate in the show, they are part of the event as opposed to watching the event from the outside. Sometimes when I think back to our live shows I sometimes wonder if I was a little ruthless with the audience, but I like to command people to get out of their heads and have a good time. I will do everything in my power as a frontman, and the band will do everything in their power as musicians to make sure you forget everything else while you are in the room. That is our mission.

HHMM: do you find there is a wide cross section coming to the shows, from young hipsters to traditionalists.

TT: At our shows you get the 17 year old boy musicians, you get the young girls in their 50’s outfits, the hipsters, the soul scene people, the 60 year olds who give us the authenticity nod, black, white, every ethnic group… The music kind of strips down to basics and when you are down to basics then it means every one around has a common feeling about it. When you start doing things too far on the outside it excludes people. You want to be as basic as we can and then wreck people’s basic sensibilities! These people end up hanging out together. On any of our social media sites you have 17 year olds having real conversations with adults, because our fan base doesn’t talk down to people. It’s pretty mind blowing actually. I’m very blown away by the diversity of our audience.

HHMM: It’s interesting, that community based thing. A few years ago the band s that encouraged that were the jam bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead. Did you pick up that cue from those guys?

TT: No we didn’t pick up the cue from them, but I’m glad its gone that way. You are not the first person I’ve heard that from and I’ve thought about that. The Troublemakers is our fan base, and they thought of that themselves. They have sites in Italy and Germany and in the UK. There are pages of discussion there and none of them are about Vintage Trouble, They are together because of us but they become a community. They take vacations together. They travel together, they rent hotel rooms and they invite us to come and party in their hotel!

HHMM: When you listen to the album I feel like it must have been real important for you to get songs like Gracefully on there, where you can really slide into a vocal.

TT: Yeah, but not because of the vocals. Songs like Gracefully and Not Alright By Me are important to me because I want us, as a band, to touch as many parts of a persons emotional scale as possible. I want people to heal, and love and fuck, and be mad and be happy and be political and forget about politics, you know what I mean. Certain songs are going to give me the space to do that. We didn’t choose the songs. When we went into those sessions we didn’t know we were making an album, so it wasn’t that well thought out. It just became an album.

HHMM: When you get people comparing your singing to Otis Redding or Curtis Mayfield, is that a mind blowing thing?

TT: It’s not…and please don’t take this statement as an ego based statement…but I know how great a singer I am. For me honestly, it’s a relief. I know how hard I work and I put in a lot of time. I’m a technical worker but I’m also a person that wants to be as raw and free and out of my head as possible. And I’ve done it all of my life. So when people say things like that I know that mu work is being received to a level that I feel it should be received. I also am humbled when people say that because I didn’t know what it was going to feel like.

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

HHMM: Congratulations on the album. It’s a very cool record, very raw, very direct, it’s got a lotta heart. What was your experience recording it? Did you feel like, “hey we’re doing something good here”?

HEK: I dunno know. It was really just a side hobby when I started it, something I did outside of work. I went into it, not really thinking about it at all. Towards the end of the recording I kind of realized…I was like “oh man, I have, like, an album here”. And that when it started to come together for me.

HHMM: To what extent are you channeling some of the old music that you liked, and to what extent was it new to you and you were just doing what was coming out?

HEK: I’ve always listened to all types of music so I guess it just naturally influenced me in a way. I listed to old garage and soul and stuff like that and I think it just naturally bleeds into what I make.

HHMM: I also detected a similar spirit in some of the songs to people like The Clash and Billy Bragg. Do you see yourself in a tradition of rebel music?

HEK: I think it was more of a thing of just being free and not giving a fuck, because I didn’t have any expectations to make anything. When I was making these songs I was like “Oh man, I’ll just make what I want”.  You know what I mean? I think those guys you mentioned inherently do that.

HHMM: From our perspective, we kinda look at Los Angeles and think, “white guys are into rock, and black guys are into rap and hip-hop”, which is totally a cliché, but I guess a Palestinian/Filipino guy can be pretty much into anything he wants.

HEK: Yeah totally. I think for anybody there are no real boundaries of genres. I don’t think any type of person should be stuck on any type of music or art or whatever. I have black friends who have hardcore bands, you know? It’s just one of those things that comes from the environment you are bought up in. I was like toeing the line between kids who were hip-hop and kids who were really punk and into metal and dark shit like that. I kinda soaked it all in a found my own little niche, which is kinda weird because the LA scene and the San Francisco music scene doesn’t really fit with my music. It’s not like I’ve been playing shows for a long time like some of the guys. There’s definitely specific sounds and specific scenes that are going on and I didn’t know where my music would necessarily fit in and I think that might be a product of me being open to whatever music and choosing my direction naturally.

HHMM: I’ve seen you describe your music as “knife fight music” and making that reference to the streets. Do you feel like it is some kind of urban street music that you are playing?

HEK: I try to think of music as a mood or a general vibe or aesthetic  versus a singular idea of sounds. I don’t know if that sounds a little vague. I try to connect my music with the imagery and scenes of urban decay or destruction or tragic stuff. Those are the type of things that stick out in my mind when I think of the type of sound I wanna make.

HHMM: You want people to feel the music and not just hear the music.

HEK: Yeah, exactly.

HHMM: I think of a song like Garbage City and that urban decay thing you mentioned is very evident in that song, but at the same time you have a lot of affection for the local area you are singing about.

HEK: Yeah, I grew up in San Francisco and in a tourist sense it seems real beautiful and nice, with the hills and the landmarks but it is also kinda weird. I’ve travelled all over the world and I’ve seen lots of cities and there are times in San Francisco when you just don’t feel safe. There’s a lot of crackheads and drugs and weird shit going on in that city and you are only really exposed to it if you live there and grow up there. There are times when I feel loads safer in New York and four in the morning than San Francisco at four in the morning.

HHMM: You’ve obviously got a real interest in American pop culture, whether it is Elvis, or skateboards or West Side Story. Do you feel like there is a lot left to discover about that culture?

HEK There’s a lot of inspiration to draw from once you get passed the basic obvious choices. There was just so much cool shit going on at that time and people get focused on the stuff we got used to seeing and once you get passed that there is like a lot of poverty and rough life and working people that you can draw on That’s the kind of things I connect to most, the idea of simplicity in tools and lifestyle. In those days you’d wake up, go to work, go home to your wife and ship off to war, or whatever it is. Of course you had the normal complications of life but it was relatively simple. That’s the kind of thing I’m really into. And it shows in the music of that time too. Things were a lot more pure and lot more simple and seamless. It wasn’t mucked up by a bunch of shit. I’m sure it was out there but that’s how I see it in my mind. Maybe I’m romanticizing it or whatever but it seemed relatively pure.

HHMM: Yeah, you think of a song like Summertime Blues and you hear the music and its carefree and fun, but if you actually listen to the lyrics its kinda desperate and dark.

HEK: That was the reason I chose to do Heartbreak Hotel and pull it out of context. When you do hear it out of context you do say, “OK , so that’s a lonely song, that’s a bummer, that’s what that is”.

HHMM: The other song that jumps out in a way is Wait Wait Wait. Where did that come from?

HEK: Prior to this album I did some home recordings and experimented with some songwriting and stuff and for me, all of thee songs started on a acoustic guitar. Even songs like Build Destroy Rebuild, which is one of the most electric songs, it started on acoustic guitar. I guess that’s the classic country form of folk or blues or any of that, its just about the songwriting really. With Wait Wait Wait, I had the lyrics and I wanted to write a straightforward, Townes Van Zandt song, an Americana travelling song about life or whatever. I did feel like it was kinda oddball out but I did feel like it was necessary to have a song like that on the record just to say that it was part of that time and that it captures a different thing.

HHMM: I can see this record getting embraced by multiple generations, the same way that say the Violent Femmes first record is embraced by multiple generations. Does that make sense to you?

HEK: It’s awesome that you say that and I hope that is the case. I will say that I do notice at our shows that there is a broad spectrum of people that come to it. There are times when I’ll get a father and son at the show together and both equally telling me that they are enjoying themselves. That’s pretty cool for me, being that I’m usually closer to the son’s age. I do reference a lot of stuff from the dad’s era and so its kinda cool that people are open to it.

HHMM: When you play here is it just going to be you and the drummer?

HEK: That’s what we’ve been doing for almost three years and to me that set-up just kinda lends itself to being able to improvise on the spot and its also challenging too which I appreciate. When you mess up you cant hide it. If I was in the audience I know I’d be like “How the fuck are they going to recover from that?” We don’t fuck with backing tracks or have any loops of stuff like that, so what you hear is what we are doing.

HHMM: A lot has been made of your heritage. For you, is it a big thing?

HEK: I have this kinda weird split identity. On my parents side I have the Filipino side and the Middle Eastern side. When I was growing up, I didn’t have that many close relatives around from the Middle Eastern side and it was the same with the Filipino side. So in a weird way I just identify with being an American.  I do have this weird thing about being lumped in with some group, like a ‘white kid from California’. I’m an American I guess, but technically…. there are always moments when I feel like I should be closer to my parents culture. I remember going to school when I was six or seven and knowing that me and my family were a bit different. You get that from something like the lunch you bring to school. Your best friend has a peanut butter sandwich and a soda, and you have some weird Middle Eastern food that your dad made! It wasn’t till I got older in high school that I really got comfortable with it – that I was just an American kid and that was it.

Thursday, 29 December 2011
FBi Social, Sydney

Sunday, 1 January 2012
The Tote, Melbourne

HHMM: Listening to your band, it’s cool that you come from Texas, but you cant help but hear the roots in Chicago music, the side order of Memphis soul and a dressing of Muscle Shoals. Does that sound about right?

BJL: Oh yeah, I’m big on all that stuff.

HHMM: Was that what you set out to do? To blend all that music?

BJL: I guess inadvertently, yes. I’ve always thought of myself – like most musicians do – you tend to play the type of music that you like to listen to. ‘Naturally’, you know what I mean? So I guess me being a fan of all that it just naturally creeps in there. Then you try to make your own sound out of it.

HHMM: Was it an organic thing, to educate yourself in all those sounds or was it just a case of you being a fan and then one thing leading to another?

BJL: It’s pretty simple. I started playing guitar and then I got into playing roots music and stuff like that. I guess it just kind of evolved and I got into soul music. I’d always been into punk rock and stuff. You just play the type of music you like listening to, man.

HHMM: The spirit of your band kind of reminds me of the early days of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. It’s that combination of black guys and white guys, big on soul and funk but with a very passionate rock n’ roll heart. Is that a band you kind of look at and see yourself in?

BJL: I don’t think I’ve really listened to them. I’ll have to check them out.

HHMM: Your band goes to show that white guys can get funky if that are given the right leadership!

BJL: Ha ha, nice, nice.

HHMM: You talked about having respect for the music that has gone before you, whether it’s the old blues guys or rock guys like the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Do you think it’s that unusual that you can blend blues and soul with punk rock?

BJL: Rock n’ roll came from blues and a lot of punk rock uses a lot of blues chords and then they add power chords in there too, but they are actually pretty similar. We toured with the New York Dolls and they were all fans of blues musicians too. A lot of people think that its awkward but it isn’t because they all come from the same place.

HHMM: I can almost hear David Johansen singing “When I Met You Baby” from your new album.

BJL: He’s bad ass. He’s a soul singer, he can sing jazz too, you know? He’s just pretty bad-ass. He can sing whatever. I never sand with him, I just watched, admired.

HHMM: Your songs tell some really cool stories. Is that how you see yourself, in that storyteller vein, having that desire to tell some stories?

BJL: Yeah, that’s where I get a lot of my inspiration from. I see stories on the news or in the newspaper. I see something cool or something that happened and a song will come out of it.  It’s where I got a lot of my ideas from. Every now and then I’ll see something that catches my eye. Jimmy Tanks from Scandalous is from a story I saw in a newspaper in Alabama, about this 67 year old man who killed a repo man who was trying to take his truck back. Then they killed him, it was a kinda gunfight.  I read that and I thought it would make a good song.  Most of the songs on Scandalous came out of stuff like that.

HHMM: Mustang Ranch, from Scandalous is another really funny story song. It actually reminds me of George Thorogood’s One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.

BJL: (laughs) I never thought about that but I guess so.

HHMM: The band feels like a real ‘road’ band. Is that where you feel happiest, when you’ve got a string of shows lined up ahead of you?

BJL: Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know if I would say happiest, but we thrive at it. It’s what we do the best at. We are at our best live, its how we make our money, its what we do. This will be a second time this year in Australia, so we are year round.

HHMM: You obviously had a great time last time.

BJL: I did the show Rockwiz, that was cool. We did Brisbane for Splendour on The Grass or whatever that is called. Then the rest of the band went home and I stayed in Melbourne for about a week. I was trying to entertain myself, walking around trying to get into bars and stuff. It was cool.

HHMM: I’m sure you’ll have a great time this time you are playing some cool venues.

BJL: Thanks for pushing my shit dude. Write something nice about me.

• Sydney

The Factory
Friday 9 December 2011
Supported by Smitty & B Goode

• Meredith

Meredith Music Festival
Saturday 10 December 2011
SOLD OUT

• Oakleigh

Caravan Music Club
Sunday 11 December 2011
Supported by The Frowning Clouds

• Melbourne

The Prince Bandroom
Tuesday 13 December 2011
Supported by Cash Savage & The Last Drinks

HHMM: Before we get started I wanted to remind you that we had met before. When I was in Los Angeles about a decade ago we had a mutual friend and you very kindly showed us around a few venues, including taking us to see Aimee Mann, at Largo. You were very hospitable.

AC: Oh my goodness that rings a bell! I am so happy I was well behaved. It was an era in which I could well have acted poorly and I’m terribly lucky that you have a generous recollection. So thank you, and nice to speak to you again.

HHMM: Let me congratulate you on the album. It’s just a great record and it feels to me like you have really come to terms with your songs and where you fit in.

AC: I really was a sneaker away from zipping up my bag and calling it quits. So its particularly sweet to be able to say that this is my proudest achievement yet when I really thought that I wasn’t going to get another chance.

HHMM: When we met over a decade ago, I do recall that you seemed like a guy who felt like he had a lot to prove, or a need to move something, whereas this album seem to come from a much more settled place.

AC: My pre-occupation up until very recently was to be successful and to occupy a high and visible post in the music business and participate in it, participate in its glamour and glory and sex and drugs and rock n’ roll. Now my pre-occupation is completely different. It’s much more about wanting to be good and I’m so happy I was given this other chance to record. I was writing my own obituary. I was done.

HHMM: I really like the comment on your website where you explain that you came to the realization that what you are doing is simply going into the family business, which is what a lot of other people have done, and will always do.

AC: It’s really nice to occupy an honorable post in the family business. I walk to work with pride and with a pep in my step. I’ve never felt as happy and as proud to be in the family business. I was performing a kind of contortion act, making music that was so wholly disconnected from the tradition from which I come.  Now, to do it in a way that honors that tradition is deeply gratifying.

HHMM: I really like some of the clear references to songs of your fathers, like on Sweet Dominique, where you refer to “so many kisses deep” and on Beautiful, when you make the reference to “Marianne”. Obviously it is a deliberate thing, but is it something you want people to pick up and appreciate.

AC: Oh, there is a half a dozen of those. They are embedded in there. It was just my way of saying, “fuck it!” This is a record that is essentially a homage to my father and what re-ignites every one of these songs is precisely their connection to an architecture that I grew up with and that is wholly my fathers. So why disguise it? This is my coming out party.

HHMM: The other song that really jumps out at me is What Other Guy, which on one level is a beautiful song of devotion, and on the other is almost creepily obsessive.

AC: I was just trying to be faithful to the photograph that I took in my mind of a person. It started off as an exercise and I just then fell in love with the song and I was very happy to have written that song.

HHMM: Tell me a bit about the contributions of the producer Pat Leonard, and of Don Was who plays upright bass on most of the songs.

AC: I don’t know how to properly convey to you how amazingly happy I am to and how surprised I am at the willingness of these accomplished men to work with me. I was walking through the halls of Hensen Studios and Pat and I bumped into Don. Pat explained to Don what we were about to do and before he even finished the explanation of what we were endeavoring to do, Don literally volunteered to play bass. We didn’t ask him. And he did it gratis! That was what characterizes the entire mood and spirit and flavor of the record. Virtually not a dollar was exchanged. It was all done for the love of music and song and to be a part of the celebration of my family name.

HHMM: You really seem to enjoy getting inside the architecture of relationships in your songs. It’s like you hold a relationship in your hand like a glass prism, and twist it around to see what light reflects from it from different angles.

AC: I don’t feel like I’m in a position to editorialise the songwriting. They are supposed to be able to speak for themselves and labor over them to have them be the best reflection of my abilities that they can be.  That’s pretty much all I can say about my own songwriting. The rest is for you and anybody else who cares to say anything about them.

HHMM: How has having your own son impacted upon your understanding of your place in the world?

AC: There was three things that were really pivotal triggers to me making this record. The first was a kind of disillusion with my own life and career. The second was the inspiration I got from the triumphant return to the stage of my father, which was unexpected. And the third was absolutely the birth of my son and the connection that I felt to my family instantaneously deepening more than I could ever have thought would happen.

HHMM: That whole process of coming to terms with you relationship to the family business – this is probably a strange question – but did you ever discuss than with Jacob Dylan?

AC: I never spoke to Jacob about the phenomenon of being someone’s son. I don’t believe its something that we have to speak about much. One: Our experiences  – not matter how much they outwardly seem to be the same – are not. And Two, when Jacob goes into a booth to do a vocal or a studio to record a song or into a room to write on a page, he’s all alone. No-one is singing it for him, or writing it for him or playing it for him.  It’s just a man, with his demons and whatever tools he has to catch the muse. There’s very little common between two hunters. When it comes to hunting down art, no two hunters are the same.

HHMM: Is there any chance of you coming and playing these songs for us in Australia?

AC: Coming to Australia would be a victory not only personally, because I’ve never made it to Australia, but it would also be an enormous career success because for it to be justifiable to make it all that way it would signify something having gone quite right with my little career. So I hope to come to Australia in the deepest way.

UPDATE

Since this interview dates for Adam Cohen’s first Australian tour have been announced. They are as follows:

Tue 6 Mar
Fly By Night, Perth, WA

Thu 8 Mar
Idolize Spiegeltent
The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Adelaide, SA

Fri 9 Mar
Regal Ballroom, Melbourne, VIC

Tue 13 Mar
The Tivoli, Brisbane, QLD

Wed 14 Mar
The Basement, Sydney, NSW

HHMM: You keep finding excuses to come down here.

RH: Well the excuses find me, which is very nice. It’s not a short journey as you know, but there seems to be reasons for people to invite us over which is nice.

HHMM: This time it is to be a part of the Nick Drake shows. How did you come to be involved in those – having already done this show in the UK and Europe?

RH: It’s really Joe Boyd. Joe produced the first two Nick Drake albums which he talks about in his book White Bicycles. Joe and I actually have a show called Chinese White Bicycles where Joe reads from his book I sing the shows I grew up listening to that he was involved with, be it by Nick Drake or the Dylan or the Incredible String Band or Pink Floyd. So Joe and I have known each other for a long while and I’m one of his trusties and one of his regulars. There was a prototype for this about ten years ago and it was one of the first sort of ‘collective’ shows that was done. Kate St John was involved in that and she is the musical director in this. I sang a couple of songs in that one. But this started to take off again about two years.

HHMM: And of course Kate St John (she of Dream Academy fame) as part of the spiderweb that surrounds you also appears on your last album Propeller Time.

RH: Yes, she does, well observed. And we got in touch again because of the Nick Drake stuff. She and Neil MacColl, who is also on the Way Too Blue shows are on that album. Neil plays guitar and sings a great version of Northern Sky and he and I play guitar on a song called Free Ride which Green and I duet on.

HHMM: Nick’s songs have typically been described as ‘despairing’ and ‘depressing’ and I did read a quote from you that said that despair was  your default setting. Is that how you are able to relate to Nick’s songs?

RH: Partly, I suppose. I don’t know how desperate they are. They were written by a man who felt like he didn’t belong in the world and he left it very early so I guess the answer is ‘pretty desperate’ , but at the same time it is the despair of the English middle-class living room, where nothing is really spoken out. It’s not the sort of despair of John Lennon, or even of Roger Waters, it’s a very passive kind of doom. But its also beautiful, what is produced out of that is beautiful. It’s a translation of that discomfort into something more positive. You speak of spiders making webs or oysters making pearls and there has to be some disturbance to create something beautiful and maybe that’s so. You need something to motivate you and what motivates you may not be pleasant, but he translated his despair into things of beauty. That’s one of the great things about being able to carry this show around really, it’s something that came out of somebody a long time ago who never thought anything was going to come of it. He didn’t ever have a girlfriend, he probably never had sex or not as we know it. There’s no footage of Nick Drake, he probably only did seven gigs or something. He could almost have been something that was dreamed up by Joe Boyd. All the evidence of Nick Drakes life is three records, a few outtakes and a few reminiscences of people for whom its increasingly in the past. Yet here we are, 21 of us in Australia, re-inflating the sails on this old craft and making it go places that you never thought it would have gone.

HHMM: When you say that – are you finding things in the songs and learnt more about Nick’s music by getting inside it and playing it and performing it?

RH: It’s a good point. I’m playing three songs and I’m doing my own song I Saw Nick Drake, at the end. The chords are easy on the songs I play. But I listen to a lot and I watch the show every night and I find I’ve got inside them in that way. His music is quite sophisticated and I think it was too sophisticated for me as a teenager and I think it was too sophisticated for a lot of the hippie Brits that were listening to music then, because its got these jazz inflections. I was unfortunate that some things don’t immediately unpack yourself, stand up and salute you and punch you in the nose or kiss you on the lips – they take a bit more time. Listening to Bob Dylan or The Beatles or the Velvet Underground for the first time I was immediately hooked, but Nick Drake was so much more a subtle companion. He’s almost like a house that doesn’t have a front door. It’s not something that you can directly approach, but once you get in there it’s hard to get out of.

HHMM: Does it say something about our generational appreciation of contemporary music that we are now able to look at the music of someone like Nick Drake and that we are ready to celebrate it, and analyze it and revise it?

RH: It says that we overlooked him first time and he was good. I can’t think of too many other artists who were completely overlooked in their own time. Since the CD came out people have started to look back either because they are nostalgically going back to the music that turned them on when they were younger, or they are younger people who are enquiring about what went before. Apart from punk there hasn’t really been a generational fault line since the 50’s or 60’s. Rock is one continuous tapestry stretching from Elvis and Bo Diddley up to what is happening now. There are some things that you might not have known about but its all ‘sort of’ current and nothing is really out of date anymore.  In some ways it’s the older the better really and stuff doesn’t really get discarded like it used to. It seems like about 15 years after something has occurred it becomes an icon in the discos or something!

HHMM: I’m finding that people in their twenties are much more receptive to listening to music from the 60’s and 70’s than the people in their twenties say, 10 or 15 years ago.

RH: Oh yes, the graves are open. Arguably the further back you go the fresher pop, rock, folk whatever it was, sounds. Joe Boyd isn’t impressed by modern pop or indie rock music. He feels like it’s not part of the volcanic eruption that it always was when he was working in that world. He saw some particularly exciting fireworks go off. He was there was Bob Dylan went electric and he was there for the early Pink Floyd, so he saw some incredibly exciting stuff. He witnessed the transformation of Fairport Convention from people who wanted to sound like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to people who wanted to be the British equivalent of The Band and discover their own native music. Those sort of musical upheavals just aren’t happening now. There is a steady flow of lava and the talent strands are meshing. You hear music now that sounds like it could be twenty or thirty years old except its got one or two subtle differences. A lot of new music is stuff that older people can catch on to really easily. You can listen to Midlake and the Fleet Foxes and you could be back in 1973 really.

HHMM: With your own work you tend to be a serial collaborator and you tend to collaborate with other serial collaborators like Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Jon Brion, Grant Lee Phillips and Nick Lowe. Why is that?

RH: I think the big serialist is Johnny Marr actually! I think its just that after a while you get to know people and if you enjoy playing with them you just say, ‘lets do a session’ or ‘lets form a band’.  I’ve known Peter for a long time and in fact he introduced me to Joe Boyd back in 1985, so there’s always been an excuse for Peter and I to work together. We are not joined at the ankles or anything, but we like to do things when we can. You just sort of run across more people and I finally drifted away from the safe cocoon of my old Cambridge outfit the Soft Boys. I like to try playing with different people and sitting in and discovering a new musical relationship. But having said that I don’t want to discard the old ones. You can’t unfortunately play with everybody all the time.

HHMM: Does it surprise you in a way that you’ve been able to exist so successfully on the fringe of the mainstream as long as you have and that there always is something fresh and new that is there to interest you?

RH: Yeah, I’m surprised I’m still here! I suppose it has become a lot more about other people in the last fifteen years – meeting other people to play with and then performing other people’s songs. Originally I wanted to be a songwriter, That was my mission. And I still do that. I still churn records out and I still stockpile songs. I’m prolific, more than the market needs. If you bring out too many records its hard for people to follow. The last one I put out only in Norway and the one before that was only put out in Britain so I try to make them more market specific. I never thought I was an interpreter and that people would pay money to hear me sing other peoples songs, so in a way that’s quite flattering. I’ve become more of an all-rounder as I’ve got older and I just know more people.  The thing is that musicians just like playing with each other. There might be a really obvious thing that we are overlooking. If you introduce them to each other they will sit down and play.  If they are in a dressing room or in a hotel room they will pull out their instruments and play. If you bring them around to the house for a party they will play. I’ve had more parties in recent years and when you get musicians in they will play. You don’t have to do your own song, or theirs, you can do any song and they will want to play it.  I’d like to take that idea on the road one day.

HHMM: I can see the tour poster now. “Come and see people who enjoy playing music, play music”. Simple!

RH: That’s exactly it. More and more that’s what it’s become more and more for me, bringing people together, bing a sort of ringmaster or just someone who introduces people at parties.  I haven’t courted that role for myself at all, but I think it’s a part of lasting over fifty and rock music itself lasting over fifty.  Rock N’ Roll is an old mans game. You should have a license to be in a band over the age of fifty really.

HHMM: Just as a final thing, can you let me on to what is next for you?

RH: There’s a digital greatest hits coming out. There will be some more Venus 3 but I don’t know when. I’ve got shows in Israel, Norway and Australia. It’s the 21st anniversary of an acoustic album I did called Eye and I’m doing a few versions of that in a couple of places. There’s not the demand for records that there was and although I write songs all the time I’m thinking carefully about when I would record them again. That side of things is less optimistic but the live side of things is looking great really. I’m also definitely plotting some musical things and I hope by the end of next years something will have begun to take root. I’ll say no more.

HHMM: I’m sufficiently intrigued.

RH: Well thank you!

AUSTRALIAN DATES NOVEMBER 2011

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE Friday 11 November 2011

MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE Monday 14 & Tuesday 15 November 2011

This year’s show will included performances by Darren Middleton (Powderfinger), Stuart Fraser (Noiseworks), Peter Koppes (The Church), John and Rick Brewster (The Angels) Jak Housden (The Whitlams) Kevin Borich, Steve Edmonds, Grant Walmsely (Screaming Jets) and Peter Northcote.

Last year’s show at the Enmore Theatre was a virtual sell-out and proved massively popular with fans and critics alike who raved about the show proving again how powerful Hendrix’s influence still is 41 years after his passing. The 3-hour show is a tribute to the iconic artist’s songs, showmanship and trailblazing technique and that Hendrix’s music is still very much alive and well.

We spoke to one of the great guitarist (and great blokes) of the Australian music scene, Stu Fraser as he prepared for the show.

HHMM: I’m not always a big fan of the tribute type shows but there seems to be something very legitimate about the Hendrix show. Given that its been such a long time since he was around and yet the music remains so influential, it seems to bear examination.

SF: I guess every rock player has got a connection with that somewhere. Steve Balbi put me up for it. They did one last year up at the Enmore and it was a great success. It sold out and there was a great reaction to it and so they are going to go again.

HHMM: I guess with Hendrix its’ not so much about standing there and re-producing the playing or the recordings, note for note, because that would be a bit pointless, but its more about interpretation, and as you said, about exploring that connection that every rock guitarist has to him. Is that the way you are looking at it?

SF: That’s an interesting point and I’ve sort of been trying to get more info out of everybody, because I wasn’t actually sure whether it should be verbatim, paying homage and doing it as close to the original as possible or whether it should be about our interpretations of it. From what I’ve heard of last year, I think it was a bit of both. Some people did their own thing with it and others did it pretty much as it was. At this point, I’m guessing we will work it out at rehearsal. I think there is something like eight or ten guitar players and so I guess we will all do it a different way. Maybe we can all do the one song and just do our interpretations of it!

HHMM: What have you personally drawn from Hendrix in your playing?

SF: Before I started playing when I was just a kid, I remember that my brother got Are You Experienced?, and I used to sit with the headphones on and listen to it. I couldn’t relate from a guitar point of view what was going on, but there was something about the sound that just really got me, and in particular, Third Stone From The Sun, there was this feedback noise that used to remind me of a cow and I used to say to my brother, “put the cow song on, I want to hear the cow song”. In the last fifteen years I went out and bought Are You Experienced? and Electric Ladyland for myself just to have them, and I listen to them every now and then. What I find, is that I keep going back to that first album, and every time I listen to it I pick something else up and I get something else out of it. He was obviously an incredibly innovative guitar player but the more I listen to it the more I realize he was fundamentally a songwriter and a singer and guitar just happened to be his instrument. That explains why he was able to come out with new stuff because he’s pretty much a blues player – his scales and riffs are pretty much based around blues scales – but he approached it differently.  He approaches it more as a bigger picture, as a producer would, thinking about the dynamics and the structures of the songs. But that first album… I just love it.

HHMM: Do you see yourself as a student of guitar playing – did you grow up listening to Jeff Beck and Clapton and Hendrix in the way you just explained?

SF: Before I started playing my big brother was the heavy influence because he would be the one buying the records.  I was heavily into Zeppelin and the early Alice Cooper Band, albums up to Muscle of Love and Billion Dollar Babies.  When I started playing, the influences where there even when I was not conscious of it. When I go back and listen to music that I did when I was younger, I get surprised how often I hear things that I played later. Jeff Beck is interesting – I have listened to him a bit over the years, but strangely I don’t have any of his CD’s.  But when you think that Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and jimmy Page were all in the Yardbirds at one time, all together, it’s amazing. Clapton went on the path of the traditional blues stuff and hung there for quite a few years. Jimmy Page took the basic blues thing and modernized it, for want of a better word. Zeppelin a kind of a blues band but they had their own quirks within it. Jeff Beck is still going forward and still taking it forward, which is what I imagine Hendrix would have done had he still been around. He would have kept pushing and finding something new that he could do.  It was so obvious in his music that that’s what he was looking for, something new, and like-minded people he could work with. Even with those guys he left his imprint.

HHMM: Do you think in Australia that we really understand blues based music of Hendrix, given that the blues is effectively an imported form of music that we don’t have a long legacy of here?

SF: Speaking with other musicians and guitar players here, from all different styles, they are all aware of Hendrix. I guess even for non-musicians his music leaves a mark.  I know when I was younger I used to go and see Kevin Borich, who is playing on this gig, when he had his three piece band happening and even then, as a youngster, I sensed that there was always that influence in Kevin’s playing, that Hendrix influence.

HHMM: As a guitar player you have grown up in front of our eyes, starting from when you joined Blackfeather as a 14 year old.  Could you ever have imagined that you’d still be doing this at such a high level so many years later?

SF: Absolutely not. Back then there wasn’t an industry like there is now. It was almost a case of walking into any pub and setting up and playing. The seventies was a great time for music especially in Australia, and I feel very lucky to have been around then. It was seven nights a week. I used to live just near the Bondi Lifesaver and they would have three or four bands on a night, every night. I saw everything from the original line-up of Little River Band to AC/DC before they went to England. No-one was really trying to write hit records, they were just playing the music that they wanted to play. It was a lot freer.  I realize now as I’m older that I was really fortunate to have that fantastic education that doesn’t seem to be there quite as much now. There aren’t as many gigs like that for younger musicians coming up. Mind you, there is a lot more music out there now with the internet, but I feel really lucky to have been able to stand in front of that stage and look up and see what gear they were using and watch their hands and see the licks they were doing. From when I got a guitar when I was nine years old, it was a passion for me. I’d sit there and put the records on and try and learn the chords and the notes. I wasn’t that into sport, I wasn’t that into surfing, music was my thing and it was a fantastic way to occupy my mind and educate myself. I still look at it like that. I still try to keep an open mind and there’s always something new to be learned and something to discover. But I never envisaged that I was going to get into this industry and make it my career. But I was lucky enough to be in the right spot when an opportunity arose and I just took it from there.

THE EXPERIENCE JIMI HENDRIX CONCERT RETURNS

SATURDAY OCTOBER 29, ENMORE THEATRE, SYDNEY

HHMM: Suddenly you are getting busy with the old band again.

GA: Yeah, suddenly there seems to be something to do for Ups and Downs again. It is good fun. The couple of reunions we have done over the years have been great fun and the audiences have been great. So when the opportunity came up again we were happy to do it.

HHMM: Over the past few months or even the last couple of years there’s been a real willingness for a lot of the bands from that particularly time to reform and embrace their history. Is there a cut-off point when people feel like they can embrace their history?

GA: Yeah, I think there is. The way I see music over the last 30 years is that there seems to be a re-visiting of certain eras goes along chronologically. I find that interesting. Ups and Downs seems to be from an era that had been skimmed through and now people seem to be interested again. It’s all contextual I think.

HHMM: It’s like audiences see what’s current and then look to see what fills the gaps that are apparent in what is current.

GA: Or what it reminds them of, I think.

HHMM: In the process of compiling the album and rehearsing the shows are you finding new things in the songs that you might have forgotten or over-looked or under-rated in your own eyes?

GA: Oh, for sure. I went through a stage of wanting to distance themselves from the past, some more than others I suppose. I was like that and I’m not really sure why I was like that. I suppose I was always interested in new music and I had that feeling that I was only as good as my last song. I went into Big Heavy Stuff after Ups and downs and in the last few years with my brother in the Worker Bees.  I think that when the industry loses interest, then the audience loses interest and things just have a shelf life. There’s a time when things are really good between the band and the audience and its good to acknowledge when they need a break and they need to finish. And then its good to get the opportunity to do something and revisit that.

HHMM: At the time Ups and Downs were always ‘the band most likely’, but it really never quite happened in a big way. How do you feel about that now?

GA: Big Heavy Stuff was the same. It was the band most likely at various times too, with journalists in Sydney. That was one of the quotable quotes of the day, that if Ups and Downs had been from Athens, Georgia or somewhere in England then we would have been big stars. That’s a nice flight of fantasy, but we had our opportunity to go overseas and we chose not to take it at the time. It’s always fun to do a bit of a post mortem, but the fact that we are together now and enjoying it and not feeling tragic is a wonderful thing. We can look back at those songs and find some depth in them that I hadn’t felt was there. I’ve been pretty hard on my past at times. Something like The Living Kind, someone will say to me that “hey mate that song means something to me”, and I’ll think, “It actually means something to me too now”.

HHMM: Do you feel like the timing was the problem, that the zeitgeist moment was somewhere between Sleepless and Under the Watchful Eye?

GA: Oh definitely. We lost that moment when we were involved in contractual rubbish. That was our manager’s fault to a large degree but he was trying to get a better deal for us and we went along with it so we have to take responsibility for that. But the gap between Sleepless and Under the Watchful Eye was too significant. Too much had changed with the band for people to assimilate and people thought we had sold out because we weren’t wearing the same sort of clothing! There was more production and sounds in the music and there were a lot of problems with that album. Things just lost their continuity. The album was like a comp of all the songs that we had and we tried to rework them and it half worked and half didn’t work for that reason.

HHMM: The bands and the sound that you were lumped in with, and for good reason, bands like The Church and R.E.M. , and locally The Stems and Hoodoo Gurus are all bands that have stood the test of time and have had some longevity.

GA: And significant bands too. The journey of The Church is quite unique and incredible. They managed to keep true to what they do, even after having one massive worldwide hit within that. I think because they remain just a bit outside of it all, whilst being successful enough they’ve been able to do that. I think of them having the same sort of relationship with their audience that Radiohead does.

HHMM: The liner notes on the compilation album are very funny and it seems like both you and Darren have got enough distance from it now to see the funny side of a lot of those situations.

GA: Oh yeah. Those kind of things can end up in quite an anti-climax. We did a final EP that we thought was really great but the audiences had just kind of clocked off. The scene had changed and we ended up being second support act to the current crop which was Ratcat and Falling Joys and Hummingbirds and stuff. All that contributed to us thinking, well we made a great comeback record, at least in our eyes and it was just time to finish.

HHMM: I listened to a few tracks from the Worker Bees album last night and it’s sounding really good.

GA: Oh good. I did that with my brother and we just decided to do some music again. I had some songs and it just evolved from that. Some of those songs are very powerful songs for me and Darren. We put it together and it was one of the best things we’ve been involved with. Because the Ups and Downs compilation ended up taking quite a long time to get together it’s meant its ended up being ready at around the same time as the Worker Bees. It puts a nice finish on thw whole thing.

HHMM: On the Melbourne show you are playing with Huxton Creepers. That should be fun.

GA: Yeah, I remember a story that I was told that both bands were vying to get on Countdown. Both bands had blonde lead singers and they only wanted one band and they went with Huxton Creepers because they lived in Melbourne. If that story is actually true then I’ve got a score to settle with Rob. It may be settled on stage, you’ll have to see!

Oakleigh – Caravan Music Club – Friday 7 October 2011

Also appearing: The Moffs

Melbourne – The Corner – Saturday 8 October 2011

Also appearing: Huxton Creepers, The Moffs, Wolfy & The Bat Cubs

Brisbane – The Hifi – Friday 11 November 2011

Also appearing: Huxton Creepers, Mick Medew & The Rumours

Byron Bay – Byron Bay Brewery – Saturday 12 November 2011

Also appearing: Huxton Creepers & The Remains

Joe Boyd

It was an honor to get some of his time.

HHMM: Thank you for your time. We are really looking forward to the Nick Drake shows down here. It’s a show that you have already curated in the UK. How has the reaction been?

JB: It’s been great. We did the first one in Birmingham two years ago and it was such a terrific show and people responded so well. We had the BBC offering to film it and we did another four dates in January of last year. We haven’t done it that often though. In total there’s been nine dates in the UK and two in Italy.  Each time there’s been slightly differing line-ups each time and with a core backing group and the arrangements for most of the songs pretty much stay the same.

HHMM: Do you almost have to pinch yourself when you see what a lasting impact those albums that you made with Nick have had?

JB: I hope this doesn’t sound ‘funny’, but in a way it is the opposite. For me it was more my incredulity that he failed to reach an audience with those records during his lifetime. When I first heard Nick I said, ‘this is it, this is the star, this is the guy’ and when Five Leaves Left finally came out and didn’t sell, and didn’t get ecstatic reviews and didn’t get everybody jumping up and down I was astonished and devastated. So for me the response of people discovering Nick over the years and saying, “oh he’s a genius”, then my response is “what took you so long?”

HHMM: It’s probably impossible to summarise it succinctly, but what do you feel was the magic in his music and those recordings?

JB: This is going to sound strange because my work as a producer is so associated with the Richard Thompsons and the Sandy Dennys and Nick and the McGarrigles and people like that who are very much people known as singer-songwriters – but the truth is that I never really liked Anglo-Saxon singer-songwriting very much as a genre, and particularly in the 60’s, I was quite hostile to it in a way. I started off as a blues and jazz buff and when I found myself around the folk world I was always much more interested in people who were playing blues or country music rather than people who were writing their own songs. Except of course, the great exception – Dylan – who was obviously genius. But my reaction to Fairport Convention when I first heard them was “oh god, it’s a folk rock group”. But then I heard Richard Thompson play the guitar and I thought ‘this guy is incredible’. It was the same with Nick in a way. I knew I was putting on a tape of an upper middle class boy who played the guitar, I had very low expectations for it because I knew it was the sort of thing that I didn’t really like. Because I had low expectations for the genre it took something unusual or out of the ordinary to get me interested in the form. There was something about Nick’s music from the very first time I heard it that was so unlike anything else that was around at that time. It was very mysterious where he got this from. Years later I discovered that his mother had been a huge influence on him and she from a very different set of influences. Nick had listened to Dylan and Bert Jansch and Donovan but he had his mother’s chord shapes and harmonic sense in the background. That gave him a very different starting point to people who had just grown up listening to Dylan and Rambling Jack Elliott.  But all of those things are an analytical explanation for something which is inexplicable, which is genius. And I think that Nick had something that transcended all of those influences and I think that’s what I heard on that first tape, something that was genuinely original that set him apart. And also his lyrics. He was a very well educated kid. He read all the romantic poets, he was aware of a lot of high culture and he had high standards about how to construct a song and how to construct a lyric. I get sent demo tapes from people who say they are huge Nick Drakes fans and you put on the tape and its arpeggio guitar and soft breathy vocals, but it has nothing of the intelligence and nothing of the sophistication of Nicks music and Nicks lyrics.

HHMM: By doing the shows and having these other really interesting artists interpreting these songs, have you found things in the songs that even you didn’t know where there?

JB: Certainly it reveals to me and to everybody else what a great songwriter Nick was and it doesn’t depend on hearing his performances for these songs to live. But I always believed that. Within a week of first hearing the demo I was already plotting to send a tape of Time Has Told Me to Roberta Flack, because she’s had a huge hit with First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and it thought it would be the perfect song for the follow-up and that it would Nick’s name as a songwriter. Of course she never recorded it. So now when I hear Krystal Warren singing it its like “yeah, I knew that could be a great soul ballad’. But there are other things that are totally surprising. Lisa Harrigan’s take on Black eyed Dog was totally astonishing. Deliberately  the voices are quite different, one from the other, and one thing I try to do is avoid artists who are obviously very influenced by Nick Drake. To me it’s more interesting to take somebody who sounds nothing like Nick Drake and have them sing the song. You reveal more about the song that way than by having someone who does a very good impression of Nick Drake.

HHMM: Do you think that we have reached a point in the maturity of our appreciation of contemporary music, that there are concerts and events that celebrate and re-interpret the music of people like Nick Drake?

JB: I think that this pool of music, which you can define however you want, but I guess that started with Dylan and the Beatles, has now a canon of works that can be considered the cream.  It’s like classical music where you’ve got so much to choose from, why not choose the best?  With perspective, people are looking at the canon of works from 1960 and looking at that body of work and saying, ‘these are the things that stand out and that interesting to look back at’.  You can also say, if you are an old curmudgeon like me, that one reason for that is that they aren’t writing such good songs anymore!

HHMM: I wonder if every generation says that though.

JB: There’s been more than one generation since the sixties, you know! If you still have a record store in your neighborhood and you walk in there and look at the box sets and retrospectives, there’s an awful lot more from the 60’s than there is from the 80’s. Any genre of art usually has moments of creation that provide the most interesting stuff, because the blank canvas is the most interesting. For artists today it is very difficult to find spaces to be original. People have been there and done that and the influences are so powerful that its very hard to sound original. People in the early 90’s where going crazy about Oasis and then you listen to it and think, why wouldn’t I just listen to The Beatles. But if you are young you look at them and they are sexy and young and like you, so you listen to them. But fifteen years later people are still boxing and re-issuing The Beatles and not Oasis. That’s true in a lot of areas. Nick and Leonard Cohen are two who were very original at the time. A lot of people have imitated them but once those peoples career arc has gone down, people are more likely to do a retrospective of Leonard Cohen or Nick Drake than of somebody from ten years ago who sounds a bit like them.

HHMM: Where do you think Nick’s music would have gone if he’d been able to make more music? Would he have evolved into an electric format or what?

JB: Who knows? It’s hard to predict, but whatever it would have been, it would have been interesting.  Even those terrible desperate last four songs that he recorded, those are desperately sad cries from a deep well. Some artists who get into a position of desperation and sorrow, well that’s all you can hear. But with Nick, even those songs are kind of genius. So I think whatever state he had been in, even if he had been living in a mansion with the royalties of selling a million records, he would have made really interesting music. I think Nick was incapable of doing something mediocre.

HHMM: I can’t let this opportunity pass without asking you about a record you produced which is close to my favorite album ever. And that is Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M.  How did five Americans, the band and yourself, in the midst of a London winter, manage to evoke the feeling and strange energy of the deep south so successfully?

JB: They were, at the time, and still are a remarkable group, and a very interesting one.  It’s a tricky subject for me because I think at the time we all felt frustrated with the record. I felt frustrated with the mixes. There are two studios at Livingston and the one I felt more comfortable in was being refurbished and so we had to mix the record in the other studio. I always felt like I couldn’t hear what I was doing and Michael and Peter Buck both kept telling me to turn their parts down. I always felt like I hadn’t done the job properly and I was immensely relieved when the record sold well. But to a certain degree I felt that their career was progressing at such a rate that any record they made could have sold well. They were also disappointed in the record at the time and its been really gratifying to have people many years later come up and say that they didn’t like the record at first, but that they really like it now.  The band have done that themselves and they’ve told me that they have come around and really like it now. Have you heard the re-mastered version? When that was coming back I actually approached the group and asked if they would mind if I tried re-mixing a couple of tracks.  Generally I am very much against doing that because I feel like the mixing was part of that moment and it would be violating of the whole process to go back and fix it.  But I found myself on the phone to Athens, Georgia, saying “can I re-mix it”! I went in and did a couple of tracks and I thought they sounded better with just a little bit more voice and a little bit more clarity on Michaels voice and everybody liked it. We were just about ready to go and do the rest of the songs, and then one of the group decided it was a violation of the spirit of the moment and so they vetoed the idea. They were saying exactly the kind of things I would say! I understood the point and decided to be philosophical about it. Then they put out the 25^th Anniversary edition of the album and it had been re-mastered. I don’t know who re-mastered it but they did in the re-mastering a lot of what I did in the mixing and were able to achieve what I wanted to achieve. I think it sounds great now and a lot more the way I had imagined it ought to sound.

AUSTRALIAN DATES NOVEMBER 2011

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE Friday 11 November 2011

MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE Monday 14 & Tuesday 15 November 2011

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band formed in 1977 and revolutionised the New Orleans brass band style by incorporating funk and bebop into the traditional New Orleans style. They have been a major influence on the majority of New Orleans brass bands since. Thirty years later, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band is a world famous music machine, whose name is synonymous with genre-bending romps and high-octane performances. They have revitalized the brass band in New Orleans and around the world, progressing from local parties, clubs, baseball games and festivals in their early years to touring nearly constantly in the U.S. and over 30 other countries across five continents.

We spoke to long-time member Roger Lewis (baritone sax and vocals) as he prepared for a celebration in Australia.

HHMM: We’re excited that you are coming back to Australia with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Do you feel like we have a good appreciation of what you do down here?

RL: I think so, I don’t think we’d be coming back if you didn’t appreciate what we do!. I’m looking forward to it.

HHMM: How important is it for people to understand the roots of the music. Do you find that if they really have taken the time to understand where it comes from then it helps them appreciate it?

RL: I think when people here this music they realise where other music comes from. If you ever listen to Jelly Roll Morton, who was a piano player from back in the 30’s, you hear all kind of different songs coming out of his creation. Even his improvised solos – people took some of his improvisation and made whole songs out of them. You listen to New Orleans music, you gonna hear gospel, you gonna hear jazz.  You gonna hear everything you can think of in New Orleans music.

HHMM: We’ve all seen movies with the brass bands playing in funeral processions and that kind of thing. How accurate is that representation?

RL: I just did one last Saturday. A guy died, they called him “Coach”. He was a historian kind of a guy. People would come to New Orleans and he’s take ‘em around and explain the culture to ‘em. We did a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral for him. What you see in the movies is staged, but it is pretty much what goes on in a traditional jazz funeral. The body is laid out in the church. As the body comes out the band lines up on each side of the sidewalk and the band plays hymns. Then the band goes in front of the funeral procession down the street. Depending what arrangements have been made with the city, you can only go so many blocks, because you have to have a permit. Usually you can go two or three blocks, they’ll let you do that. As the hearse passes on by with the family members, everybody heads back to what they call the repast, and that’s when you play the joyful music in the streets. That’s pretty much what a traditional jazz funeral is all about.

HHMM: With the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, it seems to me that the rhythm seems to come from the tuba. Is the tuba an important instrument in the music?

RL: With a brass band the tuba and the bass do the rhythm and then the snare drum does the colour. But the funk is coming from the bass drum. The bass drum is where the rhythm is coming from, the snare drum is the colour.

HHMM: And then the solos are improvised?

RL: Mostly all the solos are improvised. The melody is usually coming from the trumpet. In the bands of old everybody would be soloing at the same time! But you need the trumpet carrying the melody, cos’ if you just had a bunch of improvisation you wouldn’t know what the song is. Somebody’s got to carry the melody, the melodies always got to be heard. Improvisation needs to come in and out.

HHMM: When you work with people like David Bowie, Elvis Costello, the Black Crowes, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews etc – do you feel like those people really understand the structure of the music or are they looking for the funk?

RL: First of all, when people like Widespread Panic, or the Black Crowes or Dave Matthews, when they call you, they already know what they want. They want you to put your twist on their music. With Elvis Costello we did an album called Spike and when we did that he had already laid out what he wanted us to do. He wanted us to play the track and he was gonna sing over the track. But what happened was that he liked the tracks so much that he decided just to leave them as they were, and that was the song! People give you an open book to do your thing and they hire you because that’s what you do. They have a sketch of what they want maybe, but they want you to put your own twist on their music.

HHMM: There is so much joy in your music. Is that coming from the fact that it is a real community thing and that it’s a bunch of guys who get together and enjoy each others company and enjoy the music?

RL: Basically that’s what it is. There’s a lotta love and a lot of everything in our band. We’ve been together thirty sumthin’ odd years, so we like a family. You know how families get along – there’s fussin’ and cussin’ and doing just about everything imaginable that families do. And all of that comes out in the music. We probably spend more time together catchin’ the bus than we do with our families. We been together that long and its kinda unheard of for most bands to last together that long. I’m almost 70 years old, in fact I’m a gonna celebrate my 70^th birthday on October 5^th in Australia, and I’ve been in a lot of bands in my time that didn’t last two years!

HHMM: Do you guys feel like you have a responsibility to take the music forward to the next generation?

RL: I feel that first of all we represent the great city of New Orleans, the musical city and you have that responsibility. I talk to a lot of young musicians and I tell them “y’all have the responsibility to take the music to a higher level than guys like myself”. The chances of me living another forty years or fifty years, cmon! Unless technology comes up with something that’s really, really hip that wont be happening.

HHMM: How is the city recovering now from a musical perspective?

RL: I think we are going pretty good. There’s a lot of clubs opening up. Street music is vibing on Frenchmans St. you still got the French Quarter. There’s neighbourhoods that have a lot of local music. There’s a club called The Candlelight where you can hear a traditional New Orleans brass band and get a free plate of beans and rice and people are dancing. There’s a lot of culture that you can experience.

TOUR DATES

September 28th @ Sydney Opera House, Sydney NSW

September 30th @ Lizotte’s, Newcastle NSW *

October 1st & 2nd @ Bellingen Global Carnival *

October 5th @ The Palace Theatre, Melbourne VIC

October 6th @ The Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide SA

October 7th @ Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle WA

October 8th & 9th @ Caloundra Music Festival, Caloundra QLD