All Tomorrow's Parties

Magnet
by Corey duBrowa
August/September 2000

The Dandy Warhols have spent the last three years touring the world, sampling its wares and spitting it all back out again. The bleary-eyed band attempts to remember what a long, strange trip it's been.

For anyone who’s ever dreamed of throwing in his lot with the devil, the Dandy Warhols are living out your rock “n’ roll fantasy in vivid, screaming Technicolor. Stories of debauchery seem to follow this glamorously ragged Portland, Ore., crew around like a trail of crack crumbs, and you’ve probably heard at least some of the more infamous anecdotes by now.

The band blew its major-label advance on drugs, drink and sexcapades, nearly going bankrupt before the record was ever released. Early gigs revolved equally around intoxication, various states of nudity and loud, droning music set to stun. The Dandys’ first video of note, the cynically knowing “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth” (from 1997’s ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down), made creative use of dancing syringes and perfectly choreographed images of bodies being hauled off on stretchers. Their feud with the Brian Jonestown Massacre took a decidedly ugly turn when BJM sent each Dandy a bullet with his or her name inscribed on it. Not since the heady days of the Let It Bleed-era Stones (or the early years of Guns N’ Roses) has rock seen such an unabashed love affair with the lifestyle’s switchblade-sharp edge. Which has made for an uncomfortably casual relationship between the typical fan and, say, The Oregonian’s obituary pages.

What hasn’t been adequately documented is just how goddamn good this band is becoming. The Dandys would certainly have you believe they’ve always rocked your world musically, and occasionally that’s been true. Their first song to register with the public consciousness, 1995’s “The Dandy Warhols T.V. Theme Song” (from their indie debut, Dandys Rule OK), was a shaggy slice of Britpop-meets-Beach Boys, and there are certainly moments on Come Down capable of bringing the rock “n’ roll girls and boys right to their leather-trousered knees.

But until now, there was that pesky unevenness, the sense that these guys basically coasted unless it was absolutely necessary not to do so. As critic John Chandler, local editor of The Rocket and associate editor of Puncture, has said, “The Dandy Warhols have always been like a Hanna-Barbera version of a band. Nice sounds, good-looking, but intangible. And definitely not a part of the same reality as the harder-slogging folks on the scene.” Coupled with a studiously avoided expertise in musicianship (keyboardist/bassist Zia McCabe played neither instrument prior to joining the group at the ripe old age of 19), the Dandys possessed all of the music’s attitude but little of its aptitude. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as just about any punk can tell you. But the band’s aspirations to greatness seemed to bear a pretense its recorded work couldn’t quite live up to.

With the release of Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia (Capitol), all of this is going to change. Although overhyped by the band in characteristically overconfident fashion as “the last classic-rock record,” it’s actually not far from the mark: The songs all have a comfortable, lived-in feel to them, organic and familiar. You can hear a bit of Metallica-by-way-of-Moody Blues (the pensive acoustic prayer “Mohammed”), some Beggars Banquet-issue Stones (the bowlegged twang of “Country Leaver”), Zep’s “Levee Breaks” mating with the distorto-rawk of the Jesus And Mary Chain (“Nietzsche”) and even a bit of Floyd (dig the Gilmour slide that colors “The Gospel” a shade of indigo blue).

What Goes On
My journey into the surreal world of the Dandys begins the night I’m to meet them at a Portland-area restaurant called Henry Ford’s. I telephone local producer Clark Stiles (who had a hand in the recording of the band’s last two albums) a few hours before the interview. “Have you spent much time with Courtney (Taylor, the band’s leader/resident rock star)?” Stiles asks. I have to admit that, while I’ve certainly seen the band play out a number of times and witnessed Taylor in various states of disrepair at local drinking establishments, no, I haven’t. “Well, you’re in for it,” says Stiles. “He’s a character. A rock star before he was ever a musician.”

Henry Ford’s is the kind of place where time has stood still since the Kennedy administration, where red velvet wallpaper is the predominant decor and a stale, ghostly odor pervades everything present, including the vinyl chairs, retro highball glasses and even the organ down in the lounge, where the night’s entertainment is being provided by a silver-haired swinger who breezily offers up Muzak versions of Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra hits. A porkpie-hatted valet relieves me of my car keys in the parking lot, and I’m promptly seated in the bar, looking out over a small pool filling up with frothy bubbles.

The band members stumble in as if on cue, looking every inch the part of scruffy, local rock royalty. After exchanging familiar embraces and drink orders with the waitstaff (“Jack with a splash, right?”), they settle in and a long evening of sodden discussion begins. We begin at the beginning, discussing Portland’s indie-rock scene and the origins of the Dandy Warhols back during the era of grunge.

“We came out at the end of the Northwest, indie-pigtails-with-Buddy Holly-glasses, uptight, intellectual, angst era,” says Taylor, sucking down his drink and cigarette with equal enthusiasm. “And our reaction was, “Fuck this!’ I mean, alone feels alone, for everybody. Universally. Portland is the perfect town to get so depressed in that you make art only to make yourself feel better. Therefore, when we get together, we’re gonna have a fucking great time and meet other cool bands, too. They must be out there.”

Taylor’s assertion is pretty dead-on. The Dandys’ simple, repetitive blend of Velvet Underground drone and prime foppish Britpop definitely struck a chord with local scenesters back when they debuted. But this chord wasn’t altogether positive, resulting in a tendentious relationship with the local rock press and Portland’s self-appointed arbiters of hip, many of whom witnessed the band’s bacchanalian shows at now-defunct clubs such as the 1201 Lounge and X-Ray Cafe and accused the Dandys of outright plagiarism (when they weren’t sniffing that the band’s music was derivative of its limited influences in extremis). Taylor continues his speed-fueled rant: “At that point, everyone was comfortable in their knowledge of the ground rules for cool. And here we come. We just don’t give a fuck. We really didn’t want that kind of [fan] anyway.”

“There are certain people out there, you’re never going to please “em, so you might as well piss “em off,” says guitarist Peter Holmstrom. “We don’t try to do anything intentionally to piss people off, but I’m fine if our music does that.”

This us-against-the-world attitude has definitely colored the band’s work since; the group isn’t only unconcerned with critical correctness, it derives a certain amount of energy from conflict. “In the end, you don’t really have time to think about what anybody else wants, anyway,” says Taylor. “We’re gonna do what we wanna do. If everybody stuck to what made them happy, they would be way less of a fucking dick. We’re trying, as a band, to eliminate knee-jerk reactions altogether. If we can just do our thing without hurting each other’s feelings, then we can all have a good time÷all the time.” Hasn’t the band’s party-all-the-time vibe actually distorted the prism through which most people view its work?

Holmstrom fields the question. “You certainly have to have a good time and let off steam÷let’s face it, that inspires us and gives us energy÷but I’m glad that people seem to be focusing on the music this time,” he explains. “Also, we’re just a better band now. I think you reach a point where you just don’t go back, where certain plateaus of skill or musicianship [prevent you from] backsliding. More than anything, what we’re hearing is that [Thirteen] is a “mature’ record.”

Elegantly Wasted
We’re now several rounds of drinks into the evening, and the band is clearly a bit loopy (Holmstrom excepted, who has been drinking root beer while his compatriots go through martinis, margaritas and scotches with stunning rapidity), with McCabe discussing a local amusement park as a potentially “freaky” location for entertaining some out-of-town guests who are visiting over the weekend.

A waitress finally shuffles our party into the restaurant, and a couple seated directly across from us warily eyes the Dandys; they’re swaggering, profane and hard to miss among the families who have gathered for grandma’s birthday dinner. Taylor continues the talking jag he began at the bar, while Holmstrom quietly positions himself across from him. McCabe, drummer Brent DeBoer and the band’s manager weave unsteadily behind, laughing loudly and attempting to hide their cigarettes from the waiter.

The conversation turns to English rock, a topic with which the band has become very familiar (McCabe’s cheerful critique: “American shit bands are way worse than their shit bands.”) The Dandys have achieved a level of notoriety in the U.K. that far exceeds their home-turf fame, approaching a zealotry typically reserved for Brit-centric outfits such as Blur and Travis in publications like NME. “What cracks me up about English bands is that they tend to have one cool focal center, like Saffron from Republica, and then a bunch of old men around that,” Taylor laughs. “And they call that a rock band. Then there’s bands like Belle And Sebastian, who are utterly, shamelessly derivative of Nick Drake, but beautiful÷Christ, I love their records.”

“Isn’t Nick Drake’s [music] in a VW ad now?” ponders DeBoer, shaking his head.

“I think it’s a death thing,” answers Taylor glibly. “He was fucked up, a one-take kind of artist: walked in, played the songs, walked out. Completely brilliant.”

Holmstrom spends a few minutes describing the complexity of playing Drake’s music, the impossibility of its technical aspects, before Taylor interrupts him with a warning about the dangers of the “genius trap.”

“The thing about genius is it’s not like it applies to everything,” says Taylor. “That’s what I got out of the whole Kurt Cobain experience, that genius is actually very limiting. You’re lopsided, directing all of your mental energy toward this one very narrow thing÷you’re hyperdeveloped in that area. This is why you get people who are amazing word-game players on Conan, talking about politics; they don’t understand politics as deeply as they understand what makes them “genius’ or they haven’t really developed a dialogue for it. So when people tell us, “You guys shouldn’t talk about politics,’ I say, “Hey, you should want our perspective on this and other subjects, too.’ Because no matter how fucked up and wrong it is, you can’t really complain about “honest,’ can you?

“How’s this interview going for you?” Taylor asks in my ear while leaning over to sample a shrimp from a cocktail plate. “We kinda have the reputation for being the last honest band. Shit, my high is starting to wear off.” And so it goes.

Beginning To See The Light
Our dinner arrives÷giant slabs of meat for everyone at the table save McCabe, who has ordered a salmon dish she describes as “fluffy”÷along with several bottles of outstanding red wine poured by DeBoer and then greedily consumed by all present. The band’s days as the focus of a major-label bidding war have definitely made an indelible mark; the Dandys clearly know how to spend a buck or two on “entertainment,” a notion also perpetuated by scarcely concealed evidence that the band continues to dabble in drugs of any and all varieties.

These self-destructive habits probably contributed to Capitol’s rejection of the first version of Come Down; the label said it had limited commercial potential, so the Dandys had to return to the basement to write another batch of songs. (Supposedly, there’s an alter-ego version of the LP called The Black Album that the band intends to release at some point.) While it’s hard to know where truth begins and hyperbole ends with these guys, Taylor attempts to set the record straight on what happened on Come Down and how it influenced the recording of Thirteen.

“At that point, we would trip together for days on end,” he says, “coming down over a two-day period where we’re all in a bed, waking up and getting a beer out of the fridge after some warehouse party in San Francisco where we’ve been tripping on E for days.” He takes a huge bite of steak and continues. “The whole time, we’d play (the Verve’s) A Storm In Heaven and (Spiritualized’s) Lazer Guided Melodies over and over again. Every song, the pop songs and the syrupy things, was bent and molded into that sound. That may have something to do with its lack of success: You can’t really expect to get on radio with the gooey comfort of a comedown. You’re trying to reach people who are driving to work, and they’re not gonna get it.”

Taylor segues into his take on Thirteen Tales. “This one is soft and aggressive÷an art weirdo band with soul,” he says. “It’s leaner than our other stuff, and that makes it bigger sounding. We were hoping to trigger all the right “wrong’ responses with this one.”

But while the sonics continue to evolve in unforeseen ways, the songs’ subject matter remains as self-referential as always, sometimes even painfully so. “[“Bohemian Like You’] is definitely directed at the indie scene in general, but it’s directed at us, too,” Taylor cackles. “That’s why I know it so well, why it fell out of my mouth so easily and into a song, because I’m so familiar with the terrain. That, and I get to use the word “bent.’”

When added to the song “Country Leaver” (a ditty describing a lost weekend in Amsterdam with Taylor’s then-girlfriend, supermodel Michelle Norkett), the sum of Thirteen Tales’ contents hasn’t stretched that far beyond the typical confines of rock stardom and its usual conceits. But Taylor brushes these criticisms aside.

“We’re the kind of band that didn’t put out a record for three fuckin’ years, and people still treat us like we just debuted last week,” he says. “And I think that’s what this band’s function is right now: to create, every couple of years, one hour of recorded music, where people can hit play, turn the phone off, sit and listen to it and let it come to them, emotionally. It will erase the bullshit, like, “You’re not skinny enough, you’re not rich enough, your car and clothes aren’t cool enough,’ and simply say, “This feeling that made you feel fucked up, insecure and bitter? Check it out: We feel it, too.’”

I’ll Be Your Mirror
As the last of the evening’s wine is guzzled, the tab paid and the smokes fired up, it strikes me that there’s probably a reason why the hipster cognoscenti of our shared hometown talk shit about these guys. They recognize many of their own traits in the Dandy Warhols, grotesquely magnified, and the shock of this recognition frightens them. The Dandys are bohemian like you, only even more blatantly so. They openly display÷hell, embrace÷the faults the hipsters try to hide, to get over. The insecurity, the ambition, the name-dropping, the weakness for cheap highs, the search for the ultimate orgasm. Like a bizarro-world version of high school (in this one, the geeks mercilessly taunt the jocks), the hipsters shift the spotlight off themselves by calling attention to the freak show.

But somehow, we need bands like the Warhols, rock stars whose egos can barely fit into the room with their luggage. Even as Taylor spends the last few minutes of our interview trying to convince me he might be “the Robert Altman of rock,” there’s something endearingly ridiculous about the statement that defies any effort to critique it.

“Don’t ever water your shit down,” Taylor concludes. “Do exactly what you do, never compromise, have a fucking good time and look good doing it, man. By putting together this band, I was able to prove that I was right. See, we’re not that fuckin’ weird.”

The Dandys may not be a band for the ages, but they’ve proven to be a perfect group for the ‘00s. And that’s more than enough for them.