Primate Contenders

CMJ New Music Journal
by Doug Levy
2003


Perhaps more than any other artist in history, David Bowie has soared to, and maintained, almost unattainable heights of success by continually reinventing himself with the times. It’s fitting then, that with the release of their latest album, Welcome To The Monkey House, the Dandy Warhols are quick to mention the ever-persevering Duke.

“When we first started the album, Courtney said that it sounded kind of like Bowie’s career in the ’70s,” recalls Dandys guitarist Peter Holmström, before going on to clarify: “All of it — from Space Oddity through Scary Monsters. Which covers everything, pretty much. It definitely had kind of a Bowie vibe to it.”

That’s extravagantly monikered frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor he’s referring to, of course; along with keyboardist Zia McCabe and original drummer Eric Hedford, the pair formed the Dandy Warhols nine years ago at Holmström’s insistence in their hometown of Portland, Oregon — where the band is currently recuperating from a recent European tour. Known originally for psychedelic wall-ofsound guitar washouts, glam-rock divergences and a tendency for public nudity, the group has released four albums and developed into a not-altogether-different, but different-nonetheless artistic entity.

After the first two records, Dandys Rule OK? and Dandy Warhols Come Down (which scored a hit in the bouncy “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth”), current drummer Brent DeBoer stepped in for the group’s breakthrough album, Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia. An epically diverse work of rock majesty, it saw the band finally get the recognition it had been waiting for — especially overseas, where the single “Bohemian Like You” was a huge chart success. It seemed that Taylor-Taylor had reached the peak of his songwriting abilities, with the Warhols having developed into the fully-realized rock ’n’ roll dream band they were always meant to be.

So, where would they go to next? Into that re-envisioning of classic glam and glamour hinted at above? Not necessarily. Go back and re-read that quote; the key phrase is, “When we first started.” Because, somewhere along the line, Welcome To The Monkey House took on a whole different personality. “It’s still there, obviously,” says Holmström of the Bowie influence, “but it definitely went more ’80s, for some reason. I’m not really quite sure why.”He pauses, before deciding, “I think it just goes in a direction which it sort of needs to.”

Once one is clued in to the fact that the new album was co-produced by none other than Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, though, it’s extremely easy to simply point the finger at the ’80s icon and chalk up the new direction to the results of that collaboration. Especially since Duran Duran singer Simon LeBon makes an appearance on the disc, as well. But again, that isn’t really the case.

“The record actually had already taken shape before Nick became involved,” says Holmström, who also insists that even the group’s recently released covers of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” and Blondie’s “Call Me” were not attempts to actively redefine where the Warhols were coming from. In fact, he reveals that the tracks were originally recorded for the soundtrack to the Ben Stiller comedy vehicle Zoolander, but then never used — which places their recording closer to the time the band had been working on material with the trip-hop heroes in Massive Attack a few years back, before the new material had even taken shape.

“That was sort of in-between the Massive Attack stuff and starting this record,” Holmström explains. “It was a good learning step for us; maybe it influenced us, but it’s kind of a coincidence. There certainly wasn’t a plan for the album to sound ’80s — though I guess we’re capitalizing on it now.”

Meaning that the question remains: if there wasn’t a plan, how exactly did the Dandy Warhols go from the space-jams and guitar hooks of yesterday to the equally but dissimilarly spacey synth-pop indulgences of today?

“Essentially, it was just that we needed to challenge ourselves,” says Holmström. “In the past, when it came to mixing, we’ve always sort of mixed to cover mistakes made in the rhythm department — bass lines that were just holding down the root note and sort of staying out of the way, or drums that just weren’t necessarily tight or creating an interesting enough sound. So, by taking care of those two things — having interesting bass lines and really tight drums — we realized we didn’t require a large, massive wall of guitars to cover things up.”

Moreover, the band became increasingly aware that the compositions brought in by Taylor-Taylor were simply a starting point — one from which the four members could head off together down whatever road appeared to be the most promising.

“The songs can be recorded in any way,” agrees Holmström. “So it’s essentially the band’s influence in the studio that gives us what we end up with. Take ‘You Come In Burned,’ which is incredibly sparse — it’s just bass, drums, little sound effects and vocals; that song was written while we were recording ‘Godless’ on the last record. So it’s actually based on an acoustic guitar thing, which is completely gone now. It’s really interesting to see the way songs evolve, especially on this record, because we did push ourselves. At one point, it was sounding much more like the last record. Like ‘The Dope (Wonderful You)’ was completely a guitar song, with eight different tracks of guitars doing different things. But it was frustrating, because it wasn’t exciting us.

“You have to excite yourself,” he continues. “Otherwise it’s not going to be that good. I think if we had done a guitar record, it would have just been a mediocre record.”

The funny thing is, even with a song like “I Am A Scientist” — the most Reagan-era reminiscent track of the Monkey bunch — the Warhols seemingly had no idea they might be perceived as cashing in on a current trend.

“It’s weird,” says Holmström. “Coming from Portland, we’re a little out of the loop sometimes. It wasn’t until we were pretty much a year into our recording process that I even heard of The Faint and Ladytron and these bands that are doing the ’80s kind of thing. And now I feel like I hear it everywhere.”

But don’t be misled: the Dandys have hardly metamorphosed into electroclash automatons. For every keyboard effect, there’s still a guitar line to balance it out; for every hint of dance floor potential, there’s an equal dose of dreampop to remind you who you’re listening to. “Insincere Because I” drifts as lazily as anything off of the band’s earlier work, while “You Were The Last High,” the upcoming single that former Lemonhead Evan Dando had a hand in, has more of a Prefab Sprout feel than anything more Human League.

Meanwhile, back in Portland, other things are progressing for the Dandy Warhols, aside from just their music. The evocatively named “Odditorium,” the group’s new base of operations, is also beginning to take shape. This allows for an even more obvious reference point than Bowie to show its face — after all, the foursome didn’t just pull that band name from out of the ether.

“We’ve been renting spaces to record our records in over the years, because we like to take more time than a normal studio would make very practical,” explains Holmström. “We tried to buy something while we were recording this record, but we just couldn’t find the right building. Then Courtney finally found it, around last November. If everything goes right, it’s going to be our version of the Factory — of Andy Warhol’s Factory — hopefully one that helps more people than just us. It will be a studio; it’s a performance space; it’s a photo studio; it’s got computers, so we can do Web design and some basic editing and stuff like that. It’s even got an industrial kitchen, so we can have dinner parties, and have film screenings and stuff there, too. It’s really great.”

But while the Odditorium will hopefully become the mecca for local artistry the Warhols are aiming for, the odds of it becoming the den of iniquity one might lasciviously imagine after reading all the press on the band, or hearing all the (possibly) tall tales of sex, drugs and debauchery that have consistently surrounded it, aren’t as high as might be expected. Holmström may admit that, “we take probably more time than other bands having a good time,” but he’s careful to qualify that by saying, “If we lived the kind of lives that are written about, we’d be dead — or just haggard-looking — and we’d have no time for everything else that we’re trying to do. Or even no time to actually record records.”

Don’t be too disappointed by the realitycheck, though, because there’s still going to be a fair amount of excess on offer, as always, in the Dandy Warhols’ live shows. The band isn’t quite sure yet what will be in store on the road this time around, but it will definitely include the overdose — the musical overdose, that is — that fans are hoping for. “We’re still trying to figure that out.We may be taking an opening band; we may not. If not, we’re going to be doing our three-hour long shows and stuff. We’ll see how long it’s going to be, but it will definitely be longer than some people probably want,” says Holmström with a laugh.

Plus, with the degree of studio work and effects involved in Welcome To The Monkey House, this tour will mark the first time the group has had to seriously rethink its songs for the stage. “They’re different than the record,”Holmström reveals. “We’ve never approached things the same way, and this time, the only way we were going to make it work live was either by taking DATs or samplers or sequencers out with us, or to play the record completely differently. So we’re playing things fairly differently.”

After a three-year wait following the last album, this raises an interesting possibility: if the songs play out promisingly in their altered forms, maybe a live album will come out of it?

Unsurprisingly, the Dandys are already one step ahead of us. “There’s been some talk,” says Holmström.

So, what’s next for the Dandy Warhols? We’re not even going to guess.