Puncture article/interview

Puncture Magazine
by Michael Hukin
Summer 1997

“I never thought you’d be a junke because heroin is so passé…” With opening lines like that; impossibly addictive, blissy melodies; and enough attitude to launch a rocket, surely nothing stands between the Dandy Warhols and stardom. Michael Hukin tries not to get singed.
Everyone inside Seattle’s Crocodile Café is anticipating a brush with greatness. Maybe even a French kiss with greatness. It’s an unusually hot May evening in the Emerald City and the Dandy Warhols are due onstage at around midnight. When the Dandys come up from Portland to play, it’s always cause for anticipation. Last time through, at the start of the year, the band played one of the tightest performances of their career (and in a joyful black of Dandyism, added to their already noteworthy history with a by-now trademark nude encore). One song in particular so transcended the band’s expectations that at its conclusion all four Dandys were grinning with joy and staring at each other in disbelief. A perfect pop moment?
“Yeah! That was ‘Lou Weed.’ There were songs that night where we just went Oh, my god! Wow!
“I love it when that happens!” Courtney Taylor, singer and guitarist for the Dandy Warhols, is looking very rock-star tonight in leather pants and an immaculately stoned facial expression. Taylor and soft-spoken guitarist Peter Holmstrom are huddled together in the Crocodile bar for a talk with the press (me). We’re surrounded by black-clad Seattle altera-youth, plus an autograph hunter who wanders away with a poster pulled from the wall. Courtney greets each compliment spluttered his way with a long-drawn-out “Thank, man…” and a crooked smile.
It was in 1995 that the quartet started making waves, with the release of their debut album Dandys Rule OK (Tim/Kerr), an addictive, ingenious ransacking of rock’s coolest moments that gave new verve to old ideas and applied old craftsmanship to new vision. There were several kilelr track: the Velvet Underground-wasted cool mimicry of “Lou Weed,” the shoegazing sex splurge of “Ride,” the T-Rexy glam-rock stomp of “Grunge Betty,” the perfect guitar pop of “Nothin’ To Do.” Fans and critics took notice and a bidding war began.
The traditionally difficult second album, entitled Dandy Warhols Come Down (Capitol) is finally hitting the racks after months of drama and speculation. Rumors were flying: The Dandy Warhols have self-destructed! They wasted a year in the studio with nothing to show for it! Taylor has lost it in too many drugs! The members have fallen out! When Taylor himself describes the album as difficult, he isn’t exaggerating or playing on the cliché. Sure, a lot of bands make that leap from hometown indie to big-time major, in this case from Portland-based Tim/Kerr to globe-straddling Capitol, but not many bands are trailed by the amount of hype, expectation, and peer-generated jealousy that this crew experienced.
So much so that the last time I interviewed Taylor, he was feeling in a rut and unsure about impending fame. Any changes? I ask him several months later, as he lights the first of many cigarettes and blows smoke slowly into the air.
“No… it’s like we were talking about before – the more fame you get, the more it’s like you have a big target on your back, a target for ex-bandmates and ex-girlfriends to take pot-shots at… Say you’re too busy to call a friend for a couple week. If they’re an insecure person they start to imagine you think you’re too good for them, you know. Then they have this big attitude about your relationship.
“Anybody is good enough for me – anybody who’s honest, and that’s all that I look for in a friend. It seems like the more famous you get the more people feel they have to pretend around you. To be honest, for this record, I wasn’t really surrounded by people who were very supportive, or who understood what I was going through. So I felt really alienated. Everyone in the band pretty much has their own worries, and all my friends were in other bands doing their thing, and a lot of them can get really competitive, as you know…”
There was something I’d wondered ever since it was announced that the Dandy Warhols had been signed to Capitol. Were they chosen for their musical ability alone, or did the label want a band that could live out their rock-and-roll sex-and-speed-in-the-studio fantasies? This, after all, is a band famed as much for their infinitely quotable frontman and hedonistic extracurricular lives as for their pretty songs. And the contract signing was said to have taken place in an L.A. brothel.
“For Perry Watts-Russell, the guy who signed us, that’s definitely there,” Taylor smiles and leans in. “I feel like the more fucked-up we are, the more he gets off on it. All of Capitol is looking at us like that – they can’t believe we have songs that sound like hits. I think the best they were hoping for was something just fucked-up and new, you know… to give them a little credibility, or add to what they already had – Supergrass, Radiohead, their cool bands.
“But down there at the label, I keep hearing how I’m going to be some kind of sex symbol – the new androgynous sex symbol. I don’t see that happening yet. Maybe when I’m a little older, when I start to look a little more burnt-out, a little more legendary. At this point, I just feel like… some guy.”
“Androgynous sex symbol” gives me a mental image of Suede’s Brett Anderson; Taylor seems more prankish, reminding me of the time the Dandys, in an interview, pretended that they were locked in a military bunker, preparing to fight off a new wave of Brit groups la-la-la-ing their way across the ocean. I had always thougt this was a reaction to the British-band comparisons the Dandys received when the first album came out: they were like Ride, or My Bloody Valentine, or the Verve. Holmstrom laughs and Taylor nods slowly.
“That was one big gag. But a lot of people believed it, that we were living in Eastern Oregon in a compound with a lot of other bands preparing the nation against the British invasion. It was so dumb, it was great!”
“My favorite piece of press is a review of our first album that went, ‘This record is so pretentious. No, thank you.’” Taylor’s eyes widen in shock. “NO! Our first record pretentious? It was made in three days! Wow, I guess people hear what they want to hear. I mean –“ (he lights up his umpteenth cigarette and enters hugely sarcastic mode) “- yeah, yeah, yeah, we made it under the ‘pretense’ that we’re really, really good, and that what we do is really cool, you know? That was our ‘pretense’ in making the record. Otherwise we’d never had made it. I don’t think anyone makes a record unless they think it’s going to be super cool and they’ll really like it. Pretentious, whatever.”
The Dandy Warhols set themselves higher standards than their fans or their detractors would. Taylor explains how the goalposts move with each successive trip to the studio. “On this last record, my aims changed. I wanted to make an album album. That’s what I wanted to do with the first two – make classic rock albums. The next one I think I want to be a collection of little songs. We’ve got a record sitting in the can that’s like five songs, then an hour of noise, loops, jams, trippy shit; so we’ve scratched that out. This time I think I’d like to pull back and make a little pop record, something not very stressful, not emotionally draining, that just rocks.
“It’s hard when you push yourself past what you know you do well, into the territory of something you think you might be able to do, but don’t really know… it’s rough. You’re asking for depression every night when you walk away from the studio. This record was really hard to make. The fucked-up studio sessions even harder. But, yeah, this album was a nightmare and a half. Long ago I saw Sting on MTV saying, ‘You never finish a record; you just run out of time.’ That became very true for me.”
…Come Down is more precise than the first album, with less experimenting and an increased mainstream-pop focus – which may or may not be a good thing to the Dandy fan-base. If you’re looking for drug-hazed-mantra guitar workouts like “Fast Driving Rave Up,” you’ll be disappointed, though there are a couple of hallucinatory Zen shakers, including Eastern-tinged opener “Be-In,” which Taylor says was “written specifically to open this album; It’s the way I always wanted a record to start.” But if your favorite side of the Dandys is their classic three-minute-rock number, you’ll be in call-and-response heaven. The first single, “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth,” is a study in the perfect pop song. It swashes, it buckles, it has a chorus to die for, and given the right circumstances it will be a monster hit.
About half past midnight, the Dandy Warhols take the stage and greet an excited crowd who’ve just heard Portland band Sugarboom (namechecked in “Nothin’ To Do”) throw their spun-pop thing down. Now the Dandys bring the poise and set the room on fire, playing old crowd favorites and a dose of new material, including the dark obsessive throb of “I Love You,” a perfect version of “Boys Better,” and an exhilarating take on narco-country twanger “Minnesota,” where keyboardist Zia McCabe jumps up and down on the spot with joy before skipping across the stage and planting a kiss on Taylor’s face. No nudity tonight, but the band are enjoying themselves. Stress? Trauma? Not onstage, baby.
Now about that song on the new album – track 11? – “As Cool As Kim Deal.” I’m thinking, maybe if Ms. Deal heard it, she’d write a song about you guys in return?
“OH, she’s heard it!” Peter tells me. “I think next Friday she’s playing Portland. We’re going to go, say ‘hey…’ I want to see if maybe she’ll play ‘As Cool As the Dandy Warhols.”