The Hills Are Alive...

Q Magazine
by David Cavanagh
September 2000

... with the sound of 1980s UK indie rock, remade with a pinch of sexual frankness, knee-weakening melody, boob-flashing and Class A drug by Anglophile was The Dandy Warhols. David Cavanagh joins them in Oregon on the trail of success, snow, seafood salad and "naugthy poo-poo sex"...

The Dandy Warhols don't sell enough records to qualify as famous. Unlike many a band higher up the commercial ladder, however, they have achieved notoriety. Their keyboard player bares her breasts during certain gigs; there's your notoriety right there. Their surprise '98 hit Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth had lyrics about a girl who'd become a heroin addict, sung by an ex-boyfriend chiding her not because smack was dangerous but because it was "Passe". "Charming," said Jayne Middlemiss on The O-Zone, and she was not being complimentary.
Now the hits appear to have stopped. Despite some excellent reviews here, the band's third album, Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, has been a connoisseur's purchase only. More acoustic and less blissed-out than their previous two, it was inspired by Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. The Dandy Warhols regard it as a big step, a complete change of direction.
Courtney Taylor, their singer, songwriter, co-producer and leader, is keen to stress that urban bohemianism - an educated unconventionality - is his band's USP, and that in a musical climate of NSP's (No Selling Points), New Radiohead movements and risk-free radio scheduling , it is The Dandy Warhols alone who are putting the bomp and rocking the roll. When David Bowie watched their performance at Glastonbury, Taylor believes he knew full well what he was hearing and seeing.
"He looked at me and thought: that guy with the yarn turban on his head has done something that I've always tried to do but never did - and that is put a band together where everybody in the band is as cool as I am."
Bowie aside, Taylor feels that Dandy Warhols fans (they number about 200,000 around the world) are mostly "disaffected geeks... the almost hip". The irony - if it isn't the actual key to the relationship - is that The Dandy Warhols could hardly be less disaffected if they tried.

Portland, Oregon is in the north-west of the USA, 78 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Above it's head are Seattle, 170 miles away, and Canada. For Portland's tourism, size counts. Multnomah Falls is, at 500 feet plus, one of Americas tallest. Powell's City Of Books is the biggest bookstore in the country. Mount Hood, a glacier 65 miles out of the city, makes you feel a) chilly and b) tiny looking at it.
The city teems with joggers, cyclists, brew-pubs, and more than 200 parks. There is plenty of opportunity to be healthy and well-read by day, and unconscious by midnight. Portland so prides itself on having a laidback attitude to life that people are encouraged to turn up to the opera in jeans.
At Jay's restaurant, a large table by the door fills with people. Peter Holmstrom, the Dandy's blond guitarist, is now joined by Courtney Taylor, his drummer cousin Brent DeBoer and bespectacled keyboard-bassist Zia McCabe. They have hired a van to show Q the sights of their city. But first, giving the lie to their skinny-druggie physiques, they order and eat a massive seafood-and-salad banquet.
Whereas some bands are a reaction to their hometown's restrictiveness, The Dandy Warhols are a product of Portland's laissez-faire. They like where they come from very much. Parking on the banks of the Willamette river, they skim pebbles across the water. Heading off up to Mount Hood, they coo in awe: "Wow, look, snow!" Taylor has the dry drawl of a practised cynic, but drives the van like an excited father who knows the next panorama will thrill his children.
The band's joie de vivre takes some getting used to, for the first two albums were downbeat and wasted with dysphoria, even as the guitars interlocked excitedly. It was as if The Dandy Warhols were proud to uphold the Spacemen 3 motto of the late '80s ("Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To"), blotting out the pain of the world with music of the slapped veins.
But if there seems to be a contradiction between their outward disposition and their work, The Dandy Warhols insist it makes perfect sense. Those albums were heavily influenced by narcotrancey UK indie bands including Spiritualized and slowdive. Moreover, the confident Taylor prefers to write lyrics about his few doubts rather than his many certainties. He describes his method of making music as "three chords, five minutes, the shortest route between me and pleasure."
For Taylor and his colleagues, music, like drugs, fits into the wider context of instant gratification - the Dandy Warhols' chosen and absolute code. They eat constantly, love sleeping and laugh often. (McCabe, an incessant talker, triggers most of their marathon, cyclical conversations.) Three of them speak of sex with an embarrassing lack of reserve. Taylor can be quoting Withnail & I one minute; longing for "naughty poo-poo sex" the next.
These are the things that make them happy and they view them with a weird combination of respect, curiosity and hunger. You only have to watch them queue impatient for ice-creams at the foot of Multnomah Falls to appreciate their love for the simple pleasures in life. You only have to see them crane their necks as their meals arrive in Timberline Lodge (where Stanley Kubrick filmed the hotel exterior scenes for The Shining)to observe their oddly child-like understanding of how an entertaining day should be lived.
Taylor, who read Nietzsche as a student and admits to darkness in his teens, detests band who project and "uptight, holier-than-thou, angst-ridden" stance, particularly if they're unable to back it up with interesting conversation offstage. Even some of his favourites - Spiritualized, Radiohead, The Beta Band - have disappointed him in the flesh.
"Imagine our surprise," he says. "We thought Jason Pierce would be a man who would be able to articulate emotionally - the way he does with his music. Why can those people articulate their emotional self through music but not verbally? I can."

Taylor may have continued to wallow in the mire himself had he not had an epiphany in '94.
"The summer that we put this band together," he recalls, "I went, Wait a minute. I bet I can get away with not saying 'no' all summer. And I did an entire summer where if anybody offered me anything, unless I absolutely could not, I had to. It became like a noble test of chivalry or knighthood. Fear became something else. I felt like a man in the most physical, macho sense of the word."
Few genres were more angst-ridden than grunge. It was huge in Portland, like everywhere else. The Dandy Warhols were the underground alternative: a and that wore suits and ties, played quietly in cocktail lounges and partied as though they had bought all the fun that grunge had returned to the shop.
"It was like, Alright, fuck you, college boy," remembers Taylor. "We're going to snort coke and be full-on, balls-out. It was an innocent time, super-turned-on, all the cool people together. Guys kissing and girls feeling each other up. And that's where we got our reputation."
Released in '95 on a local indie, their first album, The Dandys Rule OK, contained "direct imitations" of songs by Ride and The House Of Love, whom Holmstrom had discovered as an art student at New York University. "We'd write bonehead-simple songs," says Taylor, "simple fucking song after simple fucking song." Holmstrom: "We had every person in the and doing the exact same thing. [courtney's] doing it with a clean tone, I'm doing with a distortion. Zia's doing it on the keyboard bass." Taylor: "Then it's all about vocal harmonies. Make it beautiful." Holmstrom: "It's so not complex."
Capitol signed them to a three-album deal (as Taylor wryly acknowledges, "We've been the Next Big Thing for over five years now"). But when they recorded their Capitol debut, Taylor had a fit of the collywobles and cancelled the albums release.
"Pete and I stayed I that studio for 30 days doing drugs," he recalls. "We didn't know that the great flood of '96 was happening and that people were sand-bagging the waterfront. It was a national emergency. We were 16 blocks away and thought it was just raining a lot. We were tripping out, ordering drugs, pizza, having friends over with their mandolins and banjos. I spent a month trying to discover where, between a jackhammer and Bridge Over Troubled Water, does sound become song."
The band call it "The Black Album". Holmstrom plays it for Q later. Some of it has programmed drums because their drummer of the time, Eric Hedford, had given up on Taylor in exasperation.
Tayor wrote new material and the band tried again, giving the finished album the chastened title The Dandy Warhols Come Down. It was one of the great records of 1997, blessed with the wall-of-sound production that UK indie music had sought - and missed by a mile - since the mid-'80s.
The band's reputation crossed the Atlantic that year when McCabe took her shirt off for encores and the Dandy Warhols talked openly about their drug-taking. "It's way too much effort to watch your mouth," reasons Taylor.
Did it ever cause problems for them at airports?
"Not even once."
What about on tour? Plagued by dealers?
"Huh... I wish."
That reputation now troubles them slightly. Backtracking, they say they were never major drug-users, merely honest about those they did use. Holmstrom, a non-drinker who is more bashful than the others, and steers clear of their coarseness, even wishes that McCabe would never disrobe again.
"It's become such a focus, and she knows that," he says. "She won't do it in London again, because there's a bunch of photographers there waiting for it. She's tired of it, too. But she claims she feels when a show is going well, and that if it's natural for her to take her shirt off, then she does. I don't know..."
Motivated more by music than by the band's four musketeers lifestyle, Holmstrom sometimes gives the impression that he's been swept along by the force of Taylor's personality. The future worries him: should they take Capitol's advice and support bigger bands to sell more records? He is glad that McCabe, the band's weakest musician, is showing improvement as a keyboard player.
But this isn't to say Holmstrom is a total square. He is a Dandy Warhol, after all. In a darkened bar at the end of the night, Q asks him if they have ever been banned from any of the cities pubs.
"No," he replies, "although we did get thrown out of a couple of stores a few years back." He sips at his soft drink. "It was probably because we were all naked at the time."