Rock In A Higher Space
Revolver Magazine
by Mike Gee
June 26, 2000

Copious amounts of sex, drugs and alcohol see The Dandy Warhols hark back to the classic days of what rock n’ roll is meant to be.

The last great rock star is off his face. In the background a girl giggles. It’s 1am in the morning in hometown, Portland, Oregon, and they’re in his bedroom. Probably naked. Courtney Taylor tries edging out a few words, they appear slowly, dazed and drunk. The girl giggles some more. Courtney love women; women love Courtney. It’s in the lean frame, the Mick Jagger lips that curl sleazily, disdainfully or in a broad grin, the deep wet eyes. Sex, molten sex. Courtney Taylor is spunk.

“I have been trashing myself something horrible,” he murmurs. “Alcohol is evil. Fuck, we’ve just got back from Los Angeles and before that London. We were doing PR and some shows in England for several weeks. Flying, man, it fucks me.” Or something like that.

‘We’ is the extraordinary The Dandy Warhols [Lead singer and guitarist, Taylor, sometimes-breast-bearing keyboardist, Zia McCabe, guitarist and Taylor’s childhood friend, Peter Holmstrom, and drummer Brent DeBoer] the true inheritors of the mantle left by Iggy and The Stooges, Velvet Underground and Rolling Stones at their finest. The trash aesthetic reborn with a sonic broom that swept away pretension and replaced it with slutty, glam, neo-psychedelic pop, rock and drone. The Dandy Warhols embrace all that is righteous and rock. A self-titled debut set that included the classic psychedelic, 16-minute wig-out, It’s A Fast Driving Rave-Up With The Dandy Warhols Sixteen Minutes, set the tenor but only hinted at the sheer class that smears their sophomore effort, Come Down. Welcomed by critics as one of the albums of 1997 and drawing “next big thing”, “future of rock” gasps of hyperbole, Come Down announced a band of stunning, drug-fucked, vision. Taylor’s songs from sweet dinky pop [Cool As Kim Deal, Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth, and Minnesoter] and rock-out atmospheric swagger [Hard On For Jesus, The Creep] to pulsating psycho-pop rock strut [Be In, Boys Better, Every Day Should Be A Holiday] and the sheer classicism of the marvelous Good Morning [which contained arguably the guitar solo of the year], were effortless double-handed claps and slaps of admiration for his heroes and cynicism at the falseness of the rock biz and stardom, respectively. Taylor knew how to laugh and sneer at the same time. Welcome to the new punks. Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia is The Dandy Warhols for the new millennium, and a bastard child of the old millennium. “We wanted to make a classic rock’n’roll album,” Taylor says. “I figured no one else was going to anymore.”

So they did. That easy. Thirteen tales, allegedly recorded in a studio that was once a gay bath house, is a stunning tribute to rock as a music form. Shamelessly borrowing from the Rolling Stones [copy the intro riff and ooh-oohs on Bohemian Like You and the Exile On Main Street backwoods blues of Country Leaver] and the Stooges and MC5 [the leather slash and burn of the lethal Horse Pills], there’s a new found maturity to the Warhols. The opening trio of Godless, Mohammed and Nietzche are ether-cruising psycho pop classics that stand as some of the strongest songs Taylor’s written. Godless is is blessed with some trumpet [what a magnificent idea] that both carries the melody and offsets the laconic strum-along [“I swear that you are Godless”] as a solo in the middle of the song. Mohammed opens with Eastern wailing and offbeat percussion before slipping into a wonderful picked melody with flecks of spiraling guitar and an insistent back beat; as it builds it becomes utterly hypnotic before breaking out into spine-tingling chiming guitar cutting strummed acoustic. Simply gorgeous. Nietzche, by contrast opens on full throttle feedback and power chords and slips into a monstrous trumpet-coloured blast. Solid, Get Off, Cool Scene and Shakin’ are all effortless Dandy’s pop of various hues and demeanour. That leaves the ‘cool as’ Big Indian, the ethereal Sleep - all atmosphere, and the tongue-in-cheek, album closing, The Gospel, which is precisely what it claims to be… a country blues gospel lament [“coming for to carry you home”].

“I cannot believe how good this record is,” Taylor says. “I just didn’t believe we could be this good. But as we’ve got older we’ve got better. To be honest, we’ve been trying to do the same thing since we started. We’re just more refined and better players now.

“The point for me is that there are no rock’n’roll bands anymore. People say Oasis was a rock’n’roll band but it’s really just two brothers and some session musos. There are no Led Zeppelins or Beatles anymore. When I was a kid I knew the names of everybody in all those bands, all the album titles and song names. Everybody in those bands was brilliant character. Think of the Who – each of them was a character in their own right. And they were all fuckin’ brilliant artists as well.

“We’re greater and stronger characters and artists than pure musicians. Yeah, you’re right though, this album is full of references. I’ve always been a big Stones fan so on Bohemian Like You we just ripped off a lick and added our own touch, although I hope people see it as more than just a Stones rip-off. And Iggy and the Stooges have always been there in our music.

“In a way the whole record is about moods and mood shifts. I like the dramatics and moods. But you take something Sleep - I love hypnosis and hypnotic music. That’s a different velocity of hypnosis. Then something like Horse Pills is a heavy blast about LA, the industry, power, and it’s also about Gus Van Zant [the director], a friend who lives in the LA hills. He’s very good but putting Matt Dillon and Ben Affleck into a personal movie like Good Will Hunting was such a horrible joke to play on the world. They’re so bad; so characterless, shitty and awful. I wrote Horse Pills for Tom Cruise and those kind of artists.”

What Courtney wants to talk about most of all though is sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and how messed up the Brit press is when it comes to dealing with the definitive triumvirate.

“I found the UK press stupid, embarrassing, dishonest and cheap,” he rants. “They’re all really nice guys to hang out with but when you turn your back they revert to sexually frustrated 14-year-olds. They ask us about sex and drugs so we go ahead and talk about sex and drugs and apparently they just can’t believe that.

“We’ve never met an English band that isn’t mind-boggingly fucked up on drugs, alcohol and shitty sex, from the Charlatans to Longpigs to Blur. They’re all into it. They love to party but they won’t talk about it though. The UK press have no fucking idea. You get The Guardian and their writers know what they’re talking about but the rest are just tabloid drivel. The other problem is the journalists think they are way cooler than the musicians.” He laughs sardonically.

“We’re just four people who are pretty much in tune with each other. We have fun together and we have taste. We know where to draw the line. Most of those pussy-whipped little cheesedicks in the British bands are doing way more coke and 16-year-old girls than we’ve ever done. Sure we get drunk and stoned [just like former Recovery reporter Jane Gazzo did with them for several days while they were in London, according to Taylor] but we know our limits, although right now I’m not so sure about the alcohol. Fuck man.” He moans quietly, and the girl in the background giggles again and moves a little closer.

The last great rock’n’roll star maybe about to get laid. Sadly, there’s another interview to do.