Not Fine But Still Dandy

Willamatte Week
by Wayne Pernu
1996

Slabtown.net note: This article is about the impending break-up of the band and their first drummer.

For weeks, there's been talk of trouble in the Dandy Warhols' camp. Reports have persisted of flare-ups between frontman Courtney Taylor and drummer Eric Hedford during the recording of their as-yet-untitled major label debut for Capitol Records.

Speaking from the Northwest Portland studio he's been holed up in for the past month, taylor concedes that the band has had its share of problems, but insists things are getting back on track. "Things have been weird for us," he says. "We took some serious spankings the first two or three weeks in here." Taylor claims band friction has been the result not of personal or artistic differences, but "an inability to get the results we all wanted." He also cites difffering "work ethics" between himself and Hedford as cause for some of the discord.

While a tentative plan was for the new album to be finished in time for their monthlong tour with Love And Rockets, which started in San Francisco this week, Taylor says only half of the 20 songs slated for recording are in the can. One track completed but not scheduled to appear on the album is a 12-minute drone version of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald."

From his home, Hedford describes the past month as a bad patch he'd sonner leave behind. "I've not been involved much in the past two or three weeks," he explains. "For whatever reasons, I've been kind of uninspired." Of Taylor he says, "We're the ones that butt heads most in the band. We've talked a lot about it, but then there are always a lot of things that are unspoken between me and Courtney. It's our relationshihp. We'll go along for a long time until something builds to a head and then we'll explode and argue in one intense discussion. And then it will come back together and we'll be happy as clams and then it will continue on until another explosion occurs."

Both Taylor and Hedford say their month on the road should help rejuvenate the band. "We've always just kind of done what we wanted to do from the beginning," Hedford adds. "Our band is pretty much chaos in motion, [but] we've always ended up landing on yoru feet wherever we've gone and whatever we've done."