Virtually Alternative Interview

Virtually Alternative Interview - August 2000

Virtually Alternative
No Small Thinkers: The Dandy Warhols Go Bohemian
By Alyson Mead

Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Oregon’s resident bon vivant and frontman extraordinaire for The Dandy Warhols, is a motor-mouth. His synapses fire almost as fast as his lips can form words, so it’s no stretch to assume that he’s coming down from recording Thirteen Songs From Urban Bohemia, the Dandies’ newest, lushest and most mature work to date. Think ringing harmonies layered over fuzzy guitars, punctuated with smart-ass lyrics, and you’ve got a good idea of what the band has been doing for the past year.

But don’t let the “M” word fool you. Courtney’s about as likely to buckle down to normalcy as Wittgenstein is to rise from the dead. Hell, you can even get a glimpse of his, um, irrepressible tallywacker in the Web version of their “Bohemian Like You” video. When I spoke with him recently, he was all about copulation, chemicals and charisma, but not necessarily in that order. Courtney Taylor-Taylor: “I’m with my gonzo attorney and he’s taking me to this hippy fair in Portland because he swears there’ll be girls who are on E and scantily clad. Right now I’m the burning man and getting verily, wasted-ass drunk. We’re listening to [The Beatles’] Let It Be and expounding on the fact that Phil Spector should have kept away from the string section. Have you heard the versions of those songs without strings? He completely ruined them.”

(Let It Be: an in-between record that means something to anyone who’s ever felt outside time. Not quite here and not quite there. Phil Spector: famous rock guru known for control-freak behavior and the creation of the “wall of sound” style of production. Worked with The Ramones, imbuing the very same record I heard the first time I let a boy work his hand down my pants with equal parts volume and spit. From that point forward, Spector and the smell of boy are forever linked in my brain. Music is indelible like that.)

“WHERE THE FUCK DID I LEAVE MY CAR?”
Your new record opens with a song called “Godless,” and has references to most of the world’s major religions—Mohammed, karma, etc. Is that something that’s always been there for you?
C T-T: “You know, I had no idea. Originally, the first three songs on the record were the last three songs, and then Brent [DeBoer, drummer] suggested that we move them to the front. I guess I didn’t notice that, because when you refer to a song over months and months of playing it, the words lose their meaning. Holy shit, that’s funny and really over the top that I didn’t notice that. Especially since I spend way too much of my time reading Wittgenstein and discussing Kant and Sartre and Camus and just generally philosophizing too much.”

Do you have a particular sort of spirituality or philosophy you lean towards?
C T-T: “My own personal philosophy revolves around the world’s most important question, and I don’t mean ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Mine is ‘Where the fuck did I leave my car?’ No, seriously, that’s an important one in life, because it creates a domino effect of personal pain and hell. It’s about as heavy as it can be. The rest of them are all small thinkers.”

(Small thinkers: people who dream with their eyes wrapped around that very next fix. I wonder how far the singer’s mind could reach if we splayed all of his thoughts out end to end. Probably at least as far as it is from there to here, or at least far enough so that we’d forget where we were going and just enjoy the trip.)

EXACT MOMENTS OF LIFE
What was the primary motivation for the new songs? Is there any one pervading thing?
C T-T: “It was a bunch of moments of my life strung together. ‘Godless’ was...well, every year and a half I have a year-long relationship that then gets fucked up because I get lied to and then drug through the mud. I was mixing the song in New York and she dumped me for a guy in a bigger band. Even though she kept saying that she just needed to be alone, my friends kept seeing her out with this fuck, and I felt like I was in Groundhog Day, like this endless loop of doing the same thing over and over. And she was godless. ‘Mohammed’ is maybe six months later, and you’re feeling a little better but kind of testy, and every day you wonder if you know how to have a good time or if life just makes things hard for you. They’re all like that. All of the songs on the record are different, exact moments of life for me or my friends.”

(Songs: forces of alchemy that turn time into something that glitters for five or so minutes. But if all his moments get frozen like this, forever immortalized, does it alter what really happened? I’ll probably never know. Once I had an idea for song, but then I got hungry and ate a sandwich instead.)

COPULATION: WHEREVER, WHENEVER
I guess you recorded Thirteen Songs From Urban Bohemia in a gay bathhouse. What drew you to that space?
C T-T: “It wasn’t really a gay bathhouse, it was more like a men’s gym on the ’70s. It had a sauna and a couple of showers and I’m sure a lot of ass was fucked in there.”
Yay!
C T-T: “(laughing) Yay! Ass fucking! We recorded there because it was cheap and had nine different-sized cedar rooms and a bathroom with a toilet. We got those textures [on the record] because you could move the mike anywhere you wanted and get the tone of the cello warmer or more brittle or whatever. Most of the songs were recorded in a 12x15x15 cedar cube with Oriental rugs on the floor. We just moved in and rented/borrowed/stole all the gear and spent our budget on tons of cigarettes, alcohol and chemicals. All our friends came down and smoked all of our cigarettes and drank all our beer. We were living life and recording was a by-product of that.”

(Life: somebody said that’s what happens while you’re busy making other plans. But not if you’re on “Survivor.” If you had to only hear one sound for the rest of your life, what would it be? Ditto for hairstyles, movies, books, clothing. How can anyone make a decision like that? Time moves on, baby! Get on your pony and ride.)

AND SPEAKING OF CHEMICALS...
You guys have a reputation for being an up-all-night party band. Do you ever get sick of everyone being around all the time? I listen to “Sleep” and can’t help but think that that’s someone who needs some time alone.
C T-T: “That’s only the press’s reputation, because apparently they need to write this in order to impress other writers. It’s who we are and it’s not important. The people who come to our shows know what the fuck’s going on. They don’t shout for ‘Junkie,’ more like ‘Green.’ They want that level of intimacy and so do we. If we can get the 20 people in front to chill out because they want to jump on each other’s heads, we can play. Me, Zia [bassist McCabe] and Peter [guitarist Holmstrom] constantly have one foot on the monitor to push their little heads down when they come oozing onto the stage. And we’re balancing on one foot and working pedals and trying to push their little heads down. It’s pretty stupid.”
It sounds like you want to connect, but in another way.
C T-T: “Sometimes when we were recording, I would feel like I wasn’t connecting with people and go lay in the futon room. I’d take the tube mike and the bullet mike and put them together, then get some headphones and go in there and write lyrics until I could get in the right headspace to say what I really meant. The record has a lot of croaked first takes on it because of that. I believe you should really live in the space you record in, if you want to make records and get from it what you need for the rest of your life.”

(The rest of your life: the atoms of time that are not now. Then is memory, now is fleeting, then gone. Tomorrow is potential. Now that we’ve got that straight, what are we gonna do with it?)

What ends up inspiring you these days?
C T-T: “If you really just had to hear only one song for the rest of your life, I’ll tell you what it should be: ‘Lay Lady Lay,’ from Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Have you listened to that recently? It’s something utterly other. The greatest music I’ve ever heard. And it hurts because it’s just so pure and fucked up and dripping with everything.”
You’ve been very successful in the UK. Why do you think that is?
C T-T: “We sell about the same number of records there as we do here, but it’s a smaller place, so I guess it seems like more. Also, they still think about The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. They like that shit—all the crunchy guitar tones and harmonies. Now what’s big? Slipknot? Some sort of competitive angst for 14-year-old boys who hate their parents? That’s not very sexy. Over there they’ve kept their sexuality very repressed, and here it’s cheapened. We think that fake tits and enlarged cocks are sexy, apparently. Is that the head-trip that America’s on today? With no elegance or sensuality? Do these kids get laid? I guess there’re more date-rapers going to gigs than ever before. It’s sad, you know? I never meant to be a VH1 generation fan, but for god’s sake, who the hell is into that anymore?
Are you looking forward to your very own “Behind The Music”?
C T-T: “It just depends on how it’s done, I guess. God, that girl is beautiful (hanging out the window): I love you. Will you marry me? I’ve got to stop hanging out with my guy friends. I mean, how much pool and beer can you get going?”

(Pool and beer: time-honored male substitutes for intimate congress, cloaking the real intentions behind sex, which everyone knows are power, prestige and the gaping hole of human need. Female equivalents include analyzing each word and glance until they are leeched of meaning. Humans need music because, basically, we can’t talk to each other.)

CHARISMA: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE HARMONIES
Is it Bonerville in that car right now or what?
C T-T: (laughing) “Pretty much.”
Have you guys got any new plans for releasing The Black Album?
C T-T: “Oh yeah, I keep meaning to get in there. I need to do a ‘Good Morning’ harmony and I think Brent’s got an amazing one. Maybe I could edit down ‘The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald,’ but I’ll have to ask Brent what he thinks. He’s an amazing producer in his own right and he hasn’t had a crack at it. But all we need to do is basically go in and lay some thick harmonies on it. It’s pretty cool record; I can’t believe I thought it was worthless.”
If you really did have a door in the back of your head, where would it lead?
C T-T: (laughing) “Just out onto the street and into the gutter, so it could dump out all the crap so I can just feel solid again. That was for my friend Ed, who shook if he didn’t start drinking when he got up in the morning. His girlfriend of four years dumped him and married some successful fuck. It’s horrible, but it happens. He had a great life, but he didn’t appreciate it, so that one’s for Ed. I thought I’d write a happy song for him.”