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Column: Feature Story
The Theater Fire: More Songs About Dying and Sex
Austin, Texas gets all the glory for musicians that make adventurous music without regard to commercial success, but a trip up to Fort Worth might be worth your time if you’re fond of free-thinking musical mavericks. That’s where you’ll find the boys in the Theater Fire laying down a funky groove that combines pop, rock, folk, zydeco, bluegrass, mariachi, gospel, R&B, and old-time, moustache-twirling vaudeville tunes.
Matter and Light, the Theater Fire’s third album, opens with “Beatrice (Dirge)”, a short, puzzling instrumental that blends Celtic mandolin and country style piano, letting you know you’re in for something out of the ordinary. The album lives up to its overture with tunes arranged for cello, bowed guitar, found percussion, Tex-Mex accordion, dissonant horns, and funeral drum beats.
“Ornette Coleman, the free jazz sax player, grew up and developed his harmelodic theories not far from where I live,” says Curtis Heath, one of the Theater Fire’s main songwriters. “There seems to be something progressive in the air that’s connected to our geographic identity.” He name-checks Bob Wills, Moon Mullican, and Townes Van Zandt as contributors to the city’s irrepressible musical atmosphere. Heath was born and raised in Forth Worth and grew up listing to his great grandfather play musical saw, which may account for his own predilection for surprising musical arrangements.
“My grandfather owned a country music club,” he continues. “Ray Price (who combined swing and honky tonk music) lived with us when I was a kid. At some point, I picked up a guitar.” Heath is mostly self-taught, although he did take lessons to learn how to read, write, play, and arrange western swing tunes. Despite growing up on country music and folk, Heath shunned roots music until he graduated from high school and met future bandmate Donald Feagin. “We met in our early 20s, just after we stopped rebelling against the country music and blues we heard growing up. We wanted to move to New York or California at first, then we realized that Bob Wills had everything you could ever want. You can be progressive without loosing your geographic identity. We realized we could do something new and stay true to where we come from after we stopped being embarrassed about our background.”
Wussy? What the Hell Kind of Sissy Name Is That?
Take their name literally at your own peril: America’s best rock band is signed to a record store and makes a living in stone masonry. The lead singers are in love. And they’ve been favorably touted by Rolling Stone, Spin, Blender, and Village Voice (plus, you know, Crawdaddy!). So why haven’t you heard of Wussy?
Crawdaddy!: Has it been detrimental or beneficial to be known as a band with a couple? Are you comfortable with lyrics skewed to be “about you?”
Lisa Walker: I think that people are always gonna read into a song what they put into it themselves, so I think whether or not you’re writing about your significant other or something from your past or maybe something a friend told you, I feel like, if it’s a good song, I feel good if people can get something from it. I don’t really mind how they interpret it, I just feel really good if something resonates and that people would care enough to wonder what it’s about.
Chuck Cleaver: People sometimes, I think, have a hard time separating fact from fiction too… when a novelist writes a work of fiction, I don’t think anybody ever questions that some of it, if not almost all of it, has nothing to do with his real life. Whereas some people think that songwriters specifically have to write about things that always happen to them and that’s not really necessarily true. I mean, yeah, we are in the songs, but at the same time, there might be incidents in that particular song that never happened between us. If it’s out there, we’re usually okay with it. [Laughs]
Crawdaddy!: How did you and Lisa first get together—musically—in the first place?
Cleaver: I had to sing a solo show, some kind of awards show, in Cincinnati. I’d been in a band previously [Ass Ponys] and they wanted me to sing… and I don’t do that a whole lot, so I was kind of weirded out, a little nervous. And [me and Lisa] knew each other vaguely, and she said, “Hey, have you ever thought about singing with anybody else?” and we gave it a try. It wasn’t really rehearsed. I wrote some words out on a napkin, she sang, and it was pretty immediate, I think, just like “Wow, I really like the way this sounds.” She’s just an amazing harmony singer… she could sing with anybody, really. Why she picked my caterwaul, I have no idea.
Crawdaddy!: Well, the contrast.
Walker: I love that.
Cleaver: So we were playing out, the two of us on our own. And we knew Mark, who could play just about any instrument.
Walker: So he picked the one he didn’t know how to play yet, to play with us.
Wayne Coyne: The Flaming Lips’ Freaky Frontman
I caught up with Wayne Coyne, mastermind behind the Flaming Lips, on the phone last week. Maybe it’s because he’d been trapped in his house during a snowstorm in Oklahoma City for five days by the time of our conversation, or more likely, that’s just the kind of ebullient personality he projects, but he was totally engaged and awesome to talk to. I could have sat on the phone with him for hours, but I didn’t want to presume that he didn’t have anything better to do than shoot the shit with me, because he most obviously does—even if he is trapped inside his house during a blizzard. It’s Coyne’s manic, unrestrained energy that’s been channeled into the Flaming Lips’ own brand of psychedelica, and it’s that trippy, musical theater that’s secured them the kind of enduring success not often seen in rock bands—especially one that’s still making new fans, scoring headlines, and garnering critical accolades nearly 30 years after their inception.
For a band of self-proclaimed freaks, it’s their frontman—the wise and whimsical Wayne Coyne—that leads the Flaming Lips’ charge into fearless, uncharted territory, unassumingly inspiring a legion of followers through his actions on the stage, in the way he lives his life, and the passion with which he nurtures his artistry. A man unafraid to strip down to confront his staunch individuality and expose himself, here he is, from his mouth to the page: The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne.
Crawdaddy!: Tell me about the first time you used the bubble to walk on the crowd?
Wayne Coyne: That was at Coachella in 2004, yeah. I practiced it in my front yard like, the day before we went out there, and I even rehearsed it backstage a little bit just to see if I was going to break anybody’s neck or anything by walking on top of them. It was hellish! I was scared that I was going to, ya know… not necessarily that I would get hurt but that I would fall into the crowd and suffocate, or I was going to hurt somebody, or the whole thing would go completely wrong, ya know? It was a significant moment of panic and fear… but I had fun… I didn’t care if it would have gone bad, I just thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to go for it.” And then we saw all the pictures in the paper the next day and everything; it came again as a great relief. Just like, “Cool! People liked it!” You don’t really know what people are going to think of it, they could think it’s a stupid gimmick or whatever. So yeah, it was a big moment.
Andrew Bird: Linguistic Whiz, Multi-Instrumentalist
Andrew Bird may not consider himself to be a man out of time, but his renaissance talents and fascination with music from 19th and early 20th century suggest otherwise.
In our fickle pop-culture world, we don’t run into many virtuosos these days. If you’ve ever seen Bird perform or heard one of his patented, orchestral pop songs, you know you’re in the presence of a master musician—whether he’s playing guitar, violin, glockenspiel, or just whistling. His background includes classical training for violin and a music scholarship at Northwestern University, as well as a late-’90s stint playing with the retro-swing band, Squirrel Nut Zippers.
Talkin’ And Listenin’ to the Reverend Horton Heat
In the pantheon of commercially successful psychobilly bands, the Reverend Horton Heat more or less stands alone. The dusty storm of country-flavored sounds they like to kick up has made its way to such notable mainstream fare as The Drew Carey Show, the Cartoon Network’s Johnny Bravo, and even a commercial for comfort food slingers Boston Market. Of course, if we’re going by TV appearances, I suppose legendary creep-rockers the Cramps outdid every hep cat in the game when they appeared on the original Beverly Hills 90210. Yes, it was a Halloween episode (natch).
Such anomalies aside, the Rev have basically ruled the roost since exploding onto the scene with 1990’s Smoke ’Em If You Got ‘Em. September of ’09 saw the release of the band’s 10th effort, Laughin’ and Cryin’ with the Reverend Horton Heat, a collection of honky-tonk throwback numbers leaning heavily on the humor. Genial entries like “Rural Point of View” and “Please Don’t Take the Baby to the Liquor Store” crack wise in a playful manner generally not seen since the heyday of Carl Perkins or Hank Williams. That’s not to say the Rev is stuck in the last century; the trio get their shots in at modern life, particularly in the extreme metal mockery “Death Metal Guys.”
Stardeath and White Dwarfs: An Oklahoma Success
Born in 1982, the year before the Flaming Lips formed, Dennis Coyne attended his first Lips show when he was eight months old. His dad’s younger brother, Wayne, is the group’s frontman after all, and Dennis has gone on to see them at every stage of their career. A few concerts stand out in particular, like the one that was also attended by Warner Bros. A&R reps in the early ’90s. “They poured a bunch of lighter fluid in this big symbol and lit it on fire,” Dennis remembers. “They were banging it so hard that it fell over and caught part of the stage on fire and lights were falling. It felt like everybody was about to die. I was about 10.”
But what really sold Dennis on his uncle’s band—and went a ways toward influencing the music he now crafts with his noise-pop band Stardeath and White Dwarfs—was a show he attended in 1999, just after The Soft Bulletin’s release. “It was the first time I’d seen them without a drummer, doing all that experimental stuff, not just being a traditional rock band. That’s what did it for me, because it just blew my mind. It was so loud, so crazy, and so good.”
Speaking before a recent Stardeath show at New York City’s Mercury Lounge, Dennis is energetic and warm, and possesses great quantities of middle-American charm. The 26-year-old singer/guitarist/keyboardist shares with Wayne a wiry build and a mane of long, unruly hair. He has big, blue eyes, teeth that have never seen braces, and wears a purple t-shirt that says, “You Can’t Roll a Joint on a Digital Download.” Unlike many show business newcomers who have benefitted from familial connections in the industry—it was a connection with the Lips that helped win Stardeath a deal with Warner Bros. Records—Dennis clearly delights in talking about his famous uncle, who has been enthusiastic about helping him realize his dreams. Stardeath regularly opens for the Lips, and the two acts have even recorded a cover of Madonna’s “Borderline” together.
Janis Ian: Tech Savvy Society’s Child at 58
“I predict that within the next two to three years everyone is going to go back to telephones,” says Janis Ian. Sound unlikely? That’s what people said when she launched a website and message board in 1992 and bet on music’s future at the dawn of the world wide web, too. Proving the skeptics wrong, Ian took more heat in 2003 when she came out in favor of file sharing, a view not generally shared by her contemporaries. And yet, as the decade closes, Ian, a self-managed artist, has found the totally wired life to be less than satisfying; though it’s great for her business, it’s not necessarily good for her art.
“This is my year of I Can’t Cope Anymore,” she says. “I don’t Twitter; I have a MySpace page that hasn’t been updated since 2008. I have a Facebook page, and I get a gazillion friend requests everyday. Why would I want to be friends with you? I don’t even know you!” Though Ian’s exasperation may sound like every boomer’s reaction to the interweb, she’s clearly no techno-phobe or old fogey; she’s simply a techie with a desire to unplug and, as an early adapter to online music and one of its biggest advocates, she’s allowed to vent. “I’ve always been interested in technology. I had a home IBM machine when they first came out. When I was 16, I did binary programming to earn extra money for awhile,” she explains. “I had been online really early—early enough that my AOL name is janisian. It was just obvious that this is where it was going. I mean, it was really obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me that we’d have iPods. I would never have dreamed about that. But it was obvious that this might be an amazing means of transportation and connection.”
The Moore Brothers: Sibling Revelry
When the Moore Brothers weave their voices together in one of the gleaming, harmonic lines that are the trademark of their music, time stops. Both young men have pure, high tenor voices and when they sing together, they produce something unique; a crystalline tone that’s chilling to experience. The old cliché is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that’s particularly true with brother acts—the Louvins, Osbornes, and Everlys being cases in point. When those countrified brothers sang, you could hear the individual voices playing with each other, rising, falling, and intertwining as they changed harmonic notes. The harmonies the Moore Brothers sing are just as complex, but their voices are so similar that they create something unique, producing the kind of overtones you get when striking a chord on a well-tuned instrument. The voices come together as a singular yet complex whole. The individual voices blend to generate an unfamiliar sonic space that seems to expand infinitely. With only two voices, you get the effect of a full choir bouncing its notes off of the echoing walls of an expansive, cathedral-like space. “We don’t actually think out the harmonies we’ll use on any given song,” says Greg Moore, the older sibling. “It’s done by trial and error. We may use something that sounds like a Beatles triad, but we don’t know what it’s called technically. I usually change an arrangement if it sounds too much like someone else. I don’t want people to be able to hear my influences.
“I have a four-track recorder I use for vocal arrangements, and we used that a lot making our new record. It’s the most thought-out thing we’ve ever done. We worked a long time on the demos. I have an idea of what a song should sound like when I’m writing, but until I demo it, I don’t know what will really work. I may go for the easy harmony at first, but if it’s too easy, I weird it up to make it stranger and more exciting for myself.”
How 2005 Musically Defined the Aughts
I am embarrassed to admit that my days as a newly minted, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, cliché-loving music journalist began not very long ago… in the middle of our current decade. I spent the later part of 2005 in a glorified closet jamming promotional recent-release CDs into envelopes bound for new subscribers to Magnet magazine. I had been writing humiliatingly gushy zine articles about local Philadelphia bands for a little while, and got the mother lode of burned demos out at shows every night, but my voluntary slave labor at Magnet was the first time I had ever had access to such a haul of new music that actually came from a distributor.
While I peeled self-adhesive envelope flaps and nursed my paper cuts, I would slap one disc after another into the sticker-covered Kmart CD player in the mailroom: Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, the New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema, Antony and the Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now, Nada Surf’s The Weight Is a Gift, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow. And when I asked the editors for recommendations, they handed me Alligator by the National and My Morning Jacket’s Z. My boyfriend at the time played the Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree so many times that, had it not been a totally awesome record, I might have killed him. I even lingered for 30 minutes in the Hitchcock section of the local independent video store because Eels’ Blinking Lights and Other Revelations was playing and I was transfixed. You couldn’t spit without hitting great independent music that year. read more
Feature Interview: J. From White Zombie: More Genial Than Human
by: James Greene Jr.
Crawdaddy!: You lived in Moscow as a kid. What was that like?
Jay Yuenger: [Laughs] Well, that’s a very rock ‘n’ roll question! I was in kindergarten at the time, so I only have the vaguest memories. My father was the Moscow bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. At the time, Russia was still heavily communist, so we lived in a building with all these foreign families. All my friends were kids of other newspaper people and embassy representatives. I do remember we had state-assigned servants who were believed to be reporting all our actions to the KGB.
Crawdaddy!: Weird. So what drew you to New Orleans?
Yuenger: It’s the most unique American city. There are only few truly unique cities left in this country. Sante Fe is one, Vegas is another, and then there’s New Orleans. It’s not really a part of the US. It’s its own country. Plus, it’s surrounded by music. You’ll literally look out your window and see a group kids going by playing trombones. It’s cool and old; you can have no money and live in a mansion. The downside is that it’s really crazy here, nothing works, everyone’s corrupt… so, you know.
Crawdaddy!: You once explained your “Silver Surfer” production style, wherein you envision the Silver Surfer breakdancing and try to imagine the music he’s dancing to. Do you have any other styles that involve superheroes dancing?
Yuenger: [Laughs] No, I have no other dancing hero styles of production. That particular record, that artist, Odoms, just always made me think of the Silver Surfer flying through the cosmos. You know, all those great, old 1960s Jack Kirby comics. And the Surfer eventually stops and finds a disco to get down in.
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by: James Greene Jr.
published: March 12, 2010
in column: Feature Story, What Goes On, interview
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