The Dandy Warhols Are The Rockmakers…
Renowned for their epic live performances, both sonically and visually, The Dandy Warhols are returning to Australia later this month! Australia hosts one of bands largest and most devoted fan bases in the world, a relationship built upon since their inaugural tour back in 1998. With over a quarter of a billion streams across ten studio albums, six EPs, and twenty seven singles to date, The Dandy Warhols are one of the most fundamental and influential rock acts of the 21st century.
Melding psych-rock, power pop, and synth pop with a satirical, pop-art sensibility, The Dandy Warhols are as unique as they are pioneering. With a string of hits ingrained in pop culture including; Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth, Bohemian Like You, We Used To Be Friends and more, they ruled the last years of the 90’s and were often cited as America’s answer to Brit Pop. And their witty critique of hipster culture is still as relevant as ever! Also, with new album Rockmaker in the kit bag this tour is shaping up to be an awesome one. Courtney Taylor-Taylor talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour and their new album.
Congratulations on the album, you have to be stoked with it?
Yeah, love Adelaide, very happy very pleased with it. I listen to it probably once a day at least. God, it’s just fucking amazing. I mean, it’s cool and all, if you get them in the right order it really helps, but thank God the record is so good. I can’t stop listening to it. So, if you have enough time to devote to chiselling away and moving them around until you come up with that order that feels like a natural human experience like breathing in and breathing out.
As these songs were starting to take shape, did you know at that point you had an awesome album, or did that come later?
Well, you start with an idea, a guitar riff. They all started with a metal riff. Every one of them. That was the whole point of the record, was to just make them then they go in their different directions. So, at some point, you end up with like three tracks that you’re like, oh my God. Then you’ve got like four other tracks that you’re just starting on, maybe went down this metal Gary Numan thing and just went, no, two hipster, sucks! I fucking hate it. I can’t listen to it. If this was ten years ago, I’d be like, yeah, this is awesome, but I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to hear that shit right now. They build like this, then this one over here, you’d walk in and Fathead, one of our engineers, just spent four hours on it last night, and it’s unbelievable. Now that’s the best song. You just do that until working on them more becomes reductive and it’s no longer as awesome and you go, which one was the best one? Then you go back there and then you live with it and it’s quite a journey. That’s why it takes us three or four years between records.
Was it clear to you in terms of what you actually wanted to do with what would be a Rockmaker?
No, I started experimenting with this most fucked up guitar possible. Several years back we put out a song between records called Thick Girls Knock Me Out and that was kind of when I decided that our next record, I would like us to just really go in and study in metal. My explanation was if you are around in 1970 or whenever T-Rex came out, that was some outrageously metal guitar sound that was a really super ripping, fuzzed out experience, but he didn’t sing like some operatic silly man or anything like that. He was a very cool vocalist over that. I tried explaining this to the band and it took a couple.
I had to work on a couple and then Covid hit. I had nothing else to do but be in the studio. I had to get a couple pretty far down the road. Then Pete was like, oh, oh, right and then almost every song after that has started with a Pete guitar riff. He would just come down and go, I got a new one, and we all have studios in our basement, so that’s kind of where things start, is in the basement. Then you take it in and you bring it into a computer, load it into the studio computer, and then you’ve got access to all the vintage gear and modern plugins, just a bigger rig and a huge amount of shit, I’ve been collecting recording equipment for thirty years now.
Our processes are fairly random because we own a studio, some things have been lingering and lurking in the old hard drives and they get pulled into a new one, and then you’re like that was eighteen years ago that we recorded that, or whatever the riff, the riff for I’d Like To Help You With Your Problem for that song, that riff was my roommate, I was a drummer and he was a bass player in 1990, and he came up with that rift then, and I’ve been playing it since then and finally put it into a song, made it, wrote a song around it. That is a riff from the original grunge part of the world, the epicentre of grunge, you know, the Pacific Northwest. We were playing up there all the time, and you know we were friends with all the scene. We knew all the cats from Green River and Mother Love Bone, and that was a really authentic first-generation rip.
Were there any other specific influences for the album?
Well, they all kind of went somewhere, you know, Danzig With Myself started with this Danzig Four sludge industrial feel and ended up going Pixies-ish and that’s why we got Frank Black on it. It just seemed like, oh my God, we got to do this. We’re never going to make a Pixies, a blatantly Pixies ish song again. Like the one with Debbie Harry, that could have gone like the band Sleep, it could have gone very Sleep, but that ended up going very Nick Cave. They all just kind of go wherever you lay stuff down and then you go that makes it cooler, that part makes it less cool. That makes it more exciting to listening, more engaging psychically, emotionally, sexually, whatever, you know, the balance of all that all that stuff.
The Cross was really great because there’s something very crowd Goth Club about it. I mean, it’s definitely like a goth club banger and that’s where it wanted to go. Interestingly, Root Of All Evil started as a kind of Yardbirdsy, you know, Beck and Page and Relf era Yardbirds thing, but I liked it when once it had that super fuzz tone on it, it just seemed more like it wanted to be funk. Like when Sly and the Family Stone started using super heavy metal guitar, I love that sound. We kind of went down that rabbit hole, it was a great experience, something to do to, that that we had to do, we felt we must do, and we had nothing else to do for a year and a half during Covid.
Did collaborators such as Slash, Deborah Harry and Frank Black, work remotely and send their parts in?
Yeah, exactly. You have your manager send a mix to their manager and say, Hey, do you want to play on this? Do you want to sing on this? With Slash it’s like what are you thinking? I just emailed them back and said, Vietnam Vet, LSD Rock, Wawa Pedal, you know, shit like that and it’s, fuck, you know, every single one of them blew our minds. I’d Like To Help You With Your Problem, the Viking Rock whale is James Mercer from The Shins. That was cool because we were just on a wine bender. I think we started at lunch, you know, and it was probably midnight by the time we got to that and I was like, you got to do this, man. You got the voice. I don’t have that kind of, you know, and you just use really good artists that you’re friends with or acquaintance with, or have met before and think, maybe they might like this and they’d be perfect for it. You get the people that have skills that you don’t have, neither Peter nor I can do that acid rock thing, we’re not those kind of guitar players, we’re noodly inventive and we’re like new wave guitar players or something. God, you send that out, it’s a Hail Mary, it’s not like you know they’re going to do it or anything, so you got to a knot in your stomach sometimes for weeks while waiting for a reply, hoping, they’ll do it and all of them, the shit showed up and it was like way beyond what we thought it was going to be or were capable of imagining it would do to the experience of presenting the song.
What was it like for you the first time that you, played the finished album start to end through your headphones? Did it literally blow your mind?
Yeah, I mean, everything was blowing my mind, but the process is so long and slow because we have eleven songs on it or something, right? So, what happens when you’ve got eight of them on it and they’re fucking amazing and you still have three that just don’t work and you just can’t make it work. You try and shit, and you try and shit, then finally you get them, and then you got to work on the order and you know, you like this and that and that, and that, and that, and that order. It used to start with The Cross and then go into Root Of All Evil. I think that that little passage of songs is still the same. That used to be the beginning of the record and now it’s the beginning of side two, the other ones were jumbled mixed and around and it just ended up, the Doomsday Bells it’s so clear and so concise and it’s so easy. It’s like a Doctor Dre, it’s like The Chronic or Dre 2000 or something. It’s like something he would’ve done back then. It just seemed like the most perfect stunner as an opening song and then you got to find what comes after that naturally. What does that song flatter? You want every song to flatter and set up the song that comes next. If you fuck that up, then you don’t have one of those records where you just put it on and Oh my God everything is either slightly different or exactly radically what you want to just be woken up, dropped into, or whatever.
That takes a long time too, right now, like months and months after it’s been finished I had the song with Slash Your Problem, remastered, and this dude just nailed it, man. I just said I wanted to bring out the dubbyness in it more, and I want it to bounce and I don’t want the high guitars screaming in front, like nineties radio, hair metal bands or anything, you know, hair grunge or whatever the appropriate name for that kind of era was, guitars were so brittle and it was kind of doing that. The dude remastered it and it became buzzed out instead of shredded and shred. It became fuzzed out and it was like, oh, the groove is so perfectly laid bare and guitar is really wide. Once that happened, everything was just easy and fucking perfect, man. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve been listening to it at least once a day and sometimes I just got to go do it again. It’s just so satisfying to just put it on and just let the whole thing rip.
Were there any tough choices in terms of which songs to potentially leave off if you had a couple of leftovers?
We never do that. No, we’re not prolific enough writers or anything to leave them off. If they’re not good enough to be on the record, then it’s not done yet. Every song is going to be great if you get it right in the studio.
With the Australian Tour in mind, are you looking to play the majority of the album and maybe play for three or four hours?
Oh, I know we used to do that when Monkey House came out. We would just play for over three hours, but no we’ll do about hour and a half. It’s standard feature length film. Yeah, we’ll probably do three or four off the any record, we’ve just got so much fucking music now that it is very, very difficult to make a set list.
Do you all have different favourites which makes it harder?
Exactly! Yep! That’s it. It is like, no, no, I have to play this. I have to like, okay, alright, okay. Sometimes you want to play something, you sneak one off and hope nobody notices because maybe it hasn’t been working for you for a year and a half or something. The tour set list is a biatch.
Are you stoked with the response for the Australian tour including two sold out shows in Adelaide?
It’s awesome. It’s really awesome because last time when we were down there, we were with the Hoodoo Gurus and we were staying right there on the old market and that was one of the greatest experiences ever, I’ve ever had in Australia. That culture that’s down there and the food and the restaurants and the people and the vibe, Adelaide is definitely my favourite Australian city now. I can’t believe we get to do a couple days there. I wish they were both in a row. I think they’re spread out, right? Because we couldn’t get the availability for the next night. I would love to just go spend a week just in Adelaide and go hit the wine country. We went out to the original Penfolds in that restaurant up there, we must have tasted forty things, thirty maybe, food and wine pairings and oh my God. It’s just great. Adelaide has really got a lot. It’s a real hidden gem.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Tickets for The Dandy Warhols Australian tour are sold out just about everywhere, more information at SBM Presents…
