Behold! It’s floppy, it’s flexi, it’s free to anyone who wants to wander in to our Gories / Spits / Oh Sees / Kid Congo / Cheap Time / Total Slacker show tonight at Emo’s in Austin and it’s got two-minutes-and-then-some of thee mighty Reigning Sound playing live at Alex’s Bar in your very own Long Beach, California!

Can’t make it? Don’t worry—we will be mailing these to all subscribers and seeding them around select L.A. locations for free, and you can get them from In The Red Records, too! Wanna subscribe? Click here! Flexis for everyone … while they last!

The all-powerful Reigning Sound roared out of Memphis with the realest soulful rock ‘n’ roll since the Flamin Groovies, the Real Kids and Esquerita all ruled the earth together. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Greg Cartwright makes ‘em scream, shriek, cry and weep and he visits California far too seldom, so don’t miss these shows at Alex’s Bar this weekend! (With the Strange Boys opening!? How will we ever go back to normal?) Win tickets here, and then read this interview by Chris Ziegler.

Your dad was a record collector—was record collecting your destiny?
It was a leg up! Having a parent who’s a music fan and a record collector can really point you in the right direction—it gets you to listen to a lot of different stuff early on, so you can decide what it is you like. Not everything my dad liked was something I liked, but I heard it all. And some things really helped me define the way I wanted to write. The genre doesn’t matter. You’re looking for the songs, and the artist who can deliver the good songs. Maybe the lyrics do it, or there’s an incredible hook and the lyrics are just total bubblegum. It’s gotta be aces in one of those departments.
You’ve spoken about the pre-Internet era, when you’d find a record by Andre Williams in a bucket at a flea market and have absolutely no idea who Andre Williams was and how his record got there—but that was the fun of it.
That was so great! When I first started collecting—I guess I am a collector, but I don’t think of myself as a record collector. It’s more from a practical framework. I buy them because I like to listen to them! I tend to think of record collectors as people who need a stone mint copy wrapped in plastic, and it goes on the shelf. And they want it to stay pristine til they die! They’re not gonna play it. I understand that, but it’s a different thing to me. The beauty for me is finding something I’ve never heard before, and I put it on and it’s amazing and I want to play it til the grooves are gone.
Where’s the most unexpected place you found a record you love?
I went to this restaurant supply place when I was working in Memphis—they had cooking gear and all kinds of accoutrements for kitchen workers, and at the counter was a little box with ten singles with a Doug Stone 45 and two Charlie Feathers 45s. It was bizarre! But when I lived in Memphis, those things happened surprisingly often. Those records were there! There’d been so many of them, and so many never left town, so they’d show up in the most bizarre places. I was spoiled growing up there. My wife teases me jokingly that I’m some kind of savant. I can only focus on a couple things, records being one of them. I can remember the numbers etched in the dead wax, but I can’t remember to wash the clothes!
Looking back at your time in the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers, you said you were always ‘serious about making good art.’ What makes a band like Oblivians art?
Art is like a dirty word in rock, but it’s one of those things people take out of context. They think of art as being something pretentious. But it doesn’t have to be! If you define ‘art’ that way, you’re not looking at it the way I look at it. Art transcends reality—it allows you to look at things in a whole new way and be enlightened and maybe have some kind of epiphany. To me, that’s the motivation to make art—to have those experiences. I’m not pretentious, but even rock ‘n’ roll—even the dumbest boneheaded punk rock song, if it transcends just three chords and speaks to you and blows your mind … that’s art! That’s more than just what the other bands are doing. It’s heads above! Like a good two-and-a-half-minute pop song—listen to the radio and you’ll hear a million bad ones! Creating one that’s something more than it just seems to be on the surface is not easy, and the people who can accomplish it are craftsmen. I don’t care if they’re like illiterate or … it doesn’t matter! You’re a craftsman or a shaman or something if you can transform something into something more than just the bones of what it is!
How did you learn how to do that?
Trial and error. Watching other people. Seeing a lot of rock bands when I was young. I saw bands who were good and some who were bad and some that defied both! I saw Tav Falco and it was a terrible mess, and at the same time it was enlightening! I think that’s what we all want.
Why is it better to be interesting than perfect?
Character is the most important thing. The world has plenty of pitch-perfect singers and whizbang guitar platers. But the other thing can’t be learned, and that’s what makes it special. I don’t know why that is and I don’t know what brings people to … the truth? The way you were brought up? Your experience in life? How one thing leads to another?
What’s it like when you write for someone else—like Mary Weiss? When you have to step out of yourself?
With a person like Mary—you know their music before you know them. She’s a legendary figure in rock ‘n’ roll. I knew her voice and I knew the songs, and all that spoke to me before I knew her personally. People change over time, too. You can’t jump to conclusions with Mary, like try and sit down to knock out songs about teenage love affairs. Mary Weiss is not a teenager anymore! That fifteen-year-old melodrama is what makes the Shangri-Las so fantastic, but you can’t just look for that one piece. You gotta examine who the person is now.
Where did the songs on the new EP come from? Is this like Return to The Home For Orphans? There’s a re-done Tip-Tops song I spotted.
Five of the songs we cut recently with Dan Auerbach in Nashville. Three of them are earlier outtakes—‘Watching My Baby,’ ‘Lyin’ Girl’ … I’ll probably use the five songs with Dan further down the road to make a full LP and ditch the other tracks, so I wanted to make them available to fans in kind of a limited form.
So there’s a new Reigning Sound LP on the horizon?
Absolutely!
What do you think of ‘garage rock’ becoming this kinda-powerful cultural thing? As presented by Scion?
I never saw it coming! I never would have guessed in a million years we’d be in the situation we are now. I’m not judging—I just try and navigate the situation. It’s definitely strange. In 1992 or whenever we made records, the Internet wasn’t what it was now, and the fact that commercial entities are starting to see value in kinda odd little subcultures like garage music … in some ways it’s perplexing, but in other ways it’s kind of smart!
Greg Shaw wrote about this in an old Bomp!—wondering what would happen if people could access a bottomless database of good music instantly, and find out everything about anyone as soon as they heard a name.
Like everything else, there’s positives and negatives. The good things—people get any music they want, anytime and anywhere. On their phone! That’s great because people get turned on to really amazing things at the speed of light. But you don’t have the thrill of the chase and the hunt anymore. You don’t have to spend Saturday morning at some fuckign flea market at 7 AM looking for a record some crusty old guy told you about. You miss out on that experience! But you do get overwhelmed now—I think sometimes it’s hard for kids to distinguish what is truly great from what is merely mediocre but sounds mildly like something they like. It’s harder to make the call when you’re so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of music.
When you did the very first Reigning Sound 7”, you said you wanted to make sure you didn’t give your fans exactly what they wanted. Why?
I do believe that—never give people exactly what they want! People want a donut! They want something sugary to satisfy them instantaneously! They don’t wanna have to listen hard, and especially in this modern culture they don’t wanna do the legwork. If you just make what people want, there’s a catch. If you don’t, they’re like, ‘Ah, man—he’s not making what he used to make!’ But if you bow to that and do the same record you made ten years ago, then they’re like, ‘Ah, man—this guy’s like a broken record! He keeps making the same fucking thing!’ That way lies madness! You just have to please yourself!

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Download: Mark Sultan “Misery’s Upon Us”

You know Mark Sultan from his work with the King Khan & BBQ show, but he also has two new solo albums and a new 7″, and is about to embark on a June tour that will take him to L.A.’s Blue Star Bar Friday. (Last day to win tix here!) He speaks now about In the Red Records, excrement, and so much more. This interview by Lainna Fader.

You’ve said that 2010 was a continuation of bad shit from the previous year and that you can’t see things getting any better any time soon. How are you doing in 2011?
I’m pretty … I say things, and I can be pretty dramatic sometimes. I don’t really mean it on a broad level. I mean, it was a pretty bad year, as far as—I don’t know, the last few years have been really bad for non-musical, non-career—God, I hate using that word—kind of reasons, more on the personal level, with love and friendships and life and it’s weird, getting to realize how things have changed. And I guess it carried over in these interviews.  Unfortunately, I’m an honest person, and sometimes I let things get to me and I say what’s on my mind. I do think, as I get older, year after year, I’m kind of content with everything that happens but I sometimes let things get a hold of me and I puke it up and say it and maybe I shouldn’t. That’s just me being stupid. Yes, I don’t think this year’s going to be worse—I think it’s going to be better. I’m more positive this year.
I’ve read that you’re not really a fan of record labels—why are you working with In the Red these days? What do they do differently than most labels?
I’m friends with Larry Hardy—and that’s one thing, I consider him, beyond In The Red, a friend, first and foremost, and that changes the dynamic right away.  Working with a small label—and I’ve talked to Larry forever, he’s this wise guy, he’s from a DIY background and a punk background and I relate to a lot of his taste and what he’s done and I appreciate someone who’s done something on their own—does what they want, and just goes for it and does their shit and doesn’t compromise anything. I just like how he runs his label and how he treats me anyways and the bands I’ve been in. I’m just comfortable dealing with him as a person because I know him as a person and I know where he’s coming from. I look at In the Red less as a label and more as an extension of my musical family so that’s why it’s a lot easier dealing with them.
You’ve said Greg Shaw of Bomp dug your music for the right reasons—what are the right reasons?
He was just telling me about my music and the reasons he liked it and the stuff he was citing, the words he was using to describe the music, the kind of imagery, as limited as it was, was exactly where I was coming from. And I knew that he was a very knowledgeable person when it came to rock n roll and he saw through everything I was doing and knew where I was coming from. I don’t know—the problem is, I don’t think I’m doing anything special in a way. I think I’m doing, in my own head, or, you know, I think it’s simple music that I would think that the influences are pretty obvious and the things that I like would come out pretty obviously but I don’t think that a lot of people—I just think, as I get older, I realize that people obviously like a million different things and it’s great because that’s the way things go but I also think that people who are purportedly rock n roll fans, for example, sometimes they’re fans for different reasons than I am.  Might not know exactly where I’m coming from because they’re stuck on one thing or one image or one genre or whatever it is. I was just really stocked first only dealing with Greg on any level cuz I respected the guy a lot, been a fan of his label, but also I was so happy that he understood what I was doing, heard my influences right away, and he was stoked on it and so that was one of the few times in my life where I was really proud of what I was doing. That doesn’t happen very often.  Ha ha!
What do you think you could’ve learned from him?
Yeah, I mean, that’s the kind of person I’d love to just hang out with at their place with some wine and listen to stories and records. That’s what it’s about—learning stuff. I’ve always—the majority of my musical enjoyment and my experience with music and the love it’s given me and everything I’ve learned about it I’ve learned from somebody else, either first hand or through magazines or interviews or whatever. I owe everything to everybody else. So somebody that knowledgeable who was privy to so much of the history that I like firsthand would’ve been a really cool experience. But you know, that’s the way things go.
You’ve called yourself a terrible guitar player and said you want to stay that way—why?
I’m very very comfortable with my limited knowledge of guitar. It’s one instrument that—I could probably get accused of wanking with my voice, and that in itself, that bothers me, because I’m just trying to emote, as much as I can, through my voice. But I understand that. But I think the worst culprit is a wanky guitar. It’s like 1000 cocks jerking off in your face at once. I think it’s one of the rudest things in the world! If you can play really well, that’s awesome too, but the idea of me practicing so hard to master something so phallic—I’m just not into it. And I just like staying simple because it compliments the music I’m trying to get across. Any musician I don’t think—or maybe some do, some that play piano, a composer probably can moreso, put out what’s in his head into people’s ears—I don’t think that a lot of people really can. But I’m happiest with a really primitive, simple guitar sound and let the vocals be the melody that carries everything to an extent. That’s more important to me. I admire people that can play really well but I just can’t do it and I’m too lazy to learn. I guess that’s what it comes down to.
You’ve said you write books about the vulgarity of existence.
Well I did a lot in my past, but lately I haven’t really had time to continue on with them unfortunately.  I hope to take a break in the future and finish at least one of them. I really like writing, painting and writing and all that kind of shit. Cooking. Whatever
What’s the most vulgar thing you’ve ever witnessed?
Oh, man. You know, I used to be really bad. I probably was a living stereotype. Some snotty kid that was—I don’t know. I’m not really like that anymore. I don’t really touch upon it anymore. But at the same time, somebody showed me a—I could look at anything and find it revolting. Like angles and weird shadows really bother me sometimes. Visually, there are certain little things that make me wanna puke. Moreso than an attitude or a person cuz I think that’s all fake. Things that are real to me are angles and shit. Shapes. Shadows. I don’t think people are real. They don’t disgust me as much.
You don’t think people are real?
I don’t think I’m real. I don’t think anything is really real. Unless you met some feral kid in the woods, maybe they’d be real. I don’t know.
And you’ve said you don’t believe that time exists—have you ever felt your were sneezing for 6 hours straight?
I understand the concept of it and the measurement it’s supposed to be but I don’t think it exists and I don’t believe in it. I know I’ve felt sometimes—like everybody—you’re sitting down doing something and it feels like three hours but must’ve only been like ten minutes. I don’t know. I just—I can’t really answer your question, I just don’t believe in it.
How does not believing in time affect your creative process?
People say, ‘Woah, you tour a lot’ or ‘You write a lot of music’ but I don’t think I do. In fact, I seem to have a lot of downtime and I find myself to be really lazy a lot of the time. It’s frustrating. I don’t believe in that shit. I don’t think so. I think I’m just fucking retarded.
In an old interview, you were asked what fans could expect of your show, and you said they can expect to “wipe your brain with their ass.” What happens when you wipe your brain with your ass?
Ha ha ha! I guess you get some dirty thoughts and some stinky memories! I don’t know what I was trying to say. Ha ha ha! I’m pretty—I guess, especially now, last time I came to L.A., it was a while since I’d played on my own, with my one-person thing. I mean I’ve recorded a lot of stuff and done all that but now, in the last year or so, I like to fuck around with people. I’ll make up songs on the spot and go faster and slow it down and stop something mid stream. I like fucking around. I think the concept of rock n roll show—like, ‘Okay, the next song is about a lake made of chocolate’ is lame. I like doing whatever the fuck I wanna do and hopefully people’s thoughts will turn into excrement and we can all slide in it. Have a little party in it.
What’d you do to get blacklisted at clubs across Montreal in the Spaceshits?
I don’t know, it was really weird. That band—me and King Khan and some of our friends—they were a lot younger and I guess at the time, there had always been a rock n roll scene in rock n roll but I guess we were young and brash and whatever and we really started—for fun—we were really into the band, super enthusiastic, and I worked at a record distributor and I’d send out stuff everywhere. To magazines, labels. We’d play all these shows and break lots of shit and we thought it was cool. Nobody was really at the shows—or the people at the shows were in our crowd and were just having fun. But then the moment we started getting label attention—international labels, being from Canada—it would really piss people off that young, seemingly idiotic kids, punk ass dudes, troublemakers were getting to tour but we worked our asses off—though we didn’t consider it work in the least. We’d send out stuff and we wanted our heroes to hear us and we made it a point to make everyone hear us. We knew what we wanted to do so we did but and I think a lot of the bands at the time were very concerned about what was trendy and didn’t really know what they were doing. Anyway, the point being, we started playing bigger shows and we pissed off a lot of the right—or wrong—people, depending on how you look at it. Our antics just led to ‘Okay, guess we won’t be playing here again.’ And that was fine. Because of that, we’d get on radio shows and do some nasty stuff to people but we thought it was fun and jokes. Punk stuff. And the bigger we got—which wasn’t very big at all—I got in a lot of trouble because I was working at this record distributor, and we had this big show, and people from the company came to the show. They were sitting in the balcony and lounging around with their fancy cigars or whatever the fuck these people do with their money. With a monacle and shit. You know. And we were playing, and somebody through a pillbox at me, and I threw it back. It broke on the mic stand. But then somebody got hit in the back row with a beer bottle and we found out years later that this guy we kind of knew personally went to jail and blah blah blah he actually was ‘punkin’ out’ with the beer bottle behind him and he smashed the beer bottle on the owner—or no, the guy who booked the show, or his girlfriend or something—and in the same five minute span, the drummer threw a drumstick and it hit my boss, the distributor boss guy, in the eye, and then it was like a gong show, a massive hook came out and dragged us off the stage. That was one of the biggest things. After that, people didn’t really wanna deal with us.  It didn’t really bother us. A lot of bands just focus on their city and we really wanted to travel. We got increasingly annoying and just did whatever the fuck we wanted. That’s how you get in trouble—people don’t like that!
Yeah, most people don’t appreciate beer bottles being smashed on their head…
Well, I understand that. But you know—and there’s been other incidents—that particular incident was not me, and I know that for a fact. A lot of things happened, stuff like a band trying to attack a whole nother band on stage, something like that. So pissed off that we were doing shit. Small community. Sometimes you don’t know what to do, you feel threatened. Whatever.
How does purging yourself of your possessions prepare your mind to work on projects? What does it do for your creativity?
I’ve always done that. No real point in doing it and it really doesn’t really do anything for my creativity. I hate shit. I hate things.
Why?
I don’t think they’re necessary. Yeah, I have records—I like those. But there’s been a few times in my life where my shit’s been stolen and I don’t whine about it. I think, ‘Well, hopefully someone’s enjoying that record.’ You know what I mean? Or my guitar—I like my guitar. I don’t know. I just think there are more important things. For instance,  memories. I’d rather not take pictures of stuff and not hold on to memories, just remember them, because I know they’re going to be completely wrong. I’d rather have that cartoonish memory—the real memory is probably super boring and not as fun. So I just get rid of shit. As far as creating shit, I don’t know. I like to create.  Whatever
If memories are what’s important, what happens when you start losing your memory? Are you worried about forgetting?
Ah, that probably will happen. If you lose your memory, a picture’s not going to bring it back to life. Your brain’s rotting. Yeah, I don’t really care. The only time I really feel bad about not having stuff is when people ask me, ‘Hey, can I get that single off whatever’—I don’t have that shit. That’s when I feel bad, cuz it means some kid that wants to hear my music doesn’t get to. But as far as pictures and postcards and letters go, I don’t give a shit.

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Download: Vivian Girls “When I’m Gone”

(from Everything Goes Wrong out now on In The Red)

Vivian Girls weathered a year of touring and Internet comments and took the photo for their new album cover on the day they almost broke up three times. Cassie Ramone speaks now before tour with New York City’s Beets. This interview by Vanessa Gonzalez.

You’ve been home for the whole summer after touring pretty non-stop. What was it like readjusting to home life?
Cassie Ramone (guitar/vocals): For me it was really good because at that point, touring had gotten to be so stressful and it wasn’t fun anymore after two and a half months. I feel like after the two months point we had kind of hit a second wind, but then right before we got home it was like, ‘Oh my God, we are all so tired.’ We had just spent way too much time with each other in a row. So for me, the beginning of being back home was great. Seeing all my other friends was wonderful and getting some space. But now we’re getting ready to go back out for two months again.
What does it feel like when you’ve hit that wall of it not being fun anymore?
For me it kind of feels like you’re a psychologist. You’re doing character studies on three different people. I kind of felt like I was analyzing Katy and Allie and Mark’s personalities to death, and it wasn’t fun, you know? Because you spend so much time with them, and all you do is talk to them, and then it’s like, ‘Let me figure out what these people are REALLY about.’ Even though that’s not what you WANT to think about, that’s what I end up thinking about—which isn’t fun for me because they’re my friends. I don’t want to spend that much time thinking about their inner workings, you know?
So you didn’t have the typical post-tour depression?
Maybe there was a tiny little element of that. Overall, we were all really happy to be home.
I always felt the same way coming back from tour. Just being able to open the fridge and make myself food or…
EXACTLY! Yeah, definitely. That’s one thing that I missed a lot, actually—being able to cook for myself. That really affected me. I love to cook.
The last album you had drawn the cover, and this one looks like a photograph. What’s the story behind it?
I also designed the cover for this record. It’s a photo that I took on tour. I took it from the car while the car was driving down the highway. It’s on I-10 in west Texas, right outside of Van Horn. I really liked that photo because there’s a V on the mountain. The V stands for Van Horn, but in this case it stands for Vivian, and there are three shrubs in the photo—like the three of us. Three lonely shrubs in a deserted wilderness trying to face a mountain of obstacles. I think that landscape really caught my interest because a lot of that drive is really post-apocalyptic, and a lot of it is really beautiful too. So I was taking a lot of pictures on that specific drive, but I don’t usually take pictures out the car window.
Do you remember what your mental state about tour was at that time?
That was on our first full U.S. tour. Frankie was still in the band. That was the day that we almost broke up three times! Yeah, that was a day that we all got into fights. Me and Frankie got into a fight, Frankie and Katy got into a fight, and then me and Katy got into a fight. That actually a really, really rough day. I remember we did our first full interview that day. We did it in the Subway—the restaurant—and that caused a big fight. It was so brutally hot, and I had just gotten out of the hospital because I had bronchitis or something. I spent the entire morning in the hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, and then we got out and everybody was in a bad mood. It was so hot and we’re driving through the middle of the desert—scorching heat. That was actually a really brutal day.
Did that day inspire the title of the album, ‘Everything Goes Wrong?’
No, the title of the album was actually taken from a song lyric. We were mixing the album in Costa Mesa and when we were mixing the song ‘When I’m Gone,’ one of the lines is ‘When everything goes wrong / will you sit around and miss me when I’m gone?’ We were mixing that song, so we were listening to it over and over and over and Ali just said, ‘Hey, why don’t we name the album “Everything Goes Wrong”?’And then me and Katy thought that that was a really good idea because we thought that that fit the theme of the album really well. Because the album is pretty… pretty dark… pretty apocalyptic… definitely not a happy album by any means, so we thought it made a lot of sense.
So you had the title before you picked the picture?
No, the picture was taken in 2008 and the…
No, I know you HAD the picture, but before you decided on using it had you already come up with the album’s title?
That’s actually a really good question. Working on the album cover was a really slow process. I was looking through all my old photos, and I scanned a bunch of stuff and then I was thinking about what to do for it. So I think the album cover may have been partially completed at that point, but it didn’t look like it does on the finished product.
That’s such a wonderful cosmic accident—the title and the day that the photo was taken… everything came together so perfectly. It all makes sense.
Totally. And I didn’t even think about—until just right now—about how bad that day was and how that photo was taken on like, the worst day ever. That is pretty cosmic.
Can we talk about the Stereogum interview where they say that you hate normal people?
The Stereogum interview wasn’t even for Stereogum—it was for uncensoredinterview.com, which I had never heard of before doing it. It was the kind of a thing where Daniel, our publicist, was like, ‘Hey, you have this thing to do. Get to this apartment by noon.’ And I was kind of in a bad mood because I didn’t really want to be there. But then we actually ended up having a really good time there because the man and the woman doing the interview were really nice. And then when we saw them we ended up thinking a few of the clips were really funny so we posted two of them on our blog. And they were sitting on the blog for like, two months. Nobody said anything about it. And then somebody tipped Stereogum off, and was like, ‘Hey, this is probably going to offend people. Why don’t you put this on your website?’ So they posted that one interview on the website and people just freaked out!
The interview tag says: ‘They Hate You For Not Choosing To Be In A Punk Band.’
I think it was completely out of control. I feel like if you are a part of a subculture—which we are and all of our friends are, and I assumed that pretty much everybody who had even heard about our band at that point was a part of this kind of subculture—it’s completely normal to make fun of quote/unquote, normal people every so often. It’s not like you hate them. It’s not like you think it’s stupid that they’re not in a punk band. It’s like, you know, you lead different lifestyles. And they probably make fun of you. You can make fun of them. It’s not a big deal, you know? It’s true that I think the punk community is a great thing to be a part of, and I would personally feel lost without it. I guess that might not be true for other people, but it’s something that is kind of my lifeline, you know? And at that point I think I kind of assumed that—I think I assumed that everybody who had even heard of our band would feel the same way. But then I guess I was wrong.
How did reading comments like, ‘they’re dead to me now’ make you feel?
It actually made me cry—like, multiple times. And it still frustrates me to this day because people treat that interview like it’s our mission statement when it’s just this stupid interview that we did one time in the context of a million other stupid interviews that were obviously not that serious. We were being completely ridiculous in all of them. So people treat that interview like it’s our mission statement, and like, what we’re all about, when we’re actually about so many other things… like, SO much more than that stupid interview. But that’s all people seem to focus on. I think at some point we were making fun of people that go to TGI Friday’s or something like that and then that got turned into us hating every single person with a job, and that turned into us hating working class joes. But it’s like quote/unquote working class joes aren’t the kind of people that eat at TGI Friday’s. It’s so ridiculous what the reaction to that was like. We weren’t even being serious in half of it.
I don’t want to dwell on emotional stuff necessarily, so we can skip this, but do you mind talking about what it was specifically about this that made you cry?
Yeah, it’s just that—I think I’m a pretty nice person, and I know that Katy and Ali are really good people too, and for people to hate us for something that we don’t even like, that we aren’t even passionate about… I feel like it’s really unfair. Because I’m the kind of person that will give anybody a chance and I think it’s just people wanting to take out feelings of jealousy or resentment on us for no reason and that turning into hatred. I don’t know… it’s a really childish answer but people being mean to me always affects me, even to this day.
Is this type of thing something that you are encountering more as your popularity grows—the side of humanity that tries to tear down what’s on top?
Definitely. I haven’t encountered very much of that in real life. Luckily in real life people are generally nicer to me than they ever were, but whenever I get into the habit of reading bad things on the internet I’m like, ‘Shit! People are brutal.’ So I try to avoid reading the Internet whenever possible.
The beach seems to have a strong influence upon you. Where does that come from? You didn’t grow up by the beach, did you?
Not so close to it. I grew up maybe four hours from the beach in New Jersey. My family was never that much of a beach family. They’re more of like… woods people. They like to hike. But every summer until I was eight, we went to Cape Cod for a week and that’s one of my favorite childhood memories. I don’t know—I think the beach is a really magical place. Whenever I’m there it’s just overwhelmingly… serene, you know what I mean? It fills me with this feeling that I don’t really feel any other time. I just think it’s like a really magical thing to be at the beach. Always. I’m also a Pisces, and it’s a water sign, so I guess that might also have something to do with it because I totally believe in astrology.
How strongly do you follow astrology?
I don’t follow day to day astrology so strongly because I feel like whenever I read daily horoscopes they conflict with one another, but I totally believe in the zodiac. And whenever I find out what sign one of my friends is, I feel like, ‘Oh, that makes a lot of sense.’ So I read a lot about the different signs, and what it means to be that sign.
You had said that the new album has a lot of darker themes in it. Why do you think that’s occurring when it would appear that things are going so positively for you guys?
Because even though the band’s career in 2008 seemed to be doing so well, a lot of things did go really badly for me—and us—in 2008. Like, I had this entire string of failed relationships, one bad one after another. One of my best friends died, and that was really hard for me. and everybody in our group of friends. It was a real tragedy. He was only 25. What else happened? The album also deals with the way gaining more success in your band strains relationships because that definitely happened a little bit last year. So that’s pretty much it. That’s most of what the album revolves around. Bad relationships, strains on relationships… I think the second album is way more universal than the second album. The first one was pretty much all love songs. It pretty much read like a diary. I think the second album reads more like a journey.
How does the band’s success strain relationships?
Before we ever gained any recognition, we were just three punk girls living in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and then when the band started taking off we had all these existing relationships that we thought were set in stone. When the band took off, dynamics changed. With that, relationships changed. That’s not to say that that’s happened a lot. But the few times that it has happened, it’s really affected us.
Is it the lack of time you can invest in the relationship, like you’re just doing more band stuff? Or does success change the interpersonal psychology within the relationship?
It more changes the interpersonal psychology. But the songs that deal with that aren’t that specific. It’s more vague.
How’s it been for you being in an all-girl band? Do you ever get disparaging or condescending comments in regards to your gender?
OH yeah! ALWAYS! And it’s funny because when the band started I never thought that we would get that. Because when it started we were in this community that on the surface is kind of very equal-rights oriented. Pretty much everybody we know supports women in music and so on. And all our friends at first were super-supportive of us. So the fact that people would be discriminating against us because we’re women is something that never even occurred to us. But around the time the band started to take off a little bit, that’s around the time that we realized that the world wasn’t so perfect. There’s actually a song on the second album about that. It’s the second to last song—it’s called, ‘You’re My Guy.’ The song is made to seem like it’s a boyfriend/girlfriend song, but it’s not. The guy in the title that we’re referring to is the listener, the blog reader, the male so-called music fan that judges us just because we’re women. And subsequently makes us feel like shit. Because he either talks about our looks, or makes comments like, ‘If they were a band of unattractive guys, nobody would like them, or give them a second chance.’ So that’s basically who the guy is. We are talking to him in that song.
Is it tongue-in-cheek? What are you saying?
You’ll have to listen to the song to find out. I wrote that song not too long after the interview came out on Stereogum. That’s when I was most upset about this kind of stuff.
I noticed a lot of appearance-oriented comments.
It’s complete bullshit! Like, what do you care how we look like? Sometimes I feel like the way we look has actually hurt us rather than helped us because that’s what people tend to focus on first sometimes. When in reality it doesn’t matter.
Does it make you more image-focused or does it make you want to retreat from it even more?
I feel like we’ve all been dealing with it in different ways. But I think overall we all kind of don’t want to veer too far in either direction. We’re definitely not going to turn into supermodel looking girls because of blog comments because that’s ridiculous. We’re also not going to walk around with paper bags on our heads. We’re just going to be ourselves.
I’m thinking about artists like PJ Harvey and Liz Phair who didn’t start out sexualized but ended up going in that direction. It seems like there’s a glass ceiling for female artists and if they don’t adopt the sex-symbol appearance then they won’t break through it. Is that something that you ever think about having to confront?
I don’t think that that is something that’ll ever happen to us. I think that first of all we’re extremely surprised that we even got to the level that we’re at today, so I don’t feel the need to get to a higher level of popularity. And I definitely don’t want to do that through looks.
If Clairol wanted you guys to do a hair dye commercial, would you do it?
I bet I would do it. But just because I DO use Clairol hair dye.

VIVIAN GIRLS WITH THE BEETS AND THE BLACK AND WHITE YEARS ON FRI., SEPT. 11, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8PM / $10 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. VIVIAN GIRLS’ EVERYTHING GOES WRONG IS OUT NOW ON IN THE RED. VISIT VIVIAN GIRLS AT VIVIANGIRLS.NET OR AT MYSPACE.COM/VIVANGIRLSNYC.

(from Davila 666 available now from In The Red)

In The Red Records band Davila 666 come from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where they listen to dirty rap and dirty rock ‘n’ roll and have super-super-SUPER fans who come to every show ever. Tonight will be the last of a string of L.A. shows. This interview by Drew Denny.

What’s the story behind Davila 666?
Carlitos (vocals): We started recording songs in August 2005… I used to do other music with AJ—he plays bass and writes most of the music. We used to make rap music together, like dirty rap. He did beats for a group I used to have, but I stopped because I got tired of it. I wanted to do other stuff, like rock ‘n’ roll, and he was down. A.J. and Johnny had been in bands before in Puerto Rico—local rock bands, different kinds of shit. We’ve all played in different bands in underground scene in Puerto Rico.
What’s the scene like in Puerto Rico?
I don’t know if I even wanna call it a scene, really. It’s just a bunch of kids who wanna go out and see good shows. They don’t really get to see many good shows so when they do it’s a party. There really isn’t a punk scene or a rock scene—but kids like to go out and get drunk and have fun.
What American music did you listen to growing up?
Tons. I liked American music way before I got into Puerto Rican music or Latin music. All kinds—rock ‘n’ roll, punk, garage, hip-hop, rocksteady, soul… everything! We all grew up hearing Latin music—old salsa, like the records my dad would put on. But I was into rock and hip-hop before I really got into that. We didn’t get it when we were kids, but now we appreciate it in a different way.
How’s the tour going? Any knife fights?
Nothin that crazy, but the shows have been really crazy. A couple shows ended in piles of people. Last night we played in Nashville with a bunch of really cool bands, and the crowd was going wild. Everybody’s all sweaty and naked. Getting in the streets and fightin’! We did a West Coast tour in 2007. We played two show in L.A.—at the Smell and at the Scene. That was the party where Larry Hardy from In the Red Records was there. He was friends with Haunted George—this one-man band from California. We had written Haunted George and said we liked his music. So when we got a gig in L.A., he got onto it. Larry went to see him. We gave Larry some CDs—four months later, his girlfriend put it on, and then wrote us and said he wanted to do a record with us. The record we did with Larry was the record we released in September. We just released two 7” records—one on a label from Chicago and one on a label from Atlanta. On the Douchemaster 7”, the A side is ‘Pingorocha y la Diva Rockera.’ It’s a song about these two chicks who go to all of our shows in Puerto Rico—every single fuckin’ show. They’re always in the front row, and they know all the words
So they’re like super fans?
Like super super super fans! The song’s about them getting ready to go to a rock show and then really venting and having a good time. It just seems like a really cool thing to do—we like it, so we wrote a cool song about them. We’re sweet boys. It’s a really poppy—you gotta hear it. It’s like a bubblegum song! The other record was released by Hozac Records. It’s a darker one… It’s got ‘Primero Muerta’ and ‘Sabes que Quiero.’
I love ‘Sabes que Quiero!’
Cool! At all three shows in New York we had horns playing with us on that song! Some friends from New York. It was awesome.
That’s so cool—That song is fuckin catchy… So what is it? What you want?
A.J. wrote that song – it’s about some kid from the street in Puerto Rico getting up and buying weed and getting in fights and getting pulled over by the cops. He’s just talking about how his day went but the hook is like ‘What I really want is to see you now and just fuck around’, you know?
Awww….
It’s about fuckin’ shit up on the street and comin home and having your girl.
I like it.
Good!
I just drove across the country—L.A. to Vermont. It’s might pretty country, but it gets real weird in the middle… What do you think about rural America?
It’s getting really weird. It’s always interesting, though. For us it’s a cultural thing cause we’re from Puerto Rico. Like you going to Puerto Rico and being on the island for more than three weeks—it’s gonna get weird. People have been nice. Every once and awhile you get dirty looks but nothin’ you can’t ignore. Nobody’s fucked with us.
What are you traveling in?
A minivan. Seven of us in a minivan.
Everyone have a seatbelt?
Um, yeah?
Are all seven in the band?
The band and one other guy who does all our videos and all the visuals at our shows. He’s doing a project called Puro Vicio. He’s been documenting everything we’ve done for three years. He’s been mostly driving the van on this trip.
When are you going back home?
We go home October first.
You miss it?
Yeah—certain things. But I’m having a great fuckin time. I’m happy to still be on tour and looking forward to the next eight or nine weeks. We’ll go back to Puerto Rico for two weeks then come right back for a West Coast tour. I wanna go to Latin America—Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile. I think we’re gonna go to Europe next year, too.
Have you met any cool bands on the tour?
We played with Mannequin Men from Chicago. They’re more like post punk type stuff, and it’s really good. We like them. Last night we played with a bunch of fucking cool bands from Nashville— bands that have been playing for only a couple years but they’re really good. We played with Nashville Child—they’re a three-piece, so fuckin’ good and funny. They play songs about shootin’ cops and smoking crack. But in a funny way. You have to hear it. It’s not like N.W.A. It’s like talking shit about having sex with girls you don’t wanna have sex with.
I heard you like to eat babies?
It depends upon the baby. We smell them first. If they smell good, we might eat them. But some of them are really annoying so you have to eat them.

DAVILA 666 WITH MIKA MIKO, MANNEQUIN MEN AND LE FACE ON TUE., SEPT. 1, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $10 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. DAVILA 666′S NEW 7″S ARE AVAILABLE NOW FROM DOUCHEMASTER AND HOZAC. VISIT DAVILA 666 AT DAVILA666.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/DAVILA666.

Download: The Strange Boys “To Turn a Tune or Two”

(from The Strange Boys and Girls Club on In The Red Records)

Texas made them strange and Beerland made them men and now Austin’s Strange Boys are one of the realest rock ‘n’ roll bands currently prowling the American interstate system. They play tonight at the Smell and tomorrow at the Echo and will eradicate years of listless go-nowhere-ism with only 25 minutes and access to electricity. This interview by Dan Collins.

I just read this MSN poll that said your hometown of Austin was one of the most ‘livable’ cities in the U.S.
Ryan Sambol (guitar/vocals): They haven’t been there in August, then!
And Portland got voted the worst! Do you think Austin is the polar opposite of Portland?
Ryan: That just means more people from Portland are going to move to Austin.
You’ve said in interviews that Austin was a great place musically because it was geographically in the middle of so many things. Like it was a great melting pot for blues, jazz, country and rock, and not so heavy-handed with any one thing. Can you tell me your favorite year for each of those genres?
Matt Hammer (drums): 1945 for jazz.
Ryan: It’s really hard to say! We can’t answer that question!
What’s a question you were hoping I would ask?
Ryan: ‘Do you want me to give you a million dollars?’
I was going to ask if you have crazy dreams on tour.
Ryan: Oh man, you’re asking great guys! Philip [Sambol, bass] has something called ‘night terrors.’ It’s where the person all of a sudden wakes up, out of nowhere, totally out of the blue, screaming as loud as he possibly can. Sometimes he’s just screaming, like ‘Aaaaaaaaaghgg! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaghgg!’ And sometimes he’s like, ‘Aaaaaagh, look over there, look over there, aaaaah!’ Sometimes it’s like a really quick ‘aaah.’ But once Philip has the night terror, he freaks everybody else out in the room so much where they can’t go to sleep, and their hearts are pounding! But Philip immediately goes back to sleep. Philip sleeps soundly while everyone else is at the end of their wits.
Are you excited to play in Los Angeles again?
Ryan: We’re really excited, especially to play with Mika Miko in their hometown.
What are your favorite bands in L.A. right now?
Ryan: Darker My Love, we’ve always liked a lot. Mika Miko, of course. Anasazis. There’s probably a lot… Motley Crue! Guns ‘n’ Roses!
What’s the weirdest band you’ve ever played with?
Ryan: One time we played with this guy—he’s called Captured by Robots! We started out as enemies, but now we’re friends. We saw him in Arkansas, and we didn’t get along very well at first. And then we traded off some emails discussing our viewpoints about each other’s music. And now he checks in with us every year, and he’s like, ‘How you doing?’ But he got hit by a car a few months back! He’s better now.
I’ve seen him many times back in the day. He’s like a one-man Man… or Astroman? And you guys started off as a duo yourselves, you and Matt.
Ryan: We were called ‘The Waves.’
On days like today, do you ever look around and go, ‘Fuck, this van could be so much more spacious if we kicked these other guys out?’
Ryan: Oh yeah, Matt and I think about that every day. If we were still a duo, we’d be making way more money. We’d be touring in a Civic or something, where we wouldn’t have to worry about it. We constantly talk about kicking out Philip and Greg [Enlow, guitar]!
You guys are all pretty young, but you and Greg are total total baby faces! Has that been a problem for you? Are bouncers like, ‘You’re not 21!’
Ryan: It’s not a problem now that our IDs actually say we are 21. They always say, ‘Oh, you look 14!’ I dunno. I would say most fourteen-year-olds are still cooler than the adults we meet.
Is it a problem when you meet lady folk because they think you’re jailbait?
Ryan: I think it helps!
One of things I like about your band is that despite being young, your sound has a really solid foundation in a lot of older music. Sometimes you sound a bit like something obscure from the sixties, though with a very genuine love of blues and Americana. What are your influences?
Ryan: Oh, so many. How about you ask each of us one band that has influenced us?
Okay, but don’t quote the bands you listed on your MySpace page.
Greg: I’d say Gino Washington.
Matt: I’ve been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti lately.
Philip: I’d say that the first Oh Sees record is what I was listening to the most before we went on tour. It has awesome bass on it, and just a really unique sound.
Ryan: Joe South! That guy doesn’t get a lot of props.
I think you’re just proving my point—you have a blues influence, but so much else is mixed in. And you’ve said in interviews that Texas is a great melting pot of sounds. Would you say Texas is a better state to make music in than other places?
Ryan: Being in Austin, everyone comes through, and there’s a lot of history in that sense. But it really doesn’t matter where you’re writing or recording.
Ryan, the lyrics you write are pretty intense sometimes, though I have to say I can’t always make them out on the recordings. But I pick out some stuff. Your song, ‘When,’ has parts that remind me of Woody Guthrie’s songwriting. Like, you talk about the World Trade Center bombing. Can you recite me that lyric?
Ryan: Um, let me think. It’s, uh, um…
You have to sing this somewhere tonight! You’d better know this one!
Ryan: Ha ha… it’s, um, ‘Always been proud of doing what’s right/ Always thought your government was on the same side/ And then they blew up some buildings in New York City/ And with it your trust, and what you thought was right.’ It’s about September 11th. I believe the U.S. government blew up those buildings, like a terrorist attack. But the whole song in general is not just about that, it’s about change. The first verse is about how I was looking at pictures of the band and stuff, and I never smiled. So I decided I was going to smile, and show my teeth more! And the next two verses are about being disinformed by the media, and September 11th, and the conspiracies about it, and you’re thinking about all this worldly New World Order humongous idea of conspiracies. And then suddenly you meet this girl, and she doesn’t know anything about that, and then some sort of love affair happens. And it doesn’t have anything to do with real life at all, and then the end is just, um… uh… I don’t remember what the last verse is!
It will give our readers some mystery, so they’ll go buy the album and find out!
Ryan: ‘If you’ve got three, give two to someone else/ if you’ve got two, give the other two a mouth/ if you’ve got one, give that other one away…’
Sounds kind of Biblical! Has religion played a role in your sound?
Ryan: It’s just whatever’s going on. Religion isn’t part of the music really at all. It’s broader thoughts, higher thoughts, thinking more. It’s spirituality that’s incorruptible.
In ‘No Way for a Slave to Behave,’ you have these cool ‘whoo hoos’ in the background. It’s a little more poppy than some of your other songs.
Ryan: My friend, Shane Retro, had that beginning riff. I met him two and a half years ago, and he played me this riff, and he didn’t have any lyrics to it. And I said to him at the very beginning, ‘I’m going to steal that riff, and I’m going to write a song to it.’ And I wanted more songs for the record, so I took the riff and added the lyrics to it and the other parts to it. And the poppiness just went with it, I suppose. Shane Retro isn’t really in a band or anything. He just is.
Have you given any song ideas to other bands?
Ryan: No. I think I could write an awesome song for Jarvis Cocker! Actually I have one that I don’t think I could sing right, and I think I could.
Charlyne Yi, this comedian in L.A., writes songs for other bands for that exact same reason! Would you cover a song by Charlyne Yi if you could sing it better than she can?
Ryan: Yeah, sure, if it’s good!
What about bands from the sixties? Like Back from the Grave garage bands—when you listen to those bands, are you like, ‘Oh yeah, I see where they’re coming from?’
Ryan: We dig a lot of those bands, but I don’t know. People make such a big deal about sixties music, and it was just a lot of people, and that’s what made it cool. There were so many scenes all around the world. But it’s just rock and roll, right? It’s either the real deal, or it’s some white kids trying to do it, and either way, it’s cool, you know?
But maybe people like me, unfortunately, want to be able to describe your sound, and they don’t know what else to say, so they just write ‘It’s garage-y!’
Ryan: People compare us to Nuggets. And it’s a four-disc box set! They compare one band to a four disc box set, which is 85, 90 percent filled with horrible, horrible things. Stupid, stupid lyrics that mean nothing and were written by these people just to make a quick buck, riding some sort of craze, you know? I mean, there’s some great stuff on there as well, but they’re just ridiculous. That song, ‘Sugar and Spice’—what the hell is that? That is stupid. We don’t like that.
As a bubblegum motherfucker, I beg to disagree. But you’re right—that sounds nothing like you at all.
Ryan: Just to clear up with you, we don’t care at all what other people compare us to. I don’t want it to be where someone says ,’Hey, you sound like Nuggets,’ and I say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be compared to Nuggets,’ and you write ‘Yeah, man, they’re trying to fight against labels by other people.’ If anything, just say, ‘Man, who gives a shit?’
Well, your ‘Sugar and Spice’ quote was pretty awesome, so I’m going to have to keep that in! In fact, you said something in an interview once about garage rock that I thought was really apt: someone asked if you were part of the garage rock revival, and you said, ‘There is no revival. People have been doing this kind of stuff since 1989.’ Are there some bands that are roughly in this same genre that you’ve looked up to as heroes, who formed more recently than the sixties?
Ryan: Oh, for sure! People like the Oblivians, the Reigning Sound, anything Greg Cartwright was involved with. The Cramps, the Gun Club: these were all bands that were doing awesome, awesome stuff, before it was ‘garage rock.’
Were you mortified when you heard Lux Interior had died?
Ryan: When he died, he went somewhere else. I don’t think it’s that bad of a deal. I never knew him. People gonna die.
I hear snippets of the early Rolling Stones and the early Velvet Underground in your sound, too.
Ryan: Compared to a lot of other bands, the Stones did justice to a lot of the covers they did. And then Beggars Banquet, the slide on that record, and the country aspect of that, they took it and did something else with it. The Velvet Underground for sure—you can’t even say much about it. There’s nothing cooler than being 16 and driving around listening to the Velvet Underground. I started to get guitar lessons when I was fourteen or fifteen. And one of the first times I went in to get the lessons, I brought in White Light/White Heat, and said I wanted to learn the whole record. And the teacher was like, ‘There must be alternate tunings, because I can’t figure out what they’re really playing.’ I think I quit the next lesson after that. It seemed kind of useless if he couldn’t teach me to do that.

THE STRANGE BOYS WITH MIKA MIKO, CEREBRAL BALZY AND PROTECT ME ON MON., JUNE 29, AT THE SMELL, 247 S. MAIN ST., LOS ANGELES. 9 PM / $5 / ALL AGES. THESMELL.ORG. AND WITH THE SHIRLEY ROLLS AND THE GROWLERS ON TUE., JUNE 30, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $7 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. THE STRANGE BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB IS OUT NOW ON IN THE RED. VISIT THE STRANGE BOYS AT INTHEREDRECORDS.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THESTRANGEBOYS.

Stream: The Hunches “Static Disaster”

(from Yes No Shut It out now on In The Red)

The Hunches are doing their last tour—and last show ever—tonight in L.A. They just released their last record a few months back and decided to do a few shows before waving the flag of surrender. Guitarist Chris Gunn recalls the good times and the bad while doing duty in the bowels of a hospital’s basement in San Francisco. This interview by John Henry.

What’s up with the dungeon you said you were sitting in?
Chris Gunn (guitar): I’m stationed right now in a medical library and it’s way in the bottom of a building. Archives for medical journals. There are a couple of windows but I don’t see too much natural sunlight. Unfortunately.
What finally killed the band?
I think it just got to a point were it wasn’t fun anymore. I think any creative band or whatever gets to a certain point were they run out of ideas—at least this one did. We kind of hit a dead end. There are a lot of different factors. We aren’t a band that can really tour that well. No one wanted to really go for it and make it big or anything. Touring was always hard for lots of different reasons. As far as writing the songs and working together, it just started to unravel to where a lot of that original enthusiasm was gone. Definitely for me—I’m not trying to speak for anybody else, but it kind of seemed that way. I think if we kept going it would seem formulaic. I don’t know how much we could have expanded without starting to sound monotonous or repetitive. I think these are all good songs and I’m glad we put it out. I think if we would have kept going, we would have started to suck. And I moved to San Francisco—I guess that was a factor as well.
And you play in the Hospitals, right?
I’ve known Adam since the beginning of that band but the first In The Red album is him with a different guitar player. I started playing with them a couple of years ago. We did that new one—Hairdryer Peace. I play on that one. I’m recording with him now and it’s been nice to expand and be recording a different type of music or different approaches to songwriting and recording. I think if I stayed in the Hunches I would have probably quit music. There all really good people—I think we just hit a wall.
I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing to realize when a band needs to call it quits. There are a lot of bands that should have stopped a long time ago.
I kind of saw that. Some of our live shows were getting to that point where it was just running through repetitive motions. It just didn’t feel right anymore.
What kind of responses did you get from playing live? Some of the recordings are pretty blown out and it seems like that it would be hard to replicate live.
We try and approximate that live as best we can. Definitely each show is its own thing. A lot of people are disappointed when they see us live. I know that. Some like it a lot. Our singer definitely is a unique front person—that’s a good way to put it. Depending on what mood or how much he’s had to drink, he definitely performs differently. Sometimes I don’t know if better or worse applies. He can definitely be confrontational. Sometimes he doesn’t sing and people get annoyed by that, but if you’re going to come see us and you want to hear the record, you probably shouldn’t come because you’re going to be disappointed. We play our songs but it’s definitely not polished.
When I heard you guys were coming to town I was surprised because I thought you had broken up. What has the band been doing lately? I haven’t heard any records since Yes No Shut It.
Another album came out after that and all these were on In The Red. Another one came out called Hobo Sunrise and then we did a 7-inch, I believe, and now this is the last one—the one that just came out. Larry Hardy put out this last record knowing we were going to break up. It’s been out since February. It’s called Exit Dreams. Yeah, we’ve been together pretty much—ah, it’s weird.
Where did you record the new record? I know you’ve recorded in Costa Mesa with Mike McHugh at the Distillery in the past.
We recorded it with my friend who has a nice studio up there in Portland. It’s called Old Standard Sound. He’s just getting started but he’s got all really nice analog equipment and he’s really good at what he does. It was really cool to be able to work with him at his house—I lived up there while we recorded. We tried recording a lot of different things—a lot of backwards stuff. We recorded showers—popped fifty balloons at the end of one song—but there’s so much shit in there I’d have to take it at a song-by-song level. We did a lot with backing vocals this time too, which is different. I don’t think we had done that before. Recording this was a lot of fun. It was a drawn-out process but I think it worked well for the album. It sounds a little bit different than the Distillery—but recording with Mike is awesome also. I did it on the weekends and whenever we could. Then we had to practice and learn like six songs, so I think overall it took over a year—but if you consolidated it all it would be a couple of weeks.
But this show in L.A. is going to be the band’s last show ever?
Definitely. We haven’t been playing regularly for maybe five years or so. We would play the occasional show but we all pretty much agreed that we wanted to call it quits—but we also had a bunch of songs so we wanted to do this last album—which we did—and it took forever to do. So then after that we decided it would be worth it to maybe do a west coast tour just for the hell of it. It seems kind of ridiculous to just put out an album and not play any shows. We’re going to play four shows—one in Portland, one in Sacramento, one in San Francisco and then this last one in L.A. It’s in East L.A. I tried to get a show down there but most of those clubs wouldn’t get back to me so we weren’t even going to play there. These kids from some band down there that I had never heard of e-mailed us and I guess they’re affiliated with that band the Fuse? So they e-mailed us and said, ‘When are you coming down here? We’ll set up a show for you.’ So we just went with that. My little brother’s band is actually going to be touring with us and they’re really good. They live in Eugene and they don’t really get out. They’re definitely really good. It’s very heavily influenced by Captain Beefheart in a good way. As we extinguish or as we burn out, maybe someone will offer to put out a record for them.

THE HUNCHES WITH THE LAMPS, GOLDIGGERS, BLIMP AND DE HOMBRES ON SAT., JUNE 27, AT A HOUSE PARTY IN EAST L.A. 8 PM / $5 / ALL AGES. MORE INFORMATION AT MYSPACE.COM/THEHUNCHES OR MYSPACE.COM/DEHOMBRES. THE HUNCHES’ EXIT DREAMS IS OUT NOW ON IN THE RED. VISIT THE HUNCHES AT INTHEREDRECORDS.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THEHUNCHES.

After Wounded Lion, Mark Sultan took the stage.  Probably known to most people as half of King Khan and BBQ, Sultan shed his BBQ moniker in favor of the name he used on his most resent solo LP on In the Red.  Sultan played a brief set using his trademarked one-man-band setup of playing guitar with his hands and drums with his feet, though this time he was backed by a full band as well.  Sultan played songs from his most recent LP, his recent Sub Pop 7”, as well as a few of his old BBQ classics.

When King Khan and the Shrines finally took the stage, somewhere around midnight, the crowd was packed and ready to let the King take them away.  Armed with a fur coat, a go-go dancer, and a full band of Germans, Khan seemed like James Brown incarnate and had everyone eating out of his hands.  His band, a seemingly wild bunch of German rock’n’roll partiers, was a far contrast to his more timid outings leading King Khan and BBQ Show.  For one song, however, Mark Sultan joined them on stage for “Fish Fight,” taking vocal duties, while Khan moved to guitar.  King Khan’s set was energetic and explosive as they plowed through their classic ‘60s R’n’B and soul inspired songs.  At one point in the set, Khan was offered roses by an adoring fan though he quickly tossed them into the crowd.  The most touching moment was when Khan introduced the song “Welfare Bread,” explaining that he and his wife were recently living on welfare until he was swept up by musical popularity; he then thanked the crowd and told them they were the reason he was able to get out of the gutter.  By the end of the set, Khan’s band was still rocking at full force, though now fully drenched in sweat, as was the crowd.  The organ player picked up his organ and pushed it into the guitar player, making the two fall down—meanwhile the go-go dancer was throwing confetti and glitter all over herself and the crowd.  Khan exited the stage with the true grace of a king, and everyone in attendance assembled in applause.

—Daniel Clodfelter

Download: The Strange Boys “To Turn a Tune or Two”

(from The Strange Boys and Girls Club on In The Red Records)

Read our interview with The Strange Boys here.

The Strange Boys tour dates

04.02.09 – Dallas, TX (Doublewide)
04.03.09 – Memphis, TN (Murphy’s)
04.04.09 – Oxford, MS (The Blind Pig)
04.05.09 – Athens, GA (Farm 255)
04.06.09 – Atlanta, GA (The Earl)
04.08.09 – Asheville, NC (The New French Bar)
04.09.09 – Tuscaloosa, AL (Little Willie’s)
04.10.09 – Baton Rouge, LA (The Spanish Moon)
04.11.09 – Houston, TX (House Show
06.05.09 – Denton, TX (Rubbergloves) *
06.06.09 – Austin, TX (Red 7) *
06.07.09 – Houston, TX (Mangos) *
06.08.09 – New Orleans, LA (Saturn Bar) *
06.09.09 – Atlanta, GA (Drunken Unicorn) *#
06.10.09 – Greensboro, NC (UNCG / Square One) *
06.11.09 – Washington, D.C. (Comet Pizza and Ping Pong) *
06.12.09 – Baltimore, MD (Sonar) *#$
06.13.09 – Brooklyn, NY (Market Hotel) *#
06.14.09 – New York, NY (Cake Shop) *
06.15.09 – Philadelphia, PN (Danger Danger Gallery) *
06.16.09 – Worcester, MA (Ralph’s Diner) *
06.18.09 – Cleveland, OH (Now That’s Class)
06.20.09 – Columbus, OH (Bourbon St) *
06.22.09 – Chicago, IL (Beat Kitchen) *
06.23.09 – Minneapolis, MN (First-Avenue) *
06.24.09 – Iowa City, IO (Public Space 1) *
06.25.09 – Lawrence, KS (Jackpot Music Hall) *
06.26.09 – Denver, CO (Hi-Dive) *
06.27.09 – Salt Lake City, UT (Kilby Court) *
06.29.09 – Los Angeles, CA (The Smell) *
07.02.09 – San Francisco, CA (Hemlock) #
07.03.09 – San Jose, CA (Nickel City) #
07.06.09 – San Diego, CA (Casbah) #
07.07.09 – Tucson, AZ (Plush) #
07.09.09 – Lubbock, TX (Ash Riprock’s) #
07.10.09 – Dallas, TX (TBA) #
07.11.09 – Austin, TX (Mohawk) #

* = w/ Mika Miko
# = w/ The Coathangers
$ = w/ The Death Set

Download: The Strange Boys “To Turn a Tune or Two”

(from The Strange Boys and Girls Club on In The Red Records)

Read our interview with The Strange Boys here.