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.

Thee Oh Sees took the stage wearing their vintage guitars high and tight and communicated solely by echo chamber. They were the look of a West Coast car club and the sound of Rat Fink fronting the band you always wish was playing in all those beach party movies, where psychedelic doesn’t mean an eight minute guitar solo. As John Dwyer literally had the mike in his mouth, he bragged that one of his guitars cost four dollars. Brigid Dawson provided vocal harmony and a Gene Clark/ Nico tambourine rattle. The four -piece proceeded to play songs with titles like “The Freak Was Clean,” “It Killed Mom” and “Block of Ice.” They challenged the notion of fun on a Friday night to a knife fight with your ear drums, and they won fair and square. Imagine if Lux Interior wasn’t in drag and Jan and Dean didn’t let Dead Man’s Curve overtake them and you have some idea of Thee Oh Sees’ show.

Eleven o’clock and the place is packed. Without warning, Jay Reatard took the stage in a squall of feedback and a thicket of hair. They broke into Blood Visions, channeling a Wayne Kramer swagger and fuck it all presence that pricked up your ears and held your attention. The music was heavy with hooks and the theme of the songbook was to have a fucking good time at all costs. Song after song of amped-up pop came in quick succession, with the title shouted out and immediately played at breakneck pace. This lack of direct communication with the crowd seemed to get them more and more worked up, no “Hello Cleveland” bullshit. It was the same effect the too cool guy at school has on all his crazed female admirers. Finally, Jay pulled an audience member from the insanity of the front row and handed over his Flying V guitar. This kid started wailing on the neck as bassist Steve and drummer Billy whipped the crowd into a howling mania. The shit went off everyone was locked into the same distorted frequency.   I was happy I had earplugs and even happier I did not miss out.

—Eyad Karkoutly

Download: Dex Romweber Duo “Picture Of You”

(from Ruins of Berlin out now on Bloodshot)

Dexter Romweber was the guitar half of the Flat Duo Jets, a two-man rock ‘n’ roll band from the deep south that had the power of Dr. Ross and Abner Jay combined. They were filmed for—and broke up during—the documentary Two-Headed Cow, screening tonight. Dex and his new duo (with his sister Sara) have a new album and will be performing in L.A. this weekend. This interview by Nolan Knight.

What was the extent of your involvement in the production of Two Headed Cow? Was it your idea for the documentary?
No, it wasn’t my idea at all. What it was was that the producers who made Athens, Ga.—Inside/Out, a documentary on music in Athens, Georgia, they wanted to make a Flat Duo Jets film after that film was completed. So we set out on a short Southern tour in ’87, I think. Then they ran out of funds but they wanted to complete the film and they got the funds together by 2005 or so, but the Duo Jets had already ended and I was still touring. They finished the film in 2005 and it was initially their idea—completely.
Are you satisfied with the outcome? Does it accurately reflect the legacy of the Flat Duo Jets?
Yeah, some of it—not all of it. I think they got a lot of good footage and some of it’s pretty funny, you know? There were a few things I wanted taken out but they wouldn’t take ‘em out. That caused little problems but we’re all pretty much past it now.
Your new record, Ruins in Berlin, just came out and I really enjoyed it. Was there a theme of exploration behind this record?
There wasn’t really a theme. I think me and Sara didn’t want to make it just a neo-rockabilly record and we wanted to get many different moods and flavors. These are songs I had around for awhile, so me and Sara sat down and figured out what would be the best ones to put on the record. There wasn’t really a theme behind it except to get a little more jazz influences and some different genres of music.
How has it been playing with your sister on drums so far? Does the family dynamic help when it comes to extensive touring?
It hasn’t been too bad. We’ve done a lot of work since we started playing together. Chan Marshall—Cat Power—has taken us to Europe and we’ve done many shows around America with her and we’ve been generally taking any work we can get that isn’t too bad—if the money’s decent, you know what I mean?
There are some cameos on the record and one is with Exene Cervenka. How did you two come to be good friends?
Well, I didn’t know her too much. A lot of these artists are in the film and our manager came up with the idea of maybe putting them on our record to sort of spice it up a little bit. I ended up playing on Exene’s solo record after my record was complete, so I ended up flying to Missouri and hanging with her and her husband, Jason, for about three days. I got to know her more then and a little bit when she came to lay down her tracks for Ruins of Berlin.
People like Jack White attribute you to being a major influence on their artistry. Who would you consider to be a major influence on your artistry?
Well, there are different people. Some of them are very obscure. People like Benny Joy out of Tampa, which usually only record collectors really know who he is. Big-band artists like Stan Kenton and a bit of people like Jerry Lewis and stuff.
The Jets toured with the Cramps in the early ‘90s. Can you share a fond memory or funny story involving the great Lux Interior?
Generally, I left them to themselves. I didn’t want to infringe on their privacy too much but we spent many an evening together, talking or drinking wine, and I just remember me and Lux sharing a love of Jackie Gleason [laughs]. Mostly, we talked about music and films but Lux was a real forthright guy and a very nice guy. I think what he admired most in people was a sense of honesty. It was nineteen years ago, so it’s a little hard to remember everything. We mostly just talked about artists and stuff.
Is there another solo piano album in your future?
I wanted there to be and I wanted to make a volume two but it’s taking me a while to sit down and compose all these songs that I’d have to get ready. I can’t do it right now but maybe in the coming year I will sit down and get volume two ready.
What are your thoughts on the current state of rock ‘n’ roll?
I don’t really follow it that well and I haven’t really looked at the top ten in terms of current rock ‘n’ roll or bought any of those records. My tastes generally lean towards people like Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen more than the modern neo-rockabilly sound. I got to tell you, there was actually an article on the Cramps that sort of sent me on a different road. They had been asked what they thought of the neo-rockabilly ‘cat’ bands—the Stray Cats, The Rockats, the Polecats, and all those ‘cat’ bands—and they said, ‘You can look like you’re from the fifties but that doesn’t mean that you get the same style or the same feel as the fifties.’ That kind of set my course into finding out more obscure artists in the fifties, but in a sense, I feel a little about the modern rockabilly scene that way. Where in a sense you can look like it but you’ll rarely ever catch what it was really like back in the day—not to put those bands down because there is always a validity in art and artists, it’s just that my tastes generally go towards a lot of different kinds of music. You asked me about the classical piano and I listen to that kind of music, sort of the romantic classical movement, along with jazz and gypsy music. But in truth, I still have a great fondness for early rock ‘n’ roll records.
Would you say from your early days to now with your latest record, has your vision for music been steadfast? Is the latest record a product of something that your younger self would have aspired to make?
Yeah, I think so. I think overall, I would agree with that. When I was younger it was primarily ‘50’s rockabilly but I was branching out even back in the day and listening to people like Chopin and Bach—and even Jackie Gleason records, you know?

DEX ROMWEBER WITH A SCREENING OF TWO-HEADED COW ON FRI., APR. 3, AT THE ECHO PARK FILM CENTER, 1200 ALVARADO ST., ECHO PARK. 8 PM / $5 / ALL AGES. ECHOPARKFILMCENTER.ORG. AND ON SAT., APR. 4, AT FINGERPRINTS RECORDS, 4612 E. 2ND ST., LONG BEACH. 4 PM / FREE / ALL AGES. AND WITH THE DOGHOUSE LORDS ON SAT., APR. 4, AT THE REDWOOD BAR AND GRILL, 316 W. 2ND ST., DOWNTOWN. 10 PM / CONTACT VENUE FOR COVER / 21+. THEREDWOODBAR.COM. THE DEX ROMWEBER DUO’S RUINS OF BERLIN IS OUT NOW ON BLOODSHOT. VISIT DEXTER ROMWEBER AT MYSPACE.COM/DEXTERROMWEBERDUO.

I’d never considered myself a drooling fan-boy of the Cramps. Truth be told, a lot of those latter-day Cramps albums were short on spark—more creepy-cuddly than frightful-fuzzy. But somewhere deep down, I’ve always carried a torch for the Cramps, and I never realized how brightly it burned until my Lux was taken from me yesterday.

For many Angelenos, I think the Cramps’ appearance at Sunset Junction two years ago was a profound return to form—for both us and them. I hadn’t seen them perform in at least a decade, and was prepared to see how age had stiffened Lux’s springy gyrations. But Lux seemed to wear his age well, his hair a shock of white and black makeup pressed deeply into his eye sockets. It made him more ghoulish than ever before. He climbed around on the metal scaffolding, shouted “Waaaaaaah!” like a Hammer vampire cringing against the sun, and even read us a ghoulish Ghoulardi parody of TV Guide right from a stage in the middle of Silverlake. It was an incredible show—mind-numbing in its drum monotony and cool jungle guitars—and I never would have guessed that this was a bookend for me. If anything, it seemed like a brand new beginning for this power couple who had forged a way for fandom to become a lifestyle to become a sound.

Remember, for most people now in their thirties—old enough to remember punk when it was still the cool kids’ club for getting’ spat on by jocks—the Cramps were one of the few bands to really hit you sideways with everything you thought had been nullified by hardcore. The T-shirt for Bad Music for Bad People was a glaring yellow ogre in a sea of black in the mail-order section of Thrasher Magazine. When I finally got the cassette, I expected it to be some kind of punk Iron Maiden—something to make Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra look like Cheech and Chong. Instead I found slow Bo Diddley beats, crooning instead of screaming, bwaaang instead of badabadabada. Should I even like this? Isn’t this corny?

Yes, it was! But corny lyrics from Lux sounded way less ridiculous than the Circle Jerks at their straightest. Lux really was “one half hillbilly and one half punk.” Only later did I learn that literally half the album was covers of rockabilly songs—some less inspired than the originals, maybe, but no one could doubt the conviction in Lux’s glottal stutterings. Here a creature was floating to the surface of the black leather lagoon that was far more real and sinister than anything Bad Brains had to teach me. Faster was not necessarily better.

Like Ian MacKaye, or like the hundreds of fans who’ve left comments on dozens of blogs within the past 24 hours, I could go into how transformative my first Cramps show was. Mine was at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, an old country bunker, which for years had a high-heel hole in the ceiling that Lux made while masturbating on top of the PA during a thirty minute version of “Surfin’ Bird”. But what will be mentioned less in today’s obits is how in the nineties, bands like Big Sandy, the Boss Martians, and the Makers kind of pushed the Cramps into grandpa-land. They provided more historically correct thrills to that new era of Betty Page rockabilly gals and tiki-collecting garage surfers than anything Lux and Poison’s pubic punkola could provide.

Yet Lux and Poison were still lurking in the shadows, and one of the biggest thrills for nineties Angelenos was spotting the Cramps in the wild. I caught sight of them first in a Beverly Hills garage, after a showing of Nosferatu with a live orchestra at some posh theater, when Poison Ivy was dressed to the nines in jangly earrings. Then at a reunion show for ? and the Mysterians at Spaceland, I literally ran into Lux near the bar and had a drunken conversation about the Sonics. He held up on his end quite politely, despite not knowing me from Adam. I saw Lux again at an Andre Williams show, and then once at a Lords of Altamont appearance, where he was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat—like a man back from a fifties vacation—and where he spent some time gabbing with Tom Kenny of Spongebob fame. People told me that Lux and Poison never went out, but it was easy enough to find them if you just went to see bands that rocked and rolled.

So today I’m in mourning—something I’d never expected to feel for a man who spent his whole life playing dead. A 61-year-old rocker is neither young enough nor old enough to die. And yet his legacy still walks among us. I never realized until reading his obit that the man was born in 1948. That means by the time the Cramps got anywhere close to big, Lux was older than I am now—which is pretty old by rock and roll standards! He was older than Alex Chilton, who recorded them for Songs the Lord Taught Us, and he was probably older than many of the kids on those Pebbles comps Lux enjoyed covering so much. Despite stayin’ sick for over thirty years, he actually must have lived pretty healthy, drug and booze-wise, to rock that hard and look that good. And his devotion to his wife Poison showed us all that exposing your dingle on stage every night and loving a woman with all your heart aren’t mutually exclusive.

Goddamn it. I hope he makes it to rock and roll heaven and tears that damned place up. If not, maybe he’ll at least give us an aloha from hell.

—Dan Collins