Download: Total Wreck x Carlos Rossi + Trina Darling

DJs Carlos Rossi and Trina Darling will be reinforcing L.A. RECORD at Footsie’s for Total Wreck on Saturday, and they made us this special double-shot mix, including intense personalized introductions! Come out at 10 pm for free fuzz, funk, soul, punk and rock ‘n’ roll and get ready by listening to this on the car / cab / train / brisk jog over!

TRACKLIST:

1. INTRO – CARLOSROSSI
2. THE BOYS – I DONT CARE
3. TY SEGALL – OH MARY
4. THE CRAMPS – TEAR IT UP
5. RED KROSS – ANNETTE’S GOT THE HITS
6. CRIME – MASERATI
7. INTRO – TRINADARLING
8. THE BEATLE-ETTES – ONLY SEVENTEEN
9. THE MURMAIDS – ALONE
10. VERONICA FALLS – BEACHY HEAD
11. THE TAMMYS – EGYPTIAN SHUMBA
12. NICOLE PAQUIN – MON MARI C’EST FRANKENSTEIN

Random Patterns released a new single this past weekend available for free download here. Catch their next show at the Kibitz Room, attached to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax, playing alongside Whqles (I swear that is not a typo) and Arms & Legs. This track starts off with a light carnival atmosphere, and in typical Random Patterns fashion moves along in a sonic journey bordering on jam band territory. For more info and updates check out www.randompatternsmusic.com

A mighty twenty six bands will play the Folk Fest event at Zorthian Ranch on August 6th. That’s something like one band member for every four guests attending this musical feast. Tickets on sale now at http://lafolkfest.com.

Listen to Amanda Jo Williams, Ana Caravelle, Cowboy And Indian, The Djin Aquarian Band (that’s the Djin of Ya Ho Wa 33), Dustbowl Revival, Emily Lacy, Fabiano Do Nascimento Trio, Ferraby Lionheart, Ghiant, Julia Holter, Matt Taylor And His Laurels, Nasambu And The Mystic Nomads, Nostalghia, Radical Face, Ramona Gonzalez (aka Nite Jewel), RT N’ The 44′s, Ruthann Friedman, Space Comes Soft (Anna Oxygen doing psychedelic country), Spindrift, Stone Darling, The Stevenson Ranch Davidians, Tommy Santee Klaws, Triple Chicken Foot, Very Be Careful, Yellow Red Sparks, at this link here:

STREAM: Various Artists “The 2nd New L.A. Folk Fest”

Between right now and this Sunday, July 24, at midnight, good deeds are available by donating to The Folk Fest’s Kickstarter campaign. Don’t have $$ to donate but time to spare? This Sunday you can earn a dip in Zorthian’s pool by volunteering for project Ranch Restoration (july 24, noon to 4pm), and helping spruce up this historic party site. Contact lafolkfest@gmail.com to sign up.

Bonus fact: long-time L.A. Record illustrator Christine Hale made the flyer, which will also appear as a tshirt and a towel.

Random Patterns reveals new songs and there’s cowbell involved. Known for its parts and progressions and long jams, the band explores (or records) itself in a new way here on “Cans All Day.” The wall of noise is clearer, more like a window. That’s just a warm-up for “Raw Luck,” a really cool Random Patterns experience. It’s full of nice smooth contrasts. Something pretty in the melody comes at you quickly and strangely, like it’s leaking. …Scales.

MP3: Random Patterns “Cans All Day”

MP3: Random Patterns “Raw Luck”

—Daiana Feuer

Working In Tennessee features a variety of tempos and styles from different times he’s perhaps revisiting in his record collection, as well as appearances by his family and a few of Willie Nelson’s family members. Haggard’s wife joins him on a cover of “Jackson.”

Get your download of “Working In Tennessee”

Track listing:
1.    Working in Tennessee (Merle Haggard)
2.    Down on the Houseboat (Merle Haggard, Theresa Haggard, Doug Colosio)
3.    Cocaine Blues (TJ Arnall)
4.    What I Hate (Merle Haggard)
5.    Sometimes I Dream (Merle Haggard, Jenessa Haggard)
6.    Under the Bridge (Merle Haggard, Theresa Haggard)
7.    Too Much Boogie Woogie (Merle Haggard)
8.    Truck Driver’s Blues (Merle Haggard, Tim Howard)
9.    Laugh It Off (Merle Haggard, Theresa Haggard, Doug Colosio)
10.     Working Man Blues (Merle Haggard)
11.     Jackson (Billy Edd Wheeler, Gaby Rodgers)

—Daiana Feuer

Download: True Widow “Skull Eyes”

True Widow tumbled out from the heart of Texas with a knack for the reverberatory arts. Their ‘stonegaze’ sound, as some call it, sounds a bit like a cool soothing rockslide. Their newest album—the improbably titled As High As the Highest Heavens and from the Center to the Circumference of the Earth—was released on Kemado and they will play the New Weird America Fest this Saturday at Nomad. Win tickets here! They speak to us from deep within a mineshaft somewhere in the land that cellular service forgot. This interview by Matt Dupree.

I know people want to know how you came up with the band name, but I’m not going to ask that. How’d you get the name Slim?
Slim Starks (drums): That’s older than the band name! I used to run around with a guy named Richard, when we were like, 15 or something. This really close friend of mine, who still has this habit of nicknaming everybody, he dubbed us as Rico and Slim. So we ran around as Rico and Slim and it just evolved from that. That was when I started getting into rock music, so everybody that met me knew me as Slim. The same guy that gave me the nickname, we’ve got a screenprinting business that’s been going since ’99. Everybody that’s met me via that’s known me as Slim. It’s just stuck. When we started doing press releases and all that shit for Kemado, it was just one of those things. They all knew me as Slim.
What’s your given name?
Timothy! Yeah, how bout that? But we’re all fans of nicknames. Nicknames are a part of life. We’ve all got ‘em—different nicknames for different situations. Like if I get too drunk, and I’m fin’ to get agro, they call me ‘Slam.’ Nicole’s got an alter-ego named ‘Lala’ when she’s loaded. Dan’s got a few alter-egos, depending on what kind of intake he’s on. Keeps it fresh! And who wants to be calling somebody’s name all the time, anyway? Like, my parents call me that. I collect all sorts of nicknames. My friend from L.A. came to visit me at the print shop I live at—it has the business and everything, it’s all in the same warehouse. I never really go out much when I’m home. They dubbed me the ‘Print Troll.’ So I’ve got that. I’ve got ‘Wizard’ from a few people.
Is that the beard?
The beard, the hair. I don’t know—I like magic!
You guys got a pretty sick write-up in Pitchfork. Did you feel suddenly more legitimate the day afterward?
Hell no! We weren’t expecting anything like that, or at least that kind of attention that fast. But it doesn’t really have any bearing on us either way, man. This is our little pet project. It’s more about what we wanna do and how we feel about shit than how people are responding to it. But fortunately people have been responding to it good, so we’re able to get out and play this shit live and come see you guys!
You’re gonna be playing with some pretty heavy acts. Is that unusual for you?
We’ve been fortunate that we’ve really been able to mix it up. We’ve done heavy shows before—our buddies Saviours, we played with them a few times on some really heavy lineups. And we’ve done shows with MV & EE, who are really mellow stuff. So we’re kinda all over the place. It’s a blessing and a curse as far as that goes. But it’s been really cool, man—we don’t get stuck listening to the same type of opening bands everywhere we go. Seems like everyone who’s putting these shows together has a different idea of what they think would be the best thing for us. It’s been pretty cool to just sit back and see how it plays out, you know? Sometimes people are WAY fuckin’ off, but usually it makes for a good night.
Is that because some people think you’re a drone act that’s slower? And others think you’re more of a shoegaze act with crazy, sludgy riffs?
That’s the sense I get. They go for one or the other—there’s no middle. When we go home we try and mix it up. We’ll have a guy open a show that does old bluegrass—mountain music—and then have a metal band play after him and then kinda bring it back down at the end of the night. It’s just fun to mix it up. A lot of bands don’t have that, or aren’t afforded that opportunity. And the coolest thing is that we in the band all have our own taste in music, although we all appreciate a lot of different shit. For some reason, with the True Widow project, we’ve all been able to play with bands that we’ve admired in the past of all different sounds. Every night, at least one of us is stoked on who we’re playing with.
Have you gotten really good at nodding along to people trying to explain your music to you?
Ha ha—yeah, I’m pretty much to that point now. It didn’t get like that on the first record, but there wasn’t nearly the attention. Honestly, certain stories get run and re-run and … yeah, so… you just get to that point. But it is cool to listen to people just take the time to vocalize their thoughts. Some people will surprise you—you might get turned on to a new band. I’ve listened to so many bands now because people thought we sounded like them. Bands that I’d heard of but never listened to, so we’ve actually found some cool music that way. It has gotten a little weary, just because it seems like there are lot of people that are adamant in their opinions on True Widow. If they don’t like it, it’s the worst thing ever. If they do like it, its because it reminds them of a mashup of these two favorite things or whatever.
It’s like a Rorschach test.
Yeah—looking back at yourself.
Or an exercise in poetically describing a sound.
Yeah—the gauge of the strings and the hotness of everything. There’s definitely been some of that surrounding us. It’s fun to see where people go with that. Most of the stuff is detuned to some degree, so its pretty loose and sludgy sounding. Live it’s even more so than the record. There’s no filters there—it’s just raw. But none of us take it that seriously. When we see people getting amped up about little things like you’re talking about its like, ‘Really? I turned a knob on a string. That’s all I did.’ But that person had a deep connection with the music that allowed their mind to wander and go to deep places. On that level, I think its pretty cool when people start to rant about little things. It’s like ‘Wow.’ Part of me thinks you gotta have something better to do but part of me is like it must’ve really struck a chord. There’s been a lot of questions about tuning. A lot of questions about the song ‘Skull Eyes.’ The beginning of ‘Skull Eyes’ is actually a guitar. Everybody just assumes it’s a bass when they review the song just because it’s so heavy. Then when they find out its not a bass but a guitar they really freak out. Especially if they were already interested in the specifics of all that, then they really go apeshit. Its weird—it’s not like we’re in some mad scientist’s lab creating this shit. It’s way more haphazard. Get ripped and see what we can put together that might not or shouldn’t go together, and then if it works try and do something with it. We let shit fall where it does. Then after the fact you get all these inquiries: ‘What were you doing to make this sound?’ I don’t know, man, it’s the only pedal we had! We only had one cord, so we couldn’t plug anything else in! No grand plan there!
Speaking of grandeur, you came up with possibly the most epic title for an album… ever.
Yeah, it’s pretty beastly. We all have a light side and a serious side. That album title resonated for all of us on both levels. Part of it was there was a genuine interest in what that title means and how it works toward what we were trying to do with this record. Aside from that, it’s just been a blast seeing how people respond to it. All the press shit having to type it out over and over, its almost become comical.
Is this another example of you guys going with your instinct and getting a really unexpected response?
People can research it and find out what it means or just take it for what it is. A lot of people think its just another inside joke, which we do have a few of, but that’s our style. It’s cool, it has meaning, and it makes us laugh. I don’t think we’re going to win any awards for longest album title, though.
You’re gonna be playing with Red Sparowes—I think they’ve got you beat on length.
That lineup is killer! We’ve got friends in Night Horse. We’re looking forward to partying with them. California’s been really tough to get to, which is why we were glad when this show came around. We’ve got a lot of friends out there through the band so we were just happy to get a chance to come out and see everybody even though we weren’t going to be doing a bunch of shows. It’s looking like we’re gonna be pretty busy for the next year. And where we’re at with the band, we really just want to get it out in front of people, you know? That’s making itself a reality, so we’re just gonna roll with that and see what happens.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS TRUE WIDOW WITH RED SPAROWES, NIGHT HORSE, RADIO MOSCOW, THE FUCKING WRATH, IDES OF GEMINI AND SPECIAL GUESTS ON SAT., JULY 2, AT NOMAD GALLERY, 1993 BLAKE AVE., LOS ANGELES. 2 PM / $10. TEEPEERECORDS.COM. WIN TICKETS AND A SPECIAL TEE PEE VINYL PACK HERE OR BUY TICKETS HERE.

Paul Collins – Dont Blame Your Troubles On Me by alivenaturalsound

As the drummer for the Nerves and Breakaways and lead singer of the Beat, Paul Collins helped create the genre of power pop. His songs have been covered by virtually every band with a guitar, from Audacity to Green Day to White Fence to the Muffs to the Exploding Hearts to … me. And yet despite never achieving the chart success of his rock ‘n’ roll heroes or even bands like the Knack, Collins still has the enthusiasm and optimism of the kid he must have been in the mid-70s: a New York/San Franciscan newly arrived in Los Angeles, workin’ too hard to be the man the record labels would want. He will play Friday at Blue Star Bar—win tickets here! This interview by Dan Collins and Kristina Benson.

Kim Shattuck of the Muffs wants me to ask you if ‘being two millimeters away from my mouth with your mouth gave you any ideas.’
Yeah! I wanted to kiss her really bad! But I couldn’t do it. We did a show here a while ago, and it was great.
I feel like a lot of your fans are like her: more toward the punk side than the pop side. Even when the Nerves started, you seemed more comfortable hanging out with bands like the Weirdos rather than the Knack or the bigger power pop bands.
With the Nerves, we were like these street urchins in the streets of Hollywood and we were definitely trying to find people to relate to. And we met all those bands. The Nerves put on the first shows of the Weirdos, the Dils, the Zeros, the Zippers, the Germs … None of those bands could get gigs at the Whisky or the Starwood so we started running our own renegade shows. Unfortunately it was pre-video so we couldn’t document it, which was a shame, but we put on the first L.A. shows of the Germs and the Zeros and the Dils and all those bands, and it was incredible.
Did any of those bands ever look down on you for having a more traditional rock sound?
The Nerves were so steeped in our trip, I think people thought we were kind of crazy to tell you the truth. ‘Who the hell are these guys? What planet did they show up from?’ The thing is, all those bands were L.A. bands, and they came from Orange County and L.A. and they grew up there and they had all their friends from high school and stuff. We were complete outcasts. We didn’t have any friends, and we were major hustlers. Every day was, ‘We gotta do this! We gotta get it together!’ So I think in a way that made us a little over the top. We were just a little too intense for them because they were more laid-back. Plus we had this desperation factor. We really wanted to make it, like the Beatles and the Stones. There was like no time to waste. That’s the fucking lede for your article: NO TIME TO WASTE!
Why did you have to do everything yourself? What do we take for granted now that you never had?
Well, we’re talking about ‘70s, early ‘80s. This is just when the indie scene was starting. In 1976 you could not get a gig at a club unless you had a record deal. And that meant a major label record deal because there was no indie labels. Either you were signed to one of the handful of big major labels, or you didn’t get a gig. They’d yell at us at the Whisky: ‘Why are you calling us? Don’t call us until you have a record deal!’ Which meant, ‘Don’t call us until you have a major label record deal.’ There really was no way to get gigs. So out of desperation … we met all these bands at rehearsals cuz that’s where we’d see these bands. We ran what we called the Hollywood Punk House, which was just a roving location. Sometimes we did it at S.I.R. Studio Rentals——anyplace that we could rent out. The last place that we put on shows, we put them on at the Orpheum Theater that was across the street from the Tower. The Whisky scouts would come up and we ran the door—it was a shoestring operation. They’d say, ‘We’re from the Whisky! We want to come in.’ ‘Sure, five bucks.’ ‘We’re from the Whisky!’ ‘We don’t care where you’re from, man—we can’t even play your club! If you’re comin’ in, you’re paying!’ They’d get all upset, but you know—screw you.
Why hadn’t anyone done this before?
It does seem crazy that people didn’t think to do it. But in those days you had a whole new scene, and we were all young kids, and the es­tablished music business had such a grip on things—nobody thought there was any other way to do it. We were locked out from all sides, and so ambitious and aggressive… it forced us to do these things. And in reality, they were simple things. We put on shows. That’s a very simple thing. Anyone could do it. But it was also very difficult and nobody thought there was any point in doing it. We moved to L.A. from S.F. because we couldn’t get anywhere in San Francisco, and it’s like a light went on: ‘Oh yeah! We gotta go to L.A.! Why didn’t we think of this before? That’s where the music industry is! That’s where we’re gonna get fa­mous!’ Of course we went to L.A. and it was even harder than in San Fransisco. And it was also more brutal. S.F. is like a hippie town, and L.A. was totally cutthroat and really intense. So after we did all thse shows and we STILL couldn’t get anywhere and get any acceptance from anyone in the business, we decided to do the tour. And the tour was like the major thing that we did, outside of making that record. But then we decided once we had that record and couldn’t get anywhere in L.A., that we’d take it national and go on tour. Basically we did what every other band did locally—we just did it nationally.
Now I can just jump on the internet: ‘I want to find a bunch of venues where I can play to a hundred people.’ But back then, how did you do it?
It was a massive amount of work and I did it myself because I was good at it. I did my research by looking at fanzines, and Greg Shaw helped me a lot. He was very supportive because he knew that this would be something very important to open up the avenues for a lot of bands to do this because nobody had tried to do it with this kind of music. Bands had been doing this in other times and in other genres in American music, but nobody had done it in this new wave of music. What I did was—it was my coup d’etat. It was a stroke of genius. There was no internet and no cell phones, and calling these clubs all across the country would have been astronomical on a regular home phone, and I don’t think we even had home phones at that point, we were so broke. I have a long history of ripping off the phone company and this was my piece de resistance. I figured out that if you go on the pay phone and called up the operator and ask, ‘How much does it cost to call Chicago?’ that they’d tell you, you know? ‘Two dollars and twenty cents for the first three minutes.’ So then I’d hang up and call the operator back and I’d say, ‘Listen, I was just talking to Chicago and I got cut off.’ ‘How much did you put in?’ And if you gave them the correct amount they assumed you were telling the truth and they’d reconnect you. I’d have to get all my business done in three minutes. I booked an entire national tour on a dime.
Three minutes at a time?
Yeah! But then a year later, I’d go back to these clubs with the Beat, and this one guy told me, ‘We were getting phone calls’—cuz this is when there was only one phone company, AT&T—‘we were getting phone calls from the phone company asking about did we know this guy Paul Collins? And did we have any way of getting in touch with him?’ They tried to track me down. And at the end of that Nerves tour I was at the Chelsea Hotel in New York doing that same thing, and they changed their policy to if you got disconnected you’d have to give them your name and address and they’d send you a refund.
Because of you?
I’d like to think it was because of me because I was making a massive amount of phone calls! I think someone finally figured out that someone was trying to take advantage of the phone company. Not that they weren’t taking advantage of everybody else! Jack [Lee]’s job was to figure out how much money we needed to do this thing, and I think he came up with a number off the top of his head, it was $80. So that’s what we would ask for. Today, I think it would be even harder to do. But we would get it! 90% of the time, we got that. I kept a diary and I kept the finances and I know that we came home with no money. We were completely broke. The other thing we did that was pretty ingenious—we ran out of money going into the desert that you come out of before you get to like Palm Springs. This was in August. It was brutally hot. We had no money. And what we’d do to eat … we’d go into supermarkets and get a shopping cart and pretend to fill it up with all this crap, and a lot of these supermarkets had delis. So we would order a sandwich and eat it while we were shopping. Then we would just wind up like buying a loaf of bread and cheese whiz. That’s how we ate. I think by the time we hit Las Vegas we had literally nothing. Like zero. We didn’t have enough money to buy gas. This was Jack’s idea and I hated this but we had to do it. Everytime you pulled off the freeway, there were four gas stations—one on each corner. So we would all fan out, one guy at each gas station, and go up to the cigarette machine. This is when cigarettes were like 65 cents a pack, and you would pretend that you put your money in the machine and then you’d start pulling on the lever—back then, you’d put your money in and pull a lever and the cigarettes would come out—and then say, ‘Oh man, it just ate my 65 cents!’ And the gas station attendant would invariably give you your 65 cents. That’s how we got home. We’d do that at each exit.
Did your parents know about this?
No, that’s a whole separate issue! And that’s another thing that played into it. I came from New York, Peter came from Buffalo and Jack came from Juneau, Alaska. When we got to San Francisco and then L.A., we knew nobody. We didn’t have any infrastructure. All these bands we were dealing with—they grew up there. That was their scene. We were completely isolated. We didn’t know anybody. It was really difficult for us to get things going and as a result we were like a very nuclear family. We really depended on each other. Really, that’s all we had—each other. We were extremely ambitious and extremely aggressive and in a certain way that kind of worked against us, you know? Because California is laid back and we were anything but laid back. I think we rubbed some people the wrong way. We were like, ‘No. Now. We can’t wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow is too far away!’ And we wanted to go to the top, We wanted to be as big as the Beatles and the Stones, which are all normal things for young people to do. You’re hungry and you want to go out and eat up the world. And that drove us to go out and do what we did. In one way, it was really good. We were constantly working on the music, and constantly figuring out how to get the music out there. And I’m proud of the work we did. You look at that band, and we put out one EP with four songs. 35 years later, that record is still sought-after. People pay $180 on eBay for it. When you hear it, it sounds as incredible today as it did the day we made it. The production is simple, but it’s extremely well-executed, the music is awesome and so all those things that we applied … we were right. The principles involved were worth aspiring to. All this time later, you can pop that thing on and it still rocks and it’s still exciting and it doesn’t sound dated.
What was it like going from struggling with the Nerves to signing with the Beat and working with people like Eddie Money?
When things started to move really fast we went from the Nerves—which was like total street urchins—to, like, big time rock with Bill Graham and Bruce Botnick and Columbia Records. It was really intense. I mean, I was parking cars, and all of a sudden we were at Columbia and we were like rock stars.
You literally had a job parking cars?
I used to park cars at the Imperial Gardens, and L’Orangerie, which was like a really upscale French restaurant, and Osko’s Disco, which is no longer there. I parked everybody’s cars. I parked Jack Nietzsche, I parked Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, Milton Berle—you name it, the whole nine yards. Osko’s Disco was totally fucking insane. It’s where they filmed Thank God It’s Friday.
When you were parking the cars of people like Jack Nietzsche, were you ever tempted to leave a demo tape?
I did! I left one with him, I left one with Ringo. I used to park John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. They’d show up in, like, an old Buick Riviera, and they had a Pepsi bag filled with blues cassette tapes. And the first time they showed up, I was wearing my little red parking jacket with the black lapels and a white shirt with a skinny black tie, and I had a Blues Brothers button. I parked them and they were like, ‘Yeah, man, that’s cool.’ They gave me my best tip: $20.
Was that how you caught Columbia’s ear?
You know, Eddie Money really did it. He went out of his way for a solid year. He told everybody and anybody that I was a great songwriter. He just went on a rampage. It was almost embarrassing. He was invited to these parties—and this was in the day when people would spend fifty 50 grand making a demo tape—and he would play this fucking cassette made at home on, like, a Realistic cassette player that sounded like shit and he’d say, ‘Aw fuck that—you gotta listen to this!’ And he’d put on ‘Let Me Into Your Life’ and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Girl’ and these guys were like, ‘Eddie, what the fuck are you talking about?’ And he’d be like, ‘No! This guy’s fucking great.’ And he just went to town for me.
Are you guys still friends?
I ran into him on the street in New York, and we took a great photo, and I put it on Facebook and got this incredible response. We haven’t played together, but I love the guy and he is who he is. He co-wrote ‘Let Me Into Your Life.’
I read that the Paul Collins Beat and the English Beat had to fight over who could be ‘the Beat.’
Well, it wasn’t a fight. I just got this call in the middle of the night in L.A. saying, ‘This band from England has the rights in England. You’ve got the rights everywhere else. What do you want to do?’ Blah blah blah blah. They actually made it ugly. They were kind of assholes about it, but I was like, ‘Aw, fuck it, I’ll be ‘Paul Collins Beat.’ I don’t give a shit.’ We were actually playing the Roundhouse in London, and we went to the recording of ‘Tears of a Clown’ but they weren’t very nice to us. It’s really funny because in the last two years I’ve been touring my ass off all over America and I’ve done about ten shows where they either played the night before or the night after. At the last show I was playing in Pittsburgh, they were literally playing across the street on the same night.
Who had the bigger crowd?
They probably did. They’ve got that whole dance thing, you know. I actually called the guy and said, ‘Why don’t we do a “‘Beat Off?”’’ No, they probably would win because they have all that action, but that’s what I’m saying, man. It’s an uphill battle with power pop, and I’m totally ready for the challenge. It’s what I do every day. I bust my ass for this kind of music. A lot of people still have to hear about it and learn about it.
When people talk about the history of power pop, they often mention the Raspberries and Big Star as sort of being these pivotal—
I don’t know about that. I mean, I love the Raspberries, but power pop started in the mid- to late ‘70s. That’s the generation that started it. I know that Pete Townshend coined the word but for me it really started in the mid- to late 70s with guys like us and the Shoes and the Romantics and the Knack and the Plimsouls. You know, all those bands that did that shit.
Who would you say are the top three power pop bands of all time?
Me, me and me! [Laughs] No … it’s hard to say. That doesn’t really matter. What really matters is that people discover the treasure trove that there is here. There’s all kinds of bands. Just go look at a map: Syracuse, that’s the Flashcubes. The Pezband from Chicago. Material Issue. Name a place in the country, and there are great power pop bands that came out of there.
I’m from Oklahoma and the only power pop guy we have of any note was Dwight Twilley—and he’s now on Burger Records!
Yeah, I’ve been talking to Dwight lately and we’re talking about maybe doing some touring together. I love him. I mean, if I’m the king of power pop, he’s the emperor.
In the early ‘80s, it seemed like there were a lot of people poised to make power pop the next big thing. Kim Fowley declared on the Tom Snyder show that it would replace punk rock. And yet it didn’t happen.
You know what the problem with power pop is? It’s not that fucking dangerous. Rock music is dangerous. Punk was dangerous. Hardcore is dangerous. You don’t have to kill your parents to like power pop. It’s a very particular genre of music and it really does embody all the great elements of rock ‘n’ roll which are great songwriting, great harmonies, great hooks, great guitar parts, tight pants … sexy looking guys on a good day. The thing is, it’s not dangerous. It’s uplifting. If you come to any one of these shows that I do and there’s a hundred-plus people and you see them smiling and dancing and singing, it’s such a great time. So maybe it’s like, you know, Pat Boone. It’s wholesome, but it’s so cool.
It is cool, and a lot of it was produced really cool—tight and rockin’, not slick like mainstream seventies 70s rock. Do you think horrid production in the ‘80s helped poison the genre?
What happened in the ‘80s with the record industry is that the record industry took over, and it became a producer’s medium. I mean, to hell with the band! Look at guys like David Foster, who did Toto and all those bands. There were a handful of guys that dominated the market, and it was like, ‘We’re not going to use the band. You’re just going to come in and sing,’ and of course a lot of the bands probably hated their own records.
Did you have those struggles with making the second Beat album, The Kids Are the Same? I can’t help but notice that it lacks some of the oomph of the first album.
Oh, we had tons of problems making The Kids Are the Same. It took us two years to make that record and it was because of the music business. It was like, ‘You gotta have a hit.’ They fired the drummer, they fired the producer. We went on this merry-go-round with different producers. It cost a fortune. The problem was they were trying to fit that music into the mainstream pipeline and it just wasn’t going to work. It just wasn’t. After they fired Bruce Botnick we went back to him. We did a whole album with Andy Johns, who’s Glyn Johns’ younger brother who did Rod Stewart and shit like that. Before him, we did the album with this guy John Jansen who was from New York. It was just a clusterfuck. It was absurd. But I will say that record has some great music on it. ‘That’s What Life Is All About’ is one of my biggest songs to date.
You can tell that the first album was lovingly crafted and the second album just feels … different.
We were so lucky to make that first album with Bruce Botnick because he really loved the band and he did what every great producer should do. He acted like a piece of glass or a mirror. He just got our sound on tape. Then we let all these people tell us what to do and it took me a long, long time to get out from the influence of the music business.
And now you’re back, and there’s a larger audience than ever waiting to hear it! What rekindled that interest in your music?
First thing is, I never threw in the towel. Secondly, the internet has just been fantastic for my music and the kind of stuff I do. There are always new bands that cite me as a reference, and that’s pretty much who I work with now. Like the tour I’m doing out here, I’m going to be with Audacity, Garbo’s Daughter. The Burger Records guys are good friends of mine, and I’ve done a lot of tours with their bands. All these new up and coming bands: it’s incredible!
A lot of them are on the Nerves tribute that came out a couple months ago.
Yeah—Volar Records. The show in L.A. is going to be in conjunction with them.
Some of those songs, like the Shark Toys’ version of ‘I Don’t Fit In,’ really made me listen to your songwriting in a new light. What’s the secret to writing songs that will stand the test of time?
Well, you know—when I started, I was so lucky to hook up with Jack Lee and Peter Case at the time that I did because that was like my university. That was my college of rock ‘n’ roll, and we spent so much time studying the masters, everyone from Elvis to the Beatles to the Stones, Chuck Berry—all the great music of the ‘60s that really inspired us. We wanted to take it a step further and make it very economical and compact and high energy, but there was a level of quality that we wanted to achieve. ‘Good’ was what you threw out! We worked so hard to achieve a high level. You know, that Nerves 45 … we made that little 45 in a tiny studio for no money and thirty 30 years later, you put that record on and it rocks, man. Recording was like our religion. That was our Holy Grail. You’ve got to put it down on tape and make it count. All those things that I learned then, I’ve tried to keep all that alive and implement it in the work I do today, which is why I’m so proud of the latest album, King of Power Pop, because it really draws a direct line to what I was doing in the Nerves and the work ethic that we had and the idea of how to put together these little pop songs. I’m really dedicating myself totally now to promoting power pop as a genre and really giving it the exposure it deserves and it’s really an underdog genre. People need to be turned on to it because it really does encompass all the best elements of rock ‘n’ roll: great songs, great songwriting, harmonies, big guitar hooks. It’s fabulous!

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS PSYCHO BEACH PARTY WITH PAUL COLLINS, AUDACITY AND GARBO’S DAUGHTER ON FRI., JULY 1, AT THE BLUE STAR, 2200 E. 15TH ST., DOWNTOWN. 10 PM / $10 / 18+. WIN TICKETS HERE! OR BUY TICKETS HERE. PAUL COLLINS’ KING OF POWER POP IS OUT NOW ON ALIVE. VISIT PAUL COLLINS AT THEPAULCOLLINSBEAT.COM.

Matt Bauer “Blacklight Horses”

Bauer plays Friday and Saturday in Los Angeles. 06.24.11 – Los Angeles, CA @ Tommy’s House (pop-up loft show) w/ Dana Falconberry & 06.25.11 – Los Angeles, CA @ house show w/ Dana Falconberry

—Daiana Feuer

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YrcA_yuWWo

Down hear you can listen to the full performance…

Dublab Tonalism Live Performance June 10-11, 2011 by Julia Holter

Download: Bare Wires “Ready to Go”

Bare Wires play a kind of glam-influenced garage rock that’s been labeled “smooth punk,” which seems to mean it’s played tightly and sincerely, drawing lyrical inspiration from the best of power-pop: girls, dancing, love and the trials of youth. If The Warriors had ended with a dance party instead of a guy getting a switchblade through the wrist, Bare Wires could have been provided the soundtrack. Lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Matthew Melton bravely battles the interviewer’s digital fidelity problems in order to discuss high school beatings, late ‘80s Memphis underground cassette rap and exactly which American city lives up to its frightening reputation. This interview by Tom Child.

Your video for “Don’t Ever Change” features a group of high school delinquents. What was the most trouble you ever got into in high school?
Matthew Melton (guitar/vocals): I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and one time in high school, I was sitting on my desk. I was a punk kid with this blonde Mohawk and this other kid who was, like, a preppy fucking king of the soccer team was sitting on his desk on the other side of the class. The teacher was, like, “Matthew, get off your desk,” and the other dude’s still chilling on top of his shit so I was like, “I’ll get down when he gets down,” and she threw a big fit, sent me to the principal and they beat the shit out of me. I actually received licks. I think you can still receive licks in Tennessee. But yeah, I received ten licks for being insubordinate and then I just walked out. They just beat me so I was just going to leave. I’m not going to go back to class. There was a bunch of shit. I got kicked out of one high school just for poor attendance and shit. I had a pretty classically terrible high school experience and it’s a big inspiration.
Well, that actually leads into my next question pretty well. A friend of mine insists there are still some parts of the country where a guy can spend a night in jail just for having long hair. Have you ever experienced any prejudice in the USA for your appearance?
M: One time in Canada, we had just played in New York City and we were coming up the road going to Montreal across the border. We crossed over about eight o’ clock at night, running late for our show in Montreal and we fucking cruised through and they pinned us as being drug users so they searched the whole vehicle and they actually found three hits of LSD in a small drug bag that we had forgotten about. So, they make you stand there and watch them as they search your car and they hold it up and they don’t say anything about LSD so they’re like, “What is this weed bag? What is this?” and we were like, “Uh, yeah, man. That’s just garbage. That’s nothing,” and they grill us on it. “What do you mean? You just keep garbage in your wallet? What is this shit?” We just played dumb and they were like, “Do you have anything else like this in your van?” and we were like, “No, we’re totally cool.” They kept searching that van but they weren’t able to identify what those hits of paper blotter acid were so they actually gave it back to us and let us go into Canada.
Whoa, that is some awesome karma you’re working with there.
M: I guess we stumbled on a little loophole because there’s no real test for LSD. There’s a test for cocaine. It’ll turn blue or something if it’s real but LSD, you just have to take it. So, it was pretty cool. We didn’t know that but I guess it’s only if you say, “It’s LSD! You busted me!” then they can do something. But if you don’t admit what it is, they can’t really do anything. I thought it was really funny that the Canadian people gave it back to us. Like, “What? It’s obviously something!”
It’s that legendary Canadian politeness.
M: Yeah, “Here you kids go.”
I was reading an interview in which you mention that your SXSW festival survival kit included a lot of California marijuana. What are the logistics of transporting that kind of contraband through the Southwest? When I’ve done that trip it always seems that my car gets sniffed four or five times by scary dogs before I get to Austin.
M: Well, here in Oakland, marijuana is basically legal. Shit, I’m going to be discrete about this in print but basically there’s this Measure Z that got passed that makes marijuana and hash the lowest priority so underground stores actually pop up where you can go in and buy grass. You used to need a medical exemption from your doctor but now you can just go in there. Here [in Oakland] it’s so legal that we just got used to certain types and higher grades of it so we just have it shipped to various points along our tour. It’s just our preference. I don’t know. I just started smoking weed recently.
What is the perfect drug combo that one should take to get the most out of a Bare Wires show? Is there a Bare Wires cocktail?
M: Well, shit, probably just… I don’t know, man. Maybe, like…aw, shit…nitrous? Like a nitrous balloon? I don’t know. I’m not a big advocate of drugs. I honestly wish I didn’t have to smoke weed but it just becomes this kind of necessary weird thing…a habitual thing. I don’t drink anymore. I quit drinking.
Oh, good for you! How is that treating you?
M: Definitely our touring became more efficient because we would do shit like blank out and leave cymbals behind and shit. Just stupid moves. You know, everybody’s wasted and people’s buddies are carrying stuff out of the club and nobody knows what the hell is going on.
You mentioned in another interview that you had developed a way of sort of spacing out through the whole experience of touring. Can you provide any tips for other touring musicians on how to achieve this Zen like state?
M: Well, I think what happened was we just booked way too many shows. We’ve been touring nonstop for the past two years and it’s just kind of gotten pretty ridiculous. It kind of becomes this funny thing. But it’s cool. I’m excited for this. We’re leaving on tour in basically two days and I’m very excited to come down there because we worked up a bunch of old shit and a bunch of new songs and kind of abandoned the record that we’re touring on, which is kind of a cool move. We totally went back and took it down a notch. But yeah, spacing out? I don’t know, just smoking shit loads of weed. Just getting there. It becomes a super surreal experience.
At the end of a show, do you ever think, “Whoa, did we just play a show?”
M: Yeah, it’s like, “What happened?” It’s like second nature.
Tom Petersson of Cheap Trick allegedly coined his band’s name upon noting that he had gone to see a Slade concert and they had “performed every cheap trick in the book.” What’s your favorite rock ‘n’ roll live show cheap trick?
M: If things are going well, I like everything to stay going really well. But it seems that sometimes we’ll play clubs and venues where things aren’t going well on stage with the sound and our response is usually to push the microphone stands over into the audience and that usually makes things worse so it generally snowballs into a really psychedelic performance where we just kind of forget about the structure of our songs and go a little further out. It’s just kind of a response, you know? If this place can’t get its shit together to have, like, a monitor… I’ve kicked a couple monitors over into the audience, especially if it’s a little piece of shit that’s not doing anything anyway and the guy is making it feed back but most of those guys don’t give a shit. I’d like to tour with my own sound person but I just don’t know who that would be right now.
Do you remember the first time you heard a Slade song? How did that feel?
M: I remember really liking the production on all that classic Slade stuff but they did that movie called Flame. I thought that was pretty cool. Slade’s ok but a lot of times, I’d just rather listen to the Testors, you know what I mean? I like a lot of that ‘70s glam produced stuff.
Do you foresee a Bare Wires full-length movie in your future?
Fuck yeah, dude. We’re totally doing a full-length movie where we go to Coney Island and take over a cotton candy stand or something. It’ll be tight. Yeah, we want to invade New York City. I don’t know. We’re going on tour in Australia soon too.
You mentioned in another interview that your album title, Artificial Clouds, is about the feeling you get when you wake up and realize that things weren’t the way you thought they were but rather than being discouraged by this knowledge, it just inspires and motivates you. Can you tell me the most important “artificial clouds” moment in your life?
M: Well, I think everybody can relate to that because the way people live today is pretty lame, I think. I don’t know. I have something like that everyday because everybody’s in a different mode and you can be going along with your day and you can run into somebody who’s so brought down on themselves, that it just changes. I think I understood the question you were asking but I couldn’t hear at all! I feel bad because I can’t hear you very well so I’m kind of interpolating every other word. Am I on speakerphone or something?
I’m trying this thing through Skype. I’m basically just yelling at my computer. You mentioned in another interview that you were listening to a lot of dollar records that had been discarded on the street. What’s your greatest dollar record score? What’s the best record you’ve ever found on the street?
M: Definitely Dwight Twilley. The Dwight Twilley band. That guy’s cool. I like that guy’s early stuff that he did with Phil Seymour. You’ll see him in the dollar bin. The Bay Area has some great records. All of us are homeless and unemployed at our core so…I don’t know; I don’t really have a record player anymore because I don’t have a place for it to be because we have been traveling so extensively. I go places, I see cool records, but I can’t really buy them because I don’t have a place for them. I guess records are kind of one thing you’ve got to give up if you’re really touring, unless you can afford to hold down a swanky apartment in Echo Park or something.
When you were in Memphis, did you ever visit Ardent Studios?
M: Yeah, I checked it out. I’ve never recorded there. I left Memphis when I was still pretty young but people would always be passing through town like, “Yeah, we’re recording at Ardent, blah blah blah.”
If you were going to cover an Alex Chilton song, which song would it be?
M: Alex Chilton? I don’t know if I would cover an Alex Chilton song. You know what? I take that back. His 1970 album…it’s him and you can hear that he’s pretty wasted throughout the whole experience, or at least chunks of the experience. He does a really good cover of “Sugar, Sugar.” That album is cool. I think that’s the best record he ever made.
You’ve said you don’t really listen a lot to other people’s records when you’d rather be recording yourself. When you start listening to too much music, what does that do to your creativity?
M: I don’t listen to a whole lot of music mainly because I don’t have the time. If I had more time and I had a record player, I’d definitely collect records but I don’t think I’d be a big collector person. I’m a person who would just rather make something happen than sit around and listen to the same records over and over. I don’t know. Things will inspire me for a time but everything has an expiration date and I just sort of get burned out and want to move on. I don’t have any problems never looking back. Just trashing a bunch of cool records and being like, “Well, it’s cool. I’ll find other shit.” Or the radio is even more interesting sometimes…like AM radio in a weird town or something.
What bands do you like that someone familiar with the Bare Wires’ music would be most surprised to find that you like?
M: Ah, that’s a good question. I like really specifically Memphis underground rap from the late ‘80s into the ‘90s. I’d say that’s probably some of the best stuff. All these young rappers were cruising around Memphis, releasing these songs they recorded on, like, 4-track cassette tape and they’re so raw that they definitely blow my mind. There’s a guy named Tommy Wright III. That guy is badass.
Do you have any good Dodge Ram van breakdown stories or has she been consistently sweet to you?
M: Yeah, I got a good story about our last van, the first van I ever had. It was an all black Dodge Ram. It was black and we put green shag carpeting in it and we called it the Black Widow. We did a tour with it and by the time we made it back it was pretty non-functional. It was making terrible noises and it was basically on its last legs. This drug dealer in the neighborhood in Oakland…I ran into him on the bus running down the street that my house is on and he offered me a thousand dollars cash. I needed money at the time so I took it and he came back later that night with this really torn up girlfriend and he smoked a blunt with me and took the van. He never registered it in his name and two major events happened to the van in a month period. He pissed off some tweaker people who lived upstairs from him and they drilled holes into his radiator to sabotage him and then, like, two days later, somebody else stole the van. I get a call from this guy going like, “Hey man, you gotta call the cops, man. The van got stolen and it’s in your name still.” I was just like, “Aw shit.” So that’s the fate of that thing. But then he got it back a couple months later and then it disappeared. But you’d see it parked. You’d see our van parked, like, right down the street. It was really fucked. But I have a really good van now, a GMC.
You played in Monterrey, Mexico and you said that it wasn’t super dangerous like everybody thinks. Have you ever played a town that turned out to be exactly as dangerous as everybody thinks?
M: El Paso. Yeah, El Paso’s fucked up, dude. It’s just long strips that have these washed out tequila bars and it’s pretty desolate in a lot of places. It just feels like people are cruising back and forth over the border and you just don’t know what’s going to happen. We saw some people having sex in the bar where we were playing. This dude was just wasted and he started fingering his girlfriend at the bar. It was just gnarly. It was like, damn, people are getting gnarly here.
What’s the most wholesome rock ‘n’ roll experience you’ve ever had? You ever finish a show and go drink some tea or something?
M: Well, hang on just one second. Let me pass this question off to Nathan Price who is our drummer. Nathan, it’s L.A. RECORD. He wants to know what our sleaziest rock ‘n’ roll moment was.
Nathan Price (drums): Woo! Let me think about that for a second. That’s a good question. Me and Fletcher [Johnson, bass] got arrested in Tijuana and spent the whole day down there. We were in the wrong part of town at the wrong time and it was this really gnarly drug zone. They just picked us up right off the street with machine guns. They handcuffed us together and marched us off down the street. That was fucked up. We barely got out on bail. They wanted to keep us for two days. We barely bailed out of there after the third jail we were in around seven or eight o’ clock and then Matthew somehow magically had a cab. I don’t know how he popped up but we drove straight to the venue in San Diego and played our show that night. That’s probably the best story I’ve got because I really thought it was possible I might die in there. It was really shitty, man. It was totally like a Tarantino movie when I got in there. I was like, “Is this fucking real?” Everything looked so gnarly. It looked like a set for a movie almost. The first jail had dirt floors and two cells. In one cell there was this snappy chick and in the other cell there were three dudes. Then there was, like, a chair that had been ripped out of a car sitting on the dirt floor, and a table, and then a stack of broken bicycles and a stack of used car tires behind them. I was just like, “What the fuck is this? Where the fuck are we?” I seriously thought I was in some sort of a movie. It was trippy. We got moved around to three different jails and they wouldn’t speak English to us. We were the only white guys. It was terrible. But we definitely learned a lot that day.
So was that show you played that night in San Diego like the best show you’ve ever played in your life because you were just so fucking relieved?
N: It felt pretty good but we were really out of it and really tired. We were really dirty after being in jail for a long time but we played with our friends the Dead Ghosts and the Indian Wars from Vancouver. They’re kind of our buddies that we went on tour with and they’re really badass. Check out the Dead Ghosts and the Indian Wars, they’re good dudes. So, yeah, that was probably the best one.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS PSYCHO BEACH PARTY WITH BARE WIRES, SHITTY LIMITS, ROUGH KIDS, COSMONAUTS ON FRI., JUNE 10, AT THE BLUE STAR, 2200 E. 15th ST., LOS ANGELES. 8:30 PM / $10 / 18+. LARECORD.COM/SHOWS OR BLUESTARROCKS.COM. VISIT BARE WIRES AT MYSPACE.COM/THEBAREWIRES.