Stream: Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears “I’m Broke”

(from Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is out now on Lost Highway)

Black Joe Lewis is a Texas soul shouter who would have been at home on Sue in 1966 but finds himself instead on Lost Horizon with his band the Honeybears. He’s opened for Little Richard but his favorite rock ‘n’ roll band is Rocket From The Tombs and he loved Star Trek right up to the point J.J. Abrams got hold of it. He speaks now from a parking lot in Tennessee. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

What was the number one pawned item you saw when you worked at the pawn shop?
Black Joe Lewis (vocals): Probably guns or tools. It was an interesting job. I kinda walked out on my boss at the one that I worked at most of the time. He was—do you watch The Simpsons? The guy who made up the Simpsons characters saw him and made up the comic book store character.
You worked for the actual Comic Book Guy?
I swear to God, dude. Red pony tail, bald on top, beard—his butt crack always stuck out. He was a total asshole but he wasn’t a comic book nerd—he was a gun freak. He was like in his forties and he lived with his parents still because he was in debt because he had so many guns. I was like, ‘How many guns do you have?’ ‘Last time I checked, over 80.’
Did he have a special gun that he was uncomfortably in love with?
Yeah—he had this old Smith and Wesson revolver. Like a fucking Old Western six shooter. And he did this thing every weekend where he dressed up—like a Renaissance fair—dressed up like Civil War and cowboy characters and they’d go and show off their shooting skills. He was a fucking dork—such an asshole. We hated each other. It was just me and him and we worked there all day long together. It was at the same time as the first Bush and Gore election was going on. I was like 18 and it was the first time I was going to be able to vote. And he was a hardcore Republican and I wasn’t and we’d sit there and argue all fucking day. We just didn’t like each other—he was so conservative, man. He would sit there and argue about every little thing—like race, politics, everything. He was a dick.
Did he have a single redeeming characteristic?
Uh.
He was kind to small animals?
Nah, he got shot in his hand. That was kinda stupid too. He was a dick, dude—a total Texan Republican. I walked out on him one day. I just couldn’t stand him and I told him I was gonna put gas in my car and I got in my car and never went back.
Is that what led to the song ‘I’m Broke’?
No. ‘I’m Broke’ is just about your average person who is having a tough time.
I noticed in that picture where the band is in Star Trek uniforms, you’re wearing the blue of the science-medical officer. Why not gold or red?
Why I went to blue? In the last picture? The last one is because we lost all the shirts. I had the original yellow and I’m just a big Star Trek fan from childhood.
What’s your favorite episode of the original series?
Probably the ones with Khan. He was insane. The guy that played him, Ricardo Montalban—I just thought he was a really good actor. Him and Shatner together—Shatner would just drive him nuts, like in the movie too.
Do you think that you have to have a nemesis in your life to really attain your full potential as a creative person?
It’s hard to say because I’ve had people that I couldn’t stand and I tried to catch them. But now I don’t really try to hate on people too much. Well—since you’re talking about the Star Trek thing, my ultimate nemesis is J.J. Abrams. He straight up ruined the story of Star Trek. I wanted to throw my drink at the screen. I was pissed. There’s never gonna be a continuation of what it should be—Star Trek’s dead, man. When I saw previews for the movie, I was really excited. I was thinking it was gonna be awesome and everybody was saying J.J. Abrams wrote Lost. I went in there and I was fucking pumped and then it was like Melrose Place—a bunch of teenagers.
What is the essential thing about Star Trek that he missed?
The biggest thing is he blew up the planet Vulcan. You can’t have Star Trek without Vulcan. And Spock and Uhura were hooking up—that would never happen. In the older series, the characters were so much more professional—like military. Like hardcore guys. In this one they’re making jokes and running around.
Do you run the Honeybears with that Starfleet discipline?
Not really. I tried.
It seems like every chance you get you wanna say something about 8-Ball and MJG. Per their album Comin Out Hard, what’s the hardest you ever came out?
We did this thing at our last show in Austin where the bass player played in a wheelchair the whole time. And at the end of the show, I healed him—like the dudes on the Christian channel. The preachers. And he jumped up and spun around—everybody loved it. And then this guy back home—one of the writers—he didn’t want to write about it and so he wrote about every band but us. I was like, ‘Man, you couldn’t write about the wheelchair thing?’
But you got Barack Obama talking about you.
Exactly. I want to try to meet him one day. Isn’t he a Bob Dylan fan? I didn’t catch all the bands he liked—I remember they were talking about the iPods.
If you guys covered a Rocket From the Tombs song, which would it be?
In my old band, we did ‘(I Want You To Know) What Love Is.’ We never really started doing that in this band—I don’t know why. I love that band a lot. It’d probably be that one again because I already know it and then—‘Ain’t It Fun’ is always good.
So you’re a Peter Laughner fan?
Oh yeah. Rocket From the Tombs and the Dead Boys is my favorite rock ‘n’ roll ever. The greatest rock ‘n’ roll.
What screamers are closest to your heart?
Definitely James Brown. Bunker Hill—he’s bad ass. I guess you’ve got Little Richard, too.
Did you meet him when you played with him?
No, he was in a really, really bad mood. I didn’t get anywhere near him. He was complaining about everything on the stage. It was almost like a comedy show. He started bitching about Pat Boone stuff from the fifties.
The great ‘Tutti Frutti betrayal?
He made everybody but their camera’s away in the crowd and then he kept saying how Asian people have pretty skin. And he was like, ‘Y’all like my boots?’ I wanted him to play ‘Rip It Up’ but he never did.
What’s the nastiest thing you can say in a foreign language if you have to?
When I was in Holland they taught me how to say, ‘Bitch, I love you.’
What’s the dirtiest record in your collection?
The dirtiest record I’ve got is probably one of Eazy E’s.
How soon do you think you’ll get around to naming that record after Nat Turner?
Hopefully next one.
Any other revolutionaries you’d like to mention?
Karl Marx is always cool. Che Guevara. I’ve been reading a lot of that Howard Zinn book—I’ve been learning about it a lot. They were all like the guys who were early in the movement before it had corruption. Like Karl Marx wrote it from his prison cell or whatever. Later on when people got power, they start getting crazy.
What kind of song would you write if you found out you only had a year to live?
I would write a song about Canada. No one cares about Canada.
You once said you wanna be the black Elvis—are you still working on that?
Yeah, I’m still working.
How close are you? Are you the black Carl Perkins?
No—I don’t have any money yet!
If you end up coming into a million dollars, what shape do you want your swimming pool to be?
The shape of a butt.

BLACK JOE LEWIS AND THE HONEYBEARS WITH EXTRA GOLDEN ON MON., AUG 31, AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8PM / $15 / ALL AGES. TROUBADOUR.COM. BLACK JOE LEWIS AND THE HONEYBEARS’ TELL ‘EM WHAT YOUR NAME IS IS OUT NOW ON LOST HIGHWAY. VISIT BLACK JOE LEWIS AND THE HONEY BEARS AT BLACKJOELEWIS.COM OR ON MYSPACE AT MYSPACE.COM/BLACKJOELEWIS.

Download: Collie Ryan “Star Bright (Song of Silence)”

(from The Hour Is Now out now on Yoga)

Back in 1973, Collie Ryan recorded three albumfuls of folk songs at once before retreating deep into the Texas desert. She’s squatted in an old bus along the Rio Grande ever since, spending her days painting mandalas on hubcaps. While she has no plans of dropping back into civilization, she will share her mystical observations about circles and sing us a song or two. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

Why did you have to move your bus?
I had to move off the river in the last three months. We had an enormous flood. It took out what was left of the golf course. Since I had been living 22 years down there at the permission of the owners, it was my agreement with them that if they needed the land that I would leave. They needed the land to lift the golf course up higher so it wouldn’t flood. I am in the process of finding another place to put my trailer and we’ll see what turns out.
What do you like about the Texas desert?
The Chihuahua desert is really a beautiful desert. Each desert has its own character. It’s just absolutely beautiful and big and empty around here. There’s a lot of ocotillo way down in the Big Bend where I’m at. We kind of drop down below the plains of Texas and there are all kinds of mountains and valleys and fantastic rock formations. There’s a feeling in this desert, as most deserts have. There’s a feeling that people come down here—it happened to me, it happens to most people—they either get real antsy and don’t want to stay here at all or you come down here and it just feels so good. It feels like coming home. There are a lot of people moving in down here because of the chaos that looks like it’s going to happen in cities and the expenses and trouble going on in the world. Once it catches a hold of you—it might take 20 years, but you end up down here. It’s a famous place in Texas. It’s 200 square miles of nature’s more fantastic artwork. As Big Sur is to San Francisco, the Big Bend is to Austin and Dallas. It’s a getaway place, an inspiration place. You come here to paint, write, build original housing. Joshua Tree is that for L.A., though it’s gotten real crowded there. Joshua Tree has a really fine feeling to it, too. I imagine it has something to do with the minerals under the ground and the magnetics of the earth. Certain places produce a wonderful feeling that is very healthy to your spirit.
What is most inspiring for your art about the landscape?
The colors down here are fantastic. I’m originally from California, around the Bay Area where there was a lot of green. I moved to the desert and I began to enjoy the light. I’d always read about the light in Greece. Maybe I’ll get to go there someday and see for myself. And then down here in the Big Bend there’s a curious factor that there’s all kinds of colors in the earth. I use brown in every work. There are probably 50 shades of brown from the purple end to the gold end. It’s really an inspiring place to play, to paint, because number one, if you can live simply, you end up with more time. If you are living in the city you have X amount of money to earn to pay for your rent, etc, which keeps you moving X amount of hours to keep the electricity, gas and a very high rent going. Down in the desert, people find lower rent or live in trailers. They make-do houses and you end up with more time. It’s a different frame of mind.
In pop culture the desert is associated with apocalypse—the city has died and we have no choice but to live in desert. But, in fact, it seems to be the opposite. It’s not the end of the world, it’s more alive…
It’s incredibly alive. The first time I ever saw the desert outside Palm Springs, it was a little shocking to me coming from a verdant place with grass and trees. It’s a lot of rocks and the plant life is different. Gardening is an art; it’s not easy here. It’s quite an ordeal to put together a desert garden. It’s not like the end of the world. It’s a refuge, actually. People have always gone to the desert for their health, for peace, for time and quiet to write—to the sheer fact that there isn’t an urban atmosphere, there’s much less electricity. Moving to the desert now is an ideal situation. You get your peace and quiet and can earn your living too. You can work on a laptop. But there aren’t many radio waves, not much telephone, microwaves or electricity and since it’s quieter you have access to your own mind. This is traditional. The saints and Indians went to the desert to have visions. Also Big Bend was historically an area of refuge for outlaws and heavily pursued Indians. Actually even the conquistadors came through here. A friend of mine showed me a pictograph on a rock she found—said 1689, which is one of the earliest signs they found out here.
Do you feel the presence of spirits that have passed through?
Oh, at times, at times. The desert sort of swallows human marks after a while. If you take one of those little four-wheel drive tricycles in the desert, that will mark it, but your vibrations or being gets swallowed up and blown away in the wind. Where I lived for 22 years on the Rio Grande river had been a Humana camp that would go back 5,000 years. There were cave paintings in the hills. A little over a hundred years ago it was a Comanche camp. The Comanche camped there and raided into Mexico. When Pancho Villa was running, their people camped on the American side to get away from the pillaging of Pancho Villa. It was a Candelaria camp, it was a cavalry camp, and all those marks didn’t leave too much. It was always a happy place.
You speak of being blown away by the wind as a positive—is that what you hope your lasting presence would be? Just blown off with the dust?
Well, who knows? It’s been bulldozed over and built into a golf course! Of course there are marks any place that last in the ether—in the astral. Like I have camped in places in the hills of New Mexico where they had the massacres of the last Indian chiefs and those marks do stay because a massacre is not an everyday event. It’s a pretty tragic event. If a person can see or is psychic, he can read what’s there. It’s also been noted that many cities, like Mexico City, are built on top of ancient cities. People are drawn over and over to an area where people have built for obvious reasons—it’s a good building site, but also because marks are left in the astral. Most of us can’t see in those worlds. We just feel in this world. And in this world—in the desert—it kind of swallows it up. Everything disappears but the four-wheel drive marks.
Have you caught a glimpse into the astral plane?
In my life, I have seen that. Have you ever?
If I did, how would I recognize that it was not just a figment of my imagination?
Well, when people see ghosts, it’s kind of a leaking through from this other plane of life to this one when the conditions are right. Some dreams are like that. All planes are interwoven together and very sensitive people pick up things—some of it is emotional vibration, since everything is vibration. Some people actually leave their bodies and go traveling in the astral plane, which I can’t say I do. When an Indian goes on a hill and has a vision, sometimes things come through like that. It’s a culture that our culture has ignored, but it’s a reality of life that’s been part of cultures historically forever! It’s part of us all. It’s the electric part of us. The inner idea part. Everyone has an astral body. It’s made of energy and electricity and that’s what the physical body forms on. That’s how the baby knows how to unfold and be a human being. The electrical astral body is already formed. Every single thing in existence has an inner energy body.
What about something man-made?
Everything. You won’t have a car without somebody at least thinking of that car first and drawing it out on plans to build it. Everything has an idea body upon which the atoms collect. Whether it’s a car or piece of celery or rock or dog or human. Everyone has an energy body within your physical body. And when science recognizes that we’ll start solving all the mysteries right, left and center.
Those ideas that come to create a song to match a melody with certain words—do those things exist on an astral body?
Every song has energy. It makes an energy or mark on the inner plane. Whether it’s a harmonic one or disharmonic one or a mediocre one. It makes some kind of a mark. For instance, what inspires me is spiritual ideas. In thinking about spiritual ideas, they have beautiful forms and come into your mind and inspire you and out comes some sort of music—for me.
Do the words and music arrive together?
Yes. Sometimes the whole inspiration starts with one note and one word. Then it unfolds. I’ve talked to a lot of songwriters who say the same thing. Your song cooks in your head for a long time. It’s a feeling. It’s the flower of experience. You go through emotions or whatever happens and it cooks in your mind for a while and suddenly, the song is ready like bread rising. You sit down with a word or note and out it comes.
Have you continued writing music this whole time in the desert?
I haven’t written any new songs for a few years because most of my energy has gone into painting mandalas on hubcaps. I earn my living painting. I’ve got them all over Texas—spotted over the USA, England, Australia. I even have some in Jamaica!
Where do you get hubcaps?
Sometimes I’m out traveling, I find them. I have a friend who brings some. I trade him a hubcap for the hubcaps he finds traveling. Many people know I paint them. I have a bit of fame in this small section of the world. They’ll bring them to Big Bend and leave them at certain places for me.
How did hubcaps become your chosen medium?
I had been working with little mandalas and sketching them a lot. Then I started looking for something round to paint on. This was many years ago. I found pizza plates. I wasn’t in the Big Bend then. You could find pizza plates and tacky trays at a second-hand store. Then one day I was down in the Big Bend and wanted to paint some and didn’t have any pizza plates, so I looked around and found a hubcap and that’s how it started.
How many have you done?
Well over a thousand. I’ve been painting them for more than twenty years. For the center picture I use scenes like border pictures or cowboy pictures or scenery of the river or many people send me orders—like they want a picture of their dog or various symbols or ideas, or this bird—and then I use simple geometrics in the circles around it.
The circle is such an ultimate concept. No matter where you begin in a circle, it eventually leads to the center.
A circle encompasses everything in existence. You take a dot, that implies a circle. A circle can have a given radius or it can spin into infinity. The circle also implicates—you put the cross in the middle and you have the four seasons. Everything fits in the mandala. I think every culture that ever existed used that symbol as a representation of eternity or existence or God. It can be divided in fives or eights or fours or threes or sixes. Basically, it’s divided in four. Your clock is a mandala. The seasons are a mandala. If you cut an orange, you’re looking at a mandala. If you look at that picture Leonardo DaVinci did with his arms and legs extended, you’re looking at a mandala. The center of it is in his belly button. In a drawing of the brain, there is a mandala. Life unfolds from the center-outwards. It’s a magical design. I’ve learned a great deal painting them.
Do you look at your future as something planned or find it a voyage of discovery or neither?
It will be what it will be. The future will grow out of what I do today. What you do today and how you take care of it completely with good attention right in the present, that’s your foundation of the future. There are some people, though, who do predict a future over time and come to accomplish it. That’s another way of doing things. The way I do it, I do each day completely, one day at a time.
People struggle with what defines living a good life or doing what they should do. What advice do you have on that?
Gosh. I always went and did what my heart told me to do. I never got off too far. One does during a long lifetime. You find out what your heart really wants to do. You find your true predilection and go from there. A lot of us are involved with earning a living and raising kids but still in that time you start to find your predilection and as the years go by, and even though you’re really busy, you gradually pull your life in line to what your true duty is—what you were born to do. Each person should do that. Otherwise, if you’re living someone else’s life, yours is wasted. Then you get older and life’s not much fun at all if you haven’t been living your own real life. Unless you set out on that discovery and figure out what you really want to do—then life is exciting and rewarding amid all the troubles that come naturally.
Did you choose the songs put on the new compilation of your recorded music?
I helped choose them. Most of the songs that were chosen for this album were ones that I have chosen myself to keep alive over the years.
There’s something rather peaceful about them.
They come from a peaceful, very natural place. It’s a different kind of music. It’s the kind of music to listen to and go within. There’s music to serve every purpose. There’s marching music, there’s dancing music. A lot of music is to take you out. This music is to take you within. Over-passing the nightmares and personal nonsense into your true center. I am glad if they can help. The more you listen to them, the more secrets—the more depths—you’re going to hear in them. They have been teaching me for many years. They come from perhaps my wiser nature. They will teach you how to think in the circle. How to think from the center of you—how to feel from the center of you—which we all need help to do.
The vibrations in your voice are really prominent.
Back when I recorded those I had a three-octave voice. I think I’m down to being a moderate second soprano now. I don’t have the voice I used to have. But I still sing and I keep all those songs going. It’s very exciting that people are finally getting to enjoy them because I certainly have for many years.
Is music a language?
Everything is vibration. Everything boils down to vibration: good, bad, high, low, everything translates into vibration. Everything is a song. Everything has its song. So music is a language. It’s a language that we understand and need very much now because if you think about it, because of the technology we have, there are many more than thousands—millions—of people pouring their material out in some form for the world to hear. And each piece reaches its own little audience. Music is talking now. Music, whichever kind you like to hear, raises your spirits. You can call music a lot of things but it certainly is a language. Music that doesn’t have words speaks to your soul. I started learning Spanish because years ago I met a woman from Argentina, Amanda Miguel, and she sang so incredibly beautifully. It moved me to tears and put me through all kinds of changes and I didn’t understand a word. Just the pure vibration she was causing.

COLLIE RYAN WITH MIA DOI TODD AND ERICA HYSKA ON SUN., JULY 12, AT THE PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY, 3910 LOS FELIZ BLVD., LOS FELIZ. 8 PM / ADMISSION $10 / ALL AGES. PRS.ORG. COLLIE RYAN’S THE HOUR IS NOW IS OUT NOW ON YOGA RECORDS. VISIT COLLIE RYAN AT YOGARECORDS.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/COLLIERYAN.

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.

Download: The Flatlanders “Homeland Refugee”

(from Hills and Valleys out now on New West)

The Flatlanders knew everything that was going to happen to them when they named their first album—available if at all in the U.S. only on 8-track—More A Legend Than A Band. Founders Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore all won significant fame on their own—Ely would publish poetry and tour with the Clash besides releasing an impressive set of solo LPs—but they regroup on rare occasions just to see what happens. Their newest Hills and Valleys is out now on New West. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Do you still have the guitar you bought off the street in Venice Beach?
Joe Ely (vocals/guitar): I’ve taken it out on the road for the first time in 20 years and I’ve been playing it for the first four or five songs. It sounds better than ever—it’s just aged really well. I’ve always played it in the studio because it sounds so sweet and I used to take it out on the road with me until the airlines punched a hole in it one time. But I got a nice case for it and I’ve been taking it out. What happened was I was playing down in Houston, alternating sets with ZZ Top when they were still called American Blues. We’d start at 6 PM and play until 6 AM. We’d play an hour, they’d play an hour—all night. And I had a falling out with the club owner and he pulled a gun on me so I hit the road—ran four blocks to the bus station and caught a bus to Fort Worth, and my friend in Fort Worth had just quit his job and he had enough money for two plane tickets to L.A. And my guitar had been stolen a few nights before at the club. I had stored in Fort Worth my Super Reverb amplifier and they actually let me strap it into the seat on the plane—like a baby! So we get to L.A. and I didn’t have any clothes or anything—just the amplifier. Well, there were a few shirts stuffed in the back of the amp. And we took turns carrying that thing from LAX to Venice Beach.
On foot?
Yeah. Well, we got a ride from a winged-out guy for a few blocks, but he was so crazy we said, ‘Let us out here.’ We get to Venice Beach and I was sleeping under the old pier that’s been torn down—I had my head on the Reverb to see if it moved. And then my friend knew someone out there so I put my amplifier at their house. I was out there about a week or two just doing whatever I could and I ran into some speed freak playing that old Gibson guitar at a bus stop right off of that main road—I guess it’s called Ocean or something. I can’t remember the streets in Venice anymore. He was sitting at a bus stop playing it and he had seashells glued all over it and I just came up and started talking to him and said, ‘That’s a real interesting guitar.’ And he looked at me all pissed-off and said, ‘Yeah? You wanna buy it?’ I said, ‘Well, what do you want for it?’ He said, ‘Ten dollars.’ And I thought, ‘God, a Gibson guitar for ten dollars!’ So I told him, ‘I don’t have one penny, but where are you going to be tomorrow?’ And he said ‘Oh, I’m always here—just get out of here if you don’t have any money!’ I spent 24 hours borrowing, begging, selling Coke bottles—whatever I could—and I came up with $5 and some change and I went back and told him, ‘Hey, man, I saw you yesterday and this is all I could scrape up.’ And he just looked at me like he was kinda needing a hit of speed or something and said, ‘All right, gimme the money—but I get to keep the seashells.’ So he starts ripping off the seashells and I was scared he was going to rip the top off because they were glued on with airplane glue. And he ripped all the shells off and I take the guitar and a couple months later I take it back to Texas with me and a guitar-and-violin maker in Lubbock, Texas, put a new bridge on it and new frets and sanded down the top. He just left the top all the same because he said if he refinished it, it would lose a lot of the sound. So it has the original finish and just a bunch of half circles where the seashells were ripped off. It’s an ugly guitar but boy, it sure sounds sweet. I think I’m going to bring it out to L.A. with me for these shows.
And that was your first week in L.A.?
That was basically my first week in L.A.
What was it like the first time you rode a freight train from L.A. back to Texas?
I’d run into some Texas buddies that had come out from Lubbock on a freight train and I asked them all kinds of questions about it. And I got called for the draft to go back to Lubbock and appear at the draft board in Amarillo, and I still didn’t have any money so I had somebody drop me at a San Bernardino freight yard. I asked which train went across to Albuquerque and they pointed it out and I made it all the way to Clovis, New Mexico—and hitch-hiked part of the way. But, boy, what an experience—flying across the desert in a boxcar with no weight in it so it’s just bumpy as shit. It literally knocks your brain out of your skull. Besides that, the girls that had given me a ride to the freight yards had given me a little package with some food in it—sandwiches and chips and brownies—so about dark I got hungry and I started eating their food and I ate the brownies and I’ll be damned if they hadn’t spiked the brownies with pot! I was riding 80 miles an hour in this boxcar and the brownies started coming on and I was bouncing towards the door—pushing myself back because I was scared shitless. And then I came out to Venice the next three summers. That was the winter of 1966 when I first went out there and then I went back to Texas for the draft, came back summer of ’67—the ‘Summer of Love,’ they called it. That was when Jim Morrison lived there and Venice was just a true bohemian spot—it wasn’t an upper-hunky place like it is now. It was a real bohemian village and I had a really great time working on music out there.
Didn’t the Seeds play there every day for a month?
At the Cheetah at Pacific Ocean Park—P.O.P. Some surfers showed me a way to climb on the outside of the pier and cut across through the middle and there was a hole and you could come up right underneath the stage. So we used to climb on the pier and sneak into shows at the Cheetah. The ocean was like six stories below. I didn’t have any good sense then—that was my problem!
I read when you were a kid, you liked to follow songs around—go where someone had sang about to see what it was really like. Why?
First it was Woody Guthrie, so I had to go everywhere that Woody Guthrie had gone. About the time I got that old guitar, I had to go to the towns that Woody talked about and then I heard ‘Go to San Francisco with flowers in your hair,’ so I went to San Francisco and made it up there in ’67 and ’68. I spent a whole lot of time in Berkeley. Mainly it was Berkeley, San Francisco and Venice. Being from Lubbock, Texas, where nothing ever happens to being right in the middle of the whole movement in 1966 and ’67—it was quite different than Lubbock and I found it totally fascinating.
The Flatlanders come back together every so often—is it because of something between the three of you or is there some outside force lets you know the world could use you for a bit?
There’s no outside force that gets us together. We don’t have much drive or ambition or anything like that. Between the three of us, you could put all of our ambition in a thimble! What it is is that we are truly dumbfounded and fascinated that we sit down and put a song together one word at a time—one note at a time—and we’re always fascinated at how it’s going to turn out. We never expected we would ever write a song together. That was just something that you didn’t do. Like this last record. Somewhere around the time Hurricane Katrina hit, we got together and started putting together some songs and it took us about five years to write these last songs. I think one song took two-and-a-half years to write. It’s almost like a game that we play—to see what happens. And even if we have songs, we don’t know if we have an album or not until we sit down and start recording it. So it’s quite a process. If we had someone looking over us saying, ‘You better get this record done!’ we would never do it. We just like to take time out from our own schedules every once in a while and just see what happens.
Butch told a reporter that you’ve ‘spent many hours in pancake houses across the country revealing the secrets of the universe to each other.’ What secrets can you share with us now?
We have come to the conclusion that sooner or later it’s now or never. And that’s about all we figured out. Anything that comes your way, just say to yourself, ‘Never mind.’ And everything will be all right—you won’t have any conflicts.
You’ve said before you cared much more about the live shows then the recording sessions when you were younger—what kind of things got lost because of that?
I’m sure I lost a whole lot of things—physically and mentally. One time I lost four years of songs I had written and stories in my journal. One time I lost an entire album—when I was coming back after we were touring with the Clash in London. I was over in Europe for a few months and had recorded an album on a little tape recorder and had it all pretty mapped out and was going to record it when I got back to Texas, but we got to New York City and the taxicab that took us from the airport to the Chelsea Hotel drove off and it had my bag in it with all four years of writings and a complete record album—all the notes on cassette tape—and it never came back. That night I kicked a table in my hotel room and broke my foot, so for the next three weeks I had to hobble along on tour from town to town with a cast on my foot and playing every night. It was miserable. The University of Texas just published a bunch of my journals that I kept on the road and those would have been four years of journals I probably would have included in this book and there’s a missing gap now. I’m amazed that this many things did survive because I’ve gone off and left whole record collections and whole houses full of stuff. I’ve gone off and left cars in airport parking lots and never gone back.
What’s it feel like to walk away from things like that?
Usually it’s not an impulse—it’s just a situation that I find myself in. It’s like, ‘Well, I’m here, but somebody called me and said to come up here and I know I won’t be back for six months so I’ll just call somebody and say, “Say, want a car? You can have it.”’ One time I had a collection of glass doorknobs that was my most prized possession. I don’t know why—I found these glass doorknobs in a house that had fallen down in Amarillo. I got a gig in New York playing with this theatre company which then went to Europe for six months and I knew I was going to lose my house and everything, and I called a friend and told him, ‘I’m going to donate to you my glass doorknobs.’ And he went, ‘What in the hell is a glass doorknob?’ And I said, ‘You know. Old houses in the ‘20s—everybody had glass and crystal doorknobs.’ That’s just kind of the way things are if you’re a rambler and that’s what I’ve always been.
But you’ve settled down in Austin for a bit, right?
I’ve had this house in Austin for 20 years now. There were a few places around there—one was one of the few settlements—at least in Texas—where the white settlers and the Indians lived side by side. The guy that built my house, his family settled Texas and came out with Steven F. Austin in the 1820s. He told me some stories and there’s been a couple of books written about one of the few places where the Indians had their teepees down by the river and the settlers were on the other side and they helped each other get food and pick pecans and all that stuff. I kind of feel like I was guided into that spot. I feel like I’ve found—after all that wandering—found that right spot.
Where do you feel the Flatlanders fit in your life now?
It’s a different kind of chemistry that happens when we sit down and work on something together. I cant put my finger on it—I don’t know what it is. All I can call it is kind of like mustard and mayonnaise—just a chemistry. We have tried to figure it out and we’ve never been able to. Probably something we’d be better off talking about at a pancake house! But if we figured it out, we probably wouldn’t have it anymore. It’s like the story of somebody asking the centipede about how he moves all his legs at one time and when the centipede thinks about it, he trips all over himself.
How did you happen to get bit by the world’s smallest horse?
When I came back from one of my trips from the East Coast, the Ringling Brothers circus was setting up in my hometown of Lubbock and I went out to watch them set up. And some guy walked over and handed me a jackhammer and said, ‘Go over and help those guys set up that tent.’ I was hired on the spot. And my first job after the tent was when we moved from the auditorium where we played back to the train yards which was several miles away—I was put in charge of two llamas and the world’s smallest horse. If you can imagine, his head was exactly knee-level to me. And he was a mean sonofabitch so every five seconds he would turn over and try to take a bite out of my knee. Napoleon complex. And when I would kick the horse off me, the llamas would rear up and look at me and spit at me. That was the worst job I ever had—leading the llamas and the world’s smallest horse. Within three weeks of being in the circus in what they call ringstock—which is taking care of the animals—I had the most seniority which goes to show you how long circus employees last. It’s usually guys running from the law who get a job so they can make it to the next town. So if you’re ever running from the law, just go join the circus.
You had a lyric on the new record that says, ‘the average person’s afraid of talking about death but not afraid of driving a car.’ What does that mean?
This world we live in is one big paradox. Everybody worries about the latest thing to worry about. Today it’s swine flu, but yet there’s a volcano underneath Yellowstone National Park that is 60,000 years overdue and if it goes off, it’ll cover the entire United States with fifty feet of ash. So I don’t worry about the latest things to worry about. I just think it’s better to make the best of what you got. My old BBQ friend Stubbs, I asked him once—‘What’s the secret to what you do, all the sauce and BBQing?’ And Stubbs said, ‘The secret of it all is to make do with what you got.’ So I figured that’s a good thing to live by.

THE FLATLANDERS FEATURING JIMMIE DALE GILMORE, JOE ELY AND BUTCH HANCOCK ON SAT., MAY 30, AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8PM / $18-$20 / ALL AGES. WWW.TROUBADOUR.COM. THE FLATLANDERS’ HILLS AND VALLEYS IS OUT NOW ON NEW WEST. VISIT THE FLATLANDERS AT THEFLATLANDERS.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THEFLATLANDERSTX.