When we last left our hero, Gary Clark, he was discussing his career as a recording artist…and if you missed it, then you must immediately haul yourself over to Part One, which can be found right here. Now, can we presume everyone’s on the same page? Excellent. Then we can get to the matter at hand, which involves Mr. Clark chatting about some of the work he’s been doing in recent years as a songwriter and producer for hire…

Popdose: Obviously, you’ve been doing a lot more songwriting and producing for other people than recording yourself for the last several years, but what I’ve been wondering is whether or not you do the demos yourself, and if you do, then will we ever get to hear them?

Gary Clark: I do record demos, but I don’t always sing them. Usually, I try and choose a session singer who suits whoever I’m pitching for, but sometimes, either for lack of somebody who suits or whatever, I do sing them. I haven’t really even thought about whether I’d release them! (Laughs) Very often, what happens is, if you get a cut on a record…if it’s a song that’s been pitched, one that you’re not writing with the artist, then they very often want the production as well. They then pay for the master, therefore you don’t own the master anymore. The label owns the master. But in the case of those that don’t get cut…the bad ones… (Laughs) …you never know. One of these days, maybe I will.

I just wanted to run through some of the songs you’ve written. I just recently heard Mark Owen’s “Kill With Your Smile” (In Your Own Time) and the songs that you wrote for Emma Bunton for her Life in Mono album (“Perfect Strangers” and “Take Me To Another Town“). When it comes to writing someone who’s a former member of Take That or the Spice Girls or whoever, how does that happen? Do their “handlers” approach you, or are you pitching the songs?

No, in those cases, the artist came in, and we wrote songs together. The labels kind of get to know you after awhile, which…I kind of knew a lot of them in the UK, but I’ve recently moved here to L.A., so I’m beginning again here. But they get to know you, and they sort of think, “That might work if you put them in a room together,” so they call you up, and…basically, it starts off as something you do on spec, unless you’re Timbaland or someone, in which case people charge to get in a room with you. But for me, you just get together, write a song, record the vocal, they’ll leave, I’ll finish the track, give it to the label, and if they like it, they pay for it to go on the record. And if they don’t…? Well, in fact, at that point, if they really like it, sometimes you get the budget extended to the point where you can maybe add some real drums or strings or whatever. So that’s kind of the way that a lot of records are made nowadays, because the budgets are such rubbish.

When you contributed to Liz Phair’s self-titled album, she was a pretty big name in alternative music moreso than pop music.

Yeah, I was a fan, actually.

Oh, okay. So what the process of writing “Red Light Fever” for her like?

Well, that was one I wrote with Liz. We wrote about ten songs, and…she basically made that album twice. She made a whole album with Michael Penn, on which there were lot of my songs – like, eight songs or something – and I have never heard it to this day. I was never given a copy. But, basically, when she took it to the record label, the record label said, “It’s too alternative, we need you to go more mainstream.” And that’s when she worked with The Matrix, and The Matrix wrote the singles that were on that album…and there’s Lauren Christy again. So that was kind of Liz’s foray into the mainstream…and she kind of got beat up for it, too. (Laughs) But the only surviving song from those Michael Penn songs of mine…and as I say, I’ve never heard the others…was “Red Light Fever.”

I’d love to hear those songs. I’m a big Michael Penn fan.

Yeah, I’d love to hear it as well. (Laughs) Honestly, Liz is super lo-fi, and she would only record demos on my little Walkman in the middle of the table. She and I would play live. And at one point, they contacted us…her label…to ask us if they could use one of these demos as an iTunes free download or something, and we agreed. So I guess it’s out there somewhere! But, yeah, it’s literally just a cassette recorder in the middle of the table, and Liz and I doing it live. I don’t even remember which song it was!

You co-wrote “That Boy” with Lloyd Cole. So had you guys fallen into the same circles in the late ’80s?

Yeah, I met Lloyd a few times in the process of gigging and doing promotion and stuff. We were both published by the same publisher, and he suggested that we would be good to write together, so I went to New York and wrote two or three songs with him, of which “That Boy” was one. The interesting thing about Lloyd is that…he’s brilliant, but he doesn’t want to do lyrics with anybody else. He wants to do the lyrics himself. I was used to being very involved in the lyrics, so it was kind of a weird dynamic trying to work with him, because I’d suggest things, and I could feel him pulling away, and I’d suggest more, and he’d just kind of close the song down, as if to say, “Ah, let’s more on to something else.” So I left New York thinking that we had a bunch of unfinished things, and then he finished the lyrics once I’d gone.

Well, it’s one of my favorite songs of his.

Oh, thank you. You know, it’s weird, that song, because it’s actually been released on three different records of his. He had it on the Negatives’ record, then he had it on the greatest-hits disc, and then there’s one more, though I can’t remember what it’s on! (Laughs) But, anyway, it’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Getting a song (“Got Dynamite“) on Demi Lovato’s new album, Here We Go Again, must’ve been a major coup for you. I mean, in the States, she’s huge in the ‘tweener market.

Well, it really made us feel that the move here was worthwhile. It was a huge thing for us, because…I mean, I’d done stuff with the Matrix, but when I stepped outside of the Matrix, that was the first production I got on my own. It was done unbelievably quickly. I had the track done with a demo singer, but once they wanted to do it, the turnaround was…I have never seen anything like it. It was like lightning. They had it turned around within the week. Everything: recording, editing, mastering, mixing. When they move, that machine…it’s amazing.

So how did you come to meet Ferras?

That’s kind of…the album is produced by me and The Matrix, and one member of The Matrix is Lauren Christy, who I worked with a long time ago. Basically, she came out to London to do some meetings or something, and we had dinner, and she told me that they were supposed to start Ferras’s record in January or something, and they were worried because they were going over schedule with another album that they were working on. I think it was the Korn album. And, basically, they needed another pair of hands, and would I come out first? Initially, it was going to be three weeks or something, just to kind of help them out, and I really clicked with Ferras. It was just working. And so they then asked me to stay on and contribute from the writing point of view, since initially I was just producing. And I just ended up staying on for the entire album. And the time I was staying here, I just loved it, and it made for the final decision to renew my visa and stay out here for a bit.

I know you need to get back to the studio, but I did have one more co-write I wanted to ask about: “Katydids,” the song you did with Swan Dive for their June album. Whose concept was the song’s subject matter, and is it safe to presume that Danny Wilson and the Katydids were gigging through the UK at approximately the same time?

Ah, Bill. Always love writing with Bill DeMain. Such a lovely and talented man. Boo Hewerdine suggested we write together, and Katydids was the song that came out of the first session – we recently wrote three in a day here in L.A. – and I remember it was a beautiful day in London. I lived on a garden square, and it was so nice that we took an acoustic guitar over to the garden and sat under the shade of a tree. Bill tends to have lyrics pre-written before a session, and it’s not the way I tend to work, but in his case, the lyrics are so good and musical and inspiring that I love doing it. So although I was aware of and was into the band, “Katydids” was entirely Bill’s concept and the music was written pretty quickly on that afternoon. But although I never encountered the Katydids around the Danny Wilson period, I remember my friends from Del Amitri did some gigs with them in the States, and more recently, through the Swandive song, I chatted with Suzy Hug on MySpace.

Lastly, do you have a favorite song that people might not have heard that you’ve written for someone else?

Well, you know, it would have to be one of the ones on the Ferras record, Aliens & Rainbows. That album is really dear to my heart, and it’s just a shame that he basically got lost in the EMI takeover of Capitol, and the album didn’t get the weight behind it that I wish it had’ve gotten. But I’d say there are two or three on there. “Liberation Day,” for one. And I love “Soul Rock,” which is kind of a throwback to my youth. To my Hall and Oates records. (Laughs) And I like the title track, “Aliens & Rainbows.” Working with Ferras was the closest thing I think I’ve done in a long time to the kind of record that I’d make…on the rare occasions that I do.

So do you forsee a time when you yourself will return to recording?

I never say never. There are things I miss about it and things I don’t miss about it. I don’t miss the process of being an artist, where most of your time – and I’m sure you believe it, because you’re on the other end of the phone! – is spent doing interviews and traveling and appearing on television and being made up. All the stuff that has nothing to do with music. So all of that, I don’t really miss. But the hour that you’re on stage, I miss. And I miss the joy that you get from making something that you love when it’s your own record, when you’ve written it and sung it and seen it through to the end. But at least I still get to make records. It’s a tough music business out there, so I’m just happy to be still making records.

Well, I’m officially pitching the idea that you should do some sort of live residency, where you just pop out and play for an hour a week.

I’ve actually thought about it, and I’ve ever talked about doing stuff with some other people, but my problem is just the scheduling. It’s really, really hard, because I just never know when I’m going to have somebody in to sing a vocal or to have a mix done. All the time, I’m chasing deadlines. But I think if I just forced myself to do it, if it was just once a fortnight or something, I could probably do it. So it’s a possibility.

As your Facebook friend, I’m sure I’ll be one of the first to hear about it if it happens.

Absolutely. Just don’t hold your breath. (Laughs)

A Six Pack of Other Gary Clark Co-Writes For Ya’ll:

* Ashley Parker Angel, “Perfect Now” (Soundtrack To Your Life)
* Nick Carter, “Is It Saturday Yet?” (Now or Never)
* Natalie Imbruglia, “Wrong Impression” (White Lilies Island)
* Jack Savoretti, “Dr. Frankenstein” (Between The Minds)
* Skin, “Purple” (Fake Chemical State)
* McFly, “The End” (Radio: ACTIVE)

Popdose: So how did you and your brother Kit first get started playing music? Did you grow up in a musical family?

Gary Clark: Not really. My grandfather played accordion…well, not really played, but he played at parties and stuff. Everybody was kind of a good singer. Like, my mum and dad would sing, again, at parties. It’s kind of a Scottish thing: we’d only sing at New Year’s Eve parties and stuff. But my mum and my dad were quite good singers, and…actually, I guess Ged (Grimes) and I started working together first, ’cause Kit’s younger than me by about five years, and Ged and I are about the same age. So we had a school band and stuff, and it kind of developed from there. He and I stayed together through a few different things until we worked in Danny Wilson with Kit.

You guys were originally called Spencer Tracy. Did you just get, like, a cease-and-desist order from his estate?

Yeah, we did. (Laughs) The album was done, the artwork was done…it was a real last-minute crazy, fearful moment. Basically, the US label checked it out here, and I believe that because Spencer Tracy had lived and died in California…in this state, you can copyright a person’s name. So we were just told, “If you try and use this, you will be sued.” And so the label just went, “Nope. Change it. Now.”

So how quickly did you come up with the new name, Danny Wilson?

Unbelievably quick. I mean, we’d sort of gotten used to the idea that the band had a person’s name, and so I guess that was the next train of thought. Kit came up with it, as it was a movie that my dad used to always talk about as being one of his favorite Sinatra movies…usually when he was complaining that they didn’t show it on TV anymore. (Laughs) So Kip had that idea, and it just really fit with the album being called Meet Danny Wilson, which was the name of the Sinatra film.

Only recently did I finally get a chance to see that film, when it came out on DVD not too long ago.

Me, too! (Laughs) All through that period, I never saw the movie. Not until much later.

So how surprised were you when, after a couple of tries, “Mary’s Prayer” finally became a hit for the band?

Well, it kind of happened in the States before it happened in the UK, and because of that, it triggered the UK label to re-release it. By this time, I was going, “No, please, no…” I thought it was flogging a dead horse. But the third time we released it, it was…it was Radio One, which was the biggest station there and still is, but at the time, when it got to the end of the year, Christmas or whatever, they had a phone-in vote for people’s favorite songs that missed the chart or whatever, and “Mary’s Prayer” won by quite a big margin. And that, combined with the fact that it was doing really well over here in the States, convinced Virgin to release it for the third time. They did a remix on it, but it was essentially the same record. And this time, it just went all the way pretty quickly. By the second week, it was #2 or #3 or something like that. So that was exciting.

It’s one of those songs that, even now, remains one of the great ’80s songs that everyone remembers but no one remembers who did it.

(Laughs) True! Well, that’s okay. I get to keep my anonymity. (Laughs)

And, yet, all you have to do is sing the briefest bit of the chorus, and people immediately go, “Oh, of course, that song!”

But, you know, that’s kind of a testament to one thing that I love about the States: you have radio stations that are just dedicated to keeping songs alive. Which is not as much the case in the UK. I mean, people know the songs, but here you have the classic rock stations that just keep playing things. I love that.

By the way, I just had to mention that, when I came over to the UK in 1992 after graduating from college, I had a Britrail pass, and I made a point of stopping in Aberdeen – even though I had no real reason to do so – just because of the song “Aberdeen.”

I’m so sorry. (Laughs)

I hope you’re proud of yourself! (Laughs)

The funny thing is that I’ve had quite a few people say that they’re curious about Aberdeen or that they’ve been to Aberdeen because of the song, but, y’know, there was nothing particularly magical about the town of Aberdeen. My brother was at university there, and I used to go visit him on weekends, so I spent a little bit of time there. I basically was trying to write the Scottish version of “Do You Know The Way To San Jose?” or “Galveston” or something. It always seems to be these quite obscure American towns that make it into songs, so I thought I’d give it a go for Scotland. (Laughs)

I think my favorite song from Meet Danny Wilson that didn’t get released as a single was probably “Lorraine Parade.”

Oh, wow, thank you. Yeah, I like that song.

Do you have any other favorites that weren’t released as singles that you still remember with particular fondness?

On the second album, I always liked “The Ballad Of Me And Shirley Maclaine,” but the first album…? I don’t know. I’d probably need to see a track listing. (Laughs) And I don’t really think of them as favorites, you know?

Well, they say you have your entire life to write your first album, then only about six weeks to write the second. How many songs did you have stockpiled when it came to write Bebop Moptop?

Not that many. Really, for the first album, I had cherry-picked over quite a long period. I mean, some of the songs were older, “Mary’s Prayer” being one of them. So was “Davy,” and “Steamtrains to the Milky Way” was older. I felt like I’d used the best stuff, so that album was basically written from scratch. I’m trying to think of how long we had to do it, actually. It didn’t feel like a rush at the time. The only thing I remember was that, when I first started writing it, I got my first serious case of writer’s block.

Ugh.

I guess it was because I had so much to live up to with the first album, and I just wouldn’t finish anything, because I felt like it was all rubbish. But I somehow convinced myself, “Look, if you just finish stuff, just finish it, then at least you’ll be moving forward.” And when I decided that I was just going to finish it, that’s when it kind of started to work again, and it slowly came together…thank God! (Laughs)

I understand that “Second Summer Of Love” barely existed as a song and actually had to be extended to make it into a single.

Yeah. It was kind of a joke, really. I actually remember writing it. We were in my girlfriend at the time’s apartment, and we were waiting to do a bunch of phone interviews, I think it was, so we all had to be in one place. It was kind of a long, boring day, and I basically went out to the store around the corner to get some stuff, and it honestly just wrote itself in my head between the house and the store. I went back, grabbed a guitar, and scribbled it down. And it was honestly just a laugh, a bit of a joke. A few friends of ours were getting into that acid house scene at the time, and Kit was born in 1967, which was the first Summer of Love, and we’d just been joking about his birthday and…I don’t know, I just wrote it as a one-minute joke. But the label heard it, and they were, like, “This is your single!” And we’re going, “How in the hell are we going to double the length of this?” (Laughs) And, so, we added that harmonica solo!

It seemed as though Virgin tried everything in their power to make a hit out of that album. I mean, there were something like five singles released from that album between the UK and States.

(And if you’d like to hear them, here they are!)

* “I Can’t Wait”
* “If Everything You Said Was True”
* “Never Gonna Be The Same”
* “If You Really Love Me (Let Me Go)”

Yeah, absolutely. Virgin were really great at that time, and, y’know, we didn’t really fit what was on the radio at any time. We kind of got lucky with “Mary’s Prayer,” in the sense that it just happened to fit, whereas the records were pretty eclectic. And Virgin, even though they loved the band and loved the stuff, they obviously had trouble at radio. It didn’t fit with what was going on.

When I was over in the UK, I actually managed to find a copy of the multi-disc Sweet Danny Wilson compilation, so I came to love the band’s versions of “Kooks” and ABBA’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” In fact, I actually heard your version of “Kooks” years before I ever heard Bowie’s.

Oh, did you really? I loved the Bowie version since I was a kid. Hunky Dory was one of my super-landmark albums, and I still kind of use that as a kind of reference point. I used it for Ferras. He’d never heard it before we were working on his album. That one goes way back for me. (Laughs) And that version was done at a small studio in Dundee. We just did it as a fun B-side kind of a thing, but it was really good fun that day.

So who did Danny Wilson view as their peers, as far as the music you were putting out, who did you feel was putting out the same kind of music?

You mean contemporaries?

Yeah.

(Sighs) There wasn’t really anyone. We always felt like we were slightly out of time, because the people that we loved kind of came from another era. They were either the Bacharach & David ’60s kind of stuff, or the obvious Steely Dan reference, or…I was a huge Stevie Wonder and David Bowie fan. But at the time…? I don’t know. There weren’t that many. We didn’t fit in with anyone, really. Even the sort of Scottish scene of bands, like Deacon Blue, Hue & Cry, and Love & Money, I don’t think we really sounded like any of them.

When I listen to Danny Wilson, I often think of Prefab Sprout.

Oh, that’s a great example, actually. Prefab Sprout were probably the only group at the time where I actually thought, “Well, that’s not so dissimilar from the ground we’re trying to cover.” I was a huge fan, and Steve McQueen is still one of my favorite records. And I also felt a kinship with the Blue Nile, who also seemed to exist in their own timezone, regardless of what was playing on the radio at the time. I adore their records as well.

So when you went to do your solo album, Ten Short Songs About Love, in 1993, you were still pretty much working with Ged and Kit, at least to a certain extent.

Yeah. But Kit’s my brother, and Ged and I are, like, best friends from way back. I think Ten Short Songs is the Danny Wilson album that I wanted to make, and the guys…well, part of the reason that the band split up was that they had started writing, and so when we got to the point where we were trying to choose songs for what would have been the third Danny Wilson album, instead of being able to write the album as I had done before, I was now kind of inundated with tons of songs, and it turned into a difficult situation, because it was, like, “We don’t like all of them, we don’t want to sing them,” and so on. And so Kit’s suggestion to that was that he wanted to make a solo record. In fact, he went to see the A&R people at Virgin, who basically said, “No, you’re contracted to do another Danny Wilson album.” That kind of didn’t sit well with him. He wanted to leave. And, basically, I thought that the band would be just so different without him, so much weaker…not necessarily musicianship-wise, but he was kind of a really good force just in terms of ideas and the flavor of things. And I just felt that, with just me and Ged, it would be a completely different thing. So I decided that was the time to call it a day. We were still friends, but the songs that I had started to prepare for the third Danny Wilson album basically became Ten Short Songs.

Well, I will tell you that it was a tremendous struggle to hunt down a copy of the CD back in the days before internet shopping was a regular thing.

Yeah, it was never released here. I remember at the time doing meetings here with record labels, and the reaction was quite simply that there were no singles on it that fit in with any radio format that existed. (Laughs) It fell between the cracks.

* “We Sail On The Stormy Waters” (Ten Short Songs About Love)
* “Freefloating” (Ten Short Songs About Love)
* “Make A Family” (Ten Short Songs About Love)

And a few years ago, when I was on my honeymoon in the UK, I managed to hunt down a copy of Great Day for Gravity, the album by King L, which was you, Eric Pressly, Neill MacColl, and Matt Laug. I really enjoyed it. How was the experience for you?

Well, it was kind of…I was still under the same deal that I had with Virgin after Ten Short Songs, and looking back on it, I think I was so disappointed in the sales of Ten Short Songs that I just needed to rip it up and start again. (Laughs) And the thing that I hadn’t been doing…’cause all of those records were really made with a small group of people in studios with overdubs and blah, blah, blah. I just missed that thing of standing with a live band in a room, and that was kind of the trigger for what became King L, you know? It started as sessions where I’d bring in musicians to try and cut tracks live, which we did, and when I found my kind of favorite players, it developed into a band thing. It seemed obvious to get the sound, and the band was great live as well, though… (Laughs) …hardly anyone ever saw us! But it was a good band. It was a reaction, I guess, to what was going on at the time.

* “Life After You” Great Day for Gravity
* “First Man On The Sun” Great Day for Gravity

And then King L more or less evolved into Transister?

Yeah, that was interesting. What happened, really, was that the label dropped King L. King L sold even less…by quite a long shot…than Ten Short Songs, and the label dropped me and, therefore, dropped the band as well. And Eric, who was in King L, is from L.A., had four weeks left on his work visa, and in the process of working a lot in the UK with King L, he had met and fallen in love with Keely (Hawkes). And he basically said, “With these four weeks that I have left, how do you feel about writing some songs and producing some tracks so that I can try and get Keely a record deal?” And I said, “Sure.” It sounded like fun, and I needed the distraction from the misery of being dropped. So we just went into my studio and did the first four or five tracks in that four weeks, and Eric went back to the States. And a friend of a friend played it to Chris Douridas, who’s a radio DJ in California and, at the time, had the morning show on KCRW. It was a pretty free show called “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” so he could play demos and stuff, and that’s where he started to play the Transister demos…before we were even Transister! (Laughs) And it kind of got the record companies interested again…including Virgin, who had just dropped us, which was funny. And at the time, it was kind of a, “Whoa, this thing’s kind of taking off,” and my initial job was producer / songwriter, and in some ways, I wish I had kept it at that! But at the time, I was persuaded to sort of jump on board and join the band…and that was a whole lot of jumping! But that album (Transister) and the Lauren Christy album…and I don’t know if you’ve heard that, but I did this album with Lauren Christy…was kind of the beginning of me starting to do what I do now, which is write and produce for other people.

* “Look Who’s Perfect Now” Transister
* “Dizzy Moon” Transister
* “Head” Transister
* “Flow” Transister

Stay tuned for the second part of my conversation with Mr. Clark, in which we discuss his work with artists like Ferras, Demi Lovato, Liz Phair, Swan Dive, and members of the Spice Girls and Take That.

Now, where were we?

Oh, that’s right: we were chatting with the one and only Francis Reader, frontman for the Trashcan Sinatras. If you tuned in last week (and you really should have, you know), then you’re already aware that the conversation between Frank and myself was one that was a little freewheeling in its form, but the end result seems to be well appreciated by fans of the band…and, indeed, by members of the band. Our own David Medsker spoke with Paul Livingston a few days later – look for that interview on Bullz-Eye.com in the very near future – and remarked that I really seemed to have caught Mr. Reader in a talkative mood. Well, all I can tell you is that the decision to make it less of an interview and more of a conversation seems to have worked in my favor, and I’m glad that it seems to be going over well. Now, mind you, I did hear from one friend of mine who, after praising the piece, noted that it perhaps wasn’t the kind of interview that the band’s manager would want, given that there was zero mention of the band’s latest album, In the Music.

What luck, then, that there’s quite a bit of chat about the record in the second and final part of our conversation.

Popdose: So what’s Davy Hughes’ status with the band? Did he drop out? Did he just not want to participate anymore?

Frank Reader: Well, Davy’s still involved, but he’s…you know, he’s got a family, and it’s just not the kind of thing, really, where you can give your all your time to it when you’ve got a family and kids to support. Neither me or Paul or Steven or John have got kids, and although three of us are married, John’s married to another musician, and me and Paul are married to very understanding, beautiful women. (Laughs) For Davy, it was just a case where we had to work out a different way of having him involved, and that was…what we kind of do now is that we keep in touch, obviously, and every now and again, he’ll say, “You know, I managed to get ten minutes’ peace from the kids…” (Laughs) “…and I sat down and did a bit of writing, and here it is. If there’s anything you can do with it, do something with it.” So he contributed to In the Music in that way. And it’s great, because it feels good to have him involved, because he’s a touchstone in my life. He was there in the very beginning, although he didn’t play on Cake. He was actually playing with us once or twice before we made an album – when we were just doing covers, he was around then – so it’s good to have involved. It’s kind of “once a Trashcan, always a Trashcan” with him, you know? (Laughs) And the keyboard player we have, Stevie, has been with us off and on since ‘95, so he’s more permanent now, too.

With In the Music, I have to ask: how did Carly Simon come to appear on “Should I Pray?“

Well, we recorded part of it in Martha’s Vineyard at Andy Chase’s, and he was virtually a next-door neighbor of hers, so he knows her and her friends. I think that’s right. I’m trying to remember the relationships and the way the jigsaw goes together. He invited a couple of her friends over, and she wasn’t around, but we’d obviously said, “Can Carly come to the house?” And he said that she was out of town but that he was going to invite a couple of her friends. And we said, “Well, that’s close enough. We can talk to them about Carly Simon!” (Laughs) But we got on well with her friends, and they promised to give her a CD, so we gave her a couple of songs and a couple of ideas, and we wrote her a note with it, just basically saying how much we admired her, especially the No Secrets album. That was one of John’s favorites. And I think “You’re So Vain” was the first song I ever remember hearing, actually, so I waxed a little bit about that. It was all stuff that I’m sure she’s heard before, but much to our surprise, she got in touch with Andy after we left and she said that she loved one of the songs and asked if she could try doing a backing vocal on it. She was very gracious about it and very not at all pushy. She was very…I got the feeling that wasn’t completely sure of herself, which is a trait I always like in people. So she did some tracks, some recording with Andy over one of the songs. We never actually met, though. We were obviously just totally thrilled to have her involved. It’s a great, great honor to have her do something like that.

I understand that “Oranges and Apples” was inspired by Syd Barrett. Even without listening to the song, that certainly makes sense to me, given that I’m familiar with his early Pink Floyd single, “Apples and Oranges.”

Oh, you know “Apples and Oranges”?

Absolutely. I’m a big Barrett fan.

Oh, cool! Well, what had happened is that…well, he had died, obviously… (Laughs) …and we had been reading all about it, and there were all of the articles and the tributes, but a lot of them had been focusing on how he was an acid casualty, and…you probably know Boo Hewerdine, right?

Sure, from The Bible.

Yeah, and he plays a lot with my sister and John as well. Well, Boo’s a Cambridge man, and he was telling John that he often saw Syd around, and he always thought that Syd looked really happy. In fact, Boo actually helped him when he fell off his bike in front of him. Syd fell off his bike, and Boo helped him back on. And John started thinking about it in terms of how people like to focus on the idea of Syd Barrett and that he was a casualty because of that period of his life in the late ’60s, but you can have another perspective on his life if you read the stories from people who knew him. His sister, particularly. He was quite at peace and he was enjoying himself, and he was very, very creative still, just in a different, non-pop way. John, who’s the main writer of that song, his idea was to try and kind of write something focusing on that side of him, you know? Focusing on the positive side of actually being Syd Barrett and living your life day to day. And I think sometimes that, when people die like that, the whole story sort of falls into place in your mind. It’s no longer an open-ended story, so you can reflect on it then. It’s a lot like what people are doing right now with Michael Jackson.

We’ve always been fans of Syd, and I think that came out in the end. We knew exactly what John was talking about when he brought it in, and we had great fun getting that kind of soundscape together. We just played for hours and hours and hours, going around all of those chords, stoned out of our heads, but putting it all together…it all came together rather magically. And then the City Wakes people in Cambridge were organizing a two-week festival in tribute to Syd, with art, photography, films, and, of course, music, and we asked them if we could donate the song to the Mental Health Trust as a single, because we’d already mixed it by that point. And the proceeds, as much or as meager as they may have been, it still felt good to be involved with it. And Storm Thorgerson, he did the sleeve for it, too. So it was just a great…well, it was like the Carly Simon thing: it was great for us. We were so pleased. You open one door, and you don’t really know where it’s going to lead you, and the next thing you know, you’ve got the guy who did the Dark Side of the Moon sleeve doing your sleeve. (Laughs) And we’ll always have that! It’s the little things in life that keep you going.

Absolutely.

So it’s just been great, you know? The whole album’s been a great experience, as far as all that’s gone. It was lovely to be able to pay tribute to someone like Syd like that. We’ve always been more Syd than Roger, ourselves, and understood about the fragility of people like that. We kind of feel an empathy to him more than we do… (Starts singing) “Money!” (Laughs) All that stuff with public schoolboys whining about money. But we love Floyd.

My introduction to Syd Barrett was all hosed up. I discovered Robyn Hitchcock first, then through him I found Syd Barrett…and, then, my first Barrett album wasn’t even a proper album. It was Opel.

Oh, right, which was…was that the last one he made?

It was kind of an odds-and-sods collection.

Right. Yeah, right around 1991, we had Pete Jenner as a manager for about a year, and, of course, he was Syd’s manager while he was the Floyd’s manager. And when the band split and Syd was forced out, he obviously thought, “Well, Syd’s the guy to go with!” And he managed him all through The Madcap Laughs and right up to the point where he left and gave up making music. He was an interesting person to talk to about that, because he was so old-school business. He was still very much in the Allen Klein kind of vibe…but without the violence, probably. He was very much, like, “Just get it done! Get in the studio, and a few years later, you should have a hit single.” And we were, like, “Yeah, but it takes us six months to write one song, and even then we’ll want to start again!” So it was a bit of a mismatch, but it was interesting to get close to someone like that, who managed in that way and who knew someone so luminous in our lives. He was Billy Bragg’s manager at the time, and I think he managed Eddi, too. But after us, actually, I think. We had a bit of a connection there, too. I haven’t heard much Robyn Hitchcock, actually. I always think I’ll get round to kind of listening to some Robyn Hitchcock, but other than what I’ve heard in passing, I don’t know his stuff at all.

I should make you a Best of Robyn Hitchcock disc.

Yeah! I’d really like to hear some of that stuff.

Really? Hey, if you want one, I’ll make you one. I mean, I literally have all of his albums, so it wouldn’t be hard to put one together.

Yeah, whatever you think is the best. That’d be cool!

Okay, you asked for it!

Well, I like all of those gentle Englishmen. (Laughs)

I’ve done a couple of interviews with him, and he’s a really nice guy, always very interesting to talk with.

Yeah, he’s one of those guys who I’ve heard talk more than I’ve actually heard his music, but he’s always more than just a talking head. His perspective always seems to be a bit above the cliche and the rabble. I think we had some friends in common at one point. Tim Keegan was playing with him for awhile, wasn’t he?

He was.

We’ve had a lot of friends like that. The Blue Aeroplanes, he played with them.

Oh, sure, I remember them. Particularly “Jacket Hangs.”

Yeah, “Jacket Hangs,” and “…And Stones” was a cracker of a song. We would meet a lot of these bands on tour, you know. I remember Gerard from the Blue Aeroplanes being a sweet, sweet guy, taking us for a walk around historic Bristol after the gig. You don’t always want to just sit down and have a few beers after a show, and he said, “Come on, I’ll show you some architecture.” (Laughs) Okay, fair enough! So, yeah, lovely people.

Well, I’ve only got a couple more for you, because I’ve already talked your ear off…and vice versa! (Laughs) But I was wondering how you came to hook up with Andy Chase in the first place. I know he helped to mix Weightlifting, but how did that come about?

He came through our Japanese publisher. He’d worked with, I think, Tahiti 80, it was. You know that mob? They’re French. And we had heard his production…not his music, but his production. I think he was just getting started in production roundabout when we first heard his name, in ‘98 or something. So our publishers in Japan had wanted us to consult with the guy from Tahiti 80, because they’re always trying to push you into doing, like, songwriting. We have enough trouble getting ourselves together! But the name “Andy” stuck around, and when Weightlifting was being made, which was our first album in eight years, we sat down in front of the mixing desk, and we were, like, “We don’t actually know what the hell we’re doing here! We haven’t the faintest idea how to mix a record!” I mean, it takes practice. You have to keep your hand in, and we hadn’t done it. So we sent him a tape of a couple of songs, ’cause we knew that he was interested and really wanted to do it, and that that he liked the band a lot. So we asked him to mix a track for free. And he’s a canny soul, so it took a bit of persuading, but he did it, and he sent us a copy of a song, “All the Dark Horses.” No, he did two. He also did “Leave Me Alone.” So he sent them to us, and we just thought they sounded terrible. We were actually kind of smug about it, how we were right not to have that guy. “We’ve made the right decision!” (Laughs) We were kind of happy about it! And then we went back to try and mix it, and we had gotten an engineer friend, but we ended up somewhat mixing it ourselves…just kind of pushing faders up randomly, basically. And then we thought we had a great, great mix of “All the Dark Horses.” But just on a whim, Paul and I, after listening to our mix and seeing how great it was, we put on Andy’s…and it just blew ours out of the water. It was, like, “Fuck, we’d better phone that guy back!” So we phoned him back, and we were saying, “Look, we’re really sorry about that. I don’t know what we were thinking, but we really love the mixes now, actually.” It just sort of came to us what was there and what he was doing. It’s very strange and hard to explain how you can hear the same thing in one environment and it doesn’t sound the same as in another, or at another time of the day or in another headspace. But he was very gracious about that, and he kind of said, “Ah, I thought you’d be back with your tail between your legs!” (Laughs) So we got involved, and he was always a saint when we went over to do the mixing in New York, John, Paul, and I. He’d often say, “I wish I could’ve had this record from the start. I really want to try and make a record with you guys.” And when we got In the Music together, we had a short list of producers…and my choice was Barry Gibb. And I wasn’t even high! I really wanted Barry Gibb to do it! (Laughs) I don’t know why I came up with that idea. Maybe it’s one for the next album.

Hey, I’m behind you. I’m a big Bee Gees fan.

Yeah, so you know what I mean, then! I just love the man. He’s one of my all-time heroes, and he’s very underrated as an arranger and producer, I think, though not by me, and I’m sure not by you, either. But Andy Chase was really glad to be involved, and he has a studio in New York, of course, so we were all up for the adventure of trying it. So we had some songs, and we did a little back-and-forth with E-mail and MP3s and demos, and he helped us along, and after about six months of that, we thought we were ready to all go over. And that was a big leap for us to do that, to gather all the money we’d got and take six people over to New York. That’s not an easy or cheap thing to do. But, thankfully, we got there and the set-up was fantastic. Andy and his really amazing engineer, Rudyard, had a great sound going from the start. Andy was a little cautious. I think he’s a bit…well, it’s like I was saying about building records up a bit studio-precise, and the records that you make from scratch are like that. He uses quite a bit of machinery. It’s well-managed and I think for the most part that he keeps it in mind that if he wants to retain the soul of something, but he still uses a lot more machinery than, for instance, a band like us would use.

But he was a bit wary of our ideas because, by this point, we had been rehearsing a lot in Glasgow, and I had kind of conceptualized the album as being one that we would do completely live, maybe apart from the singing. Again, I think he kind of nodded his head and said, “Yeah, right, we’ll see.” But we went in and we did the music, and we took an extra guitarist with us, a friend of ours from Kilmarnock, so we could try and do it all live. And the very first night, we did In the Music, and it just sounded like a record. It was, like, “Wow, this is fantastic!” And we did that for about one and a half weeks, got all the tracks down, and for the rest of the time, we played internet poker, did a few overdubs, and watched him on the computer, chopping up files. I don’t know what he was doing, but, basically, it was done in a week and a half.

Wow.

It was great! It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. It was the way we had to make this record, and he was surprised that the sound was so good straight away. That won him over to the idea of us doing it live. We’d been able to capture it. We’ve got those twenty years of experience, you know, so it’s something that we should use to our advantage! It was something we had to do, though, because there was the element of sense in the band that we couldn’t really make an album like Weightlifting again. We couldn’t, like, “Right, that’s the drums down, let’s get the bass down, and, Paul, let’s get a guitar sound together.” It wasn’t really interesting to us anymore to do it like that. The excitement of sitting in the chair next to the producer had kind of worn off. Now, the excitement was sitting in the room and making the big, soupy noise and just getting lost in it. That was the excitement for us. There are plenty of 16-year-old guys in bands who start off making music like that, but our time and our experience was different. Our time and experience was a more separate recording fashion, and it took us a long time to come around to the best way of doing stuff. (Pauses) Excuse me, Will, it’s my wife. She’s just come in. (Leans away from the phone for a moment to address his wife and make sure she’s well, then explains to her that he’s just doing an interview and will be finished momentarily) So, yeah, Andy was a great facilitator for that, and very organized as well.

Well, I’ll officially start the wrapping-up process, but…are there any songs that fans should not expect to hear during the upcoming tour?

That depends on the fan, I think. (Laughs) You know, when we were making this record, I was thinking, “You know, I could see a lot of Trashcan fans not really being into this kind of thing,” and it’s been borne out, but there’s not really anything we can do about that. The Cake stuff really isn’t…we have to feel it. Sometime maybe some of those songs will talk to us again, but at the moment, a lot of them don’t, and we’re really only interested in playing songs that excite us and interest us, so I would say that if you went along thinking that you were going to hear “Who’s He,” you would probably be disappointed. And that would go all of the first album, probably. I don’t know, it’s just that…I’m over 40 now. I’m 43, and some of that stuff was done when I was 22. And it’s not just me. There are five people in the band, and I think Paul would’ve gladly stopped doing Cake stuff in, like, 1992 or something. (Laughs) He’s been a trouper, I’ll have to say that for him. He’s been a real trouper about that. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people who haven’t really responded to this record very well have been the kind of people that like the kind of Trashcan music that *I* don’t like anymore or that I’ve never really felt comfortable with. When you’ve got three or four songwriters in the band and you’re working in a collective way, that’s always going to be that way. There’s always going to be a little bit of where you’re doing things for your friends sometimes. Like, “Okay, John really believes in this, and I love John, so I’m going to give it my all,” you know? And vice versa them for us. But that doesn’t mean that, on a Wednesday night in Manchester, you feel like getting out there and doing it. And with one or two of our songs, it’s been like that, and those have been the ones that have kind of died away, but we’ve got a catalog of about a hundred songs that were recorded, and we’re really, really proud of all of them for what they are, but most of them we’re still keen on, which is nice. And, again, our collective songwriting team is what’s really helped us stay interested. I think very few bands with single songwriters last more than a couple of albums and do anything of any real interest. If you think about it, all of the big bands who’ve managed to sustain themselves for more than ten years and are still making great records…you throw in your U2, R.E.M., the Beatles, even…have at least two songwriters, sometimes three. The only bands that have sustained on the basis of one songwriter that I can think of are the Kinks and the Who. Maybe you can think of more. But I think it’s helped, because…oh, Radiohead, there’s another example. There’s too much for one person to take on. It’ll burn you out! (Laughs) That’s why bands like Coldplay make one great, great record, and the rest of them are, like, “Well, so what?”

Well, that’ll do it for me, then, Frank.

That’s actually good, because I have to go! (Laughs) We’re just dashing off. But it was nice speaking to you, and let us know if you’re at one of the shows!

There are no two ways about it: were it not for the Trashcan Sinatras, I would not be where I am today.

This is in no way an overstatement. The facts are these: many moons ago, I joined the E-mail list in support of a highly underrated band from Irvine, Scotland, where I proceeded to become friends with many of the other individuals on the list. One of those friends was Popdose’s own David Medsker, who pitched me to the CEO of Bullz-Eye.com as someone who was worth bringing on as a contributor. The end result was that, after almost two decades of looking, I was finally in possession of one of the rarest positions in all of journalism: a full-time, work-at-home writing gig. And if I hadn’t been writing for Bullz-Eye, then I wouldn’t have been able to tell David about this awesome column called “Captain Video in the 1980th Dimension,” which made us both laugh so hard that he was inspired to ask its author – one J. Giles – if he’d be interested in becoming a Bullz-Eye contributor as well, a decision which ultimately led both us to become members of this wonderful world that we all know as Popdose.

You can imagine, then, just how important the Trashcan Sinatras are to me.

One could easily argue that any of the band’s albums would be worth of a spotlight within “Hooks ‘N’ You,” since none of them have ever really achieved what you’d call tremendous success. Their debut, 1990’s Cake, certainly came the closest, with “Obscurity Knocks” and “Only Tongue Can Tell” earning enough airplay on college radio and MTV’s late, great “120 Minutes” to leave the band’s name cemented even now in the memories of those who heard them at the time. Sadly, the follow-up, 1993’s I’ve Seen Everything, came out in the wake of grunge’s arrival and didn’t get the kind of notice it deserved, but at least the video for “Hayfever” managed to earn momentary fame when it turned up in an episode of “Beavis & Butthead.” By the time the Trashcan Sinatras released their third album in 1996, however, their stock in the States had dropped to a point that A Happy Pocket didn’t even manage a release on these shores. This has always seemed more than a little ironic to me, as it was this album which really made me love the band unconditionally, with songs like “The Main Attraction,” “Twisted & Bent,” and “How Can I Apply?” seeming easily as iconic to me as any of the singles which preceded them. Of course, I realize that the biggest reason for this is that the album was released when I first joined the aforementioned Trashcan Sinatras E-mail list, but I think you’ll find that almost everyone who’s ever heard A Happy Pocket will gladly tell you that it really is one of the best albums you’ve never heard…and, yes, that includes the cover of Lulu’s “To Sir, With Love.” (Hey, my 3-year-old daughter swears by it!)

Unfortunately, the fact that no one heard A Happy Pocket meant that it would be eight long years until the band finally put out a follow-up, but when Weightlifting finally emerged in 2004, at least it showed up in the U.S. as well. It wasn’t really what you’d call a hit (though lord knows that, with songs like “All the Dark Horses,” “Freetime,” and the title track, it certainly deserved to be one), but it still managed to raise their profile far higher than it had been in more than a decade. Bad luck, though: the label – spinART Records – filed for bankruptcy a few years later, leaving the band once again without a home.

Fortunately, the band has never been described as a bunch of quitters, so they’re still plugging away, and the release of their latest endeavor, in the music, is decidedly imminent…so much so, in fact, that the Trashcans are embarking upon a US tour. As a result, one of their greatest supporters – Joe DiMaria, who’s been a mate of mine ever since I joined the list – asked me if I might able to find it in my heart to chat with someone from the band in order to help spread the word about these upcoming events.

Yeah, like I really needed to think long and hard about an offer like that.

Here’s one bit of fair warning, however: this is a fairly free-flowing interview. It has on at least one occasion been suggested that, as a journalist, I have a tendency toward becoming inappropriately comfortable with my interview subject, thereby finding myself prone to making decisions within the conversation as if I was talking to a friend rather than a professional musician. I can’t really argue with that, but with one notable recent exception, this tendency has rarely steered me wrong, and when talking to Frank Reader, the lead singer of the Trashcan Sinatras, it must be said that I do feel like he is a friend of sorts…albeit one I’ve never actually met in person. It’s also worth noting that I quickly learned that Frank is a man who, all things considered, would be quite happy talking about almost anything but his own music. Not that we didn’t do a fair amount of that, but as you’ll see, there were many tangents throughout the course of our conversation. In fact, we spent the first five minutes barely talking about music at all, chatting about what I do for a living, how I’m going to try to make it the show at the Troubadour on July 29th, where I’m staying when I’m visiting California (the Langham), and how he and his wife stayed at the same hotel for their anniversary. Eventually, though, we got down to brass tacks.

Popdose: Well, I guess we should actually talk about the band for a bit.

Frank Reader: Ah, if we must, we must. We’ve actually just been practicing. I don’t like talking about them, you know? I find it hard in interviews. I find it’s easier if we just start chatting away, and things will just eventually come out of it, anyway.

(Laughs) I’m fine with that, too.

You’ll probably be more enlightened about the record just from talking to me about my family than you would talking about my music. It’s all just a mystery to us. Yesterday was our first rehearsal in years. Two of us are in L.A. now, and the two that are out here hired…well, found a bass player, I should say…and asked him to join the band. We needed someone for the tour, but we actually found someone that we liked so much that we asked him to join, so the three other guys have come over from Scotland just to meet him. It was a bit like we were presenting them with our choice, so it was kind of nerve-wracking, you know? But he’s very musical and a fantastically positive guy, and everybody was very impressed with him. We were actually playing and remarking to each other how it was the first time we’d actually played together since we recorded the new album in December ‘07.

Wow.

Yeah, because it took, like, seven or eight months to get it mixed and into that stage, because we do it all ourselves and it’s in piecemeal fashion, so it drags out a wee bit more than you’re financing it yourself. Which is okay. As long as you can keep the focus. And we were lucky with the producer, as he was very focused on it. But as I say, we were talking about how strange that was. That’s probably the longest gap we’ve ever had! And most of the songs on the album were recorded a little bit…we had a few weeks rehearsal in Glasgow beforehand, but a lot of it we were getting the feel of it, which was a new thing for it. So it wasn’t like these were songs that we’d rehearsed the hell out of before we recorded them, you know? It was strange, because we were, like, “Do we actually know what we’re doing here?” It just sounded horrendous! But it comes out. I was moping later, saying, “This is terrible! We sound terrible! Are we going to sound all right?” And were looking for reassurance, but everyone else was, like, “What are you talking about? It’s fine!” We were all just listening to our own individual selves, and no one was listening to everything as a whole. But as a singer, I was sitting back and listening, waiting to be blown away. John says he spent half the time just reacquainting himself with his pedal and making buzzy sounds. He’s been touring a lot, and everybody’s been playing a lot of music. Frank, our new bass player, he’s busy all the time, but John plays with my sister, who’s a singer…

I’m familiar. (Laughs)

…and she’s his partner. They two have been de facto married, anyway, for ten years or so, but John plays in her band, so he’s been very, very busy…though mostly on ukulele. (Laughs) So he’s been reacquainting himself with a Les Paul. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard my sister’s music, but it’s kind of folky jazz. Her new album’s a bit more jazzy, and he’s been playing with her on that and touring all over the place.

Oh, I’ve definitely heard your sister’s music. I’ve been a fan of Eddi’s since the Fairground Attraction days.

Oh, wow! Well, yes, she’s absolutely phenomenal, and she’s a real hero of mine, a great guiding light for me throughout. But, then, she’s my big sister. She’s fantastic, and she’s always been a positive person…and growing up in working-class Glasgow, that’s not really that commonplace! It’s not a bastion of positivity. I think she took a lot of blows from people who thought she was crazy and flaky and all that, but she just kept up her determination. She wanted to be a positive person and find a way of breaking the cycle you have in life. Like, sometimes when you grow up in a big family…or any family, I suppose…you just follow in your parents’ footsteps, but to try something new…? Growing up in the ’70s, when she was a young teenager, she wanted to be a singer, and with my father a welder and my mum was a school dinner lady, you can imagine the look on their face! (Laughs) They were very supportive, and she was a wonderful singer and still is, but it was kind of understood that she would sing at parties and that’s it, you know?

I would expect the reaction would basically be, “Good luck with that.”

Yeah! “Make sure you stay in school!” But she didn’t want to go to school or anything! She was a real bonafide hippie, she had the long dress, long hair, and long everything, with the glasses and the chains, and she wanted to go and live in France when she was 16 and pick berries. She lived with a guy who made teeth! (Laughs) He did! He made his living making people’s teeth! But she did it, and I’ve always had so much admiration as well as love for her because she did all that stuff. She’s the real deal. She was a real busker, and even now, when she plays, she hates any kind of restriction on her playing. She’s been working with John for many years, of course, and everyone knows that she says at the drop of a hat, “I want to do this now!” But she’s great. She’s an inspiration.

So where were you with your music when “Perfect” topped the charts? Had you just gotten started?

We’d just gotten started. I think we’d been together for a year, maybe, at that point. It was 1988, I think, and I was actually with her the day she found out it had gone to #1. We were in an old part of Glasgow where we’d all grown up, and me and her stopped to buy a bag of chips, and the radio was on in the chip shop, and…I’m sure you know that she kind of knew it was going to be #1, because you kind of hear things. The RCA man had tipped her a wink and said, “Everything’s fine, don’t worry, we’ve paid the right people,” or whatever, so she had kind of known it was going to be #1, but she found out when we were in the chip shop, and it was kind of nice to be a part of her life when that happened. As far as the band, we were really excited for her, and it really helped my relationship with my mum and dad, trying to be a young guy who’s not working a proper job but trying to be in the band and work in music. They had seen that it was possible, so it really helped in that way. But in another way, I think my mum and dad kind of expected me to have a gold record the first time as well. (Laughs) But what the large print giveth, the small print taketh away, as Tom Waits says. But we’ve always been really supportive of each other, me and Edna, so it was a great thing to see her have that success. But I knew she was uncomfortable with it, you know? She’s pretty self-conscious and quiet…well, she was then, anyway. She’s much more confident now. But she was thrust into it really quickly, and she suffered some pretty cruel journalism from the NME and Melody Maker, people calling her ugly and things like that, because she was kind of unusual looking. But she’s absolutely beautiful, you know? It was kind of a weird, bumpy ride for her, too, and that band broke up really quickly. To watch that happen was kind of painful.

But she did, at least, step forward on her own and, at least from my perspective, seemed to do pretty good for herself. I don’t know how well it did in the charts, but her solo material was certainly acclaimed, anyway.

Yeah, but I think that, having had a #1, she was feted a little bit by her record company, and, you know, those people, they’re vampires. I mean, they really want the same thing all the time as soon as they get a formula. They just don’t want any changes. She had so many ideas, and they would come out in flashes, but you could definitely tell that she was getting more and more frustrated, and it wasn’t really until she went to Rough Trade and Geoff Travis took her under his wing that I think she felt the freedom to make the kind of records that she really wanted to make. So, yeah, it was kind of weird on the face of things. She was lucky to have that success because it gave her that. We were the same with our first album.

Actually, I was going to ask how much freedom you guys had on Go! Discs when you first signed to them.

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing about a major label is that they can do that for you. They can get your name out there and, for good or for bad, a lot of people will be able to make up their minds about you. That’s the hardest part nowadays, I suppose, making a record for a new band. The attraction is there to make it yourself, but getting heard is so hard. Now, do you make music yourself?

I do not. I’d love to tell you that I do, but I’m one of those horrible critics who can only write about other people’s.

(Laughs) Oh, that’s all right. You’re a master of your own trade! You know, it’s just so difficult for new bands to get heard, and she was lucky that we caught the tail end of that, the last of the major labels’ dying breath. They were throwing money at indie music, and they weren’t necessarily sure it wouldn’t succeed. Nowadays I think major labels are a bit more coy about that. But we can still feed on what we gained back then, you know? Like you say, there’s you guys on the list and the website. I think Go! Discs were quite quick on the wave as well. I remember in ‘95 or so we got our first list-serv up, which was really early. I don’t think I’ve met another band who was doing it in those first months that we were doing it, so we were lucky in that respect as well.

You definitely have a rabid fanbase, to say the least.

Yes! (Laughs) And it’s funny, though, because when last we played gigs in L.A. or in Glasgow, there’d maybe be 800 or 1,000 people there, but only maybe 2% are aware of our website or have been to it. That was the last time we toured, so maybe it’s changed now, but it’s funny how you think that that’s your fanbase, but your fanbase is actually spread wider than that. In my experience, at least.

With Cake, it felt like you guys burst onto the scene out of nowhere and, at least for a few minutes, you were the heroes of MTV’s “120 Minutes.”

Ah, yes, on “120 Minutes” for a few minutes. (Laughs) We got a couple, anyway.

Did you feel like you were making headway with that first album when you first came over to the States?

You know, we felt a little bit like…well, Paul was 17 when that happened, I think. George is a bit older than me, but Paul was definitely 17 or 18. We were rubbish back then. We could barely make a noise back then, as far as musical sounds. We were definitely ropey. There was something we were talking about recently, me and Paul, that we never really see crap bands anymore. Not just in L.A., but it’s happened in Glasgow, too. You go to, like, King Tut’s or wherever to see a mid-sized band, and they’d have a local support, and the local support is bang on the button! And we were, like, whatever happened to really crap bands that couldn’t actually play? I used to go see bands where the bass player would be reading his music out of a book, and he’d have to stop to turn the page! (Laughs) We were just a small notch about that. We didn’t have a clue about amplification, we didn’t have a clue about anything. It was all manic energy. I just threw myself into it like a maniac, drinking like crazy and throwing myself about, just to distract from this crazy noise that we all thought was unlistenable. ‘Cause Cake was made quite carefully in the studio, and it’s a studio record. Unfortunately, I think we might’ve learned a few bad habits from it, and I’d have to take the blame, because I’d done engineering before that. It was all very ’80s and built up from scratch. I mean, it has its merits, but when we took it on the road, it was very much like a deer in the headlights. It was chaotic, that’s how I remember it, and I can barely believe that it happened. We were coming over here for the first time, and people were screaming at us during gigs. It was very silly.

Some friends of mine have very fond memories of seeing you at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.

Ah, yes. A couple of the gigs I remember, and the 9:30 Club I remember, because I remember how weird it was. I think it’s very different now…

Actually, it’s a completely different building now.

Yeah, because we played there when we toured for Weightlighting, and I was, like, “What is this?” The last time, I remembered, was low ceilings, and possibly pillows in front of you. Something to lean on. I think we played it twice, though I may be mixing a couple of gigs up. But we were doing weird cover versions at the time, I remember, trying to flesh out our set…because we only had, like, ten songs! We weren’t like the Beatles in Hamburg. We had nothing, really, except just the bare bones, and we were trying to flesh it out by doing covers like “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” by ABBA. We were doing Charlie Rich! I don’t know where we got them from. Maybe my mum’s record collection. I think that’s where we got these ideas. But we were always big country fans. It’s always been big in Scotland, particularly in the west of Scotland. We’ve got a Grand Old Opry in Glasgow.

Really? I didn’t know that!

Yeah, I think it’s the only official one outside of Nashville. And people go dressed up as cowboys and have fake shootouts, and there’s line dancing, though I think that’s a relatively new thing. But growing up, all of my uncles loved all that stuff. My dad was a huge country and western fan.

Hey, I grew up listening to Johnny Cash’s “Live at Folsom Prison.”

Well, we were a bit cheesier than that. We were more Crystal Gayle. (Laughs) It took awhile before we got into George Jones and Gram Parsons and that kind of stuff.

I’ve been through Crystal Gayle, Dolly Parton, Ronnie Milsap, all of them.

A-ha! And it never changes, really. There’s a certain period in your life, I think, where if music is something that you’re passionate about and it’s something that gives you a thrill…what you feel about the music in a critical way doesn’t come into it. If I hear anything from, like, the year 1979 or 1980, when I was first just getting knocked over by music, reading the charts every week and taking the radio to school, it doesn’t matter what the record is or if it’s the craziest comedy record or whatever. It just gives me such a thrill of nostalgia that I can’t not like it and can’t not enjoy that moment. It’s not about the record.

I know what you mean, though it took me years to appreciate that. I went through the same stage that everyone goes through, where I was, like, “I’m too cool to like this.” But then, at a certain point, I realized, “Who am I kidding? I grew up listening to Barry Manilow, and I can still appreciate this!”

Absolutely. “Weekend in New England” is a great song! (Laughs) I love a bit of Mr. Manilow. You’re right, though. It was hard on our psyches to grow up and make these musical strides in a harsh critical glare, for the most part, because we were pretty confused and never really confident, you know? We only really got confident, like, maybe about a year or two ago! Something like that. Honestly! And yesterday all the confidence was away again. But it’ll come back. It just felt like, “Is this the right time? Is the music we should be making?” And, also, the record company had a pretty strong influence on us. We weren’t headstrong people, you know, and we never have been, really. We are a bit more now, I’d say, but we were very kind of…we would make the music that we felt came from our heart, and then the record company would say, “Hey, that’s great, but can you change it a wee bit?” (Laughs) And we’d be, like, “Okay, if you like,” and we’d lock ourselves back in the studio and have a go. But what we didn’t know was that it was eating away at our confidence a tiny bit at a time…and then you wake up and it’s 1996 and you’re going, “Is this good?” So we had that period as well. It’s strange that what it takes to get you off it can sometimes seem on the surface to be really awful…like, in our case, the bankruptcy. Or losing a record company deal and being dropped. Whatever. All of these things that seem really calamitous are actually blessings at the end of the day.

And, obviously, I don’t want to dwell on that stuff, but I was curious: do you often wonder how many black cats have crossed your path over the years?

No, you cannae give that any momentum. You can’t afford it. You’ve got to remain positive. We’ve so much to be thankful for. There are four of us that have played together for almost twenty years now, and we’ve gotten so much out of just playing together. John and Paul, when they play guitar together, they’re just amazing. They just read each other very well. It’s kind of frowned upon to stay together in rock and roll, you know? But when John and my sister got married, that was in the middle of a time when we didn’t really know what we’d be doing next, and there was an element where we were, like, “We really have to accept each other or leave each other.” And we accepted each other, of course, and, y’know, we’ve grown to love each other and have learned how to treat each other properly. I think that, when we grew up together, we were very Pink Floyd-y about it. Nobody was saying anything, nobody was actually helping each other out of their problems, and we were feeling a little isolated. We had the camaraderie, but that’ll only take you so far. And now we have, I think, because we’ve been together so long and feel a bit of an element of “fuck it” and, you know, this is what we’re doing. It’s a vocation for us, and we actually enjoy each other’s company. Like I said, John and his brother are kind of my family, too. We’re much more comfortable with our music now.

Join us next week…no, seriously…when we return with more from Mr. Reader.

Okay, wait, she says, “No, you’re not.” So let’s just say I’m a dedicated journalist.

Anyway, I hope everyone who enjoyed the first half of my conversation with Robbie returns to check out this second half, as we discuss various artists he’s worked with during his career in music, and we also finally get around to asking him about his acting…and, yes, that includes Cousin Oliver. So let’s get back to where we left off, having just chatted about Napoleon Blown Apart and starting to ask about some of his other work…

I wanted to run through a couple of other albums that you played on. I hope to do a column about the Barry Holdship Four’s The Jesse Garon Project, because I love that record.

Oh, right on! Yeah, I did some playing on that. He’s an awesome guy. Barry’s an awesome guy. I just wish he didn’t put drum machines on his records. (Laughs) But we’ll talk about that. That’s a whole other thing. I’ve told him many other times, “Let me produce your stuff!” And he does it at home, and he does an awesome job, but…well, look, I listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and I go, “I would’ve fixed that.” Because, you know, I’ve made so much money on my art that I can afford to sit around and make these kind of judgement calls on other people’s art. (Laughs)

I think my favorite song on Jesse Garon is “Twist of Faith.” I first heard that on…I think it was a Poptopia! compilation.

Yeah, it’s a really good song. He’s written a lot of really good songs. “Hang Me Out to Dry” is a really fucking awesome barn-burning song that the BoDeans should’ve bought. The BoDeans should’ve bought that song from him and just had a whole second career.

You’ve worked with Cockeyed Ghost quite a bit.

I played with Cockeyed Ghost for awhile, sure. Actually, it’s a crazy thing: Adam (Marsland) is one of those who I kind of sometimes want to punch in the head. (Laughs) We’ve known each other for that long. But I’ll also say that he’s written five or six of my favorite songs ever. It’s pretty amazing. He has a song called “Ginna Ling” that’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. But going back to that, when I was playing with them, there’s a song on…I think it’s on Ludlow 6:18, and it’s called “Imagine You’re Dead.” (Writer’s note: actually, it’s on The Scapegoat Factory.) It’s a really cool, crazy pop song. “Asian Hero Worship” is another really great song. I mean, we toured for awhile, but it was sort of, like, once we got off the road… (Hesitates) I think it’s because I can’t be in a band and not go, “Oh, but I want to do it this way!” Adam has his ideas about how it’s supposed to be, and we were diametrically opposed on occasion, so once we got off the road, he said, “Yeah, I think I’m gonna go with Robert Ramos (on bass). And I just went, “Yeah, okay.” (Laughs) But we had an awesome time touring. All of the stuff you can imagine. We almost died! We were in a snowstorm outside of Flagstaff, and the car spins off the road, and the drummer’s asleep in the front seat. Adam goes, “Uh-oh, here we go,” and I’m thinking, “Well, this will be interesting. This’ll make for an interesting end of the story, won’t it?” But we were fine. And it was amazing. I think we played some amazing shows as a trio. Do you know James Hazley?

I know the name.

He was the drummer for Cockeyed Ghost for a very long time. He’s one of the best guys that’s ever played the game. I can’t believe that there are people out there that don’t know his name and who aren’t throwing lots of cash at him to play with them, because there’s nothing the dude can’t do. He’s a great singer, he’s a great songwriter, he plays multiple instruments, and he’s one of the best drummers that I’ve ever crossed paths with. Some of the shows that we played, Adam would go off the stage going, “Um, can you guys tone it down a little bit? I’m having a hard time keeping up with you.” And we’re, like, “That’s right, fucker, you are!” (Laughs)

You played on and…I think you produced the Receiver album, too, didn’t you?

I did produce Inspiration Overload, yeah. I had just…wait, when did the Receiver album come out? 2001?

That’s the date on it.

Yeah, so in 1999, there was a voiceover strike, and I was looking around for work to do. And I used to have an 8-track studio in my garage when I was a kid, and I’ve sort of always been around studios, but I never got any good at it. So I got all this gear, I got a couple of ADATs at the time, which was the big technology, and I had lined myself into a job working for a website as a recording engineer. Now, basically, the guy said, “Do you know how to do this, this, and this?” And I said, “No, but I learn fast.” And I saw the look on his face as he told me I could have this job, and it really was, like, “Oh, really. You learn fast. All right, well, you’ve got the job, and let’s see what happens next!” And, basically, I was strapped to a very fast-moving vehicle that I was completely out of control of. But because of him, I’d gotten some gear and was trying to become a recording engineer at home, so I told Ken (West), “If you want to do some songs…” I was going out with Lisa (Mychols) from the Masticators at the time, we were living together, and we started recording stuff just in the house, and then I moved my studio out to with Mike Simmons from Sparkle*Jets (UK), and we finished it up there. Receiver kind of helped me become a recording engineer. You can see all of us sort of going “What the hell are we doing?” during the course of it. But, you know, I just listened to it again about a week ago, and there were things that used to disappoint me about how some of the mixes came out, but as I listen to it now, I go, “You know, how else would it have been done? That’s sort of what the band sounded like!” I mean, Kerry Chicoine…there’s some amazing bass playing on that thing. And Bill from the Andersons played some awesome guitar on it. He was, like, their secret weapon.

Do you have a favorite song from the album?

Well, “Inspiration Overload.” I love that song. And “Erika Kane” is really great. Oh, and “Accidents.” That’s a crazy piece of material! But, yeah, that’s totally…they weren’t together long enough to be a completely crushing live act, but the thing is, I think that record kind of sounds like what they were. It’s a little rough around the edges, and there’s some pitches that go a little north and south, but overall the energy of the thing is really good. It sounds like five people or however many having the time of their lives.

You mentioned Lisa a few minutes ago. When it comes to the Masticators album (Masticate!), are you able to listen to it and separate the music from your relationship?

Yeah, I mean, our sort of thing ended badly, and that was kind of a drag because…well, it split up the group, and… (Laughs) …in classic poetic fashion and classic me fashion, the night the band actually split up, we were playing an IPO show at the Galaxy in Anaheim, and somebody from Atlantic or somewhere was there to see us, and they were interested. But it just so happened that the minute we said, “Thank you, good night,” I walked over and said, “Well, nice working with you.” And later on, we found out that there was a possible deal on the table. I mean, nothing may have happened, anyway, but I kind of went, “Oh, that just figures, doesn’t it?” And for a while after that, I was kind of bummed about it, because it was at that time when it felt like anything was possible, and I really felt that, of all of the groups that were around at the time, the Masticators really had a chance to possibly poke their head up a little higher. And we never got that opportunity. Sometimes, I still go, “Goddammit!” But other times, it’s like the end of “The Commitments.” “It was poetry, Brother Rabbitte.” (Laughs)

How did you find your way into the line-up of the Mockers?

I met Tony (Leventhal) and Seth (Gordon) at the Philadelphia Music Conference in maybe 1996, and, boy, were they a promoting machine! (Laughs) I mean, they’re both really driven dudes with huge vocabularies, so I’m watching them at this thing…I’d gone there with Kristi (Wachter), the head of Racer Records…and we’d never done anything like that, and we were, like, “I dunno, where should we go?” And they kind of took us under their wing, basically, and said, “All right, you people, over here!” Shelly Yakus, the engineer, was there, and I played him some Wonderboy stuff, because you get five minutes with an industry professional, and he liked it, so I was, like, “Well, my work here is done!” Meanwhile, I think they’d already worked out a couple of soundtracks deals! They were pretty amazing. And then they came out to L.A. for an IPO, and I played with them. We played one very disastrous show with Walter Clevenger playing lead guitar and me on drums, and we didn’t know the material as well as we would’ve liked to, and yet they still wanted me to play with them!

Was that IPO ’99?

It might’ve been. Yeah, actually, it had to have been, if Walter was in the band.

(Laughs) Actually, I was at that show!

Oh, it was disastrous. Boy, did we suck! But, somehow, they still wanted me to play with them. And eventually Nelson (Bragg), who’s now with Brian Wilson, joined up, and now we’ve been to Spain something like six or seven times. It’s pretty crazy. It’s weird about American pop stuff. Spain loves it! I did a fill-in thing for this Spanish band a couple of months ago, where we opened for the Rubinoos, and people were fucking screaming, “RUBINOOS!” And I’m going, “Really? Oh, that’s interesting. Why?” I mean, I like them, too, don’t get me wrong. I like them a whole lot. But…really? I mean, here, even if they were assassinated in the street, people would shrug and go, “Who?” It blows my mind. But, yeah, we’ve been to Spain a bunch of times, and I guess they’re working on…let’s see, I think the first tour I did with them was in 2002, and Tony brought a film crew to film the whole thing, so it looks like they’re working on a documentary that’s almost done. The working title was “15 Minutes of Spain,” but you may want to talk to them to check on that.

Well, Seth only lives a few minutes away from me, so it’s easy enough to hunt him down…if he’s in the country!

(Per Mr. Gordon, “They’re editing it right now. The director/editor’s last project was a Jay-Z doc, and he’s been working on it for the last 6 months or so. He came down here to do some more footage and interviews, and we all met up in NYC a few months back to do more interviews and wrap up some stuff. I think the ETA is sometime later this year. Then he’s gonna send it out to the film festival circuit. We’re thinking of doing a premiere at the Naro, actually, and maybe tie that in with a Mockers show here in town. I’ll let you know, of course. I think the new title is ‘Mockstar.’”)

One more I wanted to ask you about was John Hoskinson’s album, Pancho Fantastico. That’s another one of those albums that, like Barry Holdship’s, will probably earn its own “Hooks ‘N’ You” column at some point.

Yeah, John is amazingly talented. Actually, it’s funny, ‘cause he and I did time together in Eugene Edwards’ band. That’s where I met him. Although we also kind of knew each other in a roundabout way, because he’s best friends with my old roommate’s lead singer.

Um…

Yeah. (Laughs) For years, he’s been friends with this guy Sean Anders, who did that movie “Sex Drive” that was just out. He also had a movie called “Never Been Thawed,” a weird indie movie that he made. So it really is a small world, because John knew Sean, Sean knew Travis, and then John and I were in the same band with Eugene, and then I find out that John is making his own record…and his material is really, really good!

In some ways, he kind of reminds me of Dave Gregory. No, wait, not Dave Gregory. Brian Stevens. Of the Cavedogs. He put out a solo album, and Dave Gregory worked with him on it. That’s how John strikes me. He has that kind of knowledge. Eugene is a really talented guy, but I kept finding myself listening to Hoskinson’s stuff, going, “Dude, you should just have your own band! You just play shows on your own, because you’re an awesome writer who shouldn’t be standing among the chattle!” He just had me play guitar on one or two things, but anytime somebody who’s that good says, “Hey, come play on my thing,” I go, “All right! That’s what I’m talking about! This is what I want to be involved in!” Now if only the Knack would call me about that drum gig…

For real?

I wish they would! I mean, I play drums the way I do in no small part because of Bruce Gary. I saw him when I was 14. The Knack hadn’t been signed yet, and there wasn’t a person on the stage that I wasn’t completely blown away by. Their first record…to this day, I can play the first Knack record from end to end on every instrument.

Wow.

Yeah. And not that it ever happens, but if I was at a party and someone shouted, “Someone play ‘Lucinda,’” I could play it.

If only it would happen. Okay, since I’ve got you on the line, I might as well go ahead and quiz you about a couple of your acting gigs.

Sure.

And first up…no, I’m not going with the obvious. I’m starting with…“Kidd Video.”

Yes!

I have to admit, I watched it all the time when it first came on.

Well, it was weird! First off, it was Haim Saban’s first American television show. Haim Saban was the guy who was responsible for bringing the Power Rangers to America. So he comes over from Israel, he’s got this idea for “Kidd Video,” and…he made all of his mistakes on “Kidd Video” about how you spend money. From us, he learned, “Wait a minute, I don’t have to pay anybody anything if I don’t want to!” (Laughs) It was hilarious in the early stages of it to hear him on the phone with NBC, just reaming them! I mean, here’s a guy who’s got a little tiny independent company, and he’s taking on NBC, chest out, just, like, “Come on, fuckers, I dare you!” And I think the show ended up…I think the reason the show went off the air, really, is because it was just too expensive to produce for a Saturday morning show. But the second year…I don’t know what they put in the water cooler in the animation department, but it became this crazy thing that…it was like “Lidsville.” It was this acid-influenced, crazy animation. It became something like “Alice in Wonderland,” and I was in my twenties and watching these second-season episodes, going, “Is this for kids?” It was just a little bit too weird. And I guess that “Kidd Video” was also responsible for what I believe is the worst cover of “Where Did Our Love Go?” that has ever been committed to media. It’s just…oh, God, it’s awful.

You don’t have an MP3 of that, do you? (Laughs)

Actually, the video is over at KVFlipside.org.

Well, I’ll be including that in the piece…

Well, the videos are all up on YouTube, along with a couple of episodes, but it’s weird because…I’ve been lucky in that certain jobs I’ve been involved in, for some reason, still have some kind of life however many years later. So there’s a cult of “Kidd Video” out there, people who really like the show and are still paying attention to it. Yeah, there’s a “Kidd Video” website, and there are two “Kidd Video” MySpace pages, I think. It’s pretty weird about that show that people are still talking about it. And then there’s the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” thing, the “Brady Bunch” thing, even “Iron Eagle.” I did all of these jobs and, years later, people are still talking to me about them.

I’ll have you know that I watched “Big John, Little John” religiously when it was on.

Now, see, that’s another one. There’s a weird little television show, kind of adult for what it was. I mean, it was “Brady Bunch” people who made it. I’ve gotten mail on it, with people saying, “You know, somebody should make a movie out of that.” I mean, it is a Jim Carrey movie just waiting to be made!

I can still remember that, when “The Golden Girls” came on and Herb Edelman showed up as Bea Arthur’s husband, the first thing I thought was, “Hey, it’s the guy from ‘Big John, Little John’!”

(Laughs) Will, I think you were the only person who said that.

I’m pretty sure you’re right. Okay, so, Cousin Oliver: albatross around the neck or not?

It used to be. At one time, I can say that it was. My big concern was, “Is that it?” I mean, the one chance I got for a ride on the cultural icon-hood train, and I was nine years old for it. I had no idea what I was doing the one time that this happened, and I wondered, “Is this going to be it?” And, of course, as it turned out, I did more things as I got older. But the weird thing about entertainment is that all of it is lightning in a bottle. Nobody gave a shit about Hasil Adkins when he came out, but some years later, there’s a cult of Hasil Adkins. And, by the way, you can say that, yes, I did lump myself in the same category of Hasil Adkins. (Laughs) Sinatra, no. Adkins, yes. If you don’t know who I was talking about, he was kind of the proto Mojo Nixon.

You know, when I’m trying to tell someone about Wonderboy or whatever, I always feel guilty when I try to explain why they should know you but eventually just have to sigh and ask, “You remember Cousin Oliver?”

Oh, yeah, but…well, on the resume, that’s the most well-known one. What else are you going to do? To an extent, it kind of overshadows everything else, but how many people get the opportunity for that in their lives, anyway? At least I have something that overshadows everything else, and I’m pretty proud of that. It was a lucky job. I wish it was my role on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” that got all the juice. I’m not unhappy with how “The Brady Bunch” turned out, but “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” is what I call real television. For me, I was lucky enough to be on a show that was as good as “All in the Family” or as good as “Cheers” or “Taxi.” You know what I mean? But that isn’t the one that gets remembered. “The Brady Bunch” was just syndicated and was on 30 times a day.

When “Battlestar Galactica” got remade and the original series was reissued, did you start getting more people remembering you for playing Doctor Zee?

Yeah, there’s a little of that that’s come around again. For the occasional money gig, I’m starting to do these autograph conventions, and people are showing up and asking about that show. Actually, weirder than that, the last time I did one, Bobby Sherman was there, and…in the early ‘70s, I did a low-budget movie with Bobby Sherman and Keenan Wynn (“He Is My Brother”). If you look back at my resume, sometimes I go, “I worked with him? No shit!” Keenan Wynn’s a legend, you know? So Bobby Sherman and I are at this thing together, and he’s at this autograph convention – he works for the LAPD now in sort of a P.R. position – and all of the Bobby Girls from back in the day, who are now in their 50s, were all there, too. So all during the day, every once in awhile, some woman would walk up to me and ask, “Would you autograph my copy of ‘He Is My Brother’?” And I think this movie was released in, like, one market. But here it is over thirty years later, and somebody’s coming up and talking to me about it. And I haven’t heard anything about it since I did it! God bless the internet…I guess. The internet sort of allows for the survival of things that natural selection would’ve taken care of at a certain point.

Is there anything beyond “He Is My Brother” that you get people bringing up that just freaks you out when you do?

Well, so far, nobody’s brought up “Dirty Laundry,” so I’m pretty happy about that. It’s a movie I did with Greg Louganis. And Sonny Bono. And Frankie Valli. That’s a pretty weird one. No one’s brought that one up yet, so I guess it hasn’t come around again yet.

I did an interview in Spain the last time I was there, and apparently in the ‘80s…you know, Spain used to only have three channels or something, and then all of a sudden there were 20 channels, and they had to fill it with content, so they were taking American television shows that maybe didn’t fly over here. And there was a show I did with Dennis Dugan. He ended up being the director of the “Problem Child” movies, “Happy Gilmore,” and other films, but he’s actually one of my favorite comic actors ever, and I got to do this show with him called “Shadow Chasers,” a paranormal comedy show. And this guy brings it up! He says, “Oh, and then you were in this show called ‘Shadow Chasers,’ and…” And I just went, “Hey! No! Whoa! Jesus, what are you doing? How dare you blindside me like that?” (Laughs) “Kidd Video” ran for a really long time in Spain, from what he said. Really? I don’t remember getting any money from that! You know, the first time Haim sent us on a tour of Israel, when we got there, they had “Kidd Video” bedsheets, candy bars, radios, all of this crazy merchandise stuff which, because it was Israel, he didn’t have to pay us for. It was hilarious. He’s one of the great white-collar criminals of our century. (Laughs) But, yeah, sometimes people will bring up these odd things that I did a one-off from. Like, I did a “Knight Rider,” and I’ll get an E-mail from a “Knight Rider” fan who says, “Look what I did to my car!” And I don’t know if you know about this, but there is a sub-cult of “Knight Rider” fan who trick out their cars to look like KITT. I’m, like, “Really? Isn’t there anything else you can do? Do you make that much money? Because I have projects I’d like to get off the ground, so how about you don’t make KITT and you give it to me?”

You’d like to think they can afford it because they won the lottery, but that’s probably not the case.

No, no, no. What, are you kidding me? My guess is that they live in a very small apartment that’s probably a complete disaster…but the car looks great!

And, lastly, let’s bring this back to music: what’s your favorite album that you’ve worked on? Even if it’s a small, unheralded one.

So, what, all of them? (Laughs) They’ve all been pretty small and pretty unheralded! I don’t know, let me think. I’ve worked on a lot, and I’ve worked on a lot of stuff that never came out. I was in The Last for a lot of years, and we never released anything with me on it, but what we did record I’m pretty proud of. I’m proud of all of the Andersons stuff we did. Of all of the little community of power pop guys, the Andersons did a handful of cover tunes for various tribute albums, and I think every tribute that we did was pretty solid. We did one for the McCartney tribute, “Temporary Secretary,” and it sounds completely unlike the original, and yet it’s still the same song. It’s funny, because I love Wonderboy and the Masticators and all of the groups that I’ve played with, but I’d travel across continents to be in The Andersons again.

Well, you know, any band who can write a song called Hey Coelacanth” deserves your respect.

Totally! We wrote a song about science. And they say music isn’t educational! If I can help one kid when he asks “what’s that,” and then he likes dinosaurs, then I’m okay with that. More than our recorded stuff, though, what I really loved about The Andersons was that it was really familial. I mean, I still play in the Steve Barton Band with Derek. Have you heard any of Steve’s stuff yet, by the way?

I just downloaded one of his albums, actually.

Go to his MySpace page. If you can somehow sneak “Cartoon Safe,” the single off the new record (Gallery), into the piece, that would be awesome. It’s on YouTube.

I love Steve, and…well, of course, like all of the projects I involve myself in, it’s complete suicide. (Laughs) But here’s a 50-year-old power pop / punk legend from the ‘80s, and I’m going, “Come on, we can get this guy on the road!” Because he’s better now than he was when he was in his 20s! It’s really crazy. His level of songwriting…I mean, I met him at IPO, and it was just him and an electric guitar, and he’s going through his songs. I walked up to him afterwards, and I’m, like, “First off, nice to meet you, you’re a big hero, but why don’t you have a band?” And he’s , like, “I don’t know. I just don’t have a band.” “Do you want one?” “Yeah, I think I’d like a band. Sure!” So I basically put a band together for him. When I was in my early 20s, I was listening to those Translator records, and I remember listening to Steve’s songs, going, “I’ll never be in a band with anybody this good!” And now I get to be in a band not only with somebody that good but actually with the guy who made me think that!

Yeah, when I first heard “Everywhere That I’m Not,” I listened to it over and over again.

Oh, yeah, it’s an amazing piece of material. There’s “Necessary Spinning,” “Fall Forever,” so much really amazing stuff that those guys did. And, now, our labelmates are Tommy Tutone, so we’re hoping that maybe we can get something together there. I mean, you can get the record at Best Buy – I just found out about that recently – and I’m really happy about that. You talk about being proud? I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done with Steve. We’re on album three now. I work with people because I like them, not because they can make me any money. I mean, I hope that they do! (Laughs) I go into everything thinking, “This is legendary!” That’s why I involve myself with it. Do you know about Suzy and Los Quatro?

Only that it’s one of your credits.

Yeah, I produced their record, and I’m really proud of that one. And I play with Nice Guy Eddie. And I play with these groups not because I necessarily think they’ll make money, though I’d like for that to happen, but just because I think they’re really, really good. Everyone I work with is someone where, if I didn’t know them and heard what they did, I’d say, “That’s pretty great!” So all of these people I play with, that’s the reason I do it. You walk away from the experience saying, “Hey, I helped make something that’s pretty cool!” And on that note, if you can put in a shout-out for Slapdash, that’d be cool, too. That’s another band I’m working with. Right now, I’m producing a lot of bands, and I’d love to be able to plug those. What I’d like to do is be able to get more music-producing work.

It’s funny that you should make the comment about how you don’t necessarily do it to make money, since I’m writing this for Popdose, a site where we write for the love of what we’re writing about. (Writer’s note: Suddenly, it may make a lot more sense to you about why I had to keep putting off this piece in favor of meeting deadlines for my full-time…and paid…gig at Bullz-Eye.com.) I don’t know if you’ve checked it out or not, but it’s music, TV, movies, politics, and we all do it because we love it.

You know, the times we’re in really beg that sort of thing. Everything’s about niches now. There was a moment when popular music and the people’s definition of pop were neck and neck, running together. But somewhere in the mid-1980s, it just splintered, and now everybody’s just kind of finding their own little thing. Ultimately, something will poke its head up again, but in the meantime, all of us…and I include myself in what you’re talking about…are basically just showing our friends something and saying, “Dude, check this out!” It’s like we’re all in high school again. Eventually, something will rise up again and become a movement, but it’s really hard for movements to happen anymore because everyone’s so shuttered up in their own little area. Hopefully, it’ll be the beginning of new regionalism, which I miss. If you think about what rock music sounded like in California in the ‘60s and what it sounded like in New York, they were different. They were totally different, because they were kind of cut off from each other. With amplifiers, it was like you could only get Fender on the east coast, and you could only get Ampeg on the west coast. It created all of this regionalism that has really gone away, because the internet and television have homogenized our culture. Hopefully, us being shuttered up in our little areas will sort of create a new regionalism of some kind, because it all sounds the same now.

All right, Robbie, I appreciate you putting up with all of the questions. Thanks again, man!

Hey, thank you!

I can still remember the first time I became acquainted with the band known as Wonderboy. I was writing for Flash Magazine – the Hampton Roads entertainment publication formerly known as RockFlash – and I’d stopped by their offices to shoot the shit with the editor in chief, Bonn Garrett. When I walked into his office, he handed me a copy of the band’s third album, Napoleon Blown Apart, and said, “Here, this just looks like something you’d like.” The best description of his tone that I can offer is that it was both boisterous and mocking – in other words, he was having fun at my expense (our tastes in music didn’t exactly run parallel) and loving every minute of it – but I have to give the guy credit: though I would come to grow very tired of being teased by him, Bonn generally did know what I’d like, even he himself couldn’t stand it.

I’m still not entirely sure what it was about the cover of Napoleon Blown Apart that set him off and convinced him that this was outside of his musical comfort zone. Maybe he saw the piece of cake and perceived it as an advance warning that the contents would be sugary sweet…? Whatever the case, I was intrigued from the moment I checked out the credits and saw one particular name: Robbie Rist.

If you’re a trivia buff, a TV geek, or a pop culture aficionado, then you may well recognize Mr. Rist’s name. His biggest claim to fame is arguably his role as the infamous Cousin Oliver during the final days of “The Brady Bunch,” but as someone who’d recently begun devouring the Not Lame Records catalog, I had also come to know him as a power pop musician of some note. I knew of Wonderboy because I’d read about their intriguingly-titled second album, Abbey Road to Ruin, but I still hadn’t actually heard anything by them yet. What luck! Here was my chance!

As you’ve no doubt guessed, since I’m taking the time to write a column about the album, I very much dug Napoleon Blown Apart. I would later come to discover that it didn’t really sound much like the previous two Wonderboy albums, as Robbie had decided to embrace the studio and knock out some awesome arrangements with more musical flourishes than ever before, pulling in some of his pals in the Los Angeles power pop community to assist. It’s a bouncy, catchy collection of tunes, but some of the lyrics tug at your heartstrings, like “Taken,” the track that really sold me on the record. And if there’s any Jellyfish fan who can make it through “Insecurity Girl” and not want to own Napoleon Blown Apart, I’d be very surprised, indeed.

I dropped Robbie a line through Facebook to see if he’d be up for chatting about the record, and since he and I have met before and are also on the Audities list together, he gladly acquiesced. Indeed, we talked for so long that I’m going to split this into two parts, so stay tuned for the non-Wonderboy parts of the discussion in next week’s column. For now, however, let’s focus solely on the wonders of Napoleon Blown Apart!

Popdose: Would this be Robbie Rist…?

RR: Indeed it is, sir. How are you?

I am well. You ready to dive right into this thing?

Let’s do it!

So fill me in on the evolution of the Wonderboy sound. How did you guys get started, and how did you end up where you were on Napoleon Blown Apart?

I had been playing with this guy from Cleveland named Paul Pope. He started his career as a member of a group called Molkie Cole. They were signed to Janus Records in the late ‘70s. I think Henry Gross was one of their contemporaries, and so was Al Stewart. They were sort of local Cleveland legend guys, but that band, as they all do, eventually split out, and he was living out here with…well, this is somewhat of a convoluted story, but he was living out here with Jack White, who at the time was the drummer for Rick Springfield. I was looking for both a drummer and some studio time, and Jack sort of passed on being my drummer, but he also had this studio with Paul, so they started recording some songs with me. Paul and I eventually had a band called…well, it had the most commercial title ever: Paul Pope, Robbie Rist, and the Tower of Light Beer Rhythm Section.

Nice.

Can you believe that we never went anywhere with a name like that?

It’s shocking. Shocking.

(Laughs) So we had that for a little while, and then it turned out that I was just writing more material than Paul, and I wanted to do more, so I basically stole the bass player and drummer and started kinda doing my own thing. And, so, it was those guys, and then we found Patrick (McGrath), who wound up being in the Masticators a lot later. If you go down the line, the first Wonderboy record…at the time, the metal scourge had hit Los Angeles, so for gigs that we played, I thought it would be good if we at least showed that we could play like them, we just chose not to. So on the first record, there’s a lot of proto pop metal moments on it that cause most people who hear it to go, “Ew, gross!” And then I have to explain that, “Well, it was kind of a joke, but sometimes if you’re the funniest person in the room, not everybody gets it.” So then on the second album, we were still in that harder-edged thing, but we were getting poppier. We got poppier and poppier as time went on, until Napoleon Blown Apart, when we kinda went, “Well, everything that we’ve done before, forget it. Let’s just not do that.” So we threw out the click track, cut everything pretty much live, and…there you go. And that seems to be the one that everyone likes, so I should’ve been paying attention.

Well, it was actually the first album that I ever heard by you guys, and it was really only by coincidence. A copy of it turned up at the offices of the magazine I was writing for at the time (Flash Magazine), and, basically, it was handed off to me by my editor with a sneering, “Well, this looks like something you’d like.”

(Laughs) You know, what’s funny about the whole pop thing is that, when people turn you onto something like that, they will tend to say something like that. It’s always kind of an underhanded thing, where they’re, like, “Here, I kinda liked it, too, but I’m not gonna let anyone know.”

It’s one of those albums that’s kind of all over the place stylistically.

Is it really? You think so? I think it all sounds like it’s been done by the same band.

Well, sure, but the music doesn’t necessarily all sound like it’s coming from the same place, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I think I know what you’re saying. That’s kind of my thing, anyway. I mean, it was a real big ‘80s thing to decide what you wanted to sound like, and then you really just sound like that. And there are some records like that which I love very much. I’m the biggest Rainmakers fan on the face of the planet, however there’s a sameness to what they do. Or the Ramones in the ‘80s. It was sort of like, “It sounds like this.” It seems like the ‘80s, because of recording and how it was during that time, you could really standardize the sound by using digital reverbs and stuff like that. And I’ve never been a fan of that. I’m a ‘70s glam, power-pop, glitter, country guy. So why would anybody want to sound the same? During the early stages of the pop thing out here, when Tony Perkins had Bubblegum Crisis and all of these pop bands started showing up, they really sounded different from each other. There really wasn’t *a* way to do it. And I think that, by the time David (Bash) had the International Pop Overthrow in full swing, there became a standard way to make a power pop song. It was going to be a mid-tempo tune, maybe the lyrics didn’t really mean much, they just sounded good as rhymes, and it was some 40-year-old guy who didn’t tour very often. (Laughs) Whatever it was. But to me…I mean, the early punk stuff, the Germs didn’t sound the Screamers, who didn’t sound like the Butthole Surfers. You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden, someone decided that there could be a uniform that you’d wear. So is it stylistically all over the place? I guess, but mostly it’s because, y’know, how many chances do you get? And also, we were on a label where they didn’t care what the hell we did, anyway, because we weren’t going to sell any of them! So we were allowed to be as creative as we wanted to, mostly because we paid for the record? (Laughs) But why make it all sound the same? Listen to a Sinatra record. There are grooves that are all over the place!

Oh, I agree. When I say it’s all over the place, I don’t mean that as an insult.

Nor did I think you did. But should this part of the conversation end up in whatever you write, I just want you to know that I did not just lump myself into the same category as Frank Sinatra. (Laughs)

For me, I think the centerpiece of the album…even though it appears at the end of the record rather than the center…is “Insecurity Girl.” It’s really just a total blow-you-away song.

Oh, thank you!

And I think it’s the best production on the album. Or, at least, you’re the most aware of the production on that song.

Yeah, at least it’s got the most production.

How did that song come to pass? Because you’ve got kind of an all-star cast on that track.

Well, that all happened later. I’m pretty sure it was…I mean, I think everybody in Wonderboy contributed to that song in some way. Patrick wrote the music and the verses, and we all pretty much wrote that tune. At the time…when did that come out? 1995?

Actually, this copy says ’97.

Okay, well, we were probably done with it in ’96. But already at that point, we were all died-in-the-wool Jellyfish fans, and we were just sort of, like, “Hey, let’s try one of those crazy, too-many-parts Jellyfish songs!” And we ended up with that. And then once it got started, once we started recording it, we said, “It needs more stuff. Who can we call in?” And Darian Sahanaja had already said that, if we do have any piano on this thing, that he was a really good candidate for it. Basically, you can go, “Darian, write a song that sounds like it came out of 1969,” and it’ll sound like it. The guy’s an absolute wizard at evoking a time…apparently, since he’s the guy who finished Smile! (Laughs) But he can do it with anything. If you say, “Hey, whip me up something that sounds like Suzi Quatro,” then, bang, off you go, it’ll sound just like Suzi Quatro. So he was in there, and then Probyn (Gregory). And Mike , the other trumpet player on it, was a guy who just produced radio spots in town, we were friends, and I knew he was a trumpet player, so him and Probyn just went in there and played it completely live, so that was very cool. And then, ultimately, everybody at the end, for that whole round business that happens…I would just sit there and go, “Anybody know what to do?” (Laughs) And somebody would go, “Can we start this?” “Yeah, okay.” And then that would stay there. And Quentin Flynn, who’s a big voiceover guy – he was Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in the new “Fantastic Four” cartoon – I have a group with him called the Snozzberries, and he was in Slow Motorcade for awhile, so he sort of flirted with our little rock scene, and he’s on that, too. Yeah, we just threw everybody on. I mean, Jill Meschke from The Negro Problem, she played some accordion on another song. She’s amazing. At the time…it was 1996…the whole pop world here in L.A., for about a year, it looked like it was all possible. For about a year, we were having shows, and people were going to them, and there were even girls there!

Gasp!

Right? And Dave Foley (from the Kids in the Hall) was going to some of our shows, and we were, like, “Wow, maybe this thing has finally got some juice behind it!” And then…I don’t know what the hell happened. (Laughs) It just kind of all fell apart.

Well, on a more uplifting note, another one of my favorite songs on Napoleon Blown Apart is “Taken.” I loved “Why Can’t One and One Be Two?” as well, but when I hit “Taken,” I was, like, “Okay, this is something very different what I’m used to hearing.”

Oh, thank you! Yeah, I heard Andy Partridge once say that all writers of all kinds work in themes, and one of my themes is insecurity. Whimsy, insecurity, and bitterness. That pretty much embodies everything I write about, so that was kind of a whimsical insecurity song. It’s pretty much about seeing someone from a distance and going, “Oh, man, if only I could be with you, it would be the best thing in the whole world!” And, of course, you never say anything about it. Of course not, because you’re a pop guy. (Laughs) Actually, I was listening to Bread this morning, and what I noticed is that there’s a heavy-duty…and I think this an early ‘70s kind of thing…but there’s a heavy-duty melancholy to it. If you look at kids television at the time, like “Lidsville” or “Land of the Lost,” a lot of the shows were about kids trying to get back home. There’s a sadness to all of this underlying stuff, and it’s the same thing when you’re listening to Bread. There’s a melancholy “oh, maaaaaaannnnnnn” vibe to it that I think ultimately ended up going away, but I never shook it off, so it ends up in all kinds of things. There’s always an element of melancholy in most things that I do. Even a happy song has a melancholy sort of vibe to it.

What are some of your personal favorite songs on the album

Aw, man, I don’t know. That’s like asking which kid you like best.

Which, for the record, I almost always offer as the preface to that question. That’s what I get for leaving it off this time.

(Laughs) I don’t know. I think “Why Can’t One and One Be Two?” is a mini-opera. A lot happens in a short amount of time. But, you know, my favorite song is probably the one that Pat sings. “Empty” is my favorite song. Off and on, I’ve been writing with this woman named Jenny Rosen. Since we were teenagers. We’re starting to write again, actually. And, of course, her themes are alienation and resignation, and that’s a really good alienation / resignation song. It’s just, like, “I’m just existing.” That’s what the whole tune is about. It’s pretty amazing. “Taken” is a pretty good song. It’s got some funny stuff in it. “Happy? That’s Me!” is basically a cartoon character who hits himself in the head with a hammer. I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say, because Wonderboy’s a really weird thing for me. I haven’t been a lead singer since. I was in the Andersons, and I sang, but the focus was split up over three guys. After doing that thing for so long and trying so hard, I was a little bummed that no one was particularly interested, you know? But, I mean, how could anybody be interested if it flew against everything that was going on in music at the time?

Matthew Sweet got lucky, because he already had a record deal before Girlfriend came out. If he just would’ve done that record indie, it would’ve sunk like a stone, just like the Owsley record did. Or Jellyfish! There’s a perfect example. They threw boatloads of money at that thing, and nobody bought it. Nobody took the bait on that one at all. So I kind of walked away from Napoleon Blown Apart going, “We were really hopeful on that thing, and we worked really hard on it, and even the best reviews that we got were always sort of underhanded compliments.” They were always, like, “It’s not as terrible as you want it to be,” or, “He does the hardcore opening song (’Tick’), and then he sings every other song as if it has the word ‘summer’ in the title.” And I’m, like, “I don’t think that’s really a compliment. I think he’s kind of rolling his eyes at it.”

I think that a lot of stuff that I’ve worked on…I’m really proud of every band I’ve ever been in. I think every one of them really brought something to the table that nobody at the time was doing. But the odd thing about it is that nobody ever cared! (Laughs) And I don’t even have a problem with that. I mean, the most you can do with anything is just to make it. I don’t know how bitter Bill Lloyd ever gets about his own output, but he really made a lot of money with his partner (Radney Foster), so I guess it doesn’t really matter.

And it’s not like you didn’t have enough stuff to keep yourself busy after you decided to retire Wonderboy.

Oh, yeah, sure! I mean, the thing is, when the pop thing started happening here again…I started playing in bands – or in clubs, anyway – just at the tail end of the skinny tie explosion. I got in there after the wave had already crested, and it had crashed and was now washing up on the beach before going out to sea again. And I told myself at that time, when I was 19 or whatever years old, “If this ever happens again, I’ll be damned if I’m not going to do as much as I can to be involved with it,” because it’s my favorite kind of music. And, so, I became the utility infielder guy. If somebody was in town playing and they needed a whatever, with a rehearsal, I could make it happen for them. So I did that, I had the Andersons and the Masticators, and there was all of this stuff. Other people have asked…not in any huge way, but, like, my girlfriend now goes, “Why don’t you ever do anything with Wonderboy?” And I’m, like, “Um, well, you know…” I mean, aside from the fact that everyone is spread out across the continent at this point, it’d still be like naming a ship the Titanic.

Plus, I’d imagine that, given how you feel about the band’s relative lack of success, it might be hard to convince yourself to do a reunion show, knowing that, “Well, we weren’t that big to begin with.”

Well, if someone’s willing to give us money for it, I’m ready to go! (Laughs) But just to fly everybody in just to kind of relive something that only we really enjoyed…? I mean, one of the things that the group has talked about all the time is…you never saw us play, did you?

I did not.

There was a certain kind of roar that we created when we played, and I felt like it was sort like riding a wave. It was apt to that. And I wouldn’t mind experiencing that again. I wouldn’t mind experiencing that again at all! But, again, $1200 in plane tickets later, and then you have to rehearse it, and…you play, don’t you?

No, no, I’m just the lowly critic.

Well, even if you know music, you can tell that there’s an awful lot of arrangements, so you’re talking about a good two weeks of rehearsal to make this thing hum again. Who has that kind of time? (Laughs)

Yours truly and Mr. Rist @ The Troubadour in 1999

Well, folks, it’s time to take another dip into the wonderful world of Albums I Discovered While I Was Working At A Record Store. If you’re a former record store employee (and I strongly suspect that more than a few of you are), then you’re probably in possession of quite a few records which you hold near and dear to your heart, even though the average person would give you a blank look if you mentioned the artist’s name. When you’re toiling in the music retail mines, you’re rarely doing it for money; instead, you’re doing it for the love of music and, invariably, the free in-store play CDs that find their way into the personal collections of the employees when the album in question has run its course…if not before.

The Pleasure Thieves’ Simple Escape is one of those albums for me. They were one of those poor, unfortunate artists who were signed to Hollywood Records in the early ’90s, in the midst of the Disney-owned label’s glory days as The Label Who Held The US Rights To The Early Queen Catalog. It might’ve seemed like a great place to be, since Hollywood was ensured an arseload of sales from the works of Messrs. Mercury, May, Deacon, and Taylor, but as you’ll soon read, it was a place where no-one really knew how to go about breaking new artists. As such, most of the artists signed to Hollywood ended up only sticking around for a short stay…whether they wanted to hang around or not. (One of these days, I’m going to write up another one of my favorite came-quick-and-didn’t-stay-long Hollywood Records artists: Ghost of an American Airman.)

Granted, it’s not entirely a surprise that the Pleasure Thieves couldn’t find success with their sound in 1992. Lead singer Sinjin-William Dolan rather resembles Neil Diamond at times with his husky voice…check out the album-opening “Turn Me On” for proof…and the music’s very synth-heavy. Sadly, neither were attributes that would’ve led any band to success in the early ’90s, when you pretty much had to be flying the flannel to earn yourself rock radio airplay. They did manage to score a little bit of airplay with the album’s lead singer, “My Favorite Drug,” but it wasn’t enough to save them from Hollywood’s purge of virtually all of their artists with names that didn’t start with the letters “Q-U.” But, man, did I love that record, which was evidenced by the fact that more than a few of my mix tapes from the era feature the pop-tastic, horn-driven hook of “Wild Miracle.”

And, yet, for years, it seemed as though the band was a figure of my imagination. I did a posting over at ESDMusic.com in August 2006 where I bemoaned that “the group vanished so far into oblivion that they have no website, no MySpace page, nothing.” Thankfully, that’s changed a little bit since then – they now have both – but there hasn’t been much need to update the band’s site, so you’re probably better off sticking with their MySpace page, run by the band’s keyboard player, Matt Everitt.

Also now easy to find: the group’s bassist, Nick Kozonis, who can be readily found via the aforementioned MySpace page as the man behind The Knickels. I also managed to hunt Nick down via his Facebook page, and when I did so, he was very enthusiastic to grant my request for a brief interview about the life and times of the Pleasure Thieves. I also sent Matt the questions as well, so you’ll see his responses peppered in throughout the piece.

Popdose: So let’s start from the very beginning: how did the band first come together?

Nick Kozonis: If I remember correctly, it was the summer of ’87. I had been buddies with the drummer (Andy) since high school – we were in the high school jazz band together – and, around ’87, I had left a band that the drummer and I were in, and Sinjin, the lead singer, came in as a keyboard player. And then they kinda branched off to kind of do a couple of rehearsals because the keyboard player Sinjin had some ideas, and he goes, “Nick, you may want to come in and listen to this; I think this guy’s got something.” And I said, “Okay,” and we started rehearsing, Sinjin, Andy, and I. And they found Desmond in an ad in the newspaper… (Laughs) You know, “Guitarist looking to play.” Which was kind of funny, ‘cause all of our tastes are so diverse, so different. But then we found Matt, the keyboard player, about six months later. He was a friend of a friend, and we were looking for a keyboard player, and he fit that bill. So it was around the summer of ’87 that all of this came together.

Matt Everitt: I was introduced to Nick and Andy through a mutual friend named Steve James. Steve brought me to see a band called The Secret Service, a trio which included Nick and Andy. I thought they were really good. I was a music student at he time and never dreamed I’d eventually be in a band with those guys. But I end up trying out with them in a recording studio and the decided to keep me on board. Nick and I hit it off right away with our similar sense of humor.

PD: So did you guys just play around for an extended period and then eventually get signed?

NK: Yeah, we played around for a good two-and-a-half, three years…which I know is not long… (Laughs) …when we got signed. We were being courted by Atlantic Records, Geffen Records, a lot of labels, and then a producer we were working with…his name was Steve Madaio, he’s a trumpet player who played with the Stones and Stevie Wonder and all that…he heard our stuff and just said, “Hey, you guys have something.” So he was taking us into the studio to do some early recordings, and then he knew Julian Raymond, who was the lead singer of Bang Bang, who were kind of like a Duran Duran band in the mid-‘80s. They had a brief hit called “This Is Love,” I think it was called. If you Google it or YouTube it, you’ll find the video for it. But, anyway, he ended up producing our record. He was with Hollywood Records, so they nabbed us before anyone else.

ME: We were dedicated from the start to rehearse our asses off at least 5 days a week in Andy’s Garage. We played as many shows as we could at The Whiskey, The Roxy, and other places around Hollywood. Back then we had to buy the tickets for our shows and we ended up giving them away to get as many people as we could to show up. We hooked up with Steve Madaio who introduced us to Julian Raymond. After playing around town for three years or so, we finally did a private showcase for Julian and some people from Hollywood Records. They told us that day we’d have a deal if we wanted it.

PD: And they were known predominantly because they had the Queen catalog.

ME: That’s true. They had a handful of new bands like us and they signed Queen as well.

NK: It’s funny you mention that, because Queen was one of my favorite bands, too, and, yes, they had just signed Queen when we were on the label. Queen was not yet out on CD, so they did well with that.

PD: In addition to Julian Raymond, you had the Lord-Alge boys working on your record as well.

NK: Yeah, Jeff was there as well, but Chris Lord-Alge was the big guy. He had been doing it for years; he was a great mixer.

ME: I really think we were fortunate to have them work on our stuff. I especially liked watching Jeff work. It’s been so long, I doubt he’d remember me well but I thought he was a great guy to work with.

PD: So you said the tastes of the band were diverse. How did you guys come to a conclusion as to what the sound of the band would be, given that diversity?

NK: It actually just happened. We weren’t really trying to do anything. I mean, we all liked the modern music at the time, like the Psychedelic Furs and Peter Murphy. Our lead singer was a big fan of Peter Murphy; that’s why he had the lower voice. We all kind of liked those bands in the early ‘80s, so that we all had in common, but I was a big Beatles fan, our drummer liked the Tubes, our guitar player was a huge Rolling Stones fan, and then Sinjin was more into the modern stuff of the time. U2, the Alarm…we kind of all liked those bands, so we did like some of the same stuff, but we were really different when it came to other stuff.

ME: The sound just came out of us. Our separate influences just seemed to work together as a whole. Nick loved the beatles, Des was a Kieth Richards fan, Sinjin liked Peter Murphy and other alternative bands. Andy liked The Police, and we all did, too. We were all interested in U2 as well. I really liked the Simple Minds and The Who.

PD: One of the bios that I read online for the Pleasure Thieves began, “There are some bands who were born in the wrong decade.”

NK: (Laughs) Well, I told you: we loved the early ‘80s stuff, and I think that’s what came through more. We didn’t get signed ‘til ’90, the record didn’t come out ‘til ’92, and that was the heart of the grunge movement, so we were kind of stuck in something that…well, yeah, I think we were just a little too late. With the sound, anyway.

ME: That was a nice compliment. I think the writer was saying our music was still holding up. I think we’d fit right in with the Coldplay crowd actually. With the rise of grunge music we lost momentum with our label. I think radio programmers across the country wanted that sound a little more than s at he time.

PD: So what did you guys do to promote the album? I know there was at least one video, for “Favorite Drug.”

NK: There was the video, made by Sam Bayer. We were actually one of his first projects, though, of course, he went on to be the director for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” He went on to do that, and then he became huge after that.

ME: In retrospect, I think we were really lucky to get him. As Nick said, he went on to do great things.

NK: But we did the one video, and then we just went out. We toured around the United States for a little bit.

ME: We flew to select cities where our music was in rotation on the radio. San Francisco, NYC, Minneapolis to name a few. We had made a Video with “My Favorite Drug.” I wish we could have done more to promote our CD. We did play as much could. Glam Slam and the Palace in Hollywood were my favorite shows near the end.

NK: We were gearing up to go on a bigger tour later, but then we were in negotiations to do a second record, and then Hollywood Records came in and said, “We’re getting rid of the whole catalog. We’re blowing up everybody, and we’re only keeping one producer,” which was our producer, Julian Raymond. So they kept him. And we said, “Okay, we’re going elsewhere, then.” But then Sinjin was offered a solo deal with Hollywood. They were pumping him up as being the reason the Pleasure Thieves were who they were…and then they ended up never doing anything with him. (Laughs) They dropped him about a year after that.

PD: So how did you guys feel about that, when Hollywood pulled that stunt?

NK: Well, we didn’t like it at all! Yeah, Sinjin was very much, “Hey, we do things for the band,” and that was great, because we were all like that, too. But when it came to his first opportunity to really show that, he decided to take the solo deal! Which, he told me later, was kinda out of fear, like, “Wow, what if we don’t get something somewhere else? I need to have something!” So he took that, and then they ended up kind of throwing him to the side, more probably as a write-off than anything else. We had a brief reunion in ’99, where we all got back together and did a new demo of three or four songs, and we did one show in Los Angeles, but it just didn’t click after that to stay together, so we said goodbye.

ME: I was really disappointed when Sinjin left us to work on his own. I thought at he time we could have tried to get another record deal. I guess there were other problems with Nick and Andy wanting to move on. I decided to forget the the music business and find another career. Without the Thieves I was feeling pretty lost.

PD: So what are your favorite songs from the album? Or, if it’s easier, which songs really still hold up for you when you hear them now?

NK: Well, I like “Blue Flowers.” I always have. The fast version. I love “Without A Sound.” I think that’s the title of it, isn’t it? (Laughs) I haven’t listened to it in awhile, but “Without a Sound” was one of my favorite songs. And, of course, “My Favorite Drug,” I really liked that song. I think that was one of Sinjin’s best lyrics.

ME: “Into The Arms Of Love,” “My Favorite Drug” “Turn Me On” were my favorites. I still like to mess with them on the piano. I didn’t have the same enthusiasm for “Blue Flowers” as the other guys. I wanted to be harder…more like The Who.

PD: So was Sinjin the predominant lyricist for the band?

ME: Yep.

NK: Yeah, he was the sole lyric writer. One of us would have some musical ideas, like I might have a riff or something, and we would start playing off of that and turn it into a song. Or Desmond might have a few chords, and we’d start playing with that. So that’s how most of the music and songs were born, and then Sinjin just later would start singing to them, once we had some sort of structure, and he’d write the lyrics down.

PD: I remember the first time I heard the album, thinking that he actually reminded me of Neil Diamond a little bit.

NK: It’s funny you say that, because in the early time when we were being courted by a couple of labels, one guy said, “Boy, this sounds like a young Neil Diamond.” So, yeah, we’ve heard that. (Laughs)

ME: Yep. He got that a lot.

PD: So how did you guys end up on the soundtrack for “Arachnophobia”?

NK: Just through Hollywood Records. I think it was a Disney movie, was it not? And Hollywood Records was doing the soundtrack. That’s how. Through that connection. Julian, our producer, said, “Hey, we want to do a song,” and they gave us a list of songs, and we said, “Ah, we’ll do ‘Boris the Spider,’ ‘cause we’re Who fans.” So we did that song, but it’s funny, because it was not in the movie because of John Entwistle. They wanted it in the movie, but John Entwistle wanted more money, and Disney said, “We’re not going to give you the money,” so he said, “Well, then you can’t put it in the actual movie. But it can be on the soundtrack.”

PD: Did you ever hear back from Entwistle about whether he liked your version of the song or not?

NK: (Laughs) Actually, one night, we ran into him in a club in L.A., and I walked up to him and I said, “John, hey, man, we did ‘Boris the Spider,’ we remade it on the ‘Arachnophobia’ soundtrack.” He said, “Oh, yeah. Your singer sang it wrong.” And I said, “Oh, really?” He goes, “He should’ve gone…” And then he started singing it for me! He was plastered. But I said, “Okay!” (Laughs) So we kind of left him alone after that.

ME: I mentioned the song to him, but he could really care less about it. Said he didn’t like our version. As a big Who fan, I was crushed.

PD: Do you have any particular anecdotes from the recording sessions for the album?

ME: For me, recording was fun, but it was also enormous pressure since I hadn’t mastered my keyboards yet. I struggled to keep up with the talent in the band. We did get to meet Louis Conte, the famous percussionist. He played on “Pictures of Madness.”

PD: Had you guys ever really been in a studio for an extended period of time at that point?

NK: Oh, yeah, we had done other recordings. Not that structure, where we were preparing for a record…

PD: Well, I know you had done a single prior to signing to Hollywood.

NK: Where was that listed? Because there was a little blurb on that thing that I saw, that one write-up.

PD: The AllMusic.com bio refers to a 1988 single called “Chasing the Runaway.”

NK: No, that was not us. I saw that, and I see it every time, because I think people just cut and paste from that website, but that’s a mistake. I don’t know where that came from.

ME: That was misinformation spread around the internet. There was another unsigned band after us called Pleasure Thieves, from Utah. I don’t think they knew about us.

NK: But in Europe, we did release a green vinyl single of “Favorite Drug,” and on the B-side was “It’s Too Late.” You know, the song by Jim Carroll. “It’s too late / To fall in love with Sharon Tate.” We did a version of that, and you can find it on the back of that single. That’s the only other remake we ever did, as far as any famous tunes.

PD: You mentioned touring a few minutes ago. How did that go down? Were you headlining, or were you serving as an opening act?

NK: We kind of did our own solo tour. Some of the shows, they did stick us with other bands, but for the most part, it was our shows.

PD: Do you remember any of the other bands you played with?

NK: Ugh. That was a while ago. I can’t! (Laughs)

PD: I didn’t know if maybe you got stuck on any of those radio station festival deals or not.

ME: Nope.

NK: No, we were kind of lucky, actually. See, Hollywood Records was a Disney-owned company, they were new at the time, and they hadn’t broken any new bands. We flew everywhere. We didn’t’ have to get into a bus and endure all of that kind of stuff, which was cool. At the time, we didn’t realize how great we had it. They were throwing money around. They let us use real strings for that record. None of that is keyboards, other than the obvious stuff. All of that orchestration you hear is real, so we were very lucky.

PD: And a fanboy thing I’ve waited years to bitch about: who picked the font for the CD booklet? Because that is a fucking bitch to read. (Laughs)

NK: (Laughs) Who chose the font? That’s funny. What was it?

PD: Well, it’s a lovely Old English font, but it’s so small that you have to almost impossible to read the lyrics without concentrating really, really hard.

ME: Good point. Ha! But it seemed to capture our vibe pretty good.

NK: We liked the look of it, but I don’t think we anticipated how it was going to look when it finally came out.

ME: I wish it had been 12-inch vinyl. That would have been cool. I didn’t get too involved in the CD cover design. I think we just went along with the option from a design at Hollywood Records. I did like it though. I still have the promo poster in a frame.

PD: If it had been in an album, it would’ve looked fantastic…

NK: Exactly. We didn’t see it in the size of the CD booklet until after it was printed, and by then, it was too late. As a new band, we didn’t really have to luxury to re-choose, to go back and say, “Wait, let’s do this instead!” We agreed to it, though. It was designed by one of the art ladies at the label. But I agree, it’s kind of hard to read the lyrics at that size!

PD: Do you guys keep in touch in any capacity?

NK: Well, yeah, me and the drummer. We’re good friends, we’ve been in many bands together over the years. Like I said, we’ve been friends since high school. He’s not in my current band – he loves a lot of other diverse stuff – but he probably will at some point. I do plan on hitting it live with the Knickels; it’s just a matter of getting all of the members together. And Matt, the keyboard player, I do keep in touch with. He’s actually the one who put together the MySpace page for the Pleasure Thieves.

ME: I keep in touch with Des and Nick. I didn’t have much in common with the rest. So when the band ended, I didn’t make any effort to keep in touch. I had the feeling they didn’t want to include me in any more music adventures. So I moved on.

PD: Is Sinjin still floating around out there? I know he posted on the Yahoo message board that was created for the Pleasure Thieves.

ME: I saw that and I was inspired to make the page on MySpace for anyone who cared about the band. Turns out there’s a few people still out there who are curious about what happened.

NK: Yeah, Sinjin did post on there. What had happened was…if you read that brief bio that was online, it mentioned something about the Phillipines…

PD: Something about “Blue Flowers” becoming a hit over there in 2002, right?

NK: Yeah, and I actually had called Hollywood Records back then…I think it was four or five years ago…and had them investigate that, and they couldn’t come up with anything solid, but it appears that two DJs did get hold of the single and kind of make it this little cult hit out there, because I’d gotten in touch with a few people on MySpace that were fans of “Blue Flowers” because of that.

ME: Our music was passed around in clubs by some diehard fans in the Phillipines. One of them I contacted on MySpace. She explained how they would take CD to clubs and Radio stations and request it.

PD: So how has the internet served the legacy of the Pleasure Thieves?

ME: I posted our Video on YouTube and made the MySpace page. Other than that, there’s not much is out there.

NK: It’s surprised me with how many people remember our band, you know? They’re finding me, I’m finding them, just by Googling first, and then you see it’s on someone’s Favorites list. And then I’m, like, “Hey, where did you first hear of the Pleasure Thieves?” And I’ve gotten stories like, “Oh, my mom wouldn’t let me go to your show in Minnesota!?” It’s cool!

PD: Lastly, to anyone who’s never heard the Pleasure Thieves prior to this, how would you describe them?

ME: I think we were a little bit of Simple Minds, U2, INXS, Stones and Peter Murphy all in one.

NK: Let’s see…y’know, with the music that’s come out in the last five years, like the Killers and bands like that, we’ve been getting people saying, “Wow, this stuff could be released now!” And I’m, like, “You’re right.” It’s just that there’s no opportunity to get the band back together. We’re all spread out, and Sinjin’s not even playing music anymore. He’s married and has a couple of children. We tried it once before. He called me a couple of years ago to try and do something, and we said we might, but we never got it together. So all I can say is that if you like the current music scene, bands like the Killers, go listen to the Pleasure Thieves. I’m very proud of that record. I thought it went well. Some reviews said that it was overproduced. I remember one time that we went into the studio while the mixer was there, and we took all of the orchestration out on a particular song and just left the guitars and let it roar like that. And it was so good! But the producer came in and growled, “What are you doing?” And we’re, like, “Don’t you love this? This is great! This is harder-edged!” And he goes, “No, no, we’re not doing that!” So we were, like, “Oh, all right…”

PD: So how much different was the band’s live sound, then?

NK: It was a little different, because we were much harder live, much more rocky. Our guitar player, Desmond, was really a great guitar player, just edgy. So our shows were much harder and weren’t as polished as the record. They moved fine, but it’s just louder and edgier, for sure.

ME: I agree with Nick on that one. There was more energy live.

PD: What was the centerpiece of the live show?

NK: Meaning…?

PD: Like, the song where you consistently felt, like, “This is where it all comes together?”

ME: We generally played our whole CD every show. I can’t remember if one song stuck out more or not. The shows would just build more energy until they ended with an encore. We used to do a Stones tune at the end. Can’t go wrong with that.

NK: “Blue Flowers,” I think. Everyone always seemed to love that song. That’s the one I wanted to have released first, but “My Favorite Drug” was released first, instead. And that was cool. That song hit the radio, and it moved up a little bit in the charts. When we got to Minnesota, it was like we were stars! They took us to the record stores, we signed records and posters, we did radio interviews. We played at Glam Slam, Prince’s club, and that was a huge show. It was great! Driving in the van, we heard our song on the radio, and when we got to the hotel, it was on the radio in the bar, and then it was on the jukebox, too. And we were, like, “Wow, okay!”

PD: So was that trip when you most felt like a rock star in your career?

NK: Oh, yeah. It was fun! And they treated us well. It’s just that Hollywood Records had never broken a band, and they were still feeling out some of the things they needed to do. And I think that’s why they suddenly decided, “Let’s just scrap everything and start over.” But then Julian ended up producing Fastball, and that became a huge hit for him. That’s what catapulted him as a producer. He ended up at Capitol after that, and now he’s at his own label.

Nick

PD: In closing, I should probably give a little love to your current work. Nick, you’re with The Knickels. How did that group get together?

NK: The Knickels is me and my buddy who I’ve known since we were eight years old. He’s a lyric writer, and we have been writing songs all the time, all through the Thieves years…ever since we were 12, I think. (Laughs) I’ve had many incarnations of the solo stuff, but I never went out and did it live. I did some acoustic shows right after the Thieves broke up, but the Knickels is more of a project that I’m working on. The guitar player, Joe Palmeri, who’s from New York, is a good friend and has been for years. He does all of the electric guitar work on those songs. It’s like one of those projects where it’s not a full band yet, but I just like the name. (Laughs) It’s a take-off of The Knack. They’re one of my favorite bands of all time.

PD: As I mentioned to you by E-mail, if you get a proper band together, you should try to get involved with International Pop Overthrow.

NK: Yeah, I’ll look into that!

PD: And, Matt, how about you?

Matt

ME: I play and write music for fun and make TV ads now for a living.
My band days are over. I di have an interesting experience making a song on Myspace with a guy in Scotland who I have never met, which you can hear at my music page on MySpace.

If you’re a guitar guy, then all I have to do is write the name “Phil Keaggy” and you’re probably already prepared to offer up praise for his abilities. The man’s prowess with the guitar is legendary, so much so that he can’t turn around without someone bringing up the longstanding urban legend that no less an authority than Jimi Hendrix once declared him to be the best guitarist of all time. It’s been pretty well decided that such words never came forth from Hendrix’s lips…or, at least, Keaggy’s pretty sure of it, anyway…but God knows that plenty of other axe men have offered compliments along those lines.

The reference to the almighty is an intentional one. Although Keaggy started in the more traditional rock world as a member of the band Glass Harp, he’s been a staple of the Contemporary Christian music industry since the early 1970s. But, c’mon, don’t freak out, okay? I’ve always been mystified about how music fans can be totally psyched to hear about an album, only to dismiss it because there were lyrical references to religious beliefs. It’s music, people. No-one’s saying you have to embrace the lyrical content as the truth…but you can certainly enjoy the tunes.

My buddy Chris Commander is the person who was responsible for introducing me to the music of Phil Keaggy. This was in the early ’90s, when the members of my circle of friends were…you’ll forgive the expression…worshiping at the altar of Jellyfish and Crowded House. Chris said, “Dude, you’ve got to check out the album,” and he handed me a copy of Phil Keaggy and Sunday’s Child. I’m sure he mentioned that Keaggy was a Christian recording artist, but that’s not the sort of thing that would’ve turned me off, anyway, and, besides, I knew Chris’s tastes and he knew mine, so if he thought I’d like it, he didn’t have to tell me twice. And, of course, he was absolutely on the money. From the Beatles homage on the cover art to the plethora of pop hooks, this was very much my kind of album.

It’s a pleasant surprise when you drop a line to a musician of Phil Keaggy’s stature and have his personal assistant drop you a quick line back to say that your idea of spotlighting a 20-year-old album “sounds like a great interview,” because you really never really know what artists are comfortable with addressing the past and which ones just want to trumpet their latest release. Keaggy was so pleased with the idea of reminiscing about the Sunday’s Child album, however, that he answered the phone for our interview by singing the chorus to the title track.

You can’t really beat a start like that…and I told him so.

Popdose: You can’t go wrong with an interview that begins with the artist singing a song from the album we’re about to talk about.

Phil Keaggy: (Laughs) Yeah, and I just woke up half an hour ago, so how’s that?

PD: That’s not bad. That’s pretty good recovery time. (Laughs) Well, look, Phil, it’s a real pleasure to be able to talk with you today.

PK: Hey, thank you!

PD: I saw you play in Virginia Beach…gosh, it must have been 15 years ago by now. But it was a really great show that I still remember fondly.

PK: Yeah, I’ve not been down that way in a long time. So, now, Will, have you and I met since then, or was it just 15 years ago?

PD: Probably just then.

PK: Oh, man! Well, you know, speaking of “Sunday’s Child,” the last concert I played was…I believe it was Liberal, Kansas. But a fellow in the audience shouted it out. He said, “Would you please play ‘Sunday’s Child’?” And I said, “Really, it’s a duet. It sounds dumb singing it by yourself; I wrote it with Randy Stonehill. Do you want to come up and sing it? Come on, sing it with me, then!” And he comes up…and he’s got the lyrics printed. So he really came prepared! So he actually had a lot of faith, because I’m Mr. Spontaneity. But I go for all the help I can get in these solo shows, and he nailed it. It was so good. I think his name was…Tim? But it really fun. People still love that song.

PD: Oh, yeah. The whole album, in fact. That was actually the first record of yours that I’d ever heard. We were all kind of getting into power pop at the time, and he was, like, “Oh, well, you need to hear this record. It’s going to blow your mind.”

PK: You’re going to have to give me your E-mail address, because…did you hear about the album I just did with Randy Stonehill? Well, not “just.” It’s been done for a couple of years! But it’s called Mystery Highway, and it’s coming out in May, I think. Hopefully May. But Randy and I re-cut “Sunday’s Child,” just with John Sferra, my friend from Glass Harp, on drums.

PD: Oh, cool!

PK: Yeah, we did the song – along with 11 other songs – and we said, “Let’s just do this again,” because Word Records owns the master of Sunday’s Child, and we wondered if we could pull it off however many years later. Let’s see, we did it in 1987…

PD: Twenty-two years.

PK: Well, we recorded this in 2006, but, still, that’s nineteen years. And we still sound like us! So we’re hoping that it has a new life. It’s pretty cool.

PD: So this was right about when computer technology was really starting to make headway in the recording industry, and you guys kind of took a major step back and put together this fantastic record that was almost entirely live. Was that a conscious decision on your part?

PK: Well, the band…when we cut the tracks, the band did it live. Rick Cua, James Hollihan, Mark Heard, Mike Mead on drums. I’m not sure if Lynn Nichols played anything; he was really producing. And myself, of course. Yeah, when we tracked, we were tracking live together. I think the only song that started off with just, like, a sequencing was “Everything Is Alright,” by Mark Heard, which started with just a loop, but then we played to that whole loop as a band, and then we did the vocals. I wish there would’ve been more video tape of those days, because the sessions were just absolutely so much fun. I have a clip of us doing the background to “Ain’t Got No” where you don’t hear the lead part; you just hear the background voices. That’s Russ Taff, Randy, myself, and Lynn Nichols. It was a lot of fun. The major difference between that album and the new album Randy and I did recently was that we virtually did this album for free, because we did it at my house, but we got really good sounds. We used the same kind of vintage guitars…y’know, Vox amps, Gretsch, old Fenders and Les Pauls…so we went for the same kind of thing, except that, instead of being recorded to analog tape, it was recorded to ProTools. But, y’know, hey, it’s okay with me. I got a friend of mine in L.A. to mix it, and he’s got it sounding pretty hot. But we’re not talking about that album! That’s not what you want to talk about!

PD: But it ties in, actually, because one of my questions was going to be whether or not you’d consider a Sunday’s Child reunion, and it sounds like, in a sense, you had one.

PK: Well, this is interesting, because we’re going to be on the road for six concerts in April and May, maybe a little bit of June. Not many concerts, but it’s John Sferra and Daniel Pecchio of Glass Harp, myself, Randy Stonehill, and Mike Pachelli doing the new songs from Mystery Highway, which does include the song “Sunday’s Child.” I’ll tell you what: if it sounded good and it was really fun to do, it would make a lot of sense to throw in “Ain’t Got No,” “Walk in Two Worlds,” “Talk About Suffering,” “I Always Do.” There are some real classics on that album. And I’ve worked off and on a lot with John Sferra. Even though I left Glass Harp in ’72, starting in ’81, we started doing dates again almost every year, and by 2000, we did a live album in Youngstown with the Youngstown Symphony. And we all keep in touch. In fact, Glass Harp played at a club a couple of weeks ago in Ohio. But Randy’s a fun guy. He’s hilarious. And he’s a hard-working guy. He’s serious about his music. He’s a real dedicated songwriter, and he’s a real team player. He rallies the troops, and he’s very up and positive.

PD: With Sunday’s Child, I’ve often said that the trifecta of those first three songs – “Tell Me How You Feel,” the title cut, and “I Always Do” – is about as good as it gets as far as pop music. It’s just bam, bam, bam.

PK: Wow, Will, that is one major compliment. You know, the album actually did turn a lot of heads. I once had a friend who said, “I rebuke you for having made such a good album!” (Laughs) And then some other folks had said to Lynn Nichols, “I didn’t know Keaggy could sing!” Lynn really worked with my vocals and tried to get them to be as good as they could be.

PD: I’m sure no-one’s ever told you that you sound like Paul McCartney. (Laughs)

Phil Keaggy - “Here There And Everywhere,” from Acoustic Cafe

PK: Well, I’ve had a couple of moments. (Laughs) I think today I look older than him, but I think I’ve always sounded younger than him and less mature. But, on the other hand, I’m grateful for being able to get out there and hit the notes. You know, the thing is that, with Sunday’s Child, it was a Myrrh release, and here’s the weird thing about it: people from RCA/Victor heard the master of the album…it might’ve been because of Jack Puig, who engineered and mixed the album, who must’ve gotten it into the hands of friends of his at RCA…and they flipped over it. They wanted to release “I Always Do” as the first single on RCA. But because of the Myrrh/A&M deal, we couldn’t do it…and A&M did nothing with the album. They didn’t care to promote it. They didn’t do anything with it. And it was really kind of a sad thing, watching this album that we thought was kind of a classic of its sort, in a way, just kind of… (Trails off) But radio loved it. I remember KYMS out there in California, a Christian radio station…I couldn’t believe it, but I was driving home from a friend’s house, and they said, “We’re going to feature this whole album and just play it song after song.” And they played all thirteen songs. And you just never hear of that sort of thing anymore, where a Christian radio station will play…well, anything of Phil Keaggy’s, let alone thirteen songs! (Laughs)

PD: You mentioned Jack Joseph Puig a minute ago. I actually became a fan of his through his work with Jellyfish, then later realized he’d produced Sunday’s Child, but I had no idea until recently that he had actually begun in Contemporary Christian music, working with Amy Grant, Russ Taff, and so on.

PK: Yeah, and he also was the engineer of my Ph’lip Side album. That’s when I first met Jack, and he showed so much talent even then. I think he got to really love guitar music, and that’s why Jellyfish had such a good sounding record. And look what he’s doing with John Mayer! I think he’s riding a wave. I hope he stays successful! He’s one of those kind of guys who, whenever I saw him, he was always just so up. Up to record, up to create, up to make good sounds. He was a regular Captain Nemo at the soundboard console.

PD: Two of my favorite songs on Sunday’s Child are actually the Mark Heard compositions: “I Always Do” and “Everything Is Alright.”

PK: Yeah, I would agree.

PD: Your work with him was actually what brought him to my attention. How did you and Mark first meet?

PK: I think we were doing concerts off and on, back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. We’d find ourselves in Vermont together on the same stage, and a few other places, and I remember that, in ’83, I sang on Randy Stonehill’s album, Love Beyond Reason, and it had the song “Save the Children.” That was recorded in Mark’s trailer. He used his garage to record the instruments, but the multi-track machine was in his trailer there in Pasadena. That’s where I got to work with him in the studio for the first time, but then I think I did one other session with him, and then Lynn said to me, “You’ve gotta hear these songs Mark’s writing these days.” And he played me demos of “Everything Is Alright” and “I Always Do,” and I just loved them. So we invited Mark to play and sing on the album, and that was awesome, having him there. An amazing man, an amazing mind, a true artist. Bruce Cockburn spoke of Mark Heard as his favorite songwriter.

PD: High praise.

PK: It is. Then, in ’92, I was recording Crimson & Blue, Lynn was producing that as well, and we got John Sferra and Phil Madeira and Wade Jaynes. It was a different line-up than Sunday’s Child, but Mark Heard was to come, and we were going to do one of his songs, “House of Broken Dreams.” And that’s when he had his heart attack. He was going to be coming from the Cornerstone Festival up in Chicago and then come right down to Nashville, and we were going to get into the studio and work on the song, ‘cause that’s one of my favorite Mark Heard songs. So Randy and I, when we did Mystery Highway, we did 11 of our songs, re-cut “Sunday’s Child,” and then we recorded one of Mark’s songs in memory and honor of him. It’s called “Love Is Not the Only Thing, But It’s The Best Thing.” So, y’know, it’s amazing, but it’s another tip of the hat, another correlation between Sunday’s Child and Mystery Highway. But Mark Heard was great in the studio. He did the low part of the vocals for “Talk About Suffering” because he had a cold that day, so he was able to hit those low A notes really strong. You know, G, A, G, A. But I’ve got some video clips of us in the studio working back then, and it was fun to be able to find those.

PD: Whose idea was it to do the Beatles homage with the cover art?

PK: It was the producer’s. I actually had a different cover in mind. In fact, there are a smattering of friends out there across the country and in Europe who have the Phil Keaggy choice for the cover. (Laughs) It was a picture that Ben Pierson, who’s a fantastic photographer, took, a black and white of my daughter Olivia sitting on a guitar case, with this Gretsch anniversary model standing up behind her against this concrete wall, and she’s got a little white flower wreath in her hair. She’s about four years old, and…I just loved that cover. So when the album came out, I wasn’t really knocked out by the Beatles thing, because it didn’t look like the Beatles to me! It was my goofy face and then these three guys in the background, one of which was Lynn Nichols, the producer. And I thought, “Oh, I don’t care for this.” I wanted to have the other cover. I wanted it to say “Phil Keaggy and Sunday’s Child,” and to me, that was Olivia, being as she’s my daughter. So my nephew works in a printing place, and I created this cover that had all the same photos and information inside the CD insert, but I had him make 500 of these new covers, and we took the shrink wrap off all 500 CDs, and in my house in California, we inserted these covers that I wanted and took them on the road and sold them, and we mailed them out through the fan club, since we didn’t have a website in those days. I think I still have about 30 of those inserts. I don’t guess you’ve ever seen it, haven’t you?

PD: I haven’t.

PK: Okay, well, I’ll E-mail it to you, along with that new version of “Sunday’s Child.”

PD: Awesome! And, you know, you mentioned Crimson & Blue, and not to overuse the word “trifecta” in my compliments, but whenever I’m telling someone about your more pop-oriented work, I always cite Sunday’s Child, and then I also recommend Crimson & Blue and Find Me in These Fields.

“Love Divine,” from Crimson & Blue

“This Side Of Heaven,” from Find Me In These Fields

PK: Yeah, they all kind of go together as a package, I think, just like Ph’lip Side, Town to Town, and Play Thru Me kind of fit together for that period, for that season in my life. (Writer’s note: Actually, all three of this trio of albums can be bought together, though it’s in an out-of-print set that ain’t real cheap.) Yeah, I liked doing those albums. We were still really in a rock ‘n’ roll mindset. I think, in a lot of ways, as a rock musician, I’m not really a super rock musician. I’ve never really seen myself as a real rock ‘n’ roll guy. (Laughs) It’s obvious! But as far as a guitar player and the kind of stylings I was doing, yeah, I think it feels like the top of the wave for me, or the peak, with that period between Sunday’s Child and Crimson & Blue. After Crimson & Blue…I’m trying to think of what I did. I know I did Beyond Nature during that time, and I went back to Sparrow and did this pop album called True Believers which is really the most unlike me of any album I’ve ever done, in my personal opinion. It was more of a manufactured concept: “We’re gonna make a pop album for you that’s going to launch you into the next ten years.” I don’t know if it did. (Laughs) It’s an unusual album to listen to for me, but there are a couple of good songs on there, though. Then I did an instrumental album called 220 for the same label, and that was a very cool album that I just…y’know, Christians and Christian bookstores and the people who were buying my music, or the marketplace for my music and where it was distributed, they couldn’t make the connection, because it’s electric guitar music. So it kind of fell by the wayside. But then I did a self-titled album back on Word…or Myrrh, I guess it was…that I thought was a real honest effort, and it had some good songs: “Tender Love,” “Under the Grace.”

PD: Yeah, “Tender Love” is very Beatle-y.

PK: Yeah, that is. And it was really obvious and deliberate. (Laughs) You know, I really appreciate the idea of reminiscing about the old days. I like that.

“Tender Love,” from Phil Keaggy

“True Believers,” from True Believer

“County Down,” from Beyond Nature

“Animal,” from 220

PD: Oh, my pleasure. Popdose is a site that not gives me the opportunity to write about music that isn’t necessarily at the top of the charts but also allows me to delve into the past to praise older albums that were maybe unheralded or underappreciated.

PK: That’s excellent, Will.

PD: And I do have a couple of other questions for you that friends and fellow writers wanted me to ask you, if you don’t mind.

PK: Oh, sure, okay.

PD: You embraced technology very early…in fact, the friend of mine who introduced me to Sunday’s Child saw you in ’85, and you were already working with a digital loop machine…but you’re also respected by guitarists who just plug into an amp and let rip. How do you find that balance between keeping up with technology and staying organic?

PK: Well, when I go out and play solo, I take a JamMan. I got this JamMan in ’94. Chet Atkins showed me his and said, “Phil, I think this thing was made just for yew!” I said, “I think so!” What I had been using before that was Roland SDE 3000, and before that I was using MXR Digital Delay when they first came out. They were actually created in the late ‘70s, so I would say that probably about 1980 I was starting to do little loops. And then they started to expand up to 4 seconds, and then up to 8 seconds, and then 32 seconds. I’m content with looping just up to 32 seconds, but there are guys who can do entire songs looping-wise now. There are times when I wish I had a little more memory, I gotta be honest with you. (Laughs) I’m doing this phrase and all that, and, boom, it comes to the end. But I’ve been doing that, and sometimes you get a little tired of it because you can pigeonhole yourself a little bit if you do that sort of thing. But on the other hand, it can also open up a whole other cool thing. And it depends on the compositions I come up with. Some of the instrumental stuff has really been fun, like “Shades of Green” and “Legacy” and “Nellie’s Tune.” And, of course, the old standby, “Salvation Army Band” and “True Believers.” Those songs really lend themselves to the looping machine, and it creates some excitement, ‘cause they’ll see me layering these things and building upon myself…a rhythm loop, a little phrase, a bass bit…and then be free to create and play lead over these rhythms and chords. It’s fun to do. Now, that’s the acoustic thing. The electric thing…I remember playing at the Erase event, and they invited me to play guitar, so I just brought my Les Paul and an old Vox AC30 and a Route 66 pedal, and that was it. No effects, just straight into the amp, except for a little overdrive. And the tone…people were just blown away. And, of course, it felt so good, and the band was so great. And there it was: just straight-ahead. A lot of the lead work I did on the album with Randy Stonehill was straight into the Vox, with a Strat or a Les Paul or the Gretsch. If it’s good tone and you’re playing it well, that’s all that matters. And I try to play well, and I try to achieve a good tone, something that sounds really vintage. I love the sound of vintage recordings, whether it’s clean tones or overdriving tones. So that’s it: I like both worlds.

PD: So how do you decide if you’re going to perform an actual effect on your guitar or use a computer reproduction of the effect?

PK: You know, that’s a good question, and it depends on the time of day, and it depends on how much time I want to take in actually setting up the mike and dialing in the tones and how much noise I want to make. That’s why I said “the time of day.” My studio’s pretty quiet, and I don’t think I really disturb anyone on the second floor – I’m in the basement – but sometimes I’ve done some things where I think I could get a good tone out of a Line 6 pod and I’ll just do that: dial in a simulated Fender Deluxe or a British sound. It all depends on the mood and how much time I want to take. But I figure that an album that’s a full project, and one where I want to keep a consistent thing going, I think I’ll stay with the amps. But it’s, like, a lead overdub and I can achieve a nice tone and a variety of tones, I’ll go with virtual sounds. I’ve tried some software, like Eleven, Amplitude, and you can get some really great sounds. But sometimes it actually takes more time to dial in the virtual sounds by way of software. Sometimes it just seems like, you know, you plug into the amp, the mike’s there, and there’s the sound you’re looking for. I’ve actually achieved what I’ve been looking for, rhythm and lead wise, just by plugging in and turning it up, and then I tweak it if I want to, EQ on the back end.

PD: Actually, that ties in to the next question: how do you prevent technological advances from getting in the way of just making music?

PK: Well, in my case, I’ve got the real basics of recording gear, so I don’t have the funds to launch into the big game. You know what I’m saying? I’ve got ProTools 002, which is reasonable 32-track software, computer-based. And I’ve got some outboard gear that I use occasionally. So I just kind of…the technological aspect of it doesn’t really get in the way too much. I’m better at playing than I am at engineering, but I’m getting by. I put out an album called Dream Again…well, almost everything I’ve done over the last 12 years, by way of necessity, I’ve recorded myself. For the last seven years, I’ve been an independent artists, not on a label. The Phantasmagorical album that I did, which was released this past year, sonically was a nice sounding record. Dream Again was a nice sounding record. I even like Inseparable, which wasn’t well-received, but I liked the places it went, and I did put a lot of my heart into that album. The Song Within, I recorded all of the guitar parts here. Yeah, I’ve kept fairly busy. It’s, like, I’m not as busy this year as I was in years previous, for some reason. I don’t know what it is. Slowing down, I guess. (Laughs)

“Thank You For Today“, from Dream Again

“Lazy K“, from Phantasmagorical

“Motor Of Love“, from Inseparable

“Early One Day“, from The Song Within

PD: So what you think that the music industry has become well over 50% home recording at this stage? Do you see it as a good thing?

PK: Well, I’d say that there’s something to be said for a great recording room. Honestly. My room is, like, a 20X20, 8 foot ceilings. Sometimes I’ll bring drums up into the bonus room that I have above that room, and the drum sounds just fantastic there, because there’s more space. There’s something to be said for being free not to be an engineer and just being the player or the artist or the musician in the band, and letting somebody else take care of all that. I mean, I kinda miss that, y’know? That’s why doing the album with Randy was fun, because we had John here, and Randy and I. That was the most we had at one spot, the three of us, whereas when we did Sunday’s Child, I’m telling you, we must’ve had a minimum of five people at one time. It was a real band. You had a real producer, a real engineer, and they did their jobs, and us musicians did our job, and that’s a real party. That’s real fun. So I miss that aspect of it. I read a good book called “Here, There, and Everywhere.” You’re probably familiar with it.

PD: By Geoff Emerick. I reviewed it, in fact. It’s a great book.

PK: It is a great book. I enjoyed reading it, and I enjoyed the technical aspect of it. Nothing was really over your head if you’re involved in music and you’ve been recording for most of your life, as I have. I found it quite interesting, and he’s pretty dead on right about the whole idea of how one guy is an expert at doing that, and they do that, and they do it well, and that frees up the other people to do their job the best that they can do. And it’s kind of tough when you have to be the artist and the producer and the engineer, and that’s basically just because of finances, really, in my case. And it’s not because I want to be everything. (Laughs) It’s not that. I like being able to call the shots in terms of, like, having the last word about a song that I’m going to be writing and recording. I like that idea, and I think it should be that way. But a couple of times I’ve recorded other artists and helped them out, and I can tell you this: I have a lot of respect for engineers, because they’re the ones that end up working the hardest and the longest, because they don’t get the breaks. The other musicians do. You know, like the Geoff Emericks, as opposed to the Ringos, like when Ringo learned to play chess during the Sgt. Pepper album. (Laughs) You know? He’d do his tracks, and that’s it, you have to wait for the next song! But, yeah, I love the process of recording, and I really enjoy it. In fact, I’m having a friend…a really amazing, talented guy… help me rewire my studio right now to make it work more efficiently. We did that yesterday, and we’re going to work on that some today, too. And, hopefully, we’ll get some better sounds out of it.

PD: One of our other Popdose writers wanted to know if there’d ever be any other volumes of the Underground series released?

PK: Well, you know, Robin – who set up the interview between you and me – says that a lot of people who are writing in would like to see a CD collection of what I had done back in those days. It’s kind of like The Vault: the demos from the old days, the reel-to-reel days. That’s basically what that was. I quit doing those back when I got into DAT recording, but there were six volumes of back-room tracks, and I think that I might bring those out and remaster them, resequence them, trim off some of the fat, and see what the most interesting things are, maybe put out a 3-CD set of the best of them. Would that be a good idea?

PD: I think so. Absolutely.

PK: And there’s a lot of stuff that I have that’s unreleased that doesn’t see the light of day, but I think they’re…well, who knows. What would be cool would be to put out a 3-CD set and then maybe include a bonus of modern back-room tracks. We’ll see.

PD: Okay, last one. I’ve gotta at least bring up the longstanding Hendrix rumor.

PK: Believe it or not, the last time I heard that was just last night. I played at a cathedral, I sat in with Michael Cart and John Michael Talbot, and they invited me to come out and play guitar on a couple of things with them. And in a cathedral, of all places, he introduced me with that quote. And there was a piano there, so I sat down and immediately started laying my hands on as many keys as possible, in order to distract him. (Laughs) I think I was successful in distracting him.

PD: I think my favorite part about the rumor is that it gets updated. Like, “Oh, you know, I actually heard that it was Eddie Van Halen who said that Phil Keaggy was the best guitarist he’d ever heard.”

PK: Well, you know, Eddie is not as big as Hendrix. He’s a guitar icon, but his face has not been on Guitar Player Magazine as often as Jimi Hendrix. I think people are starting to get used to the idea tha tit was impossible that Jimi Hendrix could ever have heard me and would never have said anything about a guy who, at the time, was only nineteen years old. We actually recorded our first album at Electric Lady Studios two weeks after his unfortunate death, so I just can’t imagine how he could’ve heard me. I think it’s just a rumor that someone’s kept alive, and it must be titillating enough to keep an interest there. But it’s just a strange, ironic sort of thing. I’ll never be in the category of Jimi Hendrix, and I couldn’t understand him saying something like that, anyway, even after all these years. So I don’t think it was said…and that’s it for that!

Given that the Osbourne family became the toast of MTV in 2002, thanks to their then-groundbreaking reality series, “The Osbournes,” it came as no real surprise when it was announced that Ozzy’s youngest daughter, Kelly, would be releasing an album of her own. It was entitled Shut Up, and it was dismissed by…well, just about everyone, really.

It’s really not as bad an album as you want it to be, though, particularly given that you know full well that she only scored her recording contract because of her dad and her family’s TV show. But, man, having her cover Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” defines the concept of “a little too on-the-nose,” you know what I mean? Once Sony made her do that, there was never any chance in Hell that she was going to be taken seriously by critics as a recording artist.

Indeed, Sony quickly proved that it had little interest in promoting the record beyond its novelty value. After “Papa Don’t Preach,” the label lazily released the title track as the next single, which was only a so-so song; as a result, any attempt to push “Come Dig Me Out,” the third and arguably best of the album’s three singles, was rebuffed by radio, which is a shame.

If you dare to go back and check it out, you’ll find that there are a couple of punk-pop songs which sparkle with a little Joan Jett flair, and if we’re making comparisons to other female artists of Miss Osbourne’s era, it would not be untoward to suggest that they hold up as well as anything by, say, Avril Lavigne. Two of my favorite examples from the album: “Right Here” and “On the Run.” No, her voice as strong as Miz Lavigne’s, but, frankly, the songs rock enough that I don’t really care.

If you’re not buying into my praise of Shut Up, I won’t hold it against you. After all, even the woman who recorded the album is dismissive of it. I managed to talk to Kelly Osbourne for a few fleeting moments when I was at the Fox party during the January TCA tour, and when I asked her if there were any songs on her debut that she remembered fondly, her response was immediate.

“No,” she said. “The lesson learned there was that you shouldn’t just take the money and run. I have no regrets, but I just don’t like that record.”

When it comes to the album that followed Shut Up, however, her opinions are decidedly more favorable.

Kelly Osbourne’s star might’ve been sinking in the States, but in 2004, she surprised everyone…including herself…by pulling a UK #1 hit out of her bag with a lyrically-revised cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes,” which she performed as a duet with dear old Dad. As a result, Sanctuary Records decided to reissue Shut Up with several bonus tracks – including the new single, naturally – and give it a shiny and totally unsurprising new title: Changes.

Once again, America yawned…but that didn’t stop Kelly from entering the studio once more, and this time she had the songwriting power of Linda Perry in her corner. You know Ms. Perry, right? She might be responsible for one of the most loathsome pieces of music ever to hit the airwaves – I speak, of course, of 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up” – but by the time she teamed up with Miss Osbourne, she had long since proven herself as someone that a female singer would want in their corner, working with Pink, Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love, and even the aforementioned Joan Jett.

It’s clear that Perry had a plan when she approached Kelly Osbourne with the songs that would eventually become the album entitled Sleeping in the Nothing, and that was to go completely and totally retro. This record is all about the ’80s, with one band’s influence particularly evident: Berlin.

“I love Terri Nunn,” admitted Kelly, when I made the point of comparison.

Now, while it’s nice that she openly conceded this to be true, but when you listen to songs like “Redlight” and “Secret Lover,” it’s not like she could’ve denied it, anyway. (I’d guess that Ms. Nunn was probably torn between pride at her influence and greed at wondering if the similarity was worth suing over.) No, I was far more impressed that Kelly admitted that she wasn’t surprised that it was a hard sell to get my friends and acquaintances to believe that Sleeping in the Nothing was actually a really fun record.

“I think that album was just a bit ahead of its time,” she said. “It was released at a time that people didn’t like me very much, so whatever I did, people didn’t want to hear. If it had anybody else’s name besides Kelly Osbourne on it, I think it would’ve been a number-one selling album. It was just that people didn’t like me.”

You know, you want to tell her that she’s completely and totally wrong, but…you can’t. Not really. But with that said, at least one group dared to embrace the record: the dance club divas, who took the album’s first single, “One Word,” to the top of the US Dance charts. Here’s the Chris Cox Club Remix of the song for your enjoyment…and, of course, let us not forget the video:

Again, though, whatever your opinion of Kelly Osbourne may be, I have to say that the album just isn’t as bad as you want it to be. In fact, in the case of Sleeping in the Nothing, it’s actually quite good, just as long as you view it as what it is: Osbourne’s knowing attempt to find herself a spot within the new wave revival that was going on in 2005.

The above songs will readily fit into any ’80s playlist without the average listener questioning their authenticity, and the same can be said of several other synth-heavy tracks on the record, including “I Can’t Wait” and “Entropy.” Granted, it’ll probably grate on the nerves of the folks who actually lived through the ’80s the first time that the album contains a song called “Suburbia”…and it isn’t a cover of the Pet Shop Boys song of the same name. (Too bad. That actually would’ve been a great idea.) And maybe single young females will appreciate the anti-date-rape rocker “Don’t Touch Me While I’m Sleeping” more than I do, but while the sentiment is clearly a solid one, the song itself just doesn’t do anything for me. Still, when Sleeping in the Nothing works, it does so well enough to make you disappointed that Kelly Osbourne can’t seem to escape her reality-show reputation…and given how awful her family’s upcoming Fox series (”Osbournes: Reloaded”) looks, this is a particular shame.

Fortunately, Osbourne assured me that she hasn’t given up her recording career. She claims to be returning to the studio at some point in the not-too-distant future. Will the third time be the charm for her success as a recording artist? Probably not. But I’ve enjoyed her first two albums enough to be willing to check out Record #3 and see what she’s come up with…whenever it emerges.

How can you tell the difference between a good music critic and a bad music critic with a single question? Well, your mileage may vary on this, but for my money, you need only ask them to tell you their guilty pleasures. If they offer no hesitation whatsoever before launching into their list, then you should consider their opinions to be suspect. On the other hand, if they hem and haw for a moment before offering up a response that’s half an answer and half a clarification that “if you like something, then you shouldn’t feel guilty about it,” then it’s probably worth adding their RSS feed.

If you’re wondering, I don’t have the ego to suggest that I’m a must-add, mostly because I’m prone to answer the question by saying, “I know I shouldn’t feel guilty about liking them, but…” And as you’ve probably guessed, I have on more than one occasion ended that particular sentence by citing The Click Five.

In 2005, the Click Five released their bouncy debut album, Greetings from Imrie House, and picked up two distinct audiences the moment they left the gate: the power pop fans, most of whom discovered the album because Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) had a hand in writing two songs on the record, and the teenaged girls, who just thought the band was cute. It’s sad but true that the former audience is pretty well negligible when it comes to sales figures, but the latter helped Imrie House sprint to #15 on the Billboard album chart, thanks to the powerhouse first single, “Just the Girl.” If you scour the song titles and the credits, you’ll see that one of the two Schlesinger songs is “I’ll Take My Chances,” which was originally recorded by Swirl 360, who’ll score their own “Hooks ‘N’ You” column one of these days. You’ll also discover that Paul Stanley…yes, the one from KISS…co-wrote “Angel To You (Devil To Me),” and that Elliot Easton – late of The Cars – contributes guitar to that song and well as “I’ll Take My Chances.” In other words, it’s not hard to argue that there’s more street cred here than on your average bubblegum pop-rock album.

So how did they decide to follow it up? Why, by replacing their lead singer, of course!

Talk about killing your momentum stone dead.

Naturally, the remaining members of the band tried to keep things polite and diplomatic when discussing Eric Dill’s departure, nipping the inevitable question about the change in the bud by quickly moving off the topic and on to praising Dill’s replacement, Kyle Patrick.

I interviewed the band’s drummer, Joey Zehr, not terribly long after Dill’s departure, and his comment on the matter was, “It wasn’ t a secret amongst us that we weren’t exactly happy in the current set-up, and there were musical differences and different opinions, so when we finally made the decision, it really was kind of a mutual thing, and it wasn’t a really harsh thing on either side. And I know (Eric’s) happy doing what he’s doing now, and we’re certainly happy with what we’re doing now. We’ve got Kyle as our new singer, who’s absolutely amazing and has brought in this new level of inspiration for us to move into the second record with. He’s just an extremely talented musician with a really unique and powerful voice.”

The reality of the matter, though, is that Dill’s voice, while slightly reedy at times, had a unique sound that helped the Click Five stand out from their peers; as a result, when you first listen to the band’s sophomore effort, Modern Minds and Pastimes, Patrick comes off as comparatively faceless, and given that you can’t turn around without finding the latest bunch of cute boys with a catchy pop-rock single, the last thing any band needs is an anonymous-sounding frontman. When I noted how totally dissimilar the two guys sounded, Zehr explained, “We didn’t want to try and pull anything over on anybody. We didn’t want to, like, bring in a new Eric.” Well, they definitely succeeded on that front.

Still, you can’t say the hooks aren’t there, and the more you spin Modern Minds and Pastimes, the more it stands on its own merits. It just takes a little while…well, with the exception of “Jenny,” which was easily one of my favorite songs of 2007 and was an understandable pick for the album’s first single. And while there’s no one here who can match the mainstream power pop cool of Adam Schlesinger, the guys do have a secret weapon sitting amongst their collaborators: Jez Ashurst of the band Farrah.

(Again, I find myself citing a band who deserves a column of their own, but until that time arrives, I’ll at least give you a taste of their sound by providing you with Farrah’s Friday afternoon anthem, “Living for the Weekend.”)

Ashurst’s contributions to the album are, it must be said, the best of the bunch, including not only the aforementioned “Jenny” but also the pop nuggets “Happy Birthday” and “I’m Getting Over You.” There are certainly other fun numbers, however, and though it’s easy to argue that the Click Five sound like they’re trying a bit too hard with the retro sound of tracks like “Addicted To Me” and “Headlight Disco,” they’re still catchy as all hell.

Alas, here’s the bad news: Modern Minds and Pastimes was the kind of flop that can bury a band. While the Click Five’s debut made it all the way up to #15, thanks to a lot of touring, promotion, and Radio Disney requests, they achieved sophomore slump status in a big way, with Modern Minds crawling only to #136 before slinking back to the depths.

But is there any good news for the band? Perhaps. Word has it that they’ve been doing surprisingly well in Malaysia. They were given the title “Band of the Year” by 987FM, in Singapore, in the Top 100 Countdown of 2007 and 2008, and they won the Knockout Award at MTV Asia Awards 2008; if we can trust Wikipedia (and, to be fair, we often can’t), the band even performed at the first international rock concert held at the ancient temple of Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia. Word has it that the group has been recording a new album, scheduled to emerge later this year…but will it get a Stateside release? Time will tell.

I gotta tell ya, though, that I find myself rooting for these guys more and more with each passing day…or, to be more specific, with each further YouTube clip I see from them. I used to think they were a full-fledged studio concoction, but I haven’t felt that in quite a while now, and here are two reasons why:

1. They like Nick Lowe, which isn’t exactly something that brings the teenyboppers in by droves.

(For the record, they also like Elvis Costello, too, but I couldn’t find a version of their take on “Pump It Up” which would’ve impressed you a whole lot.)

2. They can translate their songs to an acoustic setting and keep the awesome harmonies intact.