The Raveonettes: Interview/Feature (Boston Phoenix, 1/09/09

Kicking the habits: The Raveonettes change (for a change)

I can't be the only one who, asked to name the most face-melting guitar moment in the last couple of years of recorded music, would point to the 1:57 mark (and onward) of "Aly, Walk with Me," the opening track on the Raveonettes' 2007 release Lust Lust Lust. It's a loud, soul-shattering, noteless vortex of feedback that multiplies and divides like the edge of a fractal as viewed through a thousand tiny mirrors, and it occurs in what is an otherwise baleful and Nick Cavey funereal trudge.

"I'm just so happy that we were able to capture that sound with that take," explains guitarist and songwriter Sune Rose Wagner. "We used to have a lot of songs back in the days before we recorded that were very dissonant, but I think we felt that we wanted to be more of a melodic band and to have a nice melody that would create tension with the noise. I don't think that we can make a more harsh noise than the one on 'Aly, Walk with Me' — it's kind of a pinnacle, for us, of the whole noise thing, that's going to be a very hard one to top. I don't know if we want to try it again. But it's a beautiful sound."

Anyone familiar with Wagner's œuvre with the Raveonettes (who come to the Paradise next Thursday) should be surprised by the idea that, having created something awesome, he's ready to move on to something different. His successful and brutally stylish rock duo exploded out of Copenhagen in the early naughts, armed with tasteful worn-on-sleeve influences that highlighted both his switchblade six-string Jesus-and-Mary-Chain-isms and vocalist Sharin Foo's Nico-esque ice-queen charm. They proceeded to churn out record after record of high quality and consistent sound. Has he become unstuck?

"I think we have done a lot of — well, I don't want to say the same things, but I think that we have taken a lot of our early influences, like '60s girl groups, Buddy Holly, Sonic Youth, and used them a lot. And I don't really know if it's interesting to keep going down that same road. I mean, I'm just as crazy about a band like the Doors as I am about Buddy Holly, even though they're completely different things. And you know, I love a lot of music from the '70s and '80s — influences that normally wouldn't show up in our songs."

Early on, the Raveonettes put self-conscious constraints on their work: their first EP, 2002's Whip It On, is, as it says on the album cover, "recorded in glorious B-flat minor," and their follow-up LP, 2003's Chain Gang of Love (the cover of which features Wagner and Foo done up in '50s Wild One gear), is "recorded in B-flat major"; neither record offers any song that surpasses the 3:15 mark. As with the Dogme 95 movement of filmmaker and fellow Dane Lars von Trier, these limits were imposed to focus the duo's creative energies. "Without constraints, you run the risk of having the whole thing fall apart. It's more of having creative constraints on yourself — and that's what we wanted. We always strived to be something other than an ordinary rock band."

Over time, however, the ordinary caught up with them. "I think that in the beginning we did an incredible amount of touring, and it was very unhealthy. We ended up playing a lot of shows that we didn't really care about, and I think that, you know, people could see that! I guess now we have to rebuild our reputation as a live band. Fortunately, we're totally into touring now, and getting a lot better. I'm enjoying it now, but for a while when we were on tour all we wanted to do was sit at home and write pop, you know?"

Wagner isn't kidding about sitting home writing pop: the band's current bicoastal set-up means that "I'll write songs at home, and when I have songs that I think are good for us, I'll send them to her [Foo] and get her opinion on them, and she'll say what she likes about it and what she doesn't like about it." While he's writing the songs alone in New York, Foo is raising her newborn baby on the West Coast. It's proved to be their greatest challenge. "To make the new album, first off we need to have discussions," Wagner continues. "Discussions help Sharin and me come up with something interesting. I do miss, sometimes, being in the same city, because you can resolve things much faster face to face."

The four EPs they released in 2008 showcase a looser outfit willing to experiment not just with noise but with dancebeat tropes (as on the Sometimes They Drop By EP) as well as trance and synth work (as on the Beauty Dies EP). "Yeah, it's nice — doing the EPs, we felt like we could pretty much do whatever we wanted to do. Like this song called 'Young and Beautiful' [off Beauty Dies], which is very much an '80s song with a keyboard line in it. The good thing about that is that you don't have to have 10 or 12 songs that have to be consistent together. You can write whatever comes to mind, whatever you're in the mood for. I like both things, though: the freedom of the EPs and the challenge of making a proper album."

Those shifts to moments of pure psych on Lust Lust Lust were a turning point in Wagner's getting back into the swing of playing live again. "For that record, I used the same set-up that I always use, but it's all how you work it. It's just the way that the guitars play, it comes out different every time, and I love that. It's what's so great about playing live. When you're playing loud, you never know what it's going to sound like. The way the room is, the way you stand — I love the way you just never know."

THE RAVEONETTES | Paradise, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | January 15 at 8 pm | $16.50 | 617.562.8800 or www.thedise.com

Crooked X: Interview (Boston Phoenix, 1/09/09)

Your New Favorite Teenage Rock N Roll High School Metal Music Machine

Before I climb onto the enormo tour bus of Oklahoma modern rockers Crooked X to conduct an interview under the watchful eye of their management, I meet up with them at a Dunkin' Donuts, and witness their drummer, Boomer, ask his road manager, with a straight face, if they have Egg McMuffins here. Now, I suppose you could be rolling your eyes here at Spinal Tap excess and common-man-out-of-touch-ness and whatnot, but keep in mind that Boomer (and the rest of Crooked X) are all 14 years old -- so pardon them for their child-like naivete. Because really, what did your freshman-year high school rock band sound like? And had you done tours with Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper before you were Bar Mitzvah-age? Like I said, management (and parents) were in the room when I talked to the band, so I couldn't get the skinny on any illicit tour activity -- but honestly, these kids seem way too focused on rocking the world and making it big, in that order, to really be distracted by the high life. They've been doing this since they were 8 and 9 years old (!) -- so while other kids their age are playing Rock Band, they're recording songs that get on to Rock Band. And rocking the nation one auditorium at a time.

DB: Tell me how the band started.

FORREST (vocals, guitar): Me and Boomer knew each other since we were in the womb. We've grown up together: we played on the same football team, and we hadn't won a game all year. Both of our dads coached the team, and they were talking and they were like "Well, my son plays guitar, does your son play drums? Let's get them together and let them have some fun." So we went back to Boomer's garage and learned some Metallica and AC/DC songs.

JOSH (bass): The whole thing slowly built, and we didn't know it while it was happening. We were just having fun.

JESSE (guitar, vocals): We weren't really thinking about, you know, getting songs on the radio, when we started. We were just getting together, on the weekend, you know-- I don't know, man, we just love it, we love playing together.

DB: What was your first show like?

FORREST: Our first show was my sister's birthday party, four or five years ago, I think it was fifth or sixth grade. After the show, we thought we did awesome, we thought we were the stuff. Then we saw the video and we were like "Oh, we have a lot of work to do."

JESSE (guitar, vocals): We've definitely grown together as a band -- we practice now four, five, six days a week, three to four hours a day. The longest we've ever taken off is 10 days in the last four years.

DB: Tell me about your first single, "Rock And Roll Dream": it sounds a lot different than your other, more metallic tunes.

FORREST: That song, that's kind of our singalong song. We have a lot of heavier stuff on our album, kind of Southern metal, but we needed some song that would give us some leverage, and "Rock and Roll Dream" is kind of the song that all the little kiddies will sing along to, so that's what that song's about.

BOOMER: We wrote that song needing, like, a hook, because every big band out there needs a hook in their song to at least make it on the radio, so I guess you could say that that's our radio song.

JOSH: We're hoping that song will get our other songs out there, you know?

DB: You guys are 14 years old and you do this band full-time: what was the decision like to take the band seriously at such a young age?

FORREST: It was tough because we had to sit down and say "Is this what we really want?". We knew that there was gonna be a lot of sacrifice, and there are a lot of things that we're not able to do that most kids do, like have a social life at school! But on the upside, we're doing things that other kids may never do, so we're growing up in a different way.

JESSE: We're very fortunate to be in our position.

BOOMER: When we were first starting out, my dad and Jesse's dad told us "Alright, if you guys want to get serious, do it now and we'll book you shows and stuff; if not, you can be a garage band and make it like that." And we all agreed that this is what we want to do, this is how we want to make our living.

Ron Asheton (Weekly Dig, 4/9/07)

In his seminal rockist bible Rock And The Pop Narcotic, Joe Carducci states “Rock is rock and roll made conscious of itself as small band music.” It is pretty unarguable that no band did more, at least in its infancy and early rise to power, to wave the freak flag of “small band music”, or “Rock”, as Ypsilanti, Michigan’s The Stooges. Carducci also posits that an artist like David Bowie represents the “Pop Narcotic”, or the way that the biz steals the soul of the band of rock cretins by introducing them to fame, money, and blow the way that, say, 2001 introduced the monolith to prehistoric man. Bowie-damage definitely altered the course of Stooges history forever, for better or worse (both, I’d say); regardless, the original Stooges are back to re-write history and restore order and all of that nonsense. I caught up with Stooges guitarist and co-founder Ron Asheton (“You don’t know him? Shame on you!” – a rockist) on the eve of their impending US tour supporting their new album The Weirdness.


Stooges, circa 2007, left to right: Ron Asheton, Iggy Pop, Scott Asheton

DIG: What was it like getting the band back together, playing again with Iggy and your brother?

RA: For this reunion, I was a little nervous meeting Iggy – I hadn’t seen him in, I don’t know, 25 years. It was like going to meet your ex-wife to talk about your son’s graduation. Or imprisonment. But once we talked and then had some food and wine, it was like all the years disappeared, and it was like “Remember the time we did this!” And that was cool – all the stuff we did together back then really made it easy for us to reconnect now.

DIG: Has it been difficult or odd to revisit a band that so perfectly encapsulated not only your youth, and the youth of so many fans, but essentially the youthful arrogant phase of rock’s third wave?

RA: No, it’s been easy, because now everyone’s caught up, it took the world all that time to catch up! I mean, you know, back then, we didn’t really sell a lot of records. We had some fans, but… well, here’s a good Boston story for you: we opened up [in 1969] for Ten Years After at the Boston Tea Party, and I’m going “Well, it’s an odd bill, but you know, it’s music, and people are hip”, right? So we go on, and we play, we do two songs back to back, and then there’s that little pause, and it was dead quiet. Well, except for three or four people applauding, and those people came from Philadelphia, and they were the president of our fan club and her friends! So we didn’t go over very big – but now, today, all the years have caught up, people are familiar with the songs, etc. It’s really the best of all times, now.

DIG: It’s interesting that you say that, because it seems that when you were at your “heyday”, it was more of a confrontational thing, I guess, but--

RA: Yeah, the world was stiffer then. The 60’s were interesting times because it was still that us-against-them attitude, the rockers against the establishment sort of thing. But still, I mean, at the time, the Funhouse record got dissed! Now, people say “Oh, it’s a classic record”, but back then, not too many people were saying good things.

When we started, we just flubbed along, doing the best we could. We kind of just lived our lives day-to-day back then, see what happens, and everyone hopes to be successful. But you know, in the back of our minds, we knew, you know, that we weren’t Linda Rondstadt. We weren’t really going to score any commercial success. But at the same time, in the beginning, when we started, labels were just signing anyone, everybody got a shot. It seemed pretty easy to get somebody to listen to you and wind up with something.

And then somehow, it became more of a business, in the Raw Power era – Iggy’s management, they had Bowie, they had Mott The Hoople, and that was their little trip, that was Iggy’s deal. Iggy never treated us like we were employees, but we all, James Williamson also, were hired employees of Iggy’s management to be Iggy’s band, and I was like “Wait a minute, that’s business”. [Raw Power] was actually his first solo album. But now, everything’s so bizzed out, with manufactured boy bands, girl bands. There’s just so much business now.

DIG: To me, The Stooges represents, so perfectly, the ideal of a rock band as a democratic populist entity, so of course the rock and roll machine had to come in and pervert it and destroy it. Raw Power is a pretty undeniable rock album – but at the same time, it almost represents a certain fall from innocence.

RA: That’s a good way to put it – I like the record, but seeing the slow agonizing death of the band, being dumped by management, going through managers who just took our money, living on $15 a day, etc. There was no pot of gold, no pay day on Friday. I’ll go back and listen to the album, I like the song “Search and Destroy”, but it’s very bittersweet.

DIG: It seems like for most Stooges fans, you are either a Funhouse fan, or a Raw Power fan; this reunion, for obvious reasons, is for Funhouse fans. Is this reunion a kind of re-conceptualization of The Stooges as being all about the first two albums, the pre-Williamson period, kind of making *that* the definitive Stooges?

RA: This is the *good* Stooges, the *fun* Stooges.

Turbonegro: Vagabonds of the Western World (Boston Soundcheck, October 2003)

To anyone who heard it upon its stateside release in late 1998, 'Apocalypse Dudes' by Oslo, Norway's Turbonegro was clearly nothing if not the greatest rock album of the 90's a searing combination of glam-catchy choruses, punktastic full-throttle motion, Frehley-esque lead guitar work and an over-all shimmery studio sheen that did it's best to hide the incredibly sleazy, dark, and quizzically homoerotic lyrical subject matter in a package that the band labeled 'deathpunk'. It was strange, it was new, it was bold, and when the album was done you needed to hear it again. And again. And again...

Too bad, then, that the band was already broken up, and would never tour or record again. Lead singer and chief mojo rising Hank Von Helvete went MIA, amidst reports of insane asylums, drug addiction, and paranoia. A dark period set in for the rock world as Turbonegro's majestic work was soon forgotten as it became covered by the sands of time...

...Except that the rock world would not let 'Dudes' die. As word of mouth spread, the band's popularity, even posthumously, soared. And now, over 4 years later, in what can only be seen as a wave of the wand of the grand architect herself, Hank has re-emerged, Turbonegro has re-convened, and with their new album out now ('Scandinavian Leather', on Epitaph) and their last two masterworks re-issued, finally the world can witness the resurrection of this incredible rock force.

I caught up with Hank by phone at his lair in Norway...



BSC: It's been a long time since 'Apocalypse Dudes' and in the meantime, especially in America it's amazing the kind of cult following you guys have amassed. What are your thoughts on that?

HVH: Well, I'm amazed, actually. I never expected that. And of course it's cool to have a following and it's quite unique. This hasn't happened in at least 20 years, a band getting a following like that. And I just hope it will last for a while so we can come back and play more shows. I just hope we can outgrow the cult stage, to have a cult following is not necessarily a good thing, it would be cool if we could be a bit bigger than that.

BSC: Yeah, I saw you guys at the show in Hartford, CT., and one thing I was struck by was how you, on the one hand gave the audience what they wanted in a rock sense, but also were very confrontational.

HVH: Yeah, well, it's kind of confrontational, but in a friendly way. The audience has this masochistic attitude towards us - they want to be intimidated but in a safe, secure way. They trust us a lot. I think it's like making love to a virgin that really loves you a lot. She's giving up all control because it's rough to do it. It hurts a bit, but it's a good hurt. It's kind of vulgar, the stuff we're doing. And it's this huge sleazefest, but it turns out to be very pure and clean, so I guess the way we're presenting the sleaze is kind of non-oppressive.

BSC: Yeah, it was a real trip for me to see a large crowd of really normal, straight American guys with their fists in the air chanting 'I Got Erection'.

HVH: Yeah, well, it's cool to see that people can let loose and go with the flow, even for a second, and no one has to feel intimidated. I think it's the security, the safeness, the trustworthiness that we present together with the sleaze. We manage to guide them through their own dirty sexual landscape very safely, with us it's all safe, everyone will come.

BSC: How much of what you guys do is serious?

HVH: It's all serious, everything. I have this motto that if you don't see the joke in seriousness, and if you don't see the seriousness in the joke, you haven't understood anything. And that's the like the motto, the mantra we work under. So, it's not irony and sarcasm, its labeling darkness. And it's omnipotent, the things we're labeling, everybody's had the sentiments, we're just putting names to them. People are uniting themselves in the stuff we sing about.

BSC: What's 'deathpunk' all about?

HVH: We grew up with metal, heavy metal, and punk. We were consumers of the 70s and 80s rock culture that was filled with lots of glam and also the punk scene and the heavy metal scene so we were digging bands like Kiss and Sex Pistols when we were children and when we became older it was bands like Black Flag and Dead Kennedys on the one hand, and Motley Crue and W.A.S.P. on the other. When we started to play in bands ourselves, it was punk bands and hardcore bands. After a while, we realized that we had forgotten the metal thing from our childhood, so we tried to play punk with heavy metal-sounding guitars, so in the beginning we called it 'metal-punk', but that became like a really stupid label for it. So we have that Slayer aspect in it too, lots of industrial and black and death-metal sounds we mix that together in our music, and we called it 'deathpunk', because it became quite unique, there's nothing like it, it's not punk, it's not metal, it's not glam, but at the same time it's all of them, it's a very including kind of rock. We have lots of references to our idols, and we actually manage to play a bit better than our idols too. But now we have been thinking of renaming 'deathpunk' to try to call it 'rainbow rock', because that will be like a more positive name. You know, 'punk' has a lot of aggression in it, and 'death' is very dark-sounding. If we rename it 'rainbow rock', it will be more positive.

BSC: In a lot of your songs you have very dark or vulgar topics but the music is so catchy and memorable; there have been times where I've been listening to songs like 'Rendezvous With Anus' from 'Apocalypse Dudes' on my walkman on the bus and I have to fight the urge to sing along out loud! What do you think of this dichotomy between dark or vulgar subject matter and the accessibility of your music?

HVH: I think you're correct, it is dark, the stuff we're singing about is dark, but it's not negative, and the stories we're telling always have a happy ending. David Lynch has the same philosophy: describe darkness, label madness, but always make sure to have a happy ending. The suns always sets in the pacific, you know?

BSC: You guys broke up in '98, and were essentially not a band for four years; what brought about the res-erection?

HVH: I think that to look at Turbonegro's history, and to let it all end with 'Apocalypse Dudes' and the band breaking up is not a very interesting story to tell. If I would live to become 50 and see that that was the end of Turbonegro, I would feel an unfulfillment. I think we're just fulfilling our destinies here, and it was always lying in the cards that if I survived my drug addiction, we would make another album. And I think everybody in the band was just waiting for that to happen.

BSC: Okay, the album is called 'Scandinavian Leather', what does it mean to you guys to be Scandinavian? What about Turbonegro could only happen in Norway, what's different with what you do than what an American band would, because you guys are definitely a Norwegian band, a Scandinavian band!

HVH: Well, I guess some parts of the American consumer culture have been ignored in America the last 20 years, but kept alive in countries like Norway, a society that is very Americanized in a way, and some things that have been embarrassing for Americans have been kept alive here, and looked upon with respect, and when we come back to America with a band that is so glamorous, and actually very Americanized, we're hitting a nerve with the Americans, and we're bringing back something to the Americans that they have forgotten, or tried to forget. I think when Americans listen to us they become a bit proud of belonging to a rock nation, because America is in fact a rock nation, and the best rock has come from America, I think. I prefer American rock and American punk to British rock and British punk, and we play our rock in the Scandinavian/American style. I see Americans, people in the American rock scene, becoming proud of their own icons.

BSC: Interesting, especially because a lot of the most recent American rock revival, if you want to call it that, seems to have gotten its cues from what was happening in Scandinavia a few years before, like it had to be handed back to America.

HVH: Yeah, we're handing it back. I think it's good that the American rock has been interpreted from my people from the outside. We've been standing on the outside looking in, while the American rock people have been standing on the inside looking out for something better, but there was nothing better out there. American rock is the best. We are taking American rock culture seriously, and we think it's an excellent culture, and it's an excellent cultural phenomenon and it's one of the best things in the modern western world, I think, in itself.

BSC: You guys wear your musical influences on your sleeve, which is pretty bold; a lot of bands seem to try to see what they can get away with. What's the line between homage and rip-off for you guys?

HVH: You know, a writer for The Independent, this British daily, told us he thought we were unique because we're a band with lots of references without being a retro band, and we were always, in our references, paying tribute to our heroes, and we ended up being better, playing better than our heroes, and that was a compliment that I cherish. Coming from him, that was really cool. I think that we're not looking back with our references, we're actually aiming forward. We're kind of distilling the good stuff, we're not bringing anything back to the past, we're taking stuff from the past and conserving it for the future.

BSC: Yeah, I can see that; the music on 'Scandinavian Leather' is almost a rock history lesson, cramming the best hard rock moments of the last 30 years into one album. I'm also impressed with some of the musical territory you guys go into on this record on a lot of songs a real punk or metal-sounding song will veer into more sensitive territory, and for me this shows off that you guys have a real breadth of musical knowledge, that you're all real music fans.

HVH: I think what you're saying now is right on. I have no other comment than 'Yes, you're right'. That's exactly! you said it so good I don't want to say it in any other way. Right on! That's what we're trying to do. It's not only a tribute to our heroes and a tribute to the past, it's a tribute to rock as a culture - a refined culture, a beautiful part of our culture. We should be proud to belong to the western world.

BSC: Is that what you think that rock is really all about, when you boil it all down? What's this whole rock thing getting at?

HVH: Yeah, I think that's what rock is all about, because especially here in Scandinavia, in the rock scene, a lot of artists are not actually paying enough respect to what they're doing! They say stuff in interviews like 'Uhh, well, yeah, I play in a rock band but what I really want to do is write a novel.' They use rock as a springboard to making a career in other cultures, like other parts of fine culture. And they're using rock as a kind of intellectual and social slumming. They say like 'Yeah, I'm really into kitsch and irony and rock, and I'm like rebelling against my fine cultural parents by rocking in the weekends, but really I'm a social anthropologist.' And I think that's so disrespectful to a very cool culture, you know? Rock is cool in and of itself! And not only is it cool, it's a fine culture, it's refined and it's good, and it is culture!

We like music, we like that stuff, we dig everything in that culture! That's a culture we belong to! if we were living in the 18th century, we would probably be Mozart freaks or baroque freaks, and that would be our culture there. But rock is not some trashy kitschy irony trip for upper class kids to do between their ballet and opera careers. Rock is something you need to do full time!

BSC: What do you think rock culture represents, then? What's its purpose?

HVH: Well, it's a contemporary interpretation of our society, you know? It's a result of the commonwealth countries freeing themselves, of the slaves freeing themselves, and working class kids educating themselves, and the result of an open society consisting of all the cultures of the world gathered in one society.

BSC: You were talking earlier about 'rainbow rock', and how you guys are trying to get away from the whole 'deathpunk' label, which to me makes sense when you compare the somewhat nihilistic 'Apocalypse Dudes' to 'Scandinavian Leather', which in tone is much more of a rock celebration!

HVH: It is a celebration and it's a celebration of the genre we're playing that allows a band to disappear for four years and come back even more welcome. Not many genres of show business allow you to do that, you know? It's a celebration that I survived drug addiction, it's a celebration that we could come back together again, you know, it's a celebration of our fans, that they were so loyal and that they really believed in us, and it's a kick in the ass to the ones who were dissing us all the time, who were laughing when we broke up, who were celebrating in '98 that we broke up. We're celebrating now!