BLURTING WITH… Rick Miller of Southern Culture On The Skids
Nov 24, 2010
Too much fun for just one fan: with their self-produced, self-released new album, the Tarheel twangers are still preachin' the blue-collar gospel.
BY FRED MILLS
There's no point in beating around the book of journalistic objectivity: Southern Culture On The Skids can do pretty much no wrong in my book. But I back up that bias with nearly a quarter-century of firsthand experience, having seen the Chapel Hill band perform since the days of their earliest lineup and their earliest shows, shared more than a few bottles of whiskey with ‘em and even wound up onstage as a guest musician (term used loosely...) on a number of occasions.
Bias aside, though, I'm happy to report that their brand-new album The Kudzu Ranch (released on their own Kudzu label) has a little something to offer to everyone who calls him- or herself a music fan, serving up as it does boatloads of backporch twang, discombobulated garage/psych/surf licks, and deepfried-in-Dixie blue-collar anthems. From hard-chooglin' boogie ("Bone Dry Dirt") and kick-up-yer-heels dance moves ("Highlife"); to moody, jazz-tinged noir ("Montague's Mystery Theme") and ear-twisting instrumental rock ("Slinky Springs Milt"); to deftly-chosen covers, including a riotous take on Neil Young's "Are You Ready For the Country" and a killer mashup of Nirvana's "Come As You Are" and Pink Floyd's "Lucifer Sam"; this note's for you, bubba (and bubbette). Folks who order the rec direct from the band at the official website also get to nab a free download featuring alternate versions and demos of some of the album tracks.
Southern Culture On The Skids - guitarist Rick Miller, bassist Mary Huff and drummer Dave Hartman, plus recent recruit Tim Barnes on second guitar - is a North Carolina institution, Tarheel rock ‘n' roll ambassadors determined to preach the gospel as espoused in that none-too-subtle, ever-evocative moniker. Put another way, their goddam reputation precedes them, and folks coming out to a SCOTS show aren't there because they want to furrow their brows and ponder the deep metaphysics of life itself (well, unless you're talking some esoteric Duane Eddy, Dick Dale or Tony Joe White musical reference; then you're welcome to go deep). No, they're there to shake their asses, and maybe toss a few chunks of fried chicken back and forth like crispy brown frisbees. Meanwhile, the band has a whale of a good time preaching that aforementioned gospel, something I was reminded of once again this past summer when I caught ‘em at an outdoor street festival, revving up and raving up like nobody's business and generally inciting the huge crowd to simply let down its collective hair. As Miller remarked to me in an interview we conducted a few weeks after the concert, "Yeah, that was a good show, had a really good time. I got nothing to prove anymore - I don't care if there's a hit on the new record! I just want to have fun."
"Fun," in fact, has been the operative term for SCOTS records and shows for as long as I can remember. They resume their fall tour right after Thanksgiving with dates extending into mid-December, so don't miss ‘em if they head your way.
As the interview got underway, Miller and I started off comparing notes on, of all things, our dogs - we both have border collies - and our young sons, each of whom are showing interest in playing music. I mention to Miller that I'm thinking about paying for guitar lessons for my son since to date he hasn't had sufficient patience on the instrument to let Daddy show him some of the rudiments...
RICK MILLER: Well, you know, lessons were the opposite for me. You never can tell. I remember I had one lesson I went to, and it was some hippies trying to teach me "Greensleeves" when all I wanted was "Sunshine of Your Love," ya know? So yeah, the kid's gotta like it. [laughs] My son Jack is four now, and he's started a band with Mary and I. He named it, and it's called The Surf Creatures. He's already come up with some little song things, like - "Saturday, Sunday, no school Fun Day/ Saturday, Sunday, stay at home Play Day..."
Kids are so funny, man. We should do a kid's record and let him write the songs.
BLURT: You should. A lot of musicians in recent years have decided it's cool to do a kids record and not worry too much about taking a little holiday from their main thing.
Yeah, I don't worry too much about being taken seriously. [laughs] That is not an obstacle for me! And what I'd really love to do is make a record that both the kids and their parents could listen to. There's a lot of really bad, inane stuff out there. But then, the Dan Zanes things are really cool; I love his sound. So if you just get something that sounded good and had some grooves and beats and stuff, and then just throw a kids flavor on it, I think it could be a lot of fun.
My son's favorite band is The Beatles, and what led him to them when he was barely a year old was Raffi, who had a version of "Yellow Submarine" on one of his records. Raffi was his gateway drug.
Well, I gotta say, I would never have discovered Eddie Cochran had it not been for coming across that Blue Cheer album, Vincebus Eruptum, down at the Roses five-and-dime one afternoon when I was about 10. I took it home and - whoah. Bought it with my lawn-mowing money. That was where I got my first guitar, too. Hanging down over the record bin.
We had the same thing in my home down. The local dime store with a small bin of records over in the corner of the room. Somehow they started getting in stuff like Disraeli Gears and the first Steppenwolf album.
So tell me a little about this new album and your new label you've launched. Kind of coming full circle since you essentially self-released your first EP and LP all those years ago. You've most recently been on Yep Roc.
Well, we've got Red Eye [handling] the retail stuff for Kudzu Ranch. The Yep Roc deal was record by record. I think that since we had the production facilities already - and this really started back with the Geffen deal. We've always done our own thing and recorded our own thing pretty much, but with Geffen we took the advance money and went out and bought and eight-track half-inch Tascam. The first song we ever recorded, "Red Beans and Reverb," it got in a movie called Flirting With Disaster. We literally did that song in an old garage, in this gas station we used to practice in and where I lived in for a long time. We thought man, this is kinda the way to go. And we've always kind of done it ourselves, managed ourselves, booked ourselves; it was only when it got to where we couldn't do it that we actually had the cachet to get someone to work with us. We've been with Billions [booking agency] ever since.
But then the whole thing became us building the studio when I got the money, and then I found a nice place out in the country to put it, and once we had all the means of production, we really didn't need any advance money. And when we didn't need advance money, we started questioning whether we really needed a label. Especially with all these record stores folding, not being able to get any national press and all that. We just thought we should try doing it ourselves when it came time to do the new record. The numbers just keep going down and down and down, so if you can sell instead of 25,000 records and making pennies on a dollar, if you could sell five to ten thousand records and make five bucks a record, well, you're making the same amount of money or more, and that's really the bottom line for us.
I came across an interview you and I did back in 1995 and some of the things you're saying now are echoes of some of the things you said then, about having the means of your own production. A lot of what we talked about in that earlier interview, bands are discovering now, in 2010 - but you've already been around that track and have already discovered the logic to being totally independent. Is that a pretty fair statement?
Oh yeah. I don't see any change in our outlook since the inception of the band, really. We've always been DIY as much as we could.
And in that interview you also pointed out how touring was your main source of income - that at that point, you hadn't had to work a day job in at least four years, either. Does that still hold true?
Yeah, sure. And now, what we're hoping, with our own label, is that we will start to see a bigger cut of merchandise and record sales. Because being on a record label - even on a big one like Geffen, you just could not depend on that money. You wouldn't get it for months, maybe not even for years because of accounting practices. I also remember how Geffen would take us off tour to go do these radio shows; some radio guy says, "Oh, I might play ‘Camel Walk'..." or something. So they'd fly us from Minnesota to Texas, while we'd have to pay our roadie guy to drive the gear out to Seattle where we'd hook up with him again - but we'd miss all our shows on the way. So we'd say, okay, we'll do this radio show, but if you take us off tour you're gonna have to reimburse us for the money we lose. Then I get a call from our A&R guy saying, "Oh, the radio people are saying you guys are difficult to work with, you don't ‘want it,' blah blah blah..." I said, "What I don't want is to go home and have to work at Kinko's, which I'm gonna do if this keeps up!" [laughs] You know what I mean.
A lot of band bought into - and some still do - the whole major label plantation system. It was so ingrained because nobody ever told them there were other ways to do things. It's taken this long, with the collapse of record sales, to demonstrate just that to a lot of people. But there have always been a few along the way like you that understood what was going on. Recently Amanda Palmer, another person who understands, told us in an interview that with the blockbuster system crumbling, music is moving to a working-class economy, that bands deserve to earn an honest living but they can't expect to earn at superstar levels. That's good advice.
Well, that was always my plan and our plan. We never wanted - we had very realistic goals. We had a business plan as much as a plan on the music and the schtick and all that stuff. We talked about things and we knew what we needed to do to quit our day jobs and pursue the music thing. We knew it would be touring, and maybe it would be some record sales. But yeah, that's exactly right. It's always been that way for us.
Is touring still fun? You are on the road a lot. Does it ever get to be a grind?
Well, it gets to be tough when you finally have a kid, and your wife is working, it's difficult. The first two years we had Jack, they just packed up and went with us; the first two years of his life was in the van! But now that he's older, it's harder. I mean, I like playing! And I think all bands that last, they enjoy playing. So no, I don't have a problem with touring. I mean, traveling gets old; airlines, the standard gripes. But hey, what are you gonna do, you know?
Have you ever entertained the idea of stopping performing and just doing production work in the studio?
I did that for a little while when Jack was born and [wife] Sara wasn't working. We needed it then; I had to work all the time. But I was lucky because I got to work with bands I enjoyed and that I liked. They would come to me. And it's still that way. Like, I'm going to be working with Mad Tea Party [from Asheville], I love those guys. And I just got done with a great band from Charlotte called the Aqualads, just finished their record. And then Dexter Romweber's manager just called me and I might be working with him this winter; he's always a favorite of mine. So I've got projects lined up. I had kind of quit doing the studio thing for a little while because I had to get things done with the band, but now I've opened things up again. And I love it - go out on the road for a few months, then come home and go into the studio in January and February when it's good to be inside. It gives me ideas too.
Tell me about Tim Barnes, your guitarist. How did he get involved with the band?
We've known Tim for a long time. He played in mostly bluegrass bands, but he started doing some roadie work for us back when Mojo Box came out. We developed a working relationship with him over three or four years, and then when he was roadieing for us on Countrypolitan Favorites, which had banjo on a couple of things, we'd get him up to do some banjo parts. After that record he said, "Well, let me play some guitar." And while we're a three piece, I thought, okay, let's do it, we'll try it. And now I kind of like it because it adds a bigger sound.
You have brought in a fourth member from time to time...
That's right, we had Michael Kelsh, then Crispy [Chris Bess, aka "Cousin Crispy"] played keyboards with us. And we started out as a four piece. It's kind of nice live at least, because as a three-piece, you can go wherever you want to go musically, but if you have a bad night everyone knows it. It's nice having a second guitar in there...
... and then if you have a bad night, you can blame Tim!
That's exactly right! You hit a clunker and just look over at him. "What did I do?"
On to the making of the new record: Any backstory we need to know?
Mmmm, no, not really. We did that covers record [Countrypolitan Favorites, 2007] when Jack was born. I thought that would be an easy thing to tread a little water, but that turned out to be quite the deal. I realized that to do a cover your own way is like basically rewriting the song, so that took us a lot longer than I expected and kind of backed us up on starting on our original material. We got started about two years ago, just kind of fleshed it out in between touring, and it gave us the chance to play the songs live. So probably half the songs we've been playing now for maybe six months or so. Also, it was nice having our own studio because we could come in between gigs and hit it a couple of times; the songs evolved over time, playing them live, and they got better.
So it all got recorded over a couple of years at the Kudzu Ranch. I could not find any unifying theme on the songs, so we just ended up calling it the Kudzu Ranch, where it was recorded. And a lot of the songs were about the time I spent in Mebane [NC, near Chapel Hill and Durham], where I was living in the country.
Speaking of subject matter, you've always had intriguing titles for your instrumentals - for example on this one, "Slinky Spring Milt"? Who or what does that refer to?
Oh, well, the studio is kind of in a bottom area, and right around February or March when you feel the sap starting to rise, you hear all these damn peepers over there. We were working on that song one night, and I walked out and I heard all those mating frogs. When we first started it had kind of a lilt to it, the tune did, and I thought, "Wow, man, ‘milt,' ‘slinky-springed milt,' that's the title..." Oh, it was so loud over there. And I've always been fascinated by nature in general. I watch a lot of Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
"Jack's Tune": when I first saw the title of that instrumental, I was thinking, "Oh, must be an old jazz cover or something..." But I'm guessing you wrote that for your son Jack.
Yeah, it was. Something I was working on when he was small. And it's nothing that's uptempo or jumping around and the same energy levels he has! It almost has a melancholy feel to it, and I think our kids can bring that out in you.
Have you road-tested the "Come As You Are"/"Lucifer Sam" Nirvana-Pink Floyd instrumental medley? And if so, at what point do the flickers of recognition start to come over the faces in the audience? Because it unfolds kind of subtly, particularly with the Nirvana part being the first half of the song, and that's not something you'd expect from SCOTS. And then gradually becomes more obvious as you segue into Floyd.
Yeah, we have played it live. Sometimes it goes right over their heads, but there will always be three or four faces that light up at the Nirvana song. But then we lose those folks with the Pink Floyd part! [laughs] When we were working on it, we did a tour with Los Straitjackets last year, and it sorta came from that. They wanted to do a single of Nirvana covers, so we started listening to some songs by Nirvana, trying to figure out what we wanted to do. I was listening to "Come As You Are," and at the same time, because I always have a copy of the first Pink Floyd record on hand, I was listening to Nirvana and said to my self, "God, that is like the same riff. Just one or two notes different." So that's how it happened. It's amazing when you start dissecting songs how it can be just a note or a beat or an inflection. It was really fun, just one of those musical things.
That makes me think of something: your band started out long before the time when labels had banks of lawyers to scrutinize a song before its release in order to vet any potential copyright violations - sampling, and whatnot. And you have always very liberally quoted from other songs, particularly in instrumentals. Has anyone ever sicced lawyers on you for something you've put out?
Nah, we don't make enough money. There's not enough blood in the water for the sharks to start circling! But who knows, if something blew up? I mean, "It's The Music That Makes Me' [on The Kudzu Ranch], that's right out of a T. Rex song.
On the new album Mary has some good songs. "High Life," for example, when you did it this summer - that was a real crowd pleaser.
I wanted to get her some originals because she had just been doing covers pretty much - I was telling her, you gotta sing more and sing some originals. So we worked quite hard at getting her comfortable with the lyrics and the songs, and I think the three songs she does on the record are really good. And there are different versions of "High Life" and "Bad Boys" that she does too, and they are available as a free download when folks buy the record.
Folks will ask me, "How do you choose which versions are going to go on the record?" Sometimes we'll play a version that's not like the one on the record, so I thought it would be nice to include some of that stuff so people could see what we go through [in developing] the songs. Like, for "Bad Boys," we literally had a hard rocking one, and then we had the garage rock on that wound up on the record, and we even had a rockabilly version. It wasn't just a demo - we tracked the whole song and mixed it. Then in the end, Mary picked the one she liked best. We did the same thing with "High Life": we did an acoustic version then an electric version.
Have you ever considered doing a box set or rarities collection with a lot of unreleased stuff like that? I know you're pretty prolific. And I've got tons of cassettes of demos you gave me back in the early days as well.
Well, I think we're working towards that. I think the next thing we want to do is pool a lot of that stuff. Like a lot of bands that have been around as long as us, we're digging up all kinds of stuff. And not only that, after five, seven, ten years, the rights to a lot of your stuff reverts back to the band. That has happened now with the Geffen stuff, it's happened with the TVT stuff. So we can rerecord any of that, or actually use some of the versions that were on there. So I think we are going to be doing something like that in the future. We can pull from stuff way back in the day, cassette copies too - there are so many old cassettes of us.
With the Internet, and people being able to download things so easily, I think for fans of the band they'd dig it.
And you've recently remastered Too Much Pork for Just One Fork, right? A lot of those songs you still play live. Why did it take so long to revisit that album? [Note: TMPFJOF was the band's second full-length, originally released by Chapel Hill label Moist in 1991.]
Well, with that, we've had the rights for years. We bought them when Moist went out of business back in the mid ‘90s. But we just never - you're always looking to the next thing, you know? It never occurred to me to spend much time looking backwards until recently. But I think just the way the music business has gone, the Internet... and also getting the rights back to other things, you do start thinking about reissuing them. So basically, that's what we did.
We remastered it down in Charlotte, Dave Harris and I [at Studio B]. That was [recorded] back in the early days of CDs and it did not sound that good! [laughs]
I listened to it the other day along with the new album and was thinking "minimalist SCOTS." It's a favorite of mine, but wow, what a difference in sound from then to now.
Yeah, and we've gotten a little bit better since then, too! [laughs] I'll tell you, though, I love that minimalist sound. And one thing about getting into your back catalog, in starting to listen to that stuff, I miss that kind of minimalist aesthetic. I think our next record will be more along those lines, you know? We'll see.
Pork also was a kind of visual document of the band at that point in time as well. The photos in the booklet, taken by D. Kent Thompson, are both candid and, with the live shots, full of action. In my collection I have one of his classic images from that same period, and it depicts you in the eye of the storm, with girls all over the stage and dancing frenziedly, one of them with her eyes squeezed shut and in mid-leap... those were good times. [Note: see photo at the top of this page.]
Oh, you're right. Those shows were a ton of fun. My favorite photo shows this guy wearing a headband, he would always be at the shows, with his arms outstretched like he was bowing before me. I wonder if kids still have that much fun at shows nowadays?
This also brings up the matter of your self-titled first LP, the vinyl only album, and your 4-song Voodoo Beach Party debut EP on 7-inch vinyl. Can we expect those to be reissued? Somebody bootlegged the LP and the EP together onto a single disc back in the late ‘90s - did you know that? I always thought that was interesting that someone that was crazy enough about SCOTS to approach that project. Both records are definitely fan favorites.
No, I didn't know that! Yeah, I've seen both of them going for quite a bit of money. I've still got some from the first batch, maybe about 500 that I silk-screened myself. The cover drawing was done by Matt Neal, Bill Neal's son, who was seven at the time. So yeah, we're gonna put it out! I've got a virgin copy of [the album] and I've already talked to Dave Harris about this, we're going to go down [to Charlotte], he has a turntable, and we're going to remaster that LP along with Voodoo Beach Party.
With bands being able to handle their marketing directly to their fanbase these days, it's gotten a lot easier and makes sense monetarily to do it. Irmin Schmidt from Can once told me, in a discussion about the band remastering and reissuing their back catalog on their own label, how this, their music, was essentially their life insurance policies that they can pass along to their children and grandchildren. And I thought that was really astute advice. So many artists fail to recognize how their music is their creative legacy, but in a very real sense, it should also be their next egg.
And so many people don't take care of their back catalog. For example, someone else winds up owning it. Or it gets lost in the process of so many record labels going out of business. You have to take an active interest in your band to make it happen. Because record labels, my God - the master tapes to our Geffen stuff were still sitting over there at Reflection Studio in Charlotte. Who knows where things go, you know? You have to actively pursue your back catalog, keep tabs on it, and you're right - it's like an insurance policy. Because if you have a legacy or you continue to be a band of some sort, people will be interested.
What do you think your legacy will be, ultimately, Rick?
Oh, I don't know... [laughs]
One question I like to ask musicians: If someone walks into a graveyard 20, 50 years from now and sees a tombstone with the words "Here lies Southern Culture On The Skids..." what would the rest of the epitaph read?
[answering without hesitation] "No chicken, no show."
Ah, I understand that the Europeans took that notation on your tour rider quite literally. I think you told me once how you were over there once and they didn't quite "get" the whole Kentucky Fried deal and instead brought you these baked birds on platters.
Oh, man! It was in Norway, and they had baked us several chickens. And in Norway the chickens can't live there because it's too cold, so it was like having cigarettes in prison. [laughs] The crowd started ripping the chickens apart, and I think I stuck one of them - because they weren't real big - on the headstock of my guitar. So there I am with a whole chicken on my headstock and the cook was literally screaming, coming out trying to choke me onstage.
Sometimes we don't do it, sometimes we do, really depends on the crowd. With festivals we usually do stuff like [tossing fried chicken into the audience] because it's always fun for the audience.
Here's a quote from 1995 - we were talking about your shows, some of the songs and some of the humor that can go into them and the general entertainment factor you aim for. You said, "If you get people on your side early, they'll go anywhere with you."
And that's true!
But why do so many bands not understand that? You'll see them come out and dick around for 15 minutes. But if you get people's attention first - it's like when a teacher goes into the classroom, she has to get their attention first or they're not going to learn anything.
Well, I don't think they're professionals. Especially some of what you'd call the more "indie bands." Maybe they lack confidence. Sometimes I think they've got an issue with entertaining. Some bands think that their non-professional attitude is a commentary. But it's a schtick, just like anything else, and to me, they're wrong. And you're right. It kinda goes back to the whole Pied Piper thing. If you look like you're enjoying yourself, they will enjoy themselves.
Because that is the secret: to enjoy what you do. I don't care WHAT you do; if you enjoy it, the vibe you give off will pull people in. It's like a magnet. And you can't continue to do it without getting something back, too. You can't be a slave to the audience either. And we keep making our own original music and doing our own thing. But like I say, when you play live to a room full of people, c'mon - it's rock ‘n' roll, and people need to have fun. It's good therapy. For them, and for me.
Is being in the band your therapy, Rick?
Yeah! I love it! But you know, even before I was in the band, I was an art major and I always liked making things. I think that's why I was drawn to the production end of things too. It's fun being in the studio, whether you're painting or writing or... I just enjoy that time.
[PHOTO CREDIT: D. Kent Thompson; image taken at the Milestone Club, Charlotte, NC, in May 1991. "For Editorial Use Only" - amen to that, brother Kent. I dedicate this SCOTS piece to you.]
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