Grifters

rifters' singer/guitarist Scott Taylor isn't feeling too good. Three-days ago the Grifters flew into Sydney as the bottom rung on the Jeff Buckley/Dambuilders tour, promptly transforming his persistent winter cold into a summer cold. Next to him, bassist Tripp Lamkins nurses a beer while telling me about the flower shop van the band used to tour America in. "It was small and bright yellow," he says in his faint Memphis drawl, " but it carried us very far."

While much has been made of the Grifters' recent move to Sub Pop, it seems the band have yet to experience the perks of going (semi) major. The new record, Ain't My Lookout has only been out for a couple of weeks, and so far everything is business as usual for the group - shows in small clubs, hopeful opening slots and beer. Plenty of beer. When the band's other singer/guitarist, the bespectacled, austere Dave Shouse, takes himself to task for drinking so soon after waking up, Taylor sums up the situation for me: "That's life," he says, "When you finally wake up, you're drunk."

The Grifters' arrival in Australia might have been a low-key affair, but the band's presence on our fair shores hardly went unnoticed. They performed a well-attended lunch-hour acoustic set at Sydney's Red Eye Records and managed to find time for their own headlining gig at the Annandale Hotel, one of the city's few stalwart rock-pubs.

Formed in Memphis in 1989, the Grifters are usually classified as "low-fi" - a term first coined to describe talented artists who made the most out of cheap equipment, but which now seems to cover a vast array of un-related musical styles. While Grifters' records are rough around the edges, the "low-fi" tag is somewhat misleading. There is certainly nothing reticent about the band's sound. Whether ripping through bluesy howlers or trotting out their sun-baked version of post-punk prog-rock, the music always seems to sound expansive and intimate at the same time. The riffs could echo in stadiums, but the songs are structurally designed to be continually reworked and re-invented in performance.

According to the band, the reason for this lies in the fact that the Grifters are four disparate personalities who have interlocking talents. They might look like a bunch of frat brothers who decided to whip up a band for the hell of it, but the truth is they formed on a semi-professional basis and gradually became friends over time. When you speak to them, the individual members openly acknowledge how much they rely upon one another to unlock the potential of their own work.

This interview was organised so hastily that I didn't get my hands on a copy of Ain't My Lookout until a few hours before I spoke to the band. This is probably a good thing. If I'd had a chance to listen to the CD at length, this interview would've been much longer. Even dullards can tell something shifted during the recording of Ain't My Lookout. There are soaring moments, but many fans have voiced disappointment with the record's glossy pop feel.

Is it a sell-out? According to the Grifters, the move to Sub Pop has led to more creative control over their work. After seven years of incessant touring and hasty recording, the band spent three weeks learning to use the facilities at Easely Studios, and with the assistance of friends Davis McCain and Doug Easely, tailored the studio to suit their needs.

The cred police can decide whether Ain't My Lookout is a meretricious pop move or merely the sound of a band catching it's breath. All I know is that in an era in which music as something you listen to (as opposed to watch, dissect or ritualise) is under threat, it's easier to sleep knowing the Grifters are out there.

Grifters

Wednesday, Feb 22 1996

Present:

Tripp Lamkins (the sensible, funny one): Bass

Dave Shouse (The mature, talented one): Guitar/Vocals

Scott Taylor (the goofy, earnest one): Guitar/Vocals

Stan Gallimore (the quiet, crazy one): Drums

Over the jet lag yet?

Tripp: Oh yeah. We keep strange sleep hours anyway.

So, are you guys big Jim Thompson fans?

Tripp: Yup. But nobody had read the book before we named the band. As soon as we decided to name the band I went out read it the next day.

Dave: We didn't have the book - we had After Dark My Sweet or The Killer Inside Me...

Tripp: Yeah, and on the sleeve were "other books written" by Jim Thompson. We wrote down all those books as potential names for the band.

I wanted to ask about recording. On Crappin' You Negative you had a song where you recorded the drums in an underground car park. . .

Tripp: Yeah, on Black Fuel Incinerator we recorded the rhythm section in a parking garage. We thought it would be kind of cool to have "actual" natural reverb. We set a couple mikes up close to the drums, and one of the mikes way at the other end of the garage. But really, once it all got done it just sounded like we used reverb on it anyway.

Did you do anything like that on the new record? Any clever new tricks?

Tripp: Nothing involving on-site recording or anything.

Nothing bizarre, unusual or noteworthy?

Tripp: Wait a minute... On the first song, "Covered in Flies," there was a guitar solo on there that was taken from Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles. It went through the whole process. Well, it didn't make it on the promo-CD, but it made it all the way up to the promo-CD. The day it was going to get mastered Sub Pop called and said, "You know, Michael Jackson owns the rights to all the Beatles' songs, and if you leave that riff on there, we're all going to get sued." We could've paid something like $1500 for permission to use the riff, but we would've had to give up a quarter ownership of the song.

We thought about remixing it, but Doug and Davis up at Easley studios just snipped that part of the song and turned it around backwards. When it gets to that point in the song, the "Tomorrow Never Knows" solo just goes brrrrrp, and plays backwards. If you're ever able to listen to it backwards somehow, you'll hear the actual guitar solo.

Do you guys like recording?

Scott: It's all I ever did. I was recording before I had a band.

So you're not one of these bands that prefers to play live and hates being in the studio. . .

Scott: They're two totally different things. If anything, the recordings are a kind of foundation for us to expand upon live. We don't try to get that live sound in the studio and we don't try to get that studio sound live. They're separate, although in a way they're the same thing. It's just that the record was September, and tonight is... February.

You don't road test songs before you bring them into the studio?

Scott: It's the other way around.

Tripp: Usually after recording the album we get together to learn all the songs we've just recorded. A lot of times that's the first time somebody's put the song together live.

Do you ever end up hating some of the songs that make it onto the record?

Tripp: Yeah, some of them. For sure.

That was one of the things I wanted to ask you; Are your songs as loose as they sound on record? Or are they actually labored?

Tripp: Some more than others. And some not at all.

Dave: Maybe it's funny, but I think it's both. Individually we all sit there and think "I'm going to do the best thing I can for this song" and work at that. But everybody operates independently. You have a collision of these three or four ideas happening. Sometimes it's a real curious mix. It almost sounds like we're going for something, but we're not really getting there - we're kind of hanging on the periphery. There's three or four takes on that idea, and those takes, they're serious.

So there's no main songwriter?

Scott: No, there's three. And we slam 'em together with a certain amount of ego loss and retention each time. One of us might write the song, with all the parts included and everybody will say, "Naah, that sucks. It's going to go like this." Sometimes it all fits in. Everybody just adds a part and it works.

We just play for the song. A song will tell us where it needs to go.

Tripp: Yeah, there's nothing formula. . .

There's obviously not a formula, that much comes through on the records. . .

Tripp: There are some songs that have similar origins, but if you asked about every song, there'd be a different process for every one. And a lot of our songs aren't done. There are a lot of songs that got on the records, but didn't have time to grow enough. We've got songs from our first record that we're still working on.

Sometimes, we'll just leave the bridge open-ended so we can have fun when we play it live. It'll get to that place in the song and we'll all pretty much feel how long it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be bridge length - depending on how drunk everybody is.

We'll pick a key. Say, "Okay, tonight it's going to be F sharp" Everybody goes, "Right, F sharp," improvises for 16 measures or however long, and busts out of it.

Do crowds respond to that? Do they like that open-endedness?

Tripp: If it goes good. Sometimes it falls on it's face.

Dave: Yeah, sometimes it doesn't work.

Trip: Some people like seeing it fall on it's face, though. They think it's endearing or something. Oh look, they're not polished, they're not very good. . .

Everybody brings up the lo-fi thing with you guys, but this isn't the first record you've done at Easely Studios, is it?

Dave: We've always worked there, but we took the studio and did what we wanted to with it and then mixed the record ourselves. Sometimes with Doug and Davis standing over our shoulders, and sometimes with them leaving the room. That self-mixing lent itself to making the studio sound like what we wanted, which sometimes is pretty fucked-up.

Do a lot of changes happen to songs at the mixing stage?

Dave: Yeah, it always can. . .

Scott: They fuckin' disappear sometimes. (laughing)

Dave: I think a lot of our "getting our sound together" was us not knowing what we were doing - mixing on a console when we didn't know what we were doing. Eventually, it evolved. We learned to say, "No don't change it. Leave it like that."

Scott: We always used to say "wrong-headed". We'd be like "Well, we'll do it, and we'll push these buttons and we don't really know what's going to happen. . ."

And was that successful more often than not?

Dave: Yeah, I think so. Otherwise the records probably wouldn't have come out. At some point we said, "Okay, it's good enough. We like it."

Before, you were talking about how good Sub Pop's current situation is. Has any of that newfound freedom trickled down to you guys?

Scott: We made a record in a studio for three weeks. 21 days in the studio. God, that's 19 days longer than we've ever spent in the studio. Lo-fi shit aside, we always tried to make the records sound as good as they could. It's a means to an end. What matters is the song. Is that a little fuzzy or not? Who cares?

Do you have varied tastes within the band?

Dave: That's part of the looseness, again. Different takes on a singular idea.

What do you listen to?

Tripp: Anything.

All right, what do you like?

Tripp: I like a lot of swing music. I like a lot of bad classic rock, too.

What do you consider "bad classic" rock?

Tripp: You know, like Van Halen or something. . .

Van Halen? There's nothing wrong with Van Halen. I saw Van Halen! Who's side were you on, Dave's or Sammy's?

Tripp: Dave's - but I don't mind Van Hagar that much. The last two or three albums sucked, but 5150 actually had it it's moments.

I saw Van Halen - sorry, Van Hagar - play with Bachman Turner Overdrive when I was about 14. So if you want to talk about bad classic rock. . .To top it off, when Bachman Turner Overdrive played Leslie West from Mountain got up on stage and jammed with them. I thought the stage was going to collapse. . .

Dave: He was always pretty bigÖ

[To Scott] Okay, so we've got bad 70's Rock, . . .Where are you?

Scott: Irish drinking music. I like at lot of traditional music.

Tripp: Wait, I like bad music from all decades. Not just bad 70s rock. I like a lot of bad 80s rock, too.

Scott: I've got a pretty embarrassing record collection. . .

Really? What's your most embarrassing record?

Scott: Truly?

Tripp: That Frankie Goes to Hollywood CD. . .

Scott: Yeah, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. There's a funny story about it. I used to work in a record store when CDs had just come out. They were pretty much all classical or jazz, mostly high-brow recordings. This Frankie Goes to Hollywood was one of the first pop music things to be recorded full digital, you know made for that CD format.

Tripp: Trevor Horn!

Scott: Yeah, Trevor. We love him. I had just gotten a CD player, and I thought okay, before I go out and buy Van Halen's Women and Children First, I ought to buy something that was really made for the format. I didn't know what it was gonna be like.

Anyway, it SUCKED. There's a couple of songs on there that are kind of good, but in general it sucks. From then on whenever I would take the big stack of CDs to the used record store to trade them in, it would always be the same. The guy at the store would go "Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. You gotta be fuckin' kidding. Yep. Yep. Yep. . ." I couldn't get rid of it, but I couldn't just throw it away.

Then one time when we were on tour, somebody ripped off my house. I had my CDs in a big line in alphabetical order, and they took all of them. But sitting there on the shelf, all by itself, was Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

I was so offended. It's like, "Man, you take everything - my bong, my clothes, my records - but you leave me that. Why not just kill me?" I've still got the damn thing, if anybody wants to buy it.

I saw Jim Woodring did the cover art for the new record. How'd that come about?

Tripp: We just called him up and asked him if he wanted to do it. He was real enthusiastic.

Did he know the band? Did he know your music?

Tripp: Not really. We did a tour with Yo la Tengo and I found out James McNew, their bass player, is a big Jim fan as well. He said "Next time you're in Seattle just give him a call, he's a real nice guy." So, next time we were in Seattle, I gave him a call. He was real nice. We invited him to the show, but he couldn't make it. When I called him back to do the album cover, he said one of the things he liked to do was go to record stores to look at album covers, and he said he'd seen our album covers before.

We just asked him if he wanted to do it and he said, "Hell, yeah." He's into making a name for himself and maybe getting out of comics. . .

Scott: He wants to get into that lucrative album cover art. . .

Tripp: Yeah, he'll be the next Roger Dean. He really went to town on it. He exceeded our expectations for the album cover astronomically.

Scott: He created another weird little world that's not quite black and white. It's like a toy.

Tripp: When we called him on the phone, he said, "Give me something to go on. Just give me somewhere to start." So I said, "Well, this our first album on Sub Pop, and we're kind of like some guys from the South and it's like we're going to the big city or something . . .and that's about it."

He took that and turned it into the Hillbilly and the moonshine. The background has a town on it and then there's a battlefield along the base. . .

Scott: There's a lot going on in that picture.

Tripp: Yeah. He's great. He's one of my heroes. One time we went to Seattle - just to do business and stuff - and me and Scott and some people from Sub Pop met Jim in a Tiki bar. We just hung out and got drunk and talked about comics. It was cool.

Scott: His art is sort of how I like listening to music. There's familiar lines and shadows, but not exactly familiar. . .

Tripp: It's like something you forgot when you were a little kid. Like how a smell can take you back to your grandma's room when you were three. Jim really hits that stuff. You think, "Does someone else have that memory?..."

Are you big comic fans in general? Or is it just the occasional copy of Jim?

Scott: I like certain ones. Usually ones that Tripp points out to me. I didn't have to sit through all the goofy stuff that Tripp went through. I only get the good ones. He'll hand something over and say "this is cool." I never had to read Green Lantern or any of that shit.

Tripp: I started reading comics when I was about three. Comic book characters shaped a lot of my personality - my moral values and stuff. That's why I'm such a decent fellow.

What, you only like busty women?

Scott: Yup, busty women with no real genitalia happening. He likes girls with no nipples.

Tripp: I like girls with crazy names who have killer bodies and are into martial arts. They come by and do drop kicks all over my apartment.

When you guys aren't touring like you are now, do you play together a lot? Are you the kind of band that gets together and jams often?

Scott: We tour so much that when we're home for week, it's rare.

I didn't realise you toured that much.

Scott: Oh yeah. We're out more than we're in.

Are you happy with that?

Scott: Our families ain't real happy with it, but then, we ain't real happy with our families. . .

Tripp: It has it's ups and downs. Usually when we're on the road, we'll hang out when we've got some down time and play songs together and come up with different ways of doing things.

And what about back in Memphis?

Scott: We get to bond pretty good on the road. At home, we'll get together and rehearse. At home, band practice is really just an excuse to get out and have a few beers. Then we'll get together in small groups and work on particular songs.

Tripp: Originally, we'd play a lot because I got a really nice apartment. I was looking for a place we could have band practice in, and the perfect place just fell in my lap. It's real cheap, we've got central air and heat, and we can play there any time. My roommate plays in a band, the Simple Ones, and they practice there. Since we started practicing there I've had friends come by - various bands around town. There's a lot of jamming.

Scott: There's always music going on in that building. There's four apartments and the people in three of them are real music aficionados. Until about midnight every day there's music coming out of that building.

What are your backgrounds? Are you all from Memphis?

Tripp: Yeah. I've lived there since I was four. Stan's been there since he was ten.

Scott: I was born there.

Do you have any formal musical training?

Tripp: I played French Horn in the junior high band. . .

Has the French horn made it onto any of the records?

Tripp: No. I don't remember how to play it.

Scott: My mom taught piano. There was a lot of music going around. My parents were all vaudeville people. There weren't a lot of music players, but there was always music around. It was always encouraged. Dave is our formal musical training.

Tripp: Yeah, Dave has more than the rest of us.

On what, French Horn?

Dave: No, classical piano. Every person has to have a hobby, according to parents. You know, to give the young some discipline. . .

Scott: Mine was picking my nose. . .

Dave: I fucked up and didn't pursue it, which was stupid. But it turned out to be kind of useful. Now with other instruments, I can figure out what I need to do here, or how this chord might work with that chord.

I got trapped in too much of that shit before. You can get really trapped in what you know and what you've learned. That was one of the reasons I said, "I'm through with all this shit." When I started this band, it was because I wanted to degenerate. I wanted to relax. . .

Scott: To remember what you don't know. . .

Dave: Or just to play totally uninhibited. To say, "Fuck it. Let's go back to scratch, start all over again and see what happens.

And when you say "before", when would that be? What were you doing, who were you working with?

Dave: It's a long history of people. I'd basically just given up on music. I'd been doing it for a long time. Everything, jazzÖfolky stuff. . .and crazy stuff, weird improv shit. I played with a lot of people and nothing gelled, nothing worked.

So I kind of. . . One day I said, 'Fuck this shit. Fuck it, I'm through.' I'm gonna go find a couple of people to just have a good time with.

Tripp: Dave played drums in the first incarnation of the Grifters.

Dave: ÖI'd never played drums. Never. We couldn't find a drummer. We thought there was no reason to have some pompous person come in with a double kick, so I went and bought a snare and a floor tom and turned into a human metronome.

We were stark fucking terrible. But we had so much fun doing our thing. . .

Tripp: We had a lot of good times at shows, because there was so much drinking on.

Scott: Yeah, and Tripp and I had no real musical training - or taste - to hold us back.

So you guys don't have independent bloodlines that go way back. . .

Tripp: Nope. Me and Stan have been playing together since we were twelve years old. Not that we were great or anything.

Scott: I dunno. I got stoned with Lou Barlow once.

Did you go see a lot of music when you were younger?

Scott: There wasn't a lot where we grew up. We're real isolated. Memphis is the one city in the middle of a delta. Most the music around there is real indigenous There's weird funky farm music or classic rock - not even a lot of country. You've got Seger and Skynard and Yes and stuff like that on the radio.

If you wanted to find something you had to go out and really look for it. It wasn't going to hit you on the head. I was really into punk rock bands when I was a teenager, but it was more the local punk bands I liked, as opposed to Black Flag and The Circle Jerks. I though they were great, but I wasn't really part of it.

Has touring satisfied some of the things you wanted to get out of music? Have you played with anyone you wanted to play with or met anyone you wanted to meet?

Tripp: Oh yeah.

Scott: We've met all our heroes.

Tripp: I met the midget from the Wizard of Oz that gave Dorothy the lollipopÖ

Scott: He's one of my heroes. . .

Tripp. We met him the other night.

You were on tour with Yo la Tengo, who else have your toured with?

Tripp: Guided by Voices.

You're linked with Guided by Voices a fair bit. Are friends with them?

Scott: Yeah, we became more buddies than touring mates.

What happened on that Urge Overkill tour?

Scott: You want to hear the story that most people tell? It had nothing to do with Urge Overkill. It had to do with weird roadies. Guided by Voices were getting encores and it was throwing things off schedule. The way sound guys and roadies work, they don't give a shit about the music. All they care about is the time. And Bob's not the kind of guy you can just say "Hey, stop" to. He took it personal and the roadies took it personal. . .

Tripp: . . .and they beat the shit out of Bob.

Scott: We don't know how many blows were actually tossed out, but we know Bob. . . It was probably quite a few before he shut up.

Tripp: Bob can get himself into some trouble.

Scott: And he don't take no shit.

STAN WALKS UP

So, what's the most embarrassing record in your collection?

Stan: Most embarrassing? I had a Captain and Tenille record.

Ouch. That's beats Frankie by a long mile.

Scott: Did you listen to it?

Stan: Of course I listened to it.

Scott: Did you ever have sex to that album?

Stan: Muskrat, Muskrat. . .

That's the last word from Stan, who at this point found a seat way at the other end of the table and remained there, hiding behind his bangs and drinking beer, for the rest of the interview.

Who else besides Guided by Voices?

Tripp: We did a couple of shows with Fugazi

What was that like?

Scott: What do you think?

Tripp: It was kind of nerve racking

Scott: Incredible band, horrible audience.

Tripp: They and their whole crew are pretty clean livin'. . .

They seem to inspire religious fervour. . .

Tripp: Yeah, but they're not judgmental. You know, we drink a lot - especially at shows. But they never came down on us.

Guy Picciotto kind of took a liking to us. He asked us to go on tour with them. We were going to shows and drinking a lot and getting real drunk, but they never said one thing. Never batted an eye. We came out of a show real drunk one night and their roadies were out in the parking lot doing Tai Chi. They're like super-people. They're really cool.

That one show in Chicago was probably the biggest crowd we've ever played to. That was real nerve racking. The crowd was there to see Fugazi.

Who have you played with that has been a big deal for you?

Tripp: The Flaming Lips. We did a tour with the Flaming Lips for about three weeks.

How long ago was that?

Tripp: About two years ago.

Scott: They showed us that you can still be a really cool band and work within the machine. We were so amazed by the size of the tour. All the equipment and the lights and smoke and stuff. They showed us a lot about going out and playing every night - as well as the business side of it.

They've stuck it out for a long time. I don't remember when their first one came out, but Hear It Is came out in what, 85? 86?

Scott: They were one of the few bands that I was a fan of before I played with them. A lot of times it's the other way around. You may have heard a band's records, but it's not until you see them live that you go, "Woah, they're a really good band." Red Red Meat was like that. We'd played a couple of shows with them, and they never really sunk in. Then we did a short tour with them, and of course, they're one of my favorites now.

Dave: That Flaming Lips tour was a pivotal tour.

Tripp: We were the low band on the totem pole.

If you could tour with someone, who would it be?

Tripp: I'd like to do a tour with Prince.

Dave: Oh yeah, I'd do that.

That's just the chick thing again, isn't it?

Tripp: Yup. Pretty much. And he's married now, so there would be a huge backlog.

He's not Prince anyway. He's The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

Tripp: He'll always be Prince Rogers Nelson in my heart.

Dave: I think it would be fun to tour and hang out with Tom Waits. Just to see what makes him tick.

Scott: There's lot's of bands I'd like to play with just to be able to hear them several nights in a row.

Like who?

Scott: Sonic Youth. I think it would be enjoyable to hear the subtle changes in their set every night. They've gotten to that point where they've got "the show". It's not necessarily the same songs every night, but it's "the show" - an hour of Sonic Youth. We saw them twice over the summer. Different songs, but subtle changes.

Do any of you do things outside the Grifters?

Scott: Yeah, we have lives.

No, I mean recording. Music.

Tripp: Dave's just finished something good, but his name won't be on it.

Dave: We had a lot of time off over the summer while the contract was being negotiated. I just wrote some songs. It was good. I had a nice little backlog of things that weren't quite Grifters' songs. We all write songs, and have them sitting around. Once in a while you get too many and you've got to do something with them. And occasionally somebody'll say, "Hey, you should work with me on something."

Scott: We all write songs, and we'd don't necessarily always write them for the Grifters. We write them for ourselves and whatever we're thinking about. Most of the time that fits right into the Grifters. Sometimes it doesn't and we all have outlets for doing other things. I make these demo tapes I've been making since I was 14 years old.

Okay, if you could be in any band what would you pick.

Scott: One of those big bands, like some of the Kansas City bands - like The Blue Flames.

Tripp: Maybe the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Scott: But you wouldn't want to play bass. (In Noel Redding voice) "C'mon Jimi, let me play guitar. C'mon Jimi, let's play Little Miss Strange again. . ."

Tripp: Either Jimi or Yes

You keep coming back to Yes. What is it with Yes?

Scott: You can say Yes or Genesis and bring up the entire history of prog rock in one band.

Tripp: I used to really love Yes when I was a kid. I liked the way Chris Squire played bass.

So are there concepts albums on the horizon?

Scott: All of our albums end up being concept albums. Not that we try to think up an idea and then write songs about it. They're more chronicles of a time. Most of the time, everything we've done in the past six months, we record.

Tripp: We're never going to exceed the seven-minute limit on a song, though.

Scott: Oooh, we got close on Radio City. There's a radio edit in there somewhere.

DUDE WITH A JUNE OF 44 SHIRT WALKS BY

Scott: Hey nice shirt. We know those guys.

Who's in that band again. . .

Trip: Doug, the drummer from Codeine and a guy from Rodan. . .

All these bands end up splintering into other bands with similarly mysterious names.

Tripp: Yeah, it's like there's one big band with 50 people in it.

Scott: And they're all from Louisville, but they live in Chicago now.

And are all related to Slint in some way. . .

Scott: Well, Slint were only sixteen or something. They've had plenty of time to reproduce.

Louisville is interesting. A lot of bands do seem to come out of this one little town. They're not all the same, surely, but there is a similar vibe to what they're doing. It's a city that doesn't really have a "scene" - it's just a bunch of kids who like to make music and art. I'm impressed by it.

[To Dave] I saw you nodding earlier on when I brought up Tortoise. You said, you'd done improv stuff in the past, do you like a lot of the new stuff? People like Jim O'Rourke?

Dave: My jury is still out. I have to see them live. I don't know if these are guys who play rock, who don't want to play rock or . . .

Scott: Or maybe it's not rock at all.

Dave: It's not really rock, but I don't know how much of it is beating off.

Tripp: When we did that tour with the Flaming Lips and Codeine, Jim O'Rourke was Codeine's soundman. At one of the shows in Houston me and Jim O'Rourke and Doug, the drummer from Codeine, got up on stage and improvised behind these two local kids. . .

Scott: Those kids were amazing, too. . .

Tripp: Yeah, they were. We were just doing Gastrl del Sol-type stuff. I had a really good time. After the show I said, "Look Jim, that was fun. I had a really good time jamming." He said, "We weren't jamming. It's improvisation." He was totally down on jamming, but all for "improvisation."

Scott: I think to him, "improvisation" means you only play one note, as opposed to three.

Dave: There are people out there who can really improv. . .who can play as a group because they're unbelievably talented musicians, but it's not easy. So many Jazz musicians had to work at it for years.

Scott: And you walk a fine line between playing for folks - for people - and playing for other musicians. That's what ultimately turned me off a lot of the progressive rock in the late seventies and early eighties. Even someone like Elvis Costello. I'm not sure what he's doing. He gone away from trying to impress me to trying to impress his peers.

It's like, if I didn't know anything about music I wouldn't be impressed by that chord progression. But musicians will think, "Wow, that's intense." Does that really make it better music, or does that just make it more complex? And is complex that much better than something really simple? Buddy Holly could play three chords and make you go, "That's incredible!"

In the same way, there's a complexity to the blues a lot people don't ever really understand. They all think it's just twelve bars. Oh, it's really easy, anybody can play it. Yeah, but are you really playing the blues? Or just playing twelve bars in a row?

Where do you head after you leave Australia?

Tripp: We go to New Zealand for a couple days, and then go back to the States for a couple days off. Then we start the American tour.

Scott: We've got a Tibetan tour coming up. It's kind of hard to get gigs out there. You know, China and all that shit.

Tripp: And they know when you're faking it, too.

I've heard the Tibetans are a tough crowd.

Tripp: So we've been told

Do you guys follow Australian music at all?

Tripp We don't follow American music that much. We don't follow any kind of music that much.

Scott: I like a lot of New Zealand stuff. I can see myself getting more into it over the next couple of months,

after the tour.

As beer drinkers, what do you think of Australian beer?

Dave: Not bad.

Scott: This aint't Belgium, but this is close to our palettes. The temperature's right. Germany and Australia seem to be kind of similar. Lots of Pilsners.

Gone around Sydney at all?

Scott: Bondi Beach, man. [At this point, Scott lets loose with an long, alien-sounding BUUUUUURP.]

Tripp: See, he has "Star Wars" burps.

What was that, Jawa?

Scott: Actually, it was a Sand Person.

Do you guys read much that's written about you?

Scott: Yeah, I can almost get my shirt off over my head. . .

No, that's not what I mean. I went looking up articles and information about you before this interview. You seem to inspire more bizarre prose from journalists than almost anybody. The writer's that don't compare you to Pavement flat-out, that is. . .

Tripp: Yeah, people seem to use us as a springboard to create new adjectives. "Sulfuric cave-fish guitar" is a really good one.

Here's your chance to refute some of that. What do you think it is about you that inspires people to write things like that?

Scott: You can't nail us down to any one thing. Can't say, "That's what they are" and digest it. Nobody can say definitively what we are doing.

Tripp: A lot of times it's a case of someone writing too much into something that's really simple.

Scott: Which is fine with us. And the converse is true, too. A lot of things that we think are incredibly complex, people can lay out in a sentence. We'll read it and go, "Oh yeah, I get it now."

Did you see in this week's NAMELESS LOCAL MUSIC MAG you were described as "using Howlin' Wolf as your template"? That's not one I would've picked. . .

Scott: But you see, that's a killer style, man. Not necessarily the way he sang or the way that he wrote songs, but the whole Delta Blues idiom - the guitar sounds and what the songs are about. It's a real good springboard for anybody. Rock and roll in general. What matters is the heart and soul of the song. The groove. What makes you move and cry at the same time. Butt shakin' music.

I've think I've got my headline there. Thanks.