Save Richmond

by Andrew Beaujon
June 3, 2004
 
So, the first two House of Freaks albums have been reissued. How does that feel?

It’s a lot easier than the first time around. You don’t have to tour, you do a lot fewer interviews, and probably what’ll happen is you’ll sell a lot less records, too. I think all in all probably the thing for me, especially with this resurgence of two-man bands, you know, the White Stripes, who I actually like…it’s nice to be recognized for being one of the first bands that did it. So that’s nice — kind of to get the record straight.

I work for Henrico County schools now, as a computer tech, and about two years ago, these young guys who are in their late 20s were going, ‘Man, check out this band,’ they were playing me the White Stripes, ‘It’s just drums and guitar!’ I was like, ‘Wait, wait, wait a second!’ For me it’s like, I can’t believe there’s another band getting this much attention because people were very resistant to that at the time.
 
Do you feel like House of Freaks didn’t get enough attention?

Well, you know, probably everybody feels like they didn’t get enough attention. To be honest, I don’t really think about it that much anymore. But I think for the label that we had and the timing, we probably got about as much as we could have expected. I would have liked to have sold a lot more records and probably be doing something in music now, whether it be in movies or something like that, I doubt I’d still be touring like that unless I’d made millions and millions of dollars.
 
It’s not a lifestyle that’s easy to maintain otherwise.

No, it’s not. It’s not a lifestyle, it’s not even a musical style. I kind of feel like rock’n’roll is many times best when it’s adolescents doing it. Or young males who wanna be heard. My favorite Dylan records are when he’s like early 20s.
 
You’d been in bands for a fairly long time by the time you started House of Freaks.

Yeah. Let’s see. When we did our first record I was already 30. So I’d been in many bands; I’d already had a record deal through the punk/new-wave days.
 
Do you look at the records differently now?

Not really. In the last couple of years I’ve been listening to them more because I have a seven-year-old daughter who wants to listen to them. It’s always really hard for me to listen to my own music. You always think, ‘Aah, I don’t like the way I sang that.’ I’d say there are maybe a half-dozen songs in what we did where I’d go, ‘That was good.’

But also the production values. Johnny and I were trying for a much more primitive sound. We were trying to go for this front-porch recording sound that we heard in the Son House records. We wanted it to sound like an old blues record. We were working at a time when the industry was still kind of in the new wave days—big reverb, big drum sound. That sort of mid-‘80s sound. We kept fighting the same old battles: ‘You see this expensive rack of equipment? Turn it off.’ And they’d turn down maybe half a notch. We’d say, ‘Keep going. Keep going.” Finally you just get tired of fighting those battles. Afterwards, the lo-fi ethic became a little bit more fashionable.
 
It was kind of after you’d been through the mill.

Yeah, it was pretty much more like mid-90s you started hearing bands like Pavement. Bands who never had any money were doing it all along because they didn’t know any better. But my favorite records are always the ones that were done quickly and cheaply, if they cost anything at all.
 
That’s interesting: Do you think House of Freaks was hindered by having access to money and good studios?

Yeah, maybe had we put out an indie record before we got to Rhino—and Rhino was a great label, we loved the people there.
 
There weren’t many new bands on Rhino.

No. In fact, in the mid-to-late 80s they did a foray into the new artists genre. And the A&R guy, Gary Stewart, was great. One of the all-time nicest guys in music. And we loved Rhino because they all had a sense of musical history. These people knew music. When we got together with the record company people, you weren’t dealing with same old schmuck hang-on people who wanted to glom off of people’s fame; these were people who were genuinely into music. And they would turn us on to a cool blues set or R&B or whatever. Captain Beefheart. So we spent a lot of time talking music with them. But really, the budget for our first record [Monkey On a Chain Gang] was like, I don’t know, $15,000. Which, you could do a great record for that, but in L.A. that got eaten up pretty quick! So we basically did our first record in a couple of nights. I feel like in the mixing it kind of got a little slicked-up. But I’ve heard other records from the same era, and you go, ‘Well, we got about halfway there.’ You hear records like whatever was on the radio at the time, and they were very produced.
 
And everybody had to have that sound were the snare drum sounded like it was 100 feet deep.

Exactly. Even on country records, you’d be like, ‘Man, the backbeat is dominating this thing,’ and you’re missing what country music’s all about.
 
You were talking about disenchantment, and I was listening to “Meet Your Heroes” — that’s a bitter little song!

[Laughs] You know, that was one of the first songs I wrote. I wrote it before Johnny and I even got together. I went out to L.A. before we moved out there. A friend of mine, Steven McCarthy, he was out there. I went to a party, it was the Long Ryders’ drummer’s wife’s birthday, who is Lucinda Williams, but there was someone, I can’t even remember who it was, some rock guy who people might have known at the time, and he was puking in the corner. I was thinking ‘Man, that’s pretty funny.’ I don’t think it was directed at myself or any real experience with stardom except as an observer visiting Los Angeles. It seemed silly to me. That was an early song. It wasn’t as a result of disillusionment with the record industry. Which certainly came! The way we sort of expressed that was we got in the band Gutterball, and we just sort of said, “aah, f**k it” to everything.” Financed our own records, financed our own tours, and that was great.
 
Do you have any regrets about the course of your career? Is there anything you’d change if you could go back and do it again?

You know, I have a few regrets. I think sometimes we were a little bit too much the artist types. Sometimes I felt like we should have not fought some of the battles we fought. Just kind of sucked it up a couple of times. Not like they put makeup on, but to have done a show, a certain tour. There were a few shows where we said, ‘Forget it, man. We’re not gonna do this. This is bullshit.’ And there were a couple of shows that we didn’t do that probably kind of hurt us. We were sometimes kind of pains in the asses.

But in the record industry they treat you like product. They basically don’t care. There’s a zillion bands out there, and there are even more today than there were 15 years ago. But we hated being treated like product. Cause it was our lives. We sometimes resisted that. If you resist once you become difficult. And you get a reputation for being difficult. So we might have been difficult. There was a real lack of creative ideas in the music business. We kind of fought that a lot, get people to think differently. Not use the same old photographers trying to get the new wave poses. That’s over with.
 
You definitely had a different style of photography on Cakewalk.

Yeah, exactly. And I didn’t really like that.
 
I was gonna ask if those pants figured in your regrets!

You know, no. I don’t think I really regret that too much. Probably my biggest — Johnny at some point, right when things were really starting to happen for us in L.A., Johnny decided to move back to Richmond.
 
I was wondering when that was.

That was after we’d done our first record. He just sort of sprang it on me. I was like, ‘Oh, you’re going back to Richmond. Good timing…’
 
So you stayed out there for a while?

I stayed in Los Angeles for a little bit. And then I came back and met my current wife. And it was good to be back in Richmond. Being out in Los Angeles, which was great career-wise, I felt like artistically it wasn’t as good. Cause we drew so much on Richmond, you know, the Southern thing. And when we got out to Los Angeles, people immediately picked up on it, and I think we became hyper-aware of our Southern-ness. Whereas in Virginia—
 
You didn’t even think about it.

You didn’t think about it. You just wrote about the stuff around you. That’s when we did the EP All My Friends — we said, man, this is great. Let’s just have all our friends play with us. And out of that ethic grew Gutterball — just hanging out, playing music. Which is what I do now, what Johnny does now. Kind of back to what it was, which is a lot of fun.
 
What are you doing now?

I play in a ‘60s funk and soul band with Armistead Wellford who was in Love Tractor, Coby Batty who was in the Fugs…
 
Oh, is this NRG Krysys?

Yeah! We can play parties, clubs — we have a bunch of singer/songwriters, and none of us write in this band. We keep saying, ‘Maybe we should write some songs,’ and then it’s like, ‘Naaah! Too much trouble!’ Probably like five guys in this band who could do it, but, aah, we’ve done it, and it’s like, boy it sure is great to just show up, play, make money, and leave. For once!
 
Is it more fun?

It is in a way. It was really satisfying putting out records and writing songs. That was always my favorite part — getting together with Johnny and writing those songs. From then on it was kind of downhill. You were recording it, dealing with managers, you know. But I mean that not in the worst way, but the best thing about making a record or being in a band that writes their own songs is the moment of creativity. It’s really hard to get that out, except maybe on the demo. I kind of have it all in perspective now. It’s not my livelihood, but I’m actually making probably better money than I made before!
 
I see Johnny all the time. He lives maybe six blocks away from me. We’re over in Woodland Heights by the river, both of us. There’s a lot of people over here: Bob Rupe who was in the Silos, he’s a block away, David Lowery is about a mile away. Richmond’s a good little — I don’t know. I like the hot Southern summers. The slow pace of life here sometimes. It was good to be back here. I don’t think I would have stayed in L.A. anyhow. But I wouldn’t have left as early. What I would have liked is to maybe have been involved in movie soundtracks or something like that. I doubt I ever would have worked at a record company. I always saw them and still do see them as the enemy.

Did you hear our records the first time around?

Yeah. I had a hard time judging what House of Freaks’ profile was then, though, because I was living in Richmond. Obviously you were really well covered in Richmond.

Well, to be honest, we probably had our biggest following in Los Angeles and on the West Coast. That’s where we—cause we played here in Richmond for about a year, and it just wasn’t taking off for us. And so we went out to L.A. and just immediately we were getting great shows and great press. What I really liked about Los Angeles is you do a show in a dump over there and you get a review in the L.A. Weekly and people in New York read it. I think before I went I thought in my mind that bands in L.A. were somehow better. But they weren’t, and in fact there were so many and still are so many good musicians in Richmond and places like Richmond, but there’s just no record industry there. Bands would do great things and break up. But in L.A., one show, one review, and you have A&R people at your next show. So it really took off for us quickly.

And it was really exciting. Lot of fun, met a lot of neat people that this reissue has got me back in touch with. Greg Allen, who took a lot of the photos, Chris Morse, who I guess is now editor of Billboard, he was a writer for Billboard then, he wrote the liner notes. Gary Stewart, who, it was his idea, he was the A&R guy who signed us to Rhino. It was his idea to reissue these records. In fact, he just stopped working for Rhino after 20-something years, and this is the last thing he wanted to do. So it’s kind of a labor of love on his part. Plus he dug up songs that I didn’t even remember recording.
 
These are jampacked, these CDs.

Yeah, well, Rhino—they’re overly complete! It was interesting to hear some of those [bonus cuts]. There’s a song called “While You Sleep’ that I guess was part of the sessions for our first record that I don’t think we continued to play. I listened to it once and said, ‘I don’t remember this song at all.’
 
Were you like, “That’s why it wasn’t on the album”?

I was like, “I know why most of them weren’t on the album. They weren’t the best songs.” There were some good ones on the Tantilla one. Incidentally, Tantilla and then Cakewalk we tried to do the same thing over and over. Johnny and I really wanted to do our version of [Captain Beefheart's] Trout Mask Replica , which is almost an avant garde blues record. We wanted to do our thing with field recordings. We were doing that, recording on the street, kids beating on five-gallon buckets. We wanted to bring all that stuff in. We tried to communicate all that stuff to our producer, Dennis Herring, on Cakewalk. He claimed he liked Captain Beefheart, but I don’t think he did it for the record. All in all we never did achieve that. We tried to do it on Tantilla , but our ideas really crystallized on Cakewalk. But we had a producer that didn’t really get it. But I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to do that Captain Beefheart record.
 
You can always do it on your own, man.

Yeah, I know. We still have the tapes. I liked the primitive recordings. That’s what I like about that record.
 
A year ago, some guy asked us if we’d do a reunion for a benefit. I told him, ‘I don’t really want to do it. But if Johnny’s really excited about it, I’ll do it.’ Johnny didn’t want to do it. He said, ‘I don’t think I can play like that anymore.’ Though I think I can sing like that. I know Johnny can play like that still. He just doesn’t.
 
I’m sure for both of you it’s something in the past.

Yeah, exactly. It’s really hard to go back and get to that feeling. When Johnny and I were playing, we thought we were the coolest band out there. After we’d play we knew that people were looking at us like we were from Mars. We’d piss people off. People would say, ‘You gotta get a bass player,’ and we’d say, ‘It’s our band! We don’t have to get a bass player. If you don’t like it, fine!’ We never understood that. It was like, ‘This is the band. Take it or leave it!’ But people became really kind of up in arms about it. That just really made us think, ‘We’re cool.’ So much of our energy we drew on the fact that it was just the two of us. Think back to those times, when we were on for the first five years we were playing, there was this great thing going between us. We wouldn’t count off a song. Ever. We’d just look at each other and pow!
 
I’m glad [the albums have been] rereleased, and at least have someone say there was a band before the White Stripes doing this. I don’t know that they drew any inspiration from us, but they obviously drew inspiration from the same sources. Johnny and I started playing, and we were looking for a bass player, and we couldn’t find one. Listening to these old blues records, it was like, ‘Man, there’s no bass player. In fact there’s one guy doing this and it sounds like a full band. We should be able to do this with amps and drums.’ If Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy can do this without a full band, certainly we can. I definitely see that in the White Stripes. I don’t know about the other bands, but I assume they’re probably drawing from the same sources that we were. And that’s great to see in music and finally see someone getting some sort of recognition for it.