Dandy Warhols lighten up with return to roots
Back from dark, psychedelic wilderness, rockers hit the road in support of their latest album, Distortland
There is an incredible amount of clanking bottles in the background when Courtney Taylor-Taylor phones. The lead singer of the Dandy Warhols is at the band’s Portland studio doing some renovating.
“I’m putting in a wine shop into the front room and have been going crazy with the massive amount of hoops to jump through, forms to fill out and all sorts of awful, evil anti-people legislation there is out there to cheat new business owners out of $100 here, $200 there,” said Taylor-Taylor. “But this is the new Portland where they’ve changed things from fair to unfair in keeping with the overall plan of ruining the place. We owned a bar before and it was a dirty, dirty job, but a little wine shop to hang out in after work is far more dignified than doing blow until 4 a.m. and dealing with drunken idiots.”
Ah, the good old days. When the Dandy Warhols emerged out of Portland in the mid-1990s, the city hadn’t been put under the spotlight as an “it” place. Instead, the West Coast town still boasted a rough edge and rowdy side that Taylor-Taylor, Peter Homstrom (guitar), Zia McCabe (keyboards/vocals) and Brent DeBoer (drums) perfectly reflected in their swaggering, sneering neo-psychedelic sounds on such hit albums as 2000’s Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia and 2003’s Welcome to the Monkey House and tracks such as Not If You Were The Last Junkie on Earth or Get Off. The group is on the road in support of its ninth studio album, Distortland. Released in April on Dine Alone Records, the album is largely being heralded as a return to past pop highlights.
“What people hear is who the mixer is — Jim Lowe (Beyonce, Taylor Swift) — and I got someone who understood the feeling and the sound of 1990, which is what I wanted this album to be,” he said. “I guess I miss Old Portland and my life back then and it felt like the right thing to revisit that period. When we got the song Search Party back, which was originally going to be called Shoegazer Suicide, we knew we had it because it was exactly the feel of the era.”
For the Mark Helfrich-directed video for the song, You Are Killing Me, the band reached back to a far earlier era. Sixties underground legend and Andy Warhol muse Joe Dallesandro was cast as the lead in a story of a self-destructive writer on a near-lethal bender saved by a giant bunny played by keyboardist McCabe. The song is a big hit with live crowds.
“I came up with the idea for the video after having dinner with Joe in Los Angeles,” said Taylor-Taylor. “It’s a whole metaphor for Joe’s life after Andy, which was very, very messy — not so fun and how his wife saved him from his life and still keeps him OK.”
As for what’s keeping the Dandy Warhols OK these days, Taylor-Taylor says there is a renewed sense of fun in the ranks after a run of albums that were both increasingly dark and heavily psychedelic.