Six Things You Need To Know About…
Howlin Rain
They’re punk rockers in classic rock clothes, they’ve been burned by the industry, and more “Well fancy that”s.
Ethan Miller looks equally as wild as his music sounds. With his straggly hair, Unabomber beard and rakish demeanour born of a vintage suit, Afghan coat and tasteful headwear, the Howlin Rain frontman could have beamed in from 1972, and his band’s epic brand of cosmic Americana rock’n’roll is no less attentiongrabbing. But the spirit of 2018 flows through their freewheeling fifth album, The Alligator Bride, a record that, for all its backwoods ambience and Crazy Horse-inspired wig-outs, is a very much a product of its time. “We’re standing here, with the complicated rip tides of history flowing around us and over us,” says Miller. “There’s a sense of hope and hopelessness at the same time. I wanted to echo that.” Howlin Rain were born behind the Redwoods Miller grew up in Eureka, Northern California, a remote fishing outpost between San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. “They call that area the
Lost Coast,” says Miller. “It’s where the Avenue Of The Giants and all the great sequoia redwoods are.” It was in those forests that his musical tastes were shaped. “I used to go out into the forest with my dad. He’d be chopping wood for the winter and listening to the first Crosby, Stills And Nash record. That record is always tied into that area in my mind.”
Howlin Rain are legitimate punk rockers in classic rock clothes
Or maybe that should be the other way round? As a kid, Miller was a fan of Def Leppard and Poison, but at the age of 15 he became immersed in Eureka’s thriving punk rock scene. “I remember going to see The Melvins, and there’s Buzz Osbourne with his crazy hair and ‘Blue Velvet’ T-shirt, playing the loudest and slowest and craziest music you’ve ever heard.”
Unlike most converts to punk, however, Miller retained a love of classic rock. “Bands like The Beatles and Jefferson Airplane and CSN were always touchstones to me. Punk rock had exactly the same emotion.”
The Alligator Bride accidentally plugged into the US election
Howlin Rain recorded the new album’s title track
on November 8, 2016 – the day of the US election. “Our mood going into the studio was a lot better than it was when we came out, for sure,” Miller says with an ironic laugh. He would periodically break away from recording to check on the results. “I was, like, ‘What the fuck?’ But you can’t just put the blinders on and cling to what you believe in. We’ve got to figure it all out together. We’re all part of a community.”
Don’t ask who the Alligator Bride is According to Miller, the song was inspired by a poem he’d begun writing about “America’s past and present”. It’s set in a small town, a lot like Eureka, “where you hear the train whistle a few times a night and you can smell the ocean in the bay, and phones were still on wiggly cables pinned to the wall.” But he won’t say who the Alligator Bride is – or maybe he just doesn’t know. “I didn’t really have a person in mind. It’s just a phrase that represented something resonant and spiritual and fitted in with the story I was trying to tell.”
The band have been burned by the majorlabel music industry
Howlin Rain’s third album, 2012’s The Russian Wilds, was overseen by producer Rick Rubin. But the experience didn’t quite pan out as planned.
“I’d never worked in the big, glossy Los Angeles music industry world before, and it was a deep experience, but I’m not sure I really enjoyed it,” says Miller. “What it did teach me was that I have an instinctual understanding of the muse I want to follow. I’m not sorry I did it, I’m just not interested in doing it again.”
Clothes maketh the man
Miller takes pride in looking dapper. “People in art and rock’n’roll aren’t stylish enough these days,” he says. “You can wear shabby clothes when you’re twenty-two and young and beautiful, because youth in itself is blinding. But as you get older it’s nice to dress up and elevate yourself. It’s all part of the theatre of rock’n’roll. Why do you think people who dress up at weddings end up having sex? It’s because they look so good.”
The Alligator Bride is out now via Silver Current.