Powerhouse drummer Paul Quattrone talks next steps with The Oh Sees
Social distancing hasn’t been a challenge for Paul Quattrone, who was one of the standouts of the Pittsburgh music scene for almost two decades.
The drummer, known here for his work in psych-rock powerhouses Modey Lemon and Midnite Snake, hardcore band Baby Bird and electronic duo Italian Ice, lives on an acre and a half of land in the Mojave Desert in Joshua Tree, Calif., where he’s been spending the quarantine planting about 50 different types of cacti.
“I’m turning into a farmer,” he says, laughing. “I have some Joshua trees on my property that I can sit out in the backyard and stare at at night, and it’s been pretty quiet and mellow here.”
The last gig he did was late November at a festival in Mexico, as one of the twin drummers in LA psych-garage heavies The Oh Sees.
Last week, the band announced a European tour, with the first show being in Bristol, England, on Nov. 5, which will make it almost a year since the last live date. He doesn’t think it will take all that long to shake off the rust, and anyone who’s seen Quattrone play knows that the madman fury will always be there.
The Syracuse, N.Y., native made his first big impact with Modey Lemon, after moving here to attend the University of Pittsburgh in 1996. Between 1999 and 2008, the band — initially a guitar-drum duo with Phil Boyd and then a trio with Jason Kirker — recorded four albums, toured with the likes of Dinosaur Jr. and Arctic Monkeys and appeared in the film “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.”
Quattrone didn’t finish at Pitt, and he didn’t need to. In 2008, with Modey Lemon beginning to fade, he joined Brooklyn dance-punks !!! (aka Chk Chk Chk), adding a fifth project to his active roster. He spent a year in Brooklyn in 2014 before going west.
“The thing with Chk Chk Chk,” he says, “is that everybody is so spread out that I could pretty much live anywhere. I just kinda wanted to change the scene, so I went to Los Angeles, and most of my friends in LA were involved in the rock ’n’ roll, psych, garage-rock circles, and I kind of realized I missed playing rock ’n’ roll.”
He had seen The Oh Sees, a band that dates back to San Francisco 1997, a bunch of times and got wind they were looking for a drummer. When frontman John Dwyer, the lone steady member, invited him over to jam, Quattrone knew he was “secretly auditioning” him.
“I knew joining them that they were like one of the best live rock ’n’ roll bands, if not THE best in the world ... I thought,” Quattrone says.
The Oh Sees have gone through a number of incarnations, in terms of both personnel and moniker, releasing albums as
Thee Oh Sees, Oh Sees, The Ohsees and OCS.
“I saw them when they had Brigid [Dawson], who sang harmony with John, and [it]was in a lot of ways a different band,” Quattrone says. “Now, it’s just a fullblown, psych-rock, double-drummer explosion.”
Quattrone, the ninth drummer to join The Oh Sees, is paired with his friend Dan Rincon, an LA native who’s played in such punk and garage bands as Wild Thing, Nobunny and Glitz. The twin drummer approach, he says, requires him to listen a lot more closely to what’s going on.
“You can’t overplay,” Quattrone says. “There’s a pocket you have to kind of sit back into. If I know he’s gonna step in front, I’ll sit back, and he does the same with me. A lot of it is unspoken. Every now and then we’ll kind of talk about, like, ‘OK, that works, that doesn’t work,’ but for the most part we have a sense of being able to read each other and give each other space.”
In featuring the two drummers last year, Modern Drummer wrote, “From behind the drums, a 90-minute Oh Sees set resembles a long-distance race run at a sprinter’s pace.”
Quattrone also compares it to a certain iconic psych-rock institution known for its double drumming.
“If you listen to any Grateful Dead show from 1968 to 1970, the drummers are really pushing everything and playing a lot more aggressively than they did later on, and that’s the stuff that I’ve really taken inspiration from for this project.”
The Oh Sees have released an album every year for the past 15 years, the last three featuring Quattrone and Rincon together: “Orc” (2017), “Smote Reverser” (2018) and
“Face Stabber” (2019). The band assembled in March in a west Texas studio, just before the pandemic was hitting, and recorded new material. It will almost certainly be released before the fall tour, an excursion which, in some ways, is wishful thinking.
“If it’s unsafe we’re not gonna do it,” Quattrone says. “We’re gonna go with whatever everybody else seems to think is safe. We don’t want to put anybody at risk, so fingers crossed, but, obviously, we have no idea what to expect between now and then.”
The drummer understands that live music is “on the lowest rung of the ladder” in terms of things getting back to normal, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
“This is my livelihood,” he says. “I don’t have any other job. This is how I’ve made a living since 2002. In fact, this would have been my 18th year of just consecutive touring, so I take that very seriously. I just want it to end, you know.”
Which brings us to a public service message:
“Just wear a [expletive] mask,” he says. “Yeah, maybe it’s a little uncomfortable, but if it increases the chance of this whole thing ending sooner, just do it, you know. Don’t be a baby.”