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from RIP magazine, October 1995
[If you've ever been to a Supersuckers show, you already know what it's like to interview them — it's brash, fast paced and always entertaining. By the time I talked to the guys for this story, I was already in their good graces, not because I'd interviewed them before, but because I was involved with one of their idols, Brian Forsythe, ex-guitarist for Kix. So much for journalistic credibility — I needed girlfriend credibility to win these guys over. Things really were looking up for the Supersuckers at this point in their careers — they were being courted by major label Interscope, who eventually signed them. Unfortunately the results were disastrous, and they wound up recording an album for the label that was never released. A few years later, the band went completely indie and released their recordings themselves, which I think is a better deal for guys with the type of initiative the Supersuckers have. By the way, I knew the real reason why Ron Heathman had left the band (only a temporary situation, as it turned out — he was back for the next recording), but I let him have his privacy. This probably makes me a bad journalist, but it does make me a good friend.]
"Oh my god, there's a fish in here!"
Nothing ever surprises Supersuckers' singer/ bassist Eddie Spaghetti. Well, almost nothing. He's brash and cynical and glosses over life's small joys and tragedies with a devil-may-care attitude. But that goldfish completely threw him. As well it should.
Eddie and the other three Supersuckers — guitarist Dan Bolton, drummer Dancing Eagle (a.k.a. Dan Siegal) and newest member, guitarist/ singer Rick Sims — are sitting in a conference room at the Hyatt [the infamous "Riot House" of Zeppelin fame] in beautiful uptown West Hollywood. The group's publicist, Nils Bernstein, got some sort of deal on the joint, and none of them realized what they'd be walking into. The place is damn plush. There's the requisite wet bar, comfy couches, a huge table... even a board for drawing charts and graphs(!). But the real kicker, almost hidden in the hallway, is a fish tank built into the wall. Spaghetti had been wolfing down breakfast and regaling me with sarcastic banter for at least half an hour before he caught sight of the little bugger serenely floating through its watery wonderland. Clearly, he's not accustomed to these subtle touches of luxury.
That doesn't mean, however, that he's not fully prepared to become used to them. If any album is meant to bring the Supersuckers to the brink of rock stardom, it's their latest, Sacrilicious. These guys, who have achieved a fair amount of fame with the blazing, impudent rock 'n' roll of The Smoke of Hell and La Mano Cornuda, have finally added a touch of musical maturity to their crunch and quips. "Money Into Sin" and "The Thing About That" have that classic Supersuckers' craziness, but the easier rhythm of "Born With a Tail" reveals a slight country flavor, and "Don't Go Blue" is a smoky blues number, with a satirical bent (what — you thought it would be serious?).
Leave it to Seattle's resident madmen to turn unfortunate circumstances in their favor. Just a few weeks before making Sacrilicious, they lost their guitarist Ron Heathman. He apparently moved back to the band's original home state of Arizona to write his memoirs. Whatever Ron's reasons for leaving, they're irrelevant anyhow — the bottom line is that the Supersuckers wound up with the indie-label score of all time: Rick Sims, former frontman for the Illinois-based Didjits, joined up.
"We needed to get a guitar player, and we had two lists," Siegal/ Eagle explains. "We had people out of town and people in Seattle. Rick Sims was on the top of the list of people out of town and nobody thought he would do it. But we called him first thing and he went, 'Sure.'"
"I don't think he said, 'Sure'," Spaghetti contends. "He said—"
And, in unison, everybody imitates Sims: "Weellll... okay."
The Supersuckers couldn't have found anyone more perfect. Until its untimely split, the Didjits were as psycho and frantic as the Supersuckers. And Sims' whacked-out vocals, which have inspired the likes of Claw Hammer's Jon Wahl, give an extra-added dimension to the already demented Supersuckers' sound. On the new album, Sims wails on "Run Like a Motherfucker." He wrote that tune, and three others, for Sacrilicious.
"We wanted somebody with opinions and ideas instead of somebody that was just there," Spaghetti tells me.
And Sims is happy that he doesn't have to carry the band's full weight. "When I was in the Didjits," he says, "I wrote all the stuff. I've joined a band that has two songwriters, plus myself. So it's been great for me not to have to do every single thing now. Plus, I didn't join a band that was like a fucking job. I joined a band that played fast, loud music like the band I was in, the Didjits. It hasn't been a step down or anything. I can come up with four songs instead of 12. And these guys know how to rock. It's rock², see, it's rock squared."
"Rock to the fourth power," laughs Spaghetti.
Nevertheless, Sims prefers to keep Chicago as his home base.
"We can't seem to get him to move," Spaghetti shrugs.
"Yeah," Sims agrees dryly. "That's where I have sex."
"Good point!" Spaghetti concedes. "I don't want to take the man away from his sex. I don't want to be around any man who's not getting his sex."
Before we go any further, I'm compelled to tell them that rumors are spreading about Sacrilicious. "Somebody was saying to me last night, 'I heard it's almost normal.'" But before they can do too much griping ("We never tried to do anything abnormal," Spaghetti insists), I continue. "The first time I heard it, I kind of thought that way myself. But then I listened to it again and decided, 'Nah, it's not normal.' I picked it apart and realized it's just not as consistently mile-a-minute fast."
"Right," Spaghetti nods. "That's the only difference I can see. It's got better songs that didn't need to be played so fast in order to make up for whatever they lacked in songwriting quality. And now, it doesn't seem like everything sounds better a hundred miles an hour — some things still do, of course."
In addition to the more... well, I guess you could say "sophisticated" timbre of the album, the band's musical credibility has also been heightened by a collaboration with Willie Nelson. While in Austin making Sacrilicious, they also recorded "Bloody Mary Morning" with country music's perpetual outlaw for a tribute album - that is, tribute to ol' Willie, not the Supersuckers.
"There was a lot of high-gettin'," Sims recalls of the affiliation.
"He has this guy, Bucky," Spaghetti explains, "and he just goes, 'Bucky!' and then a joint is in his hand, boom! Just like that."
Willie's sister, Bobbie, also lent her soulful piano playing to the Suckers' tune, "Don't Go Blue."
"His sister's the same way," Spaghetti enthuses, "smoking us all under the table - and we're young bucks, and these are 65-year-old people here! They're just really inspirational people. They're all really nice, they treat people really good and they've been creative for years and years."
"Speaking of inspirational, I just have to know who is that powerful woman you speak of in your song, '19th Most Powerful woman in Rock'?"
"It's our booking agent," Spaghetti tells me. "She got real hammered one night and was telling the guys, either in Mudhoney or New Bomb Turks or something that she's the nineteenth most powerful woman in rock. I don't know if she has an actual list or what. I mean, I figured she must have, the way they said she was going on about it. At first she was really pissed off about the song, but it's not a total slam or anything. It's just fun, and now she's appropriately flattered."
"In that song," Sims adds, "me and Bolton have, like, dueling rock guitar stuff going on. He's going DA-DA-DA-DOOO and I'm going WHEEE!"
Like many a guitarist, Sims can give a nifty vocal imitation of his licks. He turns down my request for more examples, however. Too bad, because I would like to have heard his rendition of that familiar, classic riff at the end of "Ozzy." It turns out I had that tune completely wrong. It's not about Mr. Osbourne, as I had assumed.
"That song's about my cat," Bolton asserts. He offers a sample lyric to prove it. "He's black as a spade."
Pictures of irate African-Americans go through everyone's head.
"We're gonna get in trouble with that song," Spaghetti bemoans.
"Well, a spade is like a card," Sims dutifully explains.
"You could have said 'black as the ace of spades.' That would have made it politically correct."
"Then we would have been ripping off Motorhead," Sims counters.
There's no winning. We run into more trouble when I ask them why they went to Austin to make the album.
"We like those states that are conservative, racist and homophobic," Sims asserts. Then, naturally, he has to correct his statement. "Wait now — that's sarcasm. Put a 'Ha-ha-ha' right after that — 'They said kiddingly.'" Point taken.
"They're still pretty conservative there," Spaghetti contends. "We got thrown in jail for just having a beer in the street. In all of Austin, except for just like this six-block radius downtown, you can do that. So we had been accustomed to walking around with a beer. And then the cops came up and, you know, it seemed to me like they could have given us a ticket, but they cuffed us and put us in jail."
"That's because Eddie's bitch was sassin' to the cops," says Sims. (Although he doesn't attach "ha-ha-ha" at the end of this reference to Spaghetti's girlfriend, the implication is there.)
"Then I was just trying to ask, 'Why are you arresting her and not the rest of us?'" Spaghetti continues. "'We were all doing the same thing.' And they were like, 'Okay, smart guy!'" He sighs. "It was my birthday, we had just recorded with Willie Nelson that day and I was on this ultra-high. And then this happens, and I'm telling the cop, 'You know, I was just recording with Willie Nelson, and I think you're being really mean here.' And he just looks at me — 'You think I'm really stupid, don't you?'"
"They just said, 'We arrested him too,'" Sims says, imitating the cop's sarcastic drawl. Eventually, someone sprung them from their confinement, but not before Spaghetti had resigned himself to incarceration. "I was all ready to spend the night," he says. "It was late and I was kinda drunk so I put on the grays and laid down and started falling asleep. Then they came and got me out."
Sob stories like this, however, are few and far between in the Supersuckers' long and sordid history. These guys are on their way up, up, up, and they know it.
"I just bought a brand new big-ass TV," Spaghetti proudly announces. "All my friends are asking me if I plan on spending a lot of time on the couch. Damn right I do! Who doesn't?"
"Does this mean success is going to your head?" I inquire.
"There's no success yet, man," Sims hedges.
"Yeah, but obviously there's some anticipation here, what with buying new appliances," I say.
"The truth of my TV is that I got approved for a credit card, so I went out and — BAM!" Spaghetti reveals.
"You got approved for a credit card?" I'm amazed.
"Yeah, well kinda," he equivocates. "My girlfriend did and I got in on it."
But with a quality record like Sacrilicious, that big old glossy gold card is sparkling on the horizon. The day will come when Eddie Spaghetti will no longer be shocked to find fish in his hotel room wall — he'll be demanding them.
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