By Brian Baker
If word got out that Jon Spencer suffered from ADD, it probably wouldn’t come as a total shock. Spencer throws himself into side projects with the kind of intensity most players reserve for their primary gig. So, while the Blues Explosion takes a bit of a break and Spencer Dickenson likewise languishes by the proverbial pool, Spencer and fellow guitarist Matt Verta-Ray are taking more than a busman’s holiday with the recording of and tour support for their latest outing as Heavy Trash.
“This has been keeping us pretty busy, and we don’t have much time for anything else,” says Verta-Ray from the streets of New York City while Spencer enjoys a family holiday in Spain. “I have all kinds of catch-all bands that pick up the pieces that don’t fit into Heavy Trash. But both of us have been pretty busy at this thing, and it kind of took us by surprise because we approached it as if it were this fleeting side project kind of thing. All of a sudden it was so much fun and the records were so fun to make and touring was going so well, we were like, ‘Fuck, let’s do this.’ It evolved into a real project without anyone mentioning it.”
That may well be, but the ADD thing still doesn’t seem so outlandish, considering the methodology that Spencer and Verta-Ray employed to record the glorious garageabilly rock that emanates from Going Way Out with Heavy Trash. Utilizing three separate bands in three different locales with three different engineers may seem like a scattered approach to making a single album, but the Spencer/Verta-Ray connection was more than enough to draw it all together in the end.
“I always enjoyed reading about the Rolling Stones, when they’d be touring and they would just pop in at Muscle Shoals and pop in at Chess Studio, and every album would have its own feel because of that stuff,” says Verta-Ray.
In fact, Heavy Trash was initially comprised of just Spencer and Verta-Ray in the studio, but on the road the pair would team with whomever else was available to tour, so it made sense to them to make Going Way Out in essentially that same way. Dividing their time between Camp Street Studio in Boston with veteran Paul Kolderie on the board, Verta-Ray’s own NY Hed Studio in New York with Ivan Julian at the home-based console and London’s Toe Rag Studio to work with Liam Watson, Spencer and Verta-Ray worked in a broad spectrum of environments with a unified vision.
“Me and Jon were the producers, we just used various engineers,” says Verta-Ray. “We wanted Liam Watson to oversee things because he’s such an analog head and so are we. And this place is known for having all this beautiful, archaic tube gear and tape machines. He was even more hardcore about the media than us. He was like, ‘I don’t really think we should do this multi-track.’ And we were like, ‘What?’ He thought this kind of music should be mono … maybe stereo. We finally convinced him to go eight track with us, then when we got back to our studio, we dumped it onto our 24-track machine and continued to tape live.”
In addition to the studio shifts, Spencer and Verta-Ray switched out personnel in each location as well: bassist Simon Chardiet and drummer Phil Hernandez in New York, trashabilly cowpunk surf roustabouts the Sadies in Boston, and Danish rockabilly superstars Yebo on drums and The Great Nalna on keyboards (from Tremelo Beer Gut) and bassist Kim Kix (from Powersolo). Verta-Ray notes that he and Spencer had fairly specific roles in mind for each group in each setting.
“We wrote all the stuff first and taught it to the bands who we thought would be appropriate for each type of song,” says Verta-Ray. “The Sadies are from this Canadian country tradition — their parents were in a famous hippie country band — and since they come from that tradition and they’re such consummate players, the ones that were classic and had that feel and relied on that jittery rockabilly, we saved for the Sadies. The Charlie Feathers-ish ones, we did with our New York crew, Simon Chardiet and Phil Hernandez, and they’re like really stripped down and can really play rockabilly. They leave so much out, there’s so much they’re not playing. I don’t think there’s even one cymbal crash and often there’s no snare drum, it’s just this really clickety-clickety-click stuff.”
For the artier rockabilly rhythms, Spencer and Verta-Ray split the difference between their New York session pals Chardiet and Hernandez and left the remainder to the Danish contingent.
“It’s amazing how rockabilly a bunch of Europeans can sound,” says Verta-Ray with a laugh. “These guys are the real thing. This guy [Kim Kix], he’s definitely steeped himself in the tradition. A lot of times, Japanese and European bands will really be enthusiastic about American music but kind of miss the subtleties that make it what it is. That’s not the case with these fellas. They really drank the potion at the source. It’s not like they were looking at the Stray Cats and decided to start a rockabilly band, they’re familiar with Charlie Feathers and Hasil Adkins and some really weird rockabilly stuff that happened.”
The Sadies frequently back up Spencer and Verta-Ray when they take Heavy Trash to Canada and Chardiet and Hernandez are longtime friends of the duo, explaining their involvement. Spencer and Verta-Ray met the Scandinavians two years ago when they needed a band for a European tour and tapped them, as the drummer Yebo also runs the label that licenses Heavy Trash in parts of Europe.
“On the first tour we did with them, I showed up about a week early and played with them and worked stuff out and was pleasantly surprised how good they were,” says Verta-Ray. “They’re all extremely funny, intelligent guys. They were able to pick up the subtleties of the humor. They’re extremely erudite fellas.”
With Spencer and Verta-Ray ultimately having the final say in the production and mixing process, there was never any real danger of Going Way Out, well, going way out.
“It didn’t feel too disjointed because most of the actual overdubbing and mixing and shaping it into an album happened over a course of weeks back in New York with me and Jon down there,” says Verta-Ray. “The actual tracking days were only like three days in those various locations.”
One of the reasons that Going Way Out retained a sense of cohesion was in Spencer and Verta-Ray’s planning phase. With a good deal of the material written and thought out ahead of time, the recording went off without many hitches.
“We knew it was going to go down like this so we wanted to have stuff ready,” says Verta-Ray. “The last album was just me and Jon, there wasn’t a band, and that was a little more informal. We did that on the fly; we’d be in the studio writing stuff and when it felt like a song, we put it on tape. We didn’t want to be wasting everyone’s time, with dollar bills and English pounds floating out the window while we’re trying to come up with stuff.”
And just to keep things interesting when Heavy Trash hits the road, Spencer and Verta-Ray will be switching out live bands just like they did in the studio. For their upcoming Spanish tour, they’ll be taking the Sadies along as their band du tour, and when they circuit through the States, they’ll be accompanied by the Scandinavians.
“Just to shake things up,” says Verta-Ray with a laugh.
Shaking things up seems to be what Heavy Trash does best of all.
Heavy Trash, Powersolo
9 p.m. Wednesday, September 12
Grog Shop
2785 Euclid Heights Blvd.
216.321.5588
Tickets: $12
