BSM: Do you take pains at all to not be considered a mere nostalgia act?
AG: We try not to play “Shake, Rattle and Roll” at weddings, or like, I wouldn’t wear a poodle skirt, and put up jukebox signs on the stage, or all Brian Setzer’s campy stuff like gas station signs and thing like that. I wouldn’t really be into something like that. We played a couple of really corny car shows, like one had a car with mannequin legs stick out of the windows...
KP: Yeah, and people wanted us to play “Blue Suede Shoes” and stuff like that, and that’s not what we do. Like, some people are like ‘We want you to play at our wedding,’ and we’re like ‘Well, we’re glad to do it, but we’re not the kind of band that’s going to play those songs.’ We’re not going to play “Rock Around the Clock,” you know?
AG: Not that those aren’t good songs. It’s just, like at the car show things, people expect something different. I mean, I like it because it’s cool, wild music.
KP: Most people who were around in the 50s don’t even know anything about this kind of music. It’s such a short period of time when it happened, and then it got commercialized from there, and we try to pay homage to the guys who never really got any attention. And that’s the kind of thing we do. It’s a very primitive form of music, so we try to stay true to that, and if we’re being nostalgic, I guess we are, but we’re being nostalgic to a very specific --it’s not like this campy 1950s thing of poodle skirts and pink Cadillacs. It’s more about a bunch of white hillbilly guys that never went anywhere. People are like, “What the heck are you listening to that for?” But it’s the corner stone of the music, y’know? For every Elvis, there’s about 1,000 guys that never went anywhere, and those guys are the important ones. And they never made a dime, just like we don’t. We’re keeping it alive.
BSM: Do you find it intimidating to write songs that are competing with those original classic cuts?
AG: I do, now. I used to not so much, but there’s only so much subject matter, and a lot of the songs I think of are either sad or...I dunno, wordy, and you can’t be like that. I don’t like rockabilly that’s about being angry or like psychobilly things that’s about zombies or I dunno--
KP: Songs about the Devil.
AG: But, it’s hard sometimes.
KP: You want to stay true to form, but also add your own spin to it. We try to stay true to it as best we can. It’s kind of limiting, but challenging, too. A lot of people think ‘Oh, it’s three chords and silly lyrics,’ but some of the greatest songs out there, if you listen to them, the words are just very very clever. And it’s like, yeah it’s three chords, but if you listen to Hank Williams, which to me was like the step before rockabilly, it’s just genius. This is a guy that probably never went past the sixth grade, and he had these lyrics that are just genius. It’s like a working class poet, you know? We aspire to that. I dunno if we’ll ever pull that off. A lot of people are a little corny and go with the simple approach, saying “we’re gonna sing about fuzzy dice,” like Brian Setzer’s a classic example of that, and we try not to do that. I hope we don’t anyway.
BSM: You’ve recently signed up with Rubric Records, and the new album came out this past March...
KP: We recorded the record with Deke Dickerson, who is kind of like the premier guitar player of our generation of this musical style. He was in the David Deke combo, and now he’s a solo act, and he’s this pioneer of vintage recording. We call it a vintage recording studio, but it’s really the living room of his house. It sounds much more fancy to say that we went to Los Angeles and made a record in Hollywood, but it was really his house in Burbank. It’s all recorded on one track mono, it’s an Ampeg 350 1-track machine, so everything was recorded live, with only one microphone on all the drums, one microphone for the vocal and guitar, and there’s no overdubbing. What you hear on the record is what was heard in the room. We were all in one room, no headphones, and it was made the way records were made. We got to use his old guitar amps and stuff, so it was very simply recorded. So if you liked the way records sounded from back then, you kind of have to use the same stuff to make them sound the same way. We came pretty close. There’s some things I’d like to do differently, take some more time on it, but I’m pretty happy with it.

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