A Conversation with The Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor – HuffPost 3.28.14
Mike Ragogna: The Dandy Warhols has a new album, Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia: Live At The Wonder. Why did you go back to that album and can you describe the event beyond the music?
Courtney Taylor-Taylor: So 2013 was the 13th anniversary of Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, and I think it was probably our biggest-selling record…maybe …Monkey House was, but I think Thirteen Tales… outsold …Monkey House. But we decided that we would just play the entire record with all of the segues between the music and extra musicians and all of that stuff. So we did a litlte tour, just a couple weeks in America and maybe one overseas show with it. But sort of at the last minute, because that’s sort of how we do everything, somebody said, “Hey, you guys have got like four shows left, you should probably record this.” So that was maybe the second to last show of the tour and somebody managed to get some kind of digital recording box down there, plug it into the board and just record whatever came out. Then we mixed it here at the studio, the auditorium, and we made sure not to do any of the overdubs or anything like that. We didn’t want to cheat, we just wanted to document what we do live. Also we can then take exactly that and play it for a live mixing engineer and say, “By the way, this is exactly what it should sound like in front of the stage when we’re playing,” because you can not go see your own band. You can never go and see your own band, decide how it sounds and either correct your front of house mixing engineer or change that person. So that’s as close as we’ll ever get to hearing our own band. But really you don’t know what it sounds like.
MR: What did you think of the performance in the end? A lot has happened between when you first recorded Thirteen Tales… and now. It sounds like you guys have grown as musicians and artists.
CT: That’s a pretty long assumption. Okay, okay, let’s just assume we have.
MR: [laughs] But you know where I’m going with this, it’s about the evolution from how you heard that project when you first recorded to heard how performed it live all those years later.
CT: Yeah. I don’t know that we’ve grown up since then at all. Certainly a good bunch of us spent the last thirteen years basically drunk or stoned. You don’t necessarily grow up that much. I don’t know if we changed at all. I really don’t. I look at the pictures on that record and I say, “Wow, we look a lot younger. We look like little kids.” We look like grown-ups now.
MR: What do you think of The Dandy Warhols nowadays and what are you doing in 2014?
CT: What are we doing in 2014? The usual. Go to Europe for a little bit, enjoy the spring and early summer. For the spring tour, we’ll do America, we’ll go around and do a couple weeks and try to go to places we haven’t hit in 15 years like Memphis and just do kind of small venues in America so that we can go back again and do more serious, larger venues later in the year, with colleges in September. Then Australia and Europe. That’s kind of just what we do year in and year out. Last year we didn’t really work very hard, and I haven’t left Portland all winter, which is a real bummer because it’s pretty grey and crappy here. We usually go somewhere in the other hemisphere for the winter, but we didn’t this year. We’ve changed booking agents and managers. We ended up with a bigger profile team, so we’re kind of attempting to just ramp up The Dandy Warhols and pay for our children’s education or whatever. What I think is the most important thing is that we still enjoy that new bands that come out have our records and they’re bands we like. The young bands that we have influenced, and we’ve definitely made our mark–I’m not so sure sonically we really were one of the first bands to bring back vintage guitars, vintage amps, old synthesizers, eighties keyboard sounds, that was Welcome To The Monkey House, and before that was Thirteen Tales… and before that, Come Down was a shoegazer record. We were a couple of years ahead of everybody back then. The bands that are still influenced by us are amazing, but also just the attitude, the disposition of young bands, that it’s very cool to be smart and whimsically dressed–not necessarily well-dressed but not badly dressed. I like that. I like that it’s cool to be smart, it’s cool to be eccentric and all that stuff. More importantly what I and every artists I knew at 14, 15 years old, punk or new wave kids, all we really wanted was to create a world where people understood us and were interesting to us and we were interesting to them. The Dandy Warhols have most f**king definitely done this one thing: We have definitely made the world a place that we enjoy more.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
CT: Oh God, just enjoy it. Enjoy that you’re a new band and you’re excited about getting into a band and being gone and getting four days off work at the pizza joint you work at. It’s like, fuck, man, I wish I could go back. That’s something that gets me every single day of my life. I can’t be seven years old in the summer again, I can’t be a twenty-nothing again, I can’t be a teenager, I can’t even go back three years and do it. Ugh. The art and the commerce and all that, I know that’s what you’re looking for in an answer, “What you really need to do, man, is develop a web presence.” No, f**k that, just enjoy your f**king life and do what everyone does, document it, hashtag the f**k out of everything, whatever, that’s cool, but really, be present. Hang out with people and really milk life. Every day. Just get as much as you can out of it because it’s not just going to give you sh*t. Jackie Onassis said, “Don’t expect much from life.”
Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne