I know a secret about Spindrift that you wouldn’t be able to guess from listening to their records or watching the gonzo western based on their songs, “the Legend of God’s Gun.” Coming out of your headphones walking down the street on the way to work on a grey Monday morning their music is a perfectly hypnotic backdrop: falling into rhythm with your footsteps like a psychedelic metronome and painting over the boarded-up tagged warehouses moving past your train window with reverb-soaked 60s faded tie-die. The druggy menacing songs (especially on their new EP Goin Down) sound like they’re waiting for Oliver Stone to scoop them up and score a movie about Timothy Leary. Onstage though, the secret is revealed: Spindrift kicks ass. So many bands in this vein seem to think that the audience is paying to see a cheap light show with poorly mixed guitar swaying accompaniment, but Spindrift takes the cinematic sprawl of their albums and tightens it into catchy garage rock, um, knife-blades, yeah, and then throws them at you, without losing all the novelty and eclecticism they put into the recordings…like Sigur Ros playing Web of Sound, or Ennio Morricone conducting a Dream Syndicate orchestra.
Band leader Kirpatick Thomas was nice enough to chat with me over the phone on Labor Day from what sounded like a picnic. Both of us were rather relaxed in the haze of hot summer day off work, and our conversation wandered from the technical problems of using vintage gear to being freaks in a town with no music scene to the social implications of playing psychedelic rock in the current political climate. After we spoke I sat on my stoop and watched a helicopter circling over South East scatter crowds of migrating finches and imagined Spindrift playing over the scene until all I could see was a desert and the shadows of clouds.
BYT: You’re dead in the middle of a giant tour schedule…
Kirpatrick Thomas: Yeah we are. We played Philly last night. Luckily we have off today …this is our first day off in the last fifteen days. We’ve been playing every night, and it’s a seven week tour, pretty much hitting most of the United States.
BYT: I saw you guys open for the Black Angels last year and you had a few of them onstage with you, do you have the same line up as that tour, the same instrumentation?
KT: Relatively the same except being that is a headlining tour we had to downsize a little bit. Normally we have a second drummer and a lap-steel player but what we ended up doing this time was teaching our keyboard player to play lap-steel so she’s switched over to playing both keyboard and lap-steel at the same time.
BYT: Wait, at the same time?
KT: She plays like three or four instruments altogether. It’s quite a complex process but we make it work. So that fills the songs out really well.
BYT: I was amazed at how much stuff you had going on up there while staying consistently rocking…someone would put down a guitar and hit a crazy rattler percussion thing…
KT: Yeah the biggest example is that our bass player plays both bass and baritone on a two-neck guitar. We actually had to make it ourselves by buying the parts.
BYT: Hitting all the right cues must take a lot of work…How do you keep it so tight onstage, do you all practice 24 hours a day?
KT: Definitely through touring and consistently playing live shows and keeping a set line up which has been pretty steady for the last five years. It’s been the tightest band we’ve ever had since we started. It comes through maturity and a lot of work . We’re still working out a lot of kinks. We get up there sometimes and there’s like electrical buzzes going on, ‘cuz the equipment we use, some of it was built in the 60s, 70s…it’s mostly vintage guitars. We tend to gear towards garage sounds so a lot of the keyboards and transistors tend to buzz a lot. We come into poorly made venues and there’ll be this giant buzz sound coming through. So it takes a lot of work to hone things, make them road-worthy, with stuff breaking down. It’s just through trial and error and experience that we’re able to do it. And dynamics too is a big thing.
BYT: Do you rewrite songs for the live show?
KT: Yeah there are certain aspects that we try to cover when it comes to having certain instruments but I think that when we play live it’s a whole different life. You see the musicians playing and you’re feeling the music. I also think that when people are familiar with a recording they expect to hear a song that sounds similar but I also believe that if you’re playing live and you play it with conviction then you get the same ideas across even if it’s missing some things like timpanis or trumpets. But at the same time we try to fill everything out as close as we can. Certain songs carry over live better than others. There are many aspects to deciding what to play or not to play live…we’ve definitely been expanding on the parts that people are playing. Our keyboard player has been playing a lot more organ leads and doubling up on guitar solos, or having the other guitarist back me up on the lead melodies on the spaghetti western tunes. It’s really neat to keep expanding on it. I believe that by the time we get back from this tour we’re going to be completely transformed.
BYT: You’re touring behind this EP right now on Vacancy which has, what, two new songs on it?
KT: There are two songs on the B-side from a previous release called Songs from the Ancient Age, Beauty and Red Reflection. Red R got some really good airplay in Los Angeles, Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols was playing it on his specialty show on Indie 103.1, which was huge. But on the A-side there are two tracks that have yet to be released on the full EP which comes out in November, called the West.
BYT: The new songs sound like you’re moving away from the Spaghetti Western focus of the Legend soundtrack…am I imagining that?
KT: We are exploring more unknown territory in the cinematic sense, and in the psychedelic sense. Those songs are going to be included on the West, and every song on that album kinda gives a different impression, like you’re in a different place or in a different time in a way. There’s everything form carnival music to klezmer music to early rock and roll, from California psych to Spaceman 3 kind of stuff, Spaghetti Western to Spanish ballads. I think what we’ve tried to do instead of staying on that tip is to continue to hint at different forms of music that aren’t touched on very much while keeping within the realm of something cohesive.
BYT: Your sound seems defined cinematically
KT: We pretty much do. I’d rather have the songs take you to a different place. This song reminds me of sailing on an ocean or this song reminds me of driving though the desert, lost in a ghost town, or this song sounds like you’re at some weird carnival, you know? BYT: Well speaking of a different time I…(crackling noises), hello?
KT: Could you hold on one second?
BYT: Oh sure. (silence)
KT: Sorry about that! We’re at a Labor Day thing right now and…
BYT: Hey no problem. You’re in Philly toady, isn’t that where you’re from?
KT: We’re in Delaware. Pretty much the band started in Delaware, I used to live here. We started in ‘94 I think, as Spindrift. That was like the earlier years, more experimental, working on the music, playing local shows. We had a different line-up back then but it was still pretty solid. From there we ended up moving out to Los Angeles. Then we started happening. It’s good to be back here on Labor Day though.
BYT: Growing up on the East Coast were you fascinated with the L.A. 60s culture and music?
KT: Oh yeah. I think I started getting into the Doors and the Ventures, Iron Butterfly. I got into the bigger bands a bit, the Beatles and Rolling Stones, but not very much. I was more into Captain Beefheart even weird progressive rock and fusion like Mahavishnu Orchestra and King Crimson. I was more interested in the more rare and rare sounding things. Growing up in Deleware there’s not much going on, everyone listens to the same things which made me sick to my stomach so everything I didn’t want it to be something that someone repeated, I just didn’t want to succumb to the peer pressure. So when Spindrift started that was our whole idea, it was like, let’s be different really freak people out and freak ourselves out. Let’s explore whatever territories we want and freak out the jocks. We did it for the first ten years out here. It was like beating your head against a wall because you can do that all you want but you’re not going to go anywhere. We played 3, 4 shows a month at crazy places, backyards, whatever and we did a little touring, but it wasn’t until we got out to the expanse of the west and to Los Angeles where, you know, that whole 60s vibe happened there so it’s accepted. I go to parties and there’s kids jumping around, parents that are still partying. It blew things open, the landscape and the culture. Being that I came from this conservative place, when all of a sudden we get out there and I worked to try and do this for so long—all of a sudden you get this automatic gigantic inspiration. Which is where the whole idea for the movie and the soundtrack and the band cultivated. It was pretty much contagious from there. It’s really been an awesome ride.
BYT: Funny, I have this fantasy about you all growing up in a hut in a canyon even though I know you come from the East Coast. People romanticize California and the desert often, and I guess you did too, but it sounds like it was more freeing to be out there in an actual scene with a lot of like-minded folks rather than stultifying.
KT: By far. We beat our heads against a wall in Delaware. It’s tragic at the same time. I love the guys I played with out here, some of the older members, they were super talented. And the older songs are really cool audio experimentation. But it really isn’t until you get out to the bigger city where I met different people that were really all about it, who really loved going out to the desert and playing pioneer towns and Joshua Tree and filming videos in Death Valley.
BYT: Yeah that sound really seems suited to that particular landscape, like Black Metal does from Sweden you know? But it’s also the historical legacy of LA. As we’re speaking right now Hurricane Gustav is slamming into the south and the RNC is just getting started. Do you think that your music emerges from a correspondence between current events now and the 1960s? I think there’s a similar sense of apocalypse in the air or just radical change of some kind happening…
KT: It’s definitely an amazing time to be alive in terms of US politics right now. I feel like there are many many changes to come for our planet, but I’m more optimistic about it than I have been for the last five, ten years. There’s always going to be the dangerous combination of natural disasters and a population explosion but I do think there is a collective consciousness that’s comes across that says that if we’re going to survive on this earth we have to create a strategy for that. And maybe that transgresses into the music that we play. I think that basically it shows up as the fact that we’re six people on the road right now, and we’re not really making a living off of this, but we just quit our jobs for seven weeks because we think the music will inspire people. I believe that true inspiration when people hear music is something that increases your IQ and actually wakes you up, like breathing straight oxygen. Naturally all the events going on influence the music, it wasn’t made in the 60s so it’s a whole different thing, and it’s a whole different ballgame.
BYT: Well I can attest to that having you guys live. OK, thanks so much for your time.
KT: That’s great, thanks for calling!
Get a shot of mindpower tonight at the Velvet Lounge with Flying Eyes, and Sugarcane Crawl .
photos from: http://www.myspace.com/thewest
