by Tim Ross
The Grifters hail from Memphis, Tennessee. They might be described as four guys that, dare I say, deconstruct classic/bluesy rock and pop by updating the music to their own 1990s lo-fi, screwy indie-rock perspective. Or one could just simply say they rock. Either way, their One Sock Missing album was easily one of 1993's best.
The Grifters recently released two new singles, and with a new album out in May, they are continuing to tour relentlessly. Some opening dates for Rocket from the Crypt recently brought them to the Cat's Cradle. I got to talk with Dave, one of the guitarists, and I was impressed by his friendliness and the sincerity with which he discussed the Grifters and the music business in general. The Grifters seem to be sort of a blue-collar band that is really into making their music and playing shows. And although they are at a point where they don't totally need their day jobs anymore, they would rather play small clubs than get big guarantees. That's rock and roll.
SF! = Tim Ross
D = Dave Shouse, Grifters guitarist
The conversation begins in progress, discussing the possibility of the Grifters heading to Europe in May.
SF! -- Like NME and stuff like that . . .
D -- Yeah, I mean 'cause it's just . . . you've seen those things - weekly music tabloid crap. I mean, if you've got to write something every week, you've got to make up half of it; there's not that much good stuff to write about.
SF! -- They'll pan you one week and then the next week . . .
D -- Well, see, that was the good thing, because the reviews we got over in Europe were not great or terrible, they were... confused. These people are like, "These guys are... I don't know... "
SF! -- Fucked . . .
D -- We said "That's great." (laughs) That's so great to keep 'em off balance.
SF! -- So you don't get thrown in with the next new wave of American bands.
D -- Well, I think what happened was they did the grunge thing and then the slacker thing. Then the English press woke up one day about six months ago and said, "You know, really, nobody except for Pavement and Sebadoh on the underground scene hav e really proven themselves." And they must have written that down and passed it to all the magazines. So that became the credo. "Oh, all the American bands suck." So, unfortunately at this time, Superchunk and Tsunami and a couple of people from the East Coast were touring over there and got really panned - bad. And then they got on this macho thing about how American bands are so macho. We did a show with Fugazi in Chicago and Everett Troop came over from Melody Maker and the whole gist of the article wa s like "these bands, you know, they're kind of macho but they don't ride that macho thing." I was going "what the fuck?"
SF! -- You guys don't express any sort of "stage bravado" at all though. That's ridiculous.
D -- Yeah, I mean it's just boring. I'm sure next week they'll have a new angle.
SF! -- Let me ask you about Memphis. What's your perspective on Òthe sceneÓ now. . . it's been a musical town for so long, Sun Studios . . .
D -- Yeah, we were talking about that today. It's really weird, because Memphis has had a music scene since, like, 1920. It would really suck if someone tried to come there and declare "Oh, Memphis now has a scene..."
SF! -- The new blues scene!
D -- There's some really bizarre bands in Memphis, and it's really kind of sad, 'cause some of them don't give a shit about doing anything with their music. But that's OK, because if that's what they really want - just to play, have a good time an d not worry about the rest of the world. I mean, they make some tapes and give 'em to their friends and such. . . Memphis is a good place to listen to stuff. There's a good community station there; there's no college radio, but the community station progr ams a lot of blues, a lot of rockabilly, a lot of older stuff, and not just in that Memphis genre, they do Celtic music and all sorts of stuff. But it's good to stay in touch with that stuff, because we listen to it a lot.
SF! -- Yeah, you can tell, slightly.
D -- Well, that's what the thing is, if you try to do it just full-on, then people would go, "Yeah, you sound like Jon Spencer." And we go, "No, Jon Spencer sounds like Memphis."
SF! -- He recorded there . . .
D -- Yeah, but it's true, so... But then again, we like pop music too much. I mean it's not just Big Star. We're Big Star fans, but we're fans of Raspberries and Beatles and anything that has a good hook, like the Everly Brothers.
SF! -- You get a nice blend.
D -- As long as it feels good, because, see, we've been compared to bands like Truman's Water, which is totally wrong. They're a great band, but they're just totally different. They don't...
SF! -- I guess you could say that you both use fucked bits of noise every now and then, but aside from...
D -- The main difference there is I think they know what they're doing and I don't think we do. We get lost.
SF! -- That's odd, 'cause your songs fall apart and sound just perfect. Like "Corolla Hoist" or some of the songs off So Happy Together. Does it just kind of "gel" or . . . Is it unconscious?
D -- Well, sometimes it's forced and sometimes it's almost natural. We've been able to start out like that and say "OK, we've got a skeletal structure down." And through that, we'll see what happens. Everybody just kind of does their own thing. Ea rly on it was really 50-50. You could climb out on a limb, and someone would saw it off, and you couldn't get back in time - you were gone, you know? But we've gotten fairly intuitive.
SF! -- How does the stuff on the new album compare to One Sock Missing?
D -- It's definitely a progression beyond the last two. It incorporates some of the studio miking techniques we did on So Happy Together. Alot of that was done on four-track, but a lot of it was done in the studio with the weirdo miking techniques that made everything kind of mesh.
SF! -- It sounds like you used a lot of effects on that record.
D -- Well, it's like we used things like a jambox as a microphone to pick up sounds. Then you pump them back in through a monitor for the jambox. The jambox will overdrive really easily, provides this little cushion of "Ssssss..." sizzle. And we u sed Lesley rotating organ speakers as a microphone, and they pick up sound too. And weird floor mikes and stuff. What we didn't have this time is the flower shop. We got kicked out.
SF! -- That was your practice space?
D -- Yeah, we had a party that kinda got out of hand. One of the owners' husband walked in and it was like, "Uh-oh." So we haven't been able to do as much four-track stuff with a full-on band. The new record is mainly in the studio, with three fou r-track songs, and one four-track song that was done in a parking garage. It's more studio stuff, but I think it has fewer seams. One Sock had a lot of seams, a lot of really weird music that jumped a whole lot. This flows a bit more, but still, that's th e other thing we can't do. We're really conscious of the fact that a lot of bands blueprint their material, like "this song is great, so this is what we'll sound like for the rest of..." and that bums us out.
SF! -- You'd rather mix it up . . .
D -- And take some chances 'cause one of these days you get old, you go, "I got to put my kid through college." You can sign with Sony, do background music, you know. But now, it's just, see what we can get away with. There are some things on the record that are weird. We used some keyboards for the first time . . . really, I say keyboard, I mean Casio sampler.
SF! -- The new album is on Shangri-La?
D -- Yeah, we had an agreement with Southern to do two records. The Southern people here in the states and Chicago are really good. The English people - they're OK, we've had our problems communicating and understanding each other, but that's beca use they're so far away, and the markup there is so weird, but it's a good thing so far.
SF! -- Shangri-La is your friends' label?
D -- Yeah, it's a friend of ours who runs a record store. Sherman and Eric run the store, and Eric writes Wipeout! fanzine. So they were doing the store thing and Sherm was buying from distributors, so he said "You know, we could put stuff out, because I know who I can trust in the distribution field." So that was cool. They're just good people, and they're smart. We do all radio and fanzine mailing, so we keep track of that, cause there are a lot of shitty college stations out there, and I don't want to give away free records to somebody who's too busy playing whatever coming from England. The South is potmarked with decent stations; Tennessee doesn't have a good college station.
SF! -- When you guys go down to, say, Alabama and Mississippi to play, do people go?
D -- We've only done one show in Mississippi, and that was done two nights ago in Oxford with some friends of ours. It was a pretty decent show, we had a lot of people come from Memphis and some locals, but it's a college town. It's no different f rom Athens, GA. Athens can be a nightmare because there's 1,200 kids down at some Catfish Jenkins show, this band that's like "We smoke pot...and jam." So it's really original. Yeah, but we don't play much in the South.
SF! -- That's odd. You play mostly in Chicago and up North?
D -- Yeah, Northeast, Chicago, Minneapolis. This is like the fourth time we've been in North Carolina. But, North Carolina's different. It's different from the rest of the South. I love going to play the (Duke) Coffeehouse; (Cat's Cradle) is OK . . . it's kind of a big thing. We like smaller clubs, that way we can kind of . . . small clubs are a lot better . . . everyone's drinking a lot!