KTVU.com Talks To Melvins Drummer Dale Crover
- By David Pehling
- POSTED: 4:24 pm PDT July 15, 2008
Over the course of a 25+ year career playing by their own rules, guitarist Buzz Osborne and monster drummer Dale Crover have co-piloted seminal underground rock band the Melvins through a wildly diverse exploration of heavy music. Inspired by the slow tempos and downtuned guitar sludge of Black Sabbath as well as the dissonance of punk mavericks Flipper and My War-era Black Flag, the Melvins became legends in Washington State during their formative years in the early-to-mid 1980s after being founded in the small town of Aberdeen.
The Melvins crushing riffs and lumbering grooves would end up influencing the entire Northwest music scene: Aberdeen natives and early fans Kurt Cobain (who at one point auditioned for the band) and Krist Novoselic were inspired to form Nirvana while other grunge heavyweights like Alice In Chains and Soundgarden similarly updated the Sabbath template. The Melvins have been credited as a cornerstone inspiration for a number of heavy rock subgenres, providing the template for stoner rock bands and experimental drone terrorists alike.
With a revolving cast of bassists, the Melvins have produced a veritable landslide of experimentally minded releases that have consistently pushed the envelope of alternative rock. Whether recording for major label Atlantic or issuing discs on numerous independent imprints, the group has forged a singular, instantly recognizable sound. The band received piles of critical accolades for its 2006 effort (A) Senile Animal, an album that found Crover and Osborne partnered with equally heavy duo Big Business (featuring bassist Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis).
The quartet recently issued its follow-up featuring the same line-up entitled Nude with Boots that spotlights more of Osborne's twisted, tuneful riffs and the huge percussive onslaught of Crover and Willis while venturing into some stranger territory. KTVU.com recently spoke with Crover about his life with the Melvins, the long gestation of their concept of using two drummers and the band's plans for the future.
KTVU.com: You were 16 years old when you first joined the Melvins with Buzz Osborne, so you've been in the band for all of your adult life. Has there ever been a point when you wanted to step away from it?
Dale Crover: No, things are getting better all the time. When we first started out making records and touring people hated our guts. I'm not kidding. I remember playing this show in Salt Lake City and spending the night where we played. I remember waking up with the older, kind of hippy guy who ran the place saying 'You know, you guys just aren't very good. You should just give it up.' [laughs]
KTVU.com: Well, you were definitely blazing your own trail early on.
Dale Crover: At that time, people were playing really fast hardcore music and we were doing really slow, sludgy stuff influenced by Black Flag's My War stuff, so people just hated that stuff and hated our band.
KTVU.com: And Flipper, another band lots of people hated.
Dale Crover: Sure. Those guy were definitely a big influence. We've always loved that stuff. And people still hate our band, but oh well. We like what we do. We've always liked what we do. That's why we keep making music.
KTVU.com: I've followed the Melvins for a long time. There have been moments both live and on album where you've lost me, but you seem to be hitting a real apex since Jared and Cody from Big Business joined up. (A) Senile Animal and the new album aren't just two of my favorite Melvins albums; they're two of the best things I've heard in the last five years.
Dale Crover: I think they might be our favorites too. You always make a record and think 'I really like this a lot.' That's better than saying 'Uhhhh, I'm not sure about this.' We've always been confident. That's what you need is confidence. A lot of bands worry about what people are gonna think. When that makes them not so sure of themselves, I think they just try too hard and make something sterile.
KTVU.com: With the success that the Melvins found in the early '90s onward, did you ever get any offers to join other bands? I imagine someone must have thought 'Hey, we should get that Dale Crover guy!' Obviously you've got a great working relationship with Buzz, but did any offers come up?
Dale Crover: No big bands really. Nothing like that. I mean, people ask me to play on stuff, but nothing really major. There have been a few things. I've tried to put the word out to get studio work, but people always want the same guy who always does stuff, which down here [in Los Angeles] is Josh Freese. It's weird. I've done a few things. I played on a Hank Williams III record and a couple other things like that. I did something not that long ago with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She's doing a soundtrack for the Where the Wild Things Are movie. I don't know when it's coming out. But I went and recorded something with her and she said 'Oh, the producers didn't really like it.' It was too heavy or something, I don't know. That's a whole other world though.
KTVU.com: When I spoke with Buzz for an interview after (A) Senile Animal came out, I mentioned that concept of a band having two drummers usually fell into two camps. You have the mushy Grateful Dead approach, and then you have the more avant-garde style of say King Crimson when they used a double trio or Ornette Colman. That's the end of the spectrum the Melvins seem closer to. I was wondering when you first started working with Cody, was there any initial trepidation about having a second drummer?
Dale Crover: Not really. It was something that we had thought about for a long time. Actually, a lot longer than since they've been in the band. Originally, we were going to do something with Dave Grohl a long time ago. While he was actually still in Nirvana and they were still a functioning band. And then it just never really panned out, even after Kurt died. We were like 'Hey man, do you want to come and play?' and he was into it. He'd even drawn up plans for a giant drum set for the two of us to play. And then he started the Foo Fighters and we never heard from him again.
So it was something we'd thought about doing, and this just kind of fell in our laps once we were in the market for a new bass player. We knew those guys, they were a duo already, and they'd planned to move to L.A. before we'd even asked them. So it worked out in a really weird way. I'd also been playing with Dave Lombardo when we've been doing the combination of Fantomas and the Melvins for the big band. So I'd already done some stuff like that and I knew what it was like. I knew it could be done. It really appealed to us, the fact that Cody is left handed; we could sit really close together and it would look like a mirror image.
KTVU.com: So the idea of an eight-limbed, unified drummer was always at the core of the concept?
Dale Crover: Yeah, pretty much. Just something really massive. We always liked the older Swans stuff when they had two drummers. The Butthole Surfers, obviously. Those are probably closer to what we had in mind than an Allman Brothers type of thing or .38 Special.
KTVU.com: I didn't know .38 Special even had two drummers.
Dale Crover: Well, you can't really tell that they did. Actually, some people when they heard our last record said they couldn't tell we had two drummers.
KTVU.com: That's funny. I thought (A) Senile Animal had more of this push-and-pull where you could hear the two of you working distinctly. Together, obviously, but it gave a certain tension to some of the songs. This new album seems to have a more unified drum sound overall.
Dale Crover: We've got a lot more under our belts show-wise now. When we made Senile Animal we'd never played a show with those guys. Now we've played 150 or 160 shows together. So we're just tighter as a band.
KTVU.com: I've noticed on this album a much more distinct stereo channel separation of the drum parts. What I thought of while listening on headphones is that I was hearing what I'd hear if I was facing you on a stage...
Dale Crover: Yeah, I'm on the right and Cody's on the left. It's always kind of confusing because what I'm hearing is the opposite.
KTVU.com: Is that how the recording was approached for both albums?
Dale Crover: Sort of, but then again we don't have any rules as far as that goes. There are some songs where it's like that for sure, but then there are other ones where we decided to do something completely different. We'd use mono drums or make the drums more distorted on one channel or whatever. There are tons of possibilities and I think we have a lot more left that we can do. This is still the beginning for us with these guys in the band.
KTVU.com: In a recent interview with Buzz that I read, he said that he felt this was a weirder album than (A) Senile Animal .
Dale Crover: A little bit, I think so.
KTVU.com: But at the same time, this album is frontloaded with three of the most hook-heavy, accessible rock songs you've done. Then it veers off into "Dies Iraea," with sounds like a theme in search of a horror movie.
Dale Crover: It actually is the theme to a horror movie. That's from The Shining. Actually, it's older than that [synth composer Wendy Carlos adapted Hector Berlioz's version of the 13th century Latin hymn from the fifth movement of his Symphonie Fantastique]. I think the song was something Buzz had suggested for the Fantomas Director's Cut record. Then it never happened, so he thought we could do it. I like it because it's different than anything else on the album. I think that's where the weirdness comes in.
KTVU.com: I didn't make the Jello Biafra 50th Birthday shows you played a little while ago and had a couple of questions about that experience. You ended up backing Jello to close the shows, but you also opened them by performing songs from your original demos. What was the approach you took playing material that reached so far back in the band's history? I know you were playing bass.
Dale Crover: And the original drummer Matt Dillard was playing drums. First we had to play with him to see if it would work. Buzz hadn't played with Matt since 1984. That was the first step. I had mentioned to Buzz that we should do some shows for it when it came out [Mangled Demos from 1983 was issued for the first time on Ipecac and Alternative Tentacles in 2005]. No one had talked to Matt Lukin for years and he's not involved in music anymore. He was the original bass player. So Buzz was like 'Ok. If we do it, do you want to play bass?' and I said 'Yeah!'
So I learned all the songs and we tried it out and it sounded pretty good. So we just decided to keep rehearsing to see if we could do something. And then the Jello thing came up, and since the vinyl version of the demos were out on AT, we thought it was perfect. We ran it by him to see if he was interested and he was. We did like a 20 minute set of that stuff. I think we're probably going to do some more eventually. We even talked about writing some songs. We actually started to write a song during the rehearsals, which is pretty funny. It's like going back to where that band left off before I joined the Melvins.
KTVU.com: So you pretty much tried to stay true to the form of the demos as they were recorded 25 years ago?
Dale Crover: We didn't change them that much. The drummer plays pretty much the same way. When w first started rehearsing we made some tapes just to see how it sounded and I was like 'Sounds like you guys did back in 1984.' They said 'Yeah, except the bass playing is a little bit better." Thanks guys! That show got recorded too, so I'm hoping we can do something with that. At least the second night came out really good.
KTVU.com: For the live performance with Jello, you're still drawing on the album and EP you did with him.
Dale Crover: Yeah, stuff from those along with our pick of Dead Kennedys songs we really like a lot.
KTVU.com: Do you have plans to collaborate with him again, either on stage or in the studio?
Dale Crover: We'll probably do some more live shows. Not sure exactly when, since we're going to be busy pretty much through the end of the year. Maybe sometime next year we'll do something else with him.
KTVU.com: But no real recording plans at this point?
Dale Crover: Well, it takes a while work out stuff like that with him, but we'll see how it goes. Also he's got a new band with him [The Axis of Merry Evildoers, who also debuted at the Jello 5-0 shows].
KTVU.com: The last tour for Senile Animal was like this big sludge-rock variety show with Big Business, you playing drums with your tour manager Tim Moss and his band Porn and guitar with your band Altamont. Are you envisioning something similar when you take the new album out on the road?
Dale Crover: Sort of. Big Business will definitely be opening. That's kind of a no brainer, since they're with us anyway. They might as well. You know, we have so much gear with us, it just kind of works out better to not have a bunch of opening bands that are local. For one, we can't really pay them; secondly, it's just kind of a pain in the ass. Moss wants to do something again. Maybe some kind of noisy type of thing since the next Porn thing that's coming out is a Porn vs. Merzbow record [Merzbow is a legendary one-man Japanese experimental/noise outfit headed by Masami Akita]. It's about what you'd expect.
KTVU.com: In another recent interview, Buzz seemed to indicate that the next Melvins album would be much more of a departure. Are you already writing towards that? After two pretty conventional albums, is it time to weird out again?
Dale Crover: It's always a conscious thing to do something different. Both these records are pretty similar and in the rock vein, though I agree there is some weirder stuff on this record. I'm sure that it will be something completely different. We'll probably use a different studio and probably approach things a lot differently, recording-wise. Hopefully, we'd like to do something on our own in our practice room. We've been doing some recording there lately and have collected a nice number of microphones to use. And just considering the cost of going to a studio, we could probably take our time and do something on our own. So, yeah it'll be different. Of course it will.
KTVU.com: It's the Melvins. How could it not be different?
Dale Crover: Exactly. We're not AC/DC. There's just so many other possibilities to explore. Why wouldn't we? That's what makes it interesting. That's what's kept us going for so long. It's always something new. I've read some reviews lately from some metal magazines where they're saying 'Those guys suck when they do noise. It's good when they do this rock stuff. All that other stuff is just bulls-t.' We're not putting out the same record over and over again. Otherwise it would be boring. We would have given up a long time ago.
The Melvins play this Friday, July 18, at Slim's in San Francisco