Creative spirit guides alternative rockers Thye Dandy Warhols and Spindrift

OREGON’S DANDY WARHOLS’ INDEPENDENT LABEL, BEAT THE WORLD, ALSO A GOOD FIT FOR SPINDRIFT

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Published: September 4, 2009

Brent DeBoer of The Dandy Warhols and Spindrift front man Kirpatric Thomas were on opposite coasts last week, with plans to bring their bands together in the middle of the country for a run through the Southwest that lands them at Oklahoma City’s Diamond Ballroom on Saturday.

"We’re back here recording, doing little projects, getting ready to go back out tomorrow,” drummer DeBoer said from the front porch of his Portland, Ore., home.

Thomas, on the other hand, was already on the move with his outfit when I reached him for a separate interview.

"I’m in a van right now, and we’re driving to our next gig, which is in Providence (R.I.),” Spindrift’s singer, guitarist and chief songwriter said over the raucous chatter of his bandmates.

They may have been a continent apart at the moment, and they certainly approach alternative psych-rock from very different stylistic directions, but the bands have been closely associated for a couple of years now. In fact, Spindrift is signed to the Dandys’ new independent Beat the World label.

The Portland-based quartet launched its own imprint in 2008 after severing a 10-year relationship with Capitol Records, over creative frictions dating to the 2003 release of "Welcome to the Monkey House.” The label didn’t like the original version that was mixed by Russell Elavedo, the Grammy-winning soul engineer who’d worked with such urban acts as D’Angelo, The Roots, Common and Alicia Keys.

So Capitol called in British producer Jeremy Wheatley (Sugababes, Girls Aloud), who "ramped up the guitars” and polished things up with synthesizers and richer, poppier production.

"It was kind of a painful time,” DeBoer said. "So much work and so many flights to England and New York and basically all over the world, workin’ on this thing, shaping it into our dream album. To have that taken away from you, it really hurt. It’s like finishing your masterpiece and having somebody just drive over it with a car or something.”

So the first thing the Dandys did on their new label was release the shelved Elavedo-mixed version of the album, renaming it "The Dandy Warhols Are Sound.”

"We’re really pleased with it,” DeBoer said. "We’re just glad people who are big fans are now able to check out this original version. I think it’s more of a stripped-down version. It’s more of a straight-up, four-piece rock band style.”

DeBoer said he, singer-guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor, keyboardist Zia McCabe and guitarist Peter Holmstrom are just "bangin’ stuff out straight through the thing. ... Russell’s such an amazing mixer, an urban mixer. ... We’re kind of the first alternative rock band he’s ever worked with. It was kind of an interesting combination, but yeah, I think it’s really cool. It’s kind of like Dr. Dre remixing Simon and Garfunkel or something.”

Meanwhile, the Dandys’ new friends and labelmates, Spindrift, sound like The Doors covering the spaghetti Western scores of Ennio Morricone on their 2008 Beat the World label debut, "The West.”

"I started the band in ’94 (in Delaware),” said Spindrift’s Thomas. "And that earlier version was like experimental psychedelic rock basically, with a more shoe-gaze kind of feel to it. And we got into a lot of garage rock kind of psych bands, punk bands, and we got into space rock like Hawkwind.”

But by 2001, the lure of the West had hooked him, and so had the music of Morricone. He decided to take Horace Greeley’s famous advice.

"It was right when I was packin’ up to leave that I saw ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ by Sergio Leone, and that was an amazing inspiration,” Thomas said.

He found further inspiration as he drove through the big-sky country of the Midwest and Southwest and the vast, butte-studded deserts of Arizona and Nevada on his way to Los Angeles. This new inspiration not only began to inform his music but ignited an urge to film his own tribute to Italian horse operas, resulting in the 2007 basement-budget psychedelic Western, "The Legend of God’s Gun.”

The film was written and directed by Mike Bruce from a story idea by Thomas, about a preacher-turned-gunfighter who rides into the town of Playa Diablo to face down a scorpion venom-swilling bandito named El Sobero. Thomas plays the villain. He also wrote the film’s music, which has just been re-released on Tee Pee Records.

"We added in other subplots, things like that, references to other movies, and then put our own music in there, our own selves in there, acting out our own music,” Thomas said. "It’s almost in a weird way like true to life, true to what we believe as a band.”

And that would be the same thing The Dandy Warhols believe in: creative freedom.