As far as the bonus tracks, were there any surprises for you – anything you hadn’t heard for a while?

Those live tracks – the Thirsty Ear radio show? I remember playing them, but I hadn’t heard them since we did it. So those were fun to hear. Really, though, all of the bonus stuff – the demos, the live tracks – was stuff that I hadn’t heard in forever.

You know, hearing some of the acoustic Bottle Rockets stuff from back then makes me think of your Not So Loud album that was released in 2011. The unplugged thing isn’t really a reach for you guys – you’ve been doing it for years, man.

Well, you know what? That’s the way our songs get written and rehearsed. We don’t rehearse at “blazing rock volume” … everything starts off small. But the acoustic thing on Not So Loud really was sort of foreign for us because we’d never done a lot of it out live acoustically. Bringing it to the stage, it wasn’t odd playing it, but it was odd on the technical end … shit, when you play acoustic, you’ve got more cables and stuff than when you play electric. (laughs)

Because you’re trying to make it sound acoustic.

Right! That’s why we never did it before – we knew what a pain in the ass it is. (laughter)

Well, you guys pull it off well and not everyone can. It’s a different setting when you don’t have the volume to work with or the effects – what’s coming out under your elbow is what you’ve got, baby.

That’s right. There’s a Tom Petty quote – I guess I quote him a lot, but he says great shit. (laughter) Anyway, he said, “If you can’t pull off a song on just an acoustic guitar, you better keep an eye on it.” And that’s very true – if you can’t keep someone interested with just an acoustic guitar; if they only like it because of the loud stuff, then there’s something wrong with that song.

And then on the other hand we have the bonus tracks from your old band Chicken Truck, which are about as yeeee-hawww punk as you can get.

Yep! (laughter) We were all about crazy at that time. (laughter)

Man you had to have broken, blown up, or caught something on fire during “Brand New Year”.

Oh, yeah. (laughter) I barely remember recording that. We were down in our bass player’s basement and we didn’t know anything except to play as loud as we could.

Let me ask you something: there’s that old cliché that goes with almost any sort of art where you have the writer/painter/musician who has been creative – and drunk or high – for years. When they get straight, a lot of their audience worries they’re going to lose their edge.

Right, right, right.

But you’ve been sober for years now – and man, I defy anybody to say that you’ve lost any of your edge.

You know, it’s funny, because the whole decade of my 30s – which would’ve been the 90s – I was pretty much drunk. But I had some alcoholic qualities and not others.

For instance, I didn’t drink because I liked the taste of it; I drank to get drunk. But at the same time, I only did it in social situations. I never drank at home; I never even kept booze in the house, really … it was just a social thing.

But throughout that entire time, never once did I ever write a song drunk – ever. Somehow I kept that part separate. Now, I recorded them drunk – I would be drunk as shit when we’d record them – but I never wrote drunk.

So it wasn’t as radical a change as it might be for some people, who might have only ever written songs under the influence of something.

I had this same conversation with Jason Isbell in 2012; he was about six months sober at the time. Jason told me that – other than some stage fright – the first few times he played live and sober, there weren’t any negatives for him. He could even hear better.

He’s exactly right. Ever since I quit drinking, we’ve been bringing the stage volume down, down, down … and now we’re old and wise enough to know that’s the way to go.

I mean, you go see Roscoe and the Del-Lords and they’re using tiny amplifiers. They sound like frigging Neil Young and Crazy Horse when they’re in a club, because they’re mic’ing that shit up and pushing it through the PA.

But when you’re drunk, you’re drunk … and you just don’t give a fuck. You crank the amp, thinking you’re rocking out. When you’re blasting loud, it’s hard to be subtle; it’s hard to get any dynamics going on.

So yeah, being sober just opens your eyes to “What the hell am I doing?” (laughter) “It‘s actually easier if I don’t do it that way.”

I haven’t found any negatives to it.

No, wait – there is one negative I found early on after getting sober: what the hell do you do with yourself between soundcheck and showtime? (laughter)

Crochet?

Right? (laughs) In the early days, it was tricky, ‘cause our hotel might be 30 miles out of town and we weren’t going back there between soundcheck and the show, you know? And I don’t like to eat before I play –

Always keep the band hungry.

You got it. (laughs) So I wouldn’t go out to eat … and I always ended up kind of sitting around in shitty dressing rooms drinking bottled water. (laughter) Now we try to plan things out so there isn’t so much dead time … in the old days, we planned on dead time – that was drinking time!

I love the set you recorded for National Public Radio’s Mountain Stage late last year. It’s a tribute to the songs on this collection that you’re still picking and choosing tunes off these early albums to play live. And at the same time, it’s a tribute to the brand-new, unrecorded songs you played that they lay right in there perfectly alongside the older ones.

That’s great to hear – cool. Thank you.

No, it’s a statement of fact – not a compliment.

All right, all right. (laughs)

So hearing those new tunes on Mountain Stage, I’m assuming there’s a new album in the works?

We’re gathering songs for it right now; we’re almost ready. We’re weeding them out … if this was an airplane flight, I guess you could say we’re in the final approach. (laughs)

And Roscoe’s gonna be on board?

Oh, yeah – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Sounds good. Brian, thanks for taking the time to talk today; thanks for the first 20 years of tunes … and thanks ahead of time for the next 20, man. Let’s plan on getting together again when the next album’s ready to roll.

All right! It’s a deal – and thank you.

*****

Brian Robbins has never broken, blown up, or caught anything on fire over at www.brian-robbins.com

Pages:« Previous Page