Coming Down: An interview with Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols

By: Brett Hickman

Monday July 11, 2005

After four studio albums, two of which yielded a couple of showy singles, countless appearances on TV and in print, the Dandy Warhols remain an enigma to a majority of music fans.
Led by the impenetrable Courtney Taylor-Taylor on vocals and guitar, the Dandy Warhol's are a band that enjoys the anonymity that so many other artists of their stature often desire, constant media hounding these days being so burdensome. Oddly enough, the band's anonymity is not through lack of public interest but through their own careful design. "We keep ourselves out of things. We like it that way," so says Taylor to me, completely out of the blue. But this shroud of cool mystery follows the band's recordings as well -- there is not a clear line to be found throughout the band's Capitol recordings. From 1997's Come Down to 2000's Thirteen Tales of Urban Bohemia to the recently released Welcome to the Monkey House, the band seems intent on twisting and turning through styles and genres as if evading an unwanted tail.

Despite this disinterst in divulging every ounce of their souls, the Dandy Warhols are a band that connects with a large enough audience to sustain their touring needs. The packed crowd in Chicago at the Metro showed their appreciation and adoration by yelping, clapping, and cheering with each familiar nugget in the Warhols' catalog. The fans were mesmerized by every last indulgence of the band's performance (though a twenty-minute show starter stretched this writer's patience to the near breaking point) and were rewarded with an evening of money well spent, as the band played until the three hour mark. But who are The Dandy Warhols? If their true personalities are not shown on record or in live performance, surely meeting them would answer all of what is unknown, right?

Unfortunately, no. Taylor-Taylor is your basic logorrheic rock star, excessively talking and constantly straddling the line between cognitive thought and incoherent rambling. Dazed and sleepy, he walked off of the band's touring van and greeted me with a sheepish hello, and the haze only seemed to thicken once we made our way backstage to chat.

Taylor-Taylor first talked about the troubles in getting their latest album released. "It came out in Europe and England and stuff and Australia. We've just had a real rough relationship with this label. It's our third President. We just don't get along. At all. We just don't see eye to eye. The more we dislike them, the more they dislike us. The more they dislike us, the more we dislike them."

Conversing in a low-mumble and delivering every sentence in what would at best be described as painstaking detail and at worst as being too bored to speak, he carried on his disapproval of his label when spurred by a question concerning the band's contract. "I don't know. I would imagine it's up to them. What are we gonna do? Sue Capitol Records? I'm sure it's just up to them and whatever...I'm sure they'll be as awful as people can be. Because apparently it makes them feel good. It's like they have to prove something to us. 'Fuck you, just let us go. We'll go our way, you go yours.' I can't allow myself to give a fuck. Get to work. Do your thing. Best job security you can have is to be your own company."

Say what you will about the actual results of this band's music, but you could never not call them perfectionists -- taking a year and four months to complete the new record, the band kept tinkering with it until it was just right. Then, after recording everything on their own, they enlisted some outside help. "We went and spent two weeks finishing it up with Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran. He wasn't involved until the end. He just made sure that it sounded all elegant and slick. We re-recorded a couple drum parts, added some vocals and he laid a bunch of string keyboard little things down. But [the record] was pretty much a lo-fi version of what [it is] now. Kind of like Rick Rubin or Outkast...a little clattery...clattery...lo-fi."

Taylor-Taylor took some time finding what he wanted to say before continuing on. "Then we went to New York, mixed it, Capitol said that they didn't know what to do with it. So they sent it off and got another mix done. We picked a mixer that we liked...well...which I liked. That they were comfortable with. Some songs turned out better. "The Last High," "Plan A" turned out better, first half of "(You Come In) Burned" turned out better. "I Am Over It" was better before, "Scientist" was better before, "We Used To Be Friends" was fucking way better, way better before. Then we mixed the whole record and then they said, 'That's it! We're putting it out.'"

Famed producer Tony Visconti (frequent cohort of David Bowie, who handpicked the Dandy Warhols to open a two-month stint through Europe for him in the fall) came in to help shape another song, "Rock Bottom." "We did the same thing that we did with Nick. Just to kinda get it right. We did more with Tony than we did with Nick on "We Used To Be Friends." Tony...Nick...great guys to work with."

When asked whether or not the band had achieved the ultimate versions of the album's songs by tinkering with them to such a degree, Taylor-Taylor bristled at the thought. "You never have the ultimate version. Nobody has ever finished a record and gone, 'God, these songs!' We treat this as an experiment. Giving it to a different mixer and not going in and telling him what to do. Like, let the fucker mix. Let him do what he does. We had never done that before. Turned out about like it does the other way. Some are better and some are like 'Fuck!' This has way more cohesion to it. Sonically it's a more perfect sonic mix. Some things were left out that should have got left in. This guy was a great fucking mixer, this guy."

But what of the album? Is this indeed the effort of a band wishing to jump on the neo-80s revival currently sweeping the rock world? Or is it simply an electronic record slippery-slicked up by a former icon of that lost time? More so the latter than the former. Blurting and bleeping keyboard bits show up to whisk you back to those halcyon days of skinny ties and garish pastel colored clothing in that early part of that dreadful decade of empty flash. But this is not a trip down memory lane of goofy haircuts a la A Flock Of Seagulls or the gaudy makeup of The Cure's Robert Smith. Rather, it is an approximation of the times in which those artists were at their peak more than a mere homage or exacting replication. Not that it works, mind you. Its failure to conjure much in the way of hooks makes the label's frustration with not knowing what to do with the album a little easier to understand in hindsight.

As the interview went on, Taylor-Taylor's enthusiasm, low to begin with, dropped considerably. Slowing his responses down to a crawl, he elicited the following concerning the band's future. "Yeah, I'd like to become more responsible with the business and not get ripped off all of the time. What I'd like is to not get fucked because people aren't taking care of what they're supposed to be taking care of. There are so many fucking details, man."

It certainly cannot be easy to deal with the stress that is the modern-day recording industry. Recording and touring at the level that the Dandy Warhols have been at has put them in an awkward spot. They have to bring a certain level of sophistication to their live shows and have been shooting for a unique sound on each of their albums to set themselves apart from other bands of their ilk, but at what price?

Taylor-Taylor was obviously exhausted from the grind of being a rock star, even while celebrating the amazing experiences he has gotten out of it. "It's been amazing. I've lived so much life. Just...so much. I think."

The life that Taylor-Taylor has lived has indeed been amazing. One wishes that some of this joy would actually shine through a bit into the band's music. Instead, this air of glib, restrained "cool" permeates the air of everything they touch, making a connection to them next to impossible. Despite being occasional masters of songcraft and wonders to behold onstage, The Dandy Warhols are the equivalent of a cool breeze on a hot summer day: whisping their way gently past you, pleasing you in the moment, and then gone, only to be forgotten as the reality of the heat settles back in.