We recently chated with dynamic Electric Six frontman Dick Valentine (a.k.a. Tyler Spencer) to find out… well anything we could.
Though most of the Electric Six resides here in Detroit, you hang your hat in Brooklyn – do you come back to the Greater D often?
I would say I’m back there 7 or 8 times a year. We record there. My family is there. Northwest Airlines has fairly cheap flights between NYC and Detroit so it’s not really a problem to come and go.
This past winter you were on Fox News’ “Red Eye” how was that?
It’s pretty surreal being in the NewsCorp building and realizing that Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly are in the studios next to me. When I was in for makeup, Hannity’s personal makeup kit was left out on the table in front of me. It looked like the casing for a uranium bomb and it had his signature engraved on it. But that’s not surprising. Most regular plain old great Americans like him have their signature engraved on their personal makeup kit made of titanium.
For the record, Shepard Smith’s makeup kit was just a plastic bin with a piece of masking tape on which “SHEP” was written in Sharpie.
I suppose I might be going back. Or not. Depends on if they believe my appearance will drive up ratings. I believe it won’t.
Are you the voice of the California Milk Processing Broad’s White Gold?
Well, that is my voice, but it is somewhat affected by a pitchshifter. Basically that came about because the director of the videos and commercials for that campaign is Tom Kuntz. He directed three of our videos a few years back. I was sitting in a Starbucks while we were waiting to play in Indianapolis a couple years ago and he called and asked me if I wanted to do the music for the campaign. It happened that their deadline for getting the songs done was parallel to our recording schedule for Flashy, which our guitar player Zach was recording, so Zach and I did the milk songs while we recorded Flashy.
How are things progressing with your other band Evil Cowards?
Upcoming plans for Evil Cowards include our first record Covered In Gas being released on Metropolis on May 19 and then doing the odd East-coast show here and there over the summer. My partner Wills (William Bates) works full time for a music production company and we can’t really do full-on touring right now but we are talking about doing some more recording this summer.
So how the reaction been to your new album “Flashy?”
Same as all the albums post-Fire. Generally it takes about a year before people digest the songs. We tour for each record right when it comes out and you can see the blank stares whenever we do a song of the new album. When we go out on the road a year later for the next record, I’m sure we’ll have a bunch of people yelling for “Graphic Designer”.
When can fans expect the next album (and the album after that.)
Well, we’ve been in a groove lately where we put out one album a year and it comes out in October. We do have a new record slated for this October as well.
How’s the “Flashy” album tour been going?
This thing is on autopilot. I have some amazing musicians in this band and I don’t exactly write prog-rock songs, so it’s pretty hard for us to fall apart these days. We’ve actually stopped rehearsing before tours. We just go over stuff at soundcheck.
We just left a great band that did a couple weeks with us called Bang Camaro. They can have as many as 10 lead singers on stage with them at once. I definitely became a fan.
I read recently on your site that the legendary 1st Avenue in Minneapolis gave you a star on the wall?
Yeah, we play there twice a year and we have a great rapport with the people there, so we have been lobbying pretty hard for our star for a while. We would take them outside and point at this band and this band and point out how much they suck and how they need to be painted over.
Make no mistake – I fully expect for us to be painted over before ten years time is up. But for now, it’s a wonderful feeling being…..immortalized.
When I saw you guys in November at St. Andrews, I thought you all look really fit, how do you stay in shape when your on the road?
Really? REALLY? I always feel like John Popper minus the harmonicas. But I suppose we try to avoid fast food. Take LSD instead of drinking beer, that sort of thing.
What can we expect form the show at the Blind Pig on Saturday?
It’s usually really hot on stage. You can expect to see us soaking in our own juices by the end of the show. Also we are trying to work up a cover of “Tender Love” by Force MD’s. But we’ve been saying that for two years, so who knows…..
The Electric Six are playing with Living Things and Millions of Brazilians this Saturday, May 9th at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor ($15, 18+ Doors 9:30 P.M.)
So it turns out, Greg Gutfeld, the man who once said (when referring to Sarah Palin);
“She’s the anti-Obama, the anti-New York Times, the anti-everything that Tim Robbins Loves, which is why I love her – and you should too.
And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.”
Is actually a big
Electric Six fan, they’re better then “Nelson Mandela in the Jonas Brothers.” And Jasper has the full clip of Greg sitting down to talk to
Dick Valentine about how truly awesome he is.
Electric Six frontman Dick Valentine will be making a special guest appearance on Fox News’ Red Eye with Greg Gutfield at 3 AM this coming Saturday, December 20th (late Friday night/early Saturday morning).
Are our conservative parents ready??
Hey kids, dust off your old comic book 3D glasses, because today’s special Electric Six show recap features photos from artist Chris Dean’s ‘Live From Detroit’ series. These are ‘analglyphs’, which means you’ll need those red and blue 3D glasses. More ‘lenticular’ style images will be shown along with shots of 20+ other bands in an exhibition in summer 2009, but for now, get your glasses ready, and prepare to relive E6… in three dimensions…
If you’ve never seen Child Bite before, this visual description might help describe their sound: most of their members have the frazzled look of the Saddam Hussein that we dug out of that hole in Iraq, and their instruments include a saxophone and computer game joystick. ‘Spastic’ is the first word that comes to mind. Set ended with the guitarist giving his instrument to an unsuspecting girl in the audience to play while the singer donned a t shirt ninja mask and jumped from the balcony.
Next up was Chicago two-piece Local H, who brought in a sizable chunk of the audience nostalgic for their 90′s grunge-reared punk. The two played a punishing set, and reminded everyone that you can still make catchy, even danceable songs with three chords and the knobs turned to 11.
Electric Six took the stage in a manner that suited their musical bravado, with singer Dick Valentine clad in a sequined red cape that had “Flashy” written on it, later taking it off to reveal another cape that said “Showtime” as the band played songs of the same names.
A catalog-spanning set followed, the Six for the most part skimming for their hits, with Local H and Child Bite‘s sax player joined the band onstage to provide additional instrumentation. For as much of E6′s songs (and their charm) can be written off as gleeful studio-screwing, songs like “Dance Commander”, “Gay Bar”, “I Buy The Drugs”, and “Danger! High Voltage!” are as funny as they are great songs (though “Feed My Fuckin Habit”, the essential E6 song in my opinion, was sorely missed).
Between-song banter proved to be equally humorous, such as when the band used ‘Stephen Hawking technology’ to to send us back to 2005 so that they could play the hopefully no longer topical “Rock And Roll Evacuation”. Despite rock-royalty posturing, in the end Electric Six persists because they just want to have fun, and the band manage to deflect one-hit wonder status, in tandem with constant touring, by making songs the frat pack can pound some Jägerbombs to.
Photos by Chris Dean
I always miss Electric Six’s shows, but figure the tour will bring them around another time. Thing is, by the time they hit the stage again they’ve usually recorded a whole new album and are on a whole new tour. The industrious band has released a new album every year since 2005, each equal in its downright ridiculousness. You might say that the Electric Six are serious about not taking themselves too seriously. And while the band may be accused of delivering quantity over quality, I respond with this: Electric Six are probably having more fun than your band. And who was invited to play at Lollapalooza last year?
If you aren’t familiar with Electric Six, here’s a quick crash course: all six have stage names that sound like stripper cops (the current lineup consists of Dick Valentine, Tait Nucleus? Johnny Na$hinal, The Colonel, Percussion World, Smorgasbord), and they play a brand of aggressive, humorous rock that usually features some combination of heavy guitars, falsetto vocals, horn solos, and off kilter-lyrics.
Newly released Flashy
is no exception. To get an idea, the first music video is “Formula 409”, a blistering testimonial to the cleaning product. Yes, you heard me right. “We Were Witchy Witchy White Women” tells some sort of story about ex-lesbian witches (“I put a spell on you/ you put a spell on me”). The songs maintain the sense of humor sonically as well— “Dirty Ball” has a lounge-y spoken word breakdown over a bass line and bongos. And “Your Heat Is Rising” is a page straight out of the book of Weezer, mixing “Say It Ain’t So” guitar upstrokes with Cuomo-esque self-depreciating lyrics like “Anytime you want to leave your lover for me/ would be a good time to leave your lover for me”. Ultimately, there definitely isn’t a “Gay Bar” part two on this record (although Valentine and friends are aware of this, jokingly starting the album with “Gay Bar Part Two”…), but any reason for the E6 to hit the road again is a reason good enough.
Featured Track:
“Dirty Ball”
Flashy is now available on Amazon
Electric Six have two legally free mp3 downloads from their upcoming album Flashy posted on the their record label’s website (Metropolis Records). The album will be available everywhere on the web and in the U.S. stores on Oct 20th.
