Can you tell me a little about the early years of The Walkabouts?

CT: The Walkabouts started eleven or twelve years ago. There was three Eckman Brothers; Chris, Grant and Curt, and we did the first year together. Then the youngest brother, who was 19 at the time, he wanted to do more experimental music, so he cut out and Michael (Wells) joined. So Michael's been with us for ten years, so I consider him as an original member. And at that point, I was on guitar and keyboards and singing. I think it was about five years later that we added Glenn Slater on keyboards.

Where did he come from?

CT: He was in a band with his brother called Cyborg Rembrandt. Excellent band! I went to a crazy party at my uncle's house - you know, I had a crazy uncle, and he hired these two brothers. And we walked in, the Eckmans and myself, and I was seein' just a guitar and keyboards and two guys singin' in Japanese! Very good band! Glenn was doin' the bass and sometimes they used a drum machine. He's pretty talented. He had at that time maybe twelve different keyboards. It took them an hour to set up. Actually, the band after that was called The Doors (!) and Glenn was in that band too doin' all Doors music. So that's how we met Glenn. We were just doin' a CD release party at the Central Tavern in Seattle, and we needed to have him to come play live. I think the album was "Cataract". Then after that, he just never left! He kept showin' up for rehearsals. So he's been with us for six or seven years. And about for and a half years ago, we finally lost an original member, Grant, Chris's brother on the drums, and Terri (Moeller) joined us.

Why did Grant leave?

CT: He wanted to start a family.

CE: Sanity! He's the smart one of the bunch!

But you're still safe from sanity?

CE: So far. He didn't wanna live in a tour bus for months. We are now on our third month in this actual bus. It's a little bit crazy...

CT: He was with us when we were doin' van tours.

CE: You know, doing 12-15.000 miles around the United States.

That sounds tiring.

CE: Oh, it's insane! Most often, we leave right after shows and every day we run shifts; every day we drive for four hours, two people. And we stay up all night and drive.

CT: Yeah, like Houston, Texas to New Orleans, Louisiana and we had to make it.

CE: The worst thing we ever did was St. Louis to San Diego. It was three days straight and we never stopped driving. We got to a hotel once for three hours just to take showers. Otherwise, we ran shifts with eight people driving for three days. It wasn't a glory..

But how can you stand each other?

CE: Well, we were young enough at that point. I mean, there were certain tensions; I think that was even the tour when we ran into a fistfight at the end. But at the same time, we were a lot younger at that point, and it was all kinda new and exciting, too. And, it was sort of what we all had dreamed about doing, being able to tour.

CT: Yeah, and we were all travelers well before the band ever formed. So it was a way for people to see the Grand Canyon and see New York City and what was goin' on in Boston. We were all very well connected with what was goin' on in our own country for many years. And now we've done this for five years in Europe.

CE: For about six years now - we came over here in 1990 originally.

CT: It's great education. That keeps you going? CT: Yeah. For every tour, we add a new country to go see. We're gonna go to Poland for the first time and the band's gonna go play Zagreb, Croatia. So that makes it worthwhile.

You also recorded an album, "Weights and Rivers", that never was released. What happened to it?

CE: Yeah, the first album. Well, basically, we sent it off to a company in Los Angeles, a small indie label called Wrestler. They went bankrupt, but they didn't tell us that, so they held on to it for about a year, which we're actually thankful for. We went from a high high to a low low very quickly because we recorded this album basically with our own money. I think we sent out three copies to different people. And actually, the person who had given us this contact with Wrestler ironically turned out to be Jonathan Poneman who's the guy who founded SubPop. This was before SubPop existed. I just bumped into him on the street one day and I said, "Hey, Jonathan, we've finished this album - who shall we send it to?" He was a well known DJ at the local college radio station and did some concert promoting stuff, so he was very well connected. And he said, "Well, I think there's a really cool label for you guys, this label called Wrestler." I said, "I have no address," and he said, "You guys call me at home," so I gave him a call and got this address and I sent it out. Literally, a week later, this guy from Wrestler calls up and says, "I want to put out this album," and I thought, "That was very easy".

CT: We're lucky it didn't come out, because our first album (to be released, "See Beautiful Rattlesnake Gardens"), we had done in an 8 track studio, and you understand what's goin' on and everything. But we borrowed $5000 and went in to a 24 track studio where the engineer was basically doin' magic and we didn't understand what was goin' on. He was doin' things that we didn't necessarily agree with.

A classic problem.

CE: Yeah.

CT: There were very complicated songs that we did put too much into, so it's good that that one never came out. There was two good songs off of it.

CE: Like you said, it taught us things. It taught us to strip things back to kind of the essence of what the song was. We were sort of embarrassed by the album.

CT: Yeah, we had typewriters and breaking glass and.... I mean, everything!

Was the first 12" EP, "22 Disasters," from the sessions for that album?

CE: No, that was from sessions from about nine months before. The first that Michael Wells recorded with us was "Weights and Rivers", which I think we started right after that 12" came out. There were five songs on that 12", two tracks on the first side and three on the second.

And none of the songs have appeared in any other form?

CE: No.

CT: And I don't think it will either. We recently listened to it and the songs had way too many changes. It was recorded too fast, another classic problem for beginning bands.

CE: We don't even have a copy of it. We actually had to borrow my brother's copy the other day. It was really funny to borrow his copy to listen to it. I essentially gave all the copies away in '88 or '89 when we were getting our name out there a little bit in Europe and the States when people wrote to us and asked for it. I used to sent it off to people for free! Somebody asked for it and it was like, "OK, $15 postage". We had it in a box in our house and in the end I looked in it, and I'd probably send out over a hundred of them and none of them were left.

How many were pressed?

CE: A thousand and we sold most of them. Actually, as much as we don't like it, it was a fairly well reviewed album in Seattle.

CT: We got our first article in BraveEar which was out of San Francisco and caused the person down there, the editor of BraveEar, to let us stay at their house. "You're a rock band, if we let you stay in our house, you're not gonna destroy the furniture, are you?" "Nooo, we'll sleep on the floor, and..." So that broke us a bit outside Seattle.

What does it sound like?

CT: Fast and furious.

That's a good title - "Fast and Furious"!

CT/CE: [laugh]

CE: Yeah, but it's not even furious it's more fast! More fast and lightweight. It sounds very light somehow. There's not a lot of punch to it. But, I think, in scope, some of the songs actually hint at more the kind of stuff we're doing now with the "Devil's Road" album, like the cellos and violins, but all of it doesn't quite work. It isn't done with any sort of the confidence of what we're doing now.

CT: At that time, before we got interested in Indian ragas and things, we just thought that songs had to have multiple changes to make sense, but when you hear it later on...

CE: But it's still influenced in a lot of ways by stuff like Buffalo Springfield and Love and that kind of things. And that's what most of the reviewers picked up on it, which made sense because Love was a band that we really liked when we got together. That acoustic guitar things with Arthur Lee's lead guitar, that was something we sort of picked up on right away.

And you even recorded "Gather Round" (from Love's "Out There").

CE: That was on "Weights and Rivers", yes; it was supposed to be on "Weights and Rivers".

But the first track you released was "Certain Gift"?

CE: Yeah, it came out on a tape only compilation in Seattle. Well, I think actually that "22 Disasters" came out before that. It was, the second thing that came out. But that was a really limited release of like 300 copies. That was a compilation of bands that were friends of ours.

CT: A lot of people thought that they shouldn't be recording, so we kinda shocked people when we said, "oh, we're doin' a recording!", "Oh, but what for?" Isn't playin' live the best thing, y'know?" Well, that's fun, but once you start recording and you like it, it will fill a need also.

CE: We are - well, I'll be speaking for myself - record collectors and fans, so the recording seems to me to be the first thing as opposed to be playing live. That has changed over the years, I've grown to like the live thing but recordings, that's what's fascinating me. It's really fascinating somehow.

Were these early tracks typical for how you sounded?

CE: Nothing was typical for how we sounded then! We just sounded like so many.. We sounded like everything and nothing at the same time. Weeks could go by and we changed the way of playing or the whole sound. That's a really interesting thing; we didn't sound like a band, I think, until "Rattlesnake Gardens", and even that is a bit all over the place. But even at that point, it was starting to be some kind of distilled vision of what we wanted to do. But it's kind of strange, because most bands, they either break up or they record an album in the first few years and it goes almost five years until they get that first album out. Which in our case was sort of thankful, because it allowed us to have time to develop...

To try different things out.

CE: Yeah. You know really, not many of these bands have got it right the first time. Some bands arrive with a wholly formed... with this sort of unique thing. In our case, I think the problem was that we had too many ideas, so it was always like trying to find an idea that we could really call our own. That was the really hard part for us.

I really like "Certain Gift".

CE: That's a really cool track.

When I first heard it, I was sad that it was so psychedelic.

CE: We were quite into that psychedelic thing.

CT: We liked Rainy Day and Rain Parade.

It's a bit like Rain Parade.

CE: Especially that first Rain Parade album. We were really into that.

CT: But we're old enough also to remember third and fourth grade when we were 12 or 13 years old and the psychedelic influence came more from when we were children living in America in the Sixties.

How was the musical climate in Seattle during these days in the mid Eighties?

CT: There were a lot of bands, fifteen or twenty bands, that we followed. Pretty good bands, but we were all each other's audience. It was only about a couple of hundred people in all of Seattle that had this underground scene goin'. And clubs, well not really clubs, but things you'd rent and put shows on and club tickets and you'd do the show and clean up afterwards, like, five in the morning.

Selfmade.

CT: Very; very selfmade.

CE: And most people were at one level or another doing these sorts of selfmade shows.

CT: When we entered Seattle as a band, the old school of bands... there was a tough competition between them and they were more kinda bar rock. But the new groups were really into helping each other and lending amps if we blew up an amp at a show, y'know, puttin' two or three bands together doin' the work.

CE: The goals were really to play clubs and that, they had collectively given up on because the clubs have closed. You know, when they booked original music, it was usually original music that sounded like stuff that was already on the charts, you know - bad new wave bands. So it was a bleak scene after a while in terms of the mainstream. But I think that's really what gave Seattle that kick in the ass, that it was so bad. Everybody just went underground and did it themselves. And that's when it really started to get interesting. It took a turn at that one point. Well, there was a time in the middle Eighties when the confidence was very, very low among the ones with any ambitions. There was just occasional glimmers of hope like The Young Fresh Fellows. Their second album had got a little review in the Rolling Stone, which everyone thought was just... I mean, just to get a review was a certain accomplishment! Now, Soundgarden gets the lead review and it all has become so mundane in a way, but at that point, just even have a band that got a four star review in the Rolling Stone was unbelievable. You heard when you were walking around town, they'd just go, "Wow, that's amazing!" and the Fellows were like playing in Boston and Chicago and people actually came out to see them. They played at The Replacements' Paul Westerberg's wedding and people went, "Wow!" That was the (origin) for that whole Seattle equation, 'cause they were kinda the first band to operate on the national scene.

CT: They became very much a model for many bands in that they also had a sound person that they traveled with and that gave us the idea.

CE: And they had a producer, too.

CT: We had some ideas of what we wanted to do. We knew what other cities were doin', 'cause Chris and I had been travelin' in Europe in 1981 and we had seen The Cure and Echo and The Bunnymen, Gang of Four.. And we knew that there was festivals goin' on in Leeds and Manchester. We witnessed these things. I think that helped us givin' the idea that more could be goin' on in your own home town if we just put a little work in.

So the inspiration came mainly from the U.K.?

CE: Well, just elsewhere.

CT: Well, I saw more of those bands at that age than... I never saw, like, The Talking Heads, but they were just as influential. But not all of these bands would come to Seattle.

CE: Plus that the mid-Eighties places besides New York and LA were starting to have bands. Boston had a few big bands at that point and Athens, Georgia and R.E.M., Love Tractor, Pylon, The B- 52's - that whole bunch. The Minneapolis scene started to have Husker Du and The Replacements. Suddenly, it was like, these cities aren't the big hot beds of the record industry, and these bands are getting out and touring, hopping in vans and getting out there and doing it. So I think people in places like these became a kind of a model for places like Seattle. You had these people doing it, starting local record labels and bit by bit, it started happening. And Bruce Pavitt from SubPop, that was kind of his whole thing. SubPop started actually as a newspaper column where he would go and profile the regional scenes. And he took the whole concept of regionality, what was happening in other cities, and put it into a record label. They didn't sign any bands that weren't Seattle bands for the first few years. And that was his whole vision, to create something that was regional.

Since "New West Motel", you've been quite a stable band. Bruce Wirth was with you for a while, but the core of the band has been very much the same.

CE: Yes, since Terri's been in the band.

She seemed to fit into the band very well already from the beginning.

CE: Yeah. Well, we knew her, she was the best drummer we knew, for one thing. That's why she got the job, 'cause she was great, but we also knew her. She lived in this house with Carla and I at one point. She was part of the extended group, so she was the first person we asked. Grant said that he was gonna leave before the '92 Europe winter tour. so we just called Terri up about three days after Grant said he wanted to leave and said, "Would you want the job?" and said she didn't need to think about it. As soon as we get back from this tour, we'd start rehearsing, and that's just where it was.

Had she been in another band before?

CE: Oh, she'd been in a couple. When we lived in that house together, she had a band practicing in the basement. We had played shows with her other band. So she was a part of the family.

Were they ever released on vinyl?

CE: Yeah. but very locally.

CT: Now, Glenn's band that I told you about, they had vinyl out.

CE: One album and they finished a second one, but I think the guy went bankrupt on the second one.

Right before the live version of "Findlay's Motel", you say "This is a fictional story that became true". What did you mean by that?

CE: Basically, what happened was that there was a killing in a motel. What's strange is, we got the name New West Motel from an actual motel sign which is on a highway south of Seattle airport...

CT: Which is on the cover of the album.

CE: Right. It's a whole long strip of hotel signs there and motels. And when we were on tour, we got a call from Glenn's wife Joanne that she had read the weirdest thing in the paper that this guy, uh, was he the owner of the motel? Well, he was just at the motel, so the story was all a little bit different. But a guy staying at the motel had been murdered, not at this particular motel, but at a motel near there and his name was Findly, not I-a-y, but 1-y.

It's a bit like when Brian Wilson was recording the -Smile" album. When they did "The Elements Suite" and recorded the "Fire" section, a fire actually started somewhere down the block and Brian Wilson was convinced that his music had started it.

CE: That actually happened when we did "Firetrap" (on the "Setting the Woods on Fire" album). That day on the way to the studio when we were gonna mix it, Michael was actually in a car with Larry Barrett...

CT: He was comin' in to the studio to do his part on the lap steel and he picked up our bass player and they were goin' up a hill when the engine caught fire!

You'd better be careful with what you're singing about!

CE: The next album will be called "End of the world"...

Can you tell me a little about how "Satisified Mind" came about?

CT: Well, we actually traveled with Reinhard (Holstein) from Glitterhouse and SubPop Europe for many years. One night about three o'clock in the morning after doin' a Cologne show..

CE: The two of us doing an acoustic show.

CT: Yeah, and we traveled back to the Glitterhouse head quarters and we were just talking about what we should do next. I think that we told him that we wanted to do a more acoustic, stripped down album and I think he had the idea to do covers.

CE: It was pretty like the B sides we'd done for the "Jack Candy" single; a Neil Young song ("Like a Hurricane"), a Tom Waits song ("Yesterday is Here") and a traditional song ("Prisoner of Texas"). We went in with Conrad Uno, the guy that had produced The Young Fresh Fellows and Mudhoney, and did these three songs in his basement studio. We were really into those and said "What would it be like to do a whole album like that?"

Conrad Uno had also done a Swedish band,. The Nomads. He had produced an album of theirs.

CT:- He's the owner of PopLlama and he put out our first album.

CE: He also did produce The Presidents of the United States of America album. It has gone triple platinum by now..

Quite amazing!

CE: Yeah, and if Conrad got some money from it, it's great.

CT: He's quite a pillar in Seattle. Another one unrecognized; recognized by a few of us. One of the forgotten persons in Seattle.

A forgotten hero.

CT: Yeah, maybe in a way But he didn't stick out as much as the SubPop guy did. He didn't have a world domination plan. He just thought that there were geniuses in his own backyard. That's what he told me one time. That's why he got into the business.

CE: He's has got his payday and that is great.

CT: Yeah. One time he said to Chris, "Hey, I've got this band coming; have you heard of Sonic Youth?" and we went, "Oh! They wanna work in your basement! Yeah, they're big, they're well known!"

So how did you choose the covers for Satisfied Mind? Was it personal favorites?

CT: Or an artist, maybe that was a personal favorite. We were going through their collection to see what we could do something with. You know, we did wind up with Patti Smith, we had one by John Cale...

CE: Nick Cave, Robert Forster.. But sometimes it's the song, like the song "Satisfied Mind", that was not any particular artist that turned us on to that, it was more like the song itself it's a great song. And the Johnny Rivers track "Poor Side of Town". We did a very major reworking of that song. That song is really a fast pop tune. I always though that the lyrics was this mournful, y'know, melancholy lyric. I had always loved the song when I heard the song come on the radio. It's a late Sixties' hit and so I just put it into a minor key and slowed it way down and then it really made some sense somehow.

It's hard to imagine a fast version of that one!

CE: Oh yes, it's really! I remember Peter Buck came in to do mandolin stuff on "Satisfied Mind". We played that for him and he just couldn't handle it at all, 'cause he was such a huge fan of the original version, and he said "No-no-no, you've gotta do this guitar line!" and he showed me how it all plays up this E chord. It's really a porky little [sings), "dangdang, dat-dang-dang"; well, he's a kind of guitarist, and, "Man, how can you do "Poor Side of Town" and eliminate the guitar line!?" And I said, "Well, I just don't give a shit... we have our own purposes!" You know, I really have liked what Nick Cave had done on his "Kicking Against the Pricks", that covers album in his way that he didn't really pay attention to... well, he sort of pay attention to the heart of the song somehow, not anything else. And that's how we always have approached covers. We haven't really always learned all the chords for them. It's like, you have so much in your mind of what the song is, and then I usually sit down with the chords and just kinda making it up myself.

That's really interesting.

CE: Yeah, I think it really keeps you away from the original version.

And still you can add something to it.

CE: Precisely. It keeps you on a nice distance from it. If you go down there and tries to transcribe the original and then, as you get to that stage, you've lost it, because really at that point, why cover it? Well, really there are songs that we would have done on "Satisfied Mind" that would be more of a favorite song than the songs are that's on there. But you know, there's songs that are so perfect, so why even bother? We thought of doing "Waterloo Sunset" for example, one of our favorite tunes, but it's so perfect that you can't touch it.

CT: And it's so personal and it's so British or somethin'. We can't sing about Waterloo! [laugh]

CE: With Nick Cave it was really difficult to find a song that we sort of could get into, because of as much as we admire his stuff, it's idiosyncratic that it seems somehow too difficult to put yourself into it.

CT: I've always been so elated when we've come across... you know, in later years have come more into the blues, and when we're playin' a new album at home on our CD and you recognize a song that Nick Cave did collect; "Well, I didn't know that this was the original!" He's not afraid of changing.

I think your version of -Loom of the Land" is so gorgeous! I admire Nick Cave a lot myself, but the more I hear your version of it, the more it gets to be "that Walkabouts song that Nick Cave does".

CT/CE: [laugh]

CE: That's that Victor (van Vugt) said too, the guy that produced our album. He liked the our version of "Loom of the Land" better.

I like that country feel to it, it really suits the song well.

CE: Well, we slowed the chord change down. His version doesn't quite work somehow, and that's one of the reasons that we picked the song. I think it's good. In a way, it's cool to find songs that are slightly flawed. If you can identify the flaw, or what you perceive as a flaw; it's not really a flaw, but your opinion of it, and that's why we did "Poor Side of Town". It was like they'd got the musical arrangement of that song completely wrong; "This is not how it's supposed to be, it's not a pop tune - just listen to the lyrics. This is a really sad, sad song!" But there's other things on that album like "Feel Like Going Home" that we somehow did in the spirit of the original, or "Satisified Mind" that was done to be in the spirit, or "Polly"... "River People", we changed completely and we made a pop tune from just an acoustic ballad.

CT: And for the Carter Family song, we only took the words.

CE: And not even all of the words! That song, I literally made up from memory. I remembered vaguely what the words were, and then sort of wrote down the rest of them. As I perceived. them, no one that's listening to the original will get close to what I wrote.

Like, "They're playing it wrong!"

CT: [laugh]

CE: Yeah, that's what's great about it. It makes it a lot easier! We have a list left over from "Satisfied Mind", and we can turn around next week to do a whole album of that.

Will it happen?

CE: I don't think so. We have to have more distance from it. We're only two albums away from it this point, and we have to be much farther down the line. If we did it again, I would actually like to do more contemporary people. And also, more women. I think that's the one mistake we did on that album; there was not as many women songwriters that there should have been. It's not that I want to have some kind of quoticism, it's just that there is a lot of really great women songwriters that we admire that we just didn't cover.

CT: Yeah, bring some attention to them. Mary Margaret O'Hara - it's too bad that she doesn't come out of hiding to make another album.

I think that one song that should be great for you to cover is "Red Pony" off the first Triffids album, "Treeless Plain".

CE: I don't have any of their first two. I have from "Born Sandy Devotional".

That's their best.

CE: I'm much into "Calenture", but it certainly got a bit overblown at that point. But "Born Sandy Devotional" is a classic! We're big Triffids fans. Anybody have hardly listened to them for ten years.

CT: Yeah, them and The GoBetweens.

I think you sometimes sound a bit like The Triffids.

CE: I identify that strain in our music. I think that on this last album, that whole kind of it became a whole lot more obvious. Well, that's one of the main reasons that we worked with Victor. He never did much recording with The Triffids, but he had been their soundguy for several years. That's what's so great about working with Victor. You don't have to sit and explain anything to him. You know, we sort of come from the same place musically. We had an American engineer and he hadn't heard anything by Nick Cave yet, so we played him an album. He didn't know who the fuck he is. So it was great working with Victor, we just didn't have to do any explaining. We'll probably work with him again, because it was so easy.

Have you ever heard anything from Nick Cave how he liked your version?

CE: Uh, I don't think he ever said that he really liked it. Mick Harvey liked it. We met Nick Cave, and all he said was, "You guys, you once did cover one of my songs!" [laugh) Well, you know, I don't really care if Nick Cave approves us, I don't need that in my life.

I don't think he'll ever give anyone his approval. He's very polite, but you will probably never really understand him.

CE: Yeah, he's very much into his own trip. For me, it's more rewarding to meet someone like Townes van Zandt or someone like that. That's people I care more about and what they think about it than I do what Nick Cave thinks.

Have you ever met Townes van Zandt?

CE: Three times.

Did he like your version of "Snake Mountain Blues" (from New West Motel)?

CT: Oh yeah! He plays that for his friends just to kinda make 'em jealous, like, "These young kids, they're into me!" [laugh]

CE: We've also made friends with Robert Forster.

CT: We got to open. for The GoBetweens on their last American tour in Seattle and we had Robert and the bass player, they came to our house afterwards for a party. So we partied with him 'til 6.30 in the morning and then had to call him a taxi to send him on his way! That was a memorable night! We just keep runnin' into him in London ever since.

I've heard of a fascinating story behind the track "Storm Crazy" (from Chris & Carla's dual album "Life Full of Holes") about a man who got hit by the lightning. What happened?

CT: There was a documentary we watched on TV and this fellow claimed after being hit by a lightning bolt, he didn't have to wear a winter coat after that. He never got cold.

CE [imitating the person with a Southern accent]: "I'm out here and I take off my shirt and I feel fine!" It's a kind of a medical mystery. CE: Yeah. So that's the idea in that song with this woman that sings that wants to go to the tallest mountain and touch the lightning. She's obviously a pretty crazy person. And so was this guy..

CT: The documentary was actually about a photographer that went around the country photographing lightning.

CE: Lightning freaks... There's a freak for everything! A whole subculture of lightning freaks!

Looking at "Life Full of Holes" in general, was it songs that never really did fit into the Walkabouts repertoire, or were the songs actually written for that album?

CE: The songs were written for the album. I don't think we had any of those songs prior to when we decided to the album.

CT: Now the band's done a couple of them.

CE: I think we decided to do the album when we started to write songs. Originally the album was supposed to be an EP, 'cause there were only like five songs. And it was actually Scott McCaughey from The Young Fresh Fellows and Peter Buck who were hanging out the crocodile. The record company wouldn't pay it, it'd cost the same amount to manufacture. And we said, "We've got songs". So Scott gave us the song "The Tower" and Peter gave us two. And I had a couple of instrumental themes from these movies and we could put those in the beginning and the end. We found a song when we were down in Morocco, the title track, "Life Full of Holes"; this guy had given it to us. It's the weirdest story! We came into this music store and this guy says, "Have you got a tape recorder?", and I said, "Yeah, I've got my DAT player right here," and I put it out. "I've got a song that I want you to record on your next album."

CT: He didn't even know that we were recording artists!

CE: He knew that we were musicians, but he had no idea... and he says, "I've got a song for your next album. It is a very beautiful song," and I go like, "What are the lyrics?". "You're supposed to write them!" And he just walked out the door and that was the end of it! We didn't really believed it was true, but back at the hotel, we plugged it in and "God! That sounds beautiful!"

That's the absolutely strangest contribution and collaboration between musicians that I've ever heard about!

CE: Now, it's just really strange!

CT: We sent him the CD, but so far there's been no response. I think we'll hear from him someday. He's actually a bass player and played at one of the hotels there. So I think he'll get the CD someday and'll be able to play it somewhere.

Strange things seem to happen to you.

CT: You know, they happen to people that put themselves in positions to happen. And most travelers let things happen to them, not just "Take a look at this museum, go here and eat these meals." You have to put yourself just out there.

CE: I mean, that's really how you learn stuff about people and places.

And yourself.

CE: Yeah, absolutely. We'd gone traveling and seen the West of the United States, well, I don't know, at least once a year. We go off for about a week or two, just driving into small towns just to see what... Not going in with this big agenda of "This is what I wanna see, this is what I wanna do", more just go, go to a local restaurant, hang out, talk to somebody. At least lyrically, I get ideas from such things. I'm always carrying a notebook and I'm always talking to people and just put things down. I mean, you just have to stay open. That's how you see weird stuff. People say that to us, "God, why do all these things happen to you?" It's only because people just kinda go through life closing themselves off. They want order. I just sort of find order in chaos.

An alternative order.

CE: Yeah, exactly.

Is there a new Chris & Carla album coming?

CE: Well, it's debatable now. We want to do an album and we're contracted for a Chris & Carla album for Glitterhouse, and The Walkabouts are contracted for a Virgin album.

CT: We've always liked to be busy and we've been on a schedule for two or three years when we've been pumpin' out albums. You know, to pop out something like "Devil's Road", you need more time. So now projects are gonna start pull out each other when you decide what things are most important to get out first.

CE: Obviously, The Walkabouts are a more important projeCT: We really liked the way the last Chris & Carla album turned out, so we just don't wanna spit one just to obligate the contraCT: So hopefully Glitterhouse will be sympathetic to that. We don't wanna get into a position with either of them with, "well, now we've gotta get this thing out".

CT: We don't wanna fall into more classic mistakes.

CE: Especially with that second major label thing; there is so much pressure to get it out in a certain amount of time. But being on a major label is cool for us because for the first time ever we kinda bought us time to put into the "Devil's Road" album. And I wanna be able to kinda buy that time again. I don't wanna feel that we have to put it out next March or something like that just because it has to be out there.

Let's talk a little about "Devil's Road". Did you think of the string arrangements before you did the album?

CT: Definitely.

CE: We had to. The string arrangements were finished before anything was ever recorded. They had to be. We were demoing songs in January of '95 and we had a string arranger brought in right away. In fact, we had to track him (Mark Nichols) down - we hadn't really seen him for years. The last thing he had done with us was "Findlay's Motel" on "New West Motel.", he did the strings for that. Carla and I started looking for him in November of '94 and we finally tracked him down. Actually, we didn't...

CT: He called us out of the blue. That's how it works with him - he just calls when you really need him. CE: He seems to be more around now, but for a while there he had just gone incognito. And we knew for the next album, before we had brought in anybody, that he was definitely gonna do it, the strings. We just needed more of his significant capacity. He's fantastic.

When you wrote the songs for "Devil's Road" and you were aware of that you wanted to use strings on the album, did that influence the way you wrote the songs for it?

CE: Yeah, definitely. "All for this" was one of the first and "Christmas Valley" was one of the first. I think that that song is really brilliant with strings. "All for this" was a kind of a pop song and when I kind of heard strings on that too, so at that point it was just like, "OK, let's go in this direction with this." And well, I'm sure it influenced the way we wrote songs during that period, because you really had to keep our contributions and arrangements very succinCT: What the band did had to be very thought out, because we were gonna share the sound with so many different elements. So it did very much affect what we did.

The string arrangements fit perfectly into your music.

CE: Well, he knows us, we know him, it's not like you bring in someone from planet Mars to be kinda part of this. With the strings, we didn't wanna get into the situation where we did record the album and give it to a string arranger and say, "now arrange this". We wanted these things to be working more together. It sounds as if there was a kind of intuitive bond between you and the arranger.

CE: Some of it was that bond, but some of it was hard work, too.

CT: You know, we just gave him up to sometimes eight to twelve measures so that he actually could have the strings to do something important and not just fillers and runs. They steal the show quite often and then they give it back to the show. They're just as important as each other, the songs and the arrangements. We'd go to his office to see what he was doing and he played parts on his keyboards.

Would it have been possible to have done "Devil's Road" for SubPop?

CE: Well, we would have run out of money.

CT: The songs were already written well before we even knew that we were gonna have to switch record labels. And the idea for string players were already set. Mark already had the songs back in January of '95. CE: Yeah, he had a half dozen of them.

CT: So we would probably done it but more like with sixteen friends in Seattle.

CE: And a string quartet.

CT: We wouldn't have had Victor van Vugt.

CE: And we would definitely not have had the time to put into the arrangements. The string arrangements would have come together but just too bad. We spent a long time for rehearsals for that album. Very casually, you know, working hard and working steady but not like feeling that there was a deadline hanging over us. It was kinda the first time we put together an album under these conditions.

CT: And we also got to tour for two weeks in America on the material and two weeks in Europe, so a lot of the stuff was road tested, which tells you more about your songs than your rehearsals do quite often.

CE: Well, that's really natural, we didn't kill the stuff, but we played it enough. And we kept enough songs, we kept a handful of songs, purposely not playing them live, "Christmas Valley" and "When Fortune Smiles". These were tracks that were really fresh when we went in to record them.

CT: "When Fortune Smiles" was live vocal, live band. We did it two o'clock in the morning. A good time to record. CE: Yeah, especially when you don't feel the pressure two o'clock in the morning 'cause you know that you can come back tomorrow and get another shot at it. It's more like, "Let's see what we can do with this song right now", That's usually the best time to record when you don't have the gun to your head.

"Devil's Road" is also the first album where you Chris are solely credited for writing songs, while earlier albums give credit to the whole band. What does that indicate?

CE/CT: That was a legal thing.

CE: I wanted to go into a new publishing deal and they were not that interested in doing it quite the same because in reality it hadn't been much of a collective thing since even the first album. I always wanted to credit the band because from an arrangement standpoint, the band has always been very much important in the songwriting, so I consider that...

CT: Hours are spent doin' that part, but hours are spent coming up with the skeleton of the song and the lyrics.

CE: That goes on for months. I am already writing songs for the next album.

You've also started to work on the piano.

CT/CE: Yeah. How's that going?

CE: I'm a bad piano player. Well you know, it's just different chords and different placings which kinda leads in a different direction. I think rhythmically, it's a different kind of instrument. When you have played guitar as long and as poorly as I have...

Now he's being hard on himself!

CE: [laugh] ... you fall into very rigid patterns of what you can do with it both rhythmically and chordally, and the piano has been really cool. It's something I can also play... poorly A new instrument I can't play!

What's the main difference between the piano and the guitar?

CE: I think it's just where the chords fall. It's just as simple as you know to go from a G to a C, it's a very easy move on the guitar, so you find yourself doing it, the chords are just there. The piano is laid out differently. What's easy on the guitar is not necessarily the same that what's easy on the guitar.

CT: But it gets easier to see what a chord that's been augmented or a seventh added. You see that better on a piano, so maybe eventually we can apply what we're learning on the piano back to the guitar.

CE: We've already transposed some of the piano compositions back to the guitar. Rhythmically it's interesting because you can keep this kinda things going, "bomp-ba-bom-babomp-pa", you know different rhythmic patterns.

CT: Tom Waits' wife one time when he was down writing a new album, she said, "You sound the same" and she said "Stand up!" and she moved his piano bench down to the lower chords and, "OK! Sit down, now write!" She made him sit in a different place! [laugh] It could be that simple.

What about your songwriting, Carla? Don't you want to write more songs?

CT: No. I'm better at listening to what Chris's coming up with at home, and writing my parts or from that agree with something. I'll see if he need to rework something, especially if I'm gonna sing it, you know. Does it ever happen that you say, "Chris, I can't sing this!"?

CT: Yeah!

CE: It happened more often before, but then it was more like, "Well, I don't think we have any choice, this is what we've got." Now, it's less of that part of 01 can't sing this", because I think we've got better at knowing where each other's keys are, you know, where we sing well.

CT: Yeah. Actually, one of the toughest times when came up against that was for Chris and my album "Life Full of Holes", the song that Peter Buck gave us. We were trying to write a melody or something for that,. and we kept sounding like Michael Stipe. So that's the toughest challenge we really ever had.

It doesn't sound that much R.E.M.

CE: No, not in the end.

CT: Every time we tried to sing higher, it got anthemic, it was like "uh-oh!".

CE: The chords are very R.E.M. actually. If I just played it to you on the guitar without the melody - I mean, even the little middle eight bridge is like a total Peter Buck signature. He never write guitar licks, he just write bridges instead, you know. It was really a kind of a challenge. It took us forever to sort of get that one.

CT: But we couldn't let it go.

CE: Well, I think we even thought of letting it go. I think we had a discussion at one point, like, "We don't have to do this just because Peter gave us the song." But, I don't know, we sort of reached a breakthrough. I write in that way. A lot of people write and just throw away a lot of stuff; I tend to beat it to death 'til I get something I like. Probably not always the wisest way to get at it, but I think it's one way. It is one way. But next time it's gonna be different, because I have written so much stuff now so that I won't do that for our next album, I have enough ideas. So it will be more like throwing stuff away, as opposed to write it 'til it's done and see what you have.

I've seen a few releases with alternative versions of songs like "Break It Down Gently" and "Murdering Stone". Do you often try out different versions of a song before you decide which is the ultimate version of it?

CE: I wouldn't say often, but sometimes that happens. Sometimes it's stuff that was done as demos., like that rock version of "Murdering Stone" which was originally done as a demo and we didn't record the song until three years later. It was more a sort of a country folk thing so we tried it that way and it made more sense. The version that came out on the NME tape sounds like "Hitsville UK" by The Clash.

Will the next album be an arranged one too?

CE: Yeah. - It should be noted that Glenn actually arranged strings for "The Light Will Stay On". He did a fantastic job on that and on the next album, we'll probably split it a little bit between Glenn and Mark.

Will you use a large orchestra, as on "Devil's Road"?

CE: I think we'll have a smaller, actually. A quartet and I think we'll use brass also. I think it will be kind of a combination of brass and woodwinds and strings instead of just a straight string thing. So the strings might be a little bit smaller. But I imagine that on a couple of tracks it will be a full orchestra again. You can't really replicate that with a string quartet. But sometimes you just don't want that size. But you know, it's little too early to say. There'll definitely be strings on it, and I think woodwinds. I think the nest album overall will be more experimental. We want to use, actually, more synthesizers like MiniMoogs and that kind of things.

Older stuff.

CE: Older stuff, yeah, yeah. Not like cheap bad synths. Well, maybe cheap - they're good synths.

Very cheap ones.

CE: Yeah, very cheap, you know, Casios and things. We really want to expand the sound 'til the next time around.

So the next time you'll be playing Kraftwerk covers.

CE: There you are!

Countless thanks to The Walkabouts and Ricky Arnold and the others at Virgin Sweden for being kind and helpful.

There are variations to almost every full length album released by The Walkabouts. For instance, all full length albums previously released on vinyl and CD by SubPop, are now out on CD from Glitterhouse. I have taken no notice of this - the albums listed below have their original vinyl catalogue number in brackets after the title. The same goes for the single section, although they are in most cases listed with their CD catalogue number. The compilation tracks section lists songs that The Walkabouts have contributed to various compilation releases and magazines. Such releases come most often in only one format. After the catalogue numbers, manufacturing country is fisted in abbreviated form followed by year of release.

THE WALKABOUTS ALBUMS AND EPs:

22 DISASTERS (12" EP Necessity EP 001, US 1985)

Ask Me Another - Trouble Time - Tools of the Trade - 22 Disasters - Hope in Anchor

Sorry, I haven't heard this, Anyone with a spare copy or a tape of it, please contact me!

The albums remains unreleased and will probably do so forever. A few tracks were released as bonus cuts on the See Beautiful Rattlesnake Gardens CD and one track appeared on the Death Valley Days compilation. According to the sleeve notes for Rattlesnake Gardens, The Walkabouts first 7" single, Linda Evans/Cyclone, was taken from the Weights and Rivers sessions. On hearing the released tracks (Cyclone, Gather Round, Drunk [on a civilized rule] and the above mentioned Linda Evans single), you can only fantasize about what the remaining tracks might sound like. Especially Linda Evans and the wonderful Love cover Gather Round promise a lot, although Chris and Carla state that the unreleased songs are best unheard.

Jumping Off - Breakneck Speed - The Wellspring - John Reilly - Robert McFarlane Blues - This Rotten Tree - Laughingstock - Glass Palace - Feast or Famine Ballad of Moss Head - Who-Knows-What - Rattlesnake Theme CD bonus tracks: Linda Evans - Mai Tai Time - Cyclone - Gather Round - Certain Gift

As Chris Eckman puts it: "Even this is a bit all over the place". That's true. This, their proper debut, suffers a bit from its variety of styles and a somewhat stiff drumming from Grant Eckman. But some of these songs are truly great, such as The Wellspring and Feast or Famine, which probably is the track that most clearly hints at what was then yet to come in style as well as quality. The CD release is essential for its bonus tracks (see Weights and Rivers above). Certain Gift was originally released on the tape only compilation Sounds of Young Seattle Vol. II (see Compilation tracks listing below)

What is this? The album has been included in a discography available on the InterNet with no further information whatsoever. Anybody with any information of this unreleased item - please get in touch with me!

As with Rattlesnake Gardens, this is a quite disparate collection of songs. Among the stand out tracks are Whereabouts Unknown and the slow, glowing Long Black Veil. Cataract is included as bonus on the Rag + Bone CD (the first CD release as far as I know where a full length album is included as a bonus to an MP .. )

The Anvil Song - Ahead of the Storm - Medicine Hat - Wreck of the Old #9 - Mr. Clancy - Last Ditch

A mini album recorded more or less at the same time as CataraCT: To my ears, the only flaw is The Anvil Song. CD release includes CataraCT:

Dead Man Rise - Stir the Ashes - The Night Watch - Hangman - Where the Deep Water Goes - Blown Away - Nothing is a Stranger - Let's Burn Down the Cornfield - River Blood - Train to Mercy

Here, Chris Eckman's songwriting really starts to flourish. This album is the first where you really get the feeling that they have found their track. The last full length album with Grant Eckman on drums. Many of the songs have an unnerving quality to them, such as Hangman, The Night Watch and the Randy Newman cover Bum Down the Cornfield. CD issue contains lyrics.

Dead Man Rise - The Anvil Song - Long Black Veil (both tracks live at the Danish National Radio) - Hangman (Live for the Dutch radio) - Train to Mercy (Gospel Remix)

An MP reputedly released on vinyl as well, although I've never seen a vinyl copy of it. The title track is the same version as on Scavenger, while the remaining material is exclusive to this disc. The Anvil Song is slightly better here than on Rag + Bone. Train to Mercy is the same version as on Scavenger, but here it appears in a shorter version without the strings.

Jack Candy - Sundowner - Grand Theft Auto - Break it Down Gently - Your Hope Shines - Murdering Stone - Sweet Revenge - Glad Nation's Death Song - Long Time Here - Wondertown (Part One) - Drag This River - Snake Mountain Blues - Findlay's Motel - Unholy Dreams
LP bonus tracks: Yesterday is Here - Like a Hurricane - Prisoner of Texas

This is so good that I don't know what to do with myself! Not one bad track! Jack Candy was a kind of a hit and the rest of them should have been. Long Time Here is a slow, brooding song that finds its way under your skin (especially if you listen to it late at night) and the Townes Van Zandt (R.I.P) cover Snake Mountain Blues is very hard to ignore. And then there's Findlay's Motel and Drag This River and Grand Theft Auto and... The vinyl version includes the three Conrad Uno produced covers and, although being nice covers (Prisoner of Texas is the stand out track among them), they fall a bit on the side in this context. The first album with Terri Moeller on drums.

Satisfied Mind - Loom of the Land - The River People - Polly - Buffalo Ballet - Lover's Crime - Shelter for an Evening - Dear Darling - Poor Side of Town - Free Money - The Storms are on the Ocean - Feel Like Going Home - Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone

Their widely acknowledged semi-acoustic collection of covers. To my ears, the slower ones work best. Their version of Loom of the Land beats Nick Cave in his own game and the heavily reworked Poor Side of Town and The Storms Are on the Ocean are simply terrific. And what a good idea to slow down Patti Smith's Free Money which Chris Eckman sings with a restrained fervor. A nice introduction to The Walkabouts as well as American music in general.

Good Luck Morning - Firetrap - Bordertown - Feeling No Pain - Old Crow - Almost Wisdom - Sand & Gravel - Nightdrive - Hole in the Mountain - Pass Me On Over - Up in the Graveyard - Promised

Perhaps their greatest effort up to then - most songs are The Walkabouts at their best. Bordertown is the worthiest follow up to Neil Young's Cortez the Killer so far and Sand & Gravel is a majestic semi-psychedelic hymn of sorts. The vinyl version sounds somewhat better than the CD, but then again, the CD release comes in a digipak including a booklet with pictures taken by Chris and Carla, not included in the vinyl version, unfortunately.

Satisfied Mind - Polly - The River People - Promised - Buffalo Ballet - Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? - Loom of the Land - Good Luck Morning - Firetrap Bordertown - Grand Theft Auto - Jack Candy - Pass Me On Over - Snake Mountain Blues

Sorry to say, this CD (recorded entirely at the Garage in London despite its title) was (and might still be) available through Glitterhouse Mailorder only. The edition is limited to 1000 copies. The album is divided into two sets (as were the shows); one semi-acoustic set with mostly songs from the Satisfied Mind album, and one electric set with songs from New West Motel and Setting the Woods on Fire. The electric part is a frantic explosion of fervor and inspiration with a furious version of Snake Mountain Blues on top. Terri Moeller's drumming on Jack Candy deserves to be mentioned in its own right. The album was also accompanied by a video release from the show; the video includes a bonus track not on album (see the video listing below).

The Light Will Stay On - Rebecca Wild - The Stopping-Off Place - Cold Eye Christmas Valley - Blue Head Flame - When Fortune Smiles - All For This Fairground Blues - The Leaving Kind - Forgiveness Song

This album is beyond words, it's nothing short of a contemporary classic. I can't come to think of any other album from the 90's that even comes close to this. It's one of these perfect albums - perfect songs, perfect arrangements, perfect production. The string arrangements stand up against any comparison, even with the best on any Scott Walker album or the flawless Robert Kirby arrangements for Nick Drake. The music comforts your soul and puts a bittersweet ache in your heart. Where do they go from here?

Drunk (On a Civilized Rule) - 1+1 - Brainstorming - Chain Gang - On the Beach - Big Black Car - Cello Song - Maggie's Farm - Break it Down Gently - Train to Mercy (Italia Version) - Yesterday is Here - Prisoner of Texas - Inauguration Day - Pass Me On Over - Like a Hurricane - House of the Rising Sun - Loswerden Sand & Gravel Strings

A compilation of rare tracks and unreleased songs. There are still several tracks on deleted singles that haven't been graced with an album release and there are still plenty of unreleased recordings locked up in the vaults, but this album gathers several odd songs in one place. And it works, too. Quite often, albums like this tend to hint at too many directions, but this is surprisingly well put together. The version of Like a Hurricane is not similar to the one on the Jack Candy single, this is a much better live-in-studio version recorded for Dutch TV. The version of the all-too- familiar House of the Rising Sun is a real gem. The Walkabouts manage to give the mega standard song a haunting, eerie quality. Train to Mercy, as Paul Ricketts states in his liner notes, "works better here in its stripped down form than it does on Scavenger". Chain Gang is an odd one where The Walkabouts play to an Alan Lomax tape of prisoners singing a work song in jail. Really great one! Loswerden is lovely, sung in German by Carla (with pretty good pronunciation, too). This to mention only a few of the tracks.

CHRIS & CARLA ALBUMS

River Blood - Long Time Here - lack Candy - Wichita Lineman - Down Where the Drunkards Roll - Stir the Ashes - Hangman - Sweet Revenge - Glad Nation's Death Song - Train to Mercy - On the Beach - Maggie's Farm

The first outing from Chris & Carla is also the weakest. Recorded during two acoustic German shows in February 1993 on DAT, these recordings suffer a bit from a rather dull sound. Nevertheless, there are some really inspired moments here, such as the cover of the Jimmy Webb composed Glen Campbell song Wichita Lineman and a fine rendition of Neil Young's On the Beach (or Am Strand, as Carla introduces it to the German audience). Some of the faster Walkabouts numbers though, such as Glad Nation's Death Song and Stir the Ashes, do not really survive the acoustic treating. The CD had a limited run of 1000 copies and is now out of print.

Precursor - Storm Crazy - Death at Low Water - The Tower - Nights Between Stations - Take Me - Sleep Will Pass Us By - Sandy River Moon - The Silent Crossing - Comfort of a Stranger - Life Full of Holes - Velvet Fog - Never Gonna Fall - The Cool and the Dark

So far the only studio album from Chris & Carla and what a splendid one! Somewhat more low-key than The Walkabouts' albums up to then with brilliant songs such as Sleep Will Pass Us By, The Silent Crossing, The Tower and the title track. The Tindersticks back Chris & Carla up on the George Jones song Take Me. Several other celebrities join in on the album, among them Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey (formerly in The Young Fresh Fellows and currently leader of The Minus 5). A really inspired effort that stands up well against the best Walkabouts albums.

Where the Air is Cool and Dark - Nights Between Stations - Prisoner of Texas - The Silent Crossing - Storm Crazy - Sleep Will Pass Us By - Sweet Revenge Storrns are on the Ocean - Lungs - Velvet Fog - Inauguration Day - Sand & Gravel

Released as Chris & Carla with the Mylos All-Stars, which are seven Greek musicians that very much contribute to the sound with their approach to the musk. Their involvement makes this record quite unique in the Walkabouts discography and it's one of my personal favorites. Unfortunately, this release is another limited mailorder only release. The CD equivalent had a run of 1000 copies; how many of the vinyl album that were pressed is beyond my knowledge. It might have been pressed in Greece - the LP label says nothing of manufacturing country - but it's more likely that it's a German release. The CD comes in a digipak, while the LP is housed in a tasteful, textured, gray and brown sleeve as opposed to the CD's black and white color setting. As the vinyl pressing is very good, it's worth the trouble to track it down. The show features several unusual tracks, such as Inauguration Day (by that time only available on a Walkabouts single) and a mindblowing version of Sand & Gravel with a Dorian mode introduction. Also here is another frenzied Townes van Zandt cover, Lungs. This album is an absolute necessity to anyone interested in Chris & Carla and The Walkabouts.

SINGLES

Songs marked (*) indicates that the song is also included on the Death Valley Days compilation (see album listing above).

Linda Evans/Cyclone (7 Necessity S001 US 1987)
Both tracks are included in the Weights and Rivers section of the See Beautiful Rattlesnake Gardens CD (for further comments, see Weights and Rivers in the album section of this discography.)

COMPILATION TRACKS

Certain Gift
Sounds of Young Seattle Vol. II (Cassette, DBN 004, US 1985)
Also included as bonus track on See Beautiful Rattlesnake Gardens CD. This song shows the band surprisingly psychedelic. On hearing it, you can only wish that they would have remained only a little longer in the psychedelic haze.

VIDEO

The video released simultaneously to the CD with the same title. Feel Like Going Home is not included on the record. Limited edition.

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