http://www.willametteweek.com/story.php?story=7031

My interview with Courtney Taylor-Taylor was evidently a mistake. The Dandy Warhols frontman, currently touring North America in support of the critically dogged and popularly ho-hummed psych-pop offering Odditorium or Warlords of Mars, talked to me over the phone from Montreal. Pausing ever-so-briefly from his bloviating, Portland's favorite druggy made no bones about his displeasure, asking "Why the fuck am I talking to you?" three times and cursing Capitol Records for not adhering to his orders for no hometown press calls. But he never hung up, talking for 40 minutes. I just tried to keep up.

Riff City: Last month, the Portland Mercury reported...

Courtney Taylor-Taylor: The Portland Mercury are little liars, and they're little baby brats. Obviously, they just lie a lot and one day they're just going to be crushed by a libel suit.

So, you know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, they said we had split up, which isn't true. Do they know that I can actually own their company for them saying that? Little girls.

Well, um, the new album is very different from the last. How did you write it?

The question always is "How little sound does it take for something to be music?" The first time we tried to make a record for Capitol Records, we had a $100,000 budget and I said, "All right guys, I hate to tell you this, but what I'm going to do with this money is find out where, between a jackhammer and 'Bridge Over Troubled Water,' does sound become organized enough to be music." Because a jackhammer at 7 am waking shit up when you're hung over is not music. I promise you. I guarantee it. "Bridge Over Troubled Water," unless you're a really troubled person, you could not maintain an erection during, much less have an orgasm. The most self-indulgent experience you can have, an aroused orgasm, cannot happen at either end of the spectrum, I think. You'd have to be really horny. They are both intrusive, sonically and emotionally. That's why, with our first record with Capitol, we never finished it. They just went, "What the fuck are you doing?"

So...

...We try to do pure research. We steer clear of any current trend. The last couple popular trends, they were trends we started. We made the first '80s record [2003's Welcome to the Monkey House]. It was the Strokes, the White Stripes and Jet on the radio then, and those bands were just following 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia. There was no Strokes and no White Stripes and no Jet when we made 13 Tales. There was Blink 182 and SUM 41. That record opened the door for all these great guitar bands and fucking hipsters. Which meant that we couldn't make a retro guitar record, so we made an '80s record. So cool kids like Franz Ferdinand and the Killers got that and were making records like that.

Uh...

...and they're fucking great bands. But the last thing we're going to make is a disco-punky record. On [Odditorium] we're intent on how far you can deconstruct this stuff before the law of diminishing returns takes over. Dirty sounds are more emotionally engaging to me than good, clean, compressed, slick ones.

How did Capitol react to it?

Well, when we handed it in we turned it in burned as one track, one song for the whole record, so they couldn't fast-forward around and listen for hits. They had to listen to it all the way through. We sent one to the president, one to our A&R guys, and they listened to it in the car—which is great because we make great road-trip records, probably the best that have ever been made. And, of course, they both came back saying, "This is the best psychedelic album since Dark Side of the Moon."

Stay tuned next week for part 2 of the Courtney Taylor-Taylor interview, wherein the leadman talks about super-intelligent humans and why you suck.

Wow, hang with Liam Gallagher much?

I'm sure it was no fun talking to him, but fuck if that doesn't make for some funny reading. Thanks for posting, man.

You gotta respect that though?

Maybe he had just read another bad review or had to phone interviews all day long.

You know, it'd be one thing if the Dandy Warhols were as huge as Oasis used to be, but they're nowhere near that. I like some of their music, but I always remember that quote from "Singles" where Matt Dillon says something like, "Our record is huge in Belgium."

ummm, Tom Verlaine?

i dunno, i'm always surprised when musicians AREN'T assholes.

I don't know -- sounds similar to the experience Talk Talk had with their record label when they recorded Spirit Of Eden.

I have to admit to having my curiosity piqued.

I didn't read much of the interview but this was ridiculous:

"Because a jackhammer at 7 am waking shit up when you're hung over is not music. I promise you. I guarantee it. "Bridge Over Troubled Water," unless you're a really troubled person, you could not maintain an erection during, much less have an orgasm. The most self-indulgent experience you can have, an aroused orgasm, cannot happen at either end of the spectrum, I think. "

I kinda felt a lot of musicians were a-holes in interviews until I watched 'Meeting People Is Easy' and really saw how repetitive things can get. Courtney Taylor-Taylor has been a loose cannon for many interviews so it doesn't really surprise me. He's just a jerk. Albeit a jerk whose records I buy, bt a jerk nontheless. RParis--was that your interview? If it was--come on? This is stuff you journalistic types eat up

I wish this guy was more "asshole gift to the world" than "Opa styled queen." It reads asshole but I still have visions from DiG of this guy flaming out all over the place.

Nice interview. So the Dandy Warhols apparently invented rock and roll, and hipsters (and Jesus and The Bible). Who knew? Good info to have.

Guess he was in a foul mood that day here when he was in town.

I watched a tv interview he did for Musiqueplus (our MTV) and he was a wee bit asshole-ish to the interviewer too.

I had that DiG movie in my Netflix queue but then I realized I don't care about either of the bands enough to want to sit through it so I deleted it.

I'm sure there are much bigger a-holes in music right now. However, none of them have done any recent interviews, unlike Mr. Taylor-Taylor

He Is A Scientist
Part two of the Courtney Taylor-Taylor interview.
BY MARK BAUMGARTEN | mbaumgarten at wweek.com

Courtney Taylor-Taylor

"By the end of the great war, the Dandy Warhols had progressed far beyond the traditional jug band sound." So begins the Dandy Warhols' latest release, Odditorium or Warlords of Mars, this fictional recounting of the Portland band's origins spoken by the authoritative voice of the A&E channel's Bill Kurtis. What follows is a psychedelic pastiche of a pop album which, like its creator Courtney Taylor-Taylor, is brilliant in its indulgences. Of course, that doesn't mean it's always listenable. Fortunately, Taylor-Taylor's indulgences, the products of an unchecked ego with major-label support, yield nonstop entertainment in this, part two of Riff City's Courtney Taylor-Taylor interview.

Riff City: How's the tour going?

Courtney Taylor-Taylor: Every show is sold out, and we're playing bigger venues than we ever have in our lives. We're bigger than ever, and we've done it the right way. We don't have dipshit jock wannabe alternative posers with haircuts out of magazines and shit showing up at our shows yelling and screaming.

Well, this album hasn't really appealed to a popular audience.

Of course it hasn't. Every record we've made is an album, is a film, it is a continuum from beginning to end, appropriately organized into a very human experience. Everything we do is an experiment in "Oops, that's cool." We notice the accidents, then we freeze them in time and space and say, "Fucking leave it—that's amazing."

What about the Bill Kurtis intro? That doesn't seem very accidental.

I came up with that one. It's actually a litmus test to see if people have any language skills. With a number of people, you play it and they just sort of space off and look out the window. The minute they hear talking, they just shut down. Which is funny, that's great, you know, perfect. We've always been a band that is about separating the wheat and the chaff.

How did you get Bill Kurtis to do it?

Because of the kind of music we play, we meet a lot of the superpower intellectuals of the planet. I ended up at a beach house with one of the leading brain chemists, who was there speaking at a med school in New York on the newest advances about what happens to the brain chemically. I got to sit with this guy alone listening to Louis Armstrong records, and basically ask him what every drug does to the brain. I just got to sit with an astrophysicist in Sydney, Australia, and ask him, "Prove to me that we've been to the moon. Tell me why you know for a fact that we've been to the moon." He sat and told me, explained everything. So I've had the luxury of sitting with Bill Kurtis and talking about art and wine, and he's fantastic. When I came up with the thing, I wanted the Bill Kurtis sound—that fucking titan of information. And it's all the more comical because we're used to hearing Bill Kurtis' voice and just believing it. That's just so fucked-up on a psychological level, what it's doing is being as completely impossible as can be, and dictated by the voice that is ingrained culturally to be the voice of true perspective on history.

What do you think of the way the band is perceived in Portland?

You know, I don't know why the fuck I'm talking to you. I told Capitol that I didn't want to talk to anyone from Portland. It's already impossible for me to go get something to eat with my friends or family and not have someone come up to me and tell me how much they love me or hate me. I just want to keep to myself. I've got about 15 friends and we exist on about four blocks in Portland, where it still feels like it used to before all these fucking kids with haircuts from magazines came in. The rest of Portland, I like to call it New Hipsteria and stay away.

good decision... I didn't care for it much, and can't see the genius in either band.

13 tales is a great album - other than that I don't really care about this guy.

He loves using that "haircuts from magazines" line. I don't think I have one from a magazine. I'll have to look into that...

i met courtney taylor-taylor after their chicago show like last week or something. (i was in the bar next door to metro and he and the band came in for drinks) i was shocked at what a nice guy he was. since i don't leave the house without my camera, i asked to take pictures and he let me take a bunch of him. he kept talking and talking and i was like, "whoa, it's closing time, i gotta head home." i was completely expecting him to be a cock, but i guess he was taking a night off from that persona.

doesn't that tosser from Dandy Warhols have a haircut from a magazine? That 'Carlos D from interpol' cut.

you are female, that might have something to do with it.

he probably wanted to get them guts.

Vincent Gallo + Tom Cruise = Courtney Taylor-Taylor?

And, Zia McCabe = Katie Holmes?

God I hate this guy. I've never seen him on an interview or read one where he didn't come off like a complete prick.

Hell, knowing Anton's rep, while watching DIG I actually liked him better then Taylor.