“Dig the Now Sound” on Turn Me On, Dead Man Radio on Live365.com highlights the best of recent garage/psych. The show airs Wednesdays at 10:00pm eastern time and this week’s spotlight track is “Dutch” by Still Caves. A couple of weeks back I posted my best of 2012 lists and I selected “Dutch” as the best track of 2012.
I recently corresponded with guitarist Brian Whitmer of Still Caves and here is what he had to say.
Turn Me On, Dead Man: I was just looking at your Bandcamp page and it appears that you released “Dutch” in 2011, but the version on Static Lips is a new recording. What led you to re-record it?
Still Caves: I guess we wouldn’t really consider the first recordings a “release”. We recorded Dutch and Great Recession in 2011 by just putting a mic in the middle of the room and plugging it into a laptop. We just put those up when we started playing shows so people could check out what we sounded like. We had always planned to record those over with the rest of the stuff we had written so far.
TMODM: Who are your main influences and just how much vintage gear do you use?
SC: As for influences…We each have pretty diverse influences, but when we got started we were all interested in Eat Skull, The Whines, Burning Yellows, The Mantles, Spacemen 3, Little Claw, Les Rallizes Denudes, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Ty Segall, The Clean, Thee Oh Sees, Woods, and Crystal Stilts. Those are the ones that come to mind right away.
Equipment-wise, Jamey [Williams, also on guitar,] is the one of us who has been collecting nice old pieces for a long time. He is on a ’67 Bassman, a Gibson 335 Special, a Memory Man, and also uses some newer and reissue stuff, like the Rat. I used a reissue Twin Reverb, but recently traded it for an 80’s The Twin amp. Other than that his pedals are mostly the more affordable reissues of the good old stuff like the Deluxe Memory Boy and Big Muff Pi. The bassist [Kellam Connelly] uses a Fender Musicmaster into a big old Peavy and the drummer [Travis Visscher] uses drums.
TMODM: I see you’ve got a show coming up in a few days (January 24th at Holocene in Portland, OR–only $5!). Have you or are you planning to venture from Portland? Any new releases coming anytime soon?
SC: We would like to head out of town soon. We are looking into buying a van. We went up to Seattle and Tacoma a couple of months ago and had a lot of fun. Having a reliable form of transportation we will be able to get out more often.
We have a few songs ready to record and will do so either this month or next. Not sure what we are going to do about releasing those. We really love vinyl so getting it out that way would be great.