Chrome Cranks

Here’s a departure for the modern SLUG. After careful thought and much soul-searching, I decided to place this interview where it would cause the most confusion. The Chrome Cranks are a “garage-blues” band. I hesitate to use the term in SLUG because most people don’t have the same interpretation of it as I do, but that is what the Chrome Cranks are. They record in and actually own the studio Jon Spencer uses to record both his bands. All the greasy children know about Jon Spencer since he appeared at Saltair with the Beastie Boys. They still don’t play his music on the radio and they sure as hell don’t play the Chrome Cranks. In case the mall or the big box is your record shop of choice, you probably aren’t aware that the Chrome Cranks have a new album out. It’s titled Love In Exile, and for those familiar with the Chrome Cranks a few of the more sparse songs, it might come as a slight surprise. Don’t worry, be happy and listen to “Wrong Number” for trademark Cranks. 

I talked with Peter Aaron, guitar/vocals, about the new album and other subjects of extreme importance. As usual, I’ll leave out the really stupid questions. 

SLUG: How do you keep your voice in shape? (Our pal Aaron sings with one of those gasoline-supping growls.) 

PA: Man, I smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. Drink a lot of coffee. I don’t know, it’s funny because we were in Europe a couple of weeks ago, doing shows over there for a week and I blew my voice for the first time. 

SLUG: That’s the first time you’ve ever blown your voice? 

PA: Yeah, people have asked me that before. I think it happened more or less because William (Weber, guitar) came down with something before we left for the tour and it really kicked in on him when we were on the plane. I think I caught something that he had or whatever, and I think that’s what set me off. This happened with two shows left to go. If we were in the middle of a bigger tour, we would probably have canceled a couple of shows. But it was just like, if I blow my voice out, I’ll have plenty of time to recover after. I tried not to open my mouth until we hit the stage. We made it through okay. I don’t know, I don’t have any method. This is the first band I ever sang in or played guitar in and for some reason I do it in such a way that it hasn’t really happened to me except that one time. 

SLUG: How was Europe? 

PA: We do really well in Europe. This last time was kind of strange because we played mostly these big festival type shows. Most of those were well attended, but it was strange. I think the fourth one was in Switzerland. It was on top of one of the Alps. It was a beautiful area, like pretty much the whole country is. It was the third day of this three-day outdoor festival thing. There were a bunch of bands. The Butthole Surfers played, and then this band called Fun Lovin’ Criminals, then Los Lobos and then us. We saw the bill before we got there and we were all like, “Oh, wow, this is going to be some huge show,” but when the Butthole Surfers were playing there were maybe 200 or 250 people there. The whole festival was kind of a flop in that way. Nobody could understand it. They gave us a lot of money, but it was probably a drop in the bucket for them. The next night we played with this band Dead Moon, you probably know these guys. Their singer, he plays guitar also, was in this band The Lollipop Shoppe. They did this song, “You Must Be A Witch,” it’s on one of the Pebbles records. He’s been playing since that time and he lives in a house he built and puts out his own records, and he lives this shadowy, outside-of-society type life. They’re a terrific band and they usually draw a minimum of 500 or 600 people. The last show we played was with Dead Moon, Foetus, us and Barmarket. (Imagine that show!) We were expecting it to be a bigger show and there were a little bit more than a hundred people there. Both of those shows were really strange for Europe. In the days before, we played this big outdoor festival in Holland and were in front of four or five-thousand people. 

SLUG: Who played that one? 

PA: We went on after Everclear. 

SLUG: In one of the articles included with your press kit, the writer is kind of giving a slam to Estrus. Estrus isn’t as cool as Sympathy or Crypt?

PA: I think they’re all terrific labels. I think Estrus is a terrific label, too. It so happens that we haven’t done any records for Estrus. We definitely would love to have something out on the label because we think it’s great. I think lately, in the past couple of years, it’s sort of taken a turn. A lot of people, not necessarily that Dave Crieder guy who runs the label, but to a lot of people who sort of follow the labels have this… and this is true of Crypt also… and Tim Warner of Crypt has made mention of it, people have a stylized, regimented idea of what rock n’ roll is or something. It seems like a lot of bands – I’m trying to be diplomatic about this – just a lot of people have a stylized idea of Estrus. I don’t think that Estrus is really stylized in the way they view things. There’s so many of these bands coming out. That’s the thing. We’re identified with this whole sort of garage-under-a-bubble thing and it’s definitely a big element of our sound, but we’re not trying to do something that’s straight retro. We’re trying to put a new twist on the music. A lot of people don’t view the whole, whatever you want to call it, the whole garage rock thing. To them it’s like these bands that wear bizarre goofy matching outfits and have Big Daddy Roth-esque drawings on their record covers and wild teens on rampage. That stuff was cute when it first came out and when the Cramps started doing it. At this point it’s just really cliched and predictable. There’s a glut of way more bands that are playing really straight rock like that and they aren’t even trying to do something to make it a little bit more…go out on a limb…make it a little bit more dangerous. We don’t like to be allied or seen as being part of that. We’re trying to do something that’s a little bit more timeless. We don’t want to put out a record and go, “Oh, this record was made during this certain garage revival period.” You can listen to a lot of those records by like the Fuzztones or something from the early 80s, and a lot of it doesn’t hold up very well. 

SLUG: On to your new record. “The Receiver” is just drums and vocals. That’s a cool song. 

PA: You like that? I wasn’t sure what people were going to think about it. I really wanted to throw people a curve ball, show that something could be really powerful, that we didn’t have to do another song with really loud distorted guitars to do something that had some sort of impact to it. 

SLUG: Your drummer is amazing. 

PA: Bob (Bert, Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Bewitched and Action Swingers are listed in his credits) is incredible. It’s (“The Receiver”) my favorite thing to listen to that we’ve done. I think the drum sound that we got on this record is definitely the best. We did this one on a 16-track ADAT. I love the way our other records sound too, but we want to make all the records sound different. A lot of people are really hard-line about the whole lo-fi thing, but to all of us in the band the production should fit the songs. To record and produce something badly just to be, “Wow, we’re gonna be really punk rock and we’re going to put out this thing that sounds like a bad bootleg that was recorded through a pillow.” That’s funny for a few minutes, but if your songs are good and your playing is good then you’re really selling yourself short. People would see that you’re so much better than what you are releasing if it’s recorded in a way that enhances the song. That is not to say that the next record we’re planning to go into a bigger studio or anything like that. We might turn around and do something that is a lot more raw. 

SLUG: You made a video for “Hit The Sand?”

PA: Going with the feel of the song, I sorta had this concept for a film noir type thing because it leans towards the loungey side. This guy that shot and directed the video, a guy named David Blum, we shot a video with him last year for the song “Nightmare In Pink” that’s on the Dead Cool record. He came out from L.A. to do it. It’s got some guest stars in it. Ron, the singer from Speedball Baby, is the central character, sort of a Deniroesque type of guy. Kid Congo is in it. 

SLUG: “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” is listed as traditional on your record, but I looked it up and found that the song is credited to Blind Lemon Jefferson. Has it lost its copyright? 

PA: Oh, yeah, yeah a long time ago. But like a lot of those songs he did, that’s the version I learned it from. I know some other people have done it, like Dylan did a version on his first album. But I haven’t heard that song in a long time and I don’t know what it sounds like. I know Canned Heat did it, but of course, typical of Bob Hite, he changed the title and put himself as the author. The thing was…supposedly Blind Lemon Jefferson co-opted that from a song he learned from Son House. It was a song called “Three White Horses,” which is a line in there: “three white horses in a line, carry me to my burial ground.” It was something that was basically some kind of folk song that was… all those guys learned from someone else and maybe changed it and put some of their words in. As far as I know Blind Lemon Jefferson is the first known recorded version of it and I guess because of that, he’s more or less credited as the author. There’s a lot of songs like that. I did a different arrangement of it. (To say the least.) 

SLUG: Did you set out to make Love In Exile a bluesier album? 

PA: I guess a little bit. We wanted to do something that had a lot of different sounds on it, something that would be more of a challenge to us. Anything that’s challenging to us is hopefully going to be challenging to what people expect from us. I felt that this record was going to be a lot more bluesier. I thought it was going to be a lot more subdued. But there were definitely some rockers on it. There’s definitely some of what people would expect from us after hearing our other records. “Lost Time Blues Suite,” we did a better version of that. We had it out as a single earlier, but we weren’t happy with the version we did as the single and we re-recorded it for the album. That “Wrong Number” song, which is pretty nasty, and “Down For The Hit.” I guess I was, after we made the last record, I was like, “I’d really like to make something that’s real open, sort of a somber, sparse record, but I just can’t help it, I keep writing these rockers too. I think if we did one thing all the time, I would…all of us would…get really bored playing all loud rocking songs and we’d also get really bored playing all ballads or all blues songs. I think it’s an extension of, “you don’t feel the same way all the time,” even though there are a lot of bands that get locked into this same dynamic all the way through. I get really bored with bands like that. Art is supposed to be an outlet for who you are and the way you are feeling at different times. Actually we have one or two newer songs since we recorded that album that are more on the rockin’ side. I don’t think we’re headed down the Gordon Lightfoot path any time soon. 

No, they aren’t planning another visit to Salt Lake City anytime soon. At least we are getting two of their friends, Railroad Jerk and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. A triple bill would be heaven, but Salt Lake City folk have to wait until after death to find heaven. —KRALA, King of the Wheels

Read more interviews from the SLUG Archives:
Syd Straw
The Mermen

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