REDNECK RAMPAGE

Rip It Up, Issue 248, 1 April 1998, Page 14

REDNECK RAMPAGE

SoutHerN Culture 0n THe SkiDs

'"1 guess maybe mainstream America is more like us than they think," says Rick Miller, guitarist and vocalist of the swamp/surf hillbilly rocker trio Southern Culture On the Skids. "They just don't wanna be reminded of it."

/Ar course, middle America love to be V/1 entertained by the off-beat facets of USA culture, and that's the reason Married With Children, King of the Hill, and George and Tammy's 'D.I.V.O.R.C.E' were all big successes — which also goes some way to explaining Southern Culture On The Skids' crossover success so far. But what puzzles Miller, is why his band are told they're too peculiar for mainstream tastes. "We're not even that weird. Just Southern."

But he's not losing any sleep over it. , Miller is taking a short break from a tour that began last August and relaxing at home (yes, in the Von Franco-painted Lazy Boy that adorns the cover of their current release Plastic Seat Sweats sleeve). Home is North Carolina — which, despite the name, is a resolutely Southern state — and it has been the band's base since the current line-up of Miller, bassist Mary Huff, and drummer Dave Hartman took shape in 1987. Over the following years, a pile of independent label releases successfully reached a cult audience, but it wasn't until Southern Culture signed with Geffen in 1995, for the release of Dirt Track Date, that their musical hybrid style crossed from the noman's land of being too hip for the hicks and too hick for the hip, to gaining a faithful audience containing elements of both. The rural/cosmopolitan musical diversity of Plastic Seat Sweat has attracted a mixed audience of southerners and otherwise. Millar says students, rednecks, and tattooed and . pierced hipsters, make for some strange audience chemistry, with occasionally volatile results.

"You've got all the piercings [crowd], and

then you have the full on trailer trash with that really funky Nashville hairdo. 1 love 'em both and ]'m glad they both come; but I'll tell you what, when some of the punk rockers get moshing, the rednecks don't know what to think, and there's some serious fights that happen. You can see it coming. The redneck guy will push someone really hard, the punk rock guy thinks, 'oh man, he's into it,' and pushes back, and the guy just reels off and clobbers him."

Miller's experience with the home territories of both classes of fan are more than just a passing familiarity, having absorbed both southern and Californian culture during his upbringing. "Yeah, 1 grew up in North Carolina and 1 moved to California for awhile, at least long enough to learn how to surf and to go see Dick Dale a lot. My dad has always been here in NC, so ] had to come back every

summer and work in a mobile home factory," he says. "You guys got mobile homes down in New Zealand?" Well, there's caravans. "So you got trailers. ] was just wondering. Being so far south, you'll be into southern culture. ] hear you got a lot of good lookin' sheep down there." Hmmmm. That's questionable humour, unless you mean wool or meat. Perhaps it's a good thing that so many of Southern Culture's songs appear to be about food.

"] think the food thing works really well for us, especially since we're from the South, which has a lot of its own indigenous recipes. Food is a great metaphor because it has to do with orifices, anything that goes in comes out, it's that in-out, push-pull, yin-yang sort

of thing." Miller almost sounds wistful. "There isn't enough bands that write about food anymore, they all write about their lousy childhood or something, and that sucks, people get tired of hearing about that after awhile. But 'Banana Puddin'' —that's sexy and good, y'know." It's not all twang, bang, and goll-ee mam. Surf tunes, Las Vegas Grind styles, fantasy theme tunes to 60s spy films; and Plastic Seat Sweat's final (uncredited) track wouldn't be out of place on Beck's last album. "Well, that's sort of us moving out onto the dancefloor, because 1 don't like people calling us retro all the time. We recorded it right here in my basement, did a drum loop and then started layering all kinds of shit on it until it was basically a big, 10 minute long mess. But we really love it, and sometimes it's my favourite cut on the record." . Instrumentals have always been an

important part of Southern Culture's repertoire, and in Miller's opinion, they are the purest. "H's real music, and we put at least three on every record. Some people think it's because you can't think up enough stuff, but it's harder to write a really good instrumental than it is to hash out some lyrics with a hooky little phrase, and strum some chords behind it."

In a live setting, people can tune into the vibe of music more easily, and on a level they can't reach in their own living rooms — it may be the presence of others, it may be the volume, or, in the case of Southern Culture, it may be that little extra they add to some performances. _

"When we do 'Dance for Me' live, we try to get somebody to come up on stage and belly dance, and it's great 'cause it's usually some really good looking girl that has just got a new belly piercing or something, and they wanna get up there and show it off. Right on! 1 like that!"

These invited stage invasions are not merely an excuse for Miller (or anyone else) to ogle semi-naked flesh however, given that the tone of 'Dance for Me' and 'Theme From the Cheaters', evoke a smoky, sleazy-listening air that effortlessly lends itself to the presence of even faintly exotic dancers. Southern Culture are no strangers to the interior of real sleaze bars, having been the musical (but fully clothed) entertainment in strip clubs on more than one occasion.

"Oh yeah, we've played topless/bottomless joints, just total XXX nudity, y'know.- We played with a black stripper called Blondie, who'd peroxided her pubic hair and the hair on top of her head, pure white, and she looked incredible under black light. She would take beer cans and crush 'em between her tits and then throw 'em into the crowd. She also writes poetry, and we'd play stuff behind her while she recited her poetry, totally naked. It was ■ terrific."

But with Miller, any discussion about music inevitably leads back to the subject of Lazy Boy chairs, and it takes more than the memory of a poet/stripper to change that. "When 1 was growing up, all we had to listen to music on was a recliner with an 8track stereo built into it, with the speakers behind the ears. We didn't have a record player. Dad was a mobile home salesman, and he would get tons of bootleg 8-track tapes from truckstops. J got my musical taste just sitting there in that Lazy Boy. When my parents got divorced, my mom got rid of it. 1 can't believe she did that, it was so important to me."

Not to worry, because there's always the chair on the cover of the album.

"Yeah, right here in my living room! That's one of the perks of being on Geffen. They said, 'here's your budget to make a record,' and 1 thought, 'Great! I'll get my dream chair made and put it on the cover as an excuse!"' ]f the South rises again, and Southern Culture On the Skids become part of mainstream tastes worldwide, mayb6 that won't seem so strange, and we'll all have chairs like that. (9roy '&eryu6on