by Gonzalo Riedel
There’s always that point when you’re listening to Electric Six that you wonder how much of the music is sincere and how much is tongue-in-cheek. Take my favourite song, for example: “She’s White,” off the band’s 2003 debut Fire. On the surface it’s one of those rockers that makes you crank the volume and play air guitar, but the lyrics are silly enough to make you feel weird about singing along. “She’s white, she is so white, I was born to excite her, she could never be whiter.” You know there’s a joke somewhere, but you aren’t sure what exactly the joke is.
Even now, I’m unsure where the joke is in a few of their songs. I ask Dick Valentine, singer of Electric Six, about “Adam Levine,” a track off the band’s recently-released ninth record, Mustang. Valentine begins with the lyrics, “Give all your money to Adam Levine, but Adam Levine don’t need your money.” At first, the digs on the Maroon 5 frontman don’t seem all that personal, that maybe Levine is a stand-in for all pop music icons. But when the chorus kicks in and Valentine, with his signature growl, repeats the line, “Burn in Hell, rot in Hell, burn in Hell, motherfucker,” then it feels personal.
“I’ve got nothing against the guy, really,” Valentine says, speaking to Stylus from his Brooklyn home. “I’ve never met him. In America it seems there are only two bands that ever get airtime for, like, a two-year cycle. Just the same bands playing the Super Bowl or The Today Show. And it seems that everyone is content listening to those same groups over and over until the next group comes along. When you finally get around to actually hearing this glossy music that’s being packaged, there’s just nothing there. It’s empty.”
Valentine insists it isn’t sour grapes speaking. “Sure, it’d be nice to play those kinds of shows [that Maroon 5 plays]. We got to do a lot of TV spots in Europe back when Fire came out and was charting well, but after a while it gets exhausting being up that early.”
“But I’m happy where we are. Right from the get-go,” he says, “I wanted my band to be like Guided By Voices, recording an album a year and touring as much as we could.”
I ask how it’s possible to keep up a pace like that.
“It’s pretty easy,” Valentine says, “as long as you take it a year at a time. Everyone in the band is a really good writer, and so, really, each person writes two good songs a year, you have twelve songs, that’s an album. Besides that, we all have a yearly meeting together where we check in and make sure everyone’s good to go another year, that everyone still likes being in the band. Everyone said ‘Yes, let’s go another year,’ so we’re now working on the tenth album. It’s been getting easier. On Mustang I brought the least amount of finished ideas to the table, and people have been saying it’s our best, so that says something. I’m happy about that.”
Valentine sounds grateful that he can lean on his bandmates right now. He has been busy raising his first child, which is resulting in shorter tours. Valentine is also working on solo material.
“Those came from being pragmatic,” he says of the solo albums. “I was playing a lot of acoustic sets that were getting popular, so I recorded the albums so I’d have something to sell at the shows. I can be pretty money-motivated with things like that.”
As for Electric Six’s work, Mustang fits right in with the rest of the band’s discography, for anyone familiar with their music – that same kind of irony-soaked, fist-pumping Detroit hard rock that they’ve been turning out since 2003. As always, many of the songs have clever lyrics and often hilarious titles like “Jessica Dresses Like a Dragon” and “I Never Fucked Her.” Sure, nothing really matches the jokiness of earlier songs like “Naked Pictures of Your Mother,” but it’s good fun all the same.
“The only mandate the band had when working on the record was that it couldn’t be a synth record,” Valentine says, “because the last album was a synth record, and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves.”
In response to the level of comedy in his songs, Valentine says, “I don’t really try to write anything funny, I just tend to write something that interests me from a certain character’s standpoint. It changes over time. Like the song, ‘I’m the Bomb’ [from Fire]; I think it’s a great song, but I don’t think I could approach a song like that again. I was in my 20s when I wrote that, and I’m in my 40s now. I’d go about writing a song like that in a completely different way.”
His mention of “I’m the Bomb” proves to me that even Dick Valentine’s reference points for Electric Six go back to Fire, the band’s best-known work. You can witness the album’s popularity at their live shows. I caught the band play The Pyramid about two years ago, and no surprise, when the band broke into “Gay Bar” and “Danger! High Voltage,” much of the crowd responded in the way that drunken hooligans do, by shoving everyone with their obnoxious dancing. When that happened, I remember Valentine looking on with a kind of curious amusement that I’d never been able to decipher.
“It happens more often than it doesn’t,” Valentine says about the audience’s outburst. “I think when that happens, my thought process is to kind of laugh at it. I mean, those of us in the band, when we were growing up, going to rock shows, we never did dipshit things like that. We usually stood toward the back and watched the shows and didn’t move. So we don’t really understand why people would act that way.”
“But it’s not like it bothers us at all,” he adds. “Dipshits buy t-shirts too.”
Electric Six are performing at the Pyramid March 18, with the Mohrs. Tickets are $17 in advance, available at Into the Music, Music Trader, and ticketworkshop.com