LES SAVY FAV: CHEERLEADERS FOR THE APOCALYPSE

Photos & Story: Mike Daily

O'Grady's Note: Little Engines No. 3 published this story back in 2002. I'm sticking it on The Blog because I've always wanted to run a couple color photos I took at the show. And also because I've been listening to Les Savy Fav. Did you know that Tim Harrington got 86'd from a show in Las Vegas? Yeah, he did. The band has since put out a compilation of seven-inch releases called Inches (and the record got some pretty good reviews).

Part of Les Savy Fav's charm surely comes from the curious flourishes that pop up in their creations. For example, their first record was issued with shower caps, and the packaging underneath the disc-holder tab for the CD was printed pink, apparently to resemble a puckered anus. Curious, I say, because it seems out of step for a band that flies so far under radar it’s like a time capsule buried in the here and now, for the future of what’s possible with guitar rock music. If you want it, they got it: heroic guitarwork, elastic basslines, distinctly danceable drumming, counter-melodies on keyboard, and all-out vocals charged with a kind of cheeky uncertainty. Take themselves too seriously, they do not. What they do, and do exceedingly well, is branch away from the D.C. post-punk family tree with their own celebratory zeal and cryptic glee. Their most recent piece of subterfuge is a seven-minute radio play based on the storyline of “Reformat” from The Cat and the Cobra record. Available on seven-inch from The Self-Starter Foundation, this “dramatic reading” in the tradition of Orson Welles concerns a submarine captain who pushes his outdated diesel-powered sub beyond its limits, killing the 234 crew members. An elderly couple in Brooklyn is devastated upon hearing of their son’s death. For his crimes, the captain ends up being executed by guillotine on live TV. The year is 1996.

Since forming some six years ago as restless art students at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Les Savy Fav moved its operations to Brooklyn, New York, and managed to evolve a tighter, brighter, more incongruously appealing sound with each new release. The band is: Tim Harrington on vocals and sequencer/keyboard parts, Seth Jabour on guitar, Syd Butler on bass, and Harrison Haynes on drums. In summer of 1999, Syd founded Frenchkiss Records, which serves as Les Savy Fav’s label in addition to housing kindred-spirit bands like The Apes and the now-defunct Lifter Puller (1995-2000).

Lifter Puller singer/guitarist Craig Finn, now lyricist for The Brokerdealer, sums up everything he has to say about Les Savy Fav in this anecdote:

“We played with them in Detroit at this club called the Gold Dollar,” Craig says. “The first band, a local band, was playing to a pretty much empty room. As part of their set, this band was auctioning off items from their living room. They attempted to get the bidding going on a lamp. ‘Do I hear one dollar? Would anybody want to buy this lamp for one dollar...?’ No takers. Finally, Tim Harrington stands up and gives him a dollar and takes the lamp...

“Tim brought the lamp back to the Les Savy Fav merch table and put a Les Savy Fav sticker on the lampshade. Later that evening the club was full and the band was putting on a typically amazing show. Tim pulls out the very same lamp and says, ‘Who wants to buy a Les Savy Fav lamp for $10?’ He sold it immediately to a guy in the front row.”

Every Les Savy Fav show is its own animal. Tim Harrington is the devious comic spirit of that animal, wearing a full-grown Ulysses S. Grant beard. His stage presence is a heady mix of absurdist-style ranting, intuitive abandon to complex dynamics of the songs, and engaging members of the crowd in ridiculous impromptu games. He’s his own Surrealist Manifesto, fronting a four-man blunt instrument. Like David Yow of the Jesus Lizard, Tim introduces himself to the crowd by invading their personal space. A huskier fellow himself, Tim doesn’t crowd surf—he crowd wades, raves, celebrates. The legendary live show is invariably fraught with ludicrous behavior. But where Yow’s antics verged on perversity with a kind of “look how crazy I am” humor, Tim Harrington insists on a “look how crazy we can be” sensibility. It’s a new age. Everybody is “in” on Tim’s Dadaist performances, and that’s where the fun really begins.

Steve Barone, former guitarist and keyboardist for Lifter Puller, says he thinks it’s sweet that Syd dates a hot chick (Amy Carlson) from TV’s firefighter drama, Third Watch. Currently disguising himself as the one-man-pop-band The Hawaii Show, Steve was pressed to list some observations regarding his peers:

Ten Observations About Les Savy Fav

[Clockwise from Top Left: Tim, Seth, Harrison, Syd.]

1) I saw them at a Lakers’ game with Suge Knight. The last person he took to a Lakers’ game was Tupac.

2) Seeing them for the first time made me wonder if “beard rock” was back.

3) They toured Europe with beards.

4) When you hang out with them, it seems like a model could just appear from nowhere.

5) They are the type of band that you’ll never see at a batting cage.

6) They are cooler than thou but you can’t tell.

7) They are cleverly arrogant which is the best quality any band can have.

8) They pee in bottles in their van and take dumps in used car lots using their socks as TP.

9) They get tons of chicks.

10) Tim gets the most.

The Phil Ek-produced new album Go Forth has sold over 6,000 copies since Frenchkiss released it on October 28, 2001 [Note: This was written just a few months after its release]. “Which for us is good,” Syd says. Set in the contemporary urban landscape of information overload, the collection of songs on Go Forth is hard evidence that Les Savy Fav has officially eclipsed the sum of its influences. Female voices are sometimes used to achieve certain puzzling effects. A squadron of cheerleaders reverbed behind Tim’s opening lines to “Disco Drive” chime in with the narrator confessing he’s “looking in the pink-pink-pink / but living in the red / pissing in the sink-sink-sink / too drunk to find the head...” The eleven tracks range from herky-jerky post-rock anthems (“Crawling Can Be Beautiful”, “The Slip”, “No Sleeves”) to bite-the-rubber-bullet lamentations (“Daily Dares”, “One to Three”). Cover art is a composite mug shot of the four band members.

It’s the vision of a burning bush speaking in “Pills” that reveals more about Les Savy Fav’s collective psyche: “apocalypse can go down easy / you gotta know it’s an acquired taste / your sacrifice can’t please me / I’m dead set to destroy this place...” The music of Les Savy Fav is indeed an acquired taste. The band admittedly diagrams song structures, and cuts and pastes some of them together by computer. The more this music is played, the better it is understood and appreciated. The burning bush in “Pills” goes on to declare: “hip hip for imperfection / I want to make a mess / I’ve got a secret theory / that disarray works best / and though it can’t work often / oh my God when it does / watch as the outburst softens / it’s had its way with us...”

These lines really say a lot to me about LSF.

As the band races in their tour van from San Francisco to Los Angeles to make a show that evening at the Troubadour club, where I’ll be seeing them for the first time, I tell this to Seth by phone.

“Really, that’s awesome,” Seth says. He relays it to the rest of the band: “He says that those are lines that really say a lot to him about us.”

“I could see that,” Tim says.

Elaborate a little bit,” Seth says. “I’m curious to know.”

Well, with their first record they wanted something that sounded raw and more spontaneous with minimal production. With The Cat and the Cobra, they wanted to keep the energy of a live show yet also manipulate sounds and experiment more in the studio. Then ROME was the breakthrough that got all the great reviews, but I think a lot of the musical ideas went over my head at first because I’m not a musician and I didn’t pick up on what they were actually accomplishing with some of those ideas. I also read that the recording of that EP was kind of chaotic in the studio. What was it musically that made the band stoked about ROME?

“What we were stoked about the most was, we were like, ‘Hey, we’re composing music as a four-piece as opposed to a five-piece,’ which is what we were before,” Seth says. [Second guitarist Gibb Slife quit shortly after The Cat and the Cobra was recorded.] “I think that ROME was an amazing way for us to all of a sudden be practicing writing music with Tim playing sequencer and keyboard parts. Basically there we had five songs that all came together and we were like, ‘Wow, we wrote pop songs as a four-piece.’ And we were all very pleased with what those songs were.

“When I listen to The Cat and the Cobra, I realize that Tim had to scream a lot just to get what he wanted to say through this barrage of dueling guitars and everything else,” he goes on. “I think on one hand it’s like an exercise in preservation, too—we know when to pull out of the song a little bit and let the drum and bass take it over for a while, or let a keyboard part slip in and then slip out again. What we were hoping to do with ROME happened with Go Forth. It’s a collection of songs that is diverse but also kind of make sense with each other on the same record.”

What’s been the most intense reaction to one of their shows?

“Gee, I don’t know,” he says. “Seems we get boys to kiss each other. I don’t know if that counts. The girls falling in love with Tim, that’s a pretty intense reaction. Stuff like that.”

The phone is passed to Harrison, who I know enjoys painting. I ask: What is the one thing you learned from painting that surprised you?

“I guess I’m constantly surprised by it,” he says. “Actually the surprises are quite rare, but that’s the thing you get addicted to.”

Is that sort of the same with playing? In the band?

“Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent the same. The lucky accidents are far and few between but they’re the stuff that makes you want to keep doing it.”

I have a few questions for Tim. Does this benefit children, I ask him, or is it only for adults?

“It’s never for adults,” Tim says. “Maybe I’m automatically conceptualizing [the question] towards ourselves. Are you talking about, like, uh, hardcore pornography? That’s probably for adults. Mostly. Unless the kids are really mature.”

In “Disco Drive”, he wrote the lines: “sometimes jobs turn to vacations / but always I must earn / still waiting for standing ovations / for filing my tax returns...” How’s the vacation going with Les Savy Fav? Or would he call it a vacation?

“I would definitely call it a vacation,” he says. “I like being in the band. It’s fun. But [those lines are] mostly dedicated to my own stress of going out on tour last winter for like eight weeks and then coming back and getting into the record and realizing that I hadn’t worked in like four months and I had no money. I was like, ‘Oh man...’ Definitely the band is what I want to be doing—what I’m sacrificing for. It’s like a pleasure, to do that.”

Did the band used to live in the practice space or something?

“Harrison and I, when we first moved to New York, we moved into this Knights of Columbus hall, like a men’s club, a Shriners-type deal, which had a ballroom in the front—a banquet hall—and then in the back it had a nice little real bar. The rent was real cheap. We had to build everything. So we built rooms and studio spaces, a really nice practice space. And Seth moved into an apartment across the street. And since then, that’s where like the band lives. Harrison, the drummer, currently lives there with me, and it’s been really great. Unfortunately, in January [2002], the building’s being torn down. So then we’ll have to find a new place to live. I really liked living a couple years in a little half-size room above the practice space. It was called The Troll Hole or The Hovel Hole. Or The Cave. In this little tiny nook the rent was like half of what everybody else paid.”

This privileged information gives insight into his writing on Go Forth’s elegiac power-anthem opener, “Tragic Monsters”: “all the tragic monsters / are crying for themselves / in attics and in basements / in caves and prison cells / wishing that the citizens’ / myths they could dispel // until you’ve seen the faces / in the limestone on the pipe / don’t tell the tragic monsters / what loneliness is like…”

Is it starting to get to the point where he can make the band his job?

“No, I don’t think so,” Tim says. He laughs. “Not yet. Touring pays for itself, and it makes some money, but we come home and whatever money we make on tour quickly goes away. If we went out for eight months out of the year we’d be able to live off it. But that’s a little crazy, I think. I couldn’t handle being in the van eight months out of the year.”

Coming back like that, in a situation like that, must keep him pretty sharp in a way because he knows he can’t slack off, right?

“Yeah, definitely,” he says. “Band-wise, or life-wise?”

Life-wise. Artistically.

“Yeah, I don’t know. It’s got its pros and cons. There’s something to be said to be in a situation where you can focus just on what you want to make. But then there’s a lot to be said for maybe those other distractions of life to keep you from doing as much of your art as you want, which are in fact the things that are feeding your art.

“If you end up in the classic success syndrome of, you know, you end up successful enough that you can finally really just focus and all you have to do and all you’re ever expected to do is what you love, what your passion is—make your art, do what you got to do—the second you get that, all of a sudden you feel that you’re, like, eating your own tail. There’s no more external stuff to feed into the art and make it work. And that can be bad.”

Doctors, surgeries, and beds come up a lot in his lyrics. Does any of that come from real-life experience?

“Well, no,” Tim says. “I never knew anyone with any really serious illnesses. But I think I’m real interested in doctors, and medical science. Where science and religion cross over it’s somewhat specific, but mystical. Whereas some of the other sciences are kind of cocky. Medical science is so direct, so immediate, so individual-to-individual…like surgery, it’s tight; it’s solid. It’s really amazing, full of that weird, unwilling God-play. We like a doctor who’s saving someone’s life, but there probably a weird double vision of being [a doctor] saving someone’s life in a God-like way, but thinking, ‘Clearly, I’m not.’ Like, ‘Look what a mess this is. I’m one of these people…”

“The idea of someone turning themselves over to someone else to fix them, and the doctor simultaneously seeing more of like a fucked-up machine your body is, but also being like, ‘I’m making repairs to it. I know how it works.’”

The wordplay of his lyrics can be playful but it can also be dark.

“Yeah, I feel that way too, I guess. I agree with that. Lyrically I like to do a sort of cheerleading, the idea of sort of like a bleak cheer. The kind of thing that sing along and then all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Wait, what do those lyrics mean?’ [Someone else] might say, ‘Well, it’s heavy lyrics, it’s got to be sung in a heavy manner.’ Or everything’s got to be just so sincere. I’m much more interested in this, sort of like the tension of, ‘Oh, this song sounds one way—the mood, the tone is more subtle, more complicated, so you have to do a cheerleading’…someone who would be like Cheerleader for the Apocalypse. Like, cheerleading bad news.” He laughs. “Something you feel and you’re like, ‘Huh, that makes me feel good and bad at the same time.’”

Maybe a better word instead of “dark” would be “aware”?

“A lot of our stuff is I think kind of dark,” he says. “A friend of mine said, ’It’s like poppy goth.’ I like goth music, I think it’s cool. There’s something about it that’s got a darker, like black comedy edge.”

What he’s doing now is more narrative than ever, it seems.

“Yeah, there’s a couple songs on the new record that are pretty specific.”

Does he have any interests in the genre of poetry?

“I like poetry. I like Shakespeare. We were reading a poem by Catullus last night, who was a funny imperial Roman poet who was sort of like an original socialite queen guy. All of his stuff is like dirty poems. There’s one where he writes how he’s pissed at this guy that was sleeping with his mistress. He says this line, but I can never remember it. I think it’s: ‘when he cheated on her / she got my goat / but what he didn’t know was / he got my goat’s gout.’” He laughs. “He caught gout from his mistress because she was such a tramp. All of the stuff is like really funny, gossipy, snotty poems of ancient Rome.”

I like Catullus. Gaius Valerius Catullus, a kind of pre-punk lyric writer who was born in northern Italy sometime around 84 B.C. and died relatively young in Rome around 54 B.C. Depending on the translation, Catullus’ work can be fairly obscene and funny. Maybe that’s why his poems have survived the centuries when odes of lesser ancient Roman poets haven’t.

I call Phil Ek, who has produced monumental indie rock records for Built to Spill, Modest Mouse and Love as Laughter, and he says a few words about the collaboration:

“If I ever had a question about a part or how it should sound, they would within themselves be able to work out what would be the coolest for Les Savy Fav,” Phil says. “The best thing about that band was that they were very open to each other to bring out the best in someone’s guitar playing or someone’s singing or someone’s drum patterns—or whatever—to feel very ‘Les Savy Fav’ to them.”

Before recording Go Forth, Phil had never seen the band perform. He has since borne witness to its utter unpredictabilities, many times.

“When they played here in Seattle a little while ago, Tim came out as kind of his ‘modern dance character’ and did Flashdancing onstage—had someone pour water on him, and he sat in a chair. That was pretty great.”

That night at the Troubadour, Tim is in especially fine fettle. He’s wearing a gauzy scarf that he says belongs to his mom. “Does your mom dress you?” a guy in the audience says. Tim doesn’t hear him. The music commences with authority and he hoists the weighty mic stand overhead, singlehandedly balancing it upside down before setting it back down and rushing the front of the stage. Apocalypse now. He crouches to shout lines in audience members’ faces, which show surprise, exhilaration, wonder.

Respect.


The singer takes off his shirt and pats his protruding belly. He veils his face with the scarf then simulates a bra with it. The music is getting to him and he pours half a bottle of red wine over his head, vocally going off like a fringe character in a low-budget horror movie. He takes a big slug from the bottle and motions to a guy near the front to open his mouth. The guy shakes his head, no, smiling. Another volunteers and the wine is dribbled from mouth to mouth, with some success. Tim balances an apple on his head and stands at attention, then picks it off and chomps at it, pieces crumbling from his mouth. He changes into a shirt that says NEW YORK CITY, people cheering it. Was the prop an oblique reference to The Big Apple? Out come flashlights. Tim steps offstage into the ground and collapses to the floor, still singing. Then he’s back onstage. He goes into the wings and returns with a blue blanket, which he drapes over the shoulders of Seth like a cape.

They’re slamming through “The Slip” at one point and that’s when the singer sees it: the balcony over the bar. The people.

What happens next brings to mind Dino de Laurentis' remake of King Kong. Tim Harrington stands as transfixed as King Kong when Kong saw the World Trade Center towers for the first time and they reminded him of the mountains back on his island. Tim calmly but determinedly makes his way through the crowd. He’s got to do what he’s got to do. Les Savy Fav extends the song like the Doors probably did for Jim Morrison when they played the Troubadour, and all eyes are upon Tim. He jumps and gets a hand up on a crossbeam, then the other, then a foot. He’s struggling. He reaches his right hand up for help and a girl pulls him the rest of the way…

Cheers.

Tim eventually returns to the stage and takes his place at the mic. The chorus is a crisis situation: “If you disappear without a trace, they won’t give chase!” he sings. “If you disappear without a trace, no hearts will break! If you disappear without a trace, as some must do! If you disappear without a trace, take me with you!”

Les Savy Fav. You gotta know it’s an acquired taste.

See them if you can, while you can.

--MD