Moodcrush
Devil Monkey Stew (Young American)
An interview with vocalist Ken Lyons and bassist Paul
by Scott Hefflon
You have some psychotic lyrics on Devil Monkey Stew. Who writes your lyrics?
Ken: I do.
Do you smoke a lot of dope?
Ken: I try to, unless it interferes with my singing.
You have a wide range of vocals, yet in the privacy of your own home you smoke and write extremely bizarre lyrics?
Ken: Right (laughing).
Paul: We try to write and then do shows, and then take time to write because when we’re writing that’s when we’re smoking all the weed.
Ken: I sort of get the ideas when I’m stoned and I’ll jot down lyrics and think they’re crazy. I think they’re awesome until the next day, when I’m sober, I say to myself, I’ve got to write something that’s somewhat coherent. So usually I fine-tune them when I’m straight.
So even when you’re straight, Devil Monkey Stew makes sense to you?
Ken: Oh yeah. (Laughter.) Humans are Devil Monkeys and Stew is the world. It makes sense to me.
Paul: There are different categories of lyrics. There are the kind that are obvious, and then there are lyrics that he writes, which you can relate to, maybe, if you can figure it out. But it’s colorful and it can be visual.
Ken: Yeah, I like the Lennonesque sort of lyric writing when it’s colorful. I try to make more sense than Lennon. I don’t know if I do.
Paul: With a song like “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” you don’t know exactly what Lennon’s trying to express. He writes colorfully, yet he is trying to say something specific. We recently got slammed in a review in another local magazine because they said the lyrics made no sense at all. They actually quoted a couple lines from one of the songs, and I thought they made a lot of sense.
Ken: Yeah, they quoted the lyrics that make the most sense, which kind of bummed me out. Other people say the lyrics are too psychedelic for the music. And that the music is more straightforward.
“Straightforward”? How do you mean?
Paul: We play rock.
What’s the process involved in writing psychedelic lyrics to rock songs?
Ken: When we write, we usually get stoned and we have a tape recorder going. Because if we don’t record it then, it’s gone forever. Travis starts jamming and I’ll just start singing. Within a few seconds, we get into a groove and we have something on tape. Then we get out of the groove and we hit rewind to see what we got. Usually, we start with a melody and the lyrics come next. Right now we have four new songs without any lyrics. I’ll just sing the melody and write the lyrics later.
Do you have any guitar background, Ken?
Ken: I played the guitar, but then they made me sing.
Paul: Actually, it was a different band, but with some of the same people. We used to have another singer, but he wasn’t really going in the direction that we were. It was the era we came out of, when we were listening to all those ’80s metal bands, and we trying to do that kind of music. We really weren’t doing it that well, because we were too “quirky” for what we were trying to do. Then Travis, the guitar player, wanted to write and we’d get together and Ken would sing along while playing guitar. The singer had a job at a bakery on the night shift, and he always had to split in the middle. Since Ken was writing the lyrics, we figured he might as well sing. He said, “OK, I’ll sing, but I don’t want to play the guitar too.” So we had to get another guitar player.
Ken: Of course, now, singing and playing guitar is chic. But back then, it was like, “No, Sebastian Bach, man… He doesn’t have to sing and play guitar…”
Paul: We jam for about four hours and then give the tape to Ken.
Ken: Then I have the joy of listening to it for four hours in the car, saying to myself, “I know there was something cool in there somewhere.” It takes about four hours of jamming to get something that sounds like a song.
Paul: Then Travis will show up, and he’s already fucked up and we’ll have to tame him so he won’t start going off on tangents…
Ken: Sometimes, I won’t have my tape recorder and I’ll say we better not start jamming, but we will anyway. Then I’ll say, “Travis that was cool, do you remember what we just played?” and He says, “I don’t fuckin’ know, man.” There goes another song.
Paul: That’s how we write. I’m sure we’re the only band that writes like that, (laughing). Which is probably why you’ve never heard anything like it.
How many songs do you have?
Paul: We really have as many tunes as we’re currently playing. As a band, who knows how many songs we’ve written? One of the songs on the album we’d already trashed, but it was the song that was on the demo that got us the deal and the label really wanted it on the CD. One of the songs was written a week before we went into the studio. When we went into pre-production, we were supposed to have about 20 tunes. But we only played the eight we wanted on the album. They weren’t happy about it. It was a struggle, but we learned a lot. We did get it to the point where we could live with it. We wanted it really raw, and then we’re going to add in all the cool studio tricks. We forgot we were on a budget.
What about your sound live?
It’s a problem, because booking agents don’t really know what to do with us. We get put on the bill with a lot of cheesy metal bands, and sometimes with thrash bands, but we’re just not heavy enough to satisfy that audience. We might have a couple of tunes where people say, yeah, I can mosh to this, but then they have to wait before they hear another they like.
Why is that? I mean, who do you think you should be playing with?
Paul: I think everyone’s trying hard to shake the ’80s. We know what we could do to get on “the right” bills. We know there are things about our band we could change to fit into the scheme of things. One thing different about our band is the way Ken sings. There’s all this lo-fi stuff going on now, where the people aren’t really singing. For Ken not to sing would be a conscious decision to tailor to what’s going on.
Ken: There’s the dumb singer thing now, where, ya know, they’re trying to sound really, like, dumb… Heh, heh, ya know?
Yeah, Beavis and Butthead Rock.
Paul: Ken knows how to sing. He has a unique style, and he’s going to sing.
Ken: Sometimes, I’m embarrassed, like, maybe I shouldn’t sing higher than…
You don’t do nutless, warbling falsetto, so don’t worry.
Paul: We’ve played with Big Catholic Guilt, and that’s not our audience. We’ve played with Machinery Hall, that’s certainly not our audience.
What is your audience?
Paul: People ask me all the time, especially non-musically-oriented people. They say, “Do you play like Metallica?” I have long hair, so they think I like Metallica. “It’s hard rock,” I tell them, but they still ask who we sound like.
Ken: I sing like Freddy Mercury, and the band plays like AC/DC-meets-Metallica-and-the-Beatles.
Paul: In a review, somebody mentioned Aerosmith and Mott the Hoople. I don’t see that comparison. We’ve seen Aerosmith mentioned a few times in reviews. A live review in Lollipop was positive, but the comparison with Kingdom Come was sort of an insult.
I was just saying, “wide vocal range, kind of Zeppelinish, but post-Zeppelinish, not necessarily derivative of Zeppelin, kind of like Zeppelin, but not Zeppelin.”
Paul: People who started playing the ’80s out in the ‘burbs who weren’t into the punk scene were into heavy metal. So if you picked up a guitar, that’s what you wanted to learn.
Now we have nipple rings and tattoos and post-grunge, alterna-whatever.
Paul: We could’ve gone for the post-Cobain thing, but we just can’t do the Seattle thing, or the lo-fi thing. It’s just not us. Whether it’s a conscious effort on their part, or if it’s incidental, we just can’t sound like those bands. It’d be scaling down and not doing what we we’re doing. Ken can sing, we all can play, and that’s what we’ve got to do.
Ken: People think that psychedelic lyrics can’t go with rock; they ought to stop by one of our shows, and we’ll show them that they can.
