BRMC: Insanity, Booze and The Beatles

Sigh, rockstars. The voice on the other end of the line enlightens me to the fact that Robert- bassist for rock and roll neighbourhood band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club- is drunk. I swear, one day my eyes are simply going to fall out of my head from rolling them so much. After pleasant hellos, I ask Robert where the band is at the moment. “Zurich” he replies, with a jaded sigh. He speaks like a world-weary Arts student, so I try to keep my usual lame jokes and sunny banter to a minimum.

“Insanity can be a good tool” he says, on the mechanics of the BRMC machine. “There’s a fine line between freedom and insanity”. Although Robert seems articulate and open-minded, he trails off most sentences with a despondent “I dunno…”.

I figure I’ll ask something safe: so how did the band come to be, Robert? “Me and Peter went to high school together…the day we met Nick was… ah, bordering on insanity…that was in San Francisco, and he came and we were playing in another band just for fun called Wave, it was just a trip-out psychedelic headfuck. I invited him down, in town and he jumped on stage, while we playing and started shaking maracas and tambourines and he threw the maraca against a cymbal and it exploded. I didn’t know if you break a maraca it’s filled with this white powder, that fills the air like napalm gas or whatever, so the show ended not too long after that. We tried to get him home and he was just a maniac, we went through a McDonald’s drive-through and he was yelling at some homeless person…he kept trying to jump out the window of our van on the bridge. All I remember is Pete hanging onto the loop on the back of his pants, the little belt loop. He was just holding on by one finger. So the rest is history”.

BRMC, having been called on more than one occasion “The Saviors of Rock and Roll” (most likely by NME), I ask Robert his view on the current state of the ever-changing genre;

“Better than ever. The music that’s out right now rivals any of that. It’s truly inspiring to be making music in 2007…. Beatles, Stones, that was just a fad. If you really wanna know what’s going on, check out the iTunes current Top Downloads. It’s worth its weight in gold”. I laugh, though his unaffected tone of voice does not indicate whether or not he is really joking. He must have been spent from that quip, though, since, after I ask him what music he is currently listening to, he replies, exasperated, with: “Uhhh…I think I’ve run my course of sarcasm. I don’t really like anything, I dunno…”. I am almost afraid to ask him even my most atypical questions, so I plough on with an easy one: downloading, the iDebacle. “I notice more and more these days that music isn’t respected or given…weight. But it’s kinda partially our own fault. We’re all kind of trigger-happy to download everything and get it as fast as we can and eat it up and regurgitate it and move on. It’s losing its value”. Luckily, by the grace of Lester Bangs, I am saved by our complete agreeance on this. I track back to the bane of the “Next Big Thing” tag: “I think were our own harshest critics, were really just trying to prove it to ourselves. We knew the game as far as “Ok, this is the 15 minutes, are the shoes gonna drop at any time? So we didn’t really ever allow ourselves to feel *long pause* I dunno,happy? *Laughs* Excited? Caught up in it? I kinda wish we could go back and just take it for what it’s worth. It felt kind of perverted for some reason, it didn’t feel like it should”.

I’ve never been to Zurich. I hear it’s cold, but that’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject. I can’t explain why Robert- or anyone else in such a privileged position- would- could- be so disinterested, so bored. Was it the booze? Is life on the road not what us middle-class plebs dreamingly expect it to be? Who knows, I guess there’s no room for psychoanalysis in rock and roll.

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