Freeheat

A conversation with Ben Lurie

(September 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Bickering brothers are a rock-and-roll staple, and The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim and William Reid showed younger bands how it should be done, with years of tension finally building to the disintegration of the massively influential band right before the eyes of a Los Angeles audience in 1998.  While William Reid went solo, singer Jim Reid and bassist Ben Lurie went on to record as Freeheat, eventually recruiting Romi Mori and Nick Sanderson and setting off on tour.  Back On The Water captures a particularly “on” night in Amsterdam, a city that would seem inherently friendly to Freeheat’s psychedelic, barroom-filtered strain of rock and roll.

The album also presents some studio tracks from the summer of 1997; in some cases, like “Get On Home” and “Shine On Little Star,” the tracks appear both as live cuts and studio cuts, allowing listeners to feel the transformative powers of a live show.  As Lurie explains, this could be the only way to get up close with Freeheat any more.

Meanwhile, fans who haven’t sufficiently scratched their JAMC itch have been given ample opportunity by Rhino, via their five-album reissue of the JAMC’s salad days.

The sequencing of Back On The Water is interesting, cutting back and forth from the live tracks.  How did you wind up doing it that way, as opposed to the more traditional tactic of grouping all the live songs together on the second half and putting the others together on the first?

I didn’t want the record to weigh too heavily on either the live or studio sides, so I decided to mix ’em up.  Although this record contains a lot of tracks that have never been released before, I see it as a kind of retrospective of the group.  We never released a proper studio album and now that I’m living here in Australia it doesn’t look like we ever will.  So the record encapsulates the group from the very start when Jim and I were just experimenting in the studio up to when I think we were in our best form on stage.  To me, the live and studio recordings complement, perhaps counter-point, each other, and I thought it would be more interesting to have the these two things intertwined instead of in two chunks at each end of the album.

Had you taped several shows during that 2003 tour and then chosen the best one?  Or did you know that Amsterdam would be the one?

No, we were very fortunate that the Paradiso show went so well.  It was recorded (and broadcast live) by VPRO, who are a Dutch radio station, and when I started putting this record together and sifting through the various recordings I have, both the recording and performance quality of this gig were way better than anything else.  Being the disorganized, somewhat lazy people that we are, the only other recordings I have are bootlegs from fans and a few desk recordings that sound dismal.

One other thing about that 2003 show – it was actually in 2002.  The idiot that did the artwork messed up—and, yes, that idiot was me.

So there are no plans to hit the road again, either?

We don’t really exist as a group any more.  I live in Sydney, Jim lives in Devon (in the South West of England), and Nick & Romi are still in London.  It is kind of typical of us to release an album four years after our last gig.

The landscape from Joshua Tree dominates the Back On The Water artwork.  What’s the significance for you guys?  I just watched a documentary on Gram Parsons and, living in L.A., was reminded of the strange role that Joshua Tree has played for this city’s residents—both a sanctuary and a vice-enabler. 

I’m a huge Gram Parsons fan, and that’s what prompted me to visit Joshua Tree when I was in California last year.  It was a spur of the moment thing – I was in California with my wife and a car and a few days to spare, so off we went and I just found the place amazing.  I am really not one of those spaced-out hippy types, but I felt there was an amazing atmosphere there.

Using a desert-scape on the cover is an oblique reference (kind of a reverse reference) to the album’s title.  The opposite of an ocean is a desert.  And this desert has a lot of soul and not a fair amount of rock’n’roll history.

The tracks from The Drugstore pre-date the end of JAMC, is that correct?  I was surprised to see that Summer 1997 date.  Had you written some of those with an eye on having them be JAMC songs, or were you and Jim already working on what would later become Freeheat?

That summer was after we had finished recording Munki, which wasn’t due for release until 1998, so Jim and I were kind of kicking our heels thinking we should do something. William had been talking about maybe doing a solo record once we had finished touring Munki and Jim and I began thinking about a side project ourselves – we didn’t know what would happen to the JAMC after Munki.

With the exception of “Don’t Look Back,” the songwriting credits are split individually between you and Jim.  Do you tend to go off individually and then bring in the songs mostly intact?  Or do you prefer to tinker and flesh things out with the rest of the band?

We tended to bring the songs to the group with the structure pretty much intact, but with plenty of room for development by the band.  When Jim and I recorded the studio stuff, we were experimenting a lot with what we could actually do in there – I was doing the engineering for the first time and there was a lot of trial and error with what we could physically achieve.  It was a good time – there was no pressure on us to meet any deadline, or please any label, we just tinkered about with sounds and textures until we were happy.

Later on, when Nick and Romi joined and we had a proper band, we would generally work up songs pretty quickly in a rehearsal room—and, man, did we hate rehearsing.  I think we stopped doing it altogether by the end of 2001, at which juncture we did new songs at soundchecks.  Jim would usually have the structure worked out, and maybe some ideas about instrumentation, and we would just go for it.  Nick is the most exciting drummer I have ever worked with—and we certainly had a few through the JAMC in our time—and things just fell into place for us quite easily.

Do you feel that Freeheat is a black sheep, or are you finding kindred spirits?  I don’t necessarily mean bands that sound like you guys, but bands that embrace a similar aesthetic—that strip-down to the essentials that you’ve talked about in interviews before.

Well, rock’n’roll is all about being the black sheep, the outsider, doing things your own way.  If that’s not the way you look at things, then you’re probably not inclined towards being in a rock’n’roll band.  We’ve found a few kindred spirits along the way – Jim and I produced a couple of them: we did an album for The Parkinsons, a Portuguese punk rock band based on London (sadly now defunct) and I’m a big fan of Tompaulin who are maybe a bit more maudlin, possibly soulful than us or The Parkinsons.

Five JAMC albums have recently been reissued—does the time in that band seem like a lifetime ago, or just like yesterday?

Depends on my mood – the memories are still fresh, but when I think about everything that’s happened since our ill-fated House of Blues explosion, it certainly does feel like a lifetime ago.  That thing Rod Stewart once said – “I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger” – sometimes comes to mind.

In the liner notes for 21 Singles, William and Jim issued a joint statement saying that JAMC spent 5% of the time making music and 95% of the time “dealing with bullshit.”  I trust that Freeheat evened those numbers out a little?  How have you learned to avoid the bullshit?

Not being very successful has gone a long way towards evening up those numbers ­- the less you have, the less everybody wants a piece of it.  And maybe because of this, some of my (and I think Jim would agree) most enjoyable and exciting band-related experiences have been with Freeheat.  There was a tremendous amount of satisfaction in pulling off our two short US tours in 2000, although there was a degree of dealing with bullshit involved there, but that’s water under the bridge.  We were a lot less uptight in Freeheat than we were back in the JAMC days, which helped us shrug off all sorts of little incidents that in the past would have driven us crazy.

Back On The Water is an album that embraces a dear friend of mine—booze.  What albums would you recommend for soundtracking someone going on a bender?

Man, this could be anything… can’t go wrong with a bit of Earl Brutus, Stooges, or angry Steve Earle.  Then there’s Gram for feeling a bit more jolly or for the mellow hangover.