#ONErpmInDepth: Total Slacker
We had the opportunity to talk to Tucker Rountree of Total Slacker about life, death, Parallels, and what not to do at a Warner Brothers audition.
What does a typical day look like for a total slacker?
Oh, so you’re talking about the proverbial aesthetic image of the caricature of a Total Slacker type person? I think the whole band and the idea solicits a sense of wanting to explore your life in a creative way and do things you want to do. Not really live life by the constructs of normal western society and having to work a 9 to 5 job under florescent lights.
Have you had experiences like that or have you been able to avoid that kind of lifestyle?
Yeah man, I started working shitty jobs when I was 12 years old. I had my first real job when I was 13, working at dairy queen flipping hamburgers, but before that I’d been painting houses with my dad since I was 9. Fortunately I don’t really have to do that any more. I’m really happy about that.
Had you had a lot of odd jobs before?
Oh yeah. Countless. Countless odd jobs. I could tell you so many embarrassing stories. I worked for the parks and recreation office in Utah and it was just like the show, Parks and Rec. The oddest one was probably working at the dry cleaners, there’s one in Utah called the Red Hanger. I also did cold calls for the American Cancer Society. It was basically calling people up and asking for money. But that taught me some skills for later on, like for negotiations. That came in pretty handy.
You’re a former jazz musician, is that right?
I’m still a jazz musician. Total Slacker is like a medium for me, or a format. It’s kind of an outlet for me to make music. So I am a jazz musician, and I practice studying theory and harmony every day to keep my ear sharp and exercise my brain. I enjoy harmonic theory, jazz improv, modulations and things like that. I just enjoy studying those things and they totally come into play in pop writing.
When did you get into that? What was the genre that captivated you as a musician early on?
Well my dad was a singer-songwriter in the 70’s and 80’s and he was making a lot of demos. He was kind of like a jack of all trades. He could play bluegrass, jazz music, to really soft singer-songwriter acoustic music. If you were to hear my dad’s demos from the 70’s, he was like the Elliot Smith that know body had ever heard before, but that wasn’t really popular at the time.
I still have all of his old recordings and demos, and eventually I’m going to comprise them together and find a record label to release them as kind of a retrospective. I think that would be kind of fun.
His name is Bill Rountree. He’s a native Utahn.
Your guitar tone is wonderful and it comes up a lot in interviews. Can you indulge our gear heads and tell us what you're working with?
Well, for guitars I really like sounds from the early 80’s bands like The English Beat, the Police, Men at Work, Tears for Fears, the Smiths, or even early U2. All of those albums from like pre 1985 in England have really beautiful guitar sounds. So I use this vintage Roland chorus pedal from 1984 that’s really hard to find called a CE 2.
On the album I played a whole array of late 80’s Fender Stratocasters from America. I used two 87’s, an ’88, and a ’91. I used a 1995 Fender Jaguar that was really cool. It was from Japan and went on tour with Smashing Pumpkins at one point in its lifetime. I’m actually getting more into the Jaguar these days. More than Strats. Traditionally, I’ve always played Strats for my whole life. When I was opening up for Eric Johnson on the road for two years, those were the guitars that he used and it influenced me.
What does songwriting look like for you guys? Does one person lead the charge and you collectively build around it, or is it more collaborative?
I would say the premise is closer to a democracy where there’s one leader, but musically everyone shares their ideas and comes up with their own parts. I bring raw material to the band in a structure, like chord progressions and lyrics, and we all work on arrangements and individual parts. Everyone’s really creative in the band. Lydia Gammill, she’s in this other band called ONWE, and she comes up with some really cool ideas. She’s got a really sharp mind, you know? Mattie (Siegal) has been playing in a bunch of different bands, so she comes up with her own parts. She also works in film, so she has a producer’s mindset sometimes, so she’s able to see the big picture.
How do you feel like Parallels is different than your previous records?
It’s vastly different, because it’s the first real album that we’ve ever made. I think for the first two albums, we were still experimenting and trying to find our voice. I didn’t really put as much time and thought and energy in to the first two records because of the budgets that we had. The first album that we made was recorded for $500 in the basement of a Korean church on Coney Island.
I had this old Toyota van that my dad gave me. It was like an extra painting vehicle that he had and I drove it all the way from Salt Lake City to New York. I think it was like an 1987 and it was the only possession that I really had. I sold that to get the money to record the first album. We recorded in the basement of that church and Carlos Hernandez and Julian Fader of Ava Luna both engineered and produced the record.
Did this all happen when you were fresh from Utah?
Yeah, fresh from Utah. It was like about 2010 when we recorded it and Warner Brothers was already all over the record. We were already in negotiations with them at the time in L.A. Before the first album came out, we went on our first tour and Warner Brothers came out to one of our shows. My drummer was so scared that they were going to be there in the audience, listening at our “audition” that he self-medicated. He got wasted on whiskey. We tried to play the show, but he kept falling off his drum throne and he couldn’t really play. We lost the deal with Warner on the first album, so I ended up signing with a smaller independent label in London called Marshall Teller Records.
Oh my god! What did you do? Did you talk to the guys from WB afterward?
Yeah they were there, just like out a movie, wearing suits and stuff. They were all forty years old. One of the A & R men was from that band called Redd Kross, which is a vintage punk band from the late 80’s. Redd Kross toured with Nirvana and he was one of the guys that scouted my band. They were all there and they were really nice. They said, “Sorry man, we just don’t think it’s the right timing.” and like, “You need to get a new drummer.” So I did get a new drummer, but he died in a hit and run accident.
That was between the first and second album. Pitchfork actually wrote about it. He was a really cool person, and I loved him dearly. I wish he were still here today, his name is Terence Connor. We were just about to record the second album and he was killed. They never found the assailant. They never found the car or the guy. We just picked up the pieces and kept going. You can’t stop writing, you know? So here we are.
I’m so sorry, I can’t even imagine what that must have been like. What happened then? Was there sort of a turning point between the first and second record?
Well the first album got picked up by Marshall Teller, they were a bunch of really interesting kids. They were post college guys in their late twenties with family money to start a record label in London. One of the guys names is Leon Diaper. They have great taste and have released a lot of really cool music in the UK and for some reason they really championed our thing. That was an integral turn because when the record came out, I wasn’t really sure if I was going to stay in New York. They were pretty responsible for getting my first Rolling Stone review. So when that happened that kind of changed a lot of stuff. Suddenly here were more shows, and better shows, and more opportunities with the industry. That led me to the second album deal which was actually under a Warner Brothers subsidiary.
So how did that experience differ from recording in a church basement?
Well I feel like that was a good intermediary step from where I am now, from the first album. We had 5K to work with and we had Daniel Schlett (Bob Dylan,Yeasayer, Dive) producing. We were in the studio for like six days, a really minimal recording time. The recording kind of sounds like it too, but I’m happy with that album for what it is and the limited resources we had. ...And Daniel is an engineering genius, obviously.
And what was it like recording Parallels?
So I worked with a producer named Dave Weingarten, who’s like the real deal pop producer. He really understands taking a raw artists’ compositions and putting it into a radio world. It was a really interesting transformation to see a raw song that’s in your head or in a tape demo go into multiple studios. We recorded in three different studios, three different locations, and then we spent a month just mixing, and we spent a month just tracking vocals and guitars. So we spent months and months developing that record with him. I’m really pleased with the way it turned out, but I’m already writing a fourth album now, so I’m kind of not really paying attention to that stuff.
How do you find inspiration?
That’s a really tricky question because there’s no definite way to capture inspiration. You just have to be open to it all the time, which is annoying for everyone else around you. You never know when a song hits you and you need to scribble down some idea and people think you’re obsessed. That’s really the only way though. You have to have your antenna up and just receive information when it comes. You mix that with your mind, with theory, and you can come up with something really cool. The inspiration part is just the raw medium, like when you’re cooking in a kitchen. You’ve got all these ingredients but they don’t taste good unless you mix them together the right way and that’s where harmonic theory comes in, because you have to understand structure. You have to understand at least a general level of theory so you’re able to communicate through the language. Music is a syntax. I don’t want to get too heady here, but there’s also like a psychological level to the lyricism and the writing. That’s just as important on the verbatim level of what’s happening linguistically. So all of those things come together and create a piece of music, you know?
Is there anything that you’re trying to convey with the new record?
I think the songs speak for themselves. If you take a listen you’ll hear it in the lyrics, what’s going on. The music will speak to your heart and that’s really what they’re designed to do, to make people happy and take them on a voyage to another place. Some of the songs are even spiritual in nature and kind of raise some questions in a general sense and hopefully get people thinking about their life. That’s ultimately what I want to do.
One of the last questions that I like to ask in interviews is “If you could impart one thing to people to make our lives better as a species, what do you think that would be?”
No one’s above being honest. Honestly, truth, knowledge, and true love are the things that always prevail. Help people through any kind of circumstances in their life and if you’re an honest person, and your kind, and you give people the same kind of latitude that they give you in any of life’s circumstances, then you’re going to have a happy life. You’re going to make the people around you happy too. Isn’t that what it’s all about? We’re only down here for like 80 years, if we’re lucky. And it’s all just going to burn anyways. So you might as well be a good person and enjoy your life. I’m 35 years old, and I’ve made some mistakes along the way in trying to find myself in the world but I can say now as an adult, I try to make the best decisions that I can, and help people when I can, and be a positive influence. Especially to younger kids.
When we’re on tour and a kid comes up, he’s like sixteen and actually knows the lyrics to our songs, and wants to buy our record. That’s just a really special thing, and you want to communicate somehow to never give up on your dreams. Those things really happen, and you want to make sure that everyone’s all right. All my favorite bands that I’ve gotten to see growing up, it’s really important for me that you can have one moment to connect with someone in the band and find out if they’re a real human.