Pour a Rat Layer Over Your Heart: An Interview with Buck Gooter’s Billy Brett
by Brian Flota, March 31, 2016
Buck Gooter, Stainless Steel Mirrors, Feeding Tube Records 2016
Buck Gooter is a Harrisonburg, Virginia-based band whose Bandcamp website describes their sound as “PRIMAL INDUSTRIAL BLUES.” There’s no better way to describe it. Big 80s new wave beats provide the foundation for acoustic guitarist Terry Turtle’s pickup-fueled runs and primary vocalist Billy Brett’s furious vocals and bloody theremin bleeps.
In a live setting the band is explosive. The demented distortion on Turtle’s beat-up acoustic guitar turns relatively simple chord progressions into the aural equivalent of tobacco spit. And Billy Brett dives headfirst into every song, managing to combine the spirit of a snake handler, a Pentecostal preacher, Henry Rollins, and Iggy Pop as he contorts himself, delivering full-throated screams, practically working himself into a trance. Buck Gooter is one of those rare bands whose music is wholly original and distinct. Nobody sounds like them, and nobody ever will.
Their new album, Stainless Steel Mirrors, their fourteenth, drops tomorrow. At the end of February, I sat down with Billy Brett in an Indian American restaurant whose window sign inspired the typography for the new album art. We talked about the album, his approach to music, and his love for David Bowie.
You’ve got a new album coming out?
Billy Brett: Yeah.
It’s got ten songs on it. You usually do about ten songs an album right? How long did it take to record it? Was there something different about the process this time?
We were both really focused on it. We basically wrote it for nine months. We started in February of last year.
Is that the longest you’ve taken to write an album?
Just to write it and then practice it into the ground. And then at the last minute we changed a bunch of stuff up. Really the last practice before we recorded it we changed all these things, which is hilarious. It was real easy to record. When we record we just do it all in one take.
I find you to be a totally chill dude. But when you get up on stage you just rage and I love it. Do you have to work up to that for a show or recording? Is performing a place you like to get that energy out?
It doesn’t really take much for me to get to that point. I’m not an angry person. It’s just sort of the material and the feel of everything. The tension is normally just there to bring it off that way. I don’t feel like I’m really angry when I’m playing but I’m definitely bringing down some kind of vibe. If the music’s bumpin’ from the start I’ll just feel it and get right into it. Or if something happens, like Terry messes up in that process, I’ll get even madder. Or more like anger. At least it would look that way. I think about that a lot. People are like, “Why are you screaming?” It’s part of the music, for sure. I’ve always kind of been like boiling over in a lot of ways. I don’t think of it as a negative thing.
It’s great watching Buck Gooter play because you two have such different approaches on stage.
Terry’s a great foil.
In at least three Buck Gooter songs you mention rats [“Rat On,” “Rat Layer,” and “Dead Rats”]. And in songs like “No One Owns the Sky,” politics seems to sneak in. Do you try to sneak in political topics into your songs or is it just a fractured or surreal way of looking at the world around you?
Sometimes you just get an idea about what you want to write about or sometimes things just come to you in a stream of consciousness way. Sometimes terms just look good, feel good, resonate in some way so you write about it. I’m thinking about the instances of rats, especially the song “Dead Rats.” That was just real. There were dead rats in my house, and it stank (laughs). It just sounded cool.
We’ve got a new one called “Rat Layer.” The “rat layer” concept came from a conversation we had with our friend who was talking about how he needed to redo his basement. He said that he needed to raise the floor up, pour more concrete on the floor, because the guy that did the floor said that what he’s got is okay. But it’s called a “rat layer.” It’s just there to keep rats from digging into your basement. So then I was like “you’ve got to pour a rat layer over your heart” to keep the vermin from digging into your heart. I guess a rat would be something you wouldn’t want in your heart, in that context.
When I reflect on rats I suppose I think of danger: vectors for disease, destructive pests. I know those animals can’t help it but from a human perspective a rat represents a negative thing but also something fascinating. So they pop up in my songs as some sort of ominous element.
A lot of times you just see things that you like and come up with lines and expand upon that. It’s just a writing trick. Just try and go as far as you can with one concept. Sometimes, I call them “Iron Maiden songs.” You have a very defined concept, like a movie. And I just write a song about that movie. Basically interpret it or summarize it in your way. That’s fun. Those take a little less thought and feeling though. It’s cool to push across a message that people don’t know. It’s just obfuscating the reality.
So you’ve done four records with Don Zientara. [Editor’s note: Don Zientara is the engineer who recorded most of the early DC hardcore punk records released by Dischord Records. Recently he was featured in the DC episode of [Sonic Highways](http://www.hbo.com/foo-fighters-sonic-highways), Dave Grohl’s HBO documentary series.] How did that relationship start?
In the earliest days of Buck Gooter, I went to see Joe Lally [the former bassist of Fugazi] play in Charlottesville. He was doing a solo tour with Don. There I met both of them at the show beforehand. So we chatted all night long. We hung out pretty hard and we talked and Don suggested that we get into this DC3 recording project that was going on, which was aimed to record bands from DC that were young. We were neither of those things but somehow they let us come in and cut some songs for free in the studio. Don didn’t engineer that one. This other guy, Hugh, did. And then we just kept in touch with Don and played shows with him.
I bet we’ve played like 20 shows with Don. I asked him how much it would cost to record and it seemed affordable. So we recorded one record. Then we didn’t record with him for a couple of years. Then we went back and we’ve just been doing records with him since. I love Don and I love what we do with him. I think we could do it with somebody else alright. But Terry’s really into it. So we wanna keep it going that way.
Don’s recorded some legends: Bad Brains, Henry Rollins, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Void, Rites of Spring, The Dismemberment Plan, Black Tambourine, Foo Fighters. So does he ever regale you with stories?
Every time we record, it seems like The Evens are going to record the next day, which is Ian MacKaye and his wife [Amy Farina]. Now I think Joe Lally’s in that band. And when we recorded The Spider’s Eyes, he had already done preliminary interviews for that Foo Fighters documentary, that Sonic Highways thing. And then the next week they were gonna come in and do everything (film in his studio). I think when we recorded this one, Dag Nasty was coming in a day or two later to record their album. And he (Don) just doesn’t care.
I’m not really sure how old he is. He’s older than all the people on the scene. And he had a whole career before he started being a professional engineer. He just decided to knock off and do this and be self-employed. He’s a really interesting dude and there’s so much about him I don’t even know. I’ve had a million conversations with him, spent a lot of time with him, and there’s stuff I just don’t know about him. Pretty much everything that came out of that Sonic Highways thing I was like, “I didn’t know that”!
Once we were in Germany and we were at Armin Hofmann’s house, the guy who put out Witch Molecules, and he was like, “Oh, I have this record by Don Zientara from the 80s.” I was like, “You mean CDs?” He says, “No, a record.” He goes and gets this record from like 1987. It’s this project he did called The Earth Hell Band. It’s this weird industrial electronic album that he just engineered and played a little bit of guitar on. But, I mean, he never told me about that record. The next time we saw him he just gave me a copy. There’s a lot to Don. He’s a great guy. I love recording with him. I love being in that studio. It’s an ideal situation. I wish we could do more there or pay him better. It puts stuff into perspective when you go to that place.
You garnered an early-career endorsement from Henry Rollins. How early in the history of Buck Gooter did Rollins come to like you guys? How did that go down? Do you have much contact with him today?
It happened really early. When we recorded at Inner Ear [Don Zientara’s studio], we took that set and put it out on a CD. This was back in 2006. I went to Fort Reno in DC to see Antelope that year, probably Joe Lally, maybe both, and Ian [MacKaye] was there. Ian was the guy who had paid for the studio time. I gave Ian a CD of the recording. Then he writes me a postcard and says, “Hey man, can you send me a couple more copies.” I said, “Okay.” And then he sent those to Henry. And then Henry sent me an email saying he needed a copy of everything we had done. It was just two albums at that point. The second album was called TV Evangelist Song. The first album was called What the Hell? I sent him both of those and then I just kept sending him stuff. And he was real into it.
He had this radio show out in California and he would write these notes about every band he played on his radio show. I think it was an Internet radio station. I never heard it live but I have the recordings of those shows from the times he played us. He would write little things about every song, how he found the record, or what he thought about the song. So he wrote about us quite a bit back in the day. And it made it into a book of his. He just collected all those writings in this book about his music collection called Fanatic. We’re in Fanatic Volume 2. Terry always calls it Fanatic Volume 4 though I don’t even think there is a Volume 4. It’s cool. It’s actually kind of a fun book. It has an index and you can if Henry talked about some band you just thought about and look it up. It’s an honor to be in that book. It’s cool. Present-day contact-wise, I write him every once in awhile. Any time we have an activity I write him and tell him what we’re gonna do.
Stainless Steel Mirrors by Buck Gooter
Back in January, David Bowie died. Is Bowie your favorite musician?
Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah.
When did you first get into Bowie?
My grandmother and aunt were really into David Bowie. My aunt’s seem him like 150 times or something like that. Like every tour from 1974 on. Basically from the second tour he made of America and everything after that. I always knew they were into it. I didn’t really dig into music until I was 13. It was because they turned me on to like all this music. When I was 13, my grandmother got me a stereo. She was an early computer-head. And she burned me stacks of albums. All of these fuckin’ albums. Burned CDs, back before people were really burning CDs. 1997 or 1998. Something like that. The stuff that she burned me then I still listen to.
At some point she burned me the whole Bowie oeuvre. She was really into Outside, which is the record from 1995. The first time I got blown away by Bowie was the “Hallo Spaceboy” CD single. The Pet Shop Boys remix. That is a badass CD. I always followed [Bowie] from then on. I saw him twice. Once in New York City. He played the whole Heathen album and then the whole Low album.
How does Bowie influence you musically?
I don’t know if he really does musically. He’s just, like, everything. The only reason I was making music was so Bowie could hear it and give me feedback one day. Not that he’s gone I don’t know what I’m doing this for, haha.
You’re a big fan of 80s music by legendary sixties and seventies musicians that is often saddled with a bad reputation. Like 80s Neil Young, David Bowie, Iggy Pop.
I’m a big beat guy. I’m not nostalgic for 80s music. I just like the sound. They were engineering music in a way that it was all sounding the same. It was a big beat, but without rap.
What are you thoughts on Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA?
It’s amazing. That snare drum! That song is amazing. What I contribute musically is beats. It’s a natural thing. I’m not trying to copy that. That’s where my head’s at. I’ve played with drummers. I know drummers. They do things differently and don’t think like that.
Is percussion your first “instrument,” or primary instrument?
Yeah that’s what I’m about. I consider myself a percussionist that gets other things going. Like the synth I’ll jab keys here and there.
And treat it as a percussion instrument?
Yeah. Even with the theremin, it’s like jabbing it. My fury with the theremin is just sort of like following Terry but I’ve augmented over the years to make it more like a rhythm with him. I used to think of it as “twin leads” but then I realized that twin leads doesn’t necessarily mean two leads playing at the same time. It means trading leads. When I realized that I took into a more rhythmic section and he would do a lead and I would do some kind of flourish to differentiate from my rhythmic theremin playing. To me it is an Earth-shattering, insane sound. But when you hear it recorded it just sounds like “wee-wee wee-wee wee-wee.” It’s been hard to get to come across as a tone on all levels. Live it is very abrasive and disruptive. Over time I’ve been able to get the tone so that it’s a little more “bottom-y” because I run it through a pitch-shifter that’s shifted low. So it always has this “grrrr” to it.
Can you discuss your affinity for so-called “outsider” music?
I identify with it. I’ve been called that.
What about that music appeals to you?
A lot of it has to do with sound and a lot of it has to do with knowing that it’s a raw expression. I identify with that raw expression. Like The Shaggs. I don’t know if I identify with The Shaggs but I definitely FEEL The Shaggs. The song “Philosophy of the World” is so punk. “You can never please anybody in this world.” That is the philosophy of the world. Hasil Adkins, that’s my boy. That stuff’s incredible. He’s an outsider. He was making weird mutant rockabilly music in the 1950s from the hollers of West Virginia. He might as well have been doing it in outer space. At least he had some visitors in West Virginia. He was sending out demo tapes way back in the day trying to get somebody’s attention. He basically lived a crazy rowdy life and wrote ridiculous music. I love him, man. And from most accounts, it sounds like he was a cool guy.
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Brian Flota lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Humanities Librarian at James Madison University. He is the author of A Survey of Multicultural San Francisco Bay Literature, 1955-1979 (2009, Edwin Mellen) and the co-editor of The Politics of Post-9/11 Music (2011, Ashgate, co-edited by Joseph P. Fisher). Brian has also contributed music reviews to the All Music Guide, The Fiddleback, and The Collapsar.
Cover image, “Buck Gooter - LIVE @ the Little Grill Collective - Harrisonburg VA - 7/5/08”
via the Kevin Riley flickr photostream, July 5, 2008