Steve McCarty of Dead Meadow - New Haven Advocate - 04.22.10
Dead Meadow has been playing fuzzed-out, riff-based, Sabbath-inspired sludge rock for twelve years now — the kind of music that sounds like the tape is being slowed down, even when the band is playing live. The kind that makes you feel like you smoked some really heady pot, even when you’re fresh out. And if you did in fact smoke, well that’ll make things even more interesting, hence the over-used “stoner rock” label.
New Haven has already seen its share of Dead Meadow shows, thanks largely to Rick Omonte, aka Shaki Presents, who hosted the band at BAR four times when his free Sunday night “Sundazed” music series was in full swing there. (Omonte’s former band, Crooked Hook, played a similar sludgy style.)
Dead Meadow’s newest release, Three Kings, is available in a vinyl version (the preferred method to listen to Dead Meadow) as well as a feature-length DVD. Much like Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, the movie is part live concert footage and part theatrical fantasy vignettes. There’s something blatantly Spinal Tap about the three hooded, druid-looking characters in the trailer, but somehow anything Dead Meadow does is inherently cool. They can do no wrong. Because they are aware of the clichés, and seem to be normal, everyday guys, they are somehow immune from being corny.
“We were working at a place called Little Radio [in L.A.], doing some practicing,” explains drummer Steve McCarty. “We shared that space with a number of creative entities, including the band Artificial Army. They had access to HD video cameras. We became friends and they decided to film the last show of our three-month tour to promote [our previous LP] Old Growth. Pretty much everyone involved had some input — it was very communal and organic and we’re really proud of it.”
Since the show filmed was the last date of a tour, the band is portrayed in top form, their technical chops well-honed and their musical ideas well-developed, having lived in close quarters with the songs as dynamic entities for weeks on end.
McCarty says that the very best shows happen when there’s some kind of special connection with the audience, or maybe something unexpected happens.
“There’s some footage of our show in Santa Cruz a couple weeks ago going around, where a girl got on stage and started stripping. I’m not going to encourage that per se, but it definitely changes the energy of the music when stuff like that happens.”
You might imagine Dead Meadow driving around in some colorfully painted van, with a lava lamp on the dashboard and a beaded curtain separating the front seats from the back, smoking bowls and blasting other sludgy, fuzzed-out bands all day. In reality, they listen to anything but when they travel.
“In between shows we listen to a lot of reggae and hip-hop, stuff from different cultures,” McCarty explains. Burning out is not an option for a band that has been active for more than a decade. There’s a certain wisdom about them that can only come from experience.
“When I started I thought that we would get famous fast and make some money,” McCarty says. “I don’t have any dreams of that any more. Now I just want to make records and play tunes for people and history can judge it from there.”
