Interview
Interview
Stage Times: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Collapsing venue floors to getting banned from Coachella: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's Robert Levon Been delves into the band's gig history
Up until their third record Howl, garage rock revivalists Black Rebel Motorcycle Club reimagined the music made by British shoegaze bands like The Jesus & Mary Chain and Ride with a frayed, despondent energy which mirrored the social fragmentation and pervasive disillusionment felt by many at the turn of the 21st century. Howl was far rootsier than their previous two albums however, replete with acoustic laments and chain gang harmonies that sounded like they were perfected on the transcontinental railroads of previous centuries.
Before Howl, the band’s founder Robert Levon Been had even used a pseudonym to avoid the link to his musician father, Michael Been of The Call, but decided to use his original name whilst promoting the album. So, was it too farfetched to theorise that the impetus behind touring for the 20th anniversary of Howl – a direct reference to Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name – might have been because the 2005 album signified a pivotal moment in which they connected to their musical heritage?
“You lost the bet there,” Been smirked over Zoom. “You lost a tenner on that.” Seemingly not then.
Talking to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s bassist and singer amid the band’s recent US tour dates, revisiting Howl was more about doing the album justice for the first time. “It was a higher skill level, in terms of recording techniques and songcraft. Our heart was in it. But we couldn’t pull it off,” Been candidly admits, who was incredibly frank and hilariously droll throughout the interview. “We weren’t men yet. It’s easy to turn up and be loud, be obnoxious. Get a bunch of people jumping up and down. It’s the best thing in the world, but it’s technically easier to do that, when you don’t know what you’re doing. We were lucky that people embraced our version of that. We were even luckier that people gave us a minute to show that we could do something else too.”
Howl was praised on its release as a refreshing departure from familiar territory. But behind the scenes relationships fractured – notably with then-drummer Nick Jago who was eventually replaced by Leah Shapiro in 2008. Shapiro has stayed on the skins since. Like many bands who reached a certain milestone in their careers however, they still have contentious tendencies, even though it led to the anniversary tour for Howl.
“We don’t have to move every mountain in the world, or address and fix every issue we ever had,” Levon Been shrugged. “It was about finding ways to come together. Howl was pretty much the only thing we could really agree on.”
Whichever way you feel about it, tempestuous relationships make for interesting anecdotes. With Black Rebel Motorcycle Club set to return to the UK to play Howl in its entirety next month, Robert Levon Been delved into the band’s storied gig history: shambolic early shows, collapsing the floor of a venue in Leeds, tearing it up with the Gallagher brothers, and getting banned for life from Coachella.
The gig that made you want to become a musician
It was either Ride on the Nowhere tour, in San Francisco, or The Verve after A Storm In Heaven but before they became huge. I’d already wanted to be a musician because I was listening to Metallica and Soundgarden – but I don’t want you to print that… I was too young to get into those shows, so felt like my ship had already sailed. I didn’t get to see those bands properly, in the seductive way seeing them in a dirty club can do to you.
Around that time I was transitioning out of the East Bay San Francisco hardcore scene. I learned a lot of those bands weren’t tough, genuine people. At the same time I was really intrigued by hearing this band that some of my friends made fun of, like The Stone Roses. These people that wrote beautiful harmonies about cinnamon girls were actually the toughest people off stage, but made this melodic music. Growing up as a kid in the US, this was a major eye opener. It was a shift. Especially when I found out that Americans were sissies. I wanted to make sissy music but grow up to be a man that could take care of himself. The band name came from that idea. We’re not a riotous, burly motorcycle gang. We liked fucking with people’s heads.
The first
The Cocodrie in San Francisco, and Nick [Jago] forgot his cymbals. So, we fucking wanted to kill him. The first of many shows we wanted to kill him. We practised like we were preparing for Wembley. We practised and practised, like “we’re not going to play live until it’s perfect” – and we completely fucking shit the bed. We did this drone-y feedback in a low register, but didn’t actually play all the songs we’d prepared to play. We got handed a cruel cold reality check about what we had coming, straight out of the gate.
Can you remember the reaction?
The reaction? Depends on the two people there that you’d ask. They might have conflicting views. We played to nobody for a good few years. Two people making out and a bartender was our usual crowd. We didn’t hop on to any scenes for a while, and weren’t embraced by any scene that had the cute girls and cool guys. They felt like political parties, and we hadn’t decided if we were Republican or Democrat yet, you know. ‘We’re our own thing so fuck you’. But that hurt. It meant there were years of nobody showing up.
The smallest
Driving from San Fran to LA to play for the bartender and two more people. We got into a big fight about it driving back. Pete [Hayes] booked that show. I told him it was cursed, and it was a dumb idea. I knew the club, and knew there was going to be nobody there. I was right and he was wrong. It’s definitely helped me leverage a lot of other decisions since then. It paid off, I guess.
It sounds like a blessing, if anything.
Yeah, it made him remember he has to listen to me because there’s a lot of proof of what happens when he doesn’t.
The biggest
Opening for Oasis at Finsbury Park was pretty big. We opened for The Rolling Stones throughout a US tour of theirs. Oh, when The White Stripes were reaching their peak and Jack broke his finger. They were second down from the headline slot at Reading & Leeds and we filled in for them. There were maybe 60,000 people there? I stopped counting after a while, it doesn’t register. It’s great when I’m told people were there.
Did you hang out with the Gallagher brothers much?
Yeah, they’re both great. Noel’s definitely the chattier. Liam would pull Nick aside, our old drummer, and I’d always thought they were separated at birth somehow. He was the missing Gallagher that nobody knew about – because he certainly acted like it. They’re dogs and cats. Noel’s a cool cat to shoot shit with. He really helped us before anybody was talking about us. He showed up. We were touched by the ‘real King of England’ at the time.
Our first album came out and we toured in a van playing to close to no-one for almost a year. We nearly got dropped, nobody liked the record or plays, nobody came to the shows. We had a two album deal and the label wanted to get out of it somehow. Someone at Virgin UK said they wanted to put it out, nearly a year later. We didn’t care, we thought it’d fail there too, like ‘it’s a dud’. We went home to sulk, but then kept hearing about different magazines writing about it. When we finally came over to play the UK, the rooms were full. They were packed. You would think that was the dream come true, but to us it made us paranoid. Questioning ‘if you hadn’t seen us live before, why come now?’ We knew the British scene can be a fickle thing, so thought by next Wednesday we’d be yesterday’s bullshit. So we tried not to get attached to… anything good in our lives. We didn’t want to feel like all of our dreams weren’t going to come true then get destroyed in a a fortnight. We’d rather continue to be miserable the way we’re used to, we know how to do that.
The weirdest
Oh god, I all remember it was somewhere that served buffalo hot wings. Everyone was eating around us. This probably isn’t the weirdest, just the first that springs to mind. That list is long. I remember thinking ‘we don’t deserve this’. Someone responsible got fired shortly after that. We just had to watch families eating wings and corn on the cob.
The worst
Our first, and last, Coachella show. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. Pete’s amps went down. My literal headstock fell apart. Strings and nuts ‘n’ bolts fell on the floor, laying there. I thought another band sabotaged us. The board desk save file for the front of house was some other band’s file, so the first song, nothing was mixed. All these things went devastatingly wrong. We didn’t handle it well. We got in a fight, then got banned from ever playing again. It got a little dark. Then the festival became about pop bands, so I thought ‘good, you fucking deserve it’. It was not a friendly kinda thing. But it wasn’t the promoter’s fault. It was probably our crew, and the fates, or God, or something we’d done wrong in our lives. We took it out on them though. It was after Coachella was nothing, but also before it was nothing again.
The worst, most embarrassing, weirdest shows – the list is fucking long. But thankfully, the majority are actually pretty great. It’s the weird ones which stay with you.
Aren’t the Spinal Tap moments par for the course?
Oh sure, things catch on fire a lot. Though that’s not particularly cool, it’s just the reality of electricity and people coming together…
Oh yeah, we broke the floor in Leeds. That I’m proud of. But I’m so glad the show stopped before it happened. It could’ve been one of those horrible articles you read about a thousand people dying and the band opening up a Hellmouth to another dimension. I can still feel it, it felt like being on an ocean. It was like being on a cruise ship. Everyone was jumping, which was normal, but the physical structure of the venue felt like water. It felt cool. Thankfully someone downstairs saw the central beam in the basement was cracked and wavering, so hit the fire alarm immediately. Though, you couldn’t actually see it because of the strobes going. It was lucky. My favourite thing about that was because we couldn’t finish the show, we gave people tickets to the next show we’d do in Leeds when we’d come back. We ended the show at the breakdown of ‘White Palms’ as we were kicked off stage. So the next show, we started right where that breakdown is. The people that would know, would know. We wanted to finish our thought.
The best
I bought a car in Chile. Well, I stood on top of one. When the show ended, I played acoustic on the street and was surrounded by a couple thousand Chileans who weren’t ready for the show to end. They were all amped up after the electric show, as was I, hence why I ended up playing acoustic outside. I didn’t want it to fucking stop either, man. So I got up on this car, and everyone starting jumping on and fucking up this car. It all went fine, but after everyone left, the sides of the car were scratched and I’d dented the roof. It was this poor family’s car that used this car to get to work and back. So I ended up buying them a car for being an asshole. A legendary asshole, at least.
That’s pretty altruistic. Some people might’ve just fucked off.
Well, as soon as I heard about five different people in their family using it for their job, what else could I do? But yeah, the car gig in Chile was the best. Got rid of the dead weight. Just me, a car, and a thousand Chileans fucking chanting my name. Finally, the way it’s supposed to be.
