In a climate where so many bands tend to take themselves so seriously, it’s refreshing to see a band like Les Savy Fav that can make the crowd get up and dance without insulting their intelligence. Buddyhead managed to corner the members in an upstairs bathroom of the Troubadour and throw questions at them while they ran through their preshow rituals. We were happy to find out that this band is anything but shy. After taking care of their hygiene business, they proceeded to rock the patrons of Los Angeles into what I can only describe as a “dancing frenzy”.
Questions by Sam Velde / Photos by Travis Keller
Buddyhead: Can we get a roll call?
Tim: Tim Harrington. I’m the singer.
Harrison: Harrison Haynes. I play drums.
Syd: Syd Butler. I play the bass.
Seth: I’m Seth and I play the guitar.
Buddyhead: The music element of your band, to me there are a few different things going on…very angular guitar and a heavy rhythm section, and you (Tim) to me are like the thespian singer. I’m wondering, were you guys like “hey, let’s be a band,” or “hey let’s get together and be like gang of four,” or “let’s jam, and I know this crazy guy with a beard that can sing..” I’m curious, how did it start out?
Tim: Haha. I didn’t always have a beard.
Syd: I guess it started with myself and these guys Gibb and Pat. We were the original 3 and then we got Seth. After that is when we began to get more serious. Seth’s guitar playing took us to a whole new level. I guess we all grew up on Dischord stuff and the D.C. sound. Tim was in some other bands in college that shared some of the same creative influences.
Tim: When I joined they only had like 2 or 3 songs. They had only really been jamming.
Seth: We really needed a singer. We maybe talked to like 5 other ones. Gibb suggested Tim.
Tim: I thought they were gonna be a dance band at first. I thought it had a real good dynamic. We were always looking for interesting tangents from the very beginning.
Buddyhead: I don’t know too much about the band, except for your first record. I’ve seen you guys play like six or seven times. I know you guys were from Rhode Island, is that correct? Is everyone here an original member?
Tim: Yes, we’re from Rhode Island where we all met at school, and no, Harrison is the new drummer.
Buddyhead: Where are you from Harrison? What’s your story?
Harrison: I’m from North Carolina . I went to college in Providence with all these guys. I was a year ahead of them. They were these funny little guys I knew that were in a band, but I thought they were cool. I was in a band throughout college.
Buddyhead: What band was that?
Harrison: Hellbender. So I went home and moved back to North Carolina after college, and when my old band broke up it was sort of right around the time that their old drummer was quitting. So, they called me and asked if I wanted to play drums.
Buddyhead: So you guys aren’t all originally from Rhode Island, you guys met there at school.
Tim: Right.
Buddyhead: Ahhh, so you guys all went to RISDI. why did you move to New York?
Syd: I think everybody had their reason, but Rhode Island was a great place to go to school.. but after we graduated, there was no source of income there, no jobs or anything. Tim led the bunch of us down to New York. He got a job doing computer stuff, and we sort of followed suit.
Buddyhead: How does New York treat you as a band? It doesn’t seem there are as many bands coming out of New York as there was 4 or 5 years ago.
Syd: It’s good. growing up in D.C. it was really hard for me to adjust there because D.C. had such a community of music. Even Providence had such an amazing energy of people putting on shows and whatnot. Then we moved to New York and there is absolutley no community. There’s only a couple of bands there right now that are starting to mesh.
Tim: There’s just so many bands and so many things going on it’s hard.
Buddyhead: That sounds a lot like how it is here in L.A.
Syd: It’s also a reason why New York is so great. You’re always meeting new people every time you walk out of your house.
Tim: The original drummer and I found a place in Brooklyn. We built it all out ourselves. we took the banquet area and turned it into rooms and a really nice practice space. It’s one of the more affordable places in the city, the space to practice in is fantastic.
Harrison: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the most important of things you need if you’re in a band and in New York; practice space. So many bands in New York have to pay as much for their practice space as their apartment.
Buddyhead: Yeah, that baffles me. I’m always like, where do bands practice here?
Harrison: Yeah, there’s whole skyscrapers full of practice spaces.
Syd: They charge thirty or forty dollars an hour.
Seth: Well, you probably get them by the month.
Tim: Either way, the point is, having the practice space in our house makes it cake.
Buddyhead: Playing on the east coast is also vastly different than the west coast. What’s it like for you guys going from playing so many shows so close together out there and then having to drive 5 hours between shows out here?
Seth: Haha. It’s still better than anything in between. A 5 hour drive is better than a 12 hour drive in the middle of the country.
Syd: Out here, Seattle has always been really great.
Seth: Portland was good.
Tim: San Francisco as well. We’ve been playing around so much it’s good all over now.
Buddyhead: You guys put out three fifths on self starter, and you have a bunch of singles. you just released “the cat and the cobra” on french kiss. is that a collective label, or is that your label, Syd?
Syd: I actually started it with Juan, who is formally from Brainiac. We decided to start a label. We said what the hell, I got a credit card in the mail, and the rest is history.
Buddyhead: So Juan is actively working with you?
Syd: Yeah, he does a lot of digital stuff. He has some sample cds, and the next release we’re going to have is 99 tracks of all of his collaborative work. Melissa from Hole is on it. It’s really cool..like nine second samples of some crazy fucked up noise.
Buddyhead: I know that you guys were investigating doing a record on another label. how did it work out that you decided to do french kiss, and how has it worked it out since you’ve done french kiss?
Syd: We were sort of floating with Sub Pop for a while and trying to work out a deal with them, but it just sort of fell through. Right about that time, Touch and Go was trying to make up their mind, and I just got really impatient, and talked to Corey. He’s sort of helping us out a lot by managing and guiding us.
Tim: And also, around the same time there were a lot of other bands that we thought were good, but they were having a hard time releasing stuff. We figured it was a good time to start a new label.
Buddyhead: And you’re satisfied with what’s been happening?
Syd: I think I’ve had tremendous luck actually. Everyone has been really supportive of us. The distributors have been great. We’ve had a lot of good luck.
Buddyhead: To me, it seems like you guys are always really encouraging people to have fun. There’s so many bands that just take themselves so seriously.
Harrison: I think it’s a great goal for us. It’s so easy to take yourself seriously. Finding a way to be accesible while still taking yourself seriously without being taboo is a great goal. I think it’s really a shame that with this kind of music and this genre there is very little low brow in it.
Syd: Also, there’s so many bands taking themselves so seriously, it’s almost like they’re imitating themselves. I think that’s really boring.
Buddyhead: Yeah. There’s such a difference between a band being funny and fun. It seems as if in the year 2000 in this genre, if you can get kids to dance, you’ve pretty much won.
Harrison: Yeah, and if it’s not just gimmicky in it’s dance ability and the band is trying to blur lines, it’s great.
Syd: I have this great old clash video from the early 80′s where everybody is just jumping up and down yet not hurting each other. It’s such an amazing energy. Everytime I see it I’m like, “yeah!!!”
Buddyhead: Tell me some things you like to do on the road.
Tim: We like to dance in the van. This tour has had a lot of used cassettes we’ve bought. We got Metallica, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Guns n Roses, Van Halen. Yeah, you gotta have “kill em all” and “appetite for destruction” on any good road trip.
Buddyhead: Word.
