The metaverse of post-punk taxonomy
Ambient Country, pre-grunge grunge, and whatever Das Damen is
We went up the California Coast this weekend to do some cat sitting for some friends in Morro Bay. We woke up to the news of the horrifying attacks by Hamas in Israel. The timing—meaning the lattice of coincidence that connects us all—was strange. We spent part of the weekend with a dear friend who is half-Palestinian and the previous week Nuvia worked with a team of Jewish and Muslim educators visiting from Israel whose flights home had all been canceled. Everyone is sick with worry. Everyone is heartbroken. Everyone is shattered.
It should go without saying that it’s possible to condemn the terror attacks against innocent civilians while also condemning retribution against innocent civilians. Right-wing politicians everywhere will do their best to convince the public that such a position isn’t possible. That, of course, is bullshit.
The internet is a cess pool of bad faith arguments made by gleeful idiots and hypocrites—and that’s the charitable view. The more cynical outlook is that the bad takes are paid propaganda and political psyops. In this environment they want you to believe you’re a fool for believing anything.
I believe in a world that keeps children safe, treats elders with respect, and allows people to live with dignity. How do we get back to believing in those things, and not just for our own families, but for everyone?
Lyle Hysen of Das Damen and Royal Arctic Institute
When I was in New York last month I had the pleasure of having lunch in Chelsea with Das Damen drummer Lyle Hysen. I met Lyle during an event for Corporate Rock Sucks that Tony Rettman of
organized in Brooklyn last year. Since then I’ve been keeping up with Lyle’s band The Royal Arctic Institute, an instrumental Ambient Country band (more on that below), and the reissue of the first Das Damen EP (SST 040) from Dromedary Records.To celebrate the reissue, Das Damen reunited to play a couple of well-received gigs at WFMU Monty Hall and Dromedary’s 30th anniversary party in Hudson, NY. Lyle was bemused by reviews that emphasized the band’s physical appearance. Naturally, I started the interview by asking Lyle what he did to get in shape for the show.
Lyle Hysen: I will say for Das Damen I did go into an extra cardio mode, because it's always the drummers that get bashed on the reunions, that they're huffing and puffing, they can't cut it. I was like, "I'm not going to have that happen to me." I called my friend, Lydia, who is a long distance runner, and I asked her what her training entails. I set up a cardio routine of watching rock concerts on the treadmill and I would just watch whatever hour-long concert that I could find. That really got me through it. I did some deep dives and found some great stuff.
JR: What are some that you really like?
LH: There's this Black Sabbath show in Paris in the ’70s. That is definitely number one. It's only 40 minutes. But yeah, they're totally on top of their game. I'd say definitely the best band in the world at that moment. So that's a real killer. It actually made training interesting because there's nothing really interesting about running on a treadmill. There's no way anyone's gonna say I couldn't play that hour.
JR: What are some runner-ups?
LH: It's gonna sound weird because it was The Undertones. It's during Positive Touch. But it’s still killer. I really enjoyed that one. Also, The Ramones at Rockpalast. That's the one I watch all the time. That one’s fantastic.
JR: What was it like to play these songs again? You said that you'd never expected to but here you are.
LH: It was very enjoyable. I was completely happy to be playing them again because I really thought it was something that would never be part of my life again. I sold all the Damen drums. There was just no part of me that ever was like, "Yeah, we should do this." It wasn't like anybody made any overtures to ask us to do it. So it was a blast. Some of the songs totally came back. Some songs were total muscle memory. And then some songs were like, “What the heck was I thinking?”
JR: Needlessly complicated?
LH: Yeah, a lot of notes. Do I play it exactly the same? Do I play sort of the same? There was a lot of that going around. I think our fans, quote unquote, would be forgiving if I didn't play the exact same hi-hat part that I played on "Trick Question" 36 years ago, but I kind of wanted to. We all tried to stay somewhat true to what we played back then. But it's not like you stop learning how to play music. It's been a long time. I've been playing music a long time. Some of the things I felt I could play not necessarily better but easier than I could back then.
JR: What was the spark that got you guys back together?
LH: It was the reissue. So in all the SST battles. One of the weird things that happened was when SST put our stuff on Spotify, they didn't put up the first EP. That raised my eyebrows. Eventually, I asked our lawyer. Why isn't SST claiming the EP? The lawyer explained that since we did the record ourselves with Ecstatic Peace, and then SST licensed it from them, technically Thurston and Lee own the masters. So we went ahead and moved forward on reissuing it. I asked Al from Dromedary Records if he would put out the reissue, and he said, "Oh, interesting. I'm gonna have a 30-year anniversary next summer. You guys want to play?” And that kind of got us going.
JR: Any more shows in the works?
LH: We're gonna do Bowery Electric in February, and maybe Kingston again, and maybe Boston. We don't have a booking agent anymore. So I have some outreach to do.
JR: Why Kingston?
LH: Everybody who went to Maxwell's now lives in Kingston. It's crazy. When Royal Arctic plays up there, I know more people there than I do at New York shows. It's absolute insanity. I think it was a COVID thing. Everyone was just like, "Let's get out of dodge."
JR: Are you going to Boston because you’re daughters go to college there?
LH: Yeah, Boston has to be all ages so my one daughter who's 18 can get into the show. Boston is very strict on their 21 plus policy. So either we're gonna play a matinee or a house party.
JR: So where can people get the remastered reissue?
LH: The digital is on Bandcamp. We'll have the actual records soon, which is really exciting, because I was able to put together a timeline. It was kind of fun. But it was definitely insane. I didn't have a calendar back then. I was just kind of basing it on the flyers I had. Jim Damen has a great memory and Phil Damen came through with a bunch of flyers. We never really had an official release date for the EP. We just kind of had to guess. Because we played a New York show after it came out so we were like, “Yeah, that's the release date.”
JR: And you also put together a zine?
LH: I had the writer Brad Cohan help me. He's awesome. He interviewed all the Damens and some other people, some friends that were around then. So we did a little Please Kill Me kind of thing. Thurston wrote the opening editorial. Tom Scharpling wrote an essay and Matt Quigley from Skunk wrote an essay. I haven't done that since I was in high school but it's a lot easier to make a fanzine these days than back then. So we put it all together. We tried to really make it look like it’s 1986 because for the band 1986 was a real crucial time, a real fun time for us. And we wanted to try to capture that moment in that issue. Also, to be honest, I didn't think anyone would let us say all this stuff. We had a lot to say about this and I don't think Option magazine or Matter are going to come back and let us do this. I don't think anyone's gonna be like, “Sure, let's do an eight page feature on Das Damen.” So that was a blast.
JR: Your EP now has 17 tracks. Tell me about the bonus tracks.
LH: When we got the stems back, we found some unfinished tracks from the session that we did at Wharton's. Instead of trying to finish them we decided to bring in friends from back then to finish them. So we did "Trick Question" with Gary Lee Connor playing a solo. And we did "Behind My Eyes" with Dez Cadena and John Robinson from The Fluid. And we did "How Do You Measure" with Tahlia Zedek. That was a super hoot. We didn't remix the original record. We just remastered it. But for those new versions, we got to open them up and remix them. It’s been a ton of work, but it's been delightful.
JR: You want to talk a little bit about The Royal Arctic Institute?
LH: We played a bunch of record stores last month, which was super fun. We're gonna do a run in November. Philly, DC and cumulating in a ridiculous overplay at White Eagle Hall in New Jersey where we've set up the Ambient Country Music Fest.
JR: Excuse me?
LH: I know. It's weird. It took us a bit to understand but it's awesome. Ambient Country is the genre we have fallen into. It's a thing. This band Suss is the headliner, they are the Kings of Ambient Country. They embraced what we do. Even though we're not exactly in that milieu we decided it doesn't really matter. It's a broader term than just Ambient Country.
JR: Hermanos Gutierrez. Would they be ambient country?
LH: Yes. Not really. But yes.
JR: Is this like how surf music can also be spy music and hotrod music?
LH: Twin Peaks soundtrack kind of stuff. That's kind of where we fall sometimes, some people say. So Royal Arctic was chugging along for a few years. We would say we’re "post-everything” but the post-rock people didn't like us because we don't get that heavy. So we couldn't do the post-rock thing. We were kind of hard for people to wrap their heads around, which is fine. We like what we do. We didn't really care. But we were getting some really bad bills. We would play with loud rock bands, and yay loud rock bands, but those people who were there to see that loud rock band don't want to see quiet bands.
JR: They would talk over you?
LH: Oh my god, we have live tapes and you can hear people talking about us while we're playing. We don't play very loud. So this kind of helped steer us toward more bands in the same conversation. It’s actually been more rewarding than we ever thought. We just thought we would be on our own little planet forever. So it's been very rewarding in that regard, but it did not help me prepare for Das Damen at all, because it's the exact opposite. I know a couple of people who were like, “You've been playing for the last 10 years!” And I was like, “Yeah, but I haven't been hitting. I've been tapping.” It was definitely a shift.
JR: You’ve been busy.
LH: It's been great. It's not my term and I don't know if I should say it out loud but the graying of indie rock has become acceptable. All the bands are aging up and everyone's still playing.
JR: It’s not likely but it’s possible for bands to become more popular than they've ever been.
LH: Yes, exactly.
JR: Considering how small the audiences were before and how many more people are interested in this kind of music.
LH: Like the Replacements or the Ramones. They're huge. They're everywhere. Back then we were getting beat up for liking that shit. So it's insane. A band like Dinosaur Jr that just keeps on getting better. Their records are great and they keep on plugging along. It's fantastic. I always thought, “Well, I'm a drummer, I'm gonna have to play jazz as I get older.” But then I remembers I really can't play jazz, no matter how hard I try. I’m still a self-taught punker no matter how many lessons I got. Everyone's still playing and I don't think it's looked down upon. I didn't think that was gonna happen because when we were young, we were like, “Oh, those bands are old.”
JR: Now we're further away from, say, Nirvana. then the doo-wop bands our parents listened to when Nirvana came out.
LH: I'm 59. The funny thing with Damen is I’m my own hustle, I'll be writing to some bookers and trying to describe Damen: “We were kind of a pre-grunge grunge.” The real grungy kids don't really embrace it. I think we're too melodic or whatever. Recently we popped up on some kid's Spotify grunge playlist. I was like, “Huzzah! Good for you!”
JR: Or Screaming Trees. A lot of people don't consider them grunge and if Screaming Trees aren't a part of that, who is?
LH: Yeah, exactly. I think people think those post-Nirvana bands are considered grunge. Those are the ones that we looked down upon. It's kind of like the Ambient Country thing. I don't want to be running around saying we're grunge or post-grunge. Back when Damen was in existence, we were labeled noise rockers because we were in New York.
JR: I love that quote from Kim Gordon about being labeled a noise band when they're playing with bands who are literally grinding on metal.
LH: Yeah, but when I think about Damen now I think maybe we were too many things. I don't know. I'll never know.
JR: Do ever wonder what would the world be like if one of the big producers found their way into a Das Damen show? Because it's not about paying your dues, it's the dumb luck of opportunity.
LH: I actually I have a letter somewhere that I wrote Butch Vig because he was recording Die Kreuzen. I wrote him a letter asking him to try and figure out a way for us to record with him. So sometimes I’m like, “What if we did the Butch Vig record in 1988? What would that have been like?” At the end of our run, we had an album’s worth of songs that we were like, “Do we record these? Do we do another record and give it another round? Or do we just pull the plug?” We were on three labels in seven years and we were just so broke.
JR: You toured the country how many times?
LH: Five, I think. Real cross country tours. And Europe. We did Europe at least three times. We were broke-ass broke. We were just losing money. It was heartbreaking. On our last gig we were crying. We couldn't believe it was going to end. But these past few months, hanging out with Jim, we got to talking, "Oh, yeah, we do have almost a whole album of songs. Maybe we should record them and see what they sound like?” But then we remembered we're still broke. It's actually my super long con: we'll take 40 years off and then roll out the record. This is exactly what the kids want to hear right now.
Order the Das Damen reissue here.
No Idols T-Shirt
Speaking of
Tony Rettman is deep in his fight with bladder cancer and could use our support by ordering a long-sleeve No Idols T-shirt. Details for ordering here.Corporate Rock Sucks for the Holidays
While visiting the Madonna Inn last weekend we started our holiday shopping. Alta Magazine has assembled a gift-buying guide and Corporate Rock Sucks made the list in its roundup of West Coast history.
Be safe. Be well. See you next week—unless you’r a paid subscriber than I’ll see you Sunday with Orca Alert! It’s my secret Sunday newsletter with a round-up of stories from this week’s art, culture, and science news.
I’m going to check that Black Sabbath concert
Thank you 😃