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SOUNDTRACKING: Chatting With Ethan Miller Of Howlin Rain Before Tonight’s Show

by Daniel Colussi | Ethan Miller is a thoroughbred music hound, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music from various time periods and areas of the globe. He’s also a commanding frontman and ripping guitar shredder. His old band Comets On Fire were a full on psychedelic guerrilla unit, a ball of flame merciless in its pummeling force. He’s since dialled back the chaos with Howlin Rain and embraced the full spectrum of 70s rock, a decade staggering in its musical vastness and complexity. With Howlin Rain, Miller and band investigate the collision of the funk and prog, soul and psych. Theirs is a heady sonic brew, one that involves many moments of ecstatic electric guitar revelry. Read on as Miller dishes on having Rick Rubin as a wing man, the arduous process of recording their new album The Russian Wilds, and begins an analysis of that most misunderstood of pop bands, Steely Dan, until our phone connection gets cut off as the band passed through Mount Shasta.

What was it like working one on one with Rick Rubin for this album? It was rewarding. You can either be overly harsh on yourself as a critic or else not hard enough. You could have your own weird reasons for thinking why a part is great, and for the parts that you aren’t so sure about, you might be judging yourself too hard. So working with someone like Rick who really cuts to the heart of the matter – that was interesting for me. Sometimes it’s a little ego damaging. Some people, for their whole careers they want to have people around who tell them, “You’re amazing, you’re a fucking genius.” As if everytime you take a shit some golden song comes out! But that’s not really true. Songwriters are fallible. Paul McCartney to Burt Bacharach to Ethan Miller, sometimes you can make bad judgements. So in this instance, I found it interesting to do it like this for the first time. Before that I had really just kind of been doing it all by my own assessments.

Does this new album, The Russian Wilds, feel like a different thing than other Howlin Rain albums? Like a sea change? Absolutely, for a couple different reasons. One – the length of time that we took to make it, the budget that we had to make it through American, it wasn’t astronomical but it was bigger than before. And being judicious with the money, it allowed us to extend the process and really do a lot of work on it. The album turned into this epic journey just to make the goddamned thing! We basically worked on the record for three years, you know…the pre-production, the production, the post-production, waiting for the release. That has an effect. That’s different than recording one weekend and having it come out four weeks later. You know what I mean? And the third thing is, except for Joel and myself, the whole band is different.

I don’t know if this is something you think about at all, but to me Howlin Rain occupies an interesting zone, what with the Comets On Fire connection, Birdman records who put you out, and now having Rick Rubin’s hand involved. I know I’m being vague, but do you know what I mean? Heh, yeah without trying to cop-out of the question, it is a kind of grand-existential analysis we’re talking about. I just tell my great uncle from Toulouse that we’re a rock band because I don’t want to get into it about liquor-store soul or avant rock or avant hippie rock and all the different genres I could make up. All the things to make it sound a little cooler on paper. Every band likes to think that their indefinable. But you gotta tell the great uncle in Toulouse – who doesn’t give a fuck about all the sub-genres – you’re gonna just tell him its rock with soul elements. You know, on a basic level. It’s got some psychedelic elements. We’re an American rock and roll band. that’s the bottom line. We’re a west coast band. As far as the zoning aspects that you’re talking about, I agree. I like the places that I’ve been. I like the places that Howlin Rain has been; they haven’t had to live in a ghetto. They haven’t had to stay there. Sometimes I think that’s maybe been a bit of a detriment to us on some level. But at the same time, it’s given us the opportunity to be around, to work and to be able to move, to be able to challenge the audience a little bit. It’s going to be a trip and it’s going to be a bit of a challenge for all of us. I think you’re rewarded long term with something greater. You can be the greatest garage band in the world this year, and maybe next year half as many people will buy your album. If garage goes out then you’ve got nowhere left to go. I think that the further that I go and Howlin Rain goes, the audacity to try and to encompass a lot of things into being a rock and roll band – not just all the most popular and traditional stuff – people are being rewarded by that.

You’ve been working in fairly prominent bands for the last ten or twelve years, so you’ve seen the industry change. As far as the things I’ve seen in the music industry in the last ten years, I mean…it’s not good. On one hand, the grim side of it is that when I first started you could still make real money selling records. You could sell lots of them. It didn’t have to tip over that much for the records to really start selling out the door. That was a great thing to see in the early Comets days. Since Howlin Rain has had the opportunity to really sell some records, records don’t sell anymore. And that’s a change and a disappointment. I mean, when I first got into the underground level, people were selling tens of thousands of records right out of their cottage, so to speak, out of their back room. For executives at labels and stuff, that’s a bigger concern for them because that’s mostly what labels do. Labels don’t go out on tour. But the one thing that I kind of find exciting is that whenever you’re at an historical moment like this – and this is a historical moment for the music industry – it’s like standing on the edge of an abyss for a lot of people. But it’s also the unknown, you know what I mean? So we’re standing on the edge of something, trying to find out how it will all pan out, and if you look at it the right way, anything is possible. The landscape has changed and it’s gonna be different. What we knew is gone, but what will be is absolutely wide open. There could be some very interesting surprises, some different paradigm shifts.

Something that you touched on is the danger of musical ghettos, and getting stuck. Howlin Rain is a band that embraces a lot of different vibes and styles, even touching on certain things that are maybe distasteful to a lot people. Like even just having a proficient organist in the band. Most bands use keys in a totally rudimentary way. Usually it’s just a background flavour, a little simmer. And I understand that Steely Dan’s Gaucho was a kind of signpost for you while you were making the new album, and I thought that was rad because no indie type band would talk about Steely Dan. It’s uncouth. I think that Steely Dan…they are an interesting band because they worked against the classic model: they didn’t tour, they were fucking nerdy, ugly dudes that tried to make really challenging themselves and their audience. And some people that don’t like them accuse them of being condescending to the audience, because it’s eggheaded and there’s so much musicianship and complexity. Its like a put-down, in the way that Zappa can feel that way. And in some ways I do agree that Zappa can do that, he can be cynical about music and make it to express his cynicism. You feel like he sometimes hates people. But I don’t think that’s true of Steely Dan. Although I do think in general they did hate the human race, you know what I mean? For like mob quality. I would think that those guys would say that when you get people together – and mobs in general – you’ve got a dangerous animal that’s stupid too. But at the same time, the things that they celebrate are the greatest qualities, the most dynamic and transgressive. They names their band after William Burroughs! That’s so cool a band that’s named after a dildo in a William Burroughs novel be one of the most polished and successful top ten pop groups of all time. I mean that’s transgressive and that’s cool! And…{garbled}…total cow shit…{garbled}…aimed at…

Howlin Rain play the Biltmore tonight (Thursday February 23rd). Tickets at Zulu and Red Cat.

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Zulu Records veteran and tunage aficionado Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine.