Newspaper Page Text
Page 20
Flagpole Magazine
April 8,1992
In Knoxville’s Belfry...
“It's just a song — there are so many big-haired girls,'
said Jeff Heiskell, Judy Bats vocalist, about the song “I Just
Want to Fuck Your Hair." It doesn't appear on the Judy Bats
new recording, Down in the Shacks Where the Satellite
Dishes Grow, but they'll most likely throw it into the set list
when they play the 40 Watt Club on Wednesday, April 8.
Paleface will open.
HaJing from Knoxville, TN, that bastion of alternative
rock somewhere to the West of us, the JudyBats are six
folks, mostly University of Tennessee buddies
that melded together in 1986. Half were playing
what Heiskell calls“thrash sounds' while he and
roommate Ed Winters (guitars) were working on
foiksier elements. The band now consists of
Heiskell, Winters, Peggy Hambright (keyboards,
violins, vocals), Timothy Stutz (bass), Johnny
Sughrue (acoustic guitar, vocals), and David
Jenkins (drums). The JudyBats released an EP,
“ When Southern Bells Ring ‘ featuring nice cover
art by Hambright. The EP also featured their
Roky Erickson tribute from Where the Pyramid
Meets the Eye, “She Lives (in a Time of Her
Own).' Native Son, the JudyBats debut for Sire
Records, was released in 1991
Flagpole: This is your second album for Sire
Records. Is it going well for you?
Jeff Heiskell: Everybody at Sire’s been real
nice Everybody likes the new record a lot. I think
:t kind of surprised them. They've been real good
to us.
FP: What’s the music scene like in Knoxville 9
JHr There’s a lot of good bands in Knoxville. A real variety
of oands, too. Lots of songwriters There's really three
[clubs] that are the mam ones that everybody plays at. but
there are more than that. Smaller places. But there are at
least three really nice places
FP: How did the record company find out about you?
JH: [Our manager] had played some of our stuff for Richard
Gottehrer Richard was the co-founder of Siro, and not long
after they were bought by Warner Brothers, he got out of it.
We played a few shows in the northeast, and Warner
Chappell Publishing came down to see the show, and they
offered us a development contract and got Richard to do
three songs of ours He ran over to Sire with it to see if they
could market it. Then, another A&R person was interested in
us already, and Sire gave her the go-ahead to have us signed.
FP: How long was this whole process?
JH: ...Nine months after we got our manager, we got signed.
FP: Was that something you were working towards 9
JH: Kind of. I think But until we got our manager, it wasn’t
anything like that. It was just all of a sudden we got manage
ment and it became more “serious.’ It was like a goal.
FP: You're fairly prolific in songwriting. Are you working on
new material nov/ for the next album?
JH: It’s been a year and a month from the first [album] and
I'm sure when we get back home, we’ll make new music.
We’ve been jamming around during scundcheck on some
new stuff and it sounds pretty good.
FP: Is there anyone else in the band that writes lyrics?
JH: No, I write all the lyrics, and I write independent of the
band, usually.
FP: Do you also play an instrument?
JH: No. I can kind of bang around on the guitar. I can't really
play the guitar very well. If I were a really good guitarist I
would never write. I've written some on a guitar, and it just
bores me. I’m there by myself, and it’s not very interesting.
It’s neat when you have five or six other people who can
make it sound a lot better than I had imagined.
FP: What happened to your former drummer, Terry Casper 9
Did he blow up 9
JH: It hadn’t been working out very well. He wasn't a very
nice person. It had just gotten to the point where nobody
wanted to be around him. He would just make enemies
systematically out of everybody. We were at the studio for
a couple of days. Basically, he couldn’t play the stuff to suit
the producer, and he couldn’t play to suit us anyway. There
were no fights or anything, just finally told him what was
wrong, “I don’t think anybody wants to work with you “ He
just packed his stuff and left. It was great. It was like being
ci/red of an incurable disease. Then Kevin Jarvis came in.
He does a lot of session work with Steve Wynn and he was
John Wesley Harding’s tour drummer. He was there within
48 hours and recorded on the tracks the day he got there.
David Jenkins is the new drummer for the band now. He had
been in Japan for a while, then came back to D.C., and we
traced him down.
FP: There's not as much violin on the new recording. IsPeggy
concentrating more on keyboards?
JH: I don’t know. You know, you just play what fits. I hear
bands that I think have thrown a string instrument or a
traditional instrument into a song because they think it's
cool. I hear a tot of that. I hear a lot of songs that have violin
or mandolin in it, and they just put it in there because they
thought it was kind of trendy. I don’t think it fits.
So, Peggy plays what she thinks sounds right
with the song. She's not trying to make a state
ment on a non-electronic instrument, which I
think a lot of people are trying to do.
FP: I was wondering about some of your songs.
In the song “Our Story, ’ are you singing about
someone specific?
JH: Ummm... no, not really. Singing about a lot
of different people I’ve known in my life.
FP: And the song "Margot Known as Mjssy?"
JH: It’s about a friend of mine named Missy, a
girl I've known for a long time, i. .2 last I heard,
she sent me letters that her and her girlfriend are
thinking about having a baby. She’s going to get
some kind of fertilization done. It's just about
someone ! knew that happened to be gay. She
went up to New York to go to culinary school and
never came back. You know how it is when you
hang around a lot of people in a college town
and you don't move. A lot of people move
around.
FP: The song “Poor Bruised World' is about
environmental issues...
JH: I started talking about the environment and then my
love life takes over. I don’t know. I’m not involved in any
thing. I do a lot of things I've done for years, before it
became a fashion thing to do. Like I’ve always been
conscious about... I remember a long time ago when I was
a teenager I read about water. I read about how much water
is wasted when you flush a toilet and things like that. This
was before anything like that and I remember it really, really
struck me. It really changed me. It got to where when I brush
my teeth, I turn the water off, and I have a lot of little habits
like that. I usually don’t take really long indulgent showers,
things like that. I never waste any food at all.
FP: Is that something in the future you'd like to do whenever
you retire?'
JH: ...All I'd like to have is five acres, a horse stall barn, and
I wouldn't even care —a little house. Just to have five acres
somewhere. If I ever make any money doing this, that’s what
I want.
FP: Are you making money 9
JH: Getting by.
Hillary Meister
"1 hear bands that I think
have thrown a string or traditional instrument
into a song because they think it's cool”
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