Interview w/ Treasure Island MF Hits Trainwreck Riders

Photo: [From Left: Steve Kerwin (drumer), Andrew Kerwin,
(lead guitarist, vocalist), Garritt Heater (bassist), Pete
Frauenfelder (vocals, rhythm guitar)]
Credit: +1 Music

It’s not very often that you’ll hear a band that manages to wind its way through the two opposing genres of Americana and post-punk, within the span of an album and come out at the end with an easily accessible gem, especially when they’re doing the whole thing on a shoestring budget. Well, it seems that Festival Preview has just made contact with such a band, the Trainwreck Riders of San Francisco.

Now, why would FP bank these words on a band like the Riders, who are still used to small warehouse gigs rather than arenas and ampitheatres with a backstage buffet serving 20 types of sushi? Well, just listen to the band’s second album, Lonely Road Revival, or catch one of their shows. Live or through headphones, they’re money for this simple reason: Whether you’re a fan of Merle Watson, the Replacements, or a little bit of both, they’ll give you what you want, and then some. If you’re a country bumpkin, they’ll make that guitar fuzz you’ve always detested start to make sense. If you’re a city slicker that doesn’t know the second meaning of the word “rag”, then they’ll open your eyes to what you’ve been missing.

The key in all this is the band’s ability to both hone in on that kind of kick (and melancholy) that gets right to the core of being a bacchanalian twenty-something and trying to nail down that wide-open life of yours, and to then hold that sound steady and not muddle it up.

At the Treasure Island Music Festival, they gave everyone pretty good evidence of their mastery in the ways of punch-drunk beauty. On songs like “Through Unto The End” and “Slow Motion Cowboy”, the hard hits and addictive arpeggios came through in the extreme, and it paid off. As the crowd dispersed after their set, many a fan could be heard promising that they’d buy the Riders’ material sometime in the very near future.

FP sat down with the amiable Andrew Kerwin, guitarist and songwriter for the Riders, to talk about the band’s past, what makes the band tick, and how it bridges the gap between its diverse range of audiences.

(Q) How did you arrive on your sound?

(A) We just came up with it naturally. We listened to tons of punk rock and tons of old-timey music. Our sound’s basically just rock’n’roll, though many people would call it “punk-country.” My brother Steve (the drummer for Trainwreck Riders) and I grew up in a house full of old 78-rpm records- nothing past 1937- and we also got into punk at a pretty decent age, so there’s just an eclectic range of things that come through in what we do.

(Q) What’s it like being in a band with your brother?

(A) We’re pretty decent for siblings. Growing up, we were playing Little League together and had a mutual group of friends. At a really young age, it was kind of annoying, but when we started playing music together, we didn’t have any problems. Overall, it’s been pretty healthy, and after each gig it’s more like “See you at grandma’s” than just “See you at practice.”

(Q) Has there been any band or artist that everybody in Trainwreck has always admired throughout their career?

(A) The one the whole band all agrees on completely, the one the we all wear on our sleeves, is the Meat Puppets. They were literally the reason why I started playing guitar. To this day, if you put on a Meat Puppets record, it’ll still blow all of our minds.

The craziest thing is, we opened for them twice, in LA and in San Francisco, when they started touring again this year. I remember I was asked at South By Southwest what I was most looking forward to in 2007, and for me it was instantaneous- new Meat Puppets record and tour. A couple months later, we were opening for them! I still can’t comprehend it.

(Q) You guys gave Two Gallants a shout-out from the stage today, and you tour with them frequently. What’s the relationship between Two Gallants and TR?

(A) Well, we go way back, long before any of this (Kerwin gestures to the expansive Treasure Island backstage area). We both did our first tour outside the Bay Area together, which was our best tour ever. Today was awesome, because it was exactly like that tour, where you have your friends playing next (Two Gallants played their set immediately after TR at Treasure Island on the day of the interview).

So it was just natural to say, “Hey, check out our friends next," because we were thinking about having Adam (Stephens, singer, guitarist and harpist for Two Gallants) come onstage and play with us during “Christmas Time Blues”(probably the Riders’ most powerful song, a sonically simple, yet descriptive ballad about loneliness in wintertime San Francisco, on which Stephens plays harmonica) anyway, and that didn’t work out.

(Q) Speaking of “Christmas Time Blues”, where did that song come from?

(A) Pete wrote that song, and I don’t want to speak for him, but you can trace a map of the area he’s singing about in the song. So yeah, it’s definitely a song written from his own experience and from the heart.

(Q) What revs the engines in the songwriting process-- what takes it from tunes like “Christmas Time Blues” to “Slow Motion Cowboy” (a square-dance-on-Red Bull that's probably the Riders' flagship tune)?

(A) I think more of our stuff comes across like “Slow Motion” than it used to, but we’ve just started trying out new things. We like to remain conscious of the idea of not putting up barriers in terms of what we can or can’t do. It also depends on the subject matter and how we feel when the song comes about. I mean, look at “Alemony Wildlife Refuge” (probably the most progressive in the band’s catalog, the song veers through several tempos and melodies before ending on a start-and-stop riff)-- A song like that would never be expected from us. It goes so many places and now people say they want us to play more stuff like that anyway.

(Q) In June (2007), you guys got side-swiped by a drunk driver. What long-term effects, if any, has that event had on the band?

(A) I figured you’d ask about one of the Texas incidents. We just feel really lucky to be able to walk away from that. We had to cancel half of our tour, all of our gear was wrecked, the driver didn’t have insurance, and it was a hit and run. We didn’t have to go to a hospital or anything, though, so we just feel extremely lucky to still be able to keep doing what we’ve been doing.

(Q) Now for the other Texas incident. What was it like for one of your shows to get busted (Members of TR, including Kerwin and then-bassist Sean Kohler, along with Two Gallants, were Tasered and arrested at Houston nightclub Walter's On Washington in October 2006)?

(A) The whole Texas experience is just unbelieveable. First you have the guy who does a hit-and-run on us, in possession of drugs and without insurance. Next, you have this cop losing his shit, coming into a legit venue where they do shows every night, and we get Tasered and have to spend a night in jail. We almost missed our next show in Austin.

Because we’re from California, the court decided to drop our charges down to a Class-C Misdemeanor- it’s basically as if we just got a parking ticket. However, I just got a letter in the mail that says I have to write that cop a letter of apology and pay the $110 fine. So, it still ruffles the feathers, but we’re just glad to get it behind us, y’know?

(Q) Have you ever considered writing a purely folk record or a purely punk record?

(A) We all have these big concepts in our heads about what kind of themed-record we’d want to make, but it’s so hard to just stick to one road when we’re naturally going down so many all at once. At the same time, we also like playing everywhere from street corners to this festival at Treasure Island, from basement gigs to the Revolution Café (a coffee shop and acoustic-based music venue located in San Francisco’s Mission District), just mixing it up and doing what’s interesting for us.

Down the line we might come up with some theme or concept record, but, for right now, we just like showing our range. What we play depends on where you catch us, of course.

(Q) More on that note, what’s it like for you to play a club like the Gilman (a punk-based venue in Berkeley, CA, possibly the SF Bay Area equivalent of CBGB) vs. Freight & Salvage (a roots-based venue also in located in Berkeley)?

(A) As far as our general approach to each show, it doesn’t really change too much. As far as the atmosphere of each venue goes, though, you just take everything for what it is. Both of those places have their positives and negatives.

We did come up in the whole DIY Gilman scene, though. We were playing shows there when we were really young, like 16 or 17, and it was nice to have that place to go play gigs whenever we wanted. You also get the feeling, playing at the Gilman, that everybody there is just on the same level, completely. So, places like that do have a special little place in our hearts.

(Q) What do you like playing more, festivals or your own shows?

(A) We’ve done things like fundraisers for, say, a local radio station in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but they’ve all been in local dive bars and places like that, but this is the first festival we’ve ever done to this degree, and we’re just having a blast. I don’t really have any positive or negative things to say about the topic, in general, though. You lose some of the element of personal interaction, what with the size of the crowd, but at the same time I’ve gotten to meet some really cool people backstage.

(Q) The purpose of a band isn’t just to meet a set of objectives within some period of time. That being said, where would you like to see the band five years down the line?

(A) That’s a really hard question. I just hope that we’re still playing music together and having fun, and also doing the same music we’ve been doing, while, at the same time, not repeating ourselves. Just keeping the old ears while gathering some new ones, playing new places, playing old places. Playing with new bands, playing with old bands. And not get stagnant. That’s really all I can say.

(Q) Your most recent album came out the summer of last year. Do you have a new album in the works?

(A) Yeah. It’s a little bit over half-written. We have the basic song structure down, and we could play eight of them the way we’d want them right now, and we’re just practicing the other songs. We plan to have the album out and hit the road again next spring, and just get it out as much as we can, go farther than we did before.

--By Ross Moody