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Damnation & Redemption:
An Interview With The Black Dahlias

By Michael E. French

Part One: In the Beginning

   In the beginning was the word...
      My first meeting with Charles Lieurance was through his poetry which I had read in various local zines. The words I remembered were from "The Bukowski Poem".  After digging on the Beats, Bukowski seemed a logical next step. Heroes of mine, like Curt Cobain, talked about reading him. Bukowski. I'm down with that, I dig Bukowski.
     From this poem I got the sense that Charles was some old school literary fanatic. I imagined him as an English Lit professor, spouting rhetoric by day: holed up & scribbling by candlelight at night. His name alone seemed regal and literary.
     Some number of years later I became a regular on Words. This was a spoken word program on KRNU hosted by my hometown friend Joe Krings. Beyond playing recorded poetry and pretending we were the next Negativland, we would play weird local "music" that came our way. It was during this time that I encountered Charles and his words again. This time "The Bukowski Poem" was set to music. Charles had formed a band and called it Rise Up Beggar. Still Charles Lieurance was an enigma to me.
     When I finally "met" him in physical form I thought he was an asshole. He seemed to laugh at everything and be laughing at everyone. I didn't find his frankness charming, nor his mockery witty. Somehow I couldn't put this new creature I'd found & the Lieurance I'd imagined years ago together. I had no idea he wrote the lyrics and invented musical ideas for The Floating Opera. I didn't know he had worked for Fantagraphics and the Comics Journal, dug Led Zeppelin and horror films, that we had so much cultural tastes in common.
     I don't recall being formally introduced or even speaking more than two sentences to him, but we did run in the same circle. Thanks to Matt Silcock both our bands even ended up on the same cassette compilation.
     Eventually Words ended, the world changed, & I dropped out of "the scene". I quit recording new music, quit seeing live bands, quit reading zines - at least not as much as I had when I arrived in Lincoln. I was running with a new pack, and our experiences were different...
     In 2000 A.D. a friend & I launched Lincolnzine with the intention of hyping local music/art & making some bucks (two goals which may not, as yet, be realized...). Matt suggested I check out The Black Dahlias - Charles Lieurance's new band. Somehow it still didn't click that this was the same person whose poem I had thought highly of years before.
     It would take one live performance by the Dahlias to thoroughly enchant me. And to lead me down a year long path to an understanding of Charles, his asthetic, bandmates, and Lincoln music in general. I would make the fatal journalistic mistake - I became friends with the band. I do not regret a moment of it.

     Part one of my "official" (and by this I mean the questions & answers I've recorded on media) Dahlias interview lies below. Most of it was taped one summer night last year at Duffy's Tavern. Initially I talked to Brian & Ben while waiting for Charles & the interview to begin. Eventually the tape rolled with Charles, Mark, Ben & I sitting in the beer garden while Nick Westra watched the proceedings.
     Amidst much beer & laughter they had this to say about the early days of The Black Dahlias.

CHARLES: I was really, really pissed off about how Floating Opera was going.

MF: What was happening with that?

CHARLES: I didn't like the way that songwriting was going. I wanted things to sound more rootsy, more American, less British, less Broadway. So I thought maybe I'll start my own band. Although, I'm a terrible guitar player; I'm really pretty incompetent. I know all the chords, but trying to put songs together - I'm at a loss.
     So, I brought together people I felt really comfortable around. Mark, being one of the first and Terry Piper. We went down into the basement in 1998 and just wrote a bunch of songs, and I couldn't believe how great it turned out: like maybe these melodic ideas weren't completely imbecile, just like, idiotic. I thought I sounded like a retard when I sang them to myself half the time, because I had these old hillbilly songs kinda, like "Flower of the Night". I just thought 'Crap. No ones gonna like this crap. No one's going to figure out how this works in my head'. And it worked out. Mark really felt it, & so did Terry. It was like 'Wow, maybe I can really do this.'

BEN:  When did Matt come in? Cause I answered that he was one of the initial people.

CHARLES: I had known Matt for a long time. Matt... this gets a little weird... I fired Mark.

MARK: Over one song.

CHARLES:   Yeah, just something he couldn't do - Just this weird little part he couldn't play. But I thought that maybe it would change everything in the world if it wasn't played right, or something. So, I got Matt Silcock to play, and then I didn't know who I was going to have drum. So I moved Mark to drums.

BEN: But, you rehired him.

CHARLES: Yeah, I rehired him. Not that you can be rehired if your not making any money at all... But he was rehired even though there was no money to be made. Mark was a nice enough guy to go ahead and come back, and drummed for a long time; Really well. He was a great drummer..

MARK:  No,  I begged. I begged you.

CHARLES: You begged! Oh, shut up!

MARK: I begged you. The night of the Grammys or Emmys or whatever...

CHARLES: I know, but you don't wanna say that!

MARK: Why not?

CHARLES:  So anyway, Matt played guitar for along time, and with Mark. I think that was when people liked us best. Cause we sounded in that kinda Lullaby For the Working Class way. We had to sit down, we were measured about it; Everything was about the lyrics and keeping everything together.
     But it didn't make me very happy cause I wanted to rage. I mean I wanted things to rock a little harder. And then Matt Silcock took the job as the oboe player for LFTWC so then I had to move those things around.

MARK:  And then he got fired.

CHARLES:  No, he didn't get fired, he quit. Then we had to find a drummer. We thought about Kristin, my wife, but she really can't drum.

MARK: She drums like..

BEN: ...like an animal. She drums like she is, she drums like a wild feral cat.

CHARLES:  She drums like a weird little coyote. Yeah, she drums like a coyote. If coyotes could of course drum. And then uh... How did that finally work itself out?

BEN: Well, here's how that happened. Mark became the drummer and he was like 'Oh shit I don't have any drums!'. I was recording with my other band Gabardine at Mark's studio and after we got done with that he approached me a month later and said "Hey I need some drums, do you have anything laying around?".
     So I sold Mark like $100 worth of drums and then two weeks later he's like 'Well, I'm not the drummer anymore. But do you want to come play drums?' So we did that. Mark's still out a hundred bucks, but oh well.

CHARLES:  And then we had a band after that. I still consider Matt Silcock very much a part of the band because he formed a lot of things, I mean he's probably one of the greatest guitar players I've ever known. Mark really falls into my idea of the band, which is: I want us to be as suave as late-night nocturnal Tom Waits. But on the other hand I think noise, like the Cramps and garage rock, has been given a bad trip through the ages, ya know?

NICK WESTRA: Yeah!

CHARLES:  Right on. See he understands. But garage rock - I mean fuzztone and lot's of pedals. People tend to associate that with gimmick rock. I would like to put that with like Bob Dylanish lyrics. I mean the greatest thing about rock-n-roll is pedals and reverb and echo, you know, like Sun Studio craziness.
     But everyone always hears that and thinks 'Oh, one of those bands'. Like they're garagy, they must be morons or thugs. Like they're just playing this Southern Culture On The Skids joke band stuff.  My favorite bands are the Cramps and Gun Club and all those bands that aren't taken very seriously anymore in the punk rock movement of the early eighties. I mean they're my favorite bands!
     Rock-n-Roll to me is pedals,  it's great noises, it's incredible sounds, it's fuzz pedals, it's tremolo. Mark learned all that really fast.. He got all these pedals and got it all together and was just making crazy sounds. So, he became our guitar player. And we got Ben who everyone knows... I mean, shit! I couldn't believe we scored Ben. It still makes me insane when I think about it.

BEN:  Well, it's weird cause this is the band I'd been looking for a long time. I'd been playing in all manner of happy pop bands and weirdo technical bands and whatnot, and then I'd go home and listen to the kind of stuff that Charles wanted to do. And for all the other great things I did and all the wonderful experiences I had playing in other bands, this is one of the first bands I've ever been in that jived with what I was wanting to play, listen to and be into at the same moment. So it's just been thrilling being in this this band for so long. I don't know that Charles believes that yet.

CHARLES:  Ben was a major coup for us, it increased our audience a lot and made the songs pound a little harder. It made it into a real Rock-n-Roll band. Although, I think it kinda took away some of our audience, like when we finally stood up, when we weren't sitting down doing that LFTWC, Dark Town House Band thing, I think it kind of disenfranchised a lot of people that dug us.

BEN:  But at the same time I think it added...

CHARLES:  It added a whole other audience.

BEN:  So I don't think we necessarily lost numbers, but the audience just kinda shifted.

CHARLES:  And in some ways that disappoints me a little bit 'cause my lyrics are still the same, they're still kinda odd, and I still consider them kind of  poetic.

BEN:  But I  think ultimately we can, with the directions we're in now, usher those people back in. If all they want to hear is sit down folk shit, then fuck 'em. I mean, that's what I think.

CHARLES:  I guess I always liked having those guys who obviously like, wore their little doctor things on their heads, like LFTWC and stuff. I liked that they were kinda into me cause you could tell they were like... that they take scissors and scalpels to everything they do.
      So it was kinda cool that they liked me. It was like 'Holy crap! I'm just an old punk rocker..' Shit, I was in 8 million hardcore bands in the early eighties. It was really great to think I could write a lyric or two that maybe got to them, that they could sort of abstract around it in a way.
     Once we played a show with Lullaby and it got crazy. In some way they hadn't seen us in ages. In other words we were completely rocking in every way. Then they get up and whisper on stage... I think they were a little disappointed that we weren't trying to stay with what we had originally. But it's taught me a lot about singing to be up there in front of a real band, trying to get some soul into it or, be Iggy Pop - take off my clothes or freak out. I'm still not very good at it.

MF: I thought you were going to get naked. [At the "first" Calaca City CD release show.]

CHARLES:  Well I think I might eventually. I mean I'm still pretty shy. My idea is to be comfortable enough that I can do that. Cause my favorite rock musicians, that's were I come from. MC5, fuckin' Iggy & The Stooges, man.
     I want to freak out. I want the band to let me be whatever I want to be, like I want to fuckin' lay down on the stage and feel... I want to get on people's tables and sing to them. It's hard for me to get there, I'm still a little shy and the bands not as tight as any of us would like it to be. Maybe it'll get better. I mean, I'm sure it will. I think were solid enough as a unit, so maybe I'll  feel comfortable enough to finally just start slicing myself to death on stage like Stiv Baters. Fuck it'll be great.
     That's what I want to aim for, I wanna be a punk rock guy. I'm a little old to be getting into it from out of nowhere, 'It's a 38 year old guy who slices himself on stage'. I doubt if anyone is ready for that. Fuckin' G.G. Allen did it, he was my age! G.G. Allen use to get on stage, yank his dick out and run a razor down it, then crap on stage, and bleed everywhere, fall down, and then throw a chair into somebody. Ya know, I'm just waiting for that moment in myself. I'm just biding my time.

MF: I'm going to bring cameras to every show!

CHARLES:  It could happen. I'm just waiting. As soon as everything's right there and I'm locked into this groove, anything could happen.
     So that's how we came to be.

     More to come...

LINKS:

THE BLACK DAHLIAS: Band Profile  Website: www.theblackdahlias.com 
Reviews: Creatures of Habit / Sockeye Marigold / Crush The Clown / The Black Dahlias - Live 01/17/011, Knickerbocker's ,
THE BLACK DAHLIAS CD RELEASE PARTY W/ THE LEPERS & NICK HARRAL - LIVE AT KNICKERBOCKER'S, APRIL 12, 2000 ,
Record Reviews: THE BLACK DAHLIAS-Calaca City

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