Interview with Randy Grace
April 23, 2004

The following interview was conducted by email, so please excuse any casual typos, idioms, etc....

Duckhills Family: When did you start playing guitar? What got you into guitar and who were your earliest influences?

Randy Grace: My mother got me a guitar for my 12th (?) birthday. I liked drawing guitars and stuff but I hadn't had any previous desire to learn an instrument.

My earliest influences were Angus Young (AC/DC) and Rick Nielsen (Cheap Trick)-the giants.

DF: How did The Other Version get its start?

RG: I was in a band when I was in junior hs, with a group of high school juniors from a nearby town. They were clearly desperate for another guitar player, so much so that they would take the like hour round-trip to pick me up and drop me off for practices in the drummer's family's farm's feed shed. I'm grateful to them for that, as well as for giving me the opportunity to give a sincere try to a lot of drugs that I wouldn't have known where to get on my own in rural Texas. My lifelong love affair with beer started around this time. I had pretty much everything I needed at that point, but I moved to Houston when I was about 15, and that's where my music career pretty much should have ended.

I really wanted to be in a band again, but I didn't know any other people who played/who I could stand.

I eventually met Jim through my girlfriend. He wanted to learn the guitar. I showed him three chords, and the next time I saw him he had written like five or six good songs using those three chords. Every new chord I showed him would expand his original repertoire exponentially, and after maybe three "lessons" he had pretty much everything he needed. By that time I had a 4-track and was recording my own awful Peter Gabriel/U2 melange and had met a bass player and drummer and we were playing. I organized a concert in the hs auditorium, and then the bass player quit. Jim came in and took over on the bass. Then the drummer quit on the day we were supposed to record a demo, which is how Chad came in. Ben was singing with Chad's band. I really didn't want another person in the band, but my singing (as was repeatedly pointed out to me) was pathetic, so Ben joined, and I was able to keep him from taking over as the main songwriter for about 18 hours, right up until he learned three chords (by himself). From that point on I was the "superfluous member."

DF: Any particularly memorable moments from your TOV days?

RG: None that I remember.

DF: When/how did the concept of The Duckhills start taking shape?

RG: We decided to move to Austin-I had never been there myself, but Timbuk3 was from there and they were on MTV, so we figured it was just a matter of time before we were too. It was closer than Athens GA, so we moved there. Chad left suddenly, and we were just floored. Literally-when I heard that he had taken off, and that we were without a drummer, I just lay down on the floor of the living room in the house I was renting with two lovely lady journalism students, realizing for the first-and-not-last time that I really, really hated music.

But that's really where the duckhills came from. With all of our plans in a slimy hairball-looking mess down the drain, Ben and Jim, Gary, Brad, Dalton and various others just started hanging around every night at the house, making up songs and turning into something thoroughly different. We did everything we could to try to find a drummer, but we were in a brand-new city and even more clueless than nearly-full-grown men really had any excuse to be. We invited guys over to play, and we actually had some great drummers come by, but they wouldn't join. In hindsight (goddamn you, hindsight!), it's obvious why: we thought anyone who joined our band had to be exactly like us. They would have had to renounce any other band they played with and would need to practically marry us. We didn't realize that this wasn't the done thing in Austin. We scared off any number of likely candidates with our heavy breathing before we shanghaied Brian into joining. He had everything we were looking for-he'd already left his drum set (a Reuther, best American-made drums ever) in our living room and he had no place to live. He was actually a great drummer, and perfect for us, goddammit, but at the time, his willingness to pay rent was the main thing.

We rehearsed right there in our living room (I wasn't actually living there at the time, in keeping with my superfluity) every night, and by the time we played our first show, at a co-op party, we were absolutely awesome. We mocked the other groups we played with for being so lame and ad hoc, but again, we didn't know anything about Austin at the time. The prevailing ethic with bands was that you didn't take it seriously. Being tight was kind of uncool, because it showed that you spent all your time rehearsing and didn't get out enough. That, however, was what made us have an impact, I think. By the time we played a club (Cannibal Club on a tuesday night), we were kick ass and we had like sixty people willing to pay two bucks to see us.

DF: What is the "build-a-goat" story?

RG: If you called Jim's house in Houston and asked what he was doing, he'd answer "Nothing, just building a goat."

DF: Was there an explicit evolution of the band's music or efforts from Spongecake to Litter? (that is, was the writing process the same over the years, or did you all as writers have have a different goal for, say, Litter than Kayak?)

RG: Ben's work with Dalton and the nightly bacchanals with Jim et al (90% of which I wasn't there for) generated about a million songs by the time that Spongecake was recorded. We just wanted them all on tape. I had this weird six-track cassette recorder and a bunch of microphones purchased from pawnshops all over American South, and we recorded all the basic tracks at the house and then took the tapes into a studio to do vocals and other overdubs. By then, we had managers, and they told us that the stuff we recorded ourselves sounded terrible and begged us to do it right. So we had to choose which songs to spend money on and do it that way. It was a huge struggle. I was actually all for the full studio idea, because I still clung to the idea that it was my band, and I calculated that my songs might stand a greater chance of getting that studio sheen if we did it that way. Yet another in a series of poor decisions on my part. Well, I guess it really was a better way of doing things, to put out 12 songs (how many songs were on Spongecake? 12? 14? 16?) rather than 25, even though it was my engineering ox that was getting gored in throwing out all of those home-recorded efforts. Ben was really crushed, though, and he was right, considering how amateurish Spongecake eventually turned out; we could just have easily put out all of those songs-it's not like Spongecake was anybody's idea of a usable demo tape.

But it was maybe a good lesson, better learnt then than later. When we did Kayak, we didn't mess around so much. We recorded the whole thing in like a day, even with all the unplanned stuff, like the piano parts that Ben and Jim did. That record really should have turned out better than it did.

Before we did Litter, we recorded like six songs with a producer. It was eye-opening for me, because I had a few songs that were "my" songs, and the producer immediately discarded them, because they weren't worth a damn. But I don't know what ever happened to the songs we recorded that time. They were good, but they kind of disappeared once we started touring.

With Litter, we were determined to make a "good" record. We had just finished touring with Poi Dog Pondering and had sold a whole bunch of Kayaks and we were kind of gnashing our teeth thinking "that's not really what we sound like."
We had a producer again, Stewart Sullivan, renowned for being a super-patient, nice guy. After three days with the duckhills, he was ready to murder us (justifiable homicide).

My own personal goal was to record more of "my" songs, but in the end I failed to put any serious effort into developing the songs I was writing into viable things. I acted like if they weren't immediately perfect, then there was no point in belaboring them. The songs that I sang on Litter made it on just because they were the easiest to play and could be recorded with the least amount of fuss, not because they were very good.

DF: Which Duckhills songs, if any, stand out in your memory as ones you are particularly proud of?

RG: I always thought "I live I die" was really great. "Obvious" was also great. It was our usual set opener. "Slide" too. As far as songs that I can be personally proud of, I liked "freaky transactions"-the song is great, of course, and the guitar was kind of featured, especially live. I loved "An emotional day" because it was such a great song, first of all-Ben was like, what, 22 years old and wrote a song like that?-but personally, I played a guitar part that actually added to the song. Meaning that, I kind of hate the guitar, because while you can barely make rock music without it, a whole lot of songs are ruined by guitar players. So I was immensely proud of that little solo, because it made me like the song even more. It was like, I managed to play an expression of how much I loved that song.

Of my own songs, "helen" I like.

Some of the unrecorded songs were great live. Ben wrote "watch me sleep" and we were doing it as the first or second song on the set and god, it was cool. We played the Texas Ballroom, this huge ornate banquet hall with hardwood floors and chandeliers, and I think we did that song first, and I remember how happy I was, being in this great band.

DF: Do you have a most memorable moment from the Duckhills days?

RG: cf. "duckhills tour diary" @ www.garygilliam.com/writs/duckhills/randydiary.htm

DF: What was your rig at this point -- guitar, amp, etc.? (I've seen some tapes, but can't recognize the guitar)

RG: When we were playing as the duckhills, I mainly used the old Gretsch 6120 that I use now. It's utterly worthless-the only original thing on it is the volume knob and the paint on the headstock. I also used a Telecaster that I think is fake, a 1969 Les Paul Personal that has a microphone input on the top and an SG. I had a Fender Studio 70 which I bought for the Anvil case, and then a Vibroverb reissue when I got tired of how bad it sounded.

DF: After the Duckhills parted ways, did you have any more musical endeavors before moving to Japan?

RG: I meant to write and record a brilliant album, but I never got further than the song titles and jacket design.

DF: What took you to Japan, and when?

RG: I was tour-managing Cotton Mather, (a great band that's big in Europe but can't get arrested in Austin. They actually get mocked in the local press for continuing to stick it out-in between trips to Europe to play with Oasis in 60,000-seat venues, that is. Yet another reason why living in Austin will drive you insane) before I left Austin to help my family run a restaurant in rural Alabama (in the continuing series of poorly-thought-out decisions). They (Cotton Mather) went to Japan to do some shows and asked me to come. I think they felt that my language ability would come in handy-I spoke Spanish, and the engineer spoke Cajun French. I would have never had a chance to come to Japan otherwise, and-let's not forget-I was running a restaurant with my family in rural Alabama at the time. If I'd been offered the chance to strip asbestos in Burkina Faso I would have lunged at it.

Everyone I met in Japan was nice and real impressed with my Spanish, and when they would ask me, What do you think of Japan? I would say "hey it's great, wouldn't mind living here, etc." I said that everywhere I went (rural Alabama, remember), but in Japan people took it serious-like, and gave me all kinds of information about jobs and living in Japan, and so a few months later I moved here.

DF: When did you begin work on the music that eventually became "Made by Elaborate Process" (and is it ok to refer to that album with that title?)

RG: I was totally out of music when I came here; I didn't bring a guitar or anything. None of my more worthwhile hobbies were panning out, though, and I started going to music stores again, where I discovered that used equipment-stuff I had always been too poor to buy when it was new-was considered practically junk in Tokyo. I bought a bunch of microphones and preamps and stuff and when I went back to the states I hauled back a guitar and a mixing board. I still wasn't really writing music, but once I had a certain critical mass of gear, I really had no choice but to make something up so I could record it.

Something I hadn't anticipated was, at some point you get all the gear you really need, and when you realize that there's no reason to skulk around music stores anymore, a terrible emptiness descends-the disquieting realization that shopping for recording gear is a lot more fun than making music could ever be, that music is a vehicle for buying gear. So that's why I make music. Because I'm so ashamed.

But anyway, "made by elaborate process" is the title, so yes, people are encouraged to call it that.

DF: Can you straighten out the rumors about the recording process -- the /elaborate/ process, if you will - of that album?

What rumors? About 17 people have heard the record. What are they saying?

DF: Any funny stories there?

RG: There's a disclaimer in Japanese on the back cover stating "Nothing amusing occurred during the recording of this album." It's true.

DF: When did you decide to take Ok City Ok out into the public as a performing band?

RG: I have been trying to convince people to play with me for about three years now-longer than the duckhills even existed. I have had two intermittent periods where I got a quorum together long enough to play live.

DF: Are you considering or working on a new album?

RG: I've got a lot of songs that I keep meaning to work on. (The song titles themselves are all done.)

DF: How do the audiences in Japan differ from those in the US (if at all)?

RG: If someone is invited to go see a band, they will usually borrow or rent a cd (you can do that here) and study it. The idea is like, you can't really enjoy a band unless you know the songs. I guess not everybody is like that, but still, every once in a while someone complains that I didn't play my own songs "right."

One thing is that it's much harder to just go out and see a rock band play in Japan. Bands don't play in bars, they play at "live houses" which charge like twenty bucks for people to get in, so people go and see the band they know. The door person asks you "which band are you here to see?"

DF: Ok, some general "About Randy" style questions:

RG: I've never thought about it. I'm going to play a bar by myself next month (mostly covers) and I was thinking of doing like three sets, about 40 songs, one year at a time chronologically starting at 1964. Sounds like a good idea, but then now that I think about it, I don't think I can name any songs that came out this year.

DF: What event in known history would you most like to have been present for?

I would have liked to be there when Prince was mixing "when doves cry." I wish fervently that I had been born Prince, because he is funky.

DF: Do you have a favorite author or book?

RG: Glad you asked!
Donald Barthelme The Dead Father
Thomas Pynchon V
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene

DF: Do you ever plan on moving back to the US?

RG: It's hard to think about going back. I don't know if I'll be in Japan for many more years, though. I've never lived anywhere as long as I've lived here.

DF: Do you have a favorite Japanese TV show?

RG: There's a show called Sekai Ururun Taizaiki which is listed in English as "World Traveler" or something like that. They send an aspiring "tarento" (tv celebrity) to stay for a while with a family in some other part of the world, usually to learn some skill. It's very eclectic-people learn to draw a pint of Guinness in County Cork or skin a lemur in New Guinea. The thing is, these celebrities don't act like celebrities at all; they really knock themselves out to be good apprentices. In keeping with Japanese cultural practice, they refer to the members of their host family as "Mother," "Father," etc., and usually end up getting really attached to them, so much so that at the end of the trip they're sobbing in abject heartbreak. I used to mock it and call it "Worldwide Tearjerking Diary," but now I get all teary myself watching it.

Once I learned Japanese, I found out that the Japanese title translates as: Worldwide Tearjerking Diary.

DF: Ok, I'm afraid of going crazy with questions, so I'll stop there -- I hope this isn't too lame!

RG: I'll be the judge of what is and isn't lame around here. If things get lame, I'll make eye contact with you while adjusting my cummerbund. If you see that happening, that means something got lame, and let's split. (If I inadvertently make eye contact with you while non-subtextually adjusting my cummerbund, I'll negate the "lame sign" by moving the Mont Blanc Anniversary Series Fountain Pen, which I customarily keep in the breast pocket of my shirt, to the inside pocket of my blazer. If the formality of the occasion does not rise to the level of cummerbunds (for example, a beach barbeque or a cockfight), please remind me beforehand to establish an alternate "lame sign" and negating sign.)

DF: Cheers!!

RG: To you as well!

Duckhills Family: We would like to thank Randy immensely for taking the time to participate in this interview!

Return to Top

Return To Articles and Interviews