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Off The (Band) Wagon Eddie Spaghetti Solos with The Sauce by Kevin Wierzbicki The rumors are absolutely true and the proof
can be found at your local record store! Eddie Spaghetti has left the Supersuckers! The
reason--and boy did I see this coming--he can’t stay off The Sauce! The guy even uses his web site to hawk
glasses made just for beer swillin’! Well, at least he’s not in denial…
photo: Stephanie Neal |
| It doesn’t take
too sharp a pin to burst this bubble. Coming off the most critically acclaimed
Supersuckers record ever (2003’s Motherfuckers
Be Trippin’), Spaghetti stepped away from the band for a whopping three and a
half days to record his first solo album, The Sauce.
It seems that a guy named Spaghetti couldn’t help but eventually call a record The Sauce, but in reality the pun of a title taps a
keg of Eddie’s liquored-up country favorites penned by superlative songwriters like
Kris Kristofferson (“The Best of All Possible Worlds”) and Willie Nelson
(“Gotta Get Drunk”). The mostly acoustic, stripped-down sound of The Sauce also gives the singer, who also plunks
the bass for the Supersuckers, a chance to do some tasty six-string picking. The result is
sort of a Supersuckers unplugged; the party goes on while the cops lurk outside with their
decibel meters. The new condiment has been passing the taste test for a few months now,
giving Spaghetti a chance to pour it liberally onto recent Supersuckers shows. Worldly Remains asked Spaghetti about getting the
recipe just right before a show in Tempe, Arizona; a gig wedged between performances in
Sin City and the Seattle band’s original stomping grounds, Tucson. |
Kevin
Wierzbicki: So how was Las Vegas? Did you win? Eddie Spaghetti:
I did win a little bit! Not much--fifty bucks. Kevin: What do you play? Eddie: Everything. I wound up winning at a game
called “Let it Ride” last night. That’s where I spent the best part of the
evening, I guess. I was up a lot more at one point, but I kind of let it slip away. Kevin: How was the show? Eddie: Great! We debuted the big show. All capitalized, THE BIG SHOW. We’ve been talking about this for a little while. When we first started doing the country stuff, we kept it very separated; we either did a rock show or a country show. Lately we’ve been thinking about doing them together, even so much so that we’re the only band for the night. I get up and play by myself for a little while then we add members slowly until we’re into the country show. Then it gets a little more up-tempo, and next thing you know we’re in the full-on rock show. There’s no intermission; it just goes and goes and goes. We tried a small version of it last night and it kicked ass! We’re going to do it again tonight. Kevin: So this is what Supersuckers shows will be
like from now on? Eddie: It could be. It’s going to be like
this for the rest of this tour. |
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Kevin: Tomorrow night you’re playing in the
band’s original hometown. What does Tucson feel like to you these days? Still like a
homecoming? Eddie: Tucson has always been a real mixed bag. We
love going there and seeing all our friends and stuff, but the shows have never been good
and the band doesn’t seem to be on Tucson’s radar. But this time around it
sounds like it might be a little different. I guess we got some good advance press and it
sounds like people are excited about it. So maybe it will work. You want it to be like,
“WE’RE BACK,” you know? I guess maybe some people took it the wrong way
when we moved away, or something. Kevin: I would expect that everybody and their
brother calls you up for guest list. Eddie: It’s more like our brothers calling us
up for guest list. That’s about it. Kevin: There’s a pretty diverse group of artists and writers that you tackle on The Sauce. You cover the Reverend Gary Davis (“Cocaine Blues”) and you cover Dino (Dean Martin’s “Little Ol’ Wine Drinker Me”). I know you must have a million favorites you would have loved to put on this record. Run me through how you made your choices. Eddie: All of these songs are songs that I’ve
been singing backstage or whatever for years. Just songs that I really like, that I feel
like the way I play them has a certain, I-don’t-know-what about them. They all kind
of fit this Eddie Spaghetti-filtered--when I make a mix tape or record songs, they come
from all over the place. But when I filtered these out they seemed cohesive together. And
yeah, there’s a bunch more. But I feel like it’s a format I can do more of. I
can put out one of these records every month if I wanted to. Until somebody starts
hounding me for copyright money, then I’ll have to stop! (Laughs) Kevin: I’m not sure if you would call these
“drinking songs” or “shouldn’t be drinking songs.” Were you
thinking of a theme when you started the record? |
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Eddie: It just happened. After I picked a few, I
started seeing the linear pattern of the theme. When I was deciding whether this certain
song was going to make the cut or not, if it happened to have a reference to drinking or
drugging in it, it got an extra point in the “plus” column. Kevin: You have two originals on The Sauce. I think we can all figure out what
“Killer Weed” is about, but you reprise “Sleepy Vampire,” which was
originally on the Supersuckers' Motherfuckers Be
Trippin’. What’s the inspiration for that one? Eddie: It’s a song I wrote when my wife was
pregnant. She’s not much of a sleeper, and she became the sleepy vampire every day.
When I made the song up, it was on acoustic guitar, and was like the version on The Sauce. The Supersuckers rock it out a little
bit--I just thought it would be nice for people to hear where it started. Kevin: You guys have had your own record label,
Mid-Fi, for quite some time now. Did you start the label out of frustration? |
Eddie: Frustration, necessity, and the desire to
never have a boss again. We’ve always had this sort of boss, where you make some
up-front money when you go to make a record, but then you don’t really see any money
afterwards. We were thinking about that stuff and how to maximize our potential and be in
control of everything that we do. [Mid-Fi aide-de-camp] Chris Neal has been an invaluable
asset to what we do; he has really opened our eyes to how stuff works, I can’t even
tell you. You look at record labels like RCA, who sold more records than any other label
last year, and they reported a $35 million loss! They’re just not working smart, and
we are. I think this is the way bands are going to have to do it in order to have a
career. We’re lucky that we have fans that follow what we do. We’re not rich
from it, financially speaking, but we get to do what we want to do for a living and
we’ve been doing it for fifteen years. Kevin: It seems to be quite a family affair here
tonight. Most of the band members bring their kids on the road? Eddie: I probably bring my family on the road the
most, but Ron [guitarist Rontrose Heathman] definitely does a little bit. We don’t
make enough money at this to be away from our families for that long, so we try to bring
them along whenever we can to kind of keep it fun for everybody. It’s fun to be on
the road, especially for a kid who’s at the age before they start school. The world
is this wide-open space and I like to share it rather than say, “This is my world,
you stay out of it!” |
Kevin: Your three-year-old son, Quattro, is with
you tonight, and he’s already got his first record out (Quattro sings The Sauce’s closing cut, “Blue Shadows on
the Trail”). Eddie: (Laughs) Yeah, he’s already a
recording artist. It’s pretty cool. He’s a lucky little boy. He can do whatever
he wants for a career, but he sure likes being around all this stuff. Kevin: Does he pick up the guitar yet? Eddie: He already does, and hopefully he’ll
be a lot better at it than I am. And as if he senses that daddy has spent enough time answering questions, Quattro plays road manager and ends our interview by insisting that Eddie join him in a game of pool. |
 Eddie and the Road Manager: 3-year-old Quattro is calling the shots. Photo: Kevin Wierzbicki |
