>>PREVIEW
THEE SHAMS
Wednesday, October 5
The Ship & Anchor
What’s a band to do when it turns out songs faster than its label is ready to release ’em? Well, if you’re Thee Shams, you go ahead and release them anyway.
When Fat Possum, the label that released 2004’s Please Yourself, nixed Thee Shams plans for following a Beatles or Guided By Voices schedule (that is, an album every year), Shake It Records happily picked up the slack. The result is Sign the Line, an album that continues to mine the Cincinnati, Ohio band’s wealth of hook-filled garage rock.
"Fat Possum want to get more mileage out of the other one," explains singer Zach Gabbard prior to the start of Thee Shams current tour. "You know, they paid for it, so it makes sense that they’d want us to go out as much as possible and sing those songs. I don’t blame them for that."
Gabbard’s understanding of the music business model is without bitterness and it seems the feeling is mutual. "Everything’s cool. We’ve got the best of both worlds," he says. " They just wanted us to stay on the road, but they said it was cool for us to put out (Sign The Line) elsewhere. In the end, we got to do what we wanted."
Doing what they wanted has put Thee Shams in the enviable position of being able to tour and record without having to hold on to soul-sucking day jobs. They also made a "definite effort to avoid being lumped into the recent garage rock trend," which, even though the music has maintained a respectable fan base for decades, unsurprisingly burned bright and fast when discovered by advertisers and marketing managers.
That’s not to say Thee Shams’s brand of rough-and-tumble rock ’n’ roll doesn’t fit perfectly under the garage-rock umbrella – some might say they fit the description a little too well. "Before we hooked up with Fat Possum, we were involved in some drawn-out bullshit with Telstar."
Gabbard sounds a little weary as he explains his band’s frustrating relationship with the respected label that has been home to The Fleshtones, The Woggles and Southern Culture on the Skids. "Todd (Abramson, Telstar founder) gave us some money and we made a record, but then he came back to us and said it wasn’t produced enough. He put out records by The Mummies, who recorded in their garage, but ours was too garage. I don’t really understand how that works. That went on for three years. "
The record Thee Shams made for Telstar was recorded by The Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, who would later hook them to the Fat Possum crew.
"We’re good friends with the Black Keys and we played shows together. Patrick liked our music and somehow he turned (Fat Possum head) Matthew Johnson onto it. Matthew came back with a cheque and then everything came together."
Where Please Yourself has some sweet and poppy moments (which Zach attributes to his brother Andrew’s contributions), Sign the Line has "a lot more piano and harmonies," according to Gabbard. "I think the main difference is we didn’t half-ass this record." It also has far less controversial cover art than that of its predecessor: Thee Shams caught a bit of flack for having a naked woman on the front of Please Yourself.
"She was actually wearing a bathing suit bottom if you look closely," Gabbard says. "Bruce Watson from Fat Possum found that picture. He goes to thrift stores and buys everything for his resale shop and that picture and another that was far raunchier fell out of a Rod Stewart album and he wanted to use it for our cover. The woman’s face is still on the original picture, but Ryko, who distributes Fat Possum in the U.S., was afraid of legal ramifications, so they cut her head off. But the decision to use that picture was all Fat Possum."
The front of Sign the Line shows a contract being signed in blood.
"My wife made it," Gabbard says. "And I said, ‘OK.’" |
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