Dengue Fever's Ethan Holtzman

Dengue Fever's Ethan Holtzman

By Brad Warner
Mar 17, 2008

Dengue Fever is my current favorite band in the world. About seven years ago, when I was living in Tokyo, I bought a CD called Cambodian Rocks at a shop I used to frequent, Barn Homes Records. The CD blew my little mind to pieces. A collection of nameless Cambodian pop songs from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the CD was far and away the most psychedelic music I had heard in my life. And I have heard a lot of psychedelia.

Doors-inspired Vox and Farfisa organs swirled around raging buzzsaw, fuzztone guitars and wild man of Borneo drums. This psilocybin soup was garnished by ethereal voices singing what sounded like Sanskrit chants invoked by Krishna and Radharani themselves run through a broken Echoplex reverberation machine. I played that CD until every cut was acid-etched into my cerebral cortex.

Hungry for more of this amazing music I began hunting for it. Then I heard about a current Los Angeles based band named Dengue Fever who actually played this very same stuff. I tracked down their records and, sure enough, Dengue Fever was even wilder than the Cambodian psycho-pop nuggets that inspired them.

The musical style itself has a fascinating history. In the late ‘60s, during the Viet Nam War, Cambodian musicians began tuning into American and English pop like The Doors, The Beatles, The Stones, Yardbirds, Iron Butterfly and Blue Cheer being played on American Armed Forces radio stations. Stirred by a sound that must have seemed to have come from outer space, these musicians formed bands, creating their own unique interpretation of what they heard. For a brief, gleaming moment Cambodia had a day-glo colored homegrown rock and roll scene like nothing else on the planet.

But when Nixon started secret bombing runs into Cambodia, everything went to Hell. The chaos that ensued allowed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to sweep into power. This peasant revolution sought to destroy everything it saw as bourgeoisie or intellectual. In the process, the leading lights in the nation’s nascent rock scene were slaughtered and everything went black.

Decades later the music they made was rediscovered by American hipster back packers traveling the country’s newly opened back roads. One of those was a Farfisa organ player named Ethan Holtzman. Ethan traveled the country collecting cassette tapes of some of Cambodia’s most incredible sounds. When he returned to Los Angeles, he and his brother Zac, who’d also been getting into Cambodian rock tapes he collected from shops in L.A., decided to form their own Cambodian rock band. They recruited friends Senon Williams on bass, Paul Smith on drums and David Ralicke on sax. To add the necessary authenticity the group traveled to a club called the Dragon House in Long Beach’s Little Phnom Penh district to find a suitable Cambodian lead singer. There they found Chhom Nimol. Already a legend at home, she was at first leery of the Holtzman brothers, especially Zac’s ZZ Top beard. But eventually they persuaded her to join and Dengue Fever was ready to rock.

I had the honor of meeting Ethan Holtzman at the band’s home base in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district, a sprawling house full of cats and guitars.

Brad Warner: I first heard about you guys when I lived in Japan. I used to go to this little independent record store that carried lots of esoteric stuff. They had a CD there called Cambodian Rocks, which I’m sure you know about.
Ethan Holtzman: Oh yeah.
BW:
It was the only thing I played for weeks! Then I heard there was a band in L.A. who was playing stuff off that album and I thought that sounded really cool. I know a little bit about this style of music just from the liner notes of that CD and some of the articles I’ve read. But can you explain what it is and how you got into it?
EH:
The Cambodian psychedelic rock scene was something on its own. That inspired my brother and I to form Dengue Fever. I traveled in Cambodia and got some cassette tapes and I really liked some of the songs and it turns out a couple of them are on that Cambodia Rocks compilation as well. So that was when I first came in contact with it. The main composer was a guy named Sin Sissamouth who wrote about a thousand songs. He died during the Khmer Rouge. He wrote a lot of the coolest songs. Some of them were inspired by Western and British rock. Sometimes he would do some songs exactly but then write a different lyric.
BW:
I remember there were some of those where they just changed the words to some American song.
EH:
Yeah, like they did a Booker T. song and they did “House of the Rising Sun.” But he wrote a lot of original songs. And the ones I really got into, most of them were on Cambodia Rocks. Some them we found. There’s one of Sin Sissamouth’s songs we cover, “Shave Your Beard,” that was just on one of the cassettes we collected. Another of his songs was called “Flowers.” There were just so many good ones.
BW:
So you guys weren’t involved in the Cambodian Rocks compilation then? Do you know who did that?
EH:
No.
BW:
It’s kind of mysterious. There’s no information on there. Not even song titles.
EH:
I’ve read a little bit about it because there’ve been a couple other Cambodian Rocks volumes. We know some of the people that work at Sublime Frequencies, which is a label that gets into this style. They put out some compilations out of Cambodia. They did some music out of Iraq during Saddam’s reign. That one’s on the Parallel World label. I think someone traveled to Cambodia, bought some cassettes, and just put it out.
BW:
So you guys got into it through that and from actually being in Cambodia? How did you end up in Cambodia?
EH:
I traveled for six months in Southeast Asia. Cambodia was one of the countries I went to.
BW:
How did you go about finding other people who wanted to do this weird style of music?
EH:
Our drummer Paul Smith I always played in bands with. Senon, our bassist, my brother played with and he was a friend, so we just asked him to join. He was in another band already. But he said, “I’ll just jam with you guys and feel it out.” And our horn player David Ralicke…
BW:
He’s really good!
EH:
Yeah. He came to the first show and just played live with us without a rehearsal.
BW:
Was it difficult to explain to them what the concept of the band was?
EH:
No, we just started with a set of covers of late ‘60s early ‘70s Cambodian rock songs. Our singer didn’t speak any English so we couldn’t really express to her that we wanted to do originals. She already knew those songs. But she could only say like “yes” and “thank you” in English.
BW:
I wanted to ask you about her. Her name is Chhom Nimol? She was already well-known in Cambodia, right? How did she end up in Los Angeles? Was she trying to make a singing career here?
EH:
Her sister was working here. She came for a visit and stayed and just started working. It was good money. She was singing at night clubs in the Little Phnom Penh area. I think it was good for her just to branch out. You know, Cambodia’s a small little country. So it was good for her to be able to send some money back to the family.
BW:
Was it hard to convince her to join?
EH:
Yeah. It took about four trips down to the Dragon House. My brother’s beard was a little weird to her. We just kept swingin’ in and watching her sing and afterwards we’d ask her to come to a practice. Finally we got a rehearsal studio in Long Beach and we had some other girls singing with us. We told them Chhom Nimol’s gonna come tonight. And they’re like, Chhom Nimol’s not coming. She’s famous. She’s not gonna play with you guys! Then she walked in and she was all done up and she had a bunch of friends around her. All the other singers were just like, “Uh we gotta go!”
BW:
She does have a presence. As soon as she walked out on stage at the Echoplex the other night it was a huge thing. Very impressive. Do you guys play a lot in Long Beach?
EH:
We don’t play a lot. But I just got our schedule and we’re playing a few shows there this year. We’ve played once or twice down there before.
BW:
So how does the local Cambodian population respond to you guys?
EH:
They love it. They sing along. In San Francisco and Seattle when we play there, there are always a lot of Cambodians in the audience. They just go crazy. They’re break dancing…
BW:
It’s interesting you’ve got this sort of hipster rock audience and then the Cambodian audience.
EH:
Yeah. There’s a lot of different markets that we’ve been playing. We have the indie rock crowd and now we’re playing these world music festivals. We got this one in Seattle coming up called Sasquatch. It’s pretty cool. Last year the Beastie Boys and Bjork played it. They invited us on. So we’ll do something like that. And then we go over to Europe the next day and do a big world music festival. This summer we’re making four trips to Europe and there’s like seven shows each time. That should be fun
BW:
That’s great.
EH:
So we’re doing both markets.
BW:
That’s really great because you guys are one of the first new bands that I’ve found interesting in a long time.
EH:
Thank you.
BW:
So you guys went and did shows in Cambodia recently? How was that?
EH:
It was busy! It was like ten days of straight shooting. Our director John Pirozzi would wake us all up early. We did a documentary.
BW:
That’s what I heard.
EH:
Yeah. It’s called Sleep Walking Through The Mekong. One day we were all riding around on scooters. We rented scooters over there. So we’re flying around Phnom Penh, the capitol, while John’s in a truck shooting it. And it’s crazy in the streets over there. They don’t stop really. You just go into the flow of traffic like a fish. I was trying to catch up with the pack. And we had no helmets. I ran a red light. And then this cop tries to pull me over in a scooter. And they’re like, “Don’t stop!”
BW:
[Laughs] They’re telling you not to stop?
EH:
Yeah! They’re telling us, “Keep going! Keep going!” They want me to try and ditch the cop! And I’m not going to ditch this cop. He’s like tailing me. So I pull over. And he’s like speaking to me in Khmer and I didn’t know what he said. So I flagged Nimol and her cameraman. They talk to the guy and he’s like, asking for the equivalent of five dollars. And they’re bargaining with him, so it’s like two-fifty. And they get him down to like a dollar seventy-five.
BW:
You were bargaining with the cops?
EH:
Yeah! They got him down to like a buck seventy-five for the ticket and I’m like, “That’s cool.”
BW:
That’s funny.
EH:
Anything goes over there. But the shows were great. We played like in front of about a thousand villagers in a shantytown.
BW:
So they got into it. I also checked out a little of a movie called, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten.
EH:
Oh yeah, the documentary about the Cambodian rock scene?
BW:
I just saw the trailer on the website. I had no idea about the history that went on over there. I mean, you know a little bit from what you hear on the news or whatever. But there was this huge discontinuity in the culture. Everything was shut down for the time the Khmer Rouge were in power. How long did that go on?
EH:
They came in 1975 and they were still present when I was there in the late ‘90s. Pol Pot was still alive. Cambodia was war torn for a long time. In ’98 when I was there, we’d be sitting on these hammocks smoking pot with the locals and they’re saying there were just bombs going off across the lake. It was crazy. But now it’s doing much better and there’s a lot of tourism. It’s picking up.
BW:
So seeing you guys come over and play, that must be something for the people there.
EH:
It kind of brought together the ex-pat crowd and there were the young Cambodian crowd and the foreigners and they went to these clubs. We did as many shows as we could schedule for free and they would just go nuts. Places were getting packed. We played in this one club called Snowies -- it’s on the Tonle Sap River and it has a kind or Louisiana feel, like it’s a shack bar. It’s kind of tilted and feels like it’s about to fall. That was our first show. Just so many people packed in there! Cambodians outside in the dirt streets, listening and tripping out, like, “What are these guys doing?”
BW:
You guys started out doing covers, right?
EH:
Yeah.
BW:
And now you’re doing originals. Honestly, though, without checking the liner notes I wouldn’t know which were the covers and which were the originals. So you got that style down pretty well.
EH:
I don’t think the originals are really based on… well, some of them are based on older songs. But for the most part they’re just like music we’ll come up with in the studio while we’re playing or practicing and it’ll get developed. My brother writes a lot of the material. So he’ll come up with a chord progression and a vocal melody and I’ll come up with a keyboard part and Senon and Paul will come up with the rhythm section.
BW:
So does Nimol come up with the vocal melodies?
EH:
Once in a while. But a lot of them she gets help from the band.
BW:
Yeah, she seems like that kind of old school singer, you know?
EH:
Yeah.
BW:
They don’t write.
EH:
Yeah, they don’t write a lot. Exactly. She started as like a karaoke star.
BW:
I was listening to your second album, Escape from the Dragon House. The production is really amazing with all the echo and delay. It reminded me of this local band I saw when I was in the Yucatan in Mexico. They had all their vocals running through guitar effects pedals. It sounded great. You guys did some soundtrack stuff. Can you tell me about that?
EH:
The coolest one was Broken Flowers. It’s a Jim Jarmusch film with Bill Murray in it. He used a lot of Ethiopian jazz. The whole score was these great Ethiopiques. The main guy was Mulatu Astatke. We covered one of his songs on our first record. So they used our version in the film. That was kinda nice. We’ve always liked Jim Jarmusch’s films.
BW:
I had a band years ago in Akron, Ohio, which is where he’s from, and our drummer was Jim Jarmusch’s roommate. So that’s my little Jim Jarmusch connection.
EH:
He did a lot of good films. Then we did City of Ghosts. Matt Dillon directed it and he asked us to do a song for it so we did a version of “Both Sides Now,” the Joni Mitchell song in Khmer.
BW:
Oh yeah?
EH:
Yeah. That was the end title credit. The TV show “Weeds” on Showtime took our song “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula” and used it on a couple episodes.
BW:
That’s a great song, “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula.”
EH:
Thanks.
BW:
Is that an original? Or is that a cover of a Cambodian song?
EH:
It’s an original.
BW:
So you guys are getting a lot of notoriety, which is good. It’s really nice to see a good band get some attention. It seems like you’re doing more songs in English now.
EH:
Yeah, a couple. I mean, Nimol has been here five or six years now. So her English is getting better. It’s a natural progression to use more English. A lot of times we’ll do a song in English and Khmer and just decide which sounds better. Or which lyrics are more important to understand.
BW:
Yeah, yeah. It’s really cool listening to it. Cuz when I wqas living in Japan I got good enough in Japanese that if I heard a song I could at least tell what it was about even if I didn’t always get all the details. But listening to the songs in Khmer I just don’t have any idea what it’s about, which makes you listen to the vocal in a whole different way. So are you guys gonna do more English to court the masses or are you just like, “Fuck the masses”?
EH:
I think we’re just gonna keep doing what we’re doing. We’re not gonna be like, this next album’s gonna all be in English. We did a video a couple weeks ago. And we purposely picked our single to be a Cambodian lyric rather than an English one. That’s what was working. That was the song people were interested in. So we didn’t want to change things. But there are a couple English tracks on there. But the radio is playing some of the Cambodian songs. Like Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles, they’re playing some that are in Cambodian and some that are in English.
BW:
So the documentary you were talking about, is it gonna come out?
EH:
There’s a film rep who’s kind of working on it. It’s been in some festivals. It was shown in Bangkok. It’s being shown in San Francisco this weekend. I don’t know what’ll happen to it after that. They’re working on it. It’s going to be shown in Los Angels on March 13th at the Echo Park Film Center.
BW:
Look there’s another cat!
EH:
She’s the toughest one! She’ll climb all the way up that ladder to the loft if she wants to get up there. I was feeding the dog and she bolted through the door. So I chased her around the house. I almost go her, then she stopped and looked at me and then jumped through a hole in the fence. She’s disappeared for ten days at a time.
BW:
Wow! We had a street cat who always came into where I worked in Tokyo and he was real mellow. One of the guys scanned his balls. Just put him up on the scanner and scanned ‘em!
EH:
How’d they look?
BW:
All fuzzy and orange. It was pretty cool.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica

For more information on Dengue Fever go here
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