Courtney Taylor-Taylor is best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the band The Dandy Warhols. The band is favorite of many of here at SG and the favor is returned by many in the band. Taylor-Taylor is responsible for writing some of the groups best known songs including We Used To Be Friends and Bohemian Like You. The band is still going strong and last year announced that a new album The Machine will be released in 2012.
Taylor-Taylors new project is something completely different. One Model Nation is a graphic novel and an album coming out on January 31. Taylor-Taylor described the project as We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career. We reached him at his home in Oregon and its clear from our conversation that the project is a very personal one, driven by Taylor-Taylors personal history and his thoughts on the world as much as it a look at late seventies Germany and events that are almost too strange to be true.
ALEX DUEBEN: It was amusing to read in the back of One Model Nation about how the book began by thinking about the trend of rappers fighting the police in movies and what if they made rock movies about that situation. It is odd there arent any.
COURTNEY TAYLOR-TAYLOR: Yeah. I mean it doesnt matter anyway because the way they portray bands in movies, a nine year old wouldnt buy. They just sit around and say, weve got to stick together, you guys! Were going to make it! Thats what being a fucking band is? Are you kidding?
I felt [about this] the way I feel about everything. I wish that somebody would do this. If it bugs me for long enough, I go, I better just do it. Ill learn how to do it. Somebodys got to do it and nobodys doing it, so Ill do it.
AD: How did you and Donovan Leitch go from that idea to this story set in seventies Germany?
CT-T: Well Donovan started geeking out on the internet and he was like, youre not going to believe this. I had never heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang. That was at the same time that some anarchy people were going to blow up the space needle and apparently had a warehouse around the corner from our studio so we had cops over at our studio all the time. They werent bad, but we were definitely feeling like, theyre cool, but I can see what it would be like to really truly get hassled by the man.
Im thinking about that all the time while Donovan is telling me that a bunch of basically just jerkoff haters in Germany in the late sixties and seventies got together and without any sense just started killing people in the name of this anger that the youth of the country felt about having to inherit this war guilt. It was like, wow, it just started to work. I ended up sitting with Karl Bartos from Kraftwork. He was the one who was like, dont even try to make it real. Your idea of what it was like and what made these bands look so cool and do such cool things is far more spectacular than it really was, so just go for it.
AD: Did you end up doing much research into Germany and that period?
CT-T: Yeah. I could have just made the whole thing up since its really science fiction. Berlin in the seventies seems very science fiction, very industrial wasteland-y. Donovan was way into it. He was feeding me all these outrageous events. Andreas Baader being interviewed out of prison with just a few guards. These two two college kids that show up. I mean who else is going to come bust him out? What the fuck did they think was going to happen? Was it just too obvious that two kids showed up and said they wanted to do their homework there? I mean how does that happen in real life? Do you know how hard it was for me to write that? This is so unbelievable.
AD: I would think thats harder to write just because the real stuff seems so crazy and unbelievable.
CT-T: The real things are the hardest to believe. If I had to make up a whole story, it could never have been as deep as this one. Im just simply not that powerful of a creative person, I think. That was the good part about using actual history. It was nice to use history, but smoothing out those seams where you stitch it together was a really big bite to swallow. I mean opening with a shootout at a show. That actually happened at a college, but I wanted it to be like a rave. In Portland we had crazy ones in the early nineties, late eighties. Portland was a really empty town back then so there was a lot of warehouses and a lot of cop violence.
I did a bunch of research. I just talked to anyone I could. I was doing some college radio stuff in Germany and this teacher told me about when he was in college when bands played and the cops showed up and it was a little like Kent State. Also there are just movies. Donovan would find Fassbinder and Herzog films and wed watch them and go, what the fuck is that?
AD: After reading the book I had to poke around online to see what was real and who some of these people were.
CT-T: Wasnt that fun? Isnt that great? I really wanted that, for people to poke around and find out.
AD: The real life events are so bizarre but the scenes with the band feel very real so the unreal insanity happening around them really does give the reader a sense of what that might be like.
CT-T: And then having them have a fulcrum part in it, even on a personal level. His relationship with Ulrike Meinhof is pretty fucking believable. Its like relationships Ive had in my life. I love that part of it. Whats real and whats not.
AD: Was there that much official government hostility towards youth culture in Germany at the time?
CT-T: Well its hard to say, isnt it? How much is in your head. How much is what people say. How much is coincidence. Some weird thing happens for a different reason but you put it together with something else that happened and now youre actually just being paranoid. Thats the big thing in the book. How much is just weird coincidences and timing? Thats a thing that I really wanted to get across in the book. I guess I just wanted to make people aware that I think about that shit. I mean if you think about that, it might be interesting for you to know that I think about that shit too. A lot. Am I being paranoid or is this actually happening?
AD: In the book you wrote that you originally wanted to make this a film. How did it end up being a comic?
CT-T: I had never seen a screenplay in my life. I got this screenwriting program and I was like, Im not going to learn how to use this, so I ended up writing the thing more like a play. Ive read a lot of plays. I started having other people read it. I dont know the film industry. It starts to get out of your control and I dont really care to see any of my work get twisted and manipulated and wrongly put out there. I ended up having Mike Allred read it because hes the guy. Red Rocket 7 is this perfect rock and roll/science fiction/shoot em up with introspection. In the record producing industry you would say the dude has the ears of a thirteen year old boy. Thats why hes so good. Mike Allred is that person in the comics industry. Mike and the Image Comics guys hooked me up with Jim Rugg. He had done Afrodisiac which has a seventies look and its fucking awesome. I knew this guy could go as far as he wants stylistically.
Donovan and I tried to write it at first together and that was a disaster. We were just goofy. And we didnt know what we were doing.I started over. I was jetlagged a lot for eight years because it was constant touring and I was wide awake at three a.m. and working [on the book]. Id put it away for months and come back and be horrified. You learn to whittle away the words. Thats why it took me another six years to make it not suck.
AD: Talk a little about the album, One Model Nation. Was it harder or easier than making the graphic novel?
CT-T: Making the record was so easy. It was about just making cool shit. We didnt have to make it fit into anybodys sensibility. It was just however far we wanted to go. It was great. We just camped out in my house in the country, we set up a bassline and spent days out there. It was super fun and really easy and it was like a dream. [laughs] The jerkoff teenage fantasy of what its like to be in a German art noise band.
AD: I know that you live in Portland, Oregon.
CT-T: My familys from Portland. Were probably one of the oldest Portland families left. We predate the Civil War.
AD: The city has changed a lot in past ten or fifteen years. What keeps you there?
CT-T: I dont get lost in it.
I was pretty bitter about it for a long time. It started happening in the nineties and it was not pretty. You grow up being the outsider and dream of this world where everyone is hip and culturally aware and then it actually started to happening to Portland. This depressed economy armpit town that I lived in. To hang out at coffeeshop and have a fucking piercing is a fucking cliche. Its basically just a glut of the kind of people I always liked. To the point where its embarrassingly horrifying. It is Portlandia.
AD: So to end, how you describe One Model Nation to people?
CT-T: We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career. Its pretty weird and interesting.
One Model Nation, the book and the album, will be available January 31st.
Taylor-Taylors new project is something completely different. One Model Nation is a graphic novel and an album coming out on January 31. Taylor-Taylor described the project as We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career. We reached him at his home in Oregon and its clear from our conversation that the project is a very personal one, driven by Taylor-Taylors personal history and his thoughts on the world as much as it a look at late seventies Germany and events that are almost too strange to be true.
ALEX DUEBEN: It was amusing to read in the back of One Model Nation about how the book began by thinking about the trend of rappers fighting the police in movies and what if they made rock movies about that situation. It is odd there arent any.
COURTNEY TAYLOR-TAYLOR: Yeah. I mean it doesnt matter anyway because the way they portray bands in movies, a nine year old wouldnt buy. They just sit around and say, weve got to stick together, you guys! Were going to make it! Thats what being a fucking band is? Are you kidding?
I felt [about this] the way I feel about everything. I wish that somebody would do this. If it bugs me for long enough, I go, I better just do it. Ill learn how to do it. Somebodys got to do it and nobodys doing it, so Ill do it.
AD: How did you and Donovan Leitch go from that idea to this story set in seventies Germany?
CT-T: Well Donovan started geeking out on the internet and he was like, youre not going to believe this. I had never heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang. That was at the same time that some anarchy people were going to blow up the space needle and apparently had a warehouse around the corner from our studio so we had cops over at our studio all the time. They werent bad, but we were definitely feeling like, theyre cool, but I can see what it would be like to really truly get hassled by the man.
Im thinking about that all the time while Donovan is telling me that a bunch of basically just jerkoff haters in Germany in the late sixties and seventies got together and without any sense just started killing people in the name of this anger that the youth of the country felt about having to inherit this war guilt. It was like, wow, it just started to work. I ended up sitting with Karl Bartos from Kraftwork. He was the one who was like, dont even try to make it real. Your idea of what it was like and what made these bands look so cool and do such cool things is far more spectacular than it really was, so just go for it.
AD: Did you end up doing much research into Germany and that period?
CT-T: Yeah. I could have just made the whole thing up since its really science fiction. Berlin in the seventies seems very science fiction, very industrial wasteland-y. Donovan was way into it. He was feeding me all these outrageous events. Andreas Baader being interviewed out of prison with just a few guards. These two two college kids that show up. I mean who else is going to come bust him out? What the fuck did they think was going to happen? Was it just too obvious that two kids showed up and said they wanted to do their homework there? I mean how does that happen in real life? Do you know how hard it was for me to write that? This is so unbelievable.
AD: I would think thats harder to write just because the real stuff seems so crazy and unbelievable.
CT-T: The real things are the hardest to believe. If I had to make up a whole story, it could never have been as deep as this one. Im just simply not that powerful of a creative person, I think. That was the good part about using actual history. It was nice to use history, but smoothing out those seams where you stitch it together was a really big bite to swallow. I mean opening with a shootout at a show. That actually happened at a college, but I wanted it to be like a rave. In Portland we had crazy ones in the early nineties, late eighties. Portland was a really empty town back then so there was a lot of warehouses and a lot of cop violence.
I did a bunch of research. I just talked to anyone I could. I was doing some college radio stuff in Germany and this teacher told me about when he was in college when bands played and the cops showed up and it was a little like Kent State. Also there are just movies. Donovan would find Fassbinder and Herzog films and wed watch them and go, what the fuck is that?
AD: After reading the book I had to poke around online to see what was real and who some of these people were.
CT-T: Wasnt that fun? Isnt that great? I really wanted that, for people to poke around and find out.
AD: The real life events are so bizarre but the scenes with the band feel very real so the unreal insanity happening around them really does give the reader a sense of what that might be like.
CT-T: And then having them have a fulcrum part in it, even on a personal level. His relationship with Ulrike Meinhof is pretty fucking believable. Its like relationships Ive had in my life. I love that part of it. Whats real and whats not.
AD: Was there that much official government hostility towards youth culture in Germany at the time?
CT-T: Well its hard to say, isnt it? How much is in your head. How much is what people say. How much is coincidence. Some weird thing happens for a different reason but you put it together with something else that happened and now youre actually just being paranoid. Thats the big thing in the book. How much is just weird coincidences and timing? Thats a thing that I really wanted to get across in the book. I guess I just wanted to make people aware that I think about that shit. I mean if you think about that, it might be interesting for you to know that I think about that shit too. A lot. Am I being paranoid or is this actually happening?
AD: In the book you wrote that you originally wanted to make this a film. How did it end up being a comic?
CT-T: I had never seen a screenplay in my life. I got this screenwriting program and I was like, Im not going to learn how to use this, so I ended up writing the thing more like a play. Ive read a lot of plays. I started having other people read it. I dont know the film industry. It starts to get out of your control and I dont really care to see any of my work get twisted and manipulated and wrongly put out there. I ended up having Mike Allred read it because hes the guy. Red Rocket 7 is this perfect rock and roll/science fiction/shoot em up with introspection. In the record producing industry you would say the dude has the ears of a thirteen year old boy. Thats why hes so good. Mike Allred is that person in the comics industry. Mike and the Image Comics guys hooked me up with Jim Rugg. He had done Afrodisiac which has a seventies look and its fucking awesome. I knew this guy could go as far as he wants stylistically.
Donovan and I tried to write it at first together and that was a disaster. We were just goofy. And we didnt know what we were doing.I started over. I was jetlagged a lot for eight years because it was constant touring and I was wide awake at three a.m. and working [on the book]. Id put it away for months and come back and be horrified. You learn to whittle away the words. Thats why it took me another six years to make it not suck.
AD: Talk a little about the album, One Model Nation. Was it harder or easier than making the graphic novel?
CT-T: Making the record was so easy. It was about just making cool shit. We didnt have to make it fit into anybodys sensibility. It was just however far we wanted to go. It was great. We just camped out in my house in the country, we set up a bassline and spent days out there. It was super fun and really easy and it was like a dream. [laughs] The jerkoff teenage fantasy of what its like to be in a German art noise band.
AD: I know that you live in Portland, Oregon.
CT-T: My familys from Portland. Were probably one of the oldest Portland families left. We predate the Civil War.
AD: The city has changed a lot in past ten or fifteen years. What keeps you there?
CT-T: I dont get lost in it.
I was pretty bitter about it for a long time. It started happening in the nineties and it was not pretty. You grow up being the outsider and dream of this world where everyone is hip and culturally aware and then it actually started to happening to Portland. This depressed economy armpit town that I lived in. To hang out at coffeeshop and have a fucking piercing is a fucking cliche. Its basically just a glut of the kind of people I always liked. To the point where its embarrassingly horrifying. It is Portlandia.
AD: So to end, how you describe One Model Nation to people?
CT-T: We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career. Its pretty weird and interesting.
One Model Nation, the book and the album, will be available January 31st.