When I phoned into Deer Tick’s weird world, the wild foursome was sitting in a Texas Roadhouse restaurant in southern Ohio killing time before their performance later that night at Nelsonville Music Festival.
WATCH the video for “Sea of Clouds”
“It’s the legendary margaritas you hearing clinking in the background,” says guitarist Ian O’Neil. “We’re not having any since we have to play later.”
In the past, they’ve might’ve passed this time with lines of cocaine rather than light beers — long lines.
“We’re not really into bending to any trends or the temptation to sell more records. I think that’s helped us keep fans and appeal to new people at the same time.”
– John McCauley
Fortunately, a couple of years ago, fabled substance user and frontman John McCauley became sober and started a family in Nashville, Tenn. It hasn’t hurt his prolific songwriting or emotional lyrical delivery; if anything, the music keeps on getting better.
“I especially love that recently we’ve really embraced the importance of being ourselves,” says McCauley. “We’re not really into bending to any trends or the temptation to sell more records. I think that’s helped us keep fans and appeal to new people at the same time.”
The members of Deer Tick are good buddies who met in Providence, R.I., before picking up O’Neil after a typically raucous gig in New York City. They are proud of the burgeoning Providence music scene, which McCauley refers to as PMS.
“It was always was a good music town,” says McCauley. “As a kid, I thought I lived in a total wasteland until I got to high school and met some people that knew what was going on. But thinking back, I was only 13 when I started seeing shows. Some of my favorite bands of all time are Providence bands I got to see a couple times a month.”
“There are scenes within the scene,” he continues. “It’s not totally unusual for a metal band, a rock band and a hardcore band to play the same show. It’s the size of the city that contributes to it. There are only like 400 of us total in the state of Rhode Island. No one goes around playing a show thinking they’ll get signed to Warner Brothers. There is a real spirit of independent music in Providence.”
Although Deer Tick still releases its records on the Brooklyn-based artist-run label Partisan Records, in many aspects they’ve graduated from the indie moniker.
“I like to joke that we are a ‘dependent’ band now,” says McCauley. “We used to do it ourselves, but now we are dependent on manager and booking agents to set our tours and everything.”
As Deer Tick has eased up on the hard-partying rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, the members prefer now to take chances in the studio. Last year, they released two albums at once dubbed “Deer Tick Vol. 1” and “Deer Tick Vol. 2.”
“We had a lot more time to make these ones,” says McCauley. “It had been four years in between records. We were writing so many songs that we thought it might be fun to separate them in some way and not have to worry about sequencing them for a cohesive album. We focused more on folksier, softer sides on Volume 1 and on Volume 2 we put some of some of the louder, more rock ‘n’ roll stuff. It was my wacky idea. The only problem we could’ve run into was not having any good songs to put it off. But we did it with so much inertia that each song lived up to be its best.”
And a rock documentary about their first 10 years, “Straight into the Storm,” was recently released.
“There are no big plans on the horizon,” says McCauley. “We’re just happy to do what we do. We don’t have our own jet or anything, but we live pretty comfortably. And I think it can only get better from here if we keep working at it.”
Deer Tick will be opening up for Trampled by Turtles at the MontBleu Resort Casino. The two bands once performed together at Newport Folk Festival putting forth a raging rendition of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”
“I had no idea that at one point they used to be an AC/DC bluegrass cover band,” says McCauley. “So we shredded everybody’s balls off.” | deertickmusic.com
June 21 | 8 p.m.
MontBleu Resort & Casino | Stateline, Nev.
