If there is one set at Newport this year that I will not miss, it’s Low Cut Connie. They will start things off on Saturday on the Quad Stage and I might try to stowaway there on Friday night to make sure I get a seat up front. When the rolling lineups were announced this fall and winter, Low Cut Connie was one of those groups that I’d heard of, but hadn’t listened to. I queued up some tunes while making dinner and was immediately dancing all over the kitchen (For whatever it’s worth, as I remember, I made a damn fine dinner that night too). Their music just cuts right to your heart. Years ago, I talked with Geoff Muldaur about Paul Butterfield, and his comment about Butterfield and the blues was something like: “He heard this music, and it filled him up.” That’s how I feel listening to this band and it seems like that’s how frontman Adam Weiner feels when listening to classic rhythm and blues and creating music that is in that tradition but doesn’t shy away from pulling in other influences and pushing boundaries. It was great to talk with Adam about their latest album, Dirty Pictures, Part 2, performance, and making space for the band to push on the expectations people have of them.
RLR: I’d love to talk in detail about a few tracks from Dirty Pictures, Part 2, and then expand from there. Can we start with Hollywood, because it stands out as a song that might catch some listeners off-guard, just you and a guitar. And I’ve read that it’s an older song that you included–so why now, and how did that process for that song differ from more piano-driven work?
AW: No real process. I just took three minutes to do that song. Basically: hit record, play it for two minutes, hit stop, and then listen to it and say, “Yeah, that’s good.”
I wrote that song a long time ago, before Low Cut Connie existed. I think it’s been a process of expanding the expectations of what Low Cut Connie is and can be. And I guess I just didn’t feel ready to expose our listeners or fans that material that was outside of our wheelhouse right out of the gate. It took some time and a few albums to have enough confidence to do whatever I felt. Although I will call to your attention that on our second album, Call Me Sylvia, the very last song on the album is “Dreams Don’t Come True,” which is another me, by myself, acoustic song. So there was a precedent for it.
RLR: It’s interesting to think about expectations for what a band can and should be. I’ve read in other interviews that your first review called you scuzzball music or something like that and then every review had some variation on that. So how did you think about using that and also pushing against it?
AW: It was true that people referred to us as scuzzball, sleazeball, all those kind of things, and it still happens when people do a kind of skin deep reading of the band, and it’s OK. But I have to be honest, we didn’t avoid that. If you’re doing music in 2018 that has a real openness and sense of humor, and is red-blooded, and is sort of unapologetically funny and sexual, and is open-hearted–especially in rock n roll–it’s an anomaly. And you open yourself up to being tagged with certain descriptors like that. So it’s OK, I get why that happened. But it did start to feel little bit confining both internally in the band and externally with the industry. With Dirty Pictures, Part One, I felt so strongly about “Revolution Rock and Roll,” our first single. I felt like it was a real step forward for us, and felt almost like an anthem for us, where we were and where I wanted to go. And it was received beautifully, and then I knew I could take our fans and go anywhere my heart felt like it wanted to go.
AW: Isn’t that what art is supposed to do? Transport you? And I don’t try to be an escape for people. I ask our audience to bring their world into the room, whatever dramas, stresses, or worries, or whatever’s going on with people–bring it into the tent, and then let’s work it out. In our music, I try to not ignore people’s experience or what’s going on in the world. [Loud shot from outside] Oh my god. …. That was a gunshot. There was a gunshot outside the hotel. … Incredibly well-timed.
RLR: You guys are good?
AW: We’re fine. We’re in the hotel, we’re inside.
But you cannot ignore what’s going on in the world, you cannot ignore how people live. And I want them to be able to have a mechanism to acknowledge the tension and release the tension. Tension and release, tension and release. That’s how I try to structure our shows; it’s how I’ve tried to structure our albums recently.
RLR: There’s also a great sense of tension and release within your songs. Part of what is interesting to me about how you use quiet or silence in your songs–the strings at the beginning of “Beverly” or the stops in “Everytime You Turn Around.” Can you talk about how think about building it up and releasing it?
AW: I don’t know that I think too much about it, it’s just in my blood and how I do things. I give myself what I’m looking for, and hopefully, by proxy, it will give the audience the rhythm and the breath that I’m looking for. It’s therapeutic and exciting. I’d hate to be boring, that would be the worst thing in the world to be. I don’t know if we achieve it, but we certainly aspire to it. I’d like to think our albums and shows are getting better at achieving it and Newport will be a fantastic exercise in really trying to build up a head of steam and get this sort of group release in our little forty minute allotment of time.
RLR: I’ve talked to people in the past who think about Newport differently than other festivals, and others who try to treat it like any other show. Where are you on that?
AW: Well, we’re doing 120 shows this year and so it’s all kind of a flow, but I take the temperature in the room every day, whether we’re playing to 20 people or 20,000 people. I just get up there and do what I think is the best for the crowd in front in me. And I really won’t know until I’m there until I know what the vibe is and I see what I think people are looking for.
RLR: I saw a video of you guys and there was a big empty space before the stage and you said, “I’m not starting until there are five people up here.” And doing that seemed to give people permission to get out of their lawn chairs.
AW: There have been a lot of cultural shifts, and I think forty years ago, you wouldn’t have had to ask people to dance or instruct them. Now you really do, and in some ways, you have to demand it. And I’m very demanding of our audience and I sort of demand that they love our stuff, so sometimes I’ve got to set the tone and slap people around a little bit and say, “Alright, people, you gotta move it.” And people pay money to come see us do something, and people want to be instructed as to how to have a good time. And that’s my job.
RLR: I’ve read in past interviews that you try to perform without irony, but in performance there’s a high level of artifice there. What’s the difference to you and how do you navigate performance when that’s not how you’re feeling?
AW: You can’t pretend. You just have to use performance as your daily release. Whatever’s going on in your life, you gotta use it, and use it to get to where you need to be. Individually and collectively, there’s a place that we need to get to and we have to get there together, and I’m trying to lead us there. You can’t ignore what’s going on in the world or in your life, but you just gotta use it. I’m not a religious person, but people go church every Sunday, or have whatever their religious or spiritual program is. Mine is rock and roll; that’s my daily and constant grind that lifts me up and allows me to lift other people up.
But you did ask about irony. We’re a cult band and that’s one of the reasons we don’t have a more widespread audience or support from the industry. What we do is so out of fashion, and in rock and roll specifically what we do is so completely and terribly out of fashion. With rock, on the one hand you have heavy, macho rock that is sort of a retread of the past. And then you have this very indie rock, cerebral and ironic presentation on the other side. And we’re neither of those things. So we don’t really commercially fit in to what is laid out for us in rock music, so I don’t really consider us a rock act–I say rock n’ roll, because my relationship with rock n’ roll is through its roots in rhythm and blues and soul music.
RLR: So when you’re playing music that draws so heavily on an established musical tradition, how do you think about that conversation between what you’re doing and what’s come before?
AW: It’s in my blood. This is the music I grew up and people who inspire me. Sometimes we get called retro; it doesn’t bother me, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I don’t think we’re cutting edge, but I also don’t think we’re retro. We’re just sort of true to what we do. In 2018, if you’re doing music that aspires to be soulful and reaches and touches people, in a way, that in and of itself is revolutionary, because our climate of entertainment is not doing that. So much of our entertainment does not aspire to reach each people in a soulful way. It’s a little bit more of a pop era we live in, and a genre-segregated era. So artists that stay in the lane of a pre-existing genre and just nailing that genre is enough. I don’t try to do that. I really try and reach people: you know our song, “Boozophilia,” the chorus, “Getting down here with the people.” I really try and get into other people’s experience in as full-bodied and soulful way as I can. And that is so unsexy for the industry in 2018. But that’s all I have. I’ve never been cool. I’ve never been hip. Or anytime I’ve tried, it’s really been a disaster, so I just keep my head down and do my work.
AW: I should have used a different phrase. No, our music and our show is very sex-positive. And it’s hard to pull off and specifically in rock n roll, it’s become harder to pull off. It’s not in fashion to be a man, a front-person in a band, and be extremely sexual. And you would think that wouldn’t be the case, but, as I said, there are two strains of rock at the moment: commercial, heavy, retreads of the macho poses of the past or cerebral indie rock that sort of takes sex out of the picture or makes it an intellectual consideration. But I try and put myself in the Prince, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, James Brown lane of openness, freedom. Freedom of considerations of gender, sexuality, and just freeing up the body and mind. It’s received really well by some and rubs other people the wrong way, and I’m aware of that. But it’s just what happens, it’s what our band is about, it’s what I do on stage, and I just have to commit to it one hundred percent and just be aware that there will always be that segment that doesn’t like that.
RLR: Langhorne Slim did this thing on twitter where he would tweet out a song, and just say “best song ever.” And I loved it for its unapologetic joy about music and so that’s the last question: what’s the best song ever?
AW: That’s hard. I try and avoid that word “best” when I talk about art. All I can tell you is I went for a long drive yesterday, from Spokane to Portland, about six or seven hours. I listened to Madonna, The Immaculate Collection. I listened to Bob Marley, Exodus. I listened Bob Dylan, Biograph. Those are three bests. It was a great drive.
For those of us in the northeast, you’ll be glad to know that if the forty minutes at Newport just isn’t enough, Low Cut Connie will be back in the fall. They’ve just announced a host of new tour dates, including the Middle East (Cambridge, MA) on October 17 and Higher Ground (Burlington, VT) on October 19. And, actually, they’ll be in the area before Newport, playing two free shows in Burlington, VT on 7/26 as part of the Battery Park Concert Series and in Westport, CT on 7/27 as part of the Levitt Pavilion Summer Series. For real, my people: go see this band and dance.
Photo Credit: Marcus Junius Laws