The
Overcoat
This article originally appeared in NFH #22 in
the winter of 1992.
Halfway through a
long phone conversation with Tim Gassen, lead singer of what used to be the Marshmallow
Overcoat and now is just the Overcoat, I mentioned that I was used to reading good things
about the bands in European fanzines but not so good things here in the US.
"You know",
he answered, "you said that to me last time you saw me; when you said that both
Maximum Rock and Roll and Flipside had slagged us. On this record, both Flipside and
Maximum Rock and Roll say we're great. It's really funny. Maybe they don't know we're the
same band. Someone even did an interview with me that I think is going to get us a page in
MRR. So it's a complete reversal from being art-fag paisley wimpoids, so now we're gnarly
straight ahead rockers."
"That's 'cos you
dropped the Marshmallow, probably", I replied.
"Well, that has
helped. A lot of our fans were really mad about that and they said it was a sellout move.
But I figured if I could change one word, and not the music, and see how people would
react to that...I have to be a little pragmatic here. And a lot of people immediately did
take us more seriously, like we're a real rock band. Because we are a real rock band. And
I got tired of trying to explain to them to try something new and different. Yeah, the
name is goofy, because I'm trying to challenge what kind of name you can have for a rock
band. Well, we're in the complete opposite environment in this world right now to try
something like that. It's more than being idealistic to think that you're going to be able
to wake some people up and actually have them give you a chance. You have to at least give
yourself a fighting chance. Now suddenly when people call me about the band I don't have
to explain anything to them. I don't have to go through this 10 minute thing about the
name and what we really do and will you listen to the tape. After four years I didn't want
to have to explain it any more. Now people think it's a boring name."
As you might have
guessed from the original name, the Overcoat arose out of the mid 80s psych scene that
also spawned bands like the Miracle Workers, Cynics, or Chesterfield Kings. They've had
that 60s garage sound wired from the start, using keyboards tastefully and not forgetting
to keep the rocking side happening. Aside from a habit of writing consistently catchy
songs and covering other great ones when a cover is needed, the Overcoat are set apart by
Gassen's immediately identifiable vocal style, which generally competes with the bass
guitar for low notes. Comparing his voice in conversation to the singing is quite a
contrast, too, as he speaks about two octaves higher.
The Overcoat are
based in Tucson, Arizona, where Tim runs a video production company and works on numerous
other music related projects, including a small but very well put together fanzine called Psychedelicatessen,
and has recently finished a book called Echoes In Time: The Garage/Psych Music
Explosion 1980-1990. So he's got a lot of different things going on. Authorship isn't
your normal rock and roll pasttime, so I asked about that.
"I just got a
shipment of those suckers in the mail today", he said. "Up until then I only had
one copy of it to show everybody to make them believe that this thing actually existed.
It's about a 120 page book that covers 700 bands from a little bit before 1980 to a little
bit after 1990 all in what I would call subjectively in my own personal opinion either a
garage or psychedelic band. That's a pretty wide spectrum of people and it's totally
subjective as to what I like and what I didn't, and I threw a lot of bands in there that
no one else would think is a garage or psychedelic band but I would. But it has a lot of
photos and it took me around two and a half years to research and write. But because I'd
been working with record labels and doing a radio show and also had managed a night club
here in town with nothing but alternative underground music and through my work doing
music video, I really had contact with a lot of these people, either personally or through
the mail. Oh, yeah, and also doing my fanzine, Psychedelicatessen. So I had a lot
of material at my disposal, and then I sent out hundreds and hundreds of questionaires and
requests for materials from groups, a lot of whom actually sent me stuff. There's an essay
talking about underground music in the 80s, an encyclopedia section talking about my
favorite 200 bands or so, and then another section with another 500 bands that I think are
worth mentioning but I don't know too much about. There's a chapter on compilation albums
and cassettes and flexis, a chapter on music video and a chapter on fanzines."
A little luck was
involved in getting a deal with a publisher to put the book out; he knew the publisher
because they'd contacted him to get some information for some other rock and roll books
they were doing, and later they began a series on American rock and roll at the same time
as Tim was starting his book. An acquaintance who was writing another book in the series
for them told them about Tim's book, so the publisher contacted him. So he never even had
to look for a deal.
Tim's video
connections mark a significant difference between the Overcoat and other underground
bands. Few bands at the level of the Overcoat can afford to think about doing videos, but
Tim has the facilities to make them at his hands and he knows how to get them distributed.
And surprisingly enough, he says that getting a video played on MTV isn't really much of a
booster; there are much better opportunities on smaller regional networks, local cable
shows and independent stations.
"Like
Bombshelters Video in Seattle is a broadcast show", he says, "but it also
broadcasts to Vancouver all the way through Idaho and most of Washington State so even
though it's a local market it's a regional show. One play on that gets 4-5 million people
viewership per week. So I think shows like that are more important than MTV, but for
prestige as soon as we started telling people that we were on MTV they started considering
us to be a real band. And that's sick, but it's true. Much Music in Canada is ten times
better than MTV. It's a national cable network like MTV, but they'll play just about
anything, and they play us like crazy. People have sent me cassettes of Much Music, and
what they play just during the day is wild."
I told Tim my rather
unflattering opinion of music video in general, which is that given that most bands have a
hard enough time doing anything decent in their original medium, playing music, that
expecting them to have any useful ideas at all when it comes to video is more than a
little far fetched.
To some extent, he
agreed: "Most videos are just commercials to sell blue jeans. They have nothing to do
with either the band or music in general. They're just nice commercials. I have arguments
with people all over because I work in music video and make music video, but I'm very
picky about what I like to look at. Some of them are just pure work; you give them what
they want. The ones where I get to do what I want to do I like much better."
Back to the band,
which is the main issue here after all. The Overcoat have also been really active lately,
especially in the recording studio. There's the Overcoat lp reviewed elsewhere in these
pages, and then there is nearly a whole lp's worth of other cuts being slipped into
compilations all over the world. There's almost too many to mention them all; fanzine
comps from Ruta 66 and Freakbeat, freebie singles with Kinetic Vibes,
Ptolemeic Periscope and Unhinged, a take of "The Good's Gone" on a
Who covers lp coming out in Italy, a cut on Stanton Park's reciprocal box set tribute to
Dionysis Records...the list taxes the limits of Tim's memory to recall, and will overtax
the budget of anybody who tries to track them all down. Tim concedes that at some point
they'll probably compile them all onto one lp to solve that problem.
There's also been a
lineup change since I last saw them play in San Diego; the drummer has changed again.
"We now have a guy by the name of Harry Bolin", says Tim. "He's kind of a
cross between my brother, who was the drummer two drummers ago, who had a lot of jazz
influence in what he did, and Ernie, who was a very much straight ahead 4/4 rock drummer.
This guy does a little bit of both, which I think is kind of interesting. In our new stuff
since 3 Chords And A Cloud Of Dust, we've kind of gone back to an equal balance of
some more ornate textured stuff along with the straight ahead rock stuff. It's hard to do
that stuff in concert, in a bar setting, but we've recorded some of it, and that's what's
going out on all these compilations."
"What we've just
done is to have a gig here in town and we recorded it live to 8 track, and it's come out
really well. We felt like none of our records really captured what we can do. If you see
us on a good night we're a really good live band. But we thought our records never had
that kind of punch to them or spontaneity, so we recorded 30 songs in front of a really
wild crowd and luckily the tape caught us on a good night. Sometimes, you can play a gig
and you think you were great and you go home and listen to a tape and you cringe, because
the perception of how you played and what a microphone will hear are two different things.
But I think we were lucky. I haven't mixed this yet, but I think the microphones finally
caught a lot of what we can do. We figured if we could get 10 or 15 of these 30 songs to
come out halfway normal that would be pretty good. And I think we're going to be able to
use most of it."
"It was
basically two shows; we split it in the middle. It was two very long sets, and I thought
that by the time the second set came along we would just have run out of steam, but the
guys really pulled it off and did a great job. I'll start mixing it now and we'll see how
it's going to appear. Originally it was going to go to this Italian label but now other
people are interested, so I'm going to pass along the tapes to some other people and we'll
see what happens."
I asked if the
Overcoat played many gigs in their hometown of Tucson.
"Well, this past
year we've played more than we ever have", Tim responded. "Until this past year,
most people thought we were from Los Angeles, because we would play here three or four
times a year, but this past year we've played a lot so now I think people probably think
that we moved here from Los Angeles. The scene is kind of on the upswing here. It goes up
and down and up and down and just a few months can make a big difference. But right now
we're on an upswing. The Sidewinders are on a major label and there's more commercial
attention being paid to Tucson which is in some ways a blessing and in some ways not.
Because now the groups when they start a band take it so much more seriously and they're
so much more business minded and the music basically comes last. There was a group here
that just got signed who had never played a show and they're all synthesizers and it just
makes me want to puke and they had a big article in the paper and they say there's no need
to play music, blah, blah, blah, we got our merchandising deal. There was an article that
was done on us the next week and I said those people are my supreme version of hell. There
are more of those techno type bands around than I would care to talk about, and there's an
overabundance of REM-wimpy college bands, too. But as far as bands putting out records,
there are only a handful of us."
One of the things
that I've never been able to understand about the current music scene is that it seems to
me that, although popularity is not particularly relevant when it comes to measuring the
quality of music, popularity ought at least to increase as the accessibility of music
increases, which means that noisy bands like the Amphetamine Reptile and Touch and Go sort
of thing ought to be the most difficult draw and bands like the Overcoat ought to at least
be somewhere in between the Butthole Surfers and Michael Jackson. But instead what happens
is that noisy bands like Sonic Youth can actually sell tens of thousands of records while
more tuneful and poppy rock and roll bands can't sell a thing. Perhaps people split into
two camps; one group who don't think about music at all and they just listen to what's
played on the radio and are totally happy with that, and the other group that tries to
think about it and they succumb to peer pressure, trying to be sure that they're listening
to what's hip, so much that they can't believe that what's hip could actually be fun to
listen to.
"Yeah, I know
what you're saying" is Tim's response to this line of reasoning. "It would seem
that on an accessibility level that we would be somewhat more accessible than Sonic Youth.
I can't figure that out, I have no idea what's going on and I don't think that anyone
knows what's going on. I think somehow these bands get signed and I don't think they
really have a core of support; it's just the fact that they have the machinery to get that
record in X amount of stores all at the same time with ads and video, and I think it's
just muscle and money."
