The Sadies – Tales from the cryptic
Dean also found himself indoctrinated from an early age. The son of South African immigrants, he first learned to love music at Baptist church services, which, thanks to his parents, were part of every Sunday when he was a kid. “That’s where I got into country and roots music,” he says, “because the hymns they do are based in North American folk; it’s just been bastardized. It was later on that I got to love punk rock and new wave, which is how I ended up helping start Phleg Camp.”
Belitsky had his life changed by the Ramones (“I think my parents would say that was the end of their ‘good kid,'”), which led to him getting behind the drum kit in high school, playing Undertones, Subhumans, and Sex Pistols covers with a band made up of neighborhood kids. “We called ourselves FUs — it was supposed to be like Fuck the U.S. — but then there was an American punk band called the FUs that was actually making records, so we had to change our name to Registered Vote,” he relates.
A Stray Cats obsession followed, after which Belitsky became fixated on Led Zeppelin, all the while never losing undying respect for Johnny Cash. Determined to make a career out of playing music, he relocated to New York from Halifax in the late-’80s. Lowlights included auditioning (and not making the cut) for Boss Hog, which, ironically, featured Jon Spencer and his wife Cristina Martinez. Belitsky eventually hooked up with Halifax grunge-pop hopefuls Jale, and later did time in the Pernice Brothers.
Still, when he speaks of his past today, what he might remember most fondly is how the Big Apple got him obsessed with old-school hip-hop. “That whole early-’80s New York era is something that I romanticize and that I’m just so nostalgic for,” says Belitsky, who’s 41. “I love the old stuff — Schoolly D and Grandmaster Flash, the Beastie Boys. If you had a desert island top five, you’d totally need something from that era.”
Punk would also be a life-changing touchstone for Travis Good. He and Dallas grew up in the small town of Aurora, Ontario, during an era when wearing a Ramones T-shirt was pretty much an invitation to fight.
“All I wanted to be was not like everyone else at my school — that’s all I cared about,” Travis says with a laugh. “This was a time when it was literally like Mack jackets, Kodiaks, and Black Sabbath T-shirts in the smoking section. For the longest time my nickname was Husker Du because I had Husker Du written across the back of my jean-jacket. That’s what everyone called me. I’d walk down the hallway and people would be like ‘Hey Husker Du-faggot!!'”
For a long time, the only bands that mattered to Travis fell under the umbrella of fast and loud. “Then one day, when I was about 21 and playing in my dad’s band, a little bolt just hit me that nobody plays as fast as those old bluegrass bands. I discovered Doc Watson, and that was the whole turning point for me. I got my dad’s Doc Watson records, and even though I’d probably heard them a million times before and didn’t give a shit, suddenly I was like, ‘Man this guy’s fast, fast, fast.'”
As for Dallas, who cops to listening to almost nothing but ’60s psychedelia nowadays, don’t underestimate the importance of the likes of the 13th Floor Elevators. At the same time, it would wrong to assume they’re the sole reason the Sadies sound the way they do on New Seasons. Instead, all four members of the band credit Jayhawks/Golden Smog veteran Gary Louris with helping elevate their game to a level they’d never quite reached in the past.
“We agreed to approach this record differently than anything they had ever attempted,” Louris says. “No songs were really written prior to studio time….I believe that the typical approach for the band was to get the songs together and then rehearse them until everyone felt comfortable, and then roll tape. This record was more about discovering and rolling tape right at the point of discovery.
“Everyone who has ever seen the Sadies knows they can play the shit out of their instruments. The goal here was for them to write the best songs they had ever written and sing them better than they had ever sung before.”
Determined to keep things relaxed, the Sadies and Louris decamped to a studio in rural Spain. “It was kind of like what you would expect,” Travis says. “There was an olive garden, a little terrace, and a little bunker that was the studio. It was really cool; we never left. We would just sit around and write and record.
“And we wanted to use Gary as much as possible, from the ground up. We had ideas, but we thought if we hammered it all out beforehand and practiced everything over and over again, then he might have just ended up sitting there behind the controls.”
Dallas confirms Louris very much colored the final product, whether it be small things like lobbying for harmonies, or bigger ones such as pushing the Sadies to play to their proven strengths.Pressed for concrete examples, Dallas happily bucks up: “How about the first song on the record [‘Introduction’]. Gary said, ‘Travis is a really good flatpicking guitarist, and we don’t have anything like that on the record.’ So we wrote that on the spot. Even though we’d felt we didn’t need a song like that — it sounds like everything the Sadies have ever recorded — he said, ‘Trust me.’ So we did.”
Predictably, when you attempt to pry further specifics out of Dallas about the songs on New Seasons, he once again shuts down. If you’re looking for clarification on the blackheart-country crasher “The First Inquisition (Part 4)”, which tells of men dying for God, holy men and generals watching the blood of their children being spilled, and hellfire raining from the sky, you’ve come to the wrong place.
But he’s crystal clear about the album being a totally collaborative endeavor, and he makes sure to credit all those involved, whether it be Travis singing the Belitsky-penned “The Land Between” or Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb guesting on piano on the “The Last Inquisition (Part 5)”. It’s when he’s grilled one last time on what the songs are about, rather than how they were created, that things don’t take long to get more cryptic than the late-career films of David Lynch.
“Everything that I’ve ever written about, whether it’s instrumental or not, happy or sad, is always — always — about the fragility of life,” Dallas offers. “That’s the only reoccurring theme. Sometimes I find that topic hilarious, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes it applies to relationships, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that keeps me interested.”
Slippery? Hell yeah, but at least he’s honest about it.
“I’m just trying to make for good copy,” Dallas says with a huge laugh. “But it’s very hard to put things into nutshells. I know that you must struggle with that too.”
He couldn’t be more correct, and, in the case of the Sadies, more than he’ll ever know.
Mike Usinger lives and writes in Vancouver, British Columbia.