After releasing its debut album Fire in 2003 and giving us this decade's best dance-punk-New Wave mash-up—Danger! High Voltage\—years before those kinds of songs became trendy, Electric Six is back with the stellar album Señor Smoke. Before Electric Six jump into the studio to begin working on its third album due this September, the band plays The Annex tonight and promise to give your hips a better workout than a Richard Simmons exercise tape. Fire in the disco, indeed.
The Daily Cardinal: The song ""Jimmy Carter"" off your latest album has flat-out hilarious lyrics. How did you come up with that song?
Dick Valentine: Basically I just wanted to write a song called Jimmy Carter. That's [how] I approach songs, I just think of a title first and then write the song. I wanted to write a song called ""Dance Commander,"" and I wanted to write a song called ""Dance Epidemic,"" and so forth. ""Jimmy Carter"" is kind of old, written in 2000. It was a situation where we had the original line-up for Fire, and the guys didn't want to do a song of that tempo and speed. Once they left the band I had the green light for that song.
DC: So you come up with a phrase that you like, then start writing?
DV: I've got little notes of words written down, sometimes I can write a song in five minutes, sometimes it will take five years to finish. The songs are done before I present them to anybody. I got, like, 50 little sketches of songs running around in my head, some are almost 12 years old—I have no idea where they're going. The one exception is ""Vengeance and Fashion"" I just held my breath for a minute and blurted out the first thing that came to me.
DC: A lot of your songs have dance in the title. What's with that?
DV: Actually we did a post on our website. We have a third record coming out in the fall, this will be the first time none of the songs use the word dance. It might be because we all just turned 34. So, yeah. You start caring about dancing less.
DC: How do you approach music? Do you just write what's in your head or do you write songs to make people dance, to make people happy?
DV: Well, yeah, I want our band to be fun. That's pretty much always been the goal and anything can work within that. ""Jimmy Carter"" is a fun song even though it's really slow. We just want to be a fun band—we want to be entertaining. Everywhere we go, like The Annex, it just might be like a hundred people, but those hundred people really like the band. It keeps us going—there's a market out there for us, albeit a small one. Maybe the next time we come back to The Annex it'll be 125 people, and that's a victory right there.
DC: You cover a Queen song on your new record. Aside from them, what would you say are your other musical influences?
DV: I'm not sure Queen is a musical influence for us, the way that song ended up on the record ... The first time we went over to the UK and kind of exploded over there we happened to be doing ""Radio Ga Ga"" and everyone at our record label seized on that, saying ‘that could be a massive hit.' They wouldn't let us stop playing that. The lesson I learned from that is we'll never record another cover song again. It's not worth it. You don't get the publishing money, and like I said, I've got a backlog of 200 songs and if you do an album you can only put 13 or 14 on it, and that's one less of your songs that goes on your record.
DC: So it was a label thing?
DV: It was 200 percent a label thing. We love the video though. We thought, if they're going to force us to do this song we don't want to do—and even make it a single—we should make the video completely absurd. It's nuts.
DC: You have an eclectic, weird combination of music in your group. How did you all come together as a band?
DV: We started in a completely different line-up in 1996. I was working in an office, sort of an editor-slash-writer for an ad agency, and it's not the most exciting place. I just started a band to have an outlet on weekends. I was probably the only one in that original line-up who never thought we'd get a record deal. I never thought anyone would want to sign our band, we got people coming and giving us demo deals, coming to see the band, and it just seemed like over and over there were no takers, I just never thought it would go anywhere. Then the whole White Stripes thing exploded and we were lucky enough to have Jack on one of our songs. I think if it wasn't for that I probably wouldn't be talking to you right now.
DC: He played on ""Danger! High Voltage."" What are that song's roots?
DV: Surge Joebot and Disco [former band members]. They've played in bands together for a long time. For years in rehearsal they would break into that. The music was always there and I just decided one day I was going to write lyrics to it. I just came up with ""Fire in the disco / fire in the Taco Bell,"" and just went from there. We were working on a bunch of recordings in 2000—this was before our first record deal—they thought the way I was singing the line ""Taco Bell"" sounded like Jack White, and they were like, let's just call Jack and see if he'll do it. He was at home watching ""The Philadelphia Experiment"" and he just came over in a half hour and knocked it out. Two years later they blew up, and that was enough for us.
DC: Did you know him before you recorded the song?
DV: Yeah, yeah, all the bands that played in Detroit in the late '90s, we all knew each other. Detroit is a music town, and whether you are actually in a band or just like to go out, it's the sort of a place where the scene is a bit more supportive and a bit more vital than any other place in America. Because there's nothing else to do there.
DC: Your band has a very Detroit sound, with the hard rock edge, Stooges thing. How has living in Detroit affected your music?
DV: It hasn't affected my aesthetic. My aesthetic is not born out of the MC5 or Stooges, I'm more of a Devo and Talking Heads [guy], those are the bands I listen to, but the other guys in the band brought that harder element to it. That's why our band was a little bit unique, because we were a bit more spastic, a bit more New Wave-y, less of a garage band. One thing I love about Detroit is there are very, very few hippie jam bands there.
DC: What do you think about new wave, dance revival bands like The Killers or The Bravery?
DV: We don't think about them much. I've heard a few Killers songs obviously, they're not bad. I don't get excited about music so much anymore. You read NME: This band will change your life, and then you hear the band and your life is not changed. At all. I think they're all good bands, everybody has something for everybody, but it's not rocket science.
—Interview conducted by Joe Lynch\
