American Band (main article)

Executive Choices (sidebar article)

Two songs into the Presidents of the United States of America's set at Los Angeles' Legoin Hall, singer and "bassitarist" Chris Ballew gets hit smack in the face with a plastic cup filled with ice. But Ballew appears unfazed. Instantly and effortlessly, he improvises new lyrics to the song so coldly interrupted by the projectile:
"Oh, when you're out there in the audience,
With a big old cup o' ice..."
Far from dissing the dickhead who pelted him, Ballew's impromptu lyrics express what sounds like genuine sympathy for the sweaty dweeb out there in the hot mosh pit, suddenly deprived of his soothing cup of ice. In an instant, two of Ballew's key personality traits are made apparent:
1) He loves to improvise, and he's good at it.
2) He apparently lives his life without malice, anger, rage, resentment, frustration, angst, depression and all the other charming emotions so closely associated with rock bands from the Presidents' home city of Seattle.
With his smooth-shaven head and floppy shorts, Ballew looks like an oversized baby up on the stage. He's the quintessential man-child, singing songs about kitty cats and boll weevils. The lyrics to "Lump," the Presidents' big breakthrough hit, is the sort of thing a hyperactive three-year-old might babble while pogoing in his or her crib. On the other hand, the band's equally monstrous follow-up hit, "Peaches," betrays a far more mature sensibility-a six-year-old's, at least.
The Presidents are unapologetically dorky. They hold out the hope that misfits can be perfectly happy, that suicidal depression isn't necessarily the fate of everyone who doesn't turn out like Barbie or Ken. Perhaps the Presidents' benign stability could be ascribed to the fact that Ballew and co-President Dave Dederer grew up in a fairly affluent part of Seattle rather than the broken-home, trailer-park squalor that produced Kurt Cobain. But maybe their cheerfulness is more hereditary than environmental. Maybe they'd be incessantly up no matter what. It certainly seems that way.
The key to the Presidents' power is their total and genuine indifference to what the outside world thinks of them. They don't care if they get cups of ice thrown at them by fans or critics. Or if people laugh because Chris's guitar only has two strings on it and Dave's only three. The latter situation belies the fact that the Presidents of the United States of America are, in fact, really musicians. With percussion powerhouse Jason Finn on drums, they're a tight, rhythmically savvy unit. And when they break into three-part harmony a cover of the Buggles' 1980 New Wave hit "Video Killed the Radio Star," the old Legion Hall lifts off from its foundation and levitates on waves of bliss.

GUITAR WORLD: Where do songs come from
JASON FINN: Writers!
GW:And where do writers come from?
FINN: Moms!
CHRIS BALLEW: My mom gave birth to me, and now I give birth to a song every once in a while. No, they really come from all over the place. They're always trickling out. I keep a little tape recorder with me and babble into it all the time. A few months later, I'll listen back to see if any of it is any good. Then I stick the good bits together and make songs out of them. Sometimes, one verse comes from 1985 and one chorus comes from 1996 and they go together to make a song. "Body" was a song that came together from two totally different times. When I've got a song I bring it to Dave and Jason, and together we turn it into a Presidents song. We're good at arranging as a band; I'm not so good at that on my own. Editing is the hardest part - being able to say, "This is total shit; get rid of it."
DAVE DEDERER: I'm real good at that.
GW: So where does the three-strir thing come from?
DEDERER: Bulgaria!
FINN: Africa!
BALLEW: Well, Africa by way of Mark Sandman of the band Morphine. It started out as two strings, actually. He plays two-string bass with a slide. When I was living in Boston, we had a band together and he gave me a two-string guitar. It felt fantastic. We played live together and made up songs in front of an audience - improvised stuff - and it was great.
DEDERER: You know what it really is? It's an electric dulcimer. It's tuned like a dulcimer - or the bottom half of a dropped-D tuning. I actually never thought of this until now. 'Cause I picked it Chris, and he picked it up from Mark Sandman. But my mom had a dulcimer, and that was the first instrument I ever played. I used to play it for hours. And that was a three-stringed instrument.
GW: You tune in fifths?
BALLEW: Root, fifth, root.
DEDERER: Punk rock!
BALLEW: C sharp-G sharp-C sharp. A fifth is the greatest chord, 'cause it's ambiguous. It could be major or miner I love fifths.
DEDERER: Then you can color it with thirds or sevenths, major or minor; and you can totally change the character of a song with just one note.
GW: Why C sharp, though?
DEDERER: We just tune as low as we can go on a regular scale guitar neck and still maintain intonation and decent string tension.
BALLEW: Any lower than that and a fifth loses definition.
DEDERER: We didn't own tuners for years. But when we finally got them, we found out we were tuned to C sharp.
GW: Was the original intent just to get a different kind of guitar sound?
BALLEW: There was no intent, actually. It was just a feeling. When Mark gave me that two-string guitar it was like, "Yeah! I am free!" You don't have a technical barrier. You don't have to waste your time worrying about the fact that you can'tplay. I've given a few two-string guitars to people and they immediately start writing songs.
GW: You're down to ideas instantly.
DEDERER: Exactly. If a song is good played on an instrument with two strings, it probably really is a good song. Also, there's no body of two-string guitar work live up to. You don't have to worry about being as good as Tal Farlow or Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jimi Hendrix. You're just you.
BALLEW: Actually, I had already started taking strings off guitars before I met Mark. I had a four-string acoustic that I put through a bass amp with distorted effects and stuff. But it wasn't really the sound I wanted. I've always wanted to play like I was playing a guitar but have it sound like a bass. And the two-string guitar just filled the role. Mark sent me that very guitar in the mail, actually-the one that he first handed me.
GW: What is it?
BALLEW: Just this no-name, weird thing. He calls it "the squashed star." It looks like a star, but it got squashed.
DEDERER: It's made out of plastic, isn't it? It looks like a National or a Supro, but it's not.
GW: Which one of you plays three strings and which plays two?
DEDERER: I play the three-string.
GW: Are your roles anything like conventional lead and rhythm, or bass and guitar?
BALLEW: He's more like guitar. I'm more like bass.
DEDERER: We both used to use distortion pedals and stuff and do the dynamics together. But I'm more in charge of dynamics these days. Chris just plays straight into the amp now. And I have some effects that change tone and volume and take things up and down as far as the harmonic content goes-the intensity.
BALLEW: We found that when I went into distortion we lost the bass.
GW: You get a really great fuzz sound in your cover of [the MC5's 1969 song] Kick Out the Jams."
DEDERER: That's one of the Sovtek Big Muffs. Great pedal. I only use it about once a show when we're playing live. That's all anyone could take.
GW: Did covering that song start as a joke?
BALLEW: We used to do it with the correct words in another band we were in. But we could never figure out this one line...
FINN: Spaghetti.
BALLEW: Yeah. Something about his shirt being covered with spaghetti. We don't mean any disrespect by changing the words. It's just kind of our modus operandi to take what's really basic and enjoyble about rock-the simplicity and add our own surreal lyrical bent to it.
GW: On "Back Porch," the guitar that omes in...
DEDERER: That is not a three-string guitar. The chords and the lick - that was my chance to be from Nashville for 10 seconds. That's a real guitar. It was actually tuned down a step and a half, though. It was a Supro - not mine. I didn't own any equipment at the time. The only thing that I used on that whole album, that I owned, was my Tube Screamer and my cord. I didn't own any of the guitars that I used. We weren't the professional rock band that we are now.
BALLEW: We weren't even sure that we were a band.
GW: How long after you had formed was the album recorded?
BALLEW: We formed in December of 93 and it was recorded in the fall of '94
DEDERER: So it was about 10 months later. We only had been playing together as a threesome, with Jason, for a total of five or six months.
GW: How did Dave and Chris meet?
BALLEW: We met in junior high.
DEDERER: We went to junior high a high school together. But we didn't start playing music together until we were both pretty much done college.
DEDERER: I met Jason about 12 years ago at a rock concert at a urinal. We didn't shake hands.
BALLEW: They didn't have a sword fight.
GW: So, Jason, did you leaye Love Battery to join this band?
FINN: Yes, which was a difficult thing to do. I played in both bands for a while. I could have gone on doing that even longer, but I wanted to get out and give Love Battery time before their record came out to find another drummer. We're all still friends. In fact, we brought Love Battery on the road with us for some shows.
GW: How did you get Kim Thayil [of Soundgarden] to play on the song "Naked and Famous" on your album?
BALLEW: We've known him for a long time. I don't remember how I was introduced to him.
FINN: At a show.
DEDERER: He started coming to see us a year and a half ago - a lot.
BALLEW: We were going to put guitar like he played on that song anyway. We thought it would be fun to have Kim Thayil on our little, dinky record. And he was totally willing to do it. He had the little cassette tape we'd made to sell at our shows and he really liked it. So he was willing and able, and we plied him with alcohol. We recorded in this studio where you can't record after 10 o'clock, 'cause it was in somebody's basement. And he was completely incredulous that he had to do it before 10 o'clock, which is his lunchtime. He's a night owl...
GW: But that song definitely called for that kind of "riff guitar."
FINN: Music store guitar.
BALLEW: Like "No Stairway To Heaven"!
DEDERER: We wanted it to sound like Saturday afternoon in a music store.
BALLEW: Kim was happy to oblige.
GW: Is that your "hate L.A." song?
BALLEW: Yeah, actually it's about L.A. But not hate, just amazement. It's not vinditive at all - just jaw-dropping astonishment at the scene here. I came to L.A. 1987, after driving across the country with a drummer, living in a hatchback Toyota and playing on the street in all these different cities. And then I came to L.A., which I'd never been to before. The billboards were just insane, you know - naked people reaching out of the boards to grab at you.
"Naked and famous" was the term we came up with to describe L.A. Everybody there wants to be naked and famous. Then we got to New York and wrote the song.
DEDERER: In New York, everybody wants to be well-clothed, rich and famous. How much style can you have when you're naked?
GW: In L.A., you sculpt your chest muscles and save money on shirts.
BALLEW: Give it to a gym instead.
GW: So you guys were courted by Madonna?
DEDERER: Well, not as lovers, but actually by Maverick, her record label. We almost signed with them. It was very close.
BALLEW: She's a great person. She was very cool - understood our schtick.
FINN: She definitely understands everything about her label. She's not just some figurehead who comes in, signs checks and leaves.
BALLEW: In the end we felt that Columbia would be a little better for us. But we're still good friends with the people at Maverick.
GW: How are you regarded by the other Seattle bands?
BALLEW: Kim Thayil says there are two different factions. One thinks that we're an annoying joke, while the other thinks we're a good band...sort of. I don't care about that, really. We're so unique to ourselves. What we do is personal and our own. And we really only have to be true to that. What anyone else thinks is sort of irrelevant.
DEDERER: Well... as long as people come to the shows and buy the records.
GW: Are you the antithesis of grunge?
BALLEW: That's right. We're the Grunge Police! No grunge allowed.
GW: Are there factions in the Seattle scene?
BALLEW: I don't know. I'm out of that. Jason's the big scenester in this band.
DEDERER: Jason is the scene. Ask him.
FINN: There are always factions. It's a fairly friendly scene, but there's always an element of; "I've been around as long as you, how come I didn't get this success?"
DEDERER: But you have to remember that half the Seattle bands are millionaires. And all the rich guys are really nice, really supportive. It's amazing when you stop to think about it: in Seattle, there's Pearl Jam, Nirvana and now the Foo Fighters. Candlebox sold a million records. There's Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Queensryche, Heart... .You take those eight bands and you're talking at least 100 million records. Probably more. It's pretty mind-boggling.
GW: Do you feel burdened by all that, though? The world's perception of "Seattle bands"?
BALLEW: Oh, no way. We're a little band, we make our music, and we can do that no matter what. Everything else is outside - like the Grammys and MTV, the record label and the press and attitudes about us. All of that could disappear tomorrow and we'd still be a band, still make songs. It might even be a blessing to go back to making our little records and playing once or twice a month in Seattle. So it's not a cause for concern.
GW: How would you characterize your audience?
DEDERER: You know, it's strange. Before our record came out, we played a total of two all-ages shows in the year we were together. And it never seemed like the kids got that much into it. Our club audience was late twenties and older, 'cause a lot of what we do is tongue-in-cheek. It was almost more like cabaret when we were playing in the smaller clubs. There was a lot of joking and interplay. But now, our audience is kids, kids, kids, kids. And some grown-ups. A whole spectrum, you know. You see kids with their parents, a nice cross-section of people.
GW: You seem to be the kind of band that appeals to more of a college audience.
DEDERER: Yeah. But I don't know if we do appeal to that audience. They're in there, I suppose. I can tell you who we don't appeal to. We don't appeal to the "cool" audience, which fortunately is very small-although the press and that sector of the critic-reading public would have you think otherwise. But I don't think people who are into music because its cool see much in us. We're not very cool.
FINN: [offended] I'm cool!
DEDERER: But as a band, we're not like Oasis or Soundgarden or some band that has some really cool identity, in the classic rock and roll sense. I don't know if people relate to us in that way. Maybe we'll create a new kind of cool. It's hip to be square. That's what Huey Lewis said.
GW: Who are your songwriting influences?
BALLEW: The Beatles. Totally. I grew up with the Beatles.
FINN: I was influenced by the Rutles, actually. [sings] "Hold my hand, yeah, yeah."
BALLEW: From the time I was two until I was about 14 or 15, I didn't even know there was another band in the world besides the Beatles. I'd save up my allowance every month and go get another record for $4.97 at Budget Tapes and Records. I got them all and cycled around in them for about 10 years.
GW: Come on, no other stuff?
BALLEW: Nothing. Until I got into Nazareth and Blue Oyster Cult. I went right from the Beatles to schlock rock.
GW: There are a number of songs on your album about a guy with something in his head that he's having trouble getting rid of.
BALLEW: Like "Lump" and...
GW: "Body."
BALLEW: Yeah. "I can't get your body out of my mind..." Hey! I never thought of that!
DEDERER: In Jason's old band, Love Battery, every other song was about the world exploding.
GW: Is that a deliberate John Lennon quote at the end of "Feather Pluckin"'? ALL: [with righteous indignation] No! Noooo.
BALLEW: I came up with that myself. John who?
DEDERER: Actually, if you ever get a hold of the original version of the album-the one that came out on Pop Llama Records-there's a much more blatant version. [The song quotes the Beatles' track, "I've Got a Feeling" -Ed.] There's eight or 16 bars that we cut out when we released it on Columbia. We still do that part live.
BALLEW: Originally, that song was just an excuse to play with a phase shifter. Then it became kind of a Beatles thing as it progressed. Actually, we were playing around with that in our practice space, and somebody started singing "I've Got a Feeling" over it.
DEDERER: It was me.
BALLEW: It's just two chords: I, IV Eighty percent of the songs in the world are made up of those chords. What are you gonna do? I mean 50% of our songs are made up of those two chords.
FINN: Yeah, but when you start singing "everybody had a good time..."
GW: It's "everybody Supernova" on the record.
DEDERER: Well, the part we do live is "All the froggies had a good time. All the chickies got their toes wet. All the monkeys got a drum set-to share! Oh yeah!"
BALLEW: Then the "everybody Supernova" is in context. Supernova is a great band from Costa Mesa that we're close friends with. So we like to sing about them.
FINN: We used to have them in all the songs. But then we weeded them out indiscriminately.
GW: So which one of you actually was the first to say, "Let's name the band The Presidents of the United States of America"?
BALLEW: Me. I was playing at a hippie party in a little house up in Seattle. I'd borrowed a guitar player and a drummer from a fusion band. We were making up songs. And we were desperately trying to come up with a name for the band.
DEDERER: We had other names.
BALLEW: So I figured I'd just yell out a different name between each of these jams and maybe something would come out. And that was one of them. There it was. The hippies cracked up.
DEDERER: All 11 of them.
BALLEW: All high out of their minds.
DEDERER: They thought it was a brilliant idea, so we accepted their judgment. Chris called me the next morning. We had a good laugh and said, "Sure." In the week before that we had been The Dynamic Duo, Pure Frosting and the Lo Fi's. I still think Pure Frosting is a pretty damn good name.
GW: Part of the band's aesthetic is that you seem to find something endearing in whatever's awkward.
BALLEW: Yeah. Definitely. I always loved the Sex Pistols, and they looked really stupid. Well, I guess they looked kind of cool. They were scary and weird and you didn't want to touch them. It's funny, when we played a show at Mount Rushmore, this girl was quoted as saying about us, "I think they're cute. I'm not sure. They're weird." And then the subtitle on the page was "Weirdos perform." Great. I like being really weird.
DEDERER: We just try to be ourselves. I think the chief thing in making music is to be sincere. All the great singers-at least all the singers I've always liked-they're almost really bad. . . like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello. They have moments where you're going, "Is this really horrible?"
BALLEW: "Or really inspired?"
GW: Jim Morrison was like that too.
DEDERER: He never moved me much. People always tell me how cool he was. To me, he seemed like the guy who could take the most drugs. But it's the same thing, though he's slightly out of tune sometimes. Borderline bad. And then punk embraced that-Johnny Rotten. I remember buying that Sex Pistols record [Never Mind the Bollocks (Here's the Sex Pistols)] when it came out in '77 on domestic release. I took it to school and people were just freaking out. We were listening to Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Ted Nugent, stuff like that-with real singing. People heard the Sex Pistols and they were like, "He can't sing." But you go back and listen to it now and it's positively melodic compared to what came after it. At the time, though, it sounded completely crazed.
You gotta be on that edge. That's rock and roll-being almost bad. All your great rock and roll bands have that in some way. Buddy Holly. Elvis Presley was a really weird guy. Led Zeppelin. Completely weird vibe they had. Van Halen-that disgusting excess they had when they broke. Really fascinating. You have to embrace some of that strangeness. Professionalism and rock and roll don't always go together. In fact, in most cases they don't.
FINN: That's why we always yell from the stage, "We are a professional rock and roll band!" when we fuck up.
DEDERER: Which is about every other song. If a band can't have a train wreck on stage then it's not really happening. Disaster should be able to strike at any moment.
BALLEW: We're not afraid of "flailure."
DEDERER: Nirvana was a great example of that-just a train wreck from front to back.
GW: What's the worst gig you've ever played?
FINN: We once played at this place in suburban Tacoma, Washington, right by Lakewood Air Force base. It was supposed to be this big deal show, sponsored by a radio station. We show up and there were like 50 jar-heads there. That was the whole audience. There were barricades along the side of the stage, and we had half a dozen beers up there-for the show. And right as we were turning our amps on, this drunk Indian guy goes, "Fuck you!!!" and swipes all the beers off the barricade. It was a good show, though.
DEDERER: It was pretty funny. There were all these total die-hard heavy metal guys sitting around.
BALLEW: And we played stuff like "Boll Weevil" and "Puffy Little Shoes" and their girlfriends got into it!
FINN: One or two of them got up and started dancing around. Then they'd sit down and go, "Naahhh..."
DEDERER: [to Chris] That was the night we got the "definite Primus influence" kid. When we were starting out, everybody was always telling us they thought we were heavily influenced by Primus.
None of us are Primus fans. They do what they do exceptionally well. But, collectively, we don't own a single track by Primus. And this guy's like, "Oh, definite Primus influence, maannn."
GW: Surely that's not the only time you've been burdened with the Primus comparison.
DEDERER: No. But they seem to have ceased in the last few months.
GW: You're both quirky bands and you both play funny guitars.
BALLEW: [heatedly] And that's where the similarity ends. Les Claypool has more strings on his bass than we have in our whole band.
GW: He could probably play all your arrangements by himself.
BALLEW: That's true!
DEDERER: We could just stand on the stage and sing, and he could do all the work.

EXECUTIVE CHOICES: The gear of the PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY ALAN DI PERNA "Single-coil pickups are the secret to our sound," states The Presidents of the United States of America's "guitbassist," Dave Dederer. "We started out with cheapy guitars with single-coil pickups," adds Presidents "bassitarist" Chris Ballew, "and they helped us achieve our sound. So we stick with single-coils for that reason" Dederer's current main guitar is a new, sparkle-blue, Mexican-made Fender Standard Strat. Ballew plays a 1967 Gibson Melody Maker. "It' one of those weird Melody Makers with an DG body. I love this guitar because it looks like it comes from hell. Guitars should look like they come from hell. I also have a sunsurst Melody Maker, but it doesn't look as cool." The other key to the Presidents' sound is that Chris's guitar has but two strings, a .060 and a .036 tuned down to C sharp and G sharp, respectively. Dave has three strings on his Strat: .065, .045, and .035, tuned to C sharp, G sharp, and C sharp. With just five strings between the two of them, these boys produce a remarkably beefy sound. "We're not out for a wide range of tones," says Chris. "We're after the middle. Tht's why our band sounds great on TV." "And that's why the single-coil pickups are so important," adds Dave. "When you're tuned a step-and-a-half down from an E, as we are, it sounds like mush if you have humbuckers. Single-coils are so much more articulate. Our sound is all about space. I really can't stand humbuckers anymore. The Les Paul and the Stratocaster are completely different instruments as far as I'm concerned. They have about as much in commom as a viola and an oboe." There are no notches in the nut between Chris's two strings, which fosters his idiosyncratic technique. "It gives more space for string bends and things like that," he explains. Dave has experimented with custom nut spacings in the past, but now goes with standard spacing and no "skipped" notches between his strings. "Chris's guitar and mine are really different instruments," he notes, "mostly because of the string spacing. The way you play it is different" "You have to be way more careful on Dave's guitar sometimes," Chris chimes in, "Or tune the strings tighter. Mine are kind of floppy 'cause I like that rubbery quality. I had a Mosrite bass for a while, and it had the coolest rubbery feel to it." In Denver, a theif recently walked off two of the Presidents most treasured guitars, including the 30-dollar Harmony that Dave origianlly played in the band. If anybody finds a Harmony guitar with a picture of Jimi Hendrix taped below the first fret and three strings on it, that's mine." Chris adds: "And if they ind a Beatle bass that's green and answers to the name of 'Turtle,' that's mine. [wincing] Ooh, I don't want to think about that." While he admits to having used a Dunlop Jimi Hendrix distortion pedal on occasion, Chris usually plugs straight into a Music Man 65 head driving an old Kustom "puffy upholstery" cabinet that was originally black but which Chris spray-painted gold. The Music Man has a solid-state front end and tube power section, though Ballew also expresses a Fondness for all-solid-state amps: "I love the solid-state sound; it's so crackly and electric. And it translates into a microphone really well." As the Presidents' main sonic colorist, Dave employs an ever-changing and evergrowing array of effects pedals: "It's funny, when I played normal six-string guitar in bands, I didn't like to use a lot of effects. But this band is a totally different thing. It's about making the songs happen. I'm not a guitar slinger with my Strat and my Twin. This isn't a 'players' thing. It's a completely different mentality. It's all about textures. Now I have a fuzz box, channel switching, another fuzz box, a phaser. . . I have at least 20 different distortion sounds. There's no way you can have too many different distortion sounds. When Dave's signal leaves his pedals, it goes into a Mesa/Boogie head (he recently switched from a Dual Rectifier to a Blue Angel) and into a Fender Custom Shop 4 x12 cabinet loaded with 30-watt Celestions. "Here's a little hint for your readers," says Dave. "Slant cabinets are a joke. They all sound like shit. Buy a straight front cabinet. Somebody was telling me the other day that the Mesa and Marshall reps come into the music stores and laugh at the people who buy slant cabinets. Everybody knows that they absolutely sound like dog poo. So buy a straight front cabinet - unless you want to sound like Dave Navarro." The ever-cheerful Chris seems perturbed at this last remark: "There you go, slamming Dave Navarro," he reprimands his band-mate. "I'm not slamming him," Dave counters. "He's great. He just has a very sharp sound." Any parting advice, guys? "I'd just like to encourage kids to take strings off their guitars," Chris offers. "Make up your own thing. Don't be sheep." "Music has nothing to do with what kind of guitar you buy or what kind of amp you play through," Dave adds. "Absolutely nothing at all."