DRESDEN DOLLS INTERVIEW

By Ron Sawyer

Thursday November 18th 2004 Los Angeles

Amanda Palmer (vocals/piano/toy piano)
Brian Viglione (drums/percussion)

BLOODY MARY: Right. I think the original cabaret had more of that element anyway but people kind of forget that nowadays.

AMANDA: Yeah, cabaret has come to mean something really abominable nowadays.

BRIAN: Punk too in a lot of cases.

AMANDA: It's interesting to watch how the names of genres really start to come to mean something else.

BRIAN: But overall, we're performance rock. You know, whether that's the guys from the '60s or the '80s or glam or whatever you wanna -

AMANDA: Well, I don't call it that, personally, just because I don't think that the performance part is really essential to the music. And usually, when I hear someone say 'performance rock' I think of something that sort of depends on like the trappings and the performance to get the point across. And I think that if we had no costumes, no make-up, no show that the music would still stand by itself and independently make the same strong statement. And the rest of it is great and it's fun and it definitely enhances the show but it but it's not the core of what we do and why we do it.

BRIAN: No, it's not the core but we still do the other stuff. But that doesn't diminish the strength. I didn't mean that as a knock.

AMANDA: No no, I don't take it as a knock but I try not to define the band that way.

BRIAN: No, I just meant that if you really stand back far and eliminate all the punk this and indie that and whatever and all the labels and sort of sub-genres that's essentially what we do. We don't the sort of heavy, cerebral performance art but it's a step up from you standard kind of rock club experience.

BLOODY MARY: Yeah, your sound is very powerful and the lyrics and music is so unusual. I mean, the way you combine different influences and elements.

BRIAN: I think it's an amazing feat in itself just to have found a way to visually in a live setting express the music. Because I remember when I first heard it, when I first heard Amanda play, I thought to myself, "God, this is some of the most bizarre music I've ever heard in my life," you know, because it wasn't so out there that you could call it experimental.

AMANDA: No, they're still just rock songs but they're a little twisted.

BRIAN: The tone of the music and the place from where it springs is a very immediate and very strange sort of realm and that's immediately what caught me, you know, songs like "Half Jack", "Sex Changes" and "Bad Habit". It very much catches you off guard with how with how snappy and catchy it is but the sentiments being expressed are -

AMANDA: There's always the barb.

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly, that draws you back in. It doesn't let you just get away with having a sort of passive experience. It really hopefully challenges you to think.

BLOODY MARY: I think you've succeeded very well on that level. Who are your influences, not just in your music but also what drives your artistic force?

AMANDA: Well, I have so many that it's almost even hard to talk about it because when you look at even just the album itself there are so many genres and so many styles sort of represented. Its' everything from '60s girl group music to The Legendary Pink Dots who were a huge favorite of mine, still are, to '80s new wave, to musical theater and Kurt Weill and Weimar cabaret kind of music. And the thread that ties everything together is that I'm really a sucker for a catchy tune and so really any kind of music that has substance and is also melodic and emotionally profound is what's spoken to me and that's often genre defying. It can be musical theater and it can also be Nick Cave and it can be The Beatles and even though musically those things sound very different there's a thread that runs through them that connects them all together and I think Brian and I also have that in common. We're both really turned on by passionate performers and emotionally honest music.

BRIAN: We share that. The main difference comes in our own sort of natural tendencies and our roles within the band. Amanda is very much turned on by songwriters and song craft and I've always been more sort of, I guess mentally turned on and kind of emotionally turned on by music that really searches, especially in the role of supportive drummers. You know, for myself, listening to a lot of jazz and obviously a lot of very emotive and passionate music. I was a huge Nick Cave, Birthday Party and Black Flag and a lot of bands like that and musicians who really can express their own identity. That's why I really love Neil Young & Crazy Horse too. Those guys aren't like player's players but the way that they emote as one is really incredible. And I've always been turned on by groups like John Coltrane Quartet. So that's where I apply a lot of my knowledge within the band as how can I best musically support Amanda's songwriting and orchestrate the music so that it has the kind of punch and drive that she doesn't have on just the piano. Again, The Doors too, was like a very close relationship with that where the drums were constantly embellishing and punctuating the lyrics and the point of the song.

AMANDA: One very interesting thing is that Brian and I have had favorite bands and favorite songs even but the way we listen to that music is from such a completely different perspective. Even though we're both turned on by The Doors, I would barely be paying - to me, the music is just the backdrop for the lyrics and, you know, Jim Morrison's performance. Whereas I think Brian, you know, I would ask him, "Have you ever really listened to the lyrics of that song?" and he'd be like, "Actually, I haven't." I'd be like, "What!?"

BRIAN: I'd be like, "No, but don't you notice the interplay between -"

AMANDA: I'm like, "No! Fuck that!" But it's funny because the great artists stand out because they have -

BRIAN: But I'm not gonna also let you cut me short there. I wouldn't say that I have like this lack of appreciation for that. One of the reason's I think -

AMANDA: No, it's just not where you focus.

BRIAN: It's not where I focus but I have a definite appreciation for it. It's not that it's not in my scope of perception when I'm listening to music. It's very much there. And I listen to a lot of singer songwriters. But it's the elements of where I apply it for my own playing. I'm obviously not a songwriter and a sort of like melodic instrumentalist where I'm thinking of cord changes and that kind of thing. I'm thinking how can I best flesh out this music and express what I have to say as well too. That was one thing my father constantly pounded into my head, was sort of the jazz philosophy of really trying to find your own voice and use your instrument as a tool for expression and release and communication. And so this is the perfect context for that. There's such a direct relationship between the music and the words and how we and how we emote to the audience. You know, it's completely unhindered.

AMANDA: Yeah, we really compliment each other so perfectly, it's hard to believe. I didn't really even need a band. I needed this. I needed someone who could support and rhythmically drive the music and Brian needed someone who would provide him the forum to do just that: the freedom and the space to be able to express himself through his drumming and not just join a band where he's a timekeeper. So we both really get what what we want through the band, which is a miracle.

BLOODY MARY: It's obbviously the fact that you guys have - some of your favourite bands are shared. I mean, you both like The Doors a lot, although you like them for different reasons. I think that kind of shows how you kind of compliment each other in your own music.

AMANDA: Yeah, it's a perfect mirror for how things work onstage as well. We couldn't be the same person with the same tastes. Those differentials are really what feed us because it's a ying yang kind of thing. You know, Brian and I really fill in each other's gaps very well.

BLOODY MARY: It was very sad to see 2004's Lollapalooza, where you were scheduled to perform, cancelled just a few weeks before it's debut because of very poor ticket sales. There have been extremely successful festivals in the past such as Woodstock, US Festival and previous Lollapalooza's but now it's a virtual music ghost town. I previously spoke with you about this and you said that music festivals tend to be much more successful in Europe than in the US. Do you think that the future of music festivals in the US is doomed or is there anything that can turn this around.

AMANDA: No, I just think the market was oversaturated and it's just like any other economic model. It's gonna have to, you know, if you condense the music that everyone really wants to see and put it on the road and it's not competing with six other festivals people will go and if you keep the ticket prices down. But if you inflate the ticket prices, sort of dilute the quality of the music and put a million festivals on the road they're gonna crash. And what we saw this summer was that they all crashed because the market getting sort of just getting overburdened with too much stuff.

BLOODY MARY: Were there a lot of festivals?

BRIAN: We did our own headlining tour and got to reach fans on a much more immediate and intimate level and that was great for us and for a lot of the first time people. We got to fill up the seats the right way. I think trying to do a third stage with like 20,000 people trying to go, "What the hell is going on?" It's sort of difficult but when you have 300 people jammed into a club and really feeding off the energy -

AMANDA: They really get the experience.

BLOODY MARY: That's actually one of the questions. You're performances seem to do really well with a small intimate audience, like cabaret style. You've played with some larger bands like B-52s and Jane's Addiction, didn't you play with them?

AMANDA: Yeah. At the Tweeter Center. I mean, we played a show for 600 people last night and it was just fine. So I think it's a question of really, you know, the band is gonna grow as the size of the venue grows and I'm sure there's gonna be a point at which we'll flush out the stage show and start using feeds and do what we need to do and I'm sure there'll be a point at which it's just ridiculous.

BLOODY MARY: What did you say, start using feeds?

AMANDA: Like video feeds, live feeds and working with artists to make the show bigger and better and we'll get to a point, I'm sure, where we say, "This is too big. The point's not getting across so let's cap it," and stop. But we haven't gotten to that point but I think those will be good problems to have if we get there.

BLOODY MARY: In your biography you mentioned something about having a dream of touring around the US with a big European style Spiegel tent with a bunch of different types of performers. Do you think that might be the future of festivals, something that's on a more intimate level?

AMANDA: It's the future of our festival.

BRIAN: What a beautiful dream. Absolutely. Well, it gives one total control over the atmosphere and environment over the venue and the kind of atmosphere you want to provide for the place. And for us, we've met a lot of great bands that we are hopeful, you know, for hooking up with in the future and being able to coordinate some sort of festival like that.

AMANDA: Yeah. I mean, the unfortunately reality of that is that it needs to be cost effective which something like that probably isn't. But, you know, we could hopefully create something at such a scale where it would be and maybe that would work. And I think for a band like this, that's the way to go. It might not be the right route for every band.

BRIAN: Plus, going into a venue that's not called 'The Gillette this' or 'Pepsi that' -

AMANDA: Yeah, it does allow us - it's not the major factor but it's certainly a nice perk that we don't need to deal with beer channel.?? If you're going to different cities and running your own show and setting up your own venue every where you go then you don't need to dance with the devil. And that's definitely somewhere on our agenda.

BLOODY MARY: It seems possible. Like Cirque du Soleil, which has now become a huge thing, I remember when it started out, it was a similar thing - a tent with a bunch of performers and it took off immediately because it was so different than anything out there. And even now, there are other circuses and performances like that but it seems like something that is really untapped still, especially with musicians.

AMANDA: Well, bands have done it. Radiohead did a whole tour like that, where they just rented a giant tent. You know, said screw all the Gillette Stadium and the Dunkin' Donut Pavilions and they managed to do it and that was on a huge scale so it's possible.

BRIAN: Keep the dream alive.

AMANDA: Punk cabaret.

BLOODY MARY: What is the music scene like in Boston? Are you guys really well known there or are you kind of like considered obscure freaks?

AMANDA: Oh, those are two different questions. We're very well known in Boston but the scene is a little weird.

BRIAN: The scene, I feel, is very active and very healthy and constantly fluctuating. There's a number of different styles of groups and types of venues that one can go to. There's this sort of land's down big rock clubs, you have your Cambridge kind of dive bars and great places where you can just go see a nice loud rock show if that's what's gonna get you off that night. There's a lot of really great little art spaces that put on fantastic jazz and experimental music and stuff so it's just a matter of weeding through it to find the good, and that kind of thing. There's definitely some nice diversity in Boston.

AMANDA: And there's just starting to be, you know, we certainly weren't completely unique, coming out of Boston. There's some cabaret acts and there's a band called Beat Circus that does a 9-piece sort of Vaudeville circus kind of music.

BRIAN: Kind of jazz orchestrations. It's like Raymond Scott old style.

AMANDA: There are bands that are starting to come out of Boston and I think the wake of The Dresden Dolls is actually helping that out a little bit. And certainly the burlesque scene has been pretty big in Boston as well, just as it has in LA and New York. So you know, those girls will perform in clubs and on tracks of bands like us and they'll go down to New York for the burlesque festivals so we've kept those people in the loop and tried to involve burlesque performers wherever we go. I'm very excited about that, watching that whole scene kind of come alive.

BLOODY MARY: Yeah, it LA it's become huge.

BRIAN: LA, San Francisco's been wonderful, Seattle's great. It's nice, there's a great little core group of people in a lot of the places that we go to. And down South too. A lot of people say, "What about the South and the Midwest? You guys must be way over their heads." And it's not the case at all.

AMANDA: We're actually embraced even more. Like the straighter the town the better audience we get usually.

BRIAN: Like Missouri has been one of the strongest states so far that supports us.

AMANDA: Salt Lake City too.

BRIAN: Yeah, Salt Lake City. But yeah, it's nice going to places like that where you don't typically expect that sort of response and get an overwhelming reception from these people. It's wonderful.

BLOODY MARY: You have a lot more history on the East Coast, whereas LA, I mean, there's a lot of really cool things going on but there's no real history. It seems like everything started around the '20s. There's nothing much older than that.

AMANDA: Yeah, that is one nice thing that I love about Boston and New York is that it doesn't feel that new and me being a complete nostalgia freak and a history buff, it's really nice to walk into a building that's built 200 years ago and look at all the old architecture. It's also why we love Europe so much. Talk about old. It puts Boston to shame.

BRIAN: Now Egypt, baby, that's where we're headed. They've got the whole old thing down. That shit is old.

BLOODY MARY: Amanda, the art direction in the "Girl Anachronism" video combined with your very versatile face seem to allude a bit to the images created by photographer/artist Cindy Sherman. Are you or the video director Michael Pope by chance a fan of her work?

AMANDA: I know her stuff but it didn't even pop into my mind, doing that. I used to do a lot of photography too and stuff and theatre and you know, being the egocentric person that I am I did tons and tons of dead self-portraits and all that kind of stuff. So the idea of doing that, I mean, it was also sort of a no-brainer for the song. I mean it's a very schizophrenic song so the idea of having me as the actress playing every character referenced in the song made a lot of sense.

BRIAN: Very Eddie Murphy of you.

AMANDA: Well, and not to mention we didn't have to hire any other actors. We were doing that on less than a shoestring budget.

BLOODY MARY: I think with the resources you had you made a very cool video.

AMANDA: We can't take any credit for that. It is 100 percent Michael Pope.

BRIAN: Shock puppet theatre, baby, I'm telling you.

AMANDA: Our next video will be all shock puppets.

BLOODY MARY: Soft puppets, really?

AMANDA: Shock puppets. It's gonna be the video for "Slide". And we'll make a little paper mache slide and we'll put one sock puppet on top, a red one and one sock puppet at the bottom, a yellow one and the whole video will just be the sock going down the slide. Do you like it?

BRIAN: Yeah.

BLOODY MARY: Meanwhile, you guys will be in a lounge somewhere having a drink.

BRIAN: Right, exactly.

AMANDA: Right. No, we'll get sock doubles. We'll get other people to do it.

BRIAN: Can we get the stunt sock?

AMANDA: We digress.

BLOODY MARY: My French wife jokingly wanted me to asked if two are related to Marcel Marceau and Amanda, I just discovered that you actually trained under him a few years ago.

AMANDA: "Trained under him" is a wild exaggeration. I did one one workshop with him. And we just saw him several weeks ago. We saw his show and I met him again. Of course he didn't remember me or recognize me after the show. Brian didn't get a chance to meet him.

BRIAN: No, I flat out didn't want to. I'll be honest. I didn't like his show. Well, I was sort of split. I reallyl loved the second act, the stuff that he did with his students. But I was just like what is so engaging for 45 minutes of like an old man puttering around -

AMANDA: And I, of course, was like close to tears the entire time and thought it was wonderful.

BRIAN: I thought it was terrible but I really loved what he was doing with his students. That really grabbed me. I thought it was beautiful. I guess it was just more modern. But maybe I'm just jaded or whatever like that. I didn't find it engaging at all and I don't ever wanna be like reckoned to being a mime. Clown, fine but mime, no fucking way. Please, keep that term away from us. Seriously, because it goes far beyond just the sort of pantomime kind of thing and I have a very visceral reaction, as you can see.

AMANDA: We go to a support group once a week.

BRIAN: I'm still recovering.

RON: It's good that we're getting this on tape because I actually have a friend who I've mentioned you guys to and she's like, "I don't like mimes." I told her you're not mimes.

BRIAN: Nobody likes mimes. They're not funny.

BLOODY MARY: Where have your most memorable shows been, both good and bad?

AMANDA: Last night was pretty memorable.

BRIAN: Last night was pretty memorable probably because it was last night.

AMANDA: I think some of our best shows have been in Boston. But that's also probably because the greatest number of shows have been in Boston. Our show in Berlin was unbelievable.

BRIAN: Paris was really fun. That was great.

AMANDA: And there's also the memorably bad shows like the first show we ever played in Providence, Rhode Island, where we played to a giant 400-capacity club to 'the other band' and they hated us.

BRIAN: That was great. They did this weird kind of like Eddie Vedder rip-off, kind of event. Your early shows I think are always some of your most memorable -

AMANDA: That Food Not Bombs show we did in New Jersey about a year ago.

BRIAN: Oh yeah. See, people may point the finger and say, "You're so punk rock and what are you doing playing at all these fancy places?" but we still have our basement shows. Absolutely.

AMANDA: We played in this kid's basement.

BRIAN: His parent's basement.

AMANDA: It was in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was a Food Not Bombs benefit and it was all these crust punks. You literally had to go around the back of the house, down a bulkhead, down these dirt steps into this dirt floor basement where there was a PA set up next to the boiler. A bunch of Food Not Bombs people giving out pamphlets and bagels. It was awesome. There were like 60 people there.

BRIAN: That was at the end of the tour that we did with Edward Ka-Spel from The Legendary Pink Dots. So were were doing like huge rooms in Chicago and then the basement show. So it's nice. It keeps you adaptable.

AMANDA: Yeah, and it was an incredible show and people were psyched. The most memorable thing about that show is there was a woman who is a huge fan of ours came to the show, not knowing at all what to expect, thinking it was probably some club and here she winds up in some basement and she had brought her 7 year old daughter who is a huge fan of The Dresden Dolls. We let her daughter come up and play Brian's drums during "Missed Me".

BRIAN: That was great. She sat on this little bucket next to me and I said, "OK, when I say 'now' hit the drum," and she was like, "OK." And I said, "Now!" and she wailed on the high hat. It was great. And that's one of the most exciting things right now is seeing all the little kids.

AMANDA: There was a 3 year old girl at the show last night named Sunday who was dressed up like me. Her mother had her there in the stroller in this opera house.