 "Photo: Courtesy of Kemado Records")
This is a story of a rock 'n' roll band and the way it birthed its baby. It begins in a dark, sweat-stained apartment in Williamsburg where one summer ago, the members of Vietnam penned their self-titled debut LP. Buckle up, y'all. It's a good one.
"It was the month before we left to record in LA that the power got shut off," Josh Grubb recalls. Grubb, the lead guitarist for Vietnam, is on the phone just outside of Pittsburgh. He is battling the flu, hacking and counting down the days until the band's tour in support of its debut leads him back home to New York. It was several months earlier in a Williamsburg rental that the bearded five-piece wrote the album, with only candlelight to illuminate their guitars.
"I guess everyone that had been living there for the year or two before didn't get a bill," Grubb said. "There isn't an actual mailbox, and ConEd couldn't get a bill in, and they just never cut the power off. As soon as we move in a few weeks later, they ripped the box out and shut the power off. It was something like a $4,000 power bill. We left the door open, and every night there would be a million people coming over. It was kind of a novelty to everyone else; it was a lot of fun to hang out there. We would have 80 candles lit in the house. It was a good vibe to be writing to, because you didn't have any of the distractions electricity leads you to. You were sort of forced to play guitar."
The band bottled those long, hazy summer nights, taking the muscle and bone of it all to a Los Angeles studio last autumn. The end product is a bluesy document of grimy rock 'n' roll bliss, as gnarled in parts as the long beards covering the members' faces, though never losing the residual sweetness that makes the release so special.
It's late February, the van still rumbling along somewhere outside of "Shittsburgh, Pa." Grubb becomes animated on the telephone, describing a roadside gentleman's club housed and propped up by the walls and wheels of a blue mobile home. "Streakers. It has an really amazing sign." What a perfect place for them to play.
When not confined to the cramped interior of the Vietnam tour van, Grubb splits his time between Brooklyn and rural Pennsylvania, in a spot four hours west of New York. "It's nice to be out in the country. You realize that the air is a lot fresher."
But it wasn't always rural Pennsylvania. A few winters before, Grubbs locked himself in his Philadelphia apartment, intent on developing the chops to complement fellow Texas transplant and vocalist-guitarist, Michael Gerner.
"I wanted to play lead guitar, so I took one lesson from this really weird guy," he said. "I went over to his house, and he was teaching these two frat boys how to play that Steve Miller song 'The Joker.' Well, they left and he showed me how to play the guitar solo from some AC/DC song and the pentatonic scale. I practiced for probably like six or seven months straight. Not much else to do in the middle of winter. You drink coffee and play guitar."
He resurfaced with battle-ready hands dexterous enough to trade hooks with the likes of Gerner, the twosome now in need of a bassist and drummer to round out the band's lineup; enter Ivan Berko and Michael Foss.
"We couldn't get anything together in Philly. It was pretty dead. We were playing shows in New York all the time, so we figured we'd move up there," he said. "It just seemed like the logical step."
Playing shows in Brooklyn under the name High Society, the two caught the eye of Vice Records, releasing an EP that was spit on just as vociferously as the label's sister magazine sometimes is. After shopping the record around, New York-based label Kemado stepped in to release the band's debut. "It's been sort of a longtime thing. At least now we have a voice," Grubb said. "Vice is such a huge moniker to attach to something. When we put that EP out, we weren't trying to show everyone everything that we have. It was just a taste."
Although there was backlash, response to the band's latest album has been favorable. "I think the record stands on its own," Grubb said. "Because we've been learning together to play this kind of music, we just worked it out so that we both play guitar a certain way that comes together at once, you know? It was always our intention to be very honest about everything. I think maybe people are into that, ready for some honest music."
The same blend of road-worn conviviality and boundless enthusiasm that spurred Grubb to learn and write the way he did is exactly what galvanized the band those summer nights in Brooklyn. In the soup for air that they shared with friends and neighbors, the band was able to inject all sorts of soul into the songs they scribed.
But that doesn't mean Vietnam will look to capture the same atmosphere to write its sophomore album. Quite the contrary.
"I think we're moving somewhere south to write. It's a little town, you might have heard of it - Nashville," Grubb said. "As soon as we finish up with this tour, a few us will head down there and start breaking the town in. You know, causing lots of trouble, making lots of friends, making lots of enemies. Doing what we do."
Believe it.
Vietnam will play at Mercury Lounge tomorrow
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