Concrete Blonde

Wed 8th Sep, 2010 in Features

In Joshua Tree, in the California desert about 200kms outside of LA, where Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde lives and works alone aside from her two dogs for company, there are a lot of rattlesnakes, including the Mohave which is the world’s most venomous. Sometimes the snakes come into her house, and so she has to kill them.

“But I don’t want to! I have to, though. The nearest hospital is far away, y’know! I live on my own out here.” So sometimes she hits them in the head with a shovel, but other times it’s just whatever is most handy. Like a mic stand from her home studio.

“The most recent one, the other day, I made some tea and I came back and there was one just sitting on the chair where I’d just been sitting! So I took the mic stand and took him out. I’m not proud of it though. But I have to do it. It’s me or them.” I ask how many she’s killed this year in her house. After a moment she says, “Well, four.”

LA is a long way away for a reason now. After spending the formative and then the big years with the band there, moving to the dessert “Saved my life.” She leaves Joshua Tree for one week in every month which she spends in New Orleans, working with flamencos and rehearsing for the first ever flamenco performance there in Preservation Hall before bring the Bloodletting Tour to Australia next month.

“My dad and I had a trip down there together some years ago—it was very Hunter S Thompson and we both very much burned the candle at both ends and had this really great trip. And I lost my dad a year ago, and I got hammered at New Year last year, and I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to go to fucking New Orleans for a week out of every month,’ and that was just my promise to my dad, who always wanted me to have a better time, and not work so hard.

“It is different now [after Hurricane Katrina]. But I mean the people, the creativity and the magic, it just doesn’t let up no matter what’s going on. People are starting their own schools—it’s not a victim thing going on at all. It’s people getting back together. So this show is a huge deal to me, and historically it’s a huge deal. New Orleans people are a very special breed of Americans. They have more creativity and perseverance than BP has oil.”

When I ask her what her best memory of playing in Australia is, she laughs, “I think the hall mark of a good tour to Australia is when you can’t remember it at all!” Touring is a much simpler proposition for the band these days. It’s all in small stretches, where things are civilized and “not crazy.”

“We want to do it for a very short period of time. We don’t want to be in the van, in the one hotel room for seven months. We did that. We want to do it now where we don’t hate each other; we don’t hate the bus, we don’t hate the hotel, we don’t have the set list, we don’t hate the band.

“I mean, we did that. Man, that would a be a way to end the world—make everyone join a band and put them in a van on the road for seven months. I mean, any relationship! Whether you’re married, or whatever. It’s not going to come out well on the other end. We’re too mellow for that now! We’re stoners, what can I say? HA!”

These days her favorite downtime tour activities include sleeping, (“I love that”) and writing. “Originally, since I was like 12 years old I wanted to be a writer, a real writer. Louise May Alcott was a huge influence on me and American girls in general, for some reason making people want to live in garrets, freezing cold, in itchy wool with shallows and oil lamps, writing. She had a huge influence on me when I was a kid.”

Recently she has turned her journals into a book. “I love looking back on some of that stuff. Some of those ideas get developed and some of them don’t, and you can look back and see why they didn’t. Or you can see who they did. It’s kind of fascinating to look back on the evolution of things. And I’m a big note taker and journal keeper. The journals the book is based on go way back, back before the band. To the early days of Hollywood when I was working and trying to get a band together. Writing the early songs and taking the bus to work and the really early days when it was really raw.”

To write the set lists for the Bloodletting Tour, the band have been doing what every band in the world should do: Johnette looks up YouTube to see which songs the fans are making into Concrete Blonde playlists and plans it from there.

“So these are some of the most awesome set lists we’ve ever played.
You got to give people what they want, you know? I’m just so humbled and happy that people love our band, and want to come see us. We’re not into being like, super obscure with the set list, really.”

Concrete Blonde have a history in Australia that Napolitano is keen to revisit. She scored the theme song for Neil Armfield’s film adaptation of Luke Davies’ Candy, and Joey, their breakthrough hit single in 1990 broke the band big internationally.

“I mean, Australia was huge for us. We had a gold record there with the Mushroom people, they really broke us. And I mean, it was a different game then, MTV was huge, and after that MTV really broke us.

“It’s not like it is now,” she says of the music industry. “I mean, if I wanted I could just put out a single on the internet, and that’d be it. Not have to start up a whole crazy machinery around getting an album together. And I’ve always been a huge singles fan, by the way. So it’s different. It’s less crazy in that way.”

I ask if Joey was a real guy. “Well yeah, it was about Marc (Moreland of Wall of Voodoo). And he’s passed away now, some years ago. And it was about him. We met in Australia, by the way. And he knew that. He asked me once, ‘So, is Joey about me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Do I own you any money?’” She laughs and long, deep laugh she uses often to accentuate her point.

“I’ll tell you another story about Joey: Andy (Prieboy), the guy who wrote Tomorrow Wendy, we were driving to a show and I was asleep in the back seat of the car. And he was going a little fast and got pulled over by this cop. And the cop asks ‘Why are you speeding?’ and Andy’s like, ‘Well, I play in a band and we’re opening for Concrete Blonde and I need to get there in a hurry, so.’ And the cop shines the flashlight in the back of the car and into my face and he says ‘Is that the lady who sings Joey? Oh man, I love that song!’ And Andy says, ‘Yes! That’s the lady who sings Joey!’ He still got a speeding ticket though!”