Cobirds Unite! Rusty Willoughby Interviewed

The path of Rusty Willoughby’s musical career has run parallel to the history of Northwest rock for the last 25 years. And often, that path’s been a circuitous one.

In the mid-1980s he founded Pure Joy, a great (and criminally unsung) pop band whose British-informed atmospherics offered a sharp contrast to the Sabbath/Stooges/Sex Pistols trinity that seeped into the Seattle soil at the time. Then when Pure Joy folded, he bounced back as the principal singer/songwriter for Flop, one of the Northwest’s greatest power-pop outfits.

Flop seemed poised to join Nirvana and Soundgarden at the vanguard of the Northwest music explosion of the ’90s when Epic Records signed the band. The label allowed Flop’s excellent sophomore platter Whenever You’re Ready to die on the promotional vine, though, and Willoughby and bandmates were unceremoniously dropped.

Such a setback would have flat-out killed most mortals dead, but at his own easygoing pace Rusty Willoughby has continued to put out some of the Northwest’s best rock music since Flop’s 1995 dissolution. Throughout all of his ensemble and solo work, Willoughby’s calling cards—a knack for melody easily the equal of any pop classicist, a smart and sometimes self-lacerating lyrical sense, and one of the most distinctive schoolboy tenor rock voices this side of Robin Zander—have remained constant, and his versatility as a songwriter continues to flower.

This normally low-key guy’s been surprisingly high-profile lately. Indie label Spark and Shine Records put out his most recent CD, Cobirds Unite, on August 20, and many of the stellar musicians who backed him on the disc (Visqueen‘s Rachel Flotard, former Screaming Tree Barrett Martin, guitar wizard Johnny Sangster, and cellist-to-the-Northwest-rock-stars Barb Hunter, among many others) have joined him onstage in several well-received live gigs. Upcoming, he and Flotard join an all-star cast for the Hootenany for a Healthy Gulf fundraising show at the Moore Theatre on September 2.

Cobirds sees him augmenting his songwriting with roots touches, completely on his own terms. The pedal steel guitar, cello, violin, and vibraphone sprinkled throughout lend a cinematic cast to the proceedings–as though Lee Hazlewood wrestled George Martin from the Beatles’ production chair. And the intertwining of Wiloughby’s boyish croon with Flotard’s duskily angelic siren song of a voice casts an intoxicating spell.

This Saturday, however, the former Flop frontman gets loud(-ish) with his most recent rock venture, Llama, at Darrell’s Tavern in Shoreline ($5, 9:30 p.m.). He’s got solid instrumental support from bassist Scott Sutherland and ex-Pure Joy drummer Jim Hunnicutt, as well as a slew of great songs that sound like a slightly less-hyper variation on Flop (in other words, really damned good). The SunBreak talked with Willoughby about his past and present music projects, as well as Pixies singer Black Francis’ decidedly non-asshole tendencies.

How did Cobirds Unite come together?

It was total luck. It was around Christmas time, 2008…Rachel and I had been talking over [the course of] a year or two about doing something together, ever since she started playing with Neko [Case] and stuff. And then it just kind of didn’t happen for awhile. I had all these songs and decided to send them to her, and I told her if she had time she could listen to them, and the timing worked out. She was getting back from the tour and was in town for awhile.

Then Barrett Martin, who we all knew from back in the Screaming Trees days, had gone down to New Mexico for awhile to paint and do music down there. He came back, literally, that month as well, and was kind of aching to do something. Rachel got back into town and wanted to start learning the songs, so it was just luck, really. Johnny [Sangster] had produced the last Llama record. He plays with Llama sometimes, and I’ve known him a long time. I always used to go see his bands when I was younger, but once he moved back from Denmark, I started getting to know him better. So it was just sort of natural to have him record it.

The production on the new record is really lush and atmospheric. How much of that sound was Johnny, and how much was you?

I would say it’s everybody. A lot of it is Barrett, too…he played drums and bass on the record, and then he was like, “Hey! I’ve got an idea for vibes here,” and he’d put down some really super-cool part. And then Barbara–who’s played cello for Mark Lanegan and the Gutter Twins, people like that–had been recording with Visqueen, just because Rachel and her had become friends over the last couple of years. And so that was sort of a natural as well, since Rachel and her had already been playing together as well. I was kind of hinting at wanting a cello player and within two days, we had one [laughs]! I wish I could say it was all hard work, but we really just got lucky.

You and Rachel harmonize together really well. Was that a fresh discovery with the sessions, or was that something that you’d figured out previous to that?

I really don’t know. It’s funny, because Kim Warnick said one time that Rachel and I had similar voices. This was years ago, when they were both playing in Visqueen. And I was like, “Huh?” Then Rachel–before we started practicing–told me this funny story, where she was listening to my demos up in her sister’s attic and her sister and her mom were laughing at her downstairs because they thought she was listening to a tape of herself [laughs]. And I’m like, “I don’t get this…” First of all, I’m a dude, but then after we started singing together, it was like, we kind of do have the same kind of phrasing. And I find that I start gravitating toward the sound of her singing, and she’ll do the same…it’s just really natural, and whenever things feel natural like that, it’s usually because it’s right, or something’s working; and you just have to refine it.

Several of the songs on Cobirds appeared on your last solo CD, Filament Dust. Was it always your intent for those songs to be more fleshed-out instrumentally, or was that something that arose from playing with this group of musicians?

It was really the intention. I’d started listening to a lot of be-bop jazz, and a lot of vocal jazz from the fifties; stuff with a lot of strings and really lush arrangements. I’ve always been a huge Scott Walker fan, so that stuff kind of started rubbing off on me, too….

One of the interesting things about your songs is how well they translate in multiple treatments. That really came through with “C’mon, C’mon,” which started out as a rock song on the Llama record, then showed up on Cobirds as a gentle waltz.

It’s interesting and fun to do that. I used to not do that consciously; just because, I don’t know, maybe I thought it was some kind of rip-off if I were ever to put the same song on more than one record. But I think you grow up, and you realize that–first of all, no one cares [laughs]–and second of all, it’s my stuff. I can do what I want with it.

Your lyrics are typically smarter than your average bear’s, but as far as I know, you’ve never included lyrics sheets with any of your releases. Is there a particular reason for that?

It’s probably laziness–I’d have to type all those words out [laughs]! We put out a vinyl version of the first Flop record, and [Frontier Records'] Lisa Fancher made me put a lyric sheet in there. I just hand-drew it. And I remember at that period, I kind of caved in; I said “Okay, it’s no big deal.”

I didn’t really think it was good or bad to put lyrics in a record. Sometimes, I really love it, and sometimes I don’t. But I just started kind of thinking more in terms of: I would rather have people figure it out, or try to figure it out, than just read it. It just seems like one more thing you’re doing to say, “Hey, look at me! Look at my stuff! Read my words! Listen to my words and read my words at the same time!” [Including] lyrics to me just seems more narcissistic than I need to be, even though I love reading them on other [people's] records.

You seem like a very low-key and low-profile guy, but you’ve been a lot more visible lately in the wake of the Cobirds release. Are comfortable with that?

I have pretty bad bouts of stage fright, or at least I have in the past. I don’t know if it’s from taking too much acid when I was in high school or what [laughs]. But I think you get nervous, you start thinking through things…there are times when I don’t play live for a year at a time. I don’t look forward to the shows. But I think for me the big difference with this group is that…it’s not a rock band, so there’s no pressure to be cool or anything; it’s just playing music. And everybody, especially Rachel, is so great…she’s such a cheerleader for everybody. I start believing in myself if I hang around her enough [laughs]!

There’s a really relaxed chemistry between you guys onstage.

She’s so great in terms of bringing that out in people. We’re kind of opposites in terms of personalities. She’s just very outgoing; gregarious, I guess. She’s just on top of everything, and I kind of live under a mushroom. It’s good. I recognize the downfalls of my own living sometimes, and if I can take advantage of someone who draws out the things that I enjoy doing. I totally appreciate that about Rachel.

It’s a real nice yin/yang going on there vocally, too.

It took us awhile to learn each other, because I think we’d both been fans of each other but we never hung out that much. We played a couple of shows last summer, really right after we recorded. It was mainly little shows at the Sunset–like a 4:00 show, that sort of thing. She used to laugh at the end of the shows and she’d be like, “You look scared of me!” I think I told her I was; “You’re just like…it’s like being onstage with Annie or something [laughs]!”

Right down to the freckles and red hair…

…and everything [laughs]! I think in the last year we’ve hung out much more and kind of figured each other out. That translates when we play together.

I saw you open for Black Francis at the Triple Door a week or two ago. What was he like?

When we first got there, we were all secretly thinking he was going to be an asshole….I just remember the period where the Pixies broke up, and him and Kim Deal were being assholes to each other; so I just expected that kind of person. And he was the nicest, most down-to-earth, regular guy.

When he came up after we played, he was like, “You were really great!” And he just kind of talked to us. And then Eric Drew Feldman was playing with him! That guy played on Trout Mask Replica–he played with Beefheart, with Pere Ubu…I had no idea he was gonna be there. And there I am, talking to Black Francis, and this other guy walks up next to us and says, “Yeah, you guys were really good,” and he looks real familiar. Then I realize it’s Eric Drew Feldman [laughs]! I was way impressed. It was funny to watch Black Francis snicker because he understood someone who knew who Eric Drew Feldman was, was in the room.

I’ve been fans of both of them forever…I felt a little awkward because I didn’t want to be the superfan, but then Eric Drew Feldman asked me what amp I was using. Then I started talking about Black Francis’ acoustic sound out of his electric guitar, and [Francis] was showing me the new pick-up that he got…we were geeks. Then he was talking about buying this amp from Guitar Center, and I told him he should buy from a local shop [laughs]. It was kind of like I was talking to my friends or something. It made it so easy, so inviting. It was great, and totally unexpected. It wasn’t like we talked all night, but every time we’d pass each other it was very friendly.

You’re playing at Darrell’s Tavern with Llama on Saturday. Have you played there before?

Yeah. The first time we played there, it was like this…there was a band from San Francisco that was playing with the Tripwires; I can’t remember their name. And they were supposed to do a Portland show or something that got canceled. So they were up here without a show. We were like, “There’s got to be a place to play,” It was a Friday or a Saturday. And a friend of a friend had just bought Darrell’s. He was trying to get music in there anyway, and I guess Jim Sangster and some other people got together and kind of asked if we could do the show there. It was the one place that was trying to do music and didn’t have anything booked. And so we just did it.

It turned out to be a super-blast. The staff there were all super-excited to have bands playing, and it’s kind of nice. There’s actually a parking lot…it’s like you’re playing out in the suburbs or something. It’s not that far, but obviously people don’t have much of a nightlife up there, so there were people just coming off of the street on Aurora; they heard it from their house or apartment three blocks away. So they came down to Darrell’s to hang out and have a beer.

Will the Llama set feature any new material?

We have a small handful of new songs, but we haven’t been able to practice them as much. It’s just been one of those things. Jim just had a baby, so he and his wife, all summer, have been pretty much out of commission. He can barely get out of the house. Scott is getting married in November, and he’s kind of available less and less these days, just because he’s been playing with Paul Lynde Fan Club. We go through phases where we’re fairly busy and productive, then we’ll go five years without doing anything [laughs].

I heard that you had a second Llama record finished.

We had a second one that we recorded with Johnny. It’s been done since 2007, but we just haven’t done anything with it. Then we have probably another full record that we could record, but we’d have to finish it and stuff. We have new stuff, we just haven’t been able to practice it.

When you reformed Pure Joy a few years ago, you added one or two Flop songs to your live shows. Will you play strictly Llama songs on Saturday, or will you be dipping into the Flop and Pure Joy catalogs? 

Probably just Llama. I don’t think there’s been any time where we’ve played any Flop stuff live. The later Pure Joy were pretty lame [laughs]! Maybe something good came out of it, but Lisa and Jim and I were talking about this. We were kind of out of commission for a long time from playing any music; and then we all sort of came back and started doing Pure Joy…I think it was just practice to learn how to play again. Then just when we got comfortable playing again, we split up again. Pure Joy’s like nursery school for us [laughs].

Your songs have sported some very dark lyrics. Cobirds sports its share too, but sounds like it’s been produced by someone who’s more at peace with himself than the guy who sang “I haven’t got no friends/Shit is a better companion” years ago. Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah. It’s probably getting older and having more perspective, and not seeing everything so black-and-white. I can’t believe how dogmatic I was in my teens and twenties about things like music and art, and ideas. [I'm] so much more open to different kinds of expressions now. It seems cliche and kind of trite, but if you think about it, it’s kind of one of the most amazing things, to mature as this animal to the point to where you have all these abilities to think about the world around you. It’s actually pretty incredible to get to be middle-aged.