THE PRESIDENTS OF THE USA - 25 Year Anniversary
Pictured: PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - Album Covers (1995-2008) + Jason Finn, Dave Dederer, Chris Ballew + Dick Clark
Photo courtesy of Chris Ballew
How a President Found His Voice
Written by: Tom Wilson | Sense Music Media
Twenty-five years after its first release, much has been written about the debut album of alt. rock power trio THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA; and its stark contrast to the music that surrounded it in 1995. Hailing from Seattle – ground zero for the grunge explosion – the band’s smiling faces and good-vibes tunes were portrayed in the music press as the perfect tonic for those who had perhaps grown weary of the long-hair-and-Doc-Martens brigade. After years of distorted guitars and introspective darkness from the likes of Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney and Soundgarden, suddenly here were three guys and a tiny drumkit playing under a tree, singing a song about peaches so contagious the CDC couldn’t have stopped it if they tried. And suddenly, THE PRESIDENTS were everywhere. They were (mostly) inoffensive enough for AM radio, but cool enough for Triple J – landing two tracks on that year’s Hottest 100. They played a show in front of Mount Rushmore. They met Bill Clinton. The album – with its artwork featuring three anthropomorphic bronze animals playing music – could be found at every house I went to.
I was ten years old. I had to have it.
Pictured: Dave Dederer, Chris Ballew + Jason Finn - Seattle Space Needle
Photo courtesy of Chris Ballew
While the band would go on to release a further five records in a two-phase career that finally called it quits in 2015, they never came close to the success of their debut, which would eventually shift millions of units and be certified triple-platinum. Rock music at its most stripped-back – singer Chris Ballew famously playing an electric guitar that used two bass strings, while drummer Jason Finn’s kit was small enough to fit in a car boot – what PUSA’s music lacked in sophistication, it made up for in quality. Peaches, Dune Buggy and Lump aren’t just amazing pieces of nineties nostalgia – they’re dangerously close to perfect rock songs. Even the deep cuts are great. Body sounds romantic until you realise he’s talking about frogs and lizards, while Back Porch and Feather Pluckin’ are foot-stomping hillbilly ho-downs. Their cover of MC5’s Kick Out the Jams has the velocity and impact of a warm and fuzzy rocket-propelled grenade. Self-depreciating punk singalong We Are Not Going to Make It laments that they’re not good enough to sell records, despite this album selling over three-million units (if Alanis Morrisette could have seen a few months into the future, she might have mentioned it in Ironic).
Now, 25 years on from its release, Ballew, Finn and original guitarist Dave Dederer have come back together to re-release it on vinyl through Kickstarter. I spoke to Ballew at his home in Seattle about his musical origins, fame, and the transition from President to children’s entertainer.
Pictured: Jason Finn, Chris Ballew, Bill Clinton, Staci Slater + Dave Dederer
Photo courtesy of Chris Ballew
The Interview
Pictured: Chris Ballew - PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Photo courtesy of Chris Ballew
Obviously, the reason we’re speaking is because that album is turning 25 … After all this time, looking back on it, what were some of the early indications that it was as successful as it ended up being?
I guess the first indication was the fact that when we were just a tiny little band playing clubs in Seattle, there was a big festival called Bumbershoot – it’s an old-fashioned name for an umbrella. During that festival … there were lots of industry people in the audience, which we were unaware of, thankfully, and the next day we had seven major label offers, basically. Seven major labels sniffing around. So we went from the night before playing what we thought was just another show, to the next day, “Gotta put your big boy pants on, it’s time to go!” That was a big day.
Once you had been courted by all these [labels] … what’s that like? Were they sucking up to you?
Oh yeah. Lots of fancy dinners, fancy restaurants. I had been through it a little bit before, because I was the utility musician in Beck’s band back in the early nineties, and he had just gotten signed. I was the only band member not from L.A., so he let me live with him, and I ended up tagging along to a bunch of industry dinners. So, I knew what it was like to be the scrappy little artist at the table full of suits. There was a lot of that. We had to find a lawyer, we had to find a manager, we had to find a label. We had to assemble this crew really fast, so there were lots of lunches in places that … if we weren’t with the fat cats, we’d get kicked out immediately.
So, from there, the touring just went flat-out?
That was the age of radio, physical albums and MTV being the three-pronged approach to success … We went on airplanes and went all across the country, criss-crossing, playing at radio stations, record distributors, record stores … We had amps and guitars that we could walk onto an airplane with, and put in the overhead bins. In one day during that trip we did three major cities, the idea being that if the band storms into your record distribution outlet and stands on a meeting table and plays a three-song set and runs away, you’re going to be like, “What was that? Who were those guys? That was awesome! Let’s work hard on their record.” … We made videos with Roman Coppola, [Godfather & Apocalypse Now director] Francis Ford Coppola’s son. Half the videos were pure genius, timeless. Half were so bad we never released them. [Laughs] It was a real crap-shoot with Roman. But that was super fun. And then radio, we had an ally here in Seattle, Marco Collins, at 107.7 The End, and then the station in L.A. fell in line after he started playing us. So we had all three – we had all three prongs – so we had to set that up. Then we kind of got really into “get in the bus and go.”
Pictured: Dave Dederer, Chris Ballew + Jason Finn
Photo courtesy of Chris Ballew
It’s so alien … if you spoke to a young musician now, two of those prongs simply no longer exist. MTV hasn’t played music videos in years … in fact, where’s the radio?
Well YouTube is radio, now. Fortunately, we are the program directors. I think that’s great. I think the democratisation of that whole way of getting into the “secret room”, metaphorically, where everything’s amazing and you’re famous … I think opening that up to more people is fantastic. I mean, I come from a real DIY background. You don’t wait around for permission from the powers that be to be creative and do your own thing. You just do it. That fits more with where things are at now than where things were when we got signed and all that, you know? The analogy I always used to use is, imagine the vastness of space, and imagine a ten-mile-by-ten-mile square sheet of sheet metal that’s six feet thick, with a tiny hole in the middle, and it’s swinging back and forth in outer space, and over here are a thousand amazing bands playing their hearts out, all grouped in little blobs, flying through space at a million miles an hour. They’re all going to splatter on the surface, and one is going to go through the hole. All the bands that hit the surface were great, and they all could have easily been successful, but we went through the hole. [Laughs]
This might be a generalisation, but the music scene at the time … particularly the “Seattle Sound”, was that kind of despondent grunge sound, and then there were you guys, who were this happy ray of sunshine through the Seattle rainclouds, so to speak. What’s your take on it? Why do you think you guys resonated so much?
There’s a bunch of reasons. I was a huge fan of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, all those guys, and it definitely influenced me musically. I was actually writing really dark songs before the PRESIDENTS happened. I go on these waves, and I was in a dark wave. I heard Nevermind, and I was like, “Oh, well, that’s the record I was trying to make, so I’m going to stop, because that’s better than what I was trying to do.” [Laughs] So it got in my soul, those chords, those melodies, those harmonies, that are a little bit of darkness. But then, I am naturally a very euphoric, childlike, happy human. I hadn’t arrived at full self-awareness at the point where I was writing the songs for that album, so I was trying to still mix in this darkness and this lightness. But it was perceived that we were like the antidote to the “grunge problem.” [Laughs] So that worked in our favour as far as press [was concerned] … Then again, during all that – grunge being huge, the end of grunge, and our era – underneath all that was this very rich strata of musical diversity; jazz, weird art rock, pop, indie rock. Seattle’s always been super diverse. It’s not homogenous at all. So, yeah, there’s perception, there’s “the story”, and there’s reality, and the reality was that it was a lot more mixed and everybody was hanging out with everybody. But the story is more like, “the desolate Seattle scene was saved by these dark characters, who were then vanquished by the bright little overlords.” [Laughs] That’s us, by the way – the “bright little overlords.”
Pictured: Dave Dederer, Jason Finn + Chris Ballew
Photo courtesy of Chris Ballew
You would’ve come to Australia for the first time on that tour.
Australia was crazy. It was the most PRESIDENTS-mania kind of vibe. We literally had to run for cars. We played at a shopping mall in Melbourne, maybe Sydney, and they closed down school and all the kids came, and somebody was getting crushed in the front and we were freaking out, because we didn’t want to cause anybody any stress. It was kind of a Beatlemania experience.
So, who came up with the concept of the Peaches ninjas?
That was Roman’s idea. All I said was, “I want to play outside under a tree. I want it to be like we’re in nature.” Our first video [for Lump], we were out in a bog somewhere, so I was like, “let’s keep up the nature thing. It’s very Seattle.” And that’s where the phone call got real quiet, because that’s all I had, and it was a conference call with me and the band and Roman, and Roman just said in a little voice, “how do you feel about being attacked by ninjas?” And we were like, “yes!” He had been watching martial arts movies and wanted to try his hand at a sequence, and he was like, “Well, I’ll get paid to experiment with a new style, so let’s go!”
What is written on the back of your head in that video?
“Peaches.” Yeah. I don’t know who did that, or why we did that. I used to write things on my head in art school, because I always had this blank canvas up here. [He takes off his cap, showing his bald scalp] One time I had my head silk-screened in art school. It’s a blank canvas. You can actually rent it out if you want. [Laughs]
Were you guys ever millionaires? Or was it always kind of bleeding off?
No, we were extremely lean. I think we went on one bus tour, maybe two, and then looked at the balance sheet afterwards and went, “that’s it! No more buses!” We wanted to come home with money … We did not stay in fancy hotels, we did not blow it on big parties or lavish statements of wealth. I bought a couple of houses, invested them, ended up selling them and making three times what I paid for them, thanks to my first wife who had the acumen to understand that. [Laughs]
How do you compare writing music for the Presidents, or writing music for adults, and Caspar Babypants?
Pretty much the same thing. What I’ve learned from perspective and time is that the PRESIDENTS were innocence and innuendo rubbing up against each other. Am I singing about Peaches? Kitty? What are those about? Is it sexual? Is it innocent? That chemistry was something that I stumbled into for a period, but it isn’t really me – it isn’t really who I am. As I became more self-aware over time, I realised that I’m just the childlike guy … I met my second wife Kate [Endle], who is an artist. I looked at her art. I went, “Oh my god, that’s it! I want to make music that comes from the planet that her art is coming from.” I made a couple of songs inspired by her art, and literally a cartoon lightbulb went off. I’m supposed to be making music for children and families and babies! So I dug in, and everything made sense … Here I am, eleven years later, and seventeen albums later, and it’s still flowing. I found my voice, let’s put it that way. I definitely found my voice. It’s what I should have been doing the whole time.
Pictured: Jason Finn, Chris Ballew , Weird Al Yankovic + Dave Dederer
Photo courtesy of Chris Ballew
Lastly, can you ever see yourself making music with the guys again? Or will the Jams remain un-Kicked?
[Laughs] I think we kicked out plenty! What did we have? Five records? You know, never say never, that’s my motto. I never thought when we broke up for the first time that we’d get back together five years later and be together for thirteen more years, but I’ll tell you this: I am never wearing ear protection at a live show again. So, if we do it, it’s going to be a different animal. It’s going to be like a stage set of a back porch and us on broken couches playing acoustic guitars or something, or a fake bonfire on stage that we’re sitting around. It’s going to be more of a campfire singalong experience, not a loud rock show … I don’t really want to go around doing a solo PRESIDENTS thing, but I do this thing called Caspar Adultpants, where I play Caspar Babypants songs for adults only, who are drinking, and I make them behave like babies. I make them sing and move and stuff and call-and-response, and I throw in maybe one PRESIDENTS song to round it out. I’ve only done that a couple of times. I’ve got another one on the books for December. Let’s see if I can do it.
Pictured: Abum art from PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - That Album
Five Choice Cuts – The Debut Album
Peaches
Like this wasn’t going to make the list. On that album, Peaches is that song. The second that guitar riff kicks off, you’re transported back in time to the age of Bill Clinton, Jagged Little Pill and the Sony Playstation.
Kick Out the Jams
It’s been covered by everyone from Jeff Buckley to Rage Against the Machine to Entombed, but PUSA’s version of the MC5 classic is like the Energizer Bunny – fuzzy and unstoppable. It should be written into law that every rock band can play this song.
Lump
The album’s first single and nineties party album that was awarded that most prestigious honour of being sent up by Weird Al Yankovic, spoofing it as Gump.
We’re Not Going to Make It
Propulsive, self-depreciating, self-aware, and with a fantastic chorus that doesn’t outstay its welcome, it’s hard not to laugh when you realise that a track about fear of failure went multi-platinum.
Dune Buggy
Stripped-back rock? Check. Infectious chorus? Check. Anthropomorphic animals driving vehicles? Check. If you wanted a perfect summary of everything that made PUSA great, here it is.
Vinyl
Get your copy of the vinyl version of the debut album on Kickstarter
