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Lingering Ghosts: A Conversation with The Black Angels

by Alexander Dimitropoulos
10/26/2007

“A lotta killing and dying, and no one seems to care” – The Black Angels’ “The First Vietnamese War”

The Black Angels’ album Passover begins with Alex Maas acting as a war zone pied piper, singing, “Fire for the hills, pick up your feet and let’s go. Head for the hills, pick up steel on your way.” The song (“Young Men Dead”), most of the rest of the album, a band member’s background and even a former home point a shaking, bony index finger toward one subject: death.

Organist and drone machine player Jennifer Raines, for example, grew up in her family’s funeral home in Gun Barrel City, Texas.

“She’s obsessed with death,” drummer Stephanie Bailey said with a laugh in a phone interview with Athens Exchange Oct. 21. “Whenever there’s something bloody on television, or we pass a wreck or something, she always has to look.”

This fascination began when Raines was a child.

“I know she used to have funerals for animals that she would find randomly that were just dead in the road, and she’d bury them and then hold her own candle for them,” Bailey said. “Now she just watches stuff like Six Feet Under and really bloody stuff on television. Or like if someone hurts themselves, she’ll be like ‘Oh my God, let me look at it.’ The more blood, the better for her.”

The Black Angels play psychedelic rock and mine the 1960s for a slightly altered slogan (“TURN ON, TUNE IN, DRONE OUT…”), a historical reference in a song title (“The First Vietnamese War”) and the band’s name itself, which comes from The Velvet Underground’s “The Black Angel’s Death Song.”

No one in the band was born in the 1960s, however. Multi-instrumentalist Kyle Hunt, the oldest Black Angel and newest addition to the band, is 30 years old, Bailey said.

“Everyone develops certain tastes, and ours stem from the ’60s,” Bailey said. “And when we all come together to create music, I guess it just kind of comes out that way.”

Some in the audience have similar influences, though the age range varies dramatically.

“The age of our audience, it ranges anywhere from an 8-year-old kid to, like, there have been like 60-year-olds at our shows,” Bailey said. “I know whenever I play in Houston, where I’m actually originally from, all my uncles come out, and they’re all in their fifties, and they all really appreciate the music. They’re really into The Doors, and Pink Floyd and all that stuff. [The] Velvet Underground.”

Are the audiences in Texas, home of George W. Bush, supportive of a group that performs scathing songs about the war, though?

“It depends where we play in Texas,” Bailey said. “Austin, they’ve been really receptive. At first, they weren’t too receptive. You know, we’d have like two people in the audience. Now, it’s starting to catch on. I don’t know. Dallas, we do alright. In Houston, we’ve done horribly for so long, it’s just now finally starting to pick up, and people are starting to come out. I think we do the worst though in towns in Florida and kind of like the Southeast. It seems like in more conservative cities we don’t do as well.”

Before their European tour, The Black Angels were told to move out of their previous home, which housed guitarist Christian Bland, Raines, Bailey, Maas, another roommate and some other, weird tenants, Bailey said.

Bailey’s room was next to the band room downstairs, and she said she would hear the tambourine begin to shake at night. She would bring Raines along, and then both of them would hear the shaking. They would get a man from the band to open the door, and the tambourine would be sitting still on a hook.

“There was no way it could have moved,” Bailey said. “We have animals, but they were all upstairs. Stuff like that would happen.”

She also said that the people living upstairs would hear footsteps at night, and that an old couple died in the house before The Black Angels moved in.

Now there are eight people living in a seven-bedroom house.

“The last one was definitely haunted,” Bailey said. “There would be creepy things going on. This one, I don’t know. We had a house guest once that said that all this shit happened, but I don’t know. I choose not to think about it.”

The Black Angels will be performing at the 40 Watt Oct. 30 with Celebration and Spindrift.

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