Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Keith Voegele, bassist with the St. Louis-based alt-country/roots rock band, The Bottle Rockets, about the broad appeal of music about Middle American life and who their real influences are.
CP: What are the origins of The Bottle Rockets? How did you come together originally?
KV: Brian (Henneman) was a roadie for Uncle Tupelo back in the day, which eventually grew into Wilco and Son Volt and all that stuff. Brian’s Uncle Tupelo turned into Wilco and Wilco’s manager at the time got Brian, our singer, a record deal. He and Mark (Ortmann) put a band together real quick. That’s how The Bottle Rockets got started.
CP: When did you join up?
KV: That was in 1993 or 1994. I didn’t join until 2005. (Laughs.) But I was a fan that whole time. I was even acquaintances with the guys. John (Horton), our guitar player, has been with the band since 2003, I guess. There have been many changes, except for Brian and Mark.
CP: Did coming into a band that had been together, in some capacity, for 12 years make for a difficult assimilation period for you?
KV: I kind of just fit right in. I was really familiar with the music and everything. It was one of those things where I went to try out and knocked on the door, and when they opened the door, all of us went, “Oh! It’s you. I know you.” We never really played together before that, but after that first time, it was a great fit.
They liked my background vocal ability better than my bass playing. It was like, “Hey, wait a minute! I’m a bass player, damn it.” That’s how that came about. We’ve been the same ever since, which is almost the longest form of the Bottle Rockets with the same people in it than has ever been. We’re in our 16th year, I guess.
CP: With 15 years behind you and 20 years coming down the pike, does anything about the where the band has ended up surprise any of you?
KV: We feel like this is the best the band has ever been. So for the last 5-8 years, which is as long as John has been in it, it feels like a totally different band to Mark and Brian, which is refreshing. I’ve never been in a band that had this kind of catalog and fan base and could sell records and tour around the country. For me, it was like, “Woo hoo! This is awesome.”
Right now, we’re just chugging along. We have an acoustic record coming out later this year, so that’s the next thing. We also have a live DVD documentary coming out hopefully within the next year.
We’re keeping busy and trying not to lose sight of what we do. We do what we do, pretty much, and it seems to be getting more popular every time.
CP: Are you also from St. Louis?
KV: I’m actually from St. Louis, which is where everyone lives now. I’m actually living in Springfield, Ill., which is 90 miles north.
CP: Missouri is a really interesting place, in that it’s at the crossroads of America between north and south, east and west. Do you feel like that has any kind of affect on your music?
KV: Oh yeah, definitely. I’ve always thought, even before I was in the band, that the music and the lyrics sound like where I come from, the Midwest area. All they’ve pretty much done is write songs about the area and friends of ours, pretty much, and the serious or romantic or funny things that they do. (Laughs.)
CP: That seems like being that centered on a place could have gone one of two ways, by either being really popular with a widespread audience, like it has done, or really limit the audience. Why do you think it had a wider appeal?
KV: I think it’s basically the working thing. That goes everywhere, from Minneapolis to Austin, L.A. to Jersey. It just appealed to a wider population because there are more people like that out there than any other people, the mid-class people. That’s all we’re talking about, because that’s what we are. We get to travel all over the world and do all that stuff, but we’re not rich. We aren’t broke, but we ain’t rich, either.
CP: As the band has become more popular and started doing things outside of normal middle American life, like touring globally, has it become more difficult to stay connected in that lifestyle that inspires your songs?
KV: No, not really, because that’s the kind of fans we get all over the world. Those kind of people seek out this kind of music, music that’s about them. We just did two weeks in Spain, and Spain is weird because everywhere we played, whether there were 400 or 50 people there, half of them knew who the band was, and the other half were there just because we were an American rock band singing about American life. For some reason, they just eat that stuff up. We’re heroes to them, and their economy is even worse than ours is. The fact that we were even there was amazing to them.
CP: Does that surprise you, that there really is a universal audience that your music resonates with?
KV: Yeah, it does. Whatever you want to call it – roots rock or alt-country or whatever – I think that’s always going to be there and be popular. It won’t be U2 popular, but we’ll be able to do it the rest of our lives because you can also grow old playing this kind of music and not look like an idiot. (Laughs.) We have fans now who will have their son with them who just turned 21, and he’ll be like, “Man, my son has been listening to you since he was seven years old.” Stuff like that is crazy.
CP: If you’re writing about your own lives, I guess there’s never a shortage of material to draw on, as long as you’re continuing to live your lives.
KV: Yeah, and that’s pretty easy instead of having to search for stuff that people will like or that might be popular with them, (Laughs.) Who knows? Music comes and goes in all different forms. This could take off again and be huge for a couple of years, and then come back down to the level it’s at and still thrives at.
There are a few bands like Wilco that got away from this and went a whole different direction, instead of sticking with the roots rocky, alt-country kind of thing. They went kind of Radiohead on us. Good for them, though, it made them huge. (Laughs.) Something made them huge, I guess.
CP: Has there ever been any temptation, looking at other bands that came out of Uncle Tupelo, to follow that path and move further away from alt-country/roots music and try and mimic the approach that made them successful?
KV: That’s a funny question, because what we do seems, to us, way more marketable than some of the stuff Wilco has done. Some of our songs are the perfect, three-minute pop songs, and some of Wilco’s stuff is 11 minutes of noise.
We don’t really understand. It seems like we’re made for the radio – not that we’re trying to be a radio band. We just love three-minute rock songs that get to the point, and that’s it.
CP: You guys are often compared to Woody Guthrie and Crazy Horse. Are they actually influences of yours, or are people just making a groundless connection?
KV: We are a lyric-driven band. It’s the first band I’ve ever been in where everybody writes lyrics and we get together and put music to the lyrics. Every other band I’ve been in, the music comes first, and then we put lyrics to the music.
I think that’s where the Woody Guthrie thing comes in because we want the lyrics to be good and to mean something.
The Crazy Horse thing is that, even though assume we were influenced by Johnny Cash and those people – in reality, we were all influenced by Fog Hat and Thin Lizzy. That’s where the Crazy Horse thing comes in. We just like to rock with something that’s lyrically strong enough for people to grab hold of.
CP: Listening to your last album, “Lean Forward,” earlier, one of the songs that jumps out at me is “The Kid Next Door.” Where did that song come from? That’s an interesting take on music about war and the returning soldier theme?
KV: Right. We write with this guy Scott Tayler, who has written songs for The Bottle Rockets since day one. He’s kind of a silent fifth member. He’s actually a school teacher of Mark’s in high school, so he’s known the band for a long time.
Anyway, he wrote the song about this kid next door. Pretty much what the song says is what happens.
We changed the lyrics a little bit just because Brian wasn’t comfortable with them. He said, “I’m not really sure what’s going on over there. I don’t want to give my opinion, give my voice to an opinion making people think I know what’s going on. I don’t have the right to form an opinion.”
So we changed the lyrics a little bit so there isn’t any opinion in it; it’s just facts, that the kid next door joined the army, left and didn’t come back. There’s no real focus on how we feel about the situation. It’s just the facts of what happened.
CP: With that album being out since last year, you’ve had plenty of time to road test the songs on “Lean Forward.” Have any fan favorites developed out of those songs?
KV: “Hard Times,” “Shame on Me,” “Kid Next Door” – when we do it, which is not all that often, just whenever Brian is in the mood – and “Give Me Room,” which is great.
The reaction has been great. Bands like us are always going to have the “Play [old song]!” fans. We get a lot of fans of songs from the earlier records. It might take our new record a couple of years before the actual fans can get past the old ones. It’s a struggle here. (Laughs.)
CP: Tell me a little bit more about your upcoming acoustic album. What prompted doing something acoustic for your next project?
KV: We played a show a couple of years ago in St. Louis and just decided to do an acoustic show. There was a venue in town that was perfect for it, and we did two nights and recorded both nights. So there were 40 songs to go through. It’s been sitting around for a while. We listened to it again when we were on the road a year or so ago. I brought it along and popped it in and were like, “Man, this is good.” We’ll probably pick 16 or 17 songs for it. With a lot of songs, there are different takes on them when we do them acoustically, but our fans like that stuff.
CP: When will that come out?
KV: We don’t know yet, but hopefully, by the end of the year. The guy who finished “Lean Forward” and a couple other records is piecing it all together as we speak.
CP: Is an acoustic album something fans have been clamoring for or just something you thought they might like?
KV: Well, we’ve always done some acoustic stuff, not so much on “Lean Forward,” but on previous records. We’ve always done electric live, so it was challenging ourselves. Our roots aren’t banjos and pedal steels and stuff, it’s Thin Lizzy and Foghat. We told the crowd, “If you think we’re in our element, you’re wrong.” When we were done, we thought, “It was OK. We pulled it off.” When we listened to it later, we were like, “Wow, this is really good. It would be fun for people to hear this.”
CP: That’s your second live album, and it’s interesting that the first live album you ever did was the 2006 album from your show in Heilbronn, Germany. That seems like an odd choice for a band that thrives on writing about life in Middle America. What prompted that?
KV: We were on a European tour, and our record company over there, Blue Rose Records, and its owner Edgar Heckmann, were promoting that show. He said, “We want to record the show and use three or four songs to put on the website and have them available for free download.” We were like, “Sure, no problem.”
So we recorded the show, and then Edgar was like, “You’ve gotta hear this thing. I want to release all of it as a double record.” You pretty much can’t say no. We were like, “OK, send it to us.” We heard it and were like, “Wow, this is pretty freaking good.”
I had just joined the band. I joined in May, and we were in Europe in July, So we also thought, “Well, if it sounds that good, let’s put it out because it’ll be a year before we put an actual studio record out. This will at least have a new member on it and get the ball rolling.”
It was tough when I first joined because they thought that we had broken up because they hadn’t been out for a while. We had to change people’s minds. We had to tell them, “No, we didn’t break up. We’re better than ever. I swear!”
CP: Looking past the acoustic album, do you have plans for the next album?
KV: Hopefully, we’ll start writing for it real soon. I hope we can be recording it by the end of the year. That way, we’ll have it out June or July of next year. That’s what we’re shooting for, and hopefully, it follows through. We have a lot of time off over the next couple of months, so we’ll see when we get together and start writing to get a direction for the next record.