Chattanooga Times Free Press music reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Bug Jennings, vocalist/guitarist/banjo player with the New York-based multi-genre band The Defibulators, about using a vintage ambulance as the band van and what gets prison inmates excited about their shows.
CP: How often is your name incorrectly listed on show bills as “The Defibrillators”?
BJ: You know, a fair amount. There is actually another band called The Defibrillators in Long Island. They’re old guys. They play blues songs and stuff. They’re a good time, Long Island band. They’re about 30 years older than us. It’s funny, some people go to their Web site and are like, “This doesn’t look right.” We get confused a little bit, but of course, when you’re misspelling something to begin with, it’s hard to get people to spell it the way you want them to.
CP: Is there a story behind why you chose that name?
BJ: Not really. It just sort of popped into our heads. We needed a name quick for our first gig we were doing. Somebody asked us to play a gig before we actually had a band. It was just me and Bru and our guitarist. We all worked together, and some friends of ours knew we were musicians but didn’t have a band, so they asked us to put something together to open for a punk band.
We were all working together at a barbeque restaurant at the time in New York City. We were just preoccupied with troubles of the heart, medically and otherwise. It’s always been a fascinating thing, that this little thing can save your life with just a little, electric shock. It’s an almost medieval device. It’s always just struck me as kind of odd.
The name came to our heads, and we were like, “Yeah, that’ll work.” For better or worse, we’re stuck with it now. Sometimes, I think it’s a silly name, and sometimes, I think it’s a good name. Band names are tough because you have to live with them once you choose them.
After we chose the name, we were looking for a van, and our washboard player eventually said, “We should just get an ambulance to tie in with the name.” We started looking on eBay, and we found a 1977 Dodge ambulance. We won it in an auction and flew out to Illinois to pick it up and drove it back. It’s still running.
CP: How long have you had it?
BJ: About three years now. It gets about nine miles to the gallon.
CP: Is it a refurbished ambulance to make it commuter friendly or are you guys driving around with gurney’s and IV trees in the back?
BJ: No, it’s all-original. The gurney’s not in there, but it’s got bright orange vinyl and fake wood paneling, sliding plastic shelves and stuff. It definitely looks like an ambulance. We’ve been pulled over many times, and cops are wondering what’s going on. I’ve been accused of looking like a terrorist and looking especially suspicious driving an old-school ambulance around Manhattan. I’ve been stopped for that before.
Sometimes, cops think it’s great, like “Whoa, this is cool. Where’d you get this?” We always give them a CD. It’s gotten us out of trouble a couple of times, and sometimes, it attracts too much attention. It’s definitely a unique car to be driving around, but it’s fun, and people like it. We get notes written on it and left under the windshield wipers. Sightings of it pup up on the Internet with people taking pictures of it and posting it. It’s a cool little promotional thing.
CP: Do the sirens still work?
BJ: They do. The lights work, too. The siren still works, but we’ve detached the speaker. It’s still there to work, if we wanted it to. It’s kind of a gray area within the law. You’re technically not supposed to have the red lights on it, so whenever we’re asked by cops, we tell them they don’t work … but they do. Sometimes, it’s fun to flick on the lights when you pull in to a gig or when you’re loading out.
CP: You’re about to start your fourth U.S. tour, right? Have you ever been down to Chattanooga?
BJ: Yeah, fourth or fifth. We’re looking forward to playing Chattanooga. I’ve heard great things about that town. Tennessee is our favorite state to play, for sure. We love North Carolina, Texas and Tennessee. We could do that circuit forever and be happy. We love the people and the places. This is our first time playing Chattanooga. We’ve heard about JJ’s from all the bands we know who go through there and play. It’s a cool town. We’re looking forward to it. We’ve heard it.
CP: Give me an “in a nutshell” version of how the band formed.
BJ: I’m from Texas originally. Working at a barbeque restaurant in the city, I met a guitar player from Hoboken, N.J. We started talking, and he found out I was from Texas and then started trying to talk to me about all these obscure, old country acts and western swing, but I didn’t know too much about it. He was like, “You’re from Fort Worth, man? You’ve got to know The Fort Worth Stomp.” I was like, “I’ve never heard of it in my life.” He was like, “Yeah. Milton Brown. Bob Louis used to play with them and the Roadblocker is just like a super jazz and swing and country rockabilly scholar. He knows everything about every recording. This guy from New Jersey ended up giving me an education on country music coming from Texas. I just got hooked on it because I never heard any of that stuff.
Growing up in Texas, I heard what was on mainstream, Nashville radio -pop country and stuff like that. Once I started listening to the old stuff, I got hooked on it, and it became an obsession.
I knew Erin Bru, and I knew she could sing. She’s from California, and she’s got a beautiful voice. I thought she could probably sing country. We tried a few old Janis Martin tunes and Wanda Jackson and Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. I had a feeling she could sing them. She never liked country, either, but we started singing the old stuff, and she got hooked on it, too. It just snowballed from there.
We tried to play and learn as many covers of old standards as we could. We started playing in bars. There are a couple of honky tonks in Manhattan. We slowly started writing originals. We were around for about 2-2 _ years before we finally got the songs and money together to record an album.
We started adding members to the band. We got a great fiddle player from Wisconsin and a washboard player from New Orleans, who’s no longer with us since he went back to New Orleans. We added drummer. When we added him, it was kind of a good-time, jug band/hootenanny band with a lot of people. We had a trombone and accordion, too. It was a nine-person band at one point.
When we recorded the album, we added the drummer and then pared it down a little bit. One of the washboard players left the band and another one joined who’s also plays harmonica and is also from Fort Worth. We settled in as a seven-piece and recorded “Corn Money.”
We recorded that album over a week upstate at a farm. It was one of the greatest weeks I’ve ever had. We stayed over night there, woke up and pulled 12-15 hour days of recording for a solid week. We finished off some overdubs in the city, in Brooklyn, and now we’re still promoting that and touring on that and starting to write songs for the new one.
It all came out of a need to reintroduce ourselves to country music and what good country music could be. New York audiences love it because they don’t get to hear it all the time, and a lot of people in New York aren’t even from here – they’re from the West, the South, Canada, the West Coast. Being able to walk into a place and hear country music, people really appreciate it more than they do somewhere where it’s really common. It’s actually becoming more and more common here. There’s a good, growing scene here of country music and hillbilly rock and stuff like that.
CP: You “pared down” the band from nine members to seven? Just having seven on stage on once sounds like enough of a logistical nightmare. Does the versatility of having so many instruments at your collective command make up for the hassle?
BJ: Yes, that’s a very great and appropriate phrase, “logistical nightmare.” (Laughs.) It can be. In our first couple of tours, it was just that. We made a couple of big, tattooed sound guys cry and sweat because it was too much to handle. We slowly got more organized and got it down a little better.
It’s definitely a challenge, especially living in New York. It’s hard to get guys on the road because the cost of living is so high here. That’s one of the drawbacks. I wish we didn’t have that double edged sword of living in New York City but having to spend a lot of time here to afford living here so you can’t be on the road as much as you want. We’re doing as much as we can. We might move out of town eventually to make it easier as we get out more and more on the road.
The seven members in the band are all essential, I feel, to our sound. We just played Europe for about three and a half weeks. The tour manager thought we were six people, and when we got over there, we were seven, and he freaked out a little bit. He had to make some adjustments, and he said the next time we come back, we have to be just six people. I was like, “I don’t know who we could leave behind. It may not happen.”
It’s a big family, and the sound is dependent on every member. We can’t do it as a singer/songwriter duo or a three-piece rockabilly band. It’s a big sound, and we need a big band. We’re determined to sacrifice the easiness of having a small band for the sound we want and the sound we think makes the biggest impact and is the most fun.
CP: All your publicity materials and quotes about the band from the media suggest the energy of your live performances is the heart and soul of the band. What kind of connection are you trying to make with an audience when you’re on stage?
BJ: Yeah, we want to give it all we got. If I’m not covered with sweat by the end of the show, I feel like we haven’t put on a good show, haven’t done our jobs. I feel like it should be a serious, athletic act of performance. I don’t get off on watching people, songwriters or bands, just phoning it in or walking through it. I want to see a performance.
We try to have fun with each other and connect and have a blast playing. We just want to play as loud and, unfortunately, as loud as we can. Sometimes we sacrifice being able to hear ourselves for just pure volume. If something doesn’t happen consciously, we end up turning it up throughout the set, and by the end, it’s out of control. That’s how it is. It’s out of control, like a freight train we’re trying to keep on the tracks.
CP: You guys are listed on Myspace as a bluegrass band. You’ve made plenty of references to being influenced by country. When I listen to your music, I hear everything from rockabilly twang and punk to swing jazz in Erin Bru’s vocals. Trying to categorize you in any traditional sense seems almost a waste of time.
BJ: Yeah, it’s hard to say what kind of music we play. We’re inspired by varied types of country and folk – Dixieland and blues and rockabilly and bluegrass. We tried to be those bands exclusively as we were developing, like “We’re going to be a rockabilly band and do the rockabilly thing” or “Let’s try to be a bluegrass band and play kickass bluegrass.” But it all felt limiting if we tried to just play one of those genres. As we started writing original songs, they ended up coming out as a bit of this and a bit of that, pieces of everything we like. It’s annoying to say what kind of band we are.
CP: Surely people have tried, though. Have there been any amusing attempts by critics to put you in a box?
BJ: Man. We were kind of being called “wackabilly” for a while. That’s a phrase we came up with, but we decided to ditch that because it seemed like it didn’t take itself seriously.
What rubs us the wrong way is when people think we’re not taking it seriously or making fun of country music, making a joke of it. A lot of people think that, just because we’re from New York, we’re doing it tongue-in-cheek. That’s not the case. It’s just what we love.
In terms of descriptions, I thought “The Carter Family meets the Ramones” was funny. I don’t hear that in there; it doesn’t really make sense, but someone heard fractions of that. (Laughs.)
People get upset when we’re called bluegrass. We’ve had a negative comment on a YouTube video of someone saying, “THIS IS NOT BLUEGRASS. BLUEGRASS HAS ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS.”
I don’t know, man, we’re Brooklyn Honky Tonk. That’s kind of indicative of where we came from. Brooklyn is such a mash up of cultures and styles anyway. I don’t think this band could have been born, the sound couldn’t have been born, anywhere else.
CP: With such a multi-faced approach to the music, it seems like you wouldn’t have any trouble standing out in a crowd, even in the New York scene. Are there any other bands out there doing anything similar to you?
BJ: There are some bands that are revivalists and traditionalists that have Bakersfield Honky Tonk down pat. They play it great. Bands like The Dixons do that in Brooklyn. Then, there are bands like The Woes. They’re hard to put their finger on, too. They’ve got a horn section and banjo for that Dixieland-swamp-blues sound that’s hard to describe. Of course, that’s been said before, but that’s the kind of music that’s interesting, at least to me, the stuff that’s hard to describe. It’d be nice to have a good, solid description. (Laughs.)
CP: Your latest press release said that on the European tour you guys just returned from, you played all over Belgium and the Netherlands, including at prisons. That’s with an ‘s,’ as in multiple prisons. How did the European convict circuit treat you?
BJ: (Laughs.) That must have been a typo, actually. We only played one prison, although that would be nice, to do the prison circuit. That experience was pretty phenomenal. It was in an old castle from the 1700s with a moat around it. A prisoner had the key to the gate to let us in, which I thought was a nice touch.
They had a good time. They were hooting and hollering, and they really liked Erin. (Laughs.) It was funny because our bass player would take a periodic bass solo, and any time he did, the crowd would just erupt in hooting and hollering. It kind of caught me off guard the first and second time it happened. The third time that happened, I was like, “Man, they really like bass solos in Belgium. I wonder what it is about bass solos.” Then, I realized afterwards as we were talking about it that, no, Erin was turning around every time there was a bass solo and exposing her rear end to the audience. That’s what did it. I thought that was funny, like, “Man, bass solos rock!”
It was great. It was a really neat experience, and it was kind of weird, but it’s great to play for people you never thought you’d play for and probably never will play for again. You don’t like to think about why they’re there or anything, you just hope what you’re playing will bring some sort of optimistic feeling or perspective or experience to them. We wouldn’t want to think that we’re causing them to go and commit more crimes when they’re out. We’re no Insane Clown Posse. (Laughs.)
CP: I also read you guys self-published a 24-page coloring book. Can you elaborate on that?
BJ: We played a gig in a small place in Brooklyn right when we were starting out, about a year or two into it. There was a kid in the back with his head in the notebook the whole time. We didn’t think much of it, but at the end of the show, he came up to us and talked to us and said, ” Hey, I’ve done some sketches of you guys.” They were pretty awesome. We had been talking because we had a black and white design we had to color in ourselves, so we sat around in Washington Square Park and had to use Crayolas to color in our first flier. We thought, “Oh, that’d be a good idea, to have a coloring book.” Then, we ran into this kid shortly after, and he was already sketching pictures of us. We were like, “Hey man, we were just talking about doing a coloring book. Why don’t you do one for us?” Over a few months, he drew it, and then we expanded it into an activity book, and it turned out really cool. It was a kid named James Jajac from Queens.
CP: Tell me about your recording plans. You released your debut album, “Corn Money,” last summer. Have you given any thought to a follow up?
BJ: We want to finish writing throughout the summer and record in the fall. I think that’s a always a nice time to record, a nostalgic time. We recorded a song for “Corn Money” that didn’t end up on the album because it didn’t turn out the way we wanted, so we thought we’d rerecord it. It was called “Holy Roller.” We thought we’d make that the centerpiece of the next album and do a country/gospel-themed album and play around with that.
We’re big fans of the Louvin Brothers and country gospel, so we thought we’d go in that direction. Not to try and preconceive songs so much, just to use it as a loose framework.
We’re going to play at least one of the songs we’ve been working on called “Pay for Your Money.” That’s inspired by the massive amount of debt we find ourselves in, both as a band and individually. So I guess it’ll be debt and God, debt and Jesus. Credit card debt and Jesus Christ? I don’t know.