Taylor has never made any bones about the fact that much of the material on both The Dandys Rule OK and The Dandy Warhols Come Down is in the direct "style" of other well-known songs. Big-hype single "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" lifts ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down"; "Everyday Should Be a Holiday" rips the guitar riff right out from under ZZ Top's "Legs." On "Good Morning" Taylor sings, quite bald-faced, in the vocal style of latter-day Iggy Pop. According to Taylor, 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia is quite simply The Last Classic Rock Album. Like Buffalo Springfield or Donovan, he says. Full of harmonies and layers, and it sounds like a live band. The Last Classic Rock Album. Did you catch that?
It's been over three years since the Dandys released a record, and fans are often split passionately between loyalties to Dandys Rule and Come Down. According to Taylor, those who find themselves harboring a permanent soft spot for the revved-up sparseness of Dandys Rule should plan to start making room for another favorite: 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia is a return to that sound, which the singer describes as bigger, though achieved with less instrumentation. He's been working on it for over a year, and at the time of our conversation, it's still not finished. "Chalk that up to my obsessive nature," says Taylor. Believe what you will.
Love them or hate them, the Dandy Warhols made an indelible impression in 1995 when they rode into the major-label alt-rock scene atop a wave of glibness and sexual frankness that hadn't been seen in well over 20 years. Taylor's leather pants hung dangerously low on his slinky hips as he sang about fucking and getting high and living decadently in a decade, and a city (Portland, Oregon), that didn't have much goin' for it in terms of hedonistic pleasures. Guitarist Pete Holstrom's glammy, makeup-smeared, tough-pretty-boy stage presence and keyboard tart Zia McCabe's topless antics fueled reactions ranging from sheer disgust to breathless adoration. Emotions still ran high in 1997 when the single "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" was released, a song the media misconstrued (and in the case of MTV, embraced) to be an anti-heroin anthem, but which was, in reality, an anti-addiction anthem. Heroin's fine, claimed a shrugging Taylor. Just don't be stupid and boring enough to get addicted. That's the Dandy Warhols in a nutshell.
You'd think a band that so shamelessly posed in decadent Brit pop angles and aspired to be a less cloudy Jesus and Mary Chain would earn derision from the British music cognoscenti. This was not the case for the Dandys, however, as even Brit pop royalty Blur have gone public with their affection for the American band that found themselves on the road with Love and Rockets, Electrafixion, Echobelly, and Curve. But for all the big talk and unbridled rock-star attitude, for all the promise of drug-induced tragedy and eventual self-destruction, the Dandys have been pretty quiet of late. Too quiet, if you ask me.
While some might argue that too much time spent working on an album points unfailingly toward an unfocused effort, given the Dandy's track record and their two mind-blowingly great albums, I'm expecting 13 Tales to be nothing short of extremely studied brilliance. And nothing more. Taylor may have the biggest mouth in the Northwest in terms of sheer arrogance and honesty, but he certainly knows how to distill all that sex and bravado and insight into a record that demands to be listened to from start to finish, over and over again. Honestly, what more could you want?
