Dark Meat’s publicity describes them as “Stooges meets Neil Young,
meets Albert Ayler.” I can get with Iggy and the Crazy Horse, but Ayler
was a saxophonist. I like a saxophone about as much as I like
a greasy chicken thigh from KFC. Dark meat? Yuck.
But at SXSW, the Athens, Georgia, psych-rock collective played a
Vice Records showcase, sandwiched between Canadian hardcore band Fucked
Up and Tennessee garage punk Jay Reatard, and it was the most honest,
raw, and excited performance of the entire fest.
The Meat hit the stage with a full horn section and 18-plus hippie
crazy-heads. It was instant, brilliant mayhem. Headbanging!
Dancing! Confetti! Some girls, let’s call ’em Starshine and the Happy
Bunch, ran around smearing neon paint on people’s faces. Someone hit me
in the head with a glow stick.
I should hate this hippie shit. Instead, Dark Meat’s debut,
Universal Indians, is the only CD I’ve purchased since that
show. I interviewed bassist Ben Clack to figure out why I suddenly feel
like learning to play the tambourine, joining Starshine and the
H-Bunch, and jumping on Dark Meat’s crazy magic bus, never to
return.
How many members are on this tour, and have you ever
accidentally lost anyone? Forgot someone in a gas station bathroom,
maybe?
No less than 13, no more than 23. We’ve only ever accidentally lost
one member, but quickly swooped her back up again, in Baltimore.
Was your 1972 tour bus ever a church bus? You didn’t buy it
from some Mormons in Texas, did you?
No. It was actually used to ferry passengers from Montana to
Calgary. Later it was in We Are Marshall, a film about a
football team that dies in a plane wreck. Hopefully that’s not an
omen.
Some of you live on a commune called
Orange Twin.
What’s that about?
Orange Twin is a land-conservation community, built on an old Girl
Scout camp in 1947. It’s basically an ecofriendly farm. Check out
www.orangetwin.com for
more info.
You guys play all sorts of unconventional
instruments—bamboo flutes, piccolos, beer cans. What’s the
weirdest instrument you’ve ever used onstage?
For a while we had a Celtic harp, then we dumped that shit. Now,
probably the weirdest is the Raager (pronounced roger), who is our
drone box from India.
You guys look like hippies but play like punks. Punks are
usually mean to hippies. Has anyone ever been mean to you, thinking
you’re a stinkin’ hippie?
There’s no difference in my mind. We’re just poor people with big
record collections who are interested in internal exploration. I mean,
Void doesn’t sound like the Incredible String Band, but I love both of
them. I just base my life goals, or visions, on visual expression.
Who do you think would win a stare down: Albert Ayler or
Iggy Pop? Johnny Rotten or Captain Beefheart? Neil Young or Glenn
Danzig?
Albert Ayler would nuke Iggy. Beefheart would take Rotten. And Neil
Young would certainly win, because he’s much bigger than Glenn.
What’s the meaning of the song “There Is a Retard on Acid
Holding a Hammer to Your Brain”?
It’s actually a positive message. The song was written for a dear
friend of mine [who was] going through a meltdown. Lots of dark things
were entering his life and the decisions he was forced to make were
becoming absurd. I thought the image suited the absurdity that drug
addiction can bring into your life. The lyric “It’s your life and you
hate it, but it’s your life just the same” underlies the whole
thing—basically, finding the strength to make decisions to keep
living.
Your live shows are incredible—what’s the longest set
you’ve ever played? And what’s the craziest thing you’ve seen someone
in the audience do during a show?
One of the best shows we ever had was totally by accident and ended
up lasting about seven hours. It was in Charlottesville, Virginia, at
the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. We played our normal one-hour set and
then headed over to play an afterparty for about six more hours. We
wound up back at the Bazaar, eating Cuban breakfast and smoking hookahs
as the sun rose. The place got fucking wild. The people there were
amazing.
As for crazy audience participation, that might be Diplo taking off
his shirt and scaling the rafters and hanging upside down, throwing
beach balls at people [at SXSW]. That shit was hilarious.
Last question: Porn star Belladonna has a DVD series called
Dark Meat—do you think that’s going to
cause you guys any problems?
Our actual name is Dark Meat/Vomit Lasers Family Band/Galaxy. It
would be awesome to see someone make a porn out of that title. I wonder
what orifice would be involved in the vomit laser. I hope she doesn’t
sue us. Our name is actually simple in origin. We liked the connotation
of the physiological construction of dark meat—the meat near the
bone, slowly twitching. 
