JAKE STARR: ROLLING THE HI-BALL WITH THE
ADAM WEST/FANDANGO RECORDS SUPREMO

By KEN SHIMAMOTO

OK, we all know hyperbole suxxx, but it seems to these feedback-scorched ears that Washington, D.C.'s Adam West might just be the best band in America right now. These days, we Yanks usually leave it to the Aussies and Scandis to play rock'n'roll this uncompromising. Formed in late 1991 as a '60s-style garage band, Adam West's early works included a homage to the Who ca. '67 ("Heavenly") and a funky cover of the Ides of March's horn-driven hit "Vehicle." Since then, their sound has evolved to encompass full-on punk
thrash, driving Detroit rifferama, and even heavier "stoner" stylings.

Unafraid to wear their tastes and influences on their sleeves, they do it proudly, covering the likes of AC/DC, Black Sabbath, the Damned, the Flamin' Groovies, the Misfits, Radio Birdman, the Ramones, the Stooges, Thin Lizzy, and the Velvet Underground. The Washington Area Music Association voted Adam West "best hard rock band" for the last two! years, and frontman/songwriter Jake Starr "best vocalist" in '98.

The operative term is "prolific." These guys have a discography - two albums ("Mondo Royale" and "13 Deluxe") and a plethora of singles, EPs, split singles (with the likes of the Hellacopters, Powder Monkeys, and Bellrays - no lightweights, these), compilations, tributes, etc. (see http://fandangorecs.com/adamwest/discog.cfm for all the details) -- to rival those of record obsessives like the Nomads, Monomen, or Hellacopters. And no wonder...Jake Starr is also a serious record collector and boss of Fandango Records. These guys are starting 2K1 with a spate of releases, including a 10-inch EP, "Hi-Balls Are Rolling!" and no less than three, count 'em, three 7-inches (including a dynamite cover of Sonic's Rendezvous Band's "Asteroid B-612").

Jake joined me at the Bar on the first weekend of the New Year from his home in D.C.

K: Let's start out talking about Adam West. The material you sent me is kinda diverse, from the early power-pop sounding stuff to the material on the "13 Deluxe" CD, which is real heavy.

J: Really, the material that's on "13 Deluxe" is kinda diverse, 'cos it was written over a long period of time. I had some personnel problems - that's the story of my band's life, lineup changes - and by the time we actually got to recording all that stuff, I don't know, I LOVE that album, I really do, but in a lot of ways it's kind of weird, even when we were recording it.

K: The stuff on your [as yet unreleased] "Five the Hard Way" comp is great and really needs to be out.

J: Agreed. I need to get some cash money to do all these iffy projects, goddammit!

K: I particularly dug your cover of the Ides of March's "Vehicle." That song was always a secret kick of mine, and the rockin' version you guys did is boss!

J: To this day, "Vehicle" is still one of my favorite songs of all time! It was very cool of Messiah Complex (Phantom) Records head honcho Jules Normington to release that 7" EP for us in Australia in 1994!

K: I also love the fonky bottom Andy Rapoport's bass gave your ['93-'94] stuff. Bass players that good are hard to find!

J: Andy was an awesome bass player...a nutcase when it came to women, which got in the way of everything, but a great bass player nonetheless. We never recorded our cover of "Little Miss Lover" by Hendrix, or a really funky original called "Ridin' High"...otherwise, you'd really hear how funky Adam West could get!

K: The Barman will hate me for saying this, but I like your version of "Psycho Therapy" better than the Ramones' original!

J: HAHA! I adore the Ramones (as any rocker should), but I've always thought Joey was the weak link. [Bassist, now guitarist] Steve wanted to cover that song when we were asked to be on the Ramones tribute, so I agreed. I think we rocked it out!

K: Vocally, you cover a lot of territory...from polite early Daltrey to Bon/Angry-ism, all the way to volcanic Morgan-ic R&B soul vocalismo. I'm quite impressed!

J: Sincerely...thanks! I've always been someone who cannot tolerate half-ass singers. Even if you don't have much range, you can still rock it out.

K: Talk a bit about the band - how you got together, some of the different musicians and phases you've been through.

J: Well, it's an extremely long story I'll try to summarize very quickly. The first time I met Bill Crandall...we went to junior high school together, so I figure we were twelve and thirteen years old. He's a year older than I am. He was in a band and they were like a cover band back then. I think I was in seventh grade and he was in eighth grade. I think they played for the longest time, but anyway, that's the first time I ever saw him. Somewhere around 1981-82, we both really got into Mod, I guess it was like the whole Jam thing
that was resurrected around 1979. So we got into it and we were like the only people in our school that were into like punk rock...it was very, very isolated back then; when you saw someone else who was wearing a leather jacket or put Dippity-Do in their hair or wore bowling shoes, anything like that, you wanted to be friends with them, because everybody else in school was into like Billy Squier and! Bob Seger...all that fuckin' FM radio shite.

So Bill Crandall and I, over the years, we'd been in different bands, but never together. We're both into the mid-sixties British Invasion type stuff, so we decided to sit down and write some songs together. We wrote a bunch of songs and nothing really happened, and then we hooked up again and we were basically looking for a bass player and a drummer. We had about four songs written between the two of us, and thought, "You know, we should form a band."

So we go out one night just to get a beer after we were sitting in my living room writing songs and we ran into this guy that Bill knew as a guitar player, named Ray Wiley, and Ray was actually starting to play with a bass player and a drummer, and they were looking for a singer. So Bill and I kind of joined them, and that was the first lineup of Adam West. Tom Barrick was the drummer, and he and I are the only original members. So we just sat around and Bill and I wrote songs and Adam West took off. Just started goin'
for it.

K: Talk a bit about the D.C. scene around the time you guys were starting out.

J: When it first started, I was a little young for the very, very first wave - the early Black Market Baby and Bad Brains shows, Slickee Boys, all that kind of stuff, I'm talking like '79, '80. I got into it a little bit later,
maybe '81, when more of the hardcore bands, like Ian McKaye formed Dischord and you started seeing 7-inches around like SOA and Minor Threat, Government Issue, and that was just fantastic to be in this town and be able to see some of those bands. The media was focusing on some of these bands like the Sex Pistols, they had already broken up, that was already a thing of the past, you were never gonna see them, but here you could go out on Friday night and see Minor Threat, and their records were just as powerful, so I thought it was just fantastic.

I grew up in rock'n'roll. When I was a kid and I started getting into music, I guess '75, I bought "Kiss Alive 1," that was my first record, and I started reading Creem Magazine 'cos it was the only rock'n'roll magazine on my newsstand on the corner (I lived in downtown Philadelphia). But then I started hearing about bands like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and the Doors and I really started getting into rock'n'roll. Then punk rock came along and it was kinda like "Oh, this is THE shit." And then something happened (this is
my opinion, of course) in the mid-eighties where these D.C. bands started getting too arty, they call it "emo" now, but they were trying to get away from the rock..."rock" was like a bad word, it was like laughable or something. Somewhere around '85, they call it the "revolution summer" here...basically what happened was all these bands tried to get less and less rock, because rock was bad, and this whole Dis! chord scene got more and more insular, more elitist, and it really became like a total joke. These people I grew up with, when I was in high school and my first few years of college, I just couldn't stand these people. These people were so elitist, so small-minded, and there was just no room for anything else in this town except for like Rites of Spring and Gray Matter and Fidelity Jones and all that shit. It really left a bad taste in my mouth.

And then Fugazi...MacKaye finally got another outfit together. I don't even mind Fugazi that much, but the whole concept of Fugazi just exploded, and DC really became a capital for non-rock'n'roll. So here are these people who I have to deal with on a daily basis that will not admit to owning a Black Sabbath record because that's just not cool. They never heard of a band like Sonic's Rendezvous or Radio Birdman, they never even bothered to check something like that out. All they know is that someone tells them, "Oh, you've got to go see Fugazi, then you'll see all these cool people." Either that or they'll tell them about some lame band like the Make*Up. This town was riddled with just the worst indie-pop, non-rock'n'roll, emo shit bands
you can imagine.

And so when I formed Adam West, this was a few years later, this was totally against the grain of what D.C. was all about. There was no band in this town that was doing a Radio Birdman cover, even knew who Radio Birdman was, or even knew who the Stooges were. Nobody.

K: And that's pretty much true a lot of places in the States. There's a lot of bands, there's a pretty big indie scene, but there aren't that many real rock'n'roll bands.

J: I think D.C. has the anti-rock stigma because of the kinda punk rock that grew out of here, because it was so world renowned, because of bands like Minor Threat and eventually Fugazi. This was like an "art-rock" or whatever you wanna call it...

K: Fugazi remains pretty influential.

J: But anyway, that's the D.C. scene. So we started out, and people couldn't believe that we were covering the Kinks and that kinda stuff. It was almost like, "You can't do this! Why aren't you trying to sound like Fugazi, like every other band in town?" And I was like, "Because I don't give a fuck about any other band in town." We really did stand alone. Now it's a little bit better. But it's funny, because I felt I was alone. I thought, "Am I the only one who feels this way?" Then when I started getting in touch with other bands, like-minded bands, this was maybe '95 and bands like Electric Frankenstein, Candy Snatchers, Nashville Pussy, all these bands were like, "Oh my god, we've never been able to play D.C., we've never been able to get
a gig there. We've sent demos and records and we're just ignored at the clubs. And everybody tells us there's no rock'n'roll in that town." So all these bands that were touring were not p! laying D.C. They're going from Richmond right to Baltimore, because D.C. has such a non-rock stigma.

And it was me, I have to say, that really started pulling in these bands after I became friends with them. Like, "Oh, I'll get you a gig, and there'll be people there, and you'll make two hundred bucks and you'll have plenty of beer to drink," and blah blah blah. I started doin' that, I started booking shows for these bands. I'm just so cool. (Laughs)

K: How many venues are there in D.C.?

J: The number one rock venue in America, according to Rolling Stone or Spin, is the 9:30 Club. The 9:30 Club used to be a fantastic underground rock'n'roll/punk rock club. All the great bands played there. We used to play there all the time, headline there. Then they moved and they took over this
giant music hall on the Howard University campus, and it became a concert venue, it was no longer a club. Now it's like Smashing Pumpkins played there. Once or twice a year at the most, they'll have a local band there. It's very, very hard to get booked in there, although it is probably the best club that any band's ever gonna play. They treat you like royalty, they've got a good sound system, the stage is just amazing. Totally top-notch professional.

There's another club called the Black Cat. Now this is the whole Dischord haven. It's owned by Dante Ferrando who was the drummer in Iron Cross and Gray Matter, and he is not the most open-minded or friendly person. He'll book his friends' bands and stuff like that, but he's very anti-rock'n'roll, in fact he even said to me once that he didn't wanna have any more rock'n'roll shows, he only wanted to have some of his friends' bands, swing bands, and ska, 'cos those were the only shows that ever made money. The place is really cavernous, it holds about five hundred people. We would play there and get two hundred people in there and it would still look kinda empty, because people were scattered, it's just gigantic, and Dante would
come out and take a look and he's just furious. He's like, "What are you doing to me? I was expecting five hundred people, I'm trying to pay the rent." I pretty much told him to fuck off, so I'm not exactly welcome at that club much.

And then there's a very small club called the Velvet Lounge, which is like a real hole in the wall, but I'm really good friends with the owner there and he lets Adam West play. The place holds about eighty people and we usually get about 120 people in there. It's a real hot and sweaty, crowded...I kind of equate it to the Cavern where the Beatles played. We really cultivated our thing there over the past couple years. I've been able to book other bands there and really pick the shows I want. The owner works with me a lot. He's really cool, he really likes the band. So I'm lucky in that respect.

K: It seems like you've gotten some pretty good local recognition, the Wammies (Washington Area Music Association awards)...

J: It's kinda surprising that in spite of all the anti-rock in this town, we've really kinda risen to the top. It's pretty cool winning the Wammie. I was totally surprised the first time we were nominated. First of all, the
Washington Area Music Association is made up of musicians, entertainment industry people that join this association. They're the only ones that can nominate and vote. And most of the people in WAMA are more concerned with folk music, it's mostly folk-oriented, it came out of a bunch of folksters that got together, Irish and Celtic and stuff, who really didn't know much about punk-rock and go-go, hip-hop, reggae, anything like that. These categories, especially hard rock, where we won...that category's only been around for a couple of years. They never really had this category five years ago. At any rate, we were nominated in '98, and we won, and I won for best vocalist, and then last year, we were nominate! d again for best band, and we won, but there was no vocalist category. Then this year they brought the vocalist category back, and I was nominated again for that. So who knows, maybe we'll win three times in a row!

K: Looking forward to hearing about that.

J: That could be pretty cool.

K: So going back to the Adam West saga, it seems like your sound changed a little bit when you changed guitar players. [Original guitarist Bill Crandall was replaced by Johnny Epiphone in late 1994. James Marlowe replaced Epiphone a year later and was in turn replaced by Derrick Baranowsky in late 1997. The current lineup has Kevin Hoffman and Steve on guitars and Johnny May on bass along with Jake and Tom Barrick.]

J: Sometimes I think it really is a different band, there's no doubt about it, even though there's a common thread - obviously me and my songwriting. I think the guitar player is one of the most obvious things you hear in our different lineups. Everybody plays guitar differently and writes differently. So, I dunno. I like everything we've done. Some of the earlier stuff like "Five the Hard Way" is lighter, it's poppier...I still think it's great; I still think it's well-crafted, even though it's not as hard as something like "Piece of Ass" or "Sizzleen." I still consider it the same band, even though they're different bands, if that makes sense.

K: When you perform, do you ever do any of the older material?

J: No. When I decided to keep Adam West going at the end of '94, when Bill Crandall quit, we kinda had an arrangement, because he and I wrote all those songs from '92 to '94. He kinda said, "You know, I'd really appreciate your not doing any of this." And I was like, "Yeah, I wanna start fresh anyway. But I'm gonna keep the name, 'cos the name's already established." And he was like, "Cool." I would call him up and say, "Listen, I wanna do 'I Get a Sensation' as an encore tonight" - this was when Epiphone was in the band - that was the only song we did, 'cos that was our first single and people knew that. Bill Crandall was cool with that, but he definitely said, "I never want you to re-record any of this stuff." That's something I would never do. It's funny, our sets these days...especially since Kevin's in the band, since August I guess, in our last lineup change...our sets are even more contemporary than they usually are. We're not doing anything off "Mondo Royale" or before. That was our CD from '97, with James Marlowe on guitar. We don't do anything off that, especially nothing before that, and we only do a couple of songs off "13 Deluxe." Most of our set is new songs; we have four or five brand new ones that are gonna be on our next record, and we have some of the singles and "Hi-Ball" [from "Hi-Balls Are Rolling!"], that kinda stuff. Coupla covers. We're gonna record "I Stole Your Love" by Kiss, we're doing that as an encore.

Actually, next week, we're going down to Virginia to record with Steve Baise of the Devil Dogs. We're doing three songs. We're gonna be on a Dead Boys tribute; we're doing "Down in Flames" for that. We're gonna do a single, I think Steve's gonna get it released on Sympathy for the Record Industry (he's really good friends with Long Gone John). We're doing an original, one of my songs, called "Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail."

K: (Laughs)

J: Are you familiar with Charles Bukowski at all? He's one of my favorites. That is the name of his first book of poetry from 1960. It's never been reprinted or re-released or anything, and I've always loved that title, so I wrote a song about it. And the B-side's gonna be a Steve Baise song, we're gonna do one of his, a brand new one he wrote for me! It's called "Beltway To My Heart (Beltway To the Starr)." I told Steve, "Well, if we come down there, we should record one of yours," and so Kevin and I, we're the ones who are really into the Devil Dogs, we start culling through the Devil Dogs records, trying to think of what song we're gonna cover, and [Baise]'s like, "Fuck that, I'm gonna write a song for you!" So he wrote a song for us, which gives us even more incentive to get it released. This is the first brand-new material we're gonna record...when we recorded with Kevin, it was all covers...some compilation appearances ! we were obligated to do, we had ta get that shit done.

K: What's Baise doing these days?

J: Well, he moved down to Norfolk, Virginia, with his girlfriend, and they have a house, and he does carpentry and things like that. Music-wise, he has a band called Stevie and the Secrets; they've released one 7-inch on Sympathy. It's awesome; you gotta see if you can find it. It's very hard to find. I think Long Gone John did a thousand and they sold out immediately. Steve plays guitar and sings, Larry May from the Candy Snatchers plays guitar, Steve's girlfriend Kim plays bass, and Collen Coates, who is one of
the Candy Snatchers' former drummers, plays drums. I helped them come up to D.C. to play a show, and we just had a blast. They were great. I don't know what the lineup is now, I think Larry may have left the band, but that's pretty much what Baise is doing. He bought a studio down there in Norfolk, and when his friends' bands come down, he's producing and trying to help out. He's one of the most awesome guys around.

ON TO PART TWO

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