adrian varnam

Originally published in encore magazine on April 14th, 2010.

For over 25 years, few in music have associated being from the South more than the band Southern Culture On the Skids (SCOTS). As their name would suggest, SCOTS has made a career out of highlighting the seedier, campier and more outrageous aspects of life south of the Mason-Dixon Line, thanks to their unique brand of rockabilly/surf/country-fried rock ‘n’ roll. Now seemingly busier than ever with touring, a new record coming out this year, and upgrading their back catalog of albums and merchandise, SCOTS is once again positioning themselves to be the standard-bearer for all things bee-hived, lacquered and plastic-covered.

Recently, I spoke with frontman Rick Miller, via phone, during his band’s week-long annual residency at the Continental Club In Austin, Texas.

encore: What have Southern Culture on the Skids been up to lately?
Rick Miller: We’re doing a week’s worth of shows in Austin at the moment; we’re putting the finishing touches on our new record; we’ve got a new Web site coming; we’ve reissued Too Much Pork for Just One Fork, which has been out of print since 1992 or so. We’ve started re-issuing old Fuel-classic T-shirt designs, and we’ve got new T-shirt designs, so we’ve been busy.

We’re just doing our own thing now— we’re not working with Yep Roc [Records] anymore as our label. We’re just like a lot of other bands: We feel like it’s a better business move to try and do it on our own. We have a good established fanbase, so we’re just working toward that, and it should start to all fall together here pretty soon—we’ve been working at it a long time.

e: What makes that the right decision to be independent now as opposed to several years ago?
RM: I just think the Internet has come a long way. I mean, the music business has deteriorated as the Internet, and other ways of delivering product and publicity have grown. I think more and more bands are just taking care of things themselves. If you can sell 25,000 units, and you only make a couple bucks off each one, or you could sell 5,000 of them yourself and make 80 percent profit, why would you use a label? Even young bands are using the Internet to start their career instead of going the traditional route with an independent label and moving up to a major. You just don’t see that as much anymore. And I see that on the studio side of it, too, because I run a studio. No one has a budget; no one has any money. Even the recording is going into people’s living rooms—not that I’m saying that necessarily makes for a good-sounding record. But the do-it-yourself approach has just become so much more feasible.

e: Is SCOTS’ new material in the same vein of the music you’ve made your career on?
RM: Some of it is. [Bassist ]Mary [Huff] has got three originals on the record, which is new for us. And the sound of the record is kind of all over the place. Our records have always had a few different types of genres on it, I guess, you could say, and it’s kind of the same way with this one. We’ve got some songs about just kind-of living in North Carolina and the Southeast that I think a lot of people can identify with. One of ‘em is called “My Neighbor Burns Trash”—you know, the usual.

Then we have some very interesting stuff in a minor key, almost—I don’t know if you’d call it “psychedelic”—and a couple good instrumentals. Not necessarily “surf” but moody things. Just things like that. I think it’s all really good, but it’s hard to tell right now when you’re just finishing something.

e: Do you ever go back to old records and say, “Wow, that was a really good record?”
RM: Yeah, in hindsight, sure. I still really think Dirt Track Date was a really good record, and I really like the one before that, Ditch Diggin’. It has some really nice minimalist stuff on it. But we go back all the time, and take old songs we like and add it to our repertoire.

Since reissuing Too Much Pork for Just One Fork, we’ve pulled out and played some songs we haven’t played in 20 years, you know? So, it’s fun. It’s fun to go back, and relive those and play a lot of them better than when we recorded them.

e: So how do those songs about North Carolina translate when you play them outside of the Southeast?
RM: Pretty good, because so much of the Southern mystique and mythology is so much a part of literature, music, movies, you name it. Most people everywhere have some understanding of Southern culture—or however you want to put it.

Like the song “My Neighbor Burns Trash” is about a neighbor that I had who was a Holy Roller, and she just burned trash all the time. It was really strange. And the song itself became as much about tolerance as any thing else. So, some of the songs translate on other levels outside of just being Southern.

e: How do you, as a songwriter, manage to take a strange story like that and work it into a cohesive song?
RM: Well, it takes a lot of work. And it’s really all about editing, because you can sit down and just write 15 or 20 verses—just writing it down, writing it down. You don’t really worry too much about rhyming or anything. For me it’s more about capturing a feel or a visual thing or a character. The hard part is editing it and making it concise. I think that’s what takes time to get a song right.

You hear some songwriters say, “I wrote that in 15 minutes on a sheet of toilet paper while I was sitting in a bathroom somewhere.” That does happen occasionally, I guess, but not that often. Most of the time you have to be working on a pretty steady basis to even think that something like that could happen.

e: How do you navigate that fine line between characterization and making fun of someone?
RM: I just think you have to care about what you’re writing about, you know? You don’t just see it as satire, you actually care about it and you know about it. I think you look for stuff like that: the character-driven songs where you can actually get inside them. That, and I love banana pudding.

e: Do people around the country, outside of the South understand that? That it’s satire, but you do love these people because that’s where you come from?
RM: I think so because it comes across in our delivery of the music. It’s not aggressive; we’re not flying the Confederate flag or anything like that. It’s about genuine things that are interesting about the South. No place has the identity that the South has, and so many interesting things came from here. Some of those things may have sprung from things that weren’t so good, but nevertheless, they’re interesting. I enjoy the people from the Southeast, I enjoy being from the Southeast, and I think that comes across live and in all that we do.

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