HARVEY MILK
Loud-Pleasers
By: John Gnesin
Since releasing the Singles collection in 2003, interest in the ultra-obscure indie sludge unit known as HARVEY MILK has been soaring. Not only has the band re-formed to release their first new material in years, but the group has also seen the release of the lost Kelly Sessions as well. Relapse now proudly (re)presents the first and final albums of HARVEY MILK, the early years, in the form of My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be and The Pleaser. We caught up with drummer Kyle Spence to glean some insight on the early days and the end days of the first phase of this influential band’s career.
Resound: While you weren't a founding member of the group, your performance on their last officially released full-length album in 1997 means that you did get to make an important contribution to the Harvey Milk sound. What were the circumstances of and your personal reasons for joining the band and what do you think you brought to the table that wasn't there before?
Kyle Spence: “I moved to Athens from Atlanta in 1994 and saw HARVEY MILK play during my first week living in the ‘classic city’. Over the next couple of years I got to know them, Stephen especially, because we worked at the same restaurant; a trendy vegetarian restaurant no less. We used to drive the waitresses crazy because we’d listen to JUDAS PRIEST and AC/DC all day instead of SON VOLT. Go figure. At this point I’d be hanging out whenever they were recording so I ended up remixing a single for them and helped record My Love… with David Barbe and Brooks Carter (of BANDWAY fame) and then Courtesy… with Andy Baker. When Paul decided to leave, Stephen asked me if I’d play with them. I can’t remember why Paul left but it was on good terms. I think he wanted to try to be normal for awhile. As far as bringing something different to the table, I played really loud. I had an acrylic Fibes kit made for me that was so loud that Creston and Stephen had to get louder amps (and more of them) to play through. It was cool because you couldn’t ignore us when we played. It wasn’t like somebody would watch us play and then decide halfway through the set that they would rather talk to their buddies. They would have to leave right away if they weren’t into it because of the volume. If you add that to a four song, forty-five minute set (Live @ TT the Bears) it wasn’t your usual rock show. Some people would just bail immediately. That was always fun. Then the people that were still there at the end of the set had just seen their new favorite band so it all kind of worked out.”
Resound: I think I find myself most impressed with drummers in bands that are either really hyper-fast or agonizingly slow. HARVEY MILK was often the latter, especially on My Love.... How counterintuitive or frustrating was it for you to learn to play these songs in terms of the stretched-out rhythmic phrasings and abstract meters?
Spence: “Yeah, HARVEY MILK was slow. Real slow. Paul Trudeau played on both My Love… and Courtesy… and he made it look so easy that I figured it was. I was mistaken. It’s hard to do that, to play together as a band when you to wait forever until the next beat comes around. I was 21 when I joined the band and I was used to overplaying: it took a lot of practicing with Creston and Stephen for me to try and leave as much space as possible. Creston helped immensely; he’s a drummer as well and had studied percussion in college. He writes a lot of things on staff paper without a guitar in sight. I had taken drum lessons when I was a kid so we could talk about note values and meters and time signatures and those kinds of things. You might think that none of that stuff would matter for a song like ‘Pinocchio’s Example’ or ‘FSTP’ because certain things seem almost random at times, but it’s all in there (and on paper).”
Resound: While parts of the HARVEY MILK sound may certainly be compared to certain predecessors, the sound and vibe as a whole was purely unique. If My Love… was the beginning of an era, then The Pleaser was certainly the end of it. While not lacking a few experimental flourishes, the latter album seems almost a rebellion against everything the band originally went for sonically. What was the impetus behind writing the material that ended up as The Pleaser? Was it a logical conclusion to cap off a sequence of such illogical music with an album of songs that were totally catchy and accessible? Was the title a play on the idea of the ‘crowd-pleaser’ with the added irony that by writing ‘crowd-pleasing’ songs you might not please your particular crowd?
Spence: “Well, to me, The Pleaser has the most in common with My Love… in the HARVEY MILK discography so I’m glad to see them being reissued at the same time. Both records are basically, at heart, recordings of HARVEY MILK’s live set during their respective times. You’ll get the added bonus of hearing a radio show we did on tour that fall. There’s really not that much difference between the two, which I guess proves my point.”
“The Pleaser is a departure from the older sound, definitely. It’s cool because it sort of stands on it’s own but is really the logical extension of what we were doing already. Consider what was going on in indie rock during that time (1996-98). Post-rock like TORTOISE and STEREOLAB was everywhere. The worst shit ever and people just ate it up. Then, to add insult to injury, Athens was the home of this ‘twee-pop’ shit like OF MONTREAL. There was even a label called Kindercore (also Athens-based) that would shovel this dung on the unsuspecting masses. You tried to ignore this stuff but it was hard. We would play with some cool bands on tour every now and then that would make it seem like all was not lost (ZEN GUERILLA comes to mind) but it just got to the point where there was this big black hole out there.”
“We were also getting bored with playing so slow. It seemed like we had taken it about as far as we could at the time. The change pretty much happened overnight; we recorded a song called ‘Red as the Day Is Long’ and then that was about it for the old school. We started working on songs that were influenced by what we actually listened to: ZZ TOP, THE WHO, ZEPPELIN, KISS, HUMBLE PIE, & AEROSMITH. I know how lame that sounds but we had a secret weapon - Creston. Stephen and I would ask him to write a song like ‘Oh Well’ and he’d come in the next night with ‘Shame”’ fully written. We’d ask him for a slow blues and he’d turn up with ‘Lay My Head Down’. It was like being a kid in a candy store for me because, as much as I loved the slow stuff; not being able to let loose on the drums felt like being in a cage. Playing these songs came much more naturally to me and we gelled as a band the way we hadn’t quite been able to when I was playing the older stuff with them.”
“We set our sights pretty high as far as playing went. We wanted to be the tightest band - we practiced so much that we could not fuck up. Our only goal was to destroy your band completely before you even had a chance to set up your gear. We preferred opening slots because it just made it that much easier for us. One of the great pleasures in my life has been playing HARVEY MILK shows where people were only familiar with the slower material. You just could not believe the looks on people’s faces when we’d start to play. At first they would be totally confused. Is this a joke? Is it even the same band? Then, as the onslaught continued, they would just stare at us, not moving, slack-jawed and bewildered. Finally, fists were raised and our job was complete. Although it seems like playing that stuff would alienate our fans that never happened. It was different, yeah, but it was still HARVEY MILK. Actually, far more people would show up to see us during the latter period. I guess it was even more of a freak show than before.”
“The Pleaser is named after a particular finger on one of Dusty Hill’s hands, not as a dig against how hard it is for people to grasp ‘difficult’ music, forcing us to make a ‘stupid’ rock album. HARVEY MILK is not ironic. The Pleaser is not a satire, it is not sarcastic, it is not a joke. To us, irony was a big part of the problems in music that we were trying to distance ourselves from. To me, the only irony in The Pleaser is that most people have had to wait 11 years to hear it.”
HARVEY MILK’s first album, My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be and the final album of their first era, The Pleaser have been reissued and are available now from Relapse Mail-order.
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