INTERVIEW: THE NUDE PARTY’S PATTON MAGEE 

By Luke Dumpert

Patton Magee is the front man to the nationally acclaimed group, The Nude Party. I got to catch up with him ahead of The Nude Party’s show at George’s Majestic where we talked about the state of commercial radio, the Velvet Underground, and their latest record, “Rides On.”

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Luke Dumpert: How’s the tour going so far?

Patton Magee: It’s going good, man. Just got to Tucson, Arizona. I think it’s like three weeks on, all the way from New York to California; we had a week in L.A. and now we’re in Tucson. The water smells like sulfur, and we were blasted with Shakira out the window until like 3:45 in the morning.

LD: What are some of your favorite cities to play in?

PM: I feel like I find myself having a better and better time everywhere we go. I feel like my preconceptions kind of diminish every time.

LD: So according to your Rolling Stone interview, the band kind of came about during your time at Appalachian State University. How was the local music scene when you started playing shows? 

PM: It was a lot of house shows going on, like house parties and DIY stuff. There’s no Greek life really out there and not a ton of apartments. So, a lot of people had houses and a lot of people would throw shows at their houses. There were a few small bars in town that would have shows like Black Cat Burrito, like Boone Saloon and stuff. There was a lot of music and there were a lot of bands forming and just doing shows. I don’t think there was any cohesive sound to it.

LD: I also read that there was a college radio station in Boone [North Carolina], did you or the band ever work with them or have any relationship with them?

PM: I was in the communications college, like the radio and broadcasting school. So, I was in there fairly often and, you know, did some guest DJ stuff. I always thought it was a pretty whack station. Their whole thing is trying to make a non-com feel as much like a com station as possible so that students can get first-hand experience essentially working for a commercial radio station. And commercial radio stations are so whack these days and there’s so little creativity or any personal direction you can do with them that the school just kind of showed you how life-sucking commercial radio is. So, I guess it was successful at that. Every time we do radio interviews or on-airs with radio stations, it’s always non-com stations because those are the only ones that have life left in them, really. I mean, I’m sure you guys are non-com, aren’t you?

LD: Yeah, there’s a cool freedom about it, like our big rule is no top 40 Billboard hits.

PM: And iHeart’s big rule is only top 40. They’ve got one program director per four stations. Even that person doesn’t do anything, really. They just kind of babysit the algorithm.
 

LD: Has Appalachian music or culture influenced not just the band but your personal sound at all?

PM: Like bluegrass and banjo stuff? I definitely heard a lot of it; there were a lot of kids that played it and there were a lot of, you know, little folk festivals and things like that. I don’t think bluegrass ever gripped me particularly much or terribly interested me except for that we did play a festival outside of Boone called Merlefest in Wilkesboro. Doc Watson named it after his son. In the lobby of the hotel that we stayed in after the festival, all through the night for like five hours was all these old timers and folk players just jamming in the lobby and was kind of being led by Peter Rowan, he had a band with Jerry Garcia called Old & In the Way and he wrote, “Lonesome LA Cowboy,” [performed by New Riders of the Purple Sage]; Emmylou Harris was there. I think that was the first time that I really felt like I actually understood [bluegrass], was that like five-hour hotel lobby jam with Peter Rowan.

LD: What is your favorite guitar / equipment to use whether it’s in the studio or on tour?

PM: Well, you know it switches around. I’ll really like using something for a while and then sometimes I’ll just switch to a different guitar or start turning on the Wah or I’ll start using the phaser just because I get bored with the repetition. So right now, I’m really getting into this Rickenbacker 335. I love the Rickenbacker and a phaser. It’s cool because I like either a light phaser to kind of give a soft country thing to it or you could really like dial the phaser up and make it sound kind of insane as a lead tone. The Rickenbacker, the phaser and sometimes the Wah but you got to be careful with the Wah; you don’t want to do that modern white boy funk thing.

PM: I mean there’s a whole basket of things we like especially when we go to make a new record. I think earlier on we were more influenced and more interested in those influences that we felt were really cool and a little bit more eclectic, like I absolutely love the Velvet Underground. But it’s interesting because as time goes on, and we write more music and we make more albums, the more we like. We’ve been working on writing this new record and we’ll do some stuff that’s kind of like Jimmy Buffett where previously we would have shied away from something like that, but I think as time’s gone down, we’ve really kind of erased a lot of our pretensions. And like, I love Jimmy Buffet. We don’t need to avoid using a Jimmy Buffett Casio [keyboard] tone. I think that the bag of influences has gone from being more pretentiously eclectic to just more openly liking what we actually like.

LD: I know the VU plays a big influence on you. What aspect of their music is such a driving force behind the influence?

PM: I mean they’ve got three types of songs. They’ve got the songs that are like a jam, it’s always just like a four on the floor like “Waiting for My Man.” Those are the songs that just get stuck in your head and they’re like simple, but they repeat. The lyrics are clever, they fit together and they just ride. They’ve also got like those kind of sweet lullaby ones that are really soft like “Sunday Morning,” or like “I’m Sticking with You.” The third kind that they’ve got is the one that are more like John Cale influenced, that go into avant-garde world where the rhythm section will be keeping four on the floor and the guitar will go absolutely insane and just go so far off and out of key, out of rhythm, out of melody and just goes total insane world like “Sister Ray.” That alone would be impossible to listen to but because it’s got this rhythm section stuck behind it, half your brain connects to this steady simple rhythm and then the other half of your brain is trying to make sense of this insane, otherworldly guitar thing. The experience that I always get from the steady thing and the insane thing is that my brain can’t quite put it together and I feel really peaceful somehow, like this middle ground between those things. I really like that, and I’ve always wanted to do something that could produce the same effect that I like feeling from listening to “Sister Ray.”

LD: Would you say Sister Ray is your favorite Velvet Underground song?

PM: No, it depends. I think of music as it’s just a soundtrack to experience. But you know I’ve listened to the hell out of everything they’ve ever done.

LD: Alright, so then I have to ask what you think of “Squeeze” [by the Velvet Underground]?

PM: Ha, this is a good topic. Catfish [DeLorme] swears by it and loves it. I think it’s insane to think that Doug Yule could make a Velvet Underground album without it sounding like a tribute album or something. There’s cool stuff too, like the sounds are cool and the song ideas aren’t bad, it somehow just doesn’t land. It’s not horrible; I listen to it and the songs are almost there in the Velvet Underground world and Doug Yule sounds just like Lou Reed. There are songs that Doug sings on “Loaded,” that I thought was Lou. It somehow feels almost like Waluigi developed a Velvet Underground record and Mario wasn’t involved.

LD: That’s a really great way of putting it.

Your latest record, “Rides On” offers an honest blend of classic rock, blues, and psychedelia. Were there any palpable feelings of, “we really have something here,” during the writing or recording process?

PM: Yeah, I think the song [Ride On] itself was immediately everybody’s favorite and felt like the anthem of the record. I mean we liked it so much we didn’t have a name for the record, so we just named the record after that song. I think there were moments during recording where you could feel something special really happening. When we did the kind of acoustic stomping one, “Tree of Love,” that one wasn’t even on the slate to record. It was just something I had written like a week before because my girlfriend, at the time, came to me and was like, “Can you just write a song like right now?”. I was trying to show off as best as I could, so I just kind of wrote that one on the spot and had it in my head. We had braked for lunch, and I came back first so I was sitting there with the engineer just playing it on the guitar; it’s real simple. Then Catfish [DeLorme] came back in, and he started playing to it and then Matt [Horner], not knowing it wasn’t slated, just started setting up for it. Because it wasn’t slated, we didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, so we didn’t even set up the drum kit and just flipped over a tom upside down and the kick drum upside down with like a bunch of blankets on it. We just kind of recorded it with everybody live in the room, just kind of like hitting stuff. I told everybody what the arrangement was in the chords as we went. It only took an hour or something to cut that one and then moved past it. It’s one of my favorites on there because it sounds weird for having no drum kit and being this live, impromptu thing but those moments are always really cool when you’re in the studio with something maybe half-finished or half formed or even something people are less excited about, and it undergoes some transformation on the spot. When you get that unlocked moment in the recording process, it’s really special because I think often times it happens in the writing room, then you figure it out and you bring it to the studio and transcribe it but when the alchemy happens with the microphones running it is always a really magical feeling that doesn’t happen all the time.

LD: Was Rides On recorded live to tape like your second record, Midnight Manor?

PM: I don’t think we did right on to tape. We brought in a reel-to-reel and used a Studer tape machine as a preamp, but I don’t think that we were like spinning a reel back and forth. I think we got annoyed from the tape thing; the tape became too annoying to deal with. It didn’t seem that it was sonically that important and a Studer is so transparent anyway. The intention when they built them was to be totally transparent, which it can’t be entirely, but if you get a transparent and high-end enough half inch tape machine it doesn’t do that much. The tape sound and the hiss, punch, and stuff I think mostly comes from running high into like a quarter inch tape. Some nerd will surely disagree with me.

LD: What was it like self-producing an album? Did it give you more freedom to say, “let’s try this.”?

PM: Yeah, I mean there’s so much more freedom with this one because we self-produced it. The reason we self-produced it was because we had built a studio in tandem with Oakley Munson, our friend who produced the first two records; so we had way more time, space and freedom to just run through ideas, find sounds and try to think of different ways to make the record. Previously, we’d been given a shoestring budget to go into a professional studio, try to knock out a bunch of pre-production and demo everything out to then have a short amount of time to go into a professional studio and just do it all again, which is how we did the first two albums. It is a method that has its pros but to actually have a lot more time because we weren’t paying for studio time and just having our own space where we could mess with things, change things and run-down different ideas made for a very different record experience.