Dark Meat

The Most Organized Chaos You Ever Heard

Written by Julia Reidy

Photos by Ryan Purcell (Oh Snap! Kid) and Mike White (Deadly Designs)

Ben Clack’s oversized eyeglasses reflect the light from the street as he sips his Schlitz at a table in the empty theater. The Dark Meat bassist gestures at the chaos outside. It’s unexpectedly the day of the spring football scrimmage in Athens, Ga., and inebriated (or at least enthusiastic) college kids clad all in red stumble by on the sidewalk. Clack and frontman Jim McHugh glance up disinterestedly from time to time, but turn rather soberly away from the window. They’re here to talk about their own brand of chaos, an infamous shape-shifting musical collective that is a completely different variety of social experiment and one of Vice Records’ newest signees. It’s a project that’s taken them on the road over and over again, wreaking havoc in clubs around the country and on the eardrums of their lucky listeners; they’ve started fires in venue corners and butted heads with bouncers, all while performing delicately-named songs like “Well Fuck You Then” and “Assholes Of Eyeballs.” Even if one considers the numbers by themselves, forgetting about the spectacularly schizophrenic live shows and broad-scope recordings, Dark Meat is a force to be contended with. The band\ contains at least 12 members at all times - sometimes many more, almost all of whom are in other Athens musical groups - and commitment seems the only way to keep an operation like this running. Luckily, Dark Meat has got plenty of it.

McHugh, the band’s lead singer and guitarist, has a sly smile, long hair and speaks clearly and deliberately. He uses words like “insurmountable” and “dilettante” when he describes the attitudes surrounding the herding of at least a dozen people into and around the lyrics he writes. He compliments the musical multitudes encountered in Athens for their dedication and abilities. “It’s less of a testament to our charisma or talent as it is to Athens being full of really open people,” he says, “all of whom are complete musical badasses.”

Clack and McHugh went to college together in North Carolina, but, inspired by the reputation for musical virtuosity, decided to move to Athens to pursue their art. The band itself began, if only for a couple of practices, as a Neil Young cover act that, in Clack’s words, “started to suck really hard.”

Soon, it took on a new incarnation as the group started experimenting, delving into the areas,” Clack recalls. “He taught me a lot about music and I feel like I pushed us in these performance art areas, in ways that I think a lot of people who are traditional musicians would never think to try to do.” As the group grew, it took on informal, nebulous subsections; they call themselves Dark Meat, but al sutilize the monikers “Vomit Lasers Family Band” and “Galaxy.”

“The reason we have ‘Galaxy’ in our name is because every man’s a planet, sort of,” says Clack. He encourages complete expressive freedom and independence within the fluctuating collective, one in which the members gravitate toward each other. “This is not a band of five people where we have a horn section,” he reiterates. “We’re a band of 12 people. Musically, everyone’s equally important in the core of what’s going on. The way we’re able to maintain a group this large is through that.” As so much of Dark Meat’s material centers around improvisation, a lot of trust falls to every musician individually.

People in Dark Meat, then, play anything they can think of guitar, bass and drums (two full kits), of course, but also trumpet, trombone, saxophone, piccolo, washboard, sitar and whatever else they feel like. They begin shows with nonsensical audience addresses (“We’re going to play some songs, 75 percent of which are in the key of A,” or “We’re the Partridge family from Palo Alto, California”), wear silly costumes and use projection screens blanketed in psychedelia and the occasional curse word. They have a color guard in sparkly cheerleader uniforms and a corps of backup singers and tambourine players. A plastic foot-long sub sandwich clamps around McHugh’s mic stand as they throw those little rubber balls you get from supermarket gumball machines into the crowd, members of which then reciprocate accordingly; more than a few people get pegged in the forehead.

This is no average concert-going experience. “It’s just about being as expressive as possible,” McHugh explains, adding, “If that takes you away from the charted course, then fine - if it’s musical, behavioral or attitudinal.” Dark Meat accepts all ideas; the weirdness evolved naturally. “We were never like, ‘You have to put on a silly mask or something,’” he says. “Be yourself with it. Know that you can do this and it’s cool.”

The tiny army released its debut LP, Universal Indians, in 2006 on Orange Twin Records, the Athens label owned by members of Elf Power, who are also members of Dark Meat. It’s a collection of brass- and saxophone-heavy, rollicking southern rock wailers, featuring everything from sweet gospel interludes and jazzy waltzes to hollered choruses and complete structural breakdowns, all the parts clattering into screeching cacophony. It sounds like either the biggest jazz band or the littlest marching band you’ve ever heard, complete with bird recordings, hand percussion and assorted silliness (“Oh no!” someone laments over the saxophone and arrhythmic drumming, “The flowers disintegrated”).

These recordings are old. They were made when the band was still fledgling, and operate better as a history lesson than a reflection of where the group currently stands. “We weren’t even really a band that was forged by fire yet,” says McHugh. “It was more of a project when we started recording the songs. I stand by that record, because it’s a really accurate document of where we were.”

Upon signing with Vice, a deal that developed after the band met the company’s vice president at last year’s CMJ, Universal Indians got an April reissue. That means bonus tracks and wider distribution channels. It also means a national tour following the release under the umbrella of better publicity. With so many members, mounting a tour doesn’t come easy. No one understands this better than Dark Meat themselves, who reserve their most organized efforts for the logistics needed to play live.

For the band’s first two years of existence, Clack presided over the booking. He and everyone else made sure they were where they needed to be without fail. “That’s one thing you can’t be anarchic about,” says McHugh. “We wouldn’t be here if we were anarchic about it.” Sure, they encounter problems on the road. And yes, they have to worry about a lot of people. From the beginning, the members of the ever-shifting band took on responsibility as a group and looked after each other. “This is probably our eighth or ninth tour,” Clack says. “It’s pretty deeply personal as far as our interactions. We’re really protective of each other and really close.” McHugh adds that a group like his can’t maintain any kind of detachment or anonymity amongst themselves, especially when they share a 26,000 lb. bus (they recently graduated from 15-passenger van and trailer). “We live with them in an enormous metal tube for a quarter of the year,” he says of his bandmates. It’s one big happy family.

Which isn’t to say Dark Meat remains organized and well behaved once they’re actually in front of an audience. “It took us about three shows to get the reputation for being completely insane,” McHugh chuckles as he relates a recent Boston performance that nearly got violent. “Or for being dangerous to have in a space,” he adds, almost apologetically. “We’ve all worked in clubs before. We don’t set out to do that, but it just happens.”

Personnel for the average Dark Meat tour includes about 12 “road dogs,” along with whatever other musicians are up for the journey or can meet the band at stops along the way. The best response Clack or McHugh can give to the direct question “How many people are in your band right now?” is a matter of- fact, “It’s floating.” The one thing they know for sure is that before the tour, they don’t know for sure. They express confidence that even the filmmakers accompanying them in the spring would end up playing something on stage before the end. “Several other members, depending on what part of the country we’re in, they’ll be appearing with us,” Clack explains. “And there’s a whole honest chunk of people that do stuff, like B.P. Helium does Of Montreal, so he tours some of the time. Heather McIntosh [of The Instruments] is the cello player with Gnarls Barkley. When we play in town, you never know who exactly is going to be there, it’s weird.”

This uncertainty, however, doesn’t unsettle them.

“People come in and out of our band, like John Fernandes [of Circulatory System and Elf Power], who is just an unparalleled musician,” says Clack. “We won’t get with him for a month and then he’ll come on stage, and he’ll be tighter than all of us. I guess we’ve just sort of sifted through, chemistry wise, who works best with travel.”

“In some way,” says McHugh, “it’s just sort of schematic Darwinism or something, because the people who have their shit together and can survive on tour are the people who show up to tour. Those who are too broke, too involved with other things musically or otherwise, they’re not going to be there.”

For a band that’s so determinedly chaotic and laissez-faire about its music and its visual image, the members are startlingly clearheaded when it comes to their business goals and the way music should be released. This attracted the band to its new label, which McHugh credits with having “really astute ideas about what’s going on with the music industry.” He talks about their agreement on the value of CDs and digital downloads versus the art object and what people are willing to purchase.

“Our band, if anything, is the human embodiment of the ornate art object,” he postulates. “And that’s why our record is coming out on double LP as a gate-fold with huge full-color pictures, because they know people aren’t necessarily into the product anymore. It’s obsolete. What they’re into is the experience and the notion that they’re taking something with them that’s representative of what they just experienced. So when you leave our show and you’re covered in my drool and his sweat, and a bunch of confetti and face paint, the record is different than a downloadable piece of data or a jewel case that’s going to get broken.”

Clack stresses that the move to a new label had to be a significant step up, business-wise, because the band’s partnership with Orange Twin was so happy. “One thing that attracted me to Vice is that they were interested in the culture shock,” he says. Atlanta’s Black Lips also signed with Vice recently, and they still partner with the Die Slaughterhaus label, cites Clack. “All these things culturally inform what the bands that are on the label are.”

One gets the sense that Dark Meat’s culture of chaos will hold solid for quite a while, whatever the public as a whole might think. McHugh muses about what their strange collection of free spirits must look like to an innocent bystander. Imagine a dozen-and-a half or so oddly dressed people piling out of a tour bus, looking to expel energy after hours and hours on the road. “I’ll have these meta moments where we’ll all walk into a gas station in Beaver Tail, Idaho or something,” says McHugh, “And I’ll just see the looks on people’s faces, and I’m like, ‘I guess this is pretty out there.’ But we live hermetically sealed in our own neurotic imaginations. What we’re used to is completely more out there than anyone else.”

www.myspace.com/darkmeats

JULY

30 JULY 2008 Southeast Performer