GEORGIA SATELLITES

GEORGIA SATELLITES

FIRE THE RETRO ROCKETS

"CREEM was always my favorite magazine when I was a kid,” Rick Richards is saying, dreams of Boy Howdy running through his mind. ‘‘I remember when Lester Bangs and Lou Reed were described as two one-legged men having an ass-kicking contest. They were arguing about Metal Machine Music. I listened to Metal Machine Music three or four times. I guess I deserve a gold record for that.” Or platinum. Or a white coat with no laces.

by

Jeff Tamarkin

But so much for nostalgia. Rick Richards and his band, the Georgia Satellites, don’t have much time for that right now. No looking backwards when your own gold record might be just around the next backstage corner. But that’ll have to wait until Dan Baird, the other guitarist and founder of the Georgia Satellites, finishes a little reminiscing of his own.

“The weirdest gig we ever had, that had to be in Wilmington, North Carolina, or maybe it was Wrightsville Beach. A place called the Wits End. It had a tin roof, it was a Tuesday night and half our P.A. was blown up. There were just two guys there playing bumper pool and every time we’d finish a song they’d just glare at us. It was like, ‘Will you please fucking quit?’

“But there was another terrible one where we opened up for Three Dog Night, playing to all older women in stretch pants.”

“And don’t forget the gay country club we played,” throws in Richards. “At first we weren’t too sure, but when we walked in and saw they had 42 imported beers, a George Wallace poster on the wall and played Leadbelly, Led Zeppelin and ‘Fly, Robin, Fly,’ we said this is our kind of place. We ended up playing there with eight different lineups.”

That is to say, eight out of at least a dozen the Satellites have been through since they formed in 1980. Now they think they’ve got it; bassist Rick Prince (exBrains) and drummer Mauro Magellan have managed to last long enough to make the Georgia Satellites LP and finish a tour opening for Jason & The Scorchers, so this is about as official as a Georgia Satellites lineup gets.

They did once hire a piano player briefly, but quickly saw the error of their ways, and you’ll never hear a synthesizer in this band. “Those things are gonna be laughed at in 50 years,” says Baird with certainty. “Just like in the ’20s there were hundreds of thousands of mandolins sold and then they were laughed at. Now these synth players with their tikki-tikki boxes and that whole Euro-gloom sound, it’s all gonna be laughed at the way Frankie Avalon is laughed at. They ain’t gonna be able to wipe anybody’s ass with that stuff in 10 years. Some of these bands are so obviously overnight fabrications. You wonder how far off the Monkees were, a band put together for reasons of success. But I’d rather deal with Davy Jones than George Michael.”

“Yeah, I haven’t been the same since Wham! broke up,” cries Richards. So give these guys guitars. Lots of ’em. Big, fat, crunchy guitars. Like in the bands they idolize: Bad Company, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, the Faces, Zeppelin, Exile-era Stones (is it an accident that they have a guitarist named Richards?). Did I hear someone say ’70s revival?

“Even when they weren’t hip to like I liked Bad Company,” admits Baird. “When they’d come on the radio and none of my friends were around, that thing would go up.”

“As far as guitar bands, Aerosmith has always been one of my favorites,” adds Richards.

“And AC/DC,” continues Baird. “A year ago you couldn’t get me to listen to Powerage, but right now, I’ll tell you, that record stands out. All those people who say they can’t listen to old music because it’s square, they’re full of shit. You’ve got to listen to it because it’s there to draw from. New music is so silly; there’s no new notes, no new chords, no new lyrics. All you’ve got are some guys trying to do what the Velvet Underground did, and that’s 20 years old. Gimme a break! When I wrote the song The Myth Of Love’ on our album, I wrote it after listening to the Velvets, but I wrote it thinking what would it sound like if you had Lou Reed writing for Bad Company?”

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The Satellites shrug off the roots-rock term that has been applied to other American bands drawing from themes and forms out of the past. While their own roots do include those ’70s AOR heroes, Baird and Richards also name the Beatles, Stones and Yardbirds, and R&B singers like Otis Redding, James Brown, Don Covay and Mary Wells as artists holding season tickets in their musical minds, but they don’t see themselves as retro-rockers.

“The roots aren’t everything,” says Baird. “Because what’s been going on in the past few years is important too. You don’t place more importance on one or the other. Little Richard, John Lennon, Lou Reed and John Lydon are all on the same line as far as I’m concerned. But it is hopeful to hear a band like the Fabulous Thunderbirds, who’ve been playing roadhouses for 12 years, getting played on the radio. Or John Cougar. They’ve opened up a whole lot of things, and I’d rather hear that on the radio than someone whining about something.”

What the Georgia Satellites do align themselves with is the tradition of Southern rock. Says Baird, “I’m proud to be associated with people like Little Richard, Carl Perkins, the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding—I’m still waiting to hear a better ballad than ‘Dock Of The Bay.’ We were afraid of being lumped in with other Southern bands because we have the word Georgia right in our name. But that scene put some freshness and honesty into things and I appreciate what guys like R.E.M. are doing, even if we don’t sound a thing like them. Now I like having that regional association in our name. We’re just a bunch of kids from the South wishing we were from England.” 0