Soooo Herbie Abernethy. Valient Himself, Valient Thorr. There are many things one could expect of you. HEMI engine-roaring rock and roll, spitting hot oil and sweat? Sure. Loud guitars fucking louder drums, on festival stages with the gods of American angst? Definitely. A solo album filled with cover songs ranging from Neil Diamond’s “Forever in Blue Jeans” to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider”? I mean, I guess. Actually, yes goddammit. Bring that shit.
So I gotta wonder. Where did this come from? What makes a cover album come together? What are the initial conditions of the artists’ soul that lends itself to tribute when it’s been consumed with raw expression for decades? I am assuming “fun” is the answer. If I’m right, that includes the ability to fuck around with old homies and finally record that song you learned to played air guitar to in ‘96. Amirite?
Herbie Abernethy: Oh, man. Lots of old friends. Crooner Jukebox is an idea I came up with before the pandemic. I was hanging out in Texas, filming several weird pilots for talk shows, like interview shows. None of them ever panned out. I was down there working on one for Volcom, hanging out with all my Riverboat Gambler buddies in Austin. I was hanging out with all those guys filming at some weird restaurants. The concept for the show was to meet people who have weird jobs and talk to them. I was always in different cities on tour and meeting people who are killing it with weird jobs. It was about how they make a living and how the weirdness fits into their life.
We went to this one restaurant and this guy jumps out of his car in the middle of traffic. He’s all “hey! Valient! Valient!” and I was like, “Wassup, man?” And he’s like, “Hey, man, what’s going on? I got a studio over here. If you ever want to come and record, you know, come on, we got the doors wide open for you.” This is in Austin, in the middle of the day. Later that night we’re hanging out in this restaurant, having a couple of beers. We all get pretty ripped. I was like, “this guy told us we could go record if we want to do some jams”. We got drunk enough to call this guy and invited ourselves to his studio that same night.
So, the next two days while I was there, after we wrapped shooting the pilot each day, we would go back to his studio. We recorded two songs. The MC5 cover, (R.I.P Wayne Kramer) and the Rocky Erickson cover-
Christian Detres: R.I.P. as well…
HA: Yeah! So we did those. I’d been sitting on those forever. I was just gonna put out a seven inch or something but then the pandemic happened. I started working with Ian, from the Gamblers, throwing stuff back and forth. We did a couple jams. He worked on three more songs with me. The KISS song, the Neil Young one, and then Alice Cooper one. He is just a great collaborator. He was in Band of Horses for a while. His new band Broken Gold has a new record that just came out yesterday as well, if your readers want to check that out. But um, yeah, I just hit up all my friends.
I made a playlist of songs that I wanted to sing, and I was like, “I’m just gonna hit friends up.” So I want to give a shout out to William from Future Islands. He did a Flaming Lips cover with me.
CD: Really?
HA: Yeah. I’ve been friends with those guys since- They were undergrad students at East Carolina U in Greenville when I was a grad student.
CD: Weird, I used to live in Greenville. Actually, I used to skate in Greenville – lived in Snow Hill with Donovan Greer from Ann Beretta.
HA: Yeah! Back Door skate park!
CD: Hahaha, I used to go to The Percolator a lot too. Giant coffee cups. So 90’s…
HA: I played many shows at the Percolator.
CD: What was the club down the street from there? There was another venue…
HA: The Corner… There was The Attic…
CD: The Attic yes! That’s the one.
HA: Talking about Percolator, damn. I turn 45 next week, so this was, ummm, my 20th birthday. I was in my first band Lo-Fi Conspiracy. We played. The Spasms played. The Avett Brothers played but they weren’t called the Avett Brothers yet. They were called the Nemo Back Door Project. It’s like their third or fourth show, and I have the whole thing on film. I’ve been singing with those guys for over 20 years.
CD: Do you remember Dillon Fence?
HA: Yeah, I do remember Dillon Fence.
CD: I used to love that fucking band. My ex-wife from way back fucking forever ago, new girlfriend at the time, and the reason I ended up in Greenville – put me on to Dillon Fence and Greenville music in general.
HA: Greg from Dillon Fence also had another band called Hobex. They used to play at Peasants. This was the other club that we all used to go to and play at in Greenville. Greenville produced so many bands that all had wildly different styles, but we all remain friends. We all got record deals. Like, Nemo became the Avett Brothers. Art Lord and the Self Portraits became Future Islands. Lo-Fi Conspiracy became Valient Thorr. The Capulets became Love Language. There’s this guy Justin Little who does One Trip Little down in Florida. There’s all these guys. Like, I think it was all art school. I was just talking to Justin earlier about this. He did the Harry Nilsson cover on my album, which was, I guess, made famous by Three Dog Night. We were talking about it and he said “what do you think it was about that time?” You know, you hear people talk about pre-Green Day Gilman Street in San Francisco. What about our community gave space for all that success? And he’s thinking maybe it was that we didn’t gatekeep. Nobody gate kept. Everybody encouraged each other. Yeah, there were so many bands. I think Richmond’s like that now.
CD: Richmond is like that. The whole city is like an open mic stage.
HA: I guess I’ve lived here for 12 years now. I notice it more when bands play at Cobra Cabana. My business partner and I, Josh Novicki, we just bought Kings, one of my favorite venues in Raleigh, and it’s just, it’s so different. When you travel for 20 years, visiting all these different cities on tour, going back and forth. College towns? Sometimes it’ll be a big vibrant community and then it’ll go away. Then maybe this other city will have a more vibrant community. It’s all about the people who were there who were doing it. Sometimes it never goes away. Like you’re talking about here in Richmond or Chapel Hill or Raleigh. Sometimes, you know, the clubs close down but these pockets of really thriving music communities persist. These art communities always fuel what happens next.
I’m lucky to have picked Richmond to settle in. I never, ever would have thought back then that I would have, you know, settled here, but I’m so glad I did because this is another thriving community. There’s so many killer bands here and I’m just psyched to be a part of it. I don’t know where I’m going with this.
CD: No, no, I 100% agree. I think Richmond and Chapel Hill have this thing where they don’t hit the peaks, the high notes of say Seattle, or Portland, or San Francisco, LA, New York, Austin. Places where you expect the next giant humongous act to come from. Right? But it also never hits the low lows either. There’s always something going on. Sometimes it skips a genre, but never a generation. There’s a fulsome creative spark that always endures. It can go, like a spiritual possession from one style to another but it doesn’t die. Like the hip-hop scene here right now. It’s fucking incredible. Minus a few standouts, it’s been historically mediocre at best. But now it’s flourishing.
Back when I was a teenager here, it was the legendary Richmond 90s punk scene. That was my shit and it was fucking amazing. And then there was the whole, like, maybe, electroclash thing. Following a national trend of course, but, you know, early 2000s mid 2000s had a lot more that kind of electro pop dance club style. Even if it was mixed with a punk sensibility it still had that kind of aspect to it. But Richmond’s always been consistently really good at something. I’ve always loved that.
Let me let me swing back to the album. You have some great songs on there, a lot of them that would have been “coming-of-age” tracks for people our age. Songs our parents played in the car. The LP your dad or older sibling made you listen to like it was a family heirloom. They seem very well suited to you. You seem really happy singing them. You know what I mean? It comes across that this guy’s singing this song that he’s always wanted to record since he was ten years old.
HA: Yeah, all the songs on the album are like that. Matt Connor from RPG did the Todd Rundgren cover. He already had that one kind of dialed – with Station Aries – him and Dusty and Andy. They had that all dialed, but it was one that I knew I could do, and you know, he kind of offered it up. I think it may be the best song on the record. But the killer thing is I’m getting such good reviews from people. Everybody seems to have a different favorite.
Somebody said, “well, that’s not the KISS song I thought you would do.” They figured a more rock and roll KISS song. Which, you know, obviously makes sense with my career. But I wanted this to be, I mean, it’s called Crooner Jukebox for a reason. I wanted to do things I could sing, I’ve heard “there’s no way you’d be disappointed in this record. You’re gonna love it. But, like, you’re not getting – this is not a Valient Thorr record.” That’s by design. I wanted to show off that with Brief Lives here in town, and with Avett Brothers, and with all these other artists that I’ve sung with, that I have learned a bit you know. You have to know your range, and I’ve never been a good singer. And I’m not a screamer. I’ve always been more of a yeller, I guess you’d say.
But I’m trying to learn to sing my way because there are things I can sing. I just never had a band that played the kind of songs that I can actually sing and sound like an okay, singer. So, I feel like this allowed me to flex that a little bit. I can write songs like this too. It’s not just like, you know, all of a sudden now I’m fucking David Lee Roth and want to just sing covers all the time. Which, you know, if they all were this fun…
One time Valient Thorr did a cover night in Raleigh. We played as Funkadelic. We did a 35 minute Funkadelic set. The audience wanted more but the only other cover we knew was a Bad Brains song. So we just threw that in there. That was probably my favorite night of playing music. Ever.
Another thing that was killer about back in the day was all these crazy bands came through Greenville. Us being like 19 or whatever, we wrote down every single phone number from anyone we met from out of town – and where they were from. This is pre-Google. Our first full US tour I booked by, like us, meeting up with these bands we once met in Greenville. We helped them out when they came our way, and so our very first time we went to California, they did it up for us. They had fucking California weed ready to go.
I remember we got to San Diego-
CD: Oooh, speaking of which, you wanna smoke a bowl?
HA: Yeah, let’s do it. That makes sense to me. I should shout out my friend Hash who is on this record with me, speaking of San Diego. He’s a bass player that’s played with Thievery Corporation, Ashish “Hash” Vyas. He and I met when I was in Lo-Fi Conspiracy before Valient Thorr, when he was in GoGoGo Airheart. He was on Gold Standard Labs, Sonny Kay’s label. They put out all the early stuff by The Faint, The Mars Volta’s first 7”. Sonny and his roommate Justin Pearson, who was in The Locust, ran two record labels out of their apartment. Sonny with GSL and Justin with 31G. Sonny helped us out a lot early on. As did Hash. He smoked us out while we watched the then new 2003 Led Zeppelin live DVD on their couch all day when we first made it to their city on tour. Hash is just one of the sickest musicians too. He’s originally a Providence, RI guy – moved down to DC for awhile, which is where my wife lived too. We hung out a lot.
We hatched a plan to put out an entire album of Suicide covers and call it HHomicide, the two H’s meaning Herbie and Hash just murdering Suicide songs. It was my little joke.
CD: You should still do that. I do love that you have two Suicide covers on Crooners Jukebox though.
HA: We might. I would still do it. He’s the one that suggested it. I guess it would come down to me. He saw me back in the day before I did music. I was into the Spoken Word thing. It was that that got my bandmates to ask me to be in my first band.
CD: ‘You ever think about going back to that? Spoken word, poetry readings and such?
HA: Actually yeah. Here’s something that I just announced- but at Cobra Cabana, we have Lydia Lunch coming through.
CD: Oh snap! Get out of here. Really?
HA: Yeah man. May 5th, Lydia Lunch is going to do a spoken word performance at Cobra. I was like, man, “What if I come back and do a spoken word set? Because one of our customers that comes into Hot for Pizza a lot has been organizing spoken word events. I was like, man, this is a scene that I got out of in the late 90s. The whole thing turned into, like, cyphers. Everybody was all Def Poetry Jam. It just became like acoustic hip hop. It was people rapping you know, and the other poetry kind of got crowded out.
CD: So how did this new album fit in with all the Valient Thorr stuff.
HA: Well, so the last real VT album was in 2016. We got ripped off real bad in 2017 by our manager, and we kind of took a little bit of a break. We were coming back in 2019 though. We took ‘18 off because some of the guys were new fathers and stuff. They were gonna come back in ‘19 but I was about to open up Hot For Pizza, planning everything with that. We had a tour with Hank von Hell lined up, the late ex-singer of Turbonegro (also R.I.P.). Then that got canceled because they were worried about this global pandemic coming. Then the pandemic did happen and then everything shut down for two years. So nothing, nothing happened. Nobody did shit for a while.
We were stressed because we were thinking “Man. We got to come back.” It’s tough when you live that life, for that long, every day, and then all of a sudden it’s not there. “Everybody’s gonna forget everything you’ve done…” and so on. It kind of happens, but that’s just because of the way time is.
But you know, you don’t have to be doing it constantly. We paid our dues. We could come back at any time if we wanted to. And we did for our 20th band Anniversary. We went on tour. We went to Texas and back, Florida and back, went to Europe. And then last year was our first album’s 20 year anniversary. I put that out myself. I made a little reissue. It had only ever been released on CD. Our first album was self released. All the rest, two through six, we were on Volcom. Our seventh, most recent, album was on this label Napalm from Austria that ripped us off.
Yeah, but the 20th anniversary I was like, I’m gonna fucking put this out on vinyl and cassette. So like, it was the first one that had a cassette. People have been asking for it on vinyl since it came out. The whole time we’ve been a band. I just like cassettes. I mean, I grew up on them.
CD: I’m sure we both grew up ripping off Columbia House.
HA: So yeah, for sure. That’s literally me being 11 years old and getting into Columbia House. That was the start of me being a cassette head. I’m a cassette head still. And like, if I can take this conversation on a weird aside..
CD: No worries, weird asides is what this is all about.
HA: So cassettes for me are a crazy obsession. Like I’m literally putting out cassettes now. I’ve done two in the last two years. Here’s how deep I am in it. At 11 years old I stopped spending all my comic book money on just comic books and spent half on comics and half on tapes. My dad would take me to Kmart and get at least one per week if I did my chores and shit. You know? All my friends were getting CDs. That’s when they came out – like ‘91 basically. I didn’t even get a CD player till I was almost out of high school, just because I had so many tapes. I was like why would I want to rebuy them? That’s crazy. And I kept them all through college but at a certain point, when you’re traveling a lot, you just put everything in your parents house or in a storage unit.
When my dad passed away, I went back and got the box of tapes out. I started showing them off as I had a tape deck in my car. ‘Started showing them online and friends would say “hey man, I hear you’re coming through Kansas City. If you want any of these cassettes you can have them all because my wife’s getting rid of ‘em!”
CD: That’s the best part when you have friends with good taste.
HA: My collection is massive, and it’s not church tapes and weird shit. It’s like every good album. I like all the goods, every genre. And it’s, it’s too much. I’m probably a hoarder at this point. But they’re organized tho. The only difference between a collector and a hoarder is if the collection is organized.
CD: So you’ve been hanging on to this project for years now, through pandemics and opening restaurants and shit. What made you keep it going? It seems like ideas die on the vine a lot if you air them out too long.
HA: I really just wanted to finish it up and I had Yavé here in town. My buddy Yavé (Rust), he’s a killer dude who records in his duplex here in Richmond. He helped me sew it up. Like I had, I had seven songs and I needed help with five more. I mean, they were too big for me to mix. I’ve learned a lot about recording over the years. Watching Bennie in Valient Thorr, even watching Jack Endino for a couple records we did up in Seattle and then some of his projects. I got lucky enough to be asked to record with a band in Portugal (Men Eater) and a band in Denmark (Hjortene)- and with my buddy Jay Holmes who’s from Greenville area but who lives in Japan now (Fever Moon).
So it’s weird getting to do like – what’s old dirty bastard say? “I’m a Project ho! Love Project ho’s!” I love doing collaborations with people you know? I like making art and it doesn’t matter what kind it is. So to be able to make art with all these different friends is sick. This is like a shitload of seven inches all put together in one. I wanted it to be like a jukebox. You see these singles with like two songs on each card, a single and a b-side. Two of these songs are with Riverboat Gamblers, two of ‘em with Hash, and I thought of it as like a bunch of Singles together, you know?
CD: I like to think about the motivations behind cover albums. You’ve got artists at the sunset of their careers e.g. Johnny Cash’s cover album that put everything from Depeche Mode to Nine Inch Nails in his wheelhouse. I remember how crazy that was when he released that. He died pretty soon after. I think even before the “Hurt” music video came out.
There’s either a couple of different motivations. I mean, for instance, Nirvana, doing the Unplugged album, or for that matter Incesticide. They did a LOT of covers, now that I think of it. Yeah, when they did them it was more of a “come to my house and listen to my favorite records. No? Okay, well then I’ll just sing them for you.” It seems more like sharing treasures rather than fulfilling a record contract like The Sex Pistols, John Lennon, or Guns and Roses – obvious “fuck you’s” to their record labels. Then there’s infusing new relevance into your celebrity via appropriation of more popular artists’ work. And sometimes it just seems like fun.
Covers have a very specific place in music, right? Because it’s either revelatory, like, “oh, no, I want everyone to hear the song. I really fuckin love it. And so maybe because I’m famous, I’ll sing it. And then they’ll love it too.” Right? Or this song is really fucking dope and we’re going to make a twist on it. Maybe slow it down, speed it up, make it poppy, make it not, right? Whatever the fuck it is, glammed up, whatever the fuck, but it’s going to be our take.
Then there’s ones that are resplendent. I’ll put Johnny Cash in this category with “Hurt”, Nine Inch Nails’ song. It transcends the original version, which was already a classic. To me, probably the best cover ever made. I’d put Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” up there too.
HA: I’ve heard people say that about that, yeah. I guess when I think of covers, I go, well, sometimes songs are written for another artist you know? Sometimes some people can only do certain things, but you can write things that are out of your range to sing and it should be somebody else who records it to get the best out of the piece. Like Prince would write for all these different artists – Sinead O’Connor and so many more.
CD: I think of the music culture of the 50s and 60s primarily when it comes to covers though. There would be like twelve versions of the same song by all these different artists because the song was a bigger star than the artist. This goes way back, turn of the century even, to when popular music was shared as sheet music in newspapers and at shops as collections of songs. This is pre-phonograph and during its nascent years. You’d buy a paper, learn to play the song on the piano, and sing it with your family in a parlor or with buddies at a pub. The rockstar was missing from the equation. Maybe the crooners of the 40s and early 50s changed that. Sinatra, Johnny Mathis etc. I don’t think anyone thought of the concept of “covers” as we see it. Everyone just recorded whatever songs they wanted. I mean, there was usually credit for the writer of the piece, but it wasn’t weird to have several popular artists singing the same damn tune. Covers became ‘covers’ when someone nailed the song, making it the definitive version – all others being derivations of the most popular, not necessarily the ‘original’, version.
HA: Makes me think of “Tobacco Road”. So many versions of it. But who knows who did it first? Or did the definitive version? The Blues Magoos? – One of the only reviews I’ve gotten for the record so far was literally this guy from Jersey Beat who reviewed the first stuff our band did over 20 years ago, like 25 years ago, probably. So it was really crazy that I got an email yesterday on the day that I sent it out. And he said…
What fuck was-
I just lost my train of thought. What was I saying about the…
Wasn’t-
What we were talking about?
CD: We’re really stoned my dude. Let’s close up the interview. I wanted to ask you what are your three favorite cover songs ever recorded?
HA: That’s hard to think of.
CD: Want to make a playlist of best covers ever with me instead?
HA: Yeah. For sure.
CD: Check it out…
Main photo by PJ Sykes
Herbie Abernethy Links!
Smokedoggg Records
Cobra Cabana– thecobracabanarva
Hot For Pizza– hot4pizzarva
The Sandspur– info@thesandspurcb.com
Kings– herbie@kingsraleigh.com
Valient Himself of VALIENT THORR
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