Yeah, they're called Big Ass Truck. You got a problem with that? No, it doesn't mean anything. No hidden meaning, no cryptic message, no in-joke. It was a spur of the moment thing when guitarist Steve Selvidge had to put a band together in something like 45 minutes for a gig and none of the minutes were budgeted for creative band name brainstorming.

Here's the thing, though: when you pump up the volume on just about any of their tunes, and their power all but flattens you, Big Ass Truck doesn't seem like such a silly name after all. "Whatcha doin' on the floor in front of the speakers, Fred?" "Never mind that, did anyone get the license number of that Big Ass Truck??"

We leave Fred to fish his toupee out of the aquarium and head over to the band's hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. It's the land of R&B, funk, soul n roll, country, rock, guitar shaped pools, Booker T. & The M.G.'s, Stax/Volt, and the band that is lovingly referred to as BAT by their fans. Big Ass Truck isn't your typical rock n roll band. As with most music born in Memphis, there's some funk sprinkled over it, some soul in the coals underneath it and all kinds of spices that can't be identified, even by locals. It's secret sauce. Big Ass Truck has the guitar thing going, the bass and drum locked down so tight that Tower Of Power would be impressed, and killer keyboarding happening. They've also got a scratchmeister with a set of turntables he does impossible magic with. Colin Butler takes fantastic music and puts it over the top into a place of its own. If anyone else in Memphis (or anywhere else, for that matter) is doing it this good, nobody's brought it to my attention yet.

Steve Selvidge stands in the middle of all this sound, and that's an enviable position. The guitarist/vocalist/songwriter has to know what he's hearing is world class, but he seems unaffected by it all. Tell him his band is the best there is out there, and he'll name a dozen (inferior) bands he's sure are better. Talk about the elusiveness of mainstream success and you don't get the usual sour grapes. Not by a long shot.

Maybe it had something to do with his childhood.

Steve's dad is Sid Selvidge, formerly of Mudboy & The Neutrons, quite the legend in Memphis. Sid, himself, is a local legend for his solo work, and he made inroads into the Big Apple at one point before hanging it up. Sid and Steve have a very positive relationship, and Sid has influenced Steve in more ways than he can count. Perhaps Sid's greatest lesson to his son was passed along by example. "I grew up with a working musician for a father," says Steve, "so I had no illusions whatsoever that it was at all easy. I never thought 'oh, my band's getting good and I'm gonna be famous!' I just thought 'if I'm lucky, I can hopefully MAYBE make a living.'"

And that he does. Big Ass Truck has a loyal following in Memphis, and when they hit the road it seems their reputation precedes them. The dance floors fill and stay filled. That's success. Still, I hadda open my big mouth. Well, it's just that I want you to tell everyone you know to listen to this band. I want to start a movement. I want to get the whole world to catch up with Big Ass Truck because somehow... some unfathomable how... a lot of them missed them the first time around, and the second and the third. Hell, even Steve hangs out on Napster, happily watching people snag Big Ass Truck tunes. "Listen," he says, "if I did a search on Napster and nobody had any Big Ass Truck, THEN I'd be really worried."

No, you didn't imagine it. A professional musician hangin' out on Napster. He makes no apologies. Me either. I decided to do scans at different times of the day and night to see if people did, indeed, have Big Ass Truck songs. The early afternoon crowd... not so much. More around dinner time. But as I type this at 4:49 AM, there are 3 screens of Big Ass Truck tunes in my search window, including monster grooves like "Just Sick,", instant descents into madness such as "Who Let You In Here," and angsty thinkers like "Fading Fast Fad." Does this data mean anything? Yeah, it means maybe, just maybe, people are catching on. I caught up with Steve Selvidge recently and, of course, immediately whined to him about the public's lack of an ear.

---

Cosmik: I hope this isn't a bummer question, but I gotta know. Big Ass Truck is one of THE BEST bands on the planet, and that's not even open for debate, you tour something like 200 days out of the year, you've been at it eight years, every album you make is a freakin' masterpiece, and you're still relatively unknown. How is that even possible?

Selvidge: You know, I just don't know, man. We've had things happen. We were on MTV for a bit, there, but we didn't have anything behind us enough to really capitalize on it. We were touring, and we had as good a run of booking as we could have had at the time, but we were just sort of scrapping around, really. And then Upstart Records went south right around that time, unfortunately. With most things in life, if you do the right things, and you work really hard, you'll succeed. Well, there are no guarantees in music. You can work your ass off and still not get to the top. I guess the fact that we've been able to do it this long is an achievement in and of itself.

Cosmik: If it was me, I'd be pissed off watching all these bands in limos when you and I both know they couldn't carry your spit bucket.

Selvidge: Those bands are easily digestible, for the most part, and I don't want to sit here and dog out on those bands, because sometimes I want to hear some easily digestible music.

Cosmik: But in the mass market, don't you ever feel like enough is enough? I mean, YOUR music's not...

Selvidge: We never set out to be easily digestible. We just do what we do, you know? We just do what we get excited about and what feels right to us. Sometimes it's workin' with the public, sometimes it's not. I do think that any kind of modern rock radio is definitely a little constricting for what we're trying to do. They don't offer a lot of variation.

Cosmik: Well, I think you have the problem that Big Ass Truck doesn't fit in ANY box. There's no describing you.

Selvidge: Which makes it difficult, because with other bands someone'll say "they do this," and the other person either likes that or doesn't and decides to listen or not listen.

Cosmik: But if they don't even have a clue what to expect...

Selvidge: They can't put the time in, man.

Cosmik: If Gavin or Arbitron can't paint a media label on it, forget it. Boy, I'll tell ya, I don't believe for one minute that I'll ever hear Big Ass Truck record anything that's easily digestible. Everything you do has so much to hear. You can listen over and over and discover new things.

Selvidge: When we were growing up, I think we were all listening to records that had a lot of ear candy, so it's just what happens when we all get together and record now.

Cosmik: When you first came up, you signed with Upstart, which was part of Rounder Records. Rounder has push. What was that experience like, early on?

Selvidge: I thought it was a little odd that we were part of Rounder, because they'd always been blues and roots stuff. But basically, it was really the only deal offered to us. Honestly, we had recorded Kent, and THEN got signed to Upstart. So we were in there recording an album, banking on the idea that we were going to get signed by somebody. If we hadn't, we would have been up shit creek because we would have owed many thousands of dollars to the studio in Memphis.

Cosmik: Wait a minute, though... you signed to Upstart after Kent? Which was your second Upstart album?

Selvidge: We signed in the midst of recording Kent, yes. We did that in the summer of '95, and then it came out in the summer of '96, I guess. Robert Gordon was a writer here in Memphis, and he put us in touch with [Upstart], and they definitely helped us. It was definitely a next step, because we certainly weren't going to put the album out ourselves. They did the promotion and stuff like that, and they definitely got us on MTV. Jake Guralnick is real good with movie placement, too.

Cosmik: So far so good. But you obviously weren't convinced.

Selvidge: Actually, I felt more than anything that Rounder, being as big as it is, would probably lose us in the shuffle. What ended up happening was Upstart got lost in the shuffle off Rounder.

Cosmik: Somewhere along the line, Rounder seemed to lose interest in Upstart.

Selvidge: I'm not sure how much interest they had to begin with, honestly. Glen [Dicker] and Jake were working for Rounder, and they had Upstart going, and I think Rounder just said "okay, you can have your label too."

Cosmik: Because they were very good at their jobs. Sort of a placating move.

Selvidge: It very well could have been. Their MO seems to be to have as much stuff as possible, and by the law of averages, something will do something, and when it does they'll get behind it. And the distribution was a little strange. For some reason, our record would hit the stores at $18.00. You know, for a fledgling band's second record, it just doesn't need to be 18 bucks. I guess that was because of DNA [Distribution North America], which is Rounder's distribution house.

Cosmik: But you needed a price that someone would take a chance on a band with.

Selvidge: Right! So there's all this "if this woulda shoulda coulda hadda been," but who knows? You know, we recorded Kent and then we got a new bass player. We just started touring for real, and it was kinda scrappy.

Cosmik: Then weird stuff starts happening between Upstart and Rounder and... did you feel like you were having the famous "orphan syndrome"?

Selvidge: Yeah, we were definitely saying "hey, what about us?" Really, though, what it came down to is we were getting ready to record another record. Or we were wanting to. We wanted to do something after Kent, and we'd recorded a remix of the song "Queenie," which hadn't actually been put out on a wide level. We did that, and then we just kept recording on a 4-track, and we came up with a pretty cool EP. It was originally going to be a 45, then it became an EP, and it wasn't going to happen with Upstart. Glenn Dicker knew the owner of Yep Roc and Redeye down in North Carolina, and in fact that's where Glenn's working now, working for Redeye Distribution. So he put us in touch with them and we put the Sack Lunch EP out on Yep Roc.

Cosmik: Which must have felt more like a hop than a jump.

Selvidge: That was supposed to sort of tide us over, and then we were saying "okay, we've got a lot of songs here," and Upstart was saying "we're working on it, we'll let you know something soon, we're gonna get a budget together" and whatever, but it became apparent that things weren't really going to be happening. They had the best of intentions. Their hands were tied as well, and they were trying like mad to get us anywhere where we'd be taken care of and appreciated, to get us to the best label deal possible. They were trying to get us on a major. They were definitely there for us, but it still worked out so we were just hanging around wondering what we were going to do. In the meantime we fired another bass player, hired another guy, then he didn't work out so we hired another bass player. This is getting toward the point of recording Who Let You In Here, and I just had to get these songs down on tape before they disappeared into the ether, so to speak, so we borrowed money and did the record ourselves.

Cosmik: That had to be pretty damned frustrating to get that far and then have to do that.

Selvidge: I don't know, after a while I guess you stop worrying about why you're not famous and you just say "well, I gotta do something, so let's start working."

Cosmik: How do you feel the whole Upstart experience affected the growth of the band, or at least the potential or the... let's say trajectory?

Selvidge: It got us another record out and it helped get the word out, for sure. It's not like it fucked anything up for us. It could have gone better, but it didn't go bad. It just had a short life span.

Cosmik: Before we catch up to the current album, I want to talk a bit about the first two. I have to admit I've never heard Sack Lunch, so I can only talk about Big Ass Truck and Kent. When the first one came out, I put it on and was busy doing other things for, like... thirty seconds before you had my full attention. I couldn't believe all the elements. Psych, funk, blues, soul, country, hip-hop, sometimes in the same song. What kinds of reactions did you get?

Selvidge: We got a lot of hyphenated descriptions. We got a lot of comparisons to Beck. People were either really into it and thought it was great, or they'd say "well they really can't decide what they want to do. They're just hopping around, inconsistent." We always got one of those two, basically. Then we started hearing "Oh, it's like The Beastie Boys," or "Oh, it's like The Red Hot Chili Peppers," which I never really saw. I mean, okay, some of the instrumentation of The Beastie Boys, yeah, but the whole Chili Peppers thing I don't get. Apart from if somebody wants to compare my guitar playing to John Frusciante, then I'll take that, because he's one of my favorite guitar players. But, you know, the whole "white boy funk" thing... Funk is such a bastardized term. We prefer to call it "groove oriented music," because there were so many bands coming out in the 70s saying "we're gonna funk your face off, we're gonna funk you right off the dance floor," or whatever, and we weren't about that.

Cosmik: Have you ever considered the potential your music has to open doors for people? I'll use myself as an example. I never saw the point of scratching. Turntables are instruments? Get lost. Okay, I know, I'm a late bloomer, but it was Big Ass Truck that made me hear it. I finally got it because it's done so well there, because the music calls for it and it makes so much sense. So that door is open for me now and I like to hear scratching, if it's done well. Have you realized your music can open that door, or a funk door for a rock fan, or a psych door for a funk fan or whatever?

[Pictured: Turntable master Colin Butler. Hear him do his thing on "The Neco."]

Selvidge: I've thought about it in terms of how it's happened to me, you know, and how other music has opened doors for me, but when we're making it we're just thinking about us. Just thinking about making music. But yeah, I would hope people would listen to it and go "oh wow, turntables ARE a musical instrument," because that's always been a big thing for us. It is actually one of the MOST musical instruments, because it's melodic and percussive at the same time, and there's so much you can do. That was another thing: there were so many white funk bands that popped up with DJs, and it was just like a bunch of kids grabbing their dicks and putting a bunch of "wiggy wiggy" over the top of it, and we never wanted to go that way. It's not like we write a song and then go "okay, now let's put the funky turntables over it." We'll be writing a song and Colin will come in with a part that'll completely put the song on its ear. I guess I hadn't thought about it in those terms too much, though. I'm just hoping people enjoy it.

Cosmik: Yeah, I guess it would be important not to over-think some things.

Selvidge: Yeah, see, I've had so many intense moments because of music, and I would really hope, and everyone in the band would really hope, that we could provide somebody else with that kind of experience.

Cosmik: The first album had so many sounds and genres, and then Kent was so much more focused. Was there something that happened between the two to cause that?

Selvidge: The first record was just a collection of all the recordings we had made up to that point, all at different times and in different circumstances, so each song was about whatever we were about at that time. When we signed with Upstart, we had to put out a record, and that's what we had. And we also realized that we were a popular band in Memphis at that point, so we needed a CD to sell if we wanted to start touring. So that's how the first album came out. If you listen to it, the first four songs sound completely different than every song after that, because they were done in different studios and we were doing a whole different thing. That CD was recorded in 1993, between five and seven months from our inception, so when it came time to do Kent, which was in '95, then we'd been together for a year and a half, we'd played together a lot more, and we knew a lot of more about what it is we want to do. We also brought a producer in, and most importantly, it was the first time we ever sat down in one place in one period of time and made a record. We were saying "okay, here we are, we're making a record" instead of "we're going to record a song or two, who knows what'll happen."

Cosmik: So really you'd never had any of the proper situations until then, and you'd still made good records.

Selvidge: But this time we went in with a producer, and it was at Ardent Studios.

Cosmik: Wow, you couldn't get much better than that. A lot of great records come out of there.

Selvidge: It's one of the best studios in the country. R.E.M., Big Star, all the Z.Z. Top stuff was done there, I mean, shit, a lot of people record there. They've got a lot of gear there, you know? We had a lot more money to spend than we did starting off, so that's why Kent sounds the way it does. Really, that's our most produced, polished sounding record that we've made.

Cosmik: Is that a problem?

Selvidge: It gets a little slick for me at times, actually. There's a sheen to it. I have some issues with it after a while.

Cosmik: Over-produced?

Selvidge: Maybe over-mixed more than over-produced. There was just a couple things that I felt were a little too messed with.

Cosmik: And the funny thing is one of my next questions is where the hell did all that in-your-face power come from.

Selvidge: A lot of it is the tunes that we had and where we were at mentally at the time.

Cosmik: So many great songs. "Li'l Tico." God, I love that song.

Selvidge: Yeah, that's one we continue to play, usually toward the end of the set. It's funny, too, because we had the tune but we had nothin' for the chorus, and Colin was like "well, man, I just can't think of anything. I'm not gonna do it." I said "man, you gotta do SOMETHING! You can't just not fucking play on the song. Just go in there and do something. Just do one pass, just so you can say you did something." So he went in and he put down the turntable part in the chorus, which is what everybody remembers. (Laughs) So I said "see?"

Cosmik: What was the recording process like for Who Let You In Here?

Selvidge: With Who Let You In Here, we had a shitload of songs that we had demo'd in various forms like a bunch of times, and we were just like "good God, let's make a record before we explode!" We had concrete ideas of what we wanted to do with all the songs, and all the stuff was self produced, except on four songs we brought in the producer who did Kent [Ross Rice]. So we'd go in and put all that together, and we had a trajectory and knew what we were doing, but then at the end of the night, say 10:30 or 11:00, we'd say "okay, let's just jam," because we did that a lot on Kent. We'd just get a DAT [Digital Audio Tape] rolling during Kent jams, but this time we did multi-tracking, and all the jams turned into these instrumental songs that were spontaneous stuff. Like "March Of The Dirty Razors" and things with that kind of vibe. A lot of times Colin would just put up a loop or sample of some sort, and we'd just use that as the initial spark and build from there. "Yums" is the same way. We wrote that in the studio.

Cosmik: I gotta tell you that I love "March Of The Dirty Razors." I'm a sucker for psychedelia when it's done well. It's so heavy, but there's that swanky organ sound, like some great big Gulbranson in the background.

Selvidge: Yeah, it's an ice skating record that Colin had. Ice skating music. The main part that starts it off has those little organ stabs. That's a loop that Colin put together, and we just went from there. I follow the cords of the sample, and I put a Mellotron down and I put a flamenco guitar down, or my half-ass imitation of flamenco guitar. Then Robbie got the idea of putting all the voices on top, so we had everybody singing. When it was done we were all like "wow, we made this really neat atmospheric track!"

Cosmik: So now I gotta know: how did you come up with the name "March Of The Dirty Razors?

Selvidge: Actually, it was very controversial. This is pretty vulgar... Do you know what a "dirty Sanchez" is?

Cosmik: Um... nnnnope.

Selvidge: A dirty Sanchez is... um... [long, uncomfortable pause] It's just something really foul, man. It's really awful.

Cosmik: Yeah, but now we need to know for continuity, ya see...

Selvidge: Man... Oh, it has to do with sexual positions and fecal matter and let's just leave it at that.

Cosmik: OOoooh, Jesus, okay.

Selvidge: So the song has a Spanish feel to it because of the flamenco guitar, and somebody had the idea of calling it "Dirty Sanchez," and I said "man, we can't call it that." We got in a big argument about it. Also, during that time I had been saying the words "dirty razor" with an accent, sort of like [pronounces it 'deer-tee reh-sore']. I don't know why. So somebody said "well why don't we call it "The March Of The Dirty Razors," and I said "that is great!" Once he said that I knew it was one of the greatest, most provocative titles, so yeah, let's do that. There's no way we're gonna call it anything about a dirty Sanchez. But yeah, there was quite a heated argument about it at the time.

Cosmik: How are things with Terminus Records so far?

Selvidge: They're great. They're putting money behind us.

Cosmik: Is it a one-shot, or continuing?

Selvidge: No, it's continuing. We've got an option. They're going to put out another record from us, and then we're going to do another one, and we'll see what happens after that.

Cosmik: Is there already a new record?

Selvidge: Yeah, we've got a record recorded, manufactured and ready to go, but they're still wanting to work Who Let You In Here a little more, because right now we're getting radio play.

Cosmik: What's the next one going to be called?

Selvidge: The Rug. We're looking at it maybe coming out in March. We know the guys, and they're really into the band. They've plugged us into a real good publicity firm [Ariel Publicity], and they're just taking care of us.

Cosmik: With all that behind you, it's gotta happen. Because you and I both know Big Ass Truck is way, way too good not to have a major hit someday.

Selvidge: There's no guarantees, man. I can point to bands that were just fucking great that never did a whole lot. I mean, a band like Big Star didn't do anything until 20, 30 years later. There's no guarantee that we'll even be appreciated in 20 or 30 years. Unfortunately, talent isn't a guarantee for success. It can get disheartening, I guess, but you know... you can wallow in it or you can continue.

(C) 2000 - DJ Johnson