‘Coolest band in the world’ launches 25th anniversary tour

After 25 years in the business, the Dandy Warhols still rule.

OK?

And the influential Portland, Oregon act plans to prove it as they celebrate a quarter century of making cool rock music with a concert on May 18 at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Show time is 9 p.m., with Cosmonauts and the Vacant Lots opening, and tickets are $30, www.livenation.com.

The band, which formed in 1994 and released the debut full-length “Dandys Rule OK” the following year, also appears at the BottleRock Napa Valley music festival on May 24. See www.bottlerocknapa.com for more information.

I recently spoke with vocalist-guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor about the big anniversary for the band, which also includes multi-instrumentalist Zia McCabe, guitarist Peter Holmstrom and drummer Brent DeBoer.

JH: Happy 25th anniversary to the Dandy Warhols! What’s it like to be celebrating a quarter century of rocking and rolling?

CTT: It’s weird. It feels like about six to eight years. I’m not really sure where all that time went. So, it seems a little surprising, really.

I think people, generally, are pretty amazed. I think it’s an impressive bomb to drop. A lot of people go, “That’s amazing. Really? It’s been 25 years already?” Hopefully, we’ll get a lot of interest from the press around the handful of gigs we are doing in America.

JH: Take me back to the beginning. What were your hopes and aspirations when you started the band?

CTT: There just wasn’t a lot of cool rock out there at the time. It was the heyday of rock-rap and it was about to become boy band, girl band – and those were considered to be real bands. It was grunge, but really only the most nauseating commercialized versions of grunge. It wasn’t like Mudhoney was dominating the radio or anything really that great.

JH: I remember those days.

The big bummer was that the whole wonderful English, guitar shoe-gaze kind of club – everything from Ride to Charlatans to Blur to Happy Mondays – they were all just so cool and they had all just sort of come and gone.

We just really felt like there needed to be more of that – another of that. And that was our whole aspiration, just to make cool records and if we could get in a van and have 150 people show up in basically any city we went to, you know, that would be the dream.

Then it kind of just kept going, like, “What if we could get to Europe? What if we got on a big international label and they could send us to Europe?”

JH: What was the turning point?

CTT: I’ve always been a filmmaker. I had a $500 budget to make a video for a single from our first record. So, I did. I made a video for “T.V. Theme Song.” And MTV picked up the video and played it on “120 Minutes” on the midnight turnover hour, a crucial moment, two weeks in a row. San Francisco (radio) started playing it a lot. And Minneapolis radio started playing it a lot. That is what sort of launched us way past our founder’s dream.

JH: Did it feel like you were part of something bigger than just yourselves – like you were helping to lead a new music movement?

CTT: There have always been garage-rock psychedelic bands. There have always been those type of bands. There was the White Stripes in Detroit. They would come to our gigs. Actually, Meg (White of the White Stripes) gave us – I think it must have been about 1995 – their demo cassette and Pete (Holmstrom) says he still has it somewhere. All those kinds of bands – like the Strokes – have always existed, probably consistently since the ‘60s.

So, it really was just a matter of when (the Dandy Warhols’) “Bohemian Like You” became a big hit years later, it told the record industry that this wasn’t a niche or underground market – it could actually get on global radio and sell over a million records.

JH: That was a good time for the genre, for sure.

CTT: I would imagine that anytime a great psychedelic or garage-y band surfaces in the commercial music world it probably leads to a bit of a glut.

But that one was great, though.

Then Jet had the same producer (Dave Sardy) do their record that I had do “13 Tales (of Urban Bohemia)” and he was Anthrax’s mixer and producer. I really love the sound of Anthrax records – they are, in terms of production and engineering, some of the best sounding records ever made.

He did Jet’s record and that was a huge single too – “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” – and that deepened it. Then the White Stripes got massive. And then the Strokes put out their first record and had that huge hit.

So, that was a full-blown cultural zeitgeist. Marshall amps sold more amps in that era than they did in that same era of the ‘60s – that two or three years of super guitar heroes.

JH: I’d love to know your thoughts on what the Dandys were able to accomplish in the first 5 or so years of being a band.

CTT: In five years, we went from being a group of kids who go down to the storage room, pull our amps and our drums out of Pete and my storage locker underneath our apartment, haul them into the laundry room where they practice three times a week, to hanging out with David Bowie and being his favorite band, doing ecstasy with Joe Strummer (of the Clash) and having him tell me that we’re the coolest band in the world.

We went from, you know, trying to be a cool band and trying to keep it together to making (The Cure’s) Robert Smith’s favorite record.

It was phenomenal. It was exactly what you dream of. We went from the laundry room to being the coolest band in the world.

JH: That’s a great tagline – “the coolest band in the world.”

CTT: Joe Strummer was the one who told me that. He goes, “I was in the coolest band in the band. Right now, you’re the coolest band in the world. Enjoy it, mate.”

JH: Which album was Robert Smith’s favorite?

CTT: It was “13 Tales of Urban Bohemia” (2000). We played some shows with the Cure. I remember the last time we played (with them), I asked him something about “13 Tales” and he said, “No, man, I can’t listen to that record anymore since my girlfriend and I broke up.” That was (expletive). I was really bummed.

So, have you heard our new record yet?

JH: Yes, I’m enjoying it (“Why You So Crazy, the band’s 10th studio album, which came out in January).

CTT: I listen to our new record a lot. It is so phenomenal. It’s a lot more unique. When I hear our old records, I’m impressed that we did it. Particularly the very first record, I’m thinking when I hear it, “How the (expletive) did we do that?”

The second record is very off and in its own little weird, mushy, shoe-gaze Ride-meets-Neil Young or something.

“13 Tales” is the most normal record and I’m very surprised how good it still sounds when I hear “Godless” or “Bohemian Like You” on the radio. But it’s far less interesting to me than we made it, which really says something about how bad, truly horrible and generic, music had gotten by the 1999-2000 era.