“That’s the big ‘if’ with SXSW. There’s thousands of bands, and on paper, if you can get noticed then it can be a huge break for you, but when you’re a bunch of ball-bags from Sydney, you have very little in the way of people with any muscle pushing you over there,” explains guitarist Paulie K.
“Oh we did get noticed…just not by anyone important…heaps of drunk people loved it!” adds drummer Cougar Jones.
Vocalist Johnny Wishbone chimes in, “I specifically went with very little expectation, so I was pretty pleased with the whole thing!”
They also played a couple of shows in New York, and one in LA, at the famous Viper Room on the Sunset Strip. The biggest difference between LA and the Corner Hotel?
“Fake titties…And just the look of broken dreams in everyone’s eyes. At The Corner, you get that at about 3am, but in LA it’s just a constant. We saw Greg Brady drinking a coffee and he looked mad hagged, eh? He looked like a smackie! We made it over to New York too, which was cool…it’s just so culturally vibrant”, Wishbone says slipping into a comically camp accent.
“We all felt like we were in Sex And The City!” laughs Jones.
Embarking on their Lo Fi Thigh High tour over the next month, The Snowdroppers will bring their frenetic bluesy scuzz-rock to Melbourne, no doubt surrounded by plenty of naked boobs and a few tin cups of moonshine. But the band is hesitant to label themselves as 1920’s blues revivalists.
“I find it funny that a lot of articles say we play 1920s type music. That’s a bit lazy, because we might look a bit like the 1920s…well actually we don’t…Not really, at all, and we don’t really sound like that either,” elucidates Paulie K.
“Someone wrote once that we were a scuzz-rock band, and I really like that. I don’t even know what it means, but I like that! When we first started playing we listened to a lot of blues music and had grand illusions about being this great blues band, but to be honest, we just probably not that good! So we were like – nah, we’ll just be a rock ‘n’ roll band. We’re just a rock band, following in the great tradition of Cold Chisel…” says Johnny Wishbone.
“Rosie Tatts….” adds Paulie K.
“The Eagles…” furthers Jones, causing heavy laughter in the band.
The Snowdroppers need to be seen to be fully appreciated. Full band attendance for a Skype interview reinforced my opinion. In photos they look serious; sensational, but serious. In person, they fizz, in a laid back way. Wishbone and Paulie K did most of the talking. Cougar Jones smiled a lot. He looks like Billy The Kid in Young Guns, with a flowing mane of hair, woolen pants, white shirt and braces. London (bass) was so laid back he was out of the shot for half of the interview, but I found out that he recently broke his arm in an arm wrestle, so clearly the man goes when it’s his time to go. As a unit on stage, The Snowdroppers are electric.
“Look, I don’t think I’m out of line in saying stadium tours and pyrotechnics, do you?” Wishbone says in terms of where the live shows are headed.
“I want an ’80s Ferrari and then I’ll be happy,” says Jones.
“So, anything that can give him an ’80s Ferrari, and me some pyrotechnics in a show, I mean the guys from Kiss have gotta be getting’ pretty old. Someone’s gonna have to step up. I we’re being honest, you know, any musician wants to see their band succeed and be as big as it can be and actually make a living out of it. Any musician that says otherwise, in my opinion, is just a liar!” screams Wishbone.
Paulie K adds, “The trip to the US wasn’t really a tour as such, so we’d like to get back over there and play more shows, like in Boston, Chicago and down to New Orleans..”
What do they need in order to do that?
“Cash..!” answers Wishbone in his mind, as he leans right into the camera rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Not that that’s any different to before. Even when we were signed to the label whose name we do not mention, we still had to cover all our own costs, it’s just that at the end of the night, the cheeky buggers would have their hand out for a cut,” he says with reference to the band’s new independent status.
The Snowdroppers cover all bases – sex, booze, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and I posed the hypothetical, which would be most important if you could only take one.
“Well everything’s not necessarily free,” mentions Wishbone.
“Especially the sex!” laughs Jones.
“I like how we’re actually thinking really hard about this!” chuckles Paulie K. “Look – if you take care of the rock ‘n’ roll, the other three should follow”.
“Ahhhhhhhhh!” smile the rest of the band.
