Tin Cans talkin’ Blues

Sometimes life just kicks you square in the balls. It sucks, but it is an intrinsic part of Mother Nature’s menstrual cycle.Yeah I know it hurts because it turns out that chick you liked is actually a total slag. And that guy you thought was giving you the eye? He happens to be a sex offender. Life is full of dissapointment, so you better get used to it. What the hell did you think they invented whiskey for anyway? But when you’re right at the bottom of your cesspool of despair, Tin Can 44s are there to pull you out, give you a kind slap across the face and drag you along for a night out on Kingly Street.

I spoke to two of the Tin Cans about what the Blues means to them, musical authenticity and what they’ll bring to the party tomorrow, when they play Felix’s Music Night, 19.02.

Would you like to introduce yourselves?

Phil (guitar, vocals): Wait. What if I introduce him, he can introduce me.

Sounds like a plan.

Phil: Ok, this here’s the Big Shot. He plays percussion for us, and tends to rearrange pretty much anything we intend on doing, pretty much how he wants to do it right then and we all need to hold on tight.

Aaron (drums): This is Phil. “The Power”. “Taylor”. Nah, it’s just Phil. Plays guitar, vocals in The Tin Can 44s, which is who we are.

Phil: There was supposed to be someone else here. Boxcar Joe. Plays harmonica for us. He’s an actor and creator. Well… he calls himself that, so it’s not as omnipotent as he thinks but… Yeah, he plays harmonica for us. And fills in any of the gaps on the Delta lyrics that we’ve forgotten. That’s us at the minute. And we’re going through bassists at a pace. Umm. Having to replace them far too regularly.

Did you guys start out with Blues covers and then move towards your own songs?

Phil: I always had my own songs that I always wanted to play, and I used to write them faster than we would get them recorded or get them rehearsed properly. Immediately when we started playing we found that we needed to play gigs now, and the kind of joints that we wanted to play require you to have a playbook. You have to be able to play a certain number of standards and not sound like an idiot.

Aaron: I think we did start off with doing Blues standards and covers, but now we are writing more original material and playing that more so instead of the focus before being: “we’ll try an original song interspersed within the set”, now it’s more like we’ll play our own stuff and then at the end we’ll do a standard there that everyone knows and loves. And I think that’s what we enjoy more. Because it’s hella fun to play the blues but it’s also much more satisfying and enjoyable to write your own stuff which is still inspired by the same sort of thing.

Phil: I found we needed to do what was effectively the Blues – but a bit more. Because a lot of the original sounds, original structures, they’ve been hammered out pretty thin by the original guys, who could run rings around me certainly.

So we needed to do something that was a bit more – necessarily original. Because it just wouldn’t be authentic really, I can’t sing about the Delta, or my woman dying, or the flood in Tupelo. I wasn’t there!

Where do you get your inspiration?

Phil: To set out writing a blues is really forced. Because the process by which the blues were written were from work songs from call-and-reply tunes that were sung even without any music. The percussion was breaking rocks with a pick-axe, and a sawblade and a train. That’s what you had to work with.

So it would be a call and reply: there would just be the biggest loudest guy standing there a little bit up on a hill, and everyone would just shout the line back to him, and you get some repetition and natural harmonies and things like that. That’s a very organic way of doing it.

So if I was to sit down and go: “OK, that’s a line, and I’m gonna do that twice, and then I’m gonna go up to the dominant chord, and then come back down…” No man. Nobody’s gonna buy that. You can see all these people who are going through the motions.

Aaron: I do listen to the blues, obviously, but my background musically is a lot more kind of abstract and very sort of progressive, kind of music. So Phil can bring stuff in and I’ll completely change it. Flip everything round. But we still listen to all those great blues songs and I think that’s hopefully what comes through in our playing. Just because we’re not doing a standard 12-bar or something, you know the themes that we’re bringing up, and the way we play, and the feeling we put into it, hopefully all of that’s still there.

Phil: I mean certainly the great thing about the three of us – Boxcar Joe included – is that what the three of us do together, no one of us could have made up on their own. Boxcar Joe writes his own stuff, that he doesn’t bring to our band because he thinks he’s just gonna mix up the vibe. He writes dirty sea shanties about big-leg women and, uh… sailing. He sings that with his harmonica frame on and his guitar.

Aaron’s there listening to some progressive shit, in some time signature – like 9/11 time signature or something. So when I give these guys a song I could get it back in any old way, I have no idea, I can’t predict it. Certainly I write all my stuff acoustic. But then when it’s gone through the Tin Can factory, it comes out a completely different animal.

What does the Blues mean to you?

Aaron: The Blues is when you ain’t got no money to pay yo house rent, cuz you’re thinkin evil.

Phil: When you come in your front door, you hear your backdoor slam. You’re thinking evil.

Aaron: On a serious note, everyone feels shit during their life at certain points, maybe for crap reasons or not. Whatever. Everyone feels down. And the blues is just a celebration of that, laughing instead of crying, and just a great way to let it out and feel good. And it’s just a really enjoyable experience for me.

Phil: The Blues isn’t about moping in the corner. The Blues is about sitting on your housetop shirtless with a half-bottle of rye, shouting at the neighbour, because he done stole your woman. It’s that kind of stuff. There’s certainly a lot of commaraderie in it. When you see bluesmen talk to each other it’s something different. It’s like they’ve got a secret story. That only they know. Only they know the plot, or only they know the scene. And they can change the scripts how they want. It’s this kind of secrecy, it’s like a little club. It’s a secret handshake, it’s that kind of music. That’s what the Blues is: mythology.

What will you guys bring to 19.02?

Aaron: People will be fucking dancing when we’re playing our tunes.

Phil: If people aren’t dancing, I’ll eat my hat. And I think people will see that when we play a song, it’s that one time we played that song. It wasn’t that we’ve written beat by beat, bar by bar how it goes.

Aaron: That’s the only time you’ll hear the song that way.

Phil: The themes are the same, plot’s the same, characters are the same but the scene has changed. That’s what you get: a one time experience.