The Name of this Band is Famous Potato: Making Sense of the Spud
by Matthew Taylor
In a listless world of microwave dinners and false prophets, Burlington cult heroes famous potato have transcended the mundane, embraced the absurd and, infected with grease, agreed to explain all in their own words.
It’s a cold and windy Saturday morning, early January in Burlington Vermont and six inches of fresh snow are swirling through a crowded market place. About a half block away, down at Henry’s diner on Bank street Neil Cleary is poking thoughtfully at a plate of home fries and explaining, between sips of lukewarm Henry’s coffee, how the death of Kurt Cobain last April has oddly affected his band, Famous Potato. “I think it freed us up to do a lot of different things,” Cleary reasons, “seeing as a great energy has been released into the universe.” Intrigued, I look up from my breakfast special and inquire.
“So the energy that Kurt possessed was actually released into the universe at the time of his death?” I ask, trying unsuccessfully to visualize an event of such magnitude. Neil’s spectacled eyes slowly leave his plate and meet mine in a head-on stare.
“We like to think we’re the sole inheritance.”
David Kamm, lead singer and rhythm guitarist for the Burlington quartet, drops his fork to his plate and supports his drummer’s assertion.
“It wasn't released into the universe at large,” He explains. “It was released into the Potato’s universe.”
“That’s right,” adds Nicole Valcour, the band’s bassist and most recent spud acquisition. “With a 60 c.c. syringe.”
But jokes and irrelevant references to Seattle, pop culture, and the untimely passing of generational icons aside, Famous Potato, the two year-old spawn of red wine, caffeine, late nights, and electricity, is here to stay. And it is thriving. Or maybe it’s mashing, Or baking. Whatever a potato in action does, this one is doing.
I’m sitting at the corner booth at Henry’s with the members of the band, known affectionately in Burlington music circles as The Spud, enjoying, as the menu at Henry’s invite us to, a little slice of Americana. Jamie Harvey, the band’s lead guitarist, sits immediately to my right, followed in order by Cleary, Valcour, and Kamm.
The four which are the Potato have taken time from their schedule, which today has yet to include a practice session and still another interview, to shoot the breeze with me not just about deceased Nirvana singers, but a variety of other topics as well, from the Burlington music scene to firehouse nozzles, lead pipes, and tin cans full of glass.
Famous potato defies classification and in a musical world where labels are thrown around all too freely and rarely shed, this is a good thing. In a musical world where a band’s identity is too often marred and defaced by a few hollow adjectives, Famous Potato is at a terrific advantage with no one but themselves to thank.
The band, whose nine song CD, Milk and Motor Oil, is due out later this month, has garnished strength and, over the course of the last two years, with a hefty blend of passion and perseverance, risen to the top of Burlington’s burgeoning musical empire. But, while dedication and devotion are ever-important elements in the success of any creative endeavor, the quintessential ingredient in the Potato’s blend is talent. And they have a lot of it,
David Kamm has been called “the thinking man’s Jim Morrison on vocals” by New England Performer magazine (Dec. issue). Cleary’s drumming is as creative and intricate as it is primal and hard driving. Kamm’s guitar rhythms combine with the impressive tones of Harvey’s lead world to captivate an audience with their brilliant ability to be at once melodic and abrasive, to poetically weave emotion between the delicate and distorted. The penetrating vibration of Valcour’s bass provides the pulsating beat which navigates the sound as it wraps and coiled around the ethereal experience that is Famous Potato.
Eclectic is a word that seems to surface quickly when fans and critics discuss the Potato sound. Perhaps they take their place in some obscure realm with The Minutemen thrashing await on one side and a whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking Tom Waits sitting at the bar on the other. But the fact of the matter is that there is no real comparison. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still a little more of that over there.
The band’s success is found in their unique ability to harness chaos. It is found in the uncanny way that they are able to combine these various, sometimes calamitous sounds and noises and wrap them into one package which, though multi-faceted, successfully (and often incredibly) becomes cohesive upon hitting the stage. The Famous Potato sound has been likened to a machine getting angry at itself. While it is the anger that’s brilliant , it is also the machine itself, and more importantly the process of that anger being inflicted back upon the machine, escalating the whole insane cycle to new heights and beyond.
Many bands are eclectic and many bands are talented and neither of these attributes necessarily render them successful. It is only through a band’s ability to be creative with their talent and to take risks with their talent that real success is met, This is the measure of a true art form, whether the medium be literature, paint, sculpture, or music. Famous Potato have taken the risks and stretched their talents well beyond the ordinary realm of rock music. But, more than that they seem somehow to be in control of the risks they take. While they don’t always appear to know exactly where they’re going, Famous Potato has the ability to convince an audience that they know the whole time where they’ll end up.
They assault onlookers with a relentless arsenal of noises which, upon threatening to disassemble completely and throw the entire event headlong into chaos, manage to weld together and operate consistently as a single powerful being. A melodic four-headed monster. Such is the mystique of the Spud. That and their ability to maintain a fragile balance between the real and the absurd, to laugh at themselves, to deviate from the norm and to realize what many bands seem to lose sight of somewhere along the way: that music should be, above all, a hell of a lot of fun.
Famous Potato has been together for a little over two years at this point?
Kamm: The concept has been alive for generations.
Can you talk about what the early stages of the band were like.
Kamm: Well we have a video on sail currently illustrating
The early stages of the band. It was a predominantly ‘in the basement of the Neil Cleary household’ experience
Cleary: No, well the first birth of the spud was at the R.P. basement…
Kamm: Do we want to change the location?
Cleary: I think the Last Elm Cafe is the first…
Kamm: Let’s say it was at the Last Elm Cafe on a night when no one was there.
Cleary: No, we can’t say that either. We decided to have the band.
Kamm: We decided to have the band. It was John Russell on Bass, Jamie Harvey on guitar,... actually it was all guitar at first.
So it was more of a pickup, free form experiment?
Kamm: We didn’t know that Neil played drums at this point.
Cleary: The goal in the mind of John Russell and other members of the band was to have an electric folk rock band.
Kamm: Right.
Cleary: But that was the tortured dream of John Russell.
Harvey: Traditional folk.
Is that how the initial “Potato” sound got rolling?
Kamm: It was sort of a reaction to that.
Cleary: We never did that.
Kamm: We never did that because, first of all, I hate traditional folk music.
Cleary: Nicole, can you remember anything significant happening in your dreams around February of 94?
Valcour: I was dreaming about root vegetables…
Kamm: We got together and drank a lot of wine.
Cleary: After that we got together at my folks' house and just started playing.
The first memory I have of the Potato is at a Slade open mike in November of 92.
Harvey: That's right that was the first.
What is the significance of “Famous Potato”?
Kamm: Let’s just say I had nothing to do with the name. I came back from vacation from somewhere, I think it was Buffalo or Ithaca and I came back to a band that had named itself Famous Potato. Although I lived in Idaho and the Idaho license plates say Famous Potato.
An Idaho license plate was, at one point, used as a prop on stage, if I remember.
Kamm: Not only that but we were pummeled with potatoes at one or two gigs.
Was that traumatic? Do you want to talk about it?
Kamm: Well, it took a couple of months to clean up the mess of my guitar, my amp, my chords, ... in my shoes.
Who does most of the songwriting?
Kamm: I would say the band.
Is it a collective effort?
Cleary: The chrysalis, I would say, the pupas state of Famous Potato’s hit, is in the long extended, free form Love jam.
That ethereal space, the quasi-sexual energy, as you put it?
Kamm: Right.
So it’s not a case of David bringing a song he wrote and saying, ``let's play this.”? It evolved in the practice room?
Kamm: Initially we played a number of my songs that I had written and we just electrified them so we could have a set list but we don’t play any of those songs anymore.
If you were to categorize your music, could you do it?
Harvey: Neo-primitive Industrial Ragtime or we’ve also been linked to a machine getting angry at itself.
Cleary: Well it moved from neo-primitive industrial ragtime to grunge Apro-pop or Apro-pop grunge, if that’s possible.
Well it seems to me that that is one of the most endearing attributes of the band…
Cleary: Me, right?
Exactly. It’s Neil’s look when he’s drumming, you always seem to have your good side facing the crowd.
Kamm: I look back and Neil always looks at me and says, ‘you suck’. And that makes me feel like I can do anything.
It empowers you.
Kamm: Yeah, it does.
But seriously, it is such a diverse sound. There's the blues influence and then there’s the distortion. I thinkI can still hear the electric folk element too, even if it’s not necessarily what you’re trying to do. Of all the bands I’ve heard in Burlington, you are perhaps the hardest to classify or categorize, which is very redeeming.
Kamm: I think that’s how our audience feels too.
Cleary: A lot of sentences about Famous Potato begin, “No other band in Burlington…” I used to look forward to our first interview especially in the early d[a]ys because I could get of[f] with a quote that says “Famous Potato plays at a level of musical prowess unseen before on the Burlington music scene. Unmatched.
Kamm: In fact, a compliment we have heard lately is that we ate all good musicians.
Valcour: No, it's like this: I ain’t sayin’ you ain’t good musicians or nothin’...(group laughter)
Cleary: That’s what we heard when we opened for Chin Ho! In St. Albans at J.W. Ryan’s, a place that somebody has been shot at a couple of months earlier. We quickly moved to the back of the bar and I was sorting with the locals and one of them said repeatedly, “Well I’m sure you guys are good musicians but, etc. etc.”
Kamm: Well I was wearing a diaper on my head that night. I think that’s what the problem was.
Do you have a long term vision for the band at this point or is it just to take things as they come?
Cleary: Total Thermonuclear war.
Kamm: We’re trying to get gigs outside of Burlington and see what happens.
Are you finding any luck in that direction?
Cleary: We have a couple of gigs.
Kamm: It seems we have a gig on April Fool's day at Marlboro College and possibly a gig up in Montreal sometime soon.
Is Famous Potato where you’d like it to be right now? What has the evolution over the last two years been like?
Harvey: What amazes me about it is that we continue to evolve and I don’t see a stop to it. I’m not tired of anything and like you day the eclectic nature of it more and more influences things and I think it's going places.
You mention the eclectic nature of the band and earlier that the audience also finds that important- that there is such a diversity of sounds and music brought into one package. Is that reflected in the type of crowd? Could you categorize your audience?
Valcour: The audience is usually characterized by the other band we’re playing with. (laughter)
Kamm: we don’t really always have a choice, although I think we have a lot of fans that spend an inordinate amount of time at the Last Elm Cafe. I don’t know if they come to our shows anymore though, because I don't think they like to pay to see music. And I think for some reason we have a lot of younger fans now too.
Cleary: Young freaks. It attracts a kind of people who, what should I say?
Valcour: Misfits?
Cleary: Closet misfits, like people who you think are very normal but have an extremely strange streak, people who you wouldn’t expect to get into it but do.
Over the last couple of years. Burlington music has become more unified. It feels like there’s a lot more going on, maybe more unity between bands with the emergence of Club Fub, and the Sounds Around Burlington project, Split Records and the stuff Brad Searles is doing, in terms of bringing a lot of different talents together and recognizing that there is a lot of creativity in this town that’s maybe been more spread out until recently, How much of that has to do with Burlington itself being a fertile ground for an and coming music scene and how much is simply a reflection of the times and state of music around the country?
Valcour: I haven’t been in Burlington for very long but I’ve known Burlington for a long time and the music scene has exploded over the last couple years. The amount of really talented musicians in this small town I think is unusual. I don’t know why they’re all here. I mean, it’s cold in the winter and… I don’t know if it's a good place to start these small businesses like Tones, and Club Fub and all that. I think that the fact that there’s so much of it going on is really amazing and exciting and I think there’s a huge community within bands and that sort of thing which I’ve been impressed with so much since I’ve been here. There’s so much support for each other and a real love for homegrown music. I think it's unusual.
Harvey: Well that part really amazes me, that people are so supportive, because so many bands have been helpful with us and the communication exists. People want to get together and play with each other and I think in other scenes that doesn’t really happen. I’ve talked to other bands from other places and they say that doesn’t exist as much. Hardly at all.
So the presence of a scene doesn’t take away from a band’s own identity?
Valcour: It’s very nurturing in this town.
Kamm: Well the scene is so diverse, and each band does have its own identity that it's primarily concerned with. It doesn't seem to be a slide toward any kind of homogeneous Burlington sound. I don’t see that happening, but I think that one of the big reasons the scene is existing is because of Toast. That place is a huge supporter of local music. If you have your shit halfway together, you can get a gig. If you want to get up on stage and play, you can and you don’t have to play.
Is there a responsibility of a band within a local scene? Are you responsible for continuing to create a scene or does it create itself?, a responsibility to other bands, to audiences?
Cleary: First of all, I tend to think there’s a very good scene, but then again I’m inside it. But to me, it sort of depends on what you think is a good thing to do when good things happen to you. How do you spread it around or how much of yourself do you give back to it? It is definitely spiritually healthy to give back to it, to give other people the opportunities you’ve been given. Simple ways. For instance, we got to play at Toast or Metronome by opening up for someone else, so just to do that for someone else also. On the same level if you put out a bad feeling, it's going to come back [to] haunt you in a very different way.
Harvey: What he’s trying to say is that we’re motivated by fear.
A couple of questions about the lyrical aspects of Famous Potato. First off, how much do the lyrics matter? IS there a message or a point you’re trying to get across?
Kamm: I think the lyrics come about in a way similar to how the music come about, What starts as being being jam-oriented or nonsensical is somehow turned into a form and the form itself sometimes creates meaning and sometimes the meaning is wonderful. But I think it depends on the song. Certain songs really do have a story behind them and there is something definitely attached to that intention. It’s not just [David at this point makes a series of primal/alien mumbling noises that this interviewer is unable to recreate in writing], it’s not just that.
Cleary: It's not consistent either. It's not like one person writes the lyrics. Nicole and Jamie and David have collaborated, and David and I have collaborated. Jon and David have collaborated.
So the songwriting is entirely a group effort?
(The four Potatoes nod.)
The band’s original bassist, John Russel, left the band in spring of 94. What were the circumstances surrounding his departure?
Kamm: Do you know something about John that we don’t?
Harvey: I thought we covered that earlier, didn't we? He was carrying Kurt Cobain's lovechild…I think it was a matter of devoting time and realizing what an important project we were undertaking and that we wanted to gear up and continue to write even more. Since he himself is such an eclectic man, he didn’t have the time to devote as much as we and he would have liked.
Cleary: David and Jamie and I, I think we have more of a musical background than John and so it makes sense that we continue on doing that. John started to play because we had the band, (to Kamm) You were saying something about the feeling he gave the original set up.
Kamm: Oh yeah, John’s influence on the sound that we continue to try and work out is pretty big and I think he just looked at music in a very different way. I don’t know if I know how to explain. I don’t know if I want to. He looks at things geometrically and his bass lines are based on shapes and sizes rather than necessarily sounds so I think some of the early Potato songs are very mechanical sounding and machine like in a great way.
And some of that is definitely still with you.
Kamm: Oh yeah.
Harvey: I think also , the emotion that John brought was huge. He would strike a bass string and I would shake. I could feel the emotion. He would wail and it would work.
Kamm: A fire hose nozzle was one of the props he would use to play the bass.
Was there a lag time between John’s departure and Nicole’s arrival?
Cleary: Wasn’t there a lag time of about 48 hours?
Kamm: I think 48 hours.
Valcour: Well I heard you all were trying to get a bassist but he left town, so as a second choice and with no other choice, they let me play… as a favor to me until someone else could be found.
Cleary: You’re so humble.
Kamm: Nicole was playing in a band called Mona at the time.
Was that March of 94?
Harvey: March or April,
Kamm: When I first moved to Burlington about three years ago, I answered an ad and I didn’t understand the ad. It was, what did it say?
Valcour: It was my sister and I and we put a sign up that said ‘two women, and two cats seek a housemate.’
Kamm: Seek. But I thought it said ‘geek’. ‘Two women, two cats and a geek housemate’ and I thought, okay, I can do that.
Cleary: I think that’s when the Potato first started actually.
Does it feel as if things have really taken off in that time since April?
Harvey: I think the band has taken a real big directional turn recently and I guess you kind of tie it all together.
You’ve recently finished recording a CD that will be out soon. The feeling I got from listening to it is that it captures your live sound quite well. Was that the goal?
Valcour: We played it all live.
Cleary: The last fifteen minutes, which is the quarter of the time on it I realized only when I got back, was this thing that we didn't plan out. We just started recording. We played like we normally play in practice so I think it's sort of like the raw and the cooked from what it begins with to what it ends up with. The first song, Inkwell, is one of those ready-for-prime-time crafted sings and then at the other end is the raw material. I think in that way, I’m very happy with the sound.
Valcour: We ease people into it.
It seems that the choice of songs, the lengths and the general feel of the album is as eclectic as your sound itself, if that makes any sense. It’s a little bit of everything. Rather than just having one type of song or having each song fit some “Famous Potato” format, there is really no set format, which I think is a wonderful quality and maybe what you are shooting for.
Harvey: I just wanted to say something about the way we work together and what Neil was talking about. We’re all individuals but there’s an incredible sensitivity that we all feel for each other. It happens during live performances and certainly when we just play. People will shift into something and it’s amazing. That’s how we can all communicate. People say how tight we are and very well we’re not that tight. It’s just that we’re listening to each other and we all really feel each other’s times and because of that sensitivity, it perceives tightness.
You tolerate each other fairly well it seems.
Valcour: There’s the occasional fist fight, but other than that…
Cleary: Good times, bad times, we’ve had our share.
Kamm: I think though, you asked if we’re a live band and are we primarily a live band. I think that’s the reason that we’re playing -because we want to play live. I don’t see the plan of a band that would just record songs and then that would be it, It’s a real charge to play with these people and, you know, playing on stage is great because it’s so fucking loud. (laughter) I’m serious about that. The energy of really loud music is powerful. I think that’s something that has changed within the band. When we first started out we were kind of secret and tricky and stuff and really vague. We would play with a lot of emotional energy but we really didn’t play that hard and I think that’s kind of changed in the last two years. I think we put out a lot more.
Maybe filling out your sound more completely?
Kamm: Yeah.
Cleary: It’s funny. I’ve thought about that, and in the beginning we didn’t have serious sound hooked up, but in a way, it led us to be a lot harsher. The sound was a lot more harsh, but now it seems like we’re used to playing through a big system. It seems like it’s a lot more subdued, passionate stuff. I don’t know if that makes any sense, that we’re less likely to have a harsher sound.
Kamm: Well we had fewer effects when we first started. (Neil and David laugh) I think all we did was distortion and clean, no echo, no reverb. We had a lot of really jangly songs.
Cleary: Well, my drums had more than just distortion.
Kamm: Neil would tape things to his drum set. He had a big steel pipe that he would hit his drums with. It was about three feet long.
And that’s no longer used?
Cleary: No, that’s the one big change for me is that I would play anything in the beginning and now I bought a really nice drum set so…
So you became more conservative?
Cleary: Yeah. Well, in a way. I worry about that. In a way more conservative, but in a way trying to explore stuff with a more basic sound. Because I wouldn't be able to play the same kit from song to song.
Kamm: He has a cookie tin with broken glass in it as part of the kit.
To throw out another Burlington oriented question, could you do what you’re doing successfully in a bigger city like Boston or New York?
Kamm: I think maybe more successfully.
Harvey: I think of what Dennis (Wygmans of Club Toast) said which was you had to have big ears to listen to Famous Potato and I think that’s true.
Valcour: I’m not sure if the Potato has found it’s audience yet. I’m not sure if Burlington is the audience. I think Burlington’s so hot and cold with the Potato . I don’t know if that’s because of other things or what.
Cleary: Well, don’t know. It could get appreciated in a larger city because there’s a bigger population and you’d think about a bigger subculture, but in a way, I don’t know about the others but I can’t imagine playing in a city because I’m not a city-oriented person. I’d be a lot more scared to play in a city. I can play music here because there’s more opportunity and I don’t have to be so boisterous, do you see what I’m saying? I grew up not having to be so pushy and so think that the quaintness of the area fosters people who wouldn’t normally play music. I don’t know if I’d be in a band if there weren’t so many opportunities to play.
I think Burlington is unique in that way. It seems, as I said earlier, that there is so much talent and creativity that has been harnessed over the last couple years, with Toast and everything they’re doing to reach out to up and coming acts. It’s very welcoming to have the opportunity to express yourself. Whereas in a bigger city, while the audience may be larger, you probably would not find the same grassroots support that you do in Burlington. On the downside, does Burlington run the risk of being perceived as a dead end for the same reasons?
Valcour: I think it remains to be seen whether or not Burlington’s a dead end because other parts of the world are starting to notice Burlington, I think it can either be a springboard or hometown for a lot of people.
Cleary: It’s funny. I think music has become so much more decentralized these days in terms of smaller labels coming out and I think in Burlington it seems, at times, like there’s nowhere to go, For example, if there were a local radio station that played local music and the press focused more on local music, there would be so many more places to go. Rather than looking up to a big label or up to a big star and having them they feed you what you need, to look around to local music you could go a lot further that way.
Harvey: I think it’s happening. Even WIZN recently keyed on the local music scene. The press has started to pick up on it.
Famous Potato played at the 24/7 shows at Club Toast which featured 28 different local bands over four nights. That received a fair amount of coverage at least around New England. It was on the cover of New England performer. It seems to me that Burlington is gaining some recognition and it will be interesting to see what course that continues to take. Do you want to talk at all about the CD?
Valcour: I thought the recording of that was a blast. It was in some ways extremely tedious, but in other ways it was a whole lot of fun. We just had a weekend where we really communicated. Laying down the music and putting it down the way we wanted to heat it was the easy part.
What was the hard part?
Valcour: Mixing it down and mixing it down.
Cleary: And mixing it further down.
Kamm: Diluting it completely.
Valcour: Thirteen mixes of “Potato Blues.”
Kamm: The mechanics of assembling a bunch of noises so that it approaches the sound that we try and create live is rather time consuming. We recorded it in one place, did vocals in another place, mixed it in the place where we did vocals, and sequenced it somewhere else and this is our first time doing this. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me to of all this stuff in different places although I guess I hadn’t really considered it when we first started, what it would be like. But, it’s a process. It’s a difficult thing to sit and listen to a song for an hour or so while mixing. It’s a difficult thing. At this point, I don’t really want to hear the songs. I’ve heard these songs so many times over the last six months. We started recording in the middle of July.
Cleary: Recording is like preforming in that you learn how to play yourself, then you perform and you fuck up and then you learn how to perform and it becomes smooth. And this is our first time recording.
But generally you’re happy with the process, despite its tedious nature. Are you happy with the product?
Kamm: Yes. I think that the key thing about it all is that the original tracks, the original takes, were very strong and that come through on the final product. You can always go back and say “Oh, I screwed up there” but I think those places have become attractive to us”
Valcour: There are some beautiful screw ups.
[As this article goes to press, Famous Potato continue to pursue their goal of conquering the world as we know it. However, they are currently in the process of searching for and auditioning potential drummers. Neil Cleary, who is still pounding the skins for the Potato as this is being written, will soon be leaving the band to pursue other musical interests. Neil will continue drumming for The Pants, another sensational local band, with whom he also plays. Meanwhile, Famous Potato, with no intention of slowing its pace, doesn’t plan to miss a step while working to fill the rather large shoes which will be left by Cleary’s impending departure]