Strawberry Fuzz is a long-running Venice Beach, California-based band that started off focusing on Garage Punk Rock and has expanded over time to high-energy explorations of the many avenues of Rock and Punk. Their third record, Miller’s Garage, came out mid-May and boasts a whopping 14 tracks, hailing from older songs that have been show-tested for years and newer tracks that show off their current experiments. Following a tour with The Buzzcocks, they went home to Venice for a residency at Venice West to reveal even more of their new songs to their substantial local fanbase.
Made up of Colby Rodgers on vocals, Kris Miller on lead guitar, Alex Arias on rhythm guitar and backup vox, Dashel Dupuy on bass and backup vox, and Andy Warren on drums, the band also relies on Alex as their Producer and Colby as their designer, keeping everything as DIY and in-house as possible. I caught up with them while they were out on tour to chat about this wide-ranging and homegrown album that suggests a lot about their musical journey so far and what they value most.
Miller’s Garage is one of the longest records I’ve seen in a few years. It’s a very full record, and it looks like a lot of work. Has this been something you’ve been working on for a few years?
Andy Warren: Yeah, some of the tracks we actually made back when we made The Fuzz Tapes Vol. 1. A lot of them are new, but some are from the demo days. We played them live forever, but we just never recorded them. So we are pretty stoked to get them out there.
Alex Arias: When he says “We recorded them”, he means I recorded them.
Andy: That’s Alex, he produced the album.
I’m happy to hear that you produced it yourselves, because that suggests a lot of ownership over the sound and effects. To me, that says that you’re happy with how it came out.
Colby: That’s definitely something we pride ourselves in, is doing everything ourselves. Alex Produces it, and I, Colby, the singer, do the designs, logos, and all the merch. We’re a pretty self-sufficient, well-oiled machine, and we don’t have rely on anyone else, which is cool.
I thought that you might have a lot of extra music from your live playing, since you are very active performers. Bands who play a lot often have a much wider cache of songs than their discography shows that they’ve been honing. Have these songs been refined through live play before you finally recorded them?
Andy: Totally. “Burnt”, which is on the record, has definitely taken many different turns. We built the recording after we learned how to play it live together. That one is cool because it definitely captures what it feels like to hear that song live. It goes into this trippy, psychedelic breakdown that’s really drawn out, and that’s pretty much how we play it in our
Now that you’re out on tour, will you be specifically playing these songs some more?
Andy: We’re playing a decent amount of these new ones, probably half and half. We’re excited for when we go back to Venice, for our coming home local show, to play a bunch of the new ones off the record. That’ll be for all our local homies to hear our new shit.
I saw that you had a residency coming up. Is that the kind of terminus of the tour?
Colby: I call it the “soft landing.”
[Laughter]
I noticed that the album is high-energy to start with, and it gets high energy towards the end, again. It also feels like a kind of journey, like entering a club, maybe a new place you haven’t been to, having this experience, and then getting kicked out at the end. It’s dawn, and you’re a little scrambled.
Andy: That’s a bad-ass interpretation!
Alex: I love that.
Andy: We speak our truth, that’s for sure. It’s like getting kicked out of a bar. We got kicked out of the venue where we’re having our residency now because the front door got kicked off at one of our gigs, and they just couldn’t have that kind of chaos. They weren’t mad at us or anything.
What did you do to make it up to them and get this residency?
Andy: It’s under new management, but they said, “Okay, we’re ready to have you guys back again. Let’s tear it up again!” We’re stoked!
Why is this album called Miller’s Garage? Is that because of band member Kris Miller?
Andy: Yes, he pretty much lives in that garage.
[Laughter]
Andy: And it’s where we write a lot of our stuff. He’s got this old saloon piano, and guitars are everywhere. We pretty much go there every weekend, and there are always friends coming through.
Colby: It’s the best “afters” hangout in town.
Andy: Yes, it’s our local place for after the bars close. Pretty much everyone goes there to write music and pass around guitars. That’s our spot!
That’s such a nice thing to have.
Andy: A lot of our songs got written in that garage, in late nights or early mornings.
It makes me think of garage bands, too, and that’s pretty much the birth of Rock ‘n Roll.
Alex: We pretty much are a garage band.
Colby: That photo, the album photo, is in Miller’s backyard, so the garage is right next to that. That’s pretty much where we hang out constantly. It felt fitting to name the album that.
It’s like Cosmo’s Factory, by Creedence Clearwater Revival, with a picture of their rehearsal space on the front.
Alex: I love that album!
Colby: Our last album was called Strong’s Drive, which was our other buddy’s street, that we would jam at. We love naming our albums after random locations.
That speaks to who you are and where you come from.
Andy: We try to be as authentic as possible. All the songs are talking about people we know, or crack heads in Venice, or weird part nights, or being depressed. What’s cool, with how Alex mixed it, with songs like “House Party” and “Tour Song”, those are all clips of us being on the road, and we just mixed them into the record.
I was going to ask you about that, since I saw that you basically used “found recordings” from your life for the album.
Andy: Totally. Those were actually taken from our previous tours, with funny little videos on our phones, and weird moments, and we just mixed them in!
It does give the feeling of people hanging out with you on the album, and that’s all part of the feel. The album is definitely not presented as a pristine environment for people to see your songs in isolation. It’s more like a Punk poster wall where everything’s stuck up together and overlapping. Your life is there on the album.
Andy: Hell, yeah! Thank you, that’s a sick analogy. That’s what fun, too, if you saw the “Bad Dreams” video, is that we wanted to make it about all the homies we hang out with. Those are literally all of our friends at the garage, pretty much every weekend. We just put up a white bedsheet and shot that video. It just cycles through all the homies who have become part of the band, pretty much.
Do you have people from your community who regularly come to your shows, so that you recognize them every time?
Alex: 100 percent. We have a posse. That’s how the whole band started pretty much, a bunch of Venice friends. We’d throw backyard shows and it would be fucking crazy, with people on the roof, gnarly mosh pits, and wall-to-wall in a backyard. All those people come to every show, still, and they all end up in Miller’s garage!
[Laughter]
What do all the people think of how wide-ranging your sound actually is? Do they have a certain expectation of sound from you, or are they pretty open to your exploration of Rock and Punk traditions?
Andy: I think everyone knows that we are going to kind of put out different genres constantly. We’ve kind of done that from the start. Our shows just kind of end up more Punk because everyone gets so riled up. We also play a lot of songs fast when we play it live.
Alex: I think there are some songs, like “Look My Way” that people haven’t heard yet, and that kind of shit is going to blow people’s minds. We haven’t done shit like that before!
Andy: I want to make an Electro-Punk album with synth next! Come on, Alex, whip out the old synth, dust it off!
The thing is, based on hearing that track, I think you could possibly do that. You’re making choices with each of these songs, and obviously there are more possibilities. Another song that’s more reflective and groovy is “Bad Dreams”, which almost sounds like Psych Rock to me.
Colby: I was a bit depressed for the lyrics on that one, but it definitely has that gothy feel to it. That’s why we were stoked for that music video since it was so far from being contrived.
What happens when you write songs together? How do you develop them?
Andy: We usually start at Alex’s place, since he’s a full-time Producer, so when we’re writing, we’re already recording.
Alex: Full-time as in, I’m broke!
[Laughter]
Andy: We all write a lot together. I think Miller and Alex wrote the lyrics for “Look My Way”. I write a lot. We all sit together and we’ll just go over things until it feels good to all of us. We don’t really write separately that much.
So the sound starts with a suggestion, but goes in its own direction as it develops?
Andy: I think maybe it starts with the fact that Colby’s been listening to some band and comes in with a riff or an idea, or Alex comes in with something that he wrote and says, “Check this out.” There’s something he was feeling that day.
Colby: It’s very much about what we’ve been listening to. We say “Let’s make a Butthole Surfers record!” Then it’s, “Let’s make a Funk record!” It just kind of goes from there.
Andy: We pass around the guitar, and if someone has a lick, we just dive in. That’s also what’s crazy, is that we have a huge number of half-written demos, a bunch of songs that are half-baked. We have this wasteland folder of a hundred songs that we’ve never finished.
Do you ever go back to them, or is that it?
Alex: We went back to some of them for this album. “Found Me Dead” was one of those. We started that one like three years ago.
Andy: That’s what was crazy about “Burnt”, that we’ve been playing it since the beginning. “Found Me Dead” was recorded years ago. That came out of the graveyard!
