By Kimberly Chun
Ty Segall
It’s easy to imagine a battered and bruised zombie surfer hanging 10 to “Standing at the Station” off Ty Segall's Lemons, or the album's shaking version of Captain Beefheart’s “Drop Out Boogie.” Picture drag racing along to Segall's “In Your Car” and “Cents,” with the finish line at a fuzzed-out, frenzied Point Panic party. Deep-in-the-red ragers like “Johnny” take on hardcore’s crash-and-burn strategy -- tearing around on the edges of distortion on just two wheels -- while “Rusted Dust” strips it all down to Segall’s mournful falsetto and a single, evocatively ungainly electric guitar.
Lemons brought Segall together with the gloriously gritty Goner Records. “I actually just asked them if they wanted to put out my record,” he explains. “I didn’t think it was going to happen because I’ve been a huge fan for a long time. And they were, like, ‘Yeah!’
“I was super-psyched. I’m extremely lucky because they’re an amazing label.”
Ty Segall, "Lovely One"
It’s been a major evolution, going from Laguna Beach to Memphis. Segall first relocated North to attend USF, where he bonded with the rest of the Traditional Fools, bassist-vocalist Andrew Luttrell and guitarist-drummer-vocalist David Fox, who grew up in nearby coastal hamlets in Southern Orange County. “When we’re back at home, it’s like we’re all living in the same city," Segall muses. The Trad Fools didn’t know each other very well back home, but together, in the Bay Area, they started hanging out and jamming and, in early 2006, morphed into a legendary party band.
Segall broke away gently, on his own, after he released a cassette, Horn the Unicorn, on the Wizard Mountain label. “People liked it and wanted me to play live,” hel recalls, “and I was kind of freaked out about it.” So when Nodzzz asked the Fools to play a show at the last minute and the combo couldn’t get it together at such short notice, Segall jumped in to play a few songs on acoustic guitar. Having a foot free, the kick drum seemed like a good idea, and so ever the rock ‘n’ roll maximalist, he decided to throw that in as well. The one-man band was born.
Ty Segall, "Cents"
Why not go to the route of so many other single-musician operations out there and hoist a laptop onstage? “I like the way real instruments sound,” declares Segall. “I grew up listening to ‘Louie Louie,’ the Kinks, and stuff like that, old pop songs, and I loved how they sounded, and so when I started making music, I wanted to make that.”
Of course, now that Lemons is on a roll, he’s formed his own full-fledged touring group with Emily Epstein on drums, Tim Hellman on bass, and Sic Alps’ Mike Donovan on guitar. Coming soon: an album with his bud Mikal Cronin on Kill Shaman Records, surfing, job-hunting, and the solo disc he’s currently teasing out.
The new songs, he says, are “a little bit cleaner, which is nice because having stuff be blown out is really fun, but I think it’s easy to have something sound raw and messed up and have it be cool.”
Ty Segall
A tune might start with a drum pattern, then Segall might press record and write the rest of the song around the beat, but that’s only one fun approach. “I never try to record one way or else the songs sound the same,” he explains. “It’s always fun to experiment, and it’s kind of a goal. How can I put a soul song on this record, if it’s not going work at all? But if it does, it’s going to be so awesome.
“It’s like [the Kinks'] The Village Green Preservation Society [Reprise, 1968],” he continues. “All those songs are so different.” Is that something that Segall aspires to -- when in doubt, do as Ray Davies does? “No way, man, there will never be another Ray Davies,” he says. “But it doesn’t hurt to try a little...”
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