More (White)Cowbell!

Last October, White Cowbell Oklahoma covered Halifax in
pumpkin guts sprayed from a whirring chainsaw. This year, they’re back
to serenade you with songs from their third album, Bombardero,
and celebrate a whopping 10 years as a band. Only time will tell if
Tuesday’s show with Iron Giant at the Seahorse will be as wild as last
year’s. “It was pretty explosive, I must say,” says frontman Clem C.
Clemson. “Much of that had to do with the enthusiasm of the Halifax
crowd as much as the snowballing juggernaut of shame that is WCO.”

Ten years is a long time to be a snowballing juggernaut. To what
does White Cowbell Oklahoma owe its longevity? “It’s an
unrelenting—almost bordering on mean-spirited—desire to just not go
away,” says Clemson. “That would be just too convenient for all the
naysayers that are just dropping like flies. We have outlived every
fruitfly music critic. Some people in the Toronto region have just
written us off. And yet we don’t go away and they do. We find that
immensely satisfying.”

Clemson reminisces about some of the high points for the band in the
last 10 years: “Touring Europe six times, we played an enormous metal
festival and rubbed shoulders with Iron Maiden, played to over 40,000
people, all this while Toronto press tried to continually write us
off.” In Toronto press’ defense, the twangy psych-rock antics of the
sextet isn’t for everyone. Including, as it turns out, Holiday Inns
everywhere.

“We got banned from the Holiday Inn chain of hotels after a
particularly sordid night in Calgary,” says Clemson. “We immortalized
the evening in question by putting a photo on the cover of our
seven-inch.” When totalling hotel rooms isn’t an option, entire
provinces will do. WCO is grateful to have had the chance to “go from
province to province and leave craters in our wake.”

This tour breaks new ground—the band heads to Newfoundland for the
first time. “We’ve actually rented the ferry to be private for our
disposal. Just us and Iron Giant and a few hundred of our closest
Maritime friends, it’s actually going to be a clothing-optional
cruise,” jokes Clemson. “We often float, but not on water, more on our
own hallucinogenic air.”

The band’s devotion to hallucinogens comes across in
Bombardero. “It’s like a Bosch painting, there’s actually Bosch
art on the album,” says Clemson. “It’s dark and infernal and it’s a lot
more proggy than its predecessors. We took a lot of acid and listened
to Zappa.”

The next 10 years are up in the air. “We’ve been listening to
Funkadelic and Krautrock, so maybe we’ll put those together. Or maybe
we’ll go in a Sabbathy direction or do a country album,” says Clemson.
“We haven’t decided on a direction we are going to go in, it’s just so
exciting right now.”

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This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.