Interview with Don Chambers!

A Tom Waits-like voice, a mean playing banjo, a stubborn band, glimmers of gospel and biblical references -- these ingredients comprise Don Chambers and Goat, an Athens-based band that makes their Chicago debut Thursday at the Bottom Lounge. Chambers has played here before, in the 90s with his former band the Vaudevilles. But musically speaking that may as well have been another lifetime. The band's second album, Zebulon plays heavily on the themes of oppression, redemption and survival--like Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers with flashes of Harper Lee rolled into one. I caught up with Chambers on the phone this week, while he was on the road in Lexington, Kentucky, telling me about Southern Gothic, learning to appreciate home from Berlin and music as a type of magic.

The Latest and Greatest:
Who have been your musical influences?

Don Chambers:
I certainly had some musical idols. The first is Bob Dylan. 75 percent of white male musicians would say that. Johnny Cash would be another one. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s everyone was singing in this register I couldn't even get to. Even Jagger was out of my range. I hooked on to Cash because he sings in low range. I'm really into film noir and Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett-- pulp noir writers from the 30s and 40s. I like their use of language, like Hemingway, short to the point and very prosaic. They get the job done quickly and efficiently, kind of like what Cormac McCarthy has turned into now.

The Latest and Greatest:
Why is your band named Goat?

Don Chambers:
I used to work this job and I really didn't like it, and a good friend was working with me, at a coffee shop in Athens. He gave me this note and it said, "Don't let them get your goat." I still have the note to this day, and I'm like oh yeah that's exactly right, and from that I thought it worked as a band name. I was really into Jesus Lizard and they had an album named Goat so I stole that from them too. Goats are a pain in the ass of an animal, I like that they are stubborn and I expect my band to be stubborn, you have to be stubborn to be in the music business.

The Latest and Greatest:
You've been labeled as Southern Gothic rock, you definitely have a heavy Tom Waits element in your songs, and there are the biblical references and the gospel thing. How do you define your music?

Don Chambers:
I just call it rock-n-roll with a banjo. I play the banjo now, and in my old band I used to play bass, and when that ended I wanted to move as far away from the bass as I could, I didn't want to play the ukulele because I didn't think that was so cool. I was also listening to Dog Bogs and Roscoe Holcomb, and I still love that form. I think Holcomb in particular was the most punk rock thing I'd heard in years. When he was recording in the 70s, he had this rhythm on the banjo and I wanted to play like that and those are my banjo idols. I have a love/hate affair with the banjo most of the time because it's not loud enough but I gravitate to it because of the open tunings, which makes it hell of a lot easier to play, you can play open strings and add some notes in it, makes it something to write on. What turns me on about writing is composition. I don't sit around and play the guitar a lot except for the means of writing a song. I'm not good enough on any instrument to consider myself a player.

The Latest and Greatest:
Tell me about your childhood experiences in music, what influenced you and when did you decide you wanted to do music professionally?

Don Chambers:
Growing up music was church. I grew up in Florence, South Carolina, a small town. The church was Plymouth Bretheren--kind of like Baptist but stricter. When I was in my teens my sister had a guitar and I started playing that and listening to Dylan, and he kind of lets you into songwriting in a way, he's a force of nature, but I didn't find it intimidating. Listening to Dylan I wrote my first song when I was 15 or 16 but it wasn't until my mid 20s when I went to college that I realized I really liked it. I moved to Athens [GA] to go to art school and barely finished because I started playing in a band, and I think music had an immediacy to it that making art didn't and I realized I really liked playing with other people whereas as an artists you're doing it alone, at some point I asked myself whether I was going to get a really job or keep dong what I had to and keep playing music. Now it's too late. I can't get a real job; I'm doomed to this thing.

The Latest and Greatest
The inspiration for your recent album Zebulon is from a Georgia town you encountered in your travels. What about the town inspired you and how did that influence the music on the album?

Don Chambers:
First of all, I've never been to Zebulon, I saw the sign when we were touring in the south of Georgia, the name stuck to me because it sounded like the place you either wanted to go to, or the place you wanted to get the hell out of. And it's an odd name for a town in Georgia that was the attraction, I like the name of the town, I don't really want to go there necessarily. At that time the band was touring in the South and their album has a lot of rural southern references on it, and I wanted to explore that. Soon after that I moved to Berlin for a little while, I wasn't homesick but living in a foreign country, I was aware that I grew up in the south, some things I took for granted here but you get out of it and there are lots of interesting things right in front of your face if you just look at it and write it down.

The Latest and Greatest:
That's when you came back and wrote the album?

Don Chambers:
I started writing it in Berlin.

The Latest and Greatest:
So that's the homecoming you refer to on the album.

Don Chambers:
Yeah, I think you mentioned Southern Gothic and that ground has been trammeled by everyone from Flannery O'Connor to the Band, and I saw for myself, personally what I had to say about it. Because I had that perspective of being away, I saw richness in my experience, and you write from what you know.

The Latest and Greatest:
What are your specific experiences with gospel and religion?

Don Chambers:
Just growing up in a southern Protestant church, I think that was another thing about being out of the country and being around people who hadn't had any of that experience. Most people who grew up in the South did and at least when to church on Sundays. I realize it's not a phenomenon, not everyone is singing the hymns, eating the fried chicken and playing on the [church] softball league. I grew up going to church 4-5 times a week, in a very religious family.

The Latest and Greatest
How did your music change as a result of your band, Goat, joining you in 2001?

Don Chambers:
After my old band broke up I went through three years of doing Southern material, and I'd never written with someone else, so Goat forming made it a collaborative process, I write all the lyrics, and the last one has another player's song on it, and I think it just made it more collaborative and louder, which is fun. The difference between when you're writing for yourself, you don't worry if you write 10 songs and they're all melancholic and slow, in the back of your mind you write something that's going to be interesting for the rest of the people to play. Our band tends to want to rock, which is why it's different when you see us live.

The Latest and Greatest:
How has being based in Athens helped contribute to your exposure?

Don Chambers:
Well certainly being able to go out with Drive-By truckers over the year, going out with bigger bands, that's the great thing about Athens, just being on the creative end of it, there's so many bands in this small town making things, you can't go to a restaurant or a bar, without being served by someone in a band. It's just a good creative energy around. If you were trying something new 15 years ago, as I did when I moved here, it allows you to come out as a novice performer, there's a good amount of community support, you have an audience, it's a good creative Petri dish I like to say.

The Latest and Greatest:
Do you feel Southern audiences are more receptive to your music?

Don Chambers:
I don't know. I tend to think touring in the South and being form here, like selling ice cream to Eskimos, they're familiar with the sound and subject matter, might make it a little more interesting to them. We do OK in the South and we're getting a bigger touring circle over the years. It's hard for me to say, we got great reception up north but on the other hand we got great reception in Mississippi. I hope it's better outside of the South because for me it's more interesting. I want to go to Chicago and New York all the time.

The Latest and Greatest:
Tell me about your process of music writing and creating.

Don Chambers:
I don't believe in inspiration, I believe in perspiration. I think that writing songs or making art whatever you do, it's a habit, I try to work on 5 days a week for at least a few hours a day. A lot of process is collecting things. If you're a songwriter, you're listening to what people say, you're looking at signs on the road, I have to write down dreams or things right away. I'm just kind of constantly filling up the refrigerator with stuff, and then I go in and get stuff out to make a song dish out of it what I find. I love going in to my studio and working on words, and the music, and I demo all my stuff on the computer, just to get ideas. When I was younger it seemed like everything happened fairly easily. The older you get you want to surprise yourself, but working on it, I know myself pretty well, the only way to surprise myself is to work really hard.

The Latest and Greatest:
There's an element of redemption in your music. From where does this stem?

Don Chambers:
Not from religion. I think just from basic human kindness. I believe in human kindness… this sounds really cheesy…human kindness and love, and some hope at the end of the day. But don't put on rose-colored glasses and think everything is all right.

The Latest and Greatest:
Do you have any rituals to performing -- things you have do before or after a performance?

Don Chambers:
I've worn the same boots on stage for 15 years. That's my only ritual.

The Latest And Greatest:
What do they look like?

Don Chambers:
They're old army boots all duck taped up now, because they're falling apart. Eventually I'm going to retire them. Maybe put them on a [album] cover.

The Latest and Greatest:
Are they related to your first show?

Don Chambers:
No, they're related to Emmett Kelly, a clown in the 30s who wore a pair of clown boots covered in tape, and I saw them at a museum in Florida so in the 90s so I decided to wear them all the time. They already had a hole on them. They're my lucky clown boots.

The Latest and Greatest:
What song on Zebulon do you particularly identify with and why?

Don Chambers:
That changes over time, right now the one I really like to sing is "I Can Waltz." Written from a character's point of view, that's a little untrustworthy, character, that says one thing and does another. I think all songwriting is role playing, writing from a character's point of view and you kind of have to put yourself in that person's boots. But I don't think about it in any kind of moral sense. How does that person work and what do they do. Ultimately it comes back to you that it's you writing it, it's never all yourself; I'm not into confessional songwriting. James Taylor is great but that school of songwriting from the 70s that used the first person a lot made people think they were authentic because they were wearing their hearts on their sleeves. It's just a song, a little bit of truth and a little lie, if it's a good song it's got have a little bit of both, you got to be a good liar.

Don Chambers and Goat headline at the Bottom Lounge on Thursday, 8pm.