Giant Drag

Interview by Monte Holman

Giant Drag is slacker noise-pop duo with a propensity for shrugging satire. Annie Hardy plays the guitar, spread thick with effects pedals. She drawls the vocals with a permanent half-smile and half-shut eyes. Micah Calabrese plays drums, saving his left hand to ring out the synth bass lines. The final product is fuzzy pop in slow motion that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The duo just released their first LP, Hearts and Unicorns (Kickball Records). The songs on the record have a nice mix of low-fi warmth and polished production, which is evidenced in a huge wall of sound.
We chatted with Annie and Micah while they were here for CMJ. Things started off poorly when, a couple questions into the interview, the bouncers at Northsix kicked everyone out of the club to check for wristbands. Annie was starving, and the band had nearly rumbled with a sound guy the night before, so prospects for conversation looked shaky. Luckily, Annie and Micah have a sense of humor and are as friendly and upbeat as you’d imagine after hearing their record.
Stream Hearts and Unicorns here. Despite the band’s ironic, self effacing name, it’s a great debut. Check them out October 6 at Irving Plaza with Stellastar.
*****
FREEwilliamsburg: Some songs on Hearts and Unicorns, particularly “Cordial Invitation” have a certain My Bloody Valentineness to them, which is surprising coming from a band made up of two people. How do you translate that lush fullness live?
Micah: We turn up the delay pedal a little more. (laughs)
Annie: We don’t really try to match the album. It’s like the album and the live show are two different entities. Live, you get to establish a relationship with the people in the room.
FREEwilliamsburg: How do you try to establish that relationship?
Micah: Usually Annie’s on the mic telling jokes.

FREEwilliamsburg: You’ve been playing together since 2002 – why’d it take so long to record your first full-length?
Micah: We were just sort of hanging out. We just became friends and were like let’s just mess around and record some stuff, never intending to start a band or anything. Annie was like “I booked a show-let’s go play it.”
Annie: The time between our first show and when our record came out wasn’t that long. A lot of bands take a lot longer….
FREEwilliamsburg: How did things with Kickball Records get started?
Annie: We had an EP out on Witchita in the UK and on a small indie in the US, and Wendy Hicks, whose label it is, her friends told her that she would really like us, and she heard our song on Indie 103, the radio station in LA. She said that she was driving and pulled over and listened to it and then tracked us down and signed us.
FREEwilliamsburg: Where did you record Hearts and Unicorns?
Annie: We did the drums at Paramount Studios, and we did the rest of it at this horrible makeshift studio in Downtown Rehearsal, which is like a big building full of rehearsal rooms where all the metal bands and mariachi bands and all the other horrible bands in Los Angeles practice. It was pretty rough every day. Our friends Louis and James from Dirty Little Secret, an L.A. band, helped us out, and we had some guest musicians come and tinker around.
FREEwilliamsburg: You have a video for “Kevin is Gay” – Is that something you initiated?
Annie: Our friend GJ did our first video for “This Isn’t It.” He always has a reason for us to make a video. The first one, it was like “Hey we want to make a video, kind of.” And he was like “Well I’m trying to build up my reel,” and he did our video for free. We said we’d pay him back if we ever got in the position where we’d have money to pay him. We are not in that position.
So he, again, paid for like three-quarters of the ["Kevin Is Gay"] video. This time, somebody was talking shit to him about his videos, so he was on a mission to make nice looking videos. He paid a lot of money and got some 16 mm cameras going on.

FREEwilliamsburg: What do you think about music videos in general?
Annie: I think they’re cool. I’ve always liked music videos, growing up with MTV back before it was what it is today. It’s always cool to have a visual. Not everybody can see you live. At the same time, most of our videos don’t have that much live performance. The videos are kind of the only area where we can handle handing control over to somebody else. GJ comes up with the main idea and we riff off of each other.
FREEwilliamsburg: There’s a definite cock-rock feel to a lot of your songs, particularly the song, forgive the pun, “My Dick Sux.” As a guy-girl duo, do you consciously go into writing songs that play with gender perceptions?
Annie: Yeah, I’ve always been that way. I’ve always hung out with dudes. I’ve always had a mouth like a dude, sometimes a dirtier mouth than a dude. It’s like I’m not setting out to do anything on purpose – it’s just a part of who I am, my sense of humor and everything else.
FREEwilliamsburg: A lot of people have compared you to Nirvana, and you have a lot of sarcastic, politically-incorrect lyrics. Maybe that’s where the comparison stems from?
Annie: I’ve gotten myself in trouble a lot with that, but I’m only kidding. I’m not too serious that often unless I’m angry, usually. But even then I’ll still keep a little sarcasm.
FREEwilliamsburg: SXSW went over really well for you guys, and you’ve played CMJ before and are here this week again for it. Is there any added pressure playing at these industry festivals, or is it just fun like any other show?
Annie: It’s not fun. (laughs) These shows are going horribly, and I want to go home. Last night, I threw confetti…
Micah: Which we were asked to do…
Annie: Yeah, Frankie, the guy running the show, said, “Hey, you wanna throw this confetti from the stage?” And I was like “Whatever, I like confetti,” so at one point, it was like “Confetti party!” and I threw it. It went on the monitors, which couldn’t have done any harm. The sound guys came during our second song and took ALL the monitors off the stage and we couldn’t hear anything. It sounded bad before that, but…they started fucking with our sound. Afterwards, at the end of the show, I was like “Fuck this, I’m out!” And I threw the mic, and it went off the stage and landed on the cement. And then the sound guy yelled at Micah, who did absolutely nothing at all.
Micah: He lost his shit at me! He was too afraid to yell at a girl.
Annie: Kick him in the nuts – don’t step to me, sound-guy-bitch.
Micah: We’d kick his ass.
FREEwilliamsburg: Hopefully it’ll be better tonight. The sound guy here at North Six is nice, and he does a great job with the house sound. I haven’t heard the stage mix.
Micah: This show hopefully will turn our luck.
Annie: We’ve been having bad luck, in general, since we got here. Our hotel – it’s an art-deco hotel in Times Square, that’s the first bad part (laughter). The second bad part is that there’s a shower right in the middle of the room. THE shower.
Micah: No curtain, no sliding door – just the shower!
Annie: No nothing! It’s like “we’re just friends, we don’t need to see that.” C’mon. That’s something they should tell people. It’s like $200 a night or something.
FREEwilliamsburg: As a fairly new band to most people, you’re going to be bombarded with comparisons. Have any that you’ve heard struck you as being particularly interesting?
Micah: Oh, there was that David Lee Roth one. (laughs).
Annie: Not about the music.
Micah: Yeah, it was more about her stage presence.
Annie: They said I have David Lee Roth stage power. And somebody else said I was the…what’s that guy’s name? That comedian?
Micah: Don Rickles?
Annie: The Don Rickles of indie rock. And the Beach Boys comparison…
Micah: Probably just because we did a cover once before we were even a band.
Annie: I don’t believe in these comparisons. I just saw that someone compared us to Veruca Salt a couple times and was just like, they’re pouring Veruca Salt in my wounds!! (laughs) Get outa here with that! It’s insulting.
FREEwilliamsburg: Have you been able to meet any of your heroes in this experience of being in a band together?
Annie: I didn’t get to meet her, but when we were recording our EP, I walked back to go to the bathroom, and Stevie Nix was standing in the hallway talking about how she has menopause. And when I walked further down the hall, Mick Fleetwood was standing underneath a picture of himself from the 70s, talking on his cell phone. That was pretty cool.
FREEwilliamsburg: What was the first concert you ever went to, Micah?
Micah: The first thing I ever went to was a Steppenwolf concert.
FREEwilliamsburg: That’s a good one!
Micah: Yeah, it was awesome. I was ten, I think, and it was a free concert in the park for KLOS or something.
FREEwilliamsburg: What was the crowd like?
Micah: It was a bunch of old hippies, or people that used to be hippies. Including my dad, who brought me out there. It was fun-it was great. That was back when they actually used real organs, real B3s, rather than digital keyboards.
FREEwilliamsburg: Annie?
Annie: Unfortunately, the Steve Miller Band. (Micah laughs)
FREEwilliamsburg: What’s unfortunate about that, come on?
Annie: I was probably at an age where it was unforgivable to go to see the Steve Miller Band.
FREEwilliamsburg: How old were you?
Annie: I think I was like 15. I went with my friend. I was in boarding school, though, and I missed that time where my parents would’ve let me start going to shows. Then my first SHOW ever was the Angry Samoans at the Troubadour.
FREEwilliamsburg: Well I’m glad you admitted the Steve Miller thing to us.
Annie: Well I’m not gonna lie. “Keep On Rocking Me, Baby.” I liked that song. I was a hippie for a little while. Well, my parents raised me like a stupid, fucking…hippie.
Micah: Yeah, Annie-Summer.
Annie: My real name is Annie-Summer. A hyphenated first name.
FREEwilliamsburg: When did you drop it?
Annie: I never kept it. (laughs) My dad’s the only one who calls me that.

FREEwilliamsburg: So what’s next after these CMJ shows?
Annie: We’re going on a small East Coast tour with Stellastar, and then…
Micah: From there onto the UK.
FREEwilliamsburg: You’re on a label over there as well?
Micah: Not quite yet…
Annie: I don’t know what’s really going on, but we’re gonna have a single that’s getting put out with some unreleased tracks, kind of unrecorded. They’re live tracks from this session we did. They’re new songs. I’m already sick of the ones on the albums.
FREEwilliamsburg: You’ve played over there before, right?
Annie: He didn’t. He had quit the band for a while.
FREEwilliamsburg: I heard about that- you quit, but now you’re back because you signed your soul away to Annie or something?
Micah: Yeah, I’m a slave.
Annie: Now he gets to quit his job.
Micah: Yeah, I get to quit my job. She purchased my soul from my employer. (laughs)
******
Giant Drag Website: Click Here
Myspace fan page: Click Here
Live Dates:
10.04.05 Philadelphia, PA (The T.L.A)
10.05.05 Washington, DC (9:30 Club)
10.06.05 New York, NY (Irving Plaza)
10.07.05 Boston, MA (The Paradise)

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