Andy Dick |
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Thu. August 01.2002 7:52 AM EDT |
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Andy Dick Stalks Women, Kills Frogs, Lives To Sing About ItAndy Dick & the Bitches of the Century is due August 20. by Jon Wiederhorn |
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Andy Dick (Jason Campbell) |
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For comedians like Adam Sandler and Jimmy Fallon, writing music involves
conceiving some goofy scenario and then singing in a dorky voice. Andy
Dick's songwriting process is a little more personal and cathartic. For example, "The Stalker
"In real life I definitely have been known to, I guess you could call it stalking," he admitted recently from his Los Angeles home. "Driving by their house and checking up on 'em is kind of stalker-y in a way. So there are seeds of truth in 'Stalker Song.' "Of course, I didn't kill her new boyfriend, Kevin," he added in a tone of voice that makes you wonder if he's telling the truth. "In the song it's implied that I killed him. Of course, I probably wanted to kill him. But you can play around with fantasy in a song and it's really fun. It can even be more freeing than just outright saying something." The rest of the album is just as strange, naughty and character revealing as "Stalker Song." "I'll F---" is about Dick's history of making a play for "anything that moves," "Little Brown Ring" addresses his fascination with poop chutes, and "Garden Song" is about a frog the comedian lovingly raised in his back garden. "It died. I think it died of old age, but I was so distraught," he said. "I thought I killed it. I thought I wasn't feeding it enough 'cause I used to go to the pet store and get bags of crickets and throw them back there and let him have a field day, but one day it was just kind of sprawled out. And I felt weird and guilty about that. And then I started writing the song and realized that the song might possibly be about my other close friends who passed away, so it's a little more serious than my other stuff." Of course, Bitches of the Century also includes more absurd tracks, such as his favorite cut, "Stephen Hawking." Just mentioning the track sets him off giggling and triggers him to imitate a computer voice for almost five minutes. "It's funny because people think that's Stephen Hawking's voice, but you have to know Stephen Hawking doesn't have a voice." He sniggers again and continues, "He types on a keypad and then the computer generates a voice. It's weird because our brains think, 'Oh, yeah, I recognize that voice. It's Stephen Hawking's voice.' No, that's IBM or Macintosh speaking. It's a digital voice generated by a computer." The origin of the track is even stranger than the song itself. Dick came up with the lyrics after one of the musicians he was working with told him he dragged his feet when he walked, and he replied, "That's 'cause I'm sick of walking." From there, Dick concocted the idea of envying Hawking because he gets to scoot around in a mobilized wheelchair. "I started going off on how jealous I was of Stephen Hawking, not for the obvious, not for the fact that he's a genius who has the whole universe figured out in his head — 'cause he's got a lot of time to think, I guess — but for the reason being that he gets pushed around in a wheelchair. And that's what the whole song is about. There's this really great line that I love that goes, 'Stephen Hawking, I envy you/ Except for the fact that you can't get up if you really wanted to/ Do you really want to?' " Dick worked on the album with producer Kevin Augunas, who played bass on and helped engineer Sinead O'Connor's Faith and Courage. Because Augunas is well connected in the music biz, he was able to assemble a roster of guest guitarists including onetime Foo Fighter Franz Stahl, Jellyfish's Andy Sturmer and Greg Camp of Smash Mouth. The collaborators provided riffs that "f---ing rock," Dick said. "In 'I'll F---' there's this guitar thing that always makes me dance. It's a solo, and when I hear it I just start dancing. Actually, I don't know a lot of the people Kevin brought in. When they'd come in, he'd usually kick me out and I'd have to wait outside. Then I'd just come in later and do the vocals." The cover art for Andy Dick and the Bitches of the Century, a caricature of Dick half-naked, holding a joint, was painted by Marilyn Manson. "Marilyn is so great," Dick enthused. "He painted a beautiful watercolor for me and gave it to me as a present. He didn't do it for the album, but it was so pretty I asked him if I could use it." As the interview drew to a close, Dick frantically scurried around the room to make sure he imparted all the wisdom he could generate. He coaxed his 4-year-old daughter to sing Eminem's "Cleaning Out My Closet," explained how the secret to raising kids is "lots of love and no sugar," and he called in his co-songwriter Andreas Jones to preview the song "Good Luck With That." Finally, exhausted and momentarily talked out, Dick summed up his modus operandi for Bitches of the Century. "I just needed to get this stuff off my chest — kind of like a messy phlegm booger that you cough up and spit across the room." This report is from MTV News. |
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