Lee Sevigny has been on the Manchester music scene for a long time, especially when you consider he is still under age 30. Drumming for bands as diverse as Downtown Dave And The Deep Pockets, Squish Mitten, Teenage Hooker Factory, and now, Wild Bill And The Gash Bashers, Sevigny has insights into what makes Manchester’s music scene work, and why, in many instances, it doesn’t work.
Half way through this interview Sevigny spoke his mind about his hometown music scene. But he is a musician first and foremost so he started out discussing his music career.
His major project right now is The Bazooka Blanks, a drum line without the bugle and uniforms. “It’s basically going to be a percussive assault. We basically want to go out there and punch people in the face with noise,” Sevigny said. The drummer said his drum line will start off busking, then march in parades, and then make appearances in clubs doing half hour spots, taking the “mobile army” of drummers from club to club on a given night.
“There’s going to be a color guard dressed up in costumes, more than likely intoxicated,” Sevigny said. “We’re just going to make a lot of noise and attract a lot of attention. It’s a lot different from anything else I’ve ever done. It’s a brand new approach to my instrument. It’s going to cause a scene. It’s not like anything that’s happening in New Hampshire, that’s for sure.”
Sevigny said his drum line includes about a dozen drummers, musicians with pretty intense backgrounds. “Who knows how many people we’ll have in the color guard,” he said. “Those who can’t play drums who want to participate are welcome to. It’s going to be a spectacle.”
The young drummer also has his Wild Bill And The Gash Bashers project on the horizon. “We are going to create a musical nightmare that will frighten everybody and hopefully be bigger than The Beatles.” There is no guy named Bill in the band. “I kinda like it. It gives off a certain wild west attitude,” Sevigny added.
Sevigny is best associated with his previous bands Squish Mitten and Teenage Hooker Factory. Teenage Hooker Factory was his band from 2003 to 2009. It was a trio that he described as The Who having a fistfight between themselves and The Beatles tried to make peace between the two. “It runs between tender ballads and to noise rock assaults, very much in the vein of 50s, 60s, 70s pop,” he said.
Sevigny became a drummer as a child after following his favorite band. “When I was a kid, Kiss was the beginning and end of all rock and roll music for me,” Sevigny said. “I thought those dude were fuckin’ monsters. In fact, I was afraid of them when I first encountered them when I was three years old. But they inspired me to start playing drums because I realized if I could do that, I could make a lot of money and get a lot of women. Neither of which actually came true.”
These day, Sevigny is soaked in all kinds of different music, which he said simply makes him a product of his environment. “I barely even look at Kiss as a band with any level of integrity any more,” he said. “It’s morphed over the years. As I get older I just started listening to different shit.”
Naturally, like any kid in the 1990s with a chip on his shoulder, Sevigny was attracted to the noisy genius of Nirvana and its cathartic release. “That was about the time I started to hate my parents and smoke weed,” he said. “It really worked out.”
Sevigny said Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl was incredible and is saddened that Grohl doesn’t play the drums very often. “He made me want to go crazy,” he said. “As far as influences go, they’re pretty wide-ranging. There’ pretty obvious ones like John Bonham. I think any drummer who doesn’t cite him is lying to you. Then there was Jimmy Chamberlain from The Smashing Pumpkin, my biggest influence drumming wise, only because he had the ability cross-pollinate with his genres. He started out as a jazz drummer and he brought a lot of that technique and a lot of that feel into what was otherwise just an alternative rock band.”
Sevigny wouldn’t give Chamberlain credit for the band’s success, as the band continued to sell a lot of records after he was fired. “He certainly had a lot to do with crafting their sound initially,” he said. “I think any drummer does. You’re only as strong as the foundation the house is built on and drums and bass are huge, and that’s pretty much the essence of any band.”
Other Sevigny faves include Jon Fishman from Phish and Brann Dailor from Mastodon. “Those guys are polar opposites in terms of their playing styles but very unique players. They don’t sound like anyone else. When I look at a band or a musician, I look for something that sets them apart. I don’t need to know who it is on the radio because I can just tell by the way their playing.”
If Sevigny turned on the radio after the DJ announced a new Rush instrumental, he could tell who it is, recognizing the particular fills of Neil Peart. “He has a style very distinct,” he said. “It’s punchy. It’s technically proficient. To a layman it can sound pretty simple but to somebody who actually knows what he’s talking about and knows what he’s playing, and if you sit down and try to replicate that, it’s a pain in the ass. There’s slight little tiny signature changes in there that you can throw you off.”
Sevigny has been associated most with blues jams but he is not primarily a blues musician. He had been hanging out at the jams, sitting in on his drums. “I never grew up listening to the blues. I got into the blues because it was something else to play. Those jams afforded me a lot of space to really work on playing on stage in front of an audience, trying something different, playing songs I never played before. It was extremely educational, that sort of trial by fire atmosphere that can come from a jam. When I first started, I didn’t know jack shit about playing blues. Then you get sidelined with guys like Jon Ross, John Medeiros, Howard Randall, and Jerry Paquette. Those guys lived and breathed that type of music their entire lives, and they’ve been doing it for decades and decades. There’s a lot to be gained talking to people like that. The blues is real simple music. It’s not what I grew up playing. I was into heavy metal, punk rock, fast, hard, heavy, complicated stuff. The blues just taught me to keep it simple, strip it down, actually feel the essence of the song, get into that rhythm and lose your stupid ego.”
Lately, Sevigny has been into country music via old school artists like Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash. “There’s a real sort of mournful almost like a yodel sometimes and with the pedal steele guitar and crying in your beer,” Sevigny said. The drummer prefers to listen to country first before he goes out and plays it. “I have to absorb the feel of the music. I can’t just go out there and play and say ‘I’m going to play country now.’ Coming from a blues and rock and metal background, it’s going to sound like a blues, rock, or metal drummer playing country music.”
Recently, Sevigny played in a Manchester band called Downtown Dave And The Deep Pockets. That outfit required Sevigny to use only one drum. That started when Deep Pockets played a small cigar lounge that didn’t have enough space for a drum set. Sevigny found an old marching drum from the 1940s and tuned it down low and used a pair of brushes. “It’s very odd for somebody to walk by a bar window and see a guy with a marching drum around his neck playing with a guy on harmonica and another dude playing guitar,” he said. “Musically, it was different because it causes you to rethink how you play when you don’t have your cymbals, your toms, your high hats.”
Born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, Sevigny has always been knee deep in his local music scene. Even when he wasn’t playing, he’d be out seeing other bands. However, this has usually been a disappointing experience for the young drummer.
“I’d try to seek out exciting bands in Manchester, which sadly to say, can be few and far in between,” he said. Still, Sevigny forges on. He has done his time in bands that played Boston, the New Hampshire seacoast, and other locales.
Teenage Hooker Factory played Boston rooms All Asia, Middle East Upstairs, and others with names like one spot which was underneath drag queen bar Jacques’ Cabaret. “They had these trannies lip syncing to Whitney Houston, and we just played in the basement with a handful of other Boston indie acts.”
Sevigny said he sees himself as a mediocre drummer who plays it because he loves to. “I’m more of a fan of music than I’ve ever been a performer,” he said. “It’s like a virus. It’s get into you and just doesn’t go away. It’s just stuck there. You have to deal with it, and I’ve been dealing with that shit for a long, long time.”
“There’s tons of bands in Manchester,” he said, “and it’s just a matter of checking out the right ones. There’s a lot of crap in the New Hampshire scene. You really have to look for the good stuff, and unfortunately the good stuff doesn’t come out very often. I’m pretty convinced that where I live we are culturally retarded. That’s a lot of shit band. They’re just playing Top 40 cover shit and people flock to it like moths to a light. They don’t want anything. They don’t want to look for anything, and they don’t try anything new. They’ll just go for the first shit that rises to the top, and they won’t dive any deeper than that. It’s fuckin’ frustrating. I went out all this weekend, and I saw a band Friday, and they were the bees’s fuckin’ knees. They were the greatest thing in the universe, and the place was half full with people that were very disinterested and it struck me as absolutely bizarre. That people are face to face with something so rare that just invokes such a good feeling, and it just passes them right by. They don’t instantly recognize it. It’s just stupid. There’s so many shitty cover bands and people will just flock to them when there’s a good amount of amazing original bands, bands that are trying to do something new.”
Sevigny said Manchester just doesn’t have the fan base for music that you need to cater to eclectic tastes. “People are mostly attracted to going to the Black Brimmer to see some band that’s going to play a bunch of songs that they instantaneously recognize that they can get drunk and fall over each other to.”
Sevigny thinks fans should go beyond that and dig a little deeper into the music scene. “If you don’t, you’re going to wind up thinking like everything’s like that and it just becomes a simplistic world, and we’re all stuck watching fucking Jersey Shore and eating Dominoes.”
Sevigny is drawn more to the city of Boston to find good bands and the fans who follow them. “Boston is a hip town,” he said. “It’s a big college town. There’s a lot of intellectuals. You’re stuck in the middle of some really prestigious universities. A lot of these people investigate things. They dig a little deeper. They’re more cerebral than say you’re average fuckin’ Budweiser drinking, John Mayer loving schmoe.”
Sevigny said there are places in Manchester that are trying to foster originality, and he supports the idea. Still, he finds it hard to get people involved because “they don’t care. It’s bizarre.” Sevigny has a high regard for the Jam Factory on Elm Street that bring in industrial music and a lot of other things. His favorite room at this time is the Shaskeen also on Elm Street because he feels they’re trying out new music. He also favors Mad Dog and Rockos that are very metal centric but also bringing something fresh.
Sevigny said that the responsibility for bringing in original bands falls on many shoulders. Marketing and advertising people must be part of the equation, he said. The city also needs a lot of top notch bands in the original scene to bring people back. They can’t be weak original bands. “I’d rather see one or two really fantastic original bands than have a place saturated with original bands where 90 percent of them just blow.”
Sevigny said that by definition Manchester is a hard rock town, noting that the city’s biggest radio station is Rock 101, which plays a lot of hard rock. “It’s either classic rock or Nickleback. There’s really not a whole lot in between,” he said. “It’s very cookie butter. All that modern rock music all sounds the same. You can literally put on a Nickleback record, a Hinder record, and a fuckin’ Seether record playing at the same time, and you’d be listening to one band. I can’t differentiate between one or the other.”
“It’s just what Manchester is,” he continued. “We’re this middle of the road sort of town. We’re struggling to break out of that but there’s just so much tying us to just being mediocre.”
Sevigny did have plenty of good things to say about greater-Manchester’s blues scene. He touched upon the huge amount of blues jams for people to share what they know and for others to learn from it. This pleases Sevigny as he knows blues was the birthplace of rock and roll and just about any American music.
“There’s a lot of people fostering that,” he said. “You’ve got Pete Zona and Brenda (Cadieux) and the Wan-Tu crew. They’re really still going strong and heavily promoted that scene. For a while, Howard Randall was the king of the scene, and he had a way of bringing in not only novice players with something to learn but he brought in a lot of guys who’ve been in the scene forever who’ve extended so much knowledge to people that really wanted to learn and absorb it.”
Sevigny said that playing in blues bands made him a lot of money that saved him from homelessness more than once. “I had a great time. I’d be playing music. I’d get my rocks off, and then they give me money. Sometimes I felt like a stripper or a prostitute but it was great.”
Sevigny pointed out that the area offers two major blues rooms, The Strange Brew Tavern behind city hall and The Village Trestle in neighboring Goffstown. “Although they offer similar genres of music they couldn’t be more vastly different, in terms of their clientele, in terms of the overall vibe of the place. I love the Strange Brew. I also love the Village Trestle. Each has their pros. Each has their cons. But I think that only encourages them to get better. You need competition in order to give the consumer the best. Everybody wants to one-up the next person. If the Brew and the Trestle are paying attention to each other, and they’re watching what bands are being booked, and they see ‘Oh, they’re booking this great act. I need to better that.’ That creates a better situation for the fans. They have all these great acts, and the bar just gets raised every single time. That’s going to get people to come out and pay attention to music. Nobody pays attention to shitty music.”
Of course, there are some things about his local blues scene that Sevigny doesn’t take to. “Sometimes it can be a little cliquey. There’s certain guys that are too big for their fucking britches. I’m not going to name any names, but there’s guys that walk around with an ego and think their hot shit. The reality of the situation is you’re playing in a fucking blues band in a blue collar bar in New Hampshire. You’re not anything special. I do it all the time. It’s fun. It’s great. But that doesn’t give you license to be a prick.”
Sevigny had a lot more to say but felt “they’re probably not the best to put in print. I mean there’s a lot of people that already don’t like me in this town. If I started publicizing my opinion in a more public forum, I might get into more trouble.” Sevigny rivals were professional and others personal. “There’s a lot of guys in this town that apparently don’t like me. I mean I can see why for some reasons. Other reasons just seem silly. Some people just need to drop their certain hang ups and fuckin’ get over themselves.”
Sevigny also admits it has to do with him being a colorful figure on the scene. “I’m eccentric. I’m out there. I’ve got a big mouth. I cause a lot of trouble. I’m not really afraid of anyone or anything or what they’re going to say and do. I’m just me. People either react really well to that to they’re really taken aback by it. More people than not really like that sort of spirit. There’s a few people who find me to be offensive or they’re just generally angry at me. Or they’re just jealous of me cause I’m just awesome. I do have a very high opinion of myself but I try not to come off as an egotistical prick.”
I love Lee! Is a a bad-boy with an All American apple-pie look about him when he is clean cut and well dressed. He has so many looks about him, he is personable and very funny. Most of all, he is a great drummer with really good taste in music. He brings life to the stage and among the crowd as well. If you know Lee, you just have to love him 🙂 I’ve shared the stage with him on many occasions and it’s always fun to be in his presence. During down times in my life, he would totally make me laugh 🙂 Mostly, I love that he is passionate about his music.