Catching Up With... Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears

Black Joe Lewis has come quite a way since he first decided to teach himself guitar while working at a pawn shop. The riotous soul stirrer and his rambunctious seven-piece band The Honeybears have quickly earned a reputation as one of the best contemporary rock revivalists today. The Austin natives made this loud and clear on their captivating debut, Tell ’Em What Your Name Is!.

Like its forerunner, Scandalous is a no frills, down-to-business blues-rock record. This time around, however, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears have matched their cohesive, soul-laced songs with Lewis’s growth as a songwriter. Paste caught up with Lewis about his musical evolution on Scandalous, his experience at Mustang Ranch and his take on revivalist music acts.

Paste: Over the past year or so I’ve seen some of the bands you’ve band with ranging from Passion Pit to New York Dolls to Cedric Burnside. It’s a pretty diverse lineup—a lot of different styles of bands. How’s that experience been?
Black Joe Lewis:: It’s great, man, because they’re all bands we really love. So even if the crowd wasn’t super into it, you at least get to hear good music. The Passion Pit one was a little rough…that one stuck out…[because] it was a college tour. The kids weren’t really warming up to us at all. We played a few good shows, but I don’t think the little college girls dig us that much.

Paste: Do you approach shows differently depending on the type of crowd?
Lewis:: Nope, we come out and we do what do because that’s what got us here in the first place, you know. We just gotta go out and put on a good show every night. It’s all you can do.

Paste: You have a new record Scandalous coming out. For starters, who is the girl on the cover?
Lewis:: I don’t know. This guy Noel Waggener designed our album art. He’s just a really great artist and it was one of the designs he came up with. I don’t know if it’s anybody… I know it’s a really old picture.

Paste: Tell me about Scandalous—what were some of the biggest differences between your first record Tell `Em What Your Name Is! and this one?
Lewis:: I feel like it’s a better record overall—the band’s improved. I feel like I’ve improved a lot. The songwriting, it just like… it’s just evolved some more… that’s the main thing. I’m really proud of some of the material—we’ve got songs about government, you know. We’ve got songs about chicks and we’ve got a dedication to the soldiers over Iraq and Afghanistan and all that shit, you know.

Paste: What are some of the songs about—both serious and lighthearted ones?
Lewis:: “You Been Lyin’” is a song about… I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It just stirred me, reading through, and [also] reading all this crazy shit about Dr. Nkrumah…how do you say his fuckin’ name….Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. I’ve just learned about all this kind of shit and the Howard Zinn book just kind of… after I got done reading that book I just wrote that song just about how things are not as they seem.

“Jesus Take My Hand” is a dedication to the soldiers fighting… it’s just an old blues song about the soldiers. “Booty City” is about Washington D.C.—the Ethiopian section, neighborhood [laughs].

Paste: It’s interesting that your songwriting has transitioned from mostly lighthearted songs to incorporating some more serious ones. Was that a conscience attempt on your behalf to make more serious music?
Lewis:: I wouldn’t say we’ve become more serious, but we’ve just gotten better at saying what we want. It’s tough to put your thoughts into a song, you know. I think we just got to where we can figure out how to say [what we want]—direct our songs to say what we want them to say. With the last one, it’s kind of… a more upfront album.

Paste: In terms of the songwriting process, how does it work between you and the Honeybears bandleader Zach Ernst?
Lewis:: We collaborate. We collaborated a lot more on the first one. This one we collaborated a little bit less, but we still collaborated. Actually, this one was more of a group collaboration. Usually I’ll come up with the words or something. Every now and then I’ll write a whole song on my own. Sometimes Zach will bring an idea and we’ll work on it, and vice versa you know. This one was a lot of group effort—a lot of it just came up in practice. I remember “I’m Gonna Leave You” was a song that came out of nowhere in practice when we were just messin’ around. “Jesus Take My Hand” was a guitar riff Zach came up with and I came up with the verses. A lot of group effort.

Paste: I’ve heard about little bit about “Mustang Ranch” and a crazy story behind it, fill me in on that one.
Lewis:: That was a true story. Everything in the song really happened pretty much. Well, mostly. We were driving to Salt Lake City to San Francisco and we had to do it overnight. We just got the idea to stop in—it was just kind of a random thing. We didn’t exactly see UFO’s. After the Mustang Ranch, we pulled into Reno and just saw the freaks at fuckin’ six in the morning. We just went in there and wanted to see what it was all about, you know. A lot of people would be embarrassed to admit that they went to a whorehouse or whatever. But fuck it, it’s a once in a lifetime thing—it’s like going to the Red Light District when you’re in Amsterdam, just to see what it’s all about.

Paste: I saw you a couple years ago, I think it was at Austin City Limits and you guys were fantastic. I’m not breaking any news here by saying that you’re a phenomenal live band, but I am curious about whether or not you all find it difficult to capture your energy on record. How does taking a live sound into the studio work for Black Joe Lewis and The Honeybears?
Lewis:: I think that I kind of just make it harder on myself by bitching about it so much. In the studio, you’ve got everyone throwing all their ideas around and shit—everyone has their own idea. It just gets old—arguing going on all the time. After it’s done, it’s such a good feeling because it’s done. I wouldn’t say it’s hard to transition from the live thing, but it’s hard to make it carry over and come through on the record.

Paste: How do you set up when you record? Do you lay down tracks separately or are you all in the same room actually doing a live recording?
Lewis:: Most of the time, I’d be separated in a room. It’s either me that would be separated or the drummer. The horns are done in the same room but on a different day…We have some B-side tracks that we recorded too that were all done live. Those were all done… I think we all just went at it and Jim [Eno] recorded it.

Paste: How’s it been working with Jim on the past two records?
Lewis:: Jim’s awesome in the studio. We became friends with him in the beginning.

Paste: How did you two originally meet? I know you’re both from Austin.
Lewis:: We did a tour with them. It was the first tour we ever did as a group. We met them there on tour and hanging out.

Paste: And you’ve been working with him ever since? Who approached who about working together?
Lewis:: I think it was his idea actually. At first, he started off and said “I’d like to record you all.” We didn’t have a record—we had this really shitty thing we did on our own at this studio in Austin. The guy I know there that was working on it totally didn’t give a fuck. It was one of those places where you rent the studio out for a certain amount of time per day and they have their engineer in there doing it. I think when he was mixing it down, it was probably like his fifth band of the day and his ears were shot or something.

So we made this little EP—four or five songs. After the tour, Jim was like “I’d like to record you all.” So we did some recordings. After that, labels showed interest…then we went and finished the rest of it.

Paste: Did you record both records at the same place?
Lewis:: Yeah, we did everything at the same place. We did [both records] at Public Hi-Fi in Austin.

Paste: Obviously, Black Joe Lewis and the Honey Bears are often associated with older influences ranging from James Brown to Otis Redding to Iggy Pop. There are a handful of contemporary bands like Robert Randolph and Sharon Jones that are doing a similar thing to you guys—do you ever check them out or even draw influence from them?
Lewis:: To be honest, the only recent stuff that I listen to… I’ve been listening to Black Milk a lot lately, there’s a guy out of the Bay area called Ty Segall I like. That’s it, man. Honestly.

Just the new soul and new blues stuff… very few people do it right. Cedric Burnside and Lightnin’ Malcolm are probably the best blues band around right now. We’ve been playing with this soul group called The Relatives lately from Dallas. They’re old have done recordings in the 60’s, but they have since been reborn. Those are the only two other recent groups that are just amazing. Look up The Relatives for me, and compare that to the Dap-Kings, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. And go listen to Cedric Burnside and Lightnin’ Malcolm —compare that to Robert Randolph. That will tell you why I don’t listen to much modern music anymore, because it ain’t done right. Those two groups do it right.

Paste: Since you listen to so much older music, what’s a song that you will hear and think “man, I wish I would’ve written that one.”
Lewis:: “Wild Thing” and “Louie Louie.” I think those are two of the best rock ‘n’ roll songs ever written.