Electric 6: “A Finger on the Pulse of the New Generation”
By Jessica Skelton

Whether they are singing about gay bars, why Lenny Kravitz sucks, or nuclear war, Electric 6’s “nervous dance music” and singer Dick Valentine’s boisterous falsettos will have you dancing like your pants caught on fire. Currently on the Its Showtime tour promoting the October 9th release of their fourth studio album “I Shall Exterminate Everything that Restricts Me from Becoming the Master” (named after a painting by German Dadaist George Grosz), the six piece from Detroit put on a dance-tastic show at the Independent in San Francisco on October 16th.. Front man Dick Valentine took some time to speak with me about how the tour has been going and answer a few questions about the career of Electric 6.

Ymm: I saw you guys perform at The Independent in San Francisco last night and I must say I enjoyed the sit-ups and push-ups you did on stage in the middle of some of your songs.
Valentine: I don’t even remember that [laughs].
Ymm: How has the tour been going so far? How did you like San Francisco?
Valentine: Well this is our, wait, wait stay with me [lengthy pause] our tenth show. Yea it’s been pretty good so far. Being a straight man in San Francisco definitely gives you an edge. So for one night in San Francisco I had an edge over everyone.
Ymm: Tell me a little about the writing process for one of the new songs “Down at McDonnnnelz.”
Valentine: I had the chorus snappin’ about for awhile and it was one of the last songs that we recorded. We didn’t even come up with the piano part till the very end and the piano groove was what sort of sold the song and brought it all together. So we had the chorus and we said lets actually make this a song, lets not stop and it was our fifteenth song.
Ymm: What’s life on the road like?
Valentine: What we learned a long time ago was that if you are going to tour as much as we do then you have to pick and chose your spots. So there are a lot of real early nights for us because if you blow your wad on Monday then you’re not going to make it through Saturday.
Ymm: What kind of excesses do Electric 6 deal with out on the road?
Valentine: Excess of body fat, excess of cholesterol, and I would have to say excess of garbage in the van. Those have to be the three most excessive things in my life right now.  and it’s not even the junk food it’s more like the eggs and the cheese and the mayo and then they keep coming at you with the eggs and the cheese and the mayo. I do try and hold the mayo.
Ymm: What is in the water out in Detroit that makes the music coming out of there kick so much ass?
Valentine: Well I think that its such a sweet place to live and musicians are generally lazy, self-centered people so they gravitate towards where you can pay like 300 bucks a month to live, so you don’t have to work too hard. Plus it has always been a really supportive town. There are tons of clubs and lots of boredom. There is not much to do in Detroit, so I think this music scene is really important because it is all that we have.
Ymm: Who are some of your major influences?  
Valentine: The Talking Heads, the Pixies, Devo, I mean a lot of bands. We try and stay current and listen to what’s out there as much as possible. We are not following any particular formula. We’re just writing verse-chorus-verse-chorus rock songs. I mean that’s so ingrained in most people and it works for us.  
Ymm: You guys became big over in the UK first, what was it like transitioning back to the States?  
Valentine: It was really good in that we became kind of big in the UK for about six months to a year and we got to a level there that we probably won’t achieve again anywhere, but the good thing about that was that even though we burnt out in the UK and came back to the US and no one had even heard of us, we got to be really big and really small overnight in the UK and in the US were building it slowly. In the states we’re actually getting to build it and see bigger audiences everytime we go through town.

From Issue #54