‘The biggest underground band in the world’ is coming to SLO

The Portland, Oregon, that Courtney Taylor-Taylor remembers from his childhood was small, drab and “pretty economically depressed.”

He liked it that way.

“I wasn’t one of those kids with a chip on my shoulder talking about how ‘I’m going to get out of this town. (Screw) this dump,’ ” the Dandy Warhols frontman recalled.

Rather, he relished the “rich eccentricity” of his hometown, a place where “true freaks” felt at ease.

Then “the dirty little town that time forgot … became the cultural epicenter of earth,” as Taylor-Taylor put it in the band’s official bio. That disconnect, between Portland’s grungy past and its slick present, is at the fuzzy center of The Dandy Warhols’ new album, “Distortland.”

“I’m finding out that I want to return to the past a lot” in music, Taylor-Taylor explained. “It might be because Portland has been completely scrubbed from the face of the earth and replaced with ‘spray-tanned early retirees living in condos’ world. I’m pretty over it.”

Reached recently at The Odditorium, a massive space that serves as the Dandys’ clubhouse, rehearsal space and recording studio, Taylor-Taylor reminisced about the alternative rock band’s early days in the City of Roses.

He grew up in the Portland suburbs and studied psychology and music at Portland’s now-closed Cascade College before co-founding the Dandy Warhols — named after pop artist Andy Warhol — in 1994 with guitarist Peter Holmström. (The band, which includes keyboardist Zia McCabe and drummer Brent DeBoer, has had the same lineup since 1998.)

Back then, Taylor-Taylor said, the city supported a population of “truly great, kooky artists and weirdos.”

While Seattle’s punk rockers sported a nonchalant uniform of flannel shirts and ripped-up jeans, “Our punks wore army boots and pajama pants and had dreadlocks. That’s what we thought punk was,” he said with an affectionate chuckle. “Nobody could get it right.”

Making a name in Portland’s music scene at the time was “pretty easy,” Taylor-Taylor said, “because bands weren’t that good here. They were small-town bands, (but) they had lots of big attitude.”

The lack of serious competition “definitely made us free to do whatever the hell we wanted and do it very extremely,” he continued. “It wasn’t a big stress to put a band together and do a big show.

“We didn’t have to worry about practicing real hard. … If we could make it through four out of our six songs, we were (freaking) great. We (were) ready to gig.”

In that kind of laissez-faire atmosphere, it’s not surprisingly that the Dandys didn’t formulate big plans for their future.

“We just thought ‘one thing at a time,’ ” Taylor-Taylor explained.

He offered a for-instance: “What if we had 10 songs, and then put out a record on a label that could get it into all the … ma-and-pa groovy hipster record stores of America?”

That happened after The Dandy Warhols released their first album, 1995’s “Dandys Rule OK,” capturing the attention of Capitol Records. Their major-label debut came in 1997 with “… The Dandy Warhols Come Down,” featuring the song “Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth.”

The Dandys’ next metric — “What if we could play a punk bar in every major city in America and have a line down the block?” Taylor-Taylor said — was met when “Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia” came out in 2000.

Suddenly, their irony-drenched song “Bohemian Like You” started surfacing on screens large and small. It was memorably used in commercials for Vodafone and Ford.

“Every movie, every TV show, every commercial had a piece of our music in it,” Taylor-Taylor recalled. “We were … the biggest underground band in the world. It was just bizarre.”

The streak continued with the Dandys’ 2003 album, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” featuring the single “We Used to Be Friends,” best known as the theme song for cult TV show “Veronica Mars.” (The band’s occasionally bumpy rise to fame was chronicled in the 2004 documentary “Dig!,” which also profiled San Francisco psychedelic rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre.)

As The Dandy Warhols gradually gained a higher profile, so did the city that spawned them. Now viewed as a mecca for heavily bearded hipsters with an affection for craft beer and coffee, Portland has experienced rising real-estate costs and widespread gentrification.

“Nobody warned me that I would live to see everything I love go away,” Taylor-Taylor said, including the restaurants where he and his parents went on dates, decades apart. “It’s just gone.”

It’s natural, then, that his conflicted feelings about “new Portland” would seep into the Dandys’ ninth studio album. The band wrapped up work on “Distortland” in the fall of 2015, just three days before a huge storm caved in the roof of the Odditorium; indie record label Dine Alone released the album in April.

“That’s where songwriting starts. A particular issue or problem is persistent and grows with time rather than diminishes with time,” Taylor-Taylor, the band’s chief songwriter, explained. “It just takes years to collect those (thoughts) and flesh them out and make them into longer jams.”

“Distortland,” which features the single “You Are Killing Me,” represents a sonic return of sorts to the Dandys’ ’90s heyday.

“I wanted that early 1990s English overly slick but dirty ratty sound,” Taylor-Taylor said, and mixer Jim Lowe, known for his work with Stereophonics and Taylor Swift, delivered just that.

“It sounds like a record from 1990,” Taylor-Taylor said proudly.

Given his nostalgia for the era, there could be no higher praise than that.

This story was originally published December 8, 2016 at 1:53 PM with the headline "‘The biggest underground band in the world’ is coming to SLO."