Pleased to Meet Me: Al Huckabee / Ugly Stick
Formed in Delaware, Ohio in 1989, Ugly Stick carved out a sound that was equal parts Los Angeles punk and Midwestern heartland rock, drawing on the grit of X and the melodic punch of Tom Petty to create what critics would later hail as “genre-crossing” and “seminal.”
Introduce yourself… (Where are you from, what band do you play in etc..)
My name is Al Huckabee and I'm a guitar player in Ugly Stick.
Why do you play music?
I play music for a number of reasons. The primary one, I believe, is social. I've been lucky enough my whole life to only be in bands with people I truly care about. The other social aspect is the collaborative writing process. When people are really listening to each other and contributing the outcome can be synergistic: greater than the sum of its parts. That's the mysterious element, it's like alchemy. How can a good bass line + good vocal line become a great song?
And beyond the people making the music, music itself is a uniquely powerful thing and therefore it's just plain fun to participate in. Our minds do weird things with music. If you play the right kind of music to the right crowd it can incite people to dance, to scream, to knock things over. And one of music's most unique qualities, to me, has to do with nostalgia.The music you love to listen to starts to acquire more gravity over time. You can hear a song on the radio from a certain summer or a certain stage in your life and be rapidly brought into all the feelings you felt back then. It's time travel. Music is mysterious that way and also strangely reliable.
What was a major influence on you as an Artist/Band?
In Ugly Stick each of the four members, David Holm (vocals, guitar), Eddie Mann (bass), Jeff Clowdus (drums) and I have different musical tastes but there is a lot of overlap. Imagine a Venn diagram of musical tastes, there will always exist an eye in that hurricane.
What’s a favourite book or film?
Oh wow, that's a great question. I go through phases. I was really into film noir for a while: one of the great American forms of the art. I have a strange tendancy to believe that whatever I'm taking in at the moment is about the best possible thing I can imagine. It makes me a poor critic but a great party guest. The Springsteen movie is much on my mind "Deliver me from Nowhere" . I thought it walked a great line of myth-making and also just delivering the goods in terms of a Hollywood movie. Sean Penn did a really great job in "One Battle After Another", that was a roller coaster ride I appreciated in many ways. These are recent films, I'm no good at like "top 10 lists", that kind of thing. I tend to try to wring everything I can out of what is right in front of me. I don't really believe in objectivity as it relates to works of art but it sure is fun to think about and argue about.
Do you prefer the recording process or performing live?
They are two different pursuits and they come with their attendant joys and challenges. Playing live is like trying to harness a party. It's a blast. It's the game that moves as you play it. Nothing is nailed down so you can kind of push it in whatever direction you want. It's a vehicle that is moving quickly forward and it's about to break down at any time. It's a lot of fun.
Recording is a strange combination of knowing what you want and also staying open to things changing quickly. Because Ugly Stick has been making music together for a long time we are often lucky in that we can find some consensus in those moments in recording when you have to go one direction or the other. If everyone in the band is jazzed on some stupid little thing we came up with in the moment then we go in that direction. That's where the action is. Muck around and see what pops up and what we think is funny or catchy or new or bright and keep that, embellish that, sharpen that.
What would be a dream collaboration?
If Lux Interior ofThe Cramps contacted us from beyond the grave and was interested in working together that would be notable for a number of reasons.
Describe a favourite album.
There are a few albums that Ugly Stick has always coalesced around. It's a short list but we all agree that Exile on Main Street is a heavyweight for its freewheeling vibe, killer songwriting and the swagger of what sounds like people making music at the height of their powers. They are somehow not seeming to give a care and also showing up with incredible riffs, diverse sounds, understated production. Sounds like a dream.
What's your favourite local haunt?
The album that we're promoting right now is a deluxe re-release of 1993's Absinthe so I'll tell you about the local haunts that haunted the recording of that album. We were a new part of a music scene in Columbus, OH back then and there was a lot of camaraderie. We were coming from a smaller town so when we broke into playing proper rock clubs in this bigger city it felt really good, like we had tapped into something. There was a bar called Larry's which was not a venue per se but all the cool music people hung out there. It was pretty welcoming and there were always interesting people in bands to meet and talk with, lot's of good conversation. The other place of note was Stache's which was the great divey venue at the time. All the up and coming bands from out of town would play there on tour and all the good local acts played there as well. A lot of good times there in a supportive scene.
What's your strangest experience while performing live?
Oh man, we've played some biker bars and some country music joints where...how to say it.. we may not have given the crowd exactly what they were looking for. Those types of mismatches are always way funny in retrospect but kind of a drag at the time. What's the term: character building? Playing to an adoring crowd is fun and easy, playing to a hostile crowd and trying not to project your own discomfort requires more discipline!
If I were pursuing anything other than music it would be…
more lucrative.
What are some of your favourite aspects of being a musician in Columbus, OH?
Columbus has a robust music scene and that makes it pretty fun and rewarding. We have deep roots here and that can make it easy to make things happen. When a lot of diverse people are working towards similar goals it can make doing larger scale undertakings a little easier. There are cool people here, cool bands here like my new fav act Golomb. It's a scene, it's a community. That goes a long way.
If you weren’t playing music in Columbus, OH where would you be ?
Clawing desperately at the inside of my coffin.
Any sage advice for young musicians?
Yes! Rock on!
Ugly Stick’s Absinthe has returned in with a long overdue vinyl reissue, more than thirty years after its first appearance on CD in 1993. Hovercraft Records has remastered the album and added bonus material from contemporaneous live shows and unreleased studio sessions, marking the record’s first-ever release on LP and digital platforms. VISIT HOVERCRAFT RECORDS HERE.