Extended Play

Here is more from my great interview with Scott McCaughey, whose "The Gun Album" (Yep Roc) is one of his best efforts to date. The Minus 5 plays Lake Arrowhead Village Friday at 5:30 p.m. and Spaceland in Silverlake on Saturday.

Q: Do you do a broad range of Minus 5 material in the live set?

A: We do things from pretty much all our records, with more of a focus on the last few. We know a fair amount of covers and we might throw in a Young Fresh Fellows song, you never know.

Q: Last time I caught you play was with the Venus 3 and Robyn Hitchcock at the Coach House. You seemed to have a lot of fun up there.

A: We do. We love playing with Robyn. He’s a guy I’ve been a huge fan of over the years and got to know him and be in a band with him. It’s always entertaining with Robyn and the music’s just incredible. He’s such a great songwriter. Obviously, every night it’s a little different onstage. You never know what he’s going to say. We made the one record with him and did like another 20 songs for a new one. So we’re hopefully going to keep doing stuff with him. It’s like another band now.

Q: Good to hear. Do you get as much of a charge playing live now as when you started in the early ‘80s?

A: I do, actually. It’s different every time. There are times when you don’t get a huge crowd and wonder ‘why are we doing this?’ That happens. But once you start playing, it’s great. And you know why you’re doing it – because you love to play music.

Q: A couple weeks ago you did a Young Fresh Fellows gig at a Seattle festival. How’d that go?

A: SeaFair is a big thing. Everybody goes out to the lake and watches the hydroplanes race and the Blue Angels fly overhead. They wanted to make it a music happening as well and booked a bunch of bands. We played for an hour at noon until the Angels did their air show. We were kind of opening for an air show. It was pretty Spinal Tap, but we had a blast playing. We hadn’t played in about 11 months... We had a gas. We’re all kind of excited about playing. I think we’re actually going to record in November.

Q: I'd read once that you were into doing a new YFF CD and the others were not.

A: If we could all set aside the time, I think everybody would be into it, but we haven’t…I’m probably the biggest stickler because I’m gone on tour so much. I’m not even around for six months out of the year; maybe more. Plus I live in Portland now and they all live in Seattle. We seem excited to do stuff now. We’re going to play club shows in Portland and Seattle in November and Robyn is going to come out and produce our record. That’ll be interesting.

Q: Oh yeah. Have you started the new Steve Wynn album?

A: It's still in the planning stages. We’re throwing songs around and working on writing a record. We were planning on doing it in Oct.-Nov., but the schedules are getting convoluted. Hopefully we’ll still get it recorded this year and put it out in the spring because it has a baseball theme.

Q: I still have to get the new Tuatara CD, which just came out.

A: It’s totally different because it was vocals [this time]. It’s not an instrumental record. For us, it’s an experiment to have vocals. Peter, Kevin Larson and I did a lot of backing tracks, sent it out to people and said, ‘write lyrics and sing on it.’ We had Gary Louris, Mark Eitzel, John Wesley Harding, Dean Wareham from Luna and I did some. It’s really cool. There’s actually a second volume coming out in the fall. We did so many songs. Barrett wanted to divide it up thematically. The second one will probably be more ethnically-oriented like a lot of Tuatara stuff has been. The first one is almost regular songs with a spaghetti western vibe and stuff.

Q: Now that you’ve had a chance to live with “The Gun Album,” are you satisfied with how it turned out and how it has been perceived?

A: Oh yeah. I think it came out fantastic and have loved playing the songs off it live. I wish we could’ve toured a little more on it, but that’s the way it goes. We’re busy…it got great reviews; they usually do. I’m not ever thinking they’re going to sell a whole bunch. It’s fine. It’s a limited thing. We do a month or so of gigs when we can. Then it’s hit or miss. I’m really pleased with the record. I’ve been writing another one. But it’s the timing thing. I’m going to be so busy with R.E.M., there’s no point of putting out another Minus 5 record until next fall. That’s probably going to happen with the Robyn Hitchcock record too because Bill, Peter and I are going to be busy with the R.E.M. record. So we wouldn’t be able to tour any Minus 5 or Robyn Hitchcock shows. We’ll see.