Alice, would you like some pussy? A lil Nashville Pussy? HELL YES I WOULD! Pile it on big, don’t be skimpy, and line me up for seconds and thirds!
Nashville Pussy features musicianship at its finest! Their latest, Up The Dosage (2014) has was That Metal Show’s Pick Of The Week, and showcases EXACTLY everything this band is capable and more.
Currently out there pushing Ten Years of Pussy, a retrospective of the bands ten years of working with SPV/Steamhammer, we caught up with Ruyter and got the inside scoop of everything Nashville Pussy!
How did you pick up the guitar and say, “Yeah, let’s do this!”? Did you play with as a child?
No, I started playing piano at 3 and my parents were very encouraging to say the least. They plopped me right in front of a piano at 3, basically patted me at the back for years, like “good job! That’s great!” They eventually got me into actual music classes, and then I was horribly sick of the piano by the time I was 8. Mt father played guitar, so there was a guitar sitting at the house, so I just went naturally to that. The first thing i did with was play everything my dad played his whole life. I’d heard him playing these songs since I was a baby. I picked everything as he did and i didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t know that I was doing anything impressive by playing without having ever played.
Yeah, when I pick it up, it is like STRUM! There you go!
(laughs) I learned all my dad songs and I went from there. I started playing Zeppelin and Hendrix, Metallica and Slayer. Being a musician was only my goal, I knew I wanted to be rock star by the time I was 6, like most 6 year olds (laughs). David Bowe was my big fucking hero when I was a kid. I thought, “oh my god! I want to be like that!” but I wound up realizing that I shouldn’t chase a dream, I want to university, so I got my fine arts degree in bronze casting.
I was working as a bronze caster for a while, and that’s when I met my husband, Blaine. He was in a band. I was exhibiting as an artist. I was doing solo shows, making money as a sculptor. He would come to my house and play guitar, and he told me, “You are kind of a better guitar player than you are an artist.” I was like, “WHAT!?” He was the first person who didn’t kiss my ass as an artist and so he made me kind of rethink it all. It was pretty cool.
Awesome. Did he share your love for bronze casting as well?
We did not share the love of bronze casting, but he enjoyed my work. I made an amazing sculpture where I get body cast of people and I made this really cool sculptor of a guy shooting himself in the head with his own dick. And it was my old boyfriend too, that made it even better. I took a mold of his face, part of his chest, and the other of this hand holding on to his cock. And I had to figure out how we were going to put this. I didn’t want it to look just like his body, so, I held the hand up and BAM! There it was!
It’s almost the best revenge on any ex ever. You know what, using that sculpture of you shooting yourself in the head with your own dick.
Apropos to him and it also has a universal meaning.
I think if I had a picture of that sculpture on a shirt I would wear it with pride. Was it going through the side of his head or was it going up it through his mouth?
It was going up through the temple. I think it’s the kill yourself move when you don’t really mean it. (laughs)
(laughs) Oh gosh, now I’m going to have to think about how I can kill my exes with their own dicks!
He basically shot himself in the head with his own dick. So, nice. I got to make that sculpture again! That was great!
That’s perfect. (Laughs) In doing research, you received tonnes of amazing accolades from very influential artist, so, what was some of your feelings on this accolade? Do you have any accolade you like to strike out to any of the legends (aka Lemmy)?
We love Motorhead; we are in a mutual admiration society with them. We would open for them anywhere on the planet, and even other planets.
There you go. Well, I mean it’s Lemmy!
We will still be playing with Motorhead in the afterlife too.
You played with ZZ TOP, LYNYRD SKYNYRD, and SLAYER these legendary artists most bands will give their balls up for. What did you learn about the music industry after playing with and travelling alongside them?
Basically we are all cut from the same cloth. We are the legion of musicians that do this for life. We are lifers. Music is your life. Music is air. If you don’t do it, you die. It runs through all our veins. We all sacrificed a normal life to do this. We miss the birth of babies. We are not going to be the bridesmaid at our best friend’s wedding. We are not doing these normal things because we have got a higher calling, which might be playing a punkrock club in front of 120 people in St. Louis. Unfortunately, that’s our calling. It’s like a really strange, strange, affliction. It doesn’t matter what level you are at, whether you are fucking ZZ Top or Nashville Pussy, we’ve got the same problem. We have to find a way to get it out of our system!
It’s kind of weird, the way you put it. It’s like a disease, but we love it!
It’s all what we care about!
You all put out Up the Dosage last year and a couple of months back, like you just released another “Best Of” album. You have a lot of music out there. How do you pick out the set list?
You know what? I don’t know because I don’t do that. Maybe I am the wrong person to ask, I think there is an email going back and forth on what we are actually playing, and I ignore it until we actually sit down played together. We back eventually, and then we played on each other so, it’s actually not every hard and it’s cool, because we have, we have a replacement drummer. We had him for the last year and he was really anxious to play some of the older stuff that we haven’t done in years. Our bass player, Bonnie, has only been with us for 3-4 years, and she really likes playing old stuff too. So we are going to bringing back some of the stuff we haven’t done in a while. I’ll play anything.
You going to be on tour with Valiant Thorr?
Do you know those guys? They are fucking fantastic! They are great. We picked them because we had seen them play and they were spectacular. The’ve been in our audience. They are a bunch of boxy-looking with long haired, shirtless boys.
Nice! I’m going to have to look them up now! They are my kind of guys.
If you like long haired sweaty shirtless boys who rock, then you should come see Valiant Thorr! That’s just from a girl’s perspective! They are fucking great! They totally light a fire under our ass, and we light a fire on theirs as well. We love those guys, they are fucking great.
Awesome, awesome. You said you are married to Blaine. How do you work so closely together on musical endeavors and keep the magic alive without killing each other?
A lot of space? (laughs) Respecting each other’s needs! Don’t ask, don’t tell: that’s another good one! What else? Mutual respect has a lot to do with that. And we just love each other. He is my fucking soul mate number one, but that is not to say that there isn’t a soul mate number two, three, four, or five! He’s always number one.
How does song writing look for you? I mean, working with Blaine and your band, and so forth, how do you all say, “let’s get together and write a song!”?
Blaine does the writing. He writes constantly and he writes a lot of great riffs that can played a thousand times. He will play them around the house until he drives you fucking crazy. I will hear him banging out the same four chords, and I am like, “Oh GOD! PLEASE CHANGE CHORDS!” (laughs) I will listen to him over and over again until finally my brain will come up with a riff that will make his four chords tolerable to me. My first job is to make myself entertained and not go crazy. When you live with a musician and they will play the same song badly for a month until they get it right! I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody, and I am one. I know that I will play a song for a month until I get it right just so that you don’t have to listen to every damn bad note right?
It sounds like a match made in heaven!
We are really interesting, team, like it works so good, it works really well. We have our iPhones now, so as soon as you got a riff, you put it in your phone. Then, when you finally get a chance to sit down and come up with a song, we just listen to the whole series. We go “riff farming”. We go to through the shit that we have written, and the ones that stand out, we concentrate on that. Basically, we don’t really force anything that is not going to happen naturally. We are a very organic band. If things are flowing we go on to the next thing, like real fast.
The last album, Up the Dosage, we wrote that thing in like fucking 10 days, i think. The whole album. It was like cake man, it was just so easy. We haven’t done this in a while. Personally, my own approach to playing music is I like speed, I like to be pent up. I like to be like a nun released into a whorehouse. I tell them, “You are not going to let me pick up the guitar for a month!” As soon as I pick it up, bam! The first thing that comes out of my fingertips is fucking gold. The last album was like a giant orgasm.
That is how we got the lightning bolt on the cover. It’s just like <POW!!!> a huge, fucking blast of electricity!
Awesome! Many complimentary things have also been said about you and your interactions with fans. What been the most touching moment you had with a fan that made you take a step back and say wow?
I don’t know, man! It might be, Bonnie, our bass player! She was like a fan for years. We were actually communicating by pen and paper, old school! She had written me, like a fan letter that said, “What do I do? I am in this job and I got this boyfriend who is an asshole, and I want to play bass,”, and I was like, “you got to figure out what you want to do,” and that kind of shit. I think I actually responded to her, kind of by accident, in an interview that I had done for some magazine. They were asking me a similar question and then I said, ”Oh yeah! One fan named Bonnie, and I told how she should follow her dreams. She should tell her guy to fuck off, quit her job and play music!” I told her in that interview, and she read the interview and was like, ”Oh my God! She is talking about me!“ and 15 years later she is in our band! (laughs) That’s a pretty touching fan story for you. It’s pretty amazing.
Pretty up close and personal. You played with Dick Delicious and the Tasty Testicles and were a guest artist for their 2013 record and tour. Will you be doing any work with them in the future?
I would love to. We’ve been bouncing some shit around lately , but, I don’t know man! Those guys are some fucking serious shit magnets. It’s like, do I have a death wish? If I have a death wish, I will go on a road tour with those guys for sure.
They are so much fun, but the fact that we did not go to jail or die on that tour was kind of a miracle in itself, so maybe we should quit while we are ahead. I love to play with them. Being a 5’2” female in between two 6’3” dudes, I was the only with skirt, it was so much fun. It felt like I had joined the boys club, and then I didn’t want to be there anymore. It was wonderful. (laughs) They finally let me in! No girls allowed! Then I got in there, and then I cried and bled all over the place and then got the hell out (laughter] You guys! You let a woman join the band, ha ha!
What advice would you give to some other bands?
I don’t know! Do what is true to you, period. Don’t do anything that feels wrong. It’s just like life!
Don’t tour too hard with Dick Delicious and the Tasty Testicles.
Unless that is really what is true for you!
This is my last question what are some of your biggest pet peeves?
One of my biggest pet peeves: men who say they are sorry, men who apologise when they don’t need to, and many apologise when they don’t mean it. I am honestly a Canadian. We say sorry all the time! I hate hearing that, especially if you don’t mean it.
I don’t know! There is something about a sad and sorry man.
When a guy says he is sorry to me five times between him asking me if I wanted a drink and when the drink actually got there, he really doesn’t have a chance. He was like, “I am so sorry! I am sorry! Can I get you a drink?” I was like, he’s cute, but then he was like, “Sorry this!” and “Sorry that!” Dude! You gotta stop that man! It’s not very attractive! It’s not an attractive feature, male or female.
No, but it’s true.
Don’t tell me in your imperfections. At least don’t point them out, I’ll find out anyways!
Check out Nashville Pussy playing at The Earl 8/7/2015 Atlanta, GA
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