Interview: Scott “Deluxe” Drake

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 by Sal Lucci

Scott “Deluxe” Drake has been in many bands in his almost 25 year career, most notably Los Angeles’ the Humpers, who released six albums and a slew of EPs over the course of 10 years. He’s showing no sign of slowing down either, as he’s just released his second solo album, Grand Mal (Rankoutsider Records) and the Humpers are set to play (at least!) two gigs in their native home at the end of June. Drake, a life long rock and roll fan, came of age during the Los Angeles punk boom and his own bands were the contemporaries of some of the notorious Sunset Strip’s schlock cock rockers of the 1980s. Drake has remained steadfastly independent these many years; there’s a reason the aforementioned LA cock rockers are relegated to bargain “best of” compilations while Drake is still writing and recording new, great music. I had the chance to interview “the World’s Strongest Man” over e-mail in June 2007.

When did you move to Portland? What prompted the move?
We’ve been here three years. It was just time for a change.

How long was the first solo album (World’s Strongest Man, Dionysius, 2005) in the works? What did you do, post-Humpers (aside from music) ““ did you have a job, do you have a family?
The first solo album took almost two years to do because I was busy moving and we had to mail mixes back and forth. I worked, but now I’m a stay-at-home dad. I’m married to Jeannie “Deluxe” Drake and we have an 18-month-old daughter named Josephine. I have two more kids: Virginia (18) and Alex (11).

How did the recent Humpers gigs come about? When was the last time you guys played together? Any more shows on the horizon?
I saw that there were some phony Humpers pages on MySpace so I put up a real one. There was a huge response of people wanting us to play again so I called up the guys and we all agreed that it was time. This line-up of the band hasn’t played together in seven years. We’ll see how these two shows go, then we’ll talk about doing more.

How did the Las Vegas Grind reunion in 2000 go? Were you still friends with the guys in the band? Are you still friends?
That Las Vegas show went really well, it was a blast! We’re all still friends… more or less. We’ll find out how much more or less when we play this month in LA.

What were your post-Humpers bands? What was it like working with your brother (Jeff Drake of the Joneses) in the Vice Principals? How come these bands didn’t go as far as the Humpers did?
The Fabulous Prizes and the Vice Principals. Musically it was good playing with my brother, but it was like having two captains for one ship. You have to realize that the Humpers were doing gigs for five years before we got signed to Epitaph and these other bands were only together for about a year.

Who do you listen to now? Who are some of your favorite new bands?
I like the Libertines a lot, that’s my favorite lately. I don’t like many new bands because I’m a grumpy old man.
Where/when were you born? What were you like growing up?
March 27, 1964 in Anaheim, California. I was very quiet growing up.

How did you get into music; what were some of your favorite bands? What was it like being into rock and roll/punk before it was the thing to be into?
I was always into music, there was always music in our house. Mostly 50′s oldies and 60′s AM radio. I started off liking that kind of stuff and then got really into the Beatles when I was nine or 10, then the Stones, and then before punk rock I liked stuff like Alice Cooper, T Rex, Blue Oyster Cult… I even had a couple Bay City Rollers records. It was pretty hard sometimes being into punk rock when I was a teenager because people were VIOLENTLY opposed to it, to the point that it was sometimes hard to walk down the street. Idiots would yell and throw things at you if you looked punk. I mean, at my high school there were only three of us out of 500 or 600 kids, so we were constantly harassed.

Did you get to see any bands/shows of note while growing up?
I saw tons of good shows: the Ramones, early Black Flag, Dead Boys, Weirdos, Johnny Thunders, the Clash, the Damned, the Cramps, Robert Gordon, Roxy Music… I could go on forever.

How did you get into playing music? What did you do to pay the bills in the meantime? Were you a troublemaker?
Well, after getting into punk rock it was an obvious progression to start a band, that was just the thing to do. Meanwhile I worked tons of different jobs, first mostly as a mechanic and then later into sales. I’ve never thought of myself as a troublemaker, I just like to have a good time, but there are some people in the world who don’t want you to have a good time.

What bands were you in? How did you guys get shows? Who were some of your favorite contemporaries at that time? Was the Los Angeles rock and roll scene like the stereotype (wanky hair metal; wanna-be rock stars)?
I’ve been in a lot of bands: the Naughty Women, the Suicide Kings, the Thirsty Brats, the Humpers, the Fabulous Prizes, the Vice Principals. At first we begged for shows and then later the shows came to us. Some of my favorite contemporaries were Clawhammer, the Lazy Cowgirls, the Leaving Trains, and then later the Neckbones, the Pleasure Fuckers, the Nomads. But when I very first started doing gigs (around 1983), there weren’t very many bands around that I liked. The LA scene got pretty repulsive in the mid-’80s. For instance, in the rehearsal place where the Suicide Kings practiced, ALL the other bands there were hair-metal groups. When we played gigs it was almost always with metal bands or fey wanna-be “art-rock” people who were into Teardrop Explodes and Bauhaus and things like that. The only scene worth a damn at that time was the LA “cow punk” stuff like the Joneses, Tex and The Horseheads, the Screamin’ Sirens. We opened some shows for those bands occasionally.

The liner notes of the Suicide Kings Teenage Disaster (Sympathy for the Record Industry) album make you guys seem like seedy characters; any truth to those rumors? Do you still have your old manager’s watch? I’ve never been convicted of anything. Speaking of the Suicide Kings, I bought this CD (maybe mid-1997?) called The Humpers: High and Mighty Suicide Kings (on a label I hadn’t heard of before and haven’t since Sonic Records). I’m pretty sure it’s a bootleg, but the sound quality is very good (better the stuff on the SFTRI album). It’s got all the songs off of the Suicide Kings actual LP plus some bonus stuff. The liner notes say it should be considered the first Humpers album. Have you seen this particular release? Who is “Pinky Flamingo?
That is a bootleg and should NOT be considered a Humpers’ album, it’s a Suicide Kings album. The two were very different bands. The liner notes on that thing are complete nonsense. Pinky Flamingo was the singer of the Suicide Kings; he hasn’t played in any bands recently.

How did the Humpers come about? I don’t know anyone who owns your first album, My Machine, and I’ve never even seen it; does it really exist? Who put it out? Will it ever be re-released? Was it hard getting a steady line up?
The Suicide Kings had a deal to put out an album on a Yugoslavian label (Listen Loudest) but that band broke up. So I put the Humpers together so I wouldn’t lose the record deal. There was never any intention for the Humpers to play live, it just sort of snowballed. My Machine really exists; it came out on vinyl in Yugoslavia and also on CD in the US, but I think there were only 1000 copies. I doubt it will ever be re-released. The hardest part was finding a good drummer. I got very lucky getting Jimi Silveroli. He didn’t really know much about “underground” music at that point… he got thrown into the lion’s den!

There’s a stylistic thing I like about many Humpers’ songs, but I’m not sure how to phrase it. It seems like you would have verse-chorus (but not with lyrics for the first chorus)-verse-chorus (with chorus lyrics) for example: “Drunk Tank”; “Freak Magnet”; “For Lovers Only”; “Sick of Tomorrow Today”. Is that just part of your writing style?
There’s not really a formula or anything, it just happens that way.

The subject matter of many of your songs is pretty dark: desolation; depression; seedy characters; drinking/drug use; hatred towards all. Do you have any specific inspirations?
Hatred towards all? Ha ha ha… I don’t really feel that way. I’m a pretty upbeat person, I just write what I see.

Do you now or have you ever thought of Los Angeles as some kind of magical/horrible place (like say Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy)?
No, Los Angeles is just a huge sprawling metropolis. There are equal parts good and bad.

What was it like getting shows and touring? What are some of your more memorable stories? Did you guys ever play with anyone or band that became famous? Did you get to tour outside the United States and how were you received?
When we were just playing around LA, we would sometimes play as many as three or four shows a week. One good thing about that area is that you can drive 20 miles and play for a completely different audience. There are too many stories to recall, I mean the band was together for 10 years… every night was a story! I wouldn’t know where to begin. Actually, my first band, the Naughty Women, had Izzy from Guns and Roses in it (before I was in the band) and the McDonald Brothers from Redd Kross and Rikk Agnew from the Adolescents, but I’ve never played personally with anyone very “famous”. I try to avoid celebrities! We toured Canada and Europe and were very well received, especially in Italy and Spain.

Were there many inner-band clashes? When and what were the circumstances around (long time guitarist) Jeff Fieldhouse leaving?
Oh yeah, we clashed constantly, especially on tour. Jeff left the band for personal reasons, nothing to do with music.

How did you guys hook up with Epitaph Records? Did you get any grief from any so-called rock and roll “purists” for signing with them? What’s up with the vocal distortion on Live Forever or Die Trying?
A guy named Jeff Abarta got us signed to Epitaph, we were sort of his pet project. Yeah, we got a lot of grief for that. We were voted “biggest sellout” in Flipside magazine the same year we also won “best album”! As far as the vocals on Live Forever, I’m not sure why we did that with the vocals. To give it a more “live” sound maybe?

Did you have a day job at the time? Did you have a family at the time?
I always had day jobs when I wasn’t on the road, except for once when I tried to be a professional gambler for a while. That didn’t last long… run, Slewfoot, run! And, yeah, I had my first daughter when I was 24, so I’ve been a family man for a long time.

You guys were pretty notorious for your drunken antics. What would happen if the Humpers played a show with the Raunch Hands and the Replacements (and if you want, pretend the Replacements didn’t have Warner Brothers’ credit card)?
We’d probably never make it to the stage!

How, when and why did the Humpers end?
I think it was 1998. There were a lot of reasons: mostly we were just burned-out, a couple of our marriages were falling apart, Epitaph stopped giving us tour support. It was time. It sucked at first; you find out who your friends are when the party stops!

This entry is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.