The band emerged in the midst of what you could call the explosion of ’90s alternative. Were there influences, as far as perhaps bands that were already successful and stuff like that, that helped to shape where you wanted to take dada as a group?
Well, I don’t know if we were so much listening to a lot of stuff that was on the radio at the time. I remember that Nirvana came out right before our record actually came out and I remember listening to Nirvana and it was just so much different than what we were doing. And the nation hadn’t really heard of Nirvana [at that time] and so I just went ”holy shit, that is awesome – that is going to be huge” and [bassist/vocalist] Joie [Calio] goes ”you think so?
Our sound to me kind of came from not following [what anybody else was doing]. Joie and I got together and we were writing all of the time and it was like ”what the hell are we doing wrong?” A lot of our friends were getting signed and we had confidence that we were good. And we were just like ”you know what, we have to stop following anything.” We have to do what we’re best at.
And at that time, it was just Joie and I on acoustic guitars – we had gotten rid of an old drummer and we were trying to go electric. And it was like ”let’s just get together,” because we lived a couple of blocks away from each other in Hollywood. I learned about the propinquity effect at UCLA, where I was a psych major and it’s like, the closer you are to somebody, the more time you will spend with them.
I think the Rolling Stones used to live together in an apartment, you know? We lived really close, so we just started writing everyday. We made a commitment – let’s just make good music and let’s not try to pick a style. And what we found that we were really good at was harmony and our lyrics were I thought, fairly original. They didn’t sound like the standard lyrics of all of the pop and rock songs that had come before.
So we just started playing coffeehouses and we would just try to write the best songs that we could with two acoustic guitars. That old maxim that if it sounds good with one guy on an acoustic guitar, it’s probably a good song – that was kind of our motto. We stuck to that for a while and said ”let’s write a bunch of good songs, not worrying about how cool we are or what kind of sound we have – let’s just write and sing.” And we did, all of the time and it was really cool because we gave each other confidence.
We also edited each other and hopefully edited out the lame shit. Lots of times we’d be writing and it’s like ”is that any good” and Joie goes ”that’s fucking amazing” and then I’d play something I really liked and he’d go ”ummm, I think this might be a little light – it doesn’t fit.” So in that way, we helped each other out as writers and then we opened up for this really popular group called Mary’s Danish in L.A.
Our buddy was in that band and he said ”why don’t you open up for us” and we were like ”what? you guys are like a punk/funk band!” We opened up for them and we had like six songs that we played and people really liked it and I remember Joie as we were getting off stage, he said ”we have to remember this – the response that we just got and that it can work.” So that’s where we started from.
As far as the bands that I liked, I used to listen to KROQ out here and just any band that came on, like the Screaming Trees had this song that I loved and it was like ”wow, that’s a cool song – I love the Screaming Trees now.” But Joie and I, I think our roots are really planted in the 70s, the most. There’s lots of bands in the 80s that I liked too, like R.E.M. and the Pretenders and there’s a lot of other great bands [from that decade].
But really, our harmony style kind of developed out of a Simon & Garfunkel acoustic thing where we tried not to do the normal third background vocal or three stacked on top of one – we tried to do like Simon & Garfunkel, they have a lot of really interesting harmonies and you can tell that they put thought into that. Joie and I said that ”if we’re going to sing harmonies, we’ve got to try to do it a little bit differently.”
Eventually we started playing electrically again with the acoustic in the middle and then when we got Phil [Leavitt] in the band – thank God, we finally found a drummer after about eight tries – it just kind of all clicked. It was like we’ll use our writing that we did on acoustics with the harmonies and then we’ll beef it up with this trio sound, which naturally formed in the rehearsal room one day when the three of us played for the first time.
From: https://popdose.com/the-popdose-interview-michael-gurley-of-dada/
