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As hard as it is to detect an element of English progressive rock in their sound, Murray testifies, "I was the biggest Yes fan you could imagine in high school; to the point where I was even in a band that did Yes copy material, and I was the singer, the Jon Anderson. At a high school dance once, for an encore, we did 'Close to the Edge' [Close to the Edge, Atlantic, 7244]; the whole song." "The thing about that kind of music," he continues, "is that when I was a fanatic for it, I was also listening to the Velvet Underground and the first Roxy Music album. At that time, everyone else in the South was listening to the Allman Brothers, and I wasn't into all that. So the alternative was to listen to Yes, and something like Velvet Underground and wasn't so different from that, to me. It was all alternative music, no matter how you sliced it; it was an alternative to boogie." "I first hear David Bowie when I was 12 or 13, and it just changed my life. I grew up with country music, you know, so I had my little backlash against it. First time I heard Man Who Sold the World [RCA, AYL1-4654], I thought, 'This is really something else.' When Brian Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets [Phonogram, 6396 032] came out, that was a major deal for me. Here was a guy who didn't really sing well and approached music from a different angle, so I thought, 'There's hope for me. There's a future for being a non-musician.' I was real early to hop onto punk rock, around '75 and '76. Now I'm a big Richard Thompson fanatic. I like the Cure a whole lot, too, and I like Hank Williams, Jr.; he's great. I was always a big Beatles fan too; still am." "Recently," adds Walls, "I've liked Talking Heads, the first couple of Gun Club albums, and XTC. A couple of new bands I like a lot are Tupelo Chain Sex and drivin' n' cryin' from Georgia; they have an album coming out on Sparrow." Crowe names the Beatles as a major early influence, along with the Rolling Stones and the Who. "I kind of went at it in strange way," she says. "I started really getting exposed to music around early new wave; early Talking Heads and Elvis Costello. Then I sort of went backwards to Roxy Music and Eno. The stuff I really enjoy is different from what I actually play like. My main influence overall in terms of playing is Tina Weymouth; just because she showed that a girl could do it. She's gotten real good, too." |
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