Mardi Gras is a day defined by tradition. Since 1872, Rex’s “King of Carnival” has ascended to rule over the city. For over a century, Black Masking Indians have taken to the streets with their fierce chants, and people have clamored for Zulu’s prized coconuts. These are well-documented Carnival celebrations, but there are also countless traditions that sneak past the uninitiated. On that special day, the French Quarter erupts in bold color as revelers flood the streets with some of the most imaginative costumes possible as people fall into their own respective rituals. While it’s difficult to avoid festive favorites like “Mardi Gras Mambo” on that day, anyone strolling past Decatur and Esplanade after sunset during the last quarter of a century has had their ears scorched by something equally unmistakable. Since 2001, the hard-hitting stoner rock band Suplecs have taken over Checkpoint Charlie’s for a gig that has evolved into a marathon multi-set performance that burns late into the night.
Bassist Danny Nick, guitarist Durel Yates, and drummer Andrew Preen have served up one paint-peeling riff after another since the trio first came together in 1996. Suplecs’ first two albums Wrestlin’ With My Lady Friend and Sad Songs…Better Days came out on the storied label Man’s Ruin and sported covers by famed illustrator Frank Kozik. Down-ers Jimmy Bower and Pepper Keenan each took stabs at producing the band. Songs like the rubber burner “Moped,” spellbinding instrumental “Cities Of The Dead,” and the Headbangers Ball-worthy down-and-out declaration “Rock Bottom” established Suplecs’ reputation as world-class decibel dealers, but their momentum suffered at the hands of Hurricane Katrina, bad business, and the allure of “real money” working in the film industry. Although Nick got to tour Europe during his stint as bassist for local legends Eyehategod, Suplecs forwent world travels in favor of keeping kids fed and roofs over their heads. As out-of-town dates became fewer and farther between, their yearly promise of the fabled Mardi Gras Day gig at Checkpoint Charlie’s became the glue that kept this mighty power trio together.
On February 20, just long enough after Mardi Gras Day for revelers to hopefully have recovered from any bad decisions, Suplecs releases their fifth album Hymns Under a Blood Moon Sky. This album, their first in 15 years, embraces the highs and lows of living long enough to take a beating or two and still get back on your feet. Nick, Yates, and Preen are survivors with the courage to look back at dark times. “Blackwater Rising” and “La Ti Da” both draw upon the demise of Nick’s beloved Central City bar Portside Lounge and his unused suicide note. On “I See You,” Yates reflects on the hardship of losing his mother. Despite a cast of doom and gloom over the album, Suplecs hasn’t lost their trademark sense of sarcasm and ability to joke about the mundane, such as on the working man ode “$6 Man.” Nick quite literally flirts with the dark side on “Pentacle Star,” a stoner-meets-witch love story with a music video already in the can. Hymns Under a Blood Moon Sky appears to signify the breaking of a new dawn for a band that previously grew content to just play the hits at home. For the album’s release, Suplecs signed to well-respected heavy rock label Ripple Music, which also plans to reissue three of their past albums on vinyl. After decades as hometown heroes, the band will embark on their maiden voyage to Europe in April. Over the course of two hours at Envie Espresso Bar & Cafe on lower Decatur, the members of Suplecs opened up about their annual Carnival hijinx, their recent appearance at the UNO Lakefront Arena, and the long road to three decades of collective endurance.
December will mark three decades for Suplecs. How does that feel?
Danny Nick: For me, on one hand, it feels like it flew by. I can remember the night we put it together like it was maybe 10 years ago, not quite 30. We were all at the Fountainbleau, rehearsing with another band, with Paul [Webb] and Kenny [Sumera] from Spickle, called N.O. Industry. We were taking a break and his [Andrew Preen’s] brother had brought this bass that had a metal neck on it, a Fernandes bass. We all had rooms up there. It was like spring break for bands back then. Everyone went up to Fountainbleau. He said, why don’t you come check out my new bass? I took a break from that band and Andy was on the drums. Durel and I previously had other three piece incarnations. One was Yelocel. What was the other one called?
Malignant Minds, right?
DN: That was our punk band when we were little kids. But we did open for the Slugs when we were Malignant Minds and that’s Crowbar now.
Durel Yates: Black Bean.
DN: So we had these songs that we had written and I just started playing them with Andy. We didn’t have a drummer at the time. Andy just ripped to it. I remember not saying nothing but thinking, wow, this dude’s really fucking good. I knew he was good already ‘cause we were friends with his brother.
Andrew Preen: They would come see us play and then we could go see them play.
DY: We had the gig like a week after that… Our first Mardi Gras show was 26 years ago. That feels like it was literally yesterday. We dyed our beards gray to look like old men and put on old men outfits. Now, we all have gray beards.
DN: Which is why I think we should go as young Suplecs. Dye our shit with the Halloween spray.
It is crazy that you’ve gone three decades without a membership change. How do you stick together like that for so long? That is so rare.
DY: We did stop touring for a while. We got out of the van.
DN: It’s not like we’ve been hitting it since then, been on tour and have a new album out every year like Clutch has done.
AP: For the longest time, we were just doing music for the fun of it. We didn’t record anything for a while and we hadn’t gone anywhere but we would always play a show. We just like to play music.
DY: I’ve lived in other places across the country, but every Mardi Gras, we play that show, even if we’re not together. No matter what. I could do that for the rest of my life.
DN: Sometimes that probably anchored it. There was a time when I opened a bar—
DY: Or we’re all working on movies—
DN: Different life situations, having kids and stuff, where everything kind of slowed down. Somebody would ask me in a bar: “What’s up with Suplecs? Y’all recording a new record?” And I’d just be like, “Nah man! We just play the hits.” Between the four records we put out, you could put any number of those songs together.
DY: We have 50 songs on stage [on] Mardi Gras Day to pick from.
DN: We’re fortunate to have that. I sometimes have to remind myself that we’re lucky to have songs that resonated enough. How many bands have got that? It’s part of the payoff even though the money hasn’t paid off for us. I have brothers and friends who have been in thousands of bands as long as we’ve been together and they either learn a bunch of covers together or they have five or six songs they could really nail together. We’ve got 50. We can’t nail all 50 of them but 47 at least. [laughs]
DY: We have more than 50.
DN: Yeah. I’m not even including the new album songs and those from the new album are probably the best.
AP: Covers too.
DN: Or just jams. We have like a thousand. We could bust out that New Orleans background funk band kind of thing. We could do that for four hours if we had to.
You guys are a heavy band but you’ll play the Meters’ “Cissy Strut.” You are a distinctly New Orleans band.
DN: That’s our upbringing. We’ve all got distinct stories about that. I’ll let y’all tell your stories but I’ll introduce it. Durel’s dad was a famous guitar player.
DY: My dad [Durel Yates Sr.] was a guitar player. He played jazz and blues. Grew up on Stevie Ray Vaughan and blues. Allman Brothers. He made me play that. I was playing Black Flag and he hated it. I started playing to Greg Ginn. When I first heard Black Flag, that’s when I first picked up the guitar. Even though my dad put a guitar in my hand when I was five years old, I was like, I’m not playing that crap. But then I secretly loved it.
AP: I always, always played the drums but I didn’t really play the drums. My brother played in thrash bands and, when their band wasn’t jamming, I would go in there and jam with him. He taught me how to play metal and stuff like that. I did a band with my brother. My dad was very instrumental because he was a musician too. The whole family is musical. He was always like, don’t pigeonhole yourself into one type of music. Even though I like heavy music, I still have love for jazz and all types of other music so I play that type of stuff.
DN: My oldest brother and his [Durel’s] dad are kind of close in age so I grew up in almost the same school as he did. I had my own thing. I was big into the Circle Jerks and a lot of the punk stuff. My brother would make me learn regular chords on guitar. He was also a big Stevie Ray Vaughan head, but his early upbringing was that, in the ‘70s, he was in a punk band called RZA. They opened for U2 at like Ole Man River’s and XTC. The new wave stuff. Lenny Zenith was the leader of the band and one of my brother’s best friends was Chuck Welch, who was the original bassist for the Sluts, which played with Black Flag a lot. Growing up, I was always the little brother hanging out. Chuck always thought I was cool. My brother has always picked on me or whatever. My oldest brother then got into his [Durel’s] dad’s kind of music. I shouldn’t say he rejected his old new wave roots but embraced trying to become a really skilled player. That’s right around the time that I’m wanting to learn and he’s not teaching me that stuff. We grew up with that similar thing. You go to Mardi Gras parades, you hear that backbeat in all of those marching bands. They’re all playing New Orleans tunes like “Tipitina.” All of those old guys… You’re at a parade as a kid to catch beads and get your hands stomped over some doubloons, but you’re hearing all that shit and it ends up in your DNA.
This will be 25 years of Suplecs having that Mardi Gras gig. At that point, it is a Mardi Gras tradition. How does that feel?
DY: I’ve been seeing some of the same faces in the same spots for 25 years now.
DN: We’ve also seen some of them die.
DY: It’s sad when we don’t see that person. That’s how long we’ve been doing it.
DN: We’ve been doing it so long that we’ll lose somebody like my friend Bill Timmons, who was always right there. When he passed away, he had probably seen 18 of them at least, if not over 20 of them.
DY: Carl Elvers has been seeing us since day one. He’s always in the same spot.
DN: [Imitating Carl] Hey, y’all should play a Mardi Gras Day show! [laughs]
Suplecs’ 20 year anniversary show at d.b.a., August 2016. Photo by Adrienne Battistella.
How did the Mardi Gras show come about?
DN: We used to play Checkpoint Charlie’s a lot. I was always the one setting up shows. There was this guy named Steven Sharp that worked there. My family used to run a business down here, an art supply store, so I used to spend all of my Mardi Gras in the French Quarter. A lot of my friends would go Uptown and do the parade thing. The parades would end at noon and they’d be piss drunk. Me, I would ride my bike, because I lived Uptown, past all of them piss drunks and then come down here because Mardi Gras down here doesn’t start until the afternoon. It just resonated one year—maybe I was on acid—that playing a gig when the sun goes down would be epic no matter who you are because nobody was doing it. That was a day where nothing was going on at Checkpoint Charlie’s until I came to Steve and said: Let’s do this! I’ve had so many bands throughout the years try to hop on the gig with us. My friend Des [Kensel] from High On Fire would say, man, we play arena-sized shows but I’m jealous. Because of the energy, you can’t replicate that.
DY: For years, Morning 40 [Federation] would play after us.
DN: In the early days, they would play at midnight.
DY: It was almost like a tradition.
DN: In our 20s, it was a lot easier to do. In my 50s, it’s a challenge. We just like playing and it’s part of our thing. I can’t think of us not doing it at this point, which puts a lot of pressure on the situation. [laughs]
DY: I lived in Arizona for a couple of years. Carl works for Southwest. He would send me plane tickets just so I could play the Mardi Gras show so we didn’t miss one year.
Shout out Carl! He has kept the New Orleans scene alive in so many different ways. I introduced him to one of my former UNO professors randomly at a show and I said, “This man has probably kept about half of the bands in the New Orleans underground afloat.”
DN: For sure. Buzzov•en played in his living room.
DY: He tells stories that I have no recollection of like: You gave me that cassette tape in ‘96 or so. You asked me if I wanted to buy it. I bought the first cassette tape.
With y’all doing the Mardi Gras gig for so long, you surely must have some stories from doing that. Are there any particular standout memories?
DN: You can see everything from the stage and, this one year, a guy was just making his rounds trying to pick fights with every dude in that room who looked like they could fight real well… I came running into the crowd with my bass and I grabbed the guy by his throat like, quit fucking up my show. Right in his face. Stop fucking up. I got kind of freaked out because I felt weird doing that. I went back to the stage and one of my cousins came up and put the guy in a headlock. He dragged him out and Steve [What Style] went [imitates punches] boom boom boom. That’s a memorable show for sure, not for all good reasons.
That’s how Mardi Gras is. It’s the good and the bad.
DY: Some years are more gutter punks and fights, but most of them are totally cool.
DN: It’s gotten away from that even though there are a lot of street punks. I’ve had altercations when I’m outside trying to take a break. Some dude will be trying to pick a fight with me and I’ll be like, dude. I just played, and he [whimpering], oh, you’re in the band? What, are you just looking for fights? How stupid are you? Especially with us and this crowd. You might get your limbs ripped off. [laughs] Our buddy Teddy with his bike rolls up every year and shucks oysters. His bike is sitting there and he’s just like, hey man, you want an oyster? It is kind of a weird thing to eat after you’ve been playing for three hours… We never did it for money. Now we’re trying to fund all these things that we’re doing, even though we’ve got the label helping, like the video or going to Europe. This [new album] is our first time with a recording where we paid for it. When we were younger, we thought it was cool to have the record label pay for it because it sounds cool. Until this last album, every label paid for it. But you don’t know how much the studio guy is telling them. They never tell you those numbers. The label could be charging us like 10 grand.
DY: In 30 years, we might’ve gotten one royalty from a label. We get publishing sometimes.
DN: It’s all absorbed in that magic number. With different studio experiences, you’re sitting there with a guy and you can see that he’s been sitting there eating donuts for the last hour and you’re like, I’m ready to record. I’m not talking about James [Whitten]. You can’t get billed for that! Now we can sit there and be like, no motherfucker. I’m not paying for that.
AP: Or they’ll forget what track is what and you’ll have to remind him that that is the track we don’t want to do the overdubs.
DY: James was great to work with. He would push us. He would have everything ready. If we got tired of doing solos, he would have us sing.
DN: He grew up knowing us, doing sound at Dixie Taverne… In the beginning with the very first album, I won’t name names but we went to a studio where the guy was just trying to give us a generic metal sound. He had no understanding. There was no term for stoner rock back then. I’m trying to bring CDs of Kyuss and stuff and he doesn’t want to hear it because he thinks it’s crap. He’s trying to give my bass that run-duga-dun-dun and I’m like, no. And he’s like, shut up, what do you know? And the label is paying for it.
DY: He stopped and wanted more money from the label.
DN: It got very sketch very quick. We had to be like, no, motherfucker. You agreed to do it for this, and then it was awkward for the rest of the session.
Y’all were involved with Krewe d’Etat for a few years, right?
AP: Yeah, for like three years.
Tell me about that whole process.
DN: That was Steve What Style. He hooked it up. I think he was already involved with the krewe through one of the bone gangs.
DY: That was some of the funnest times of my life. Every second, you’re playing for a different crowd from gangsters to old women and then we would stop at Gallier Hall and play the heaviest shit we know.
DN: Right in the mayor’s face. The thing is you might end up just doing like four songs because you don’t want to try to think too much. I think the first year we tried to throw beads and it turned into me standing on tons of beads and guitar cords. We were like, we will never throw more beads. I think we made cups. We built a badass float. It was like a shoebox design that we would build every year and take it apart.|
DY: And after the parade we would do drive-bys! We would pull up to different clubs in the city.
DN: We would pull up to The Saint and just start playing.
AP: We would stop at Le Bon Temps [Roule] and what’s that other club?
DN: Parasol’s.
DY: We played at Popeyes and everyone at the Popeyes came out and danced… Quintron would do that back in the day. Someone would have to run outside with an extension cord to plug him in and then he would play his thing by Mermaid Lounge and then just take off.
DN: That’s who gave us the idea to do the drive-by. He would drive away and it would just unplug. It was so bizarre and great.
Earlier, Danny, you were talking about your family a bit. The new album’s cover is your father’s work. Could you tell me about his background as an artist?
DN: He was a Jackson Square artist. Him, my grandfather, and my aunt were all Jackson Square artists in the 1960s. They were all set up along different parts of Jackson Square so I grew up [there] a lot. My dad was also the captain of the New Orleans Fire Department and had his own business, which started out as an art supplies store to sell art supplies to all his artist friends. Then he got into the picture framing business. He had that business from like 1974 to 2001. I grew up in Metairie so, during the week, I was playing kickball in the streets or skateboarding, but my weekends were always in the Quarter. I would always be bouncing. I’d hang out with my dad or my grandpa. My parents would go out of town and I would stay with my grandpa, go out to Jackson Square to be with him, sitting on the other side of where he set up. My aunt’s gallery and stuff. I even have a coin I found from 1835 in Jackson Square as a kid. My dad, one of the paintings he did a lot was Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. He’s still alive. He’s just retired from painting. He would paint it a lot. He would do these night scenes of it. It was one of his more popular pieces. The one that’s on our cover was a very early incarnation of that. If you saw what he has done more recently, you would see that it has totally advanced. This is one of his more primitive ones. It looks like it’s from the ‘60s. I found the painting in our rehearsal space… It’s cool to finally do artwork that’s more personal to us than subbing it out.
Suplecs performs aboard the “Bones-Brah-Gade” float for Le Krewe d’Etat in 2010. Photo by L. Steve Williams.
The last Suplecs album came out 15 years ago. Were all these songs written for the new record or were there any that were laying around during that time?
DN: Two. “Got Nothing” and “No Apologies” are both kind of older ones. Also, since the last album… GarageBand is what has really helped me out a lot because I’m a bass player and I just come in with a bass line. It’s hard to interpret what I want from just a bass line. With GarageBand, we started messing around and he [Durel] taught me some tricks and I taught him some tricks. Once I figured out how to get drums on there and I got a guitar at home, I could actually compose whole songs to get the idea like this is a riffing part or this is a melodic thing.
DY: It’s the first record where we actually made demos before the record. He would write an almost complete song, send it to us, and I would do the same thing. It made the recording process so much faster because we were prepared. James had a copy of it.
DN: Usually, when we’re in the studio, I’m hearing what my vocals sound like for the first time in that recorded environment. It’s your first time hearing it so you might think it sounds awesome but then two months later you’re like, I could’ve done this so much better… By the time we were in the studio, I already knew what I wanted and didn’t have to second guess it. I wasn’t trying different vocal styles.
DY: We’re just late on the technology. [laughs] We would do the music, walk around the park, and then come up with lyrics. Never did that before.
I thought it was cool y’all wound up linking up with Egg Yolk Jubilee for the closing dirge “La Ti Da.”
DN: That was a song I wrote in GarageBand and I was trying to do some kind of brass band thing. There are horn quartets on there so I sounded it out on the keyboard and took those parts and started to think about who I was going to get that was also going to be reasonably priced to get to be on the album… Eric Belletto from Egg Yolk, I hit him up. I sent him an email of the song. He took what I did and wrote it into sheet music. They got together and rehearsed it so they just came into the studio and nailed it. They were in and out of the studio in a couple of hours. They gave us all these different horns.
DY: I got my daughter playing on one of the songs.
On “Old Spanish Trail.”
AP: Talk about that technology.
DY: James sent her a link and she went to a studio in Virginia. She laid down all the violin and different strings.
Both her and Egg Yolk’s accompaniments sound great. I love Egg Yolk and had no idea what context they would be in since they are such an eclectic band. It’s fun to hear an almost Iommi worship take on a jazz funeral.
DN: It’s a dirge. It’s that first line on the way to the graveyard. That’s what I wrote it as because the lyrics are pretty dark. I wrote that during a very dark moment when things were going on with my bar and stuff. It’s a funeral dirge but it’s also the end of the album so it’s sending you out. [laughs] I guess it’s kind of dark. Like this album is not going to do anything so here is our funeral dirge. [laughs] No! You get to the album and then comes the second line!
If you have the album in the CD player and it starts over again. [laughs]
DN: It was an intentional last song on the album. It was kind of pointed to have us fade out and him [Andrew] and Egg Yolk Jubilee finishing our record for us. It’s a march to the graveyard but it could be a lot of things.
It’s fitting because y’all played Egg Yolk member Geoff Douville’s memorial show at Tipitina’s.
DN: Yeah. And I got to know those guys because of Portside. That period of my life exposed me to a lot of different musicians. That helped me with my writing and stuff too. I had Russell Batiste [Jr.] doing his rehearsals on Tuesdays at Portside at 5 p.m. Sometimes it would be me and Russell Batiste smoking a ton of weed.
Talking about Portside, there is a reference to “Portside” in “Blackwater Rising.” That is a reference to the bar, right?
DN: Yeah. That song and “La Ti Da” were both written as lyrics to the same thing. It’s about suicide. It’s about Portside and my divorce.
But now you guys are in a much better moment because you played the UNO Lakefront Arena. How did that feel? Y’all grew up in the generation when there actually were shows there.
AP: Yeah. It was a joke that we used to say for the longest time except, no, we’re actually playing the UNO Lakefront Arena this time.
DN: Making that phone call was the day after my hernia surgery. I’m all fucking pilled out, double hernia. I’m calling him. [Acid Bath singer] Dax [Riggs] had already said they were going to hit us up to play a show but didn’t release what it was going to be or where it was going to be. It was like, I’m sure y’all are going to think I’m full of shit or fucking with y’all because I do fuck with people a lot, make jokes. It’s going to be at the UNO Lakefront Arena. We were all just like, holy shit. That was really cool.
DY: That was like a big reunion. We used to tour with Mastodon before they really blew up.
Wasn’t their first show opening for y’all?
DN: Yes. At the Sweatfest at Dixie Taverne. We were headlining the Sunday. That was a crazy weekend. I played the Saturday night because it was when I was still in Eyehategod. A huge fight broke out. A dude took a cheap shot at Phil Anselmo and hit him. Think about it, Vulgar Display of Power. If the dude had hit me, I probably would’ve pissed myself and passed out but Phil just stood still and said, you hit like a girl. The guy was just like [screams]. It was just this huge street brawl. That was Saturday night. The next night, Suplecs headlined with Mastodon. It was their first show.
DY: But yeah. It was so great to see our old friends Soilent Green at UNO. That was fucking amazing. And that was my first time seeing Acid Bath. They were great.
DN: It was equally crazy getting to play, getting to watch Soilent Green and, of course, Mastodon and Acid Bath, but equally cool was what I call the school hallway that night. The backstage area was just this hallway… All the faces. [Exhorder singer] Kyle Thomas. We went to high school with Kyle Thomas. Pepper Keenan, who produced one of our albums. People we know, some of whom are more famous than us but we’ve got stories with all of them. It was a fun night. We’re trying to step back into this and thank Dax Riggs, Sammy [Duet], and Mike Sanchez for helping some old brothers out at a time when we’re trying to get our shit back rolling.
Suplecs at the end of their set for the Acid Bath, Mastodon, Power Trip, Amigo the Devil, and Soilent Green show at the UNO Lakefront Arena in November 2025. Photo by Steven Hatley.
You talk about other bands being more successful but I do like to think that Suplecs can stand on their own two feet. Y’all have been in it for a minute and have shown that you can deliver the goods.
DY: Regardless, we just love playing music. We’re always gonna play. No matter what.
DN: Whenever you can go anywhere and people know your songs, especially outside of New Orleans, every band wants that… You could be as far away as Seattle and playing “White Devil” and some dude is singing the lyrics back to me. I wrote that in an apartment. This dude knows the lyrics and is at a show thousands of miles away from me singing it back to me. It was back in the days when you had to go to the store and buy albums. You can’t put a price on that. That’s a priceless situation.
I was at the music video shoot for “Pentacle Star” a couple nights ago. Can you tell me about the vision behind that?
DN: It’s kind of a love song of sorts between a stoner and a goth, witch-type girl. It could sub for a lot of us who live down here.
AP: Common story.
DN: And, of course, it being New Orleans culture, there’s always witches, goth girls, and vampire type, stripper type girls. It’s a play on that. When it comes to the video, Andy had the vision: Imagine a live show and the girl is there stalking him but there is a backstory of the night that they hooked up. That’s what we’re trying to recreate with the video. We didn’t want to try to explain that to everybody beforehand but that’s what all the weird shit we were shooting in between was. Last night, we shot the flashback sequence of the one night stand and its shot in black-and-white and is very film noir looking. It’s very imagery based. It’s gonna be cool.
AP: It’s very tongue in cheek. It’s not serious. It’s very Wile E. Coyote. But it is a concept of something that could happen at a show like the crazy shit that happens on Mardi Gras Day. A little vignette.
DN: I’ve wound up at some apartment where you wake up with a bunch of pentagrams and you’re like, damn. This chick’s a witch! [laughs] It’s an innocent funny play on that. Very exaggerated.
During the shoot, I noticed all of you were very hands on. Do you all have backgrounds in the film business here?
DY: Yeah. I’ve been doing it for 21 years. He [points to Danny] got us in.
DN: The first movie I worked on back in the day was Monster’s Ball back in 2001.
DY: That’s another reason why we stopped touring. We started working and making decent checks. Dollar signs. Just life.
DN: I always anchor it off of Katrina because Katrina was this pivotal moment where some of the bands could go on tour out of that experience like, alright, we’re gonna go on the road. We really couldn’t. We had wives and kids and stuff so we had to anchor ourselves. With the film industry, the money is stupid and you get health insurance and benefits. It sucks. [ANTIGRAVITY’s EiC] Dan Fox will say this: “It’s a dream killer.” There are so many writers and documentary filmmakers, a ton of musicians, who all put their art on the side to make that real money. It’s hard to say no to. But at the end of the day, it is nice to have our art that we control, and as much as we put in is what we’re going to get out of it. But that sidelined us. We all got involved in that and then we would just get together to rehearse the hits and play shows randomly. He [points to Durel] was the one who said we need to write new stuff and put out a new record. We didn’t have a rehearsal space because the Portside was our rehearsal space. Plus, you can’t write in that environment. Every five minutes someone would be banging on the door, Are y’all open? Or hey man, give me $5! I’d be like, no! Get out of here! and then get back on the stage.
At the music video shoot, you said the last music video shoot was in 2001 [“Rock Bottom”] so I guess we’re on track for you to do another one 25 years later?
DN: Yeah. In 2055 or something like that.
DY: They played us and then Down on Headbangers Ball… A couple of these labels had guys that would place their music into TV shows so we were on a few shows back in the day. That’s the only royalty statements we get, like Road Rules from MTV… They would play like 10 seconds of “Cities Of The Dead” and we would get the checks for when it would play in Portugal or something.
DN: Metal Mulisha was another one. I remember being at my parents’ house one day and telling them. I put the station on and, sure enough, it showed up. I went, “Look! That’s us!” “Are you sure?” I know my fucking band. [laughs] I had to wait until the end when it said Suplecs. “They better be paying you. How much are they giving you?” I could tell her they gave me $2 million but it wouldn’t be enough. Any amount of money, they would be like, well, it’s on TV. They should give you more than that. You can’t win with parents, still.
Unless y’all feel like anything hasn’t been addressed, I think that’s plenty.
DY: Listen to the new record please.
DN: Tell all your friends about it.
DY: Buy a shirt.
DN: Sorry about that one song [“Blackwater Rising”]. A lot of it is about divorce and I was going through a really bad time. I did kind of… almost off myself. The lyrics to that and the other song were written… as a suicide note, which I don’t know if they knew about that. I didn’t want to cover that but I didn’t want to totally not answer the question. But that’s what it is about and it was fucked up. I didn’t do it because… one of my bartenders would’ve found me. So what I did was kept it in my jean jacket for like a year and then I pulled it out and wrote lyrics to two songs. It was going to be one song but then it just ended up being two.
Before the interview, we were talking about Dege Legg, a great Louisiana musician that we lost to suicide. In light of us losing Dege, I want to say that people are happy to have you around.
DN: And that’s the thing. We’ve all been through dark shit. I got a bar left in my lap and she walked out. I spiraled pretty bad with drugs and then I got out of it. I climbed out of it. He [points to Durel] helped me get back with working on movies because I got out of that loop. He all of a sudden becomes the umbilical cord for that and I’m like a little baby attached to Durel’s umbilical cord. I want you to visualize that and put that in the article. [laughs]
I wish I could stop visualizing that. [laughs]
DY: Can you draw a picture of this article please?
DN: Is that the cover?
AP: With Andy cooking a steak on top of us.
*extended web-only bonus interview*
This is a record made by guys who have lived life. Erin Hall from ANTIGRAVITY did a really good interview with Dax Riggs and they were talking about that whole thing of looking at the shit you wrote as a kid and you’re like, I didn’t even know what the fuck I was talking about.
DN: A lot of insects! [laughs]
DY: I’ll look at lyrics or I’ll have them on my phone and some of them are pretty dark. I get rid of most of them like, Where was I at when I wrote this? A deep dark hole.
DN: On a silly note, “$6 Man,” is a song about working with Durel and working with Sid Montz. He was in Crowbar. He was in Victorian Blitz, Kirk Windstein’s old band. He’s the fulcrum of the New Orleans metal scene. He’s the one who said, hey Phil. You should call it Housecore. He’s the guy who told Phil, you’ve got a good thing going on with your band. You don’t need to go to Dallas to jam with those guys. Razor White’s doing pretty good. He knows ‘em all. He even saw Megadeth in Metairie at a fucking club with Kirk Windstein and Mike Williams.
AP: Hanging out with Metallica on Decatur Street!
DN: These dudes are like metal gods now! He’s the fulcrum and he’s also friends with us. He works with Durel so the joke is we’re the old dudes on these movie crews. There are a lot of younger people and we’re like the old mules. He’ll call us the six dollar man together instead of The Six Million Dollar Man, which was a TV show that was out before you were born.
I’m familiar! I saw re-runs!
DN: He came up with the six dollar man. The joke was we’re three dollars a piece or I’m two dollars and he’s four dollars. Together, we’re the six dollar man. He was like, “You’re writing a new record. Six dollar man’s gotta be mentioned.” “It’s funny you say that. I wrote a whole song about it.” It’s a silly song about being old and working and we gotta get some shit done, but with a bit of Black Flag because we all like Black Flag.
“Two dollars shy of the promised land” is so many of us in New Orleans.
DN: He actually wrote that lyric because I sent him a version and he was like you have to write the lyric “Two dollars shy of the promised land.” Again, GarageBand!
DY: “Mountain” is a tribute to the band Mountain. I love Mountain and Leslie West, the way he’s playing and I threw some of his lyrics in that song. What else do we have?
“Old Spanish Trail” is a great instrumental. It’s a great chance for y’all to spread things out.
DY: We have one of those on every record.
DN: It’s a blues standard that very much feels like his dad. I remember his dad trying to teach me as a kid to play 12 bar blues and I just couldn’t get it. I’m sure his dad thought, This kid is fucking stupid. Then a year later, my brother Rick taught it to me and I was like, Oh, I remember Durel’s dad showing that to me, and I figured it out. When it came to writing that song, we follow that but it also has a very unique arrangement to it.
DY: A bit of Zeppelin.
DN: I think, when we first wrote it, it was called “Mushroom” because we wrote it on mushrooms but I was like, We need something about your dad, so we went with “Old Spanish Trail” because of Slidell.
DY: My dad was a retired Slidell police captain. He passed away a couple of years ago.
DN: It’s a tribute to him and then to have his [Durel’s] daughter on it playing strings makes it extra [special.] It’s the strings album.
When are y’all doing the LPO session?
DN: We’re talking about doing a show during Jazz Fest with Morning 40. We might try to bring them out to do the horns for “La Ti Da.” We might bring the guys from Egg Yolk to do it or some of the horn players in Morning 40. It would be easy to bring some of the Egg Yolk dudes and just belt it out. It would be cool to do that one live.
I love that connection. I think it is easy for a lot of people not in the underground scene to think of heavy music as not really New Orleans music. But it is New Orleans music! Doing the dirge is a great example.
DN: Yeah. That’s what I was trying to show. I feel like that is where sludge comes from, whether people realize it or not, is that slow moving water in the river or whatever you want to say. That is sludge to me. Those horn arrangements in a dirge are so dark and heavy. It reminds me of a quick story. When I first met Russell Batiste at Portside Lounge, I got introduced to him by this guy named Kevin Scott who plays in Gov’t Mule and used to play at Portside a lot before he was in Gov’t Mule. Bass player and friend of mine. He said that when he grew up he was inspired by me, which is awesome. He introduced me to Russell Batiste when I had some party at Portside. He was like, This guy plays in this band Suplecs. It’s like heavy rock. He’s trying to describe it to him and he’s like, You’re from New Orleans in a heavy rock band? I’m about to tell him I played “Cissy Strut” a thousand times motherfucker, but, before I get that out of my mouth, he says, What do you know about The Slugs? This is Russell Batiste! I’m like, What do you know about The Slugs? He was like, The green warehouse—the same place where we were writing this record—I used to be up at the green warehouse… waiting for the Meters to come to practice, and these motherfuckers across the hall were playing heavy. He got it. It was New Orleans beats but played really slow. With the syncopation, when you play that slow, you really can’t fuck up. You can’t be a little off. The drummer’s got to—and I’m like, holy shit. This was an amazing conversation to have. I always say this about Eyehategod. If you took an Eyehategod record and sped it up really fast, you might have a Meters song or if you have a Meters song and slowed it down, you kind of almost have an Eyehategod song… Joey LaCaze especially, jamming with him.
I interviewed Eyehategod years ago and I think it was Gary who said this. He said something like, We’re a lot closer to Fats Domino than we are to Metallica. The moment I heard that, it all clicked.
DN: [Turns to Andrew] What’s the one? “Sister Fucker (Part II)?”
AP: Yeah! I want to do a big band arrangement of it with the fucking horns like the guy who did “Holiday in Cambodia” with the big band. I want it to be like that where people are like, Wait. I know this song. This is “Sister Fucker (Part II)!” [laughs]
DN: But that’s because of how that song is written and the drums.
AP: It swings!
DN: I remember when I first got asked to join that band. I was just like, Oh, they just play really slow. It’s not going to be too hard. But then you realize they’re playing slow and if you’re that one dude who’s not on. It took me a minute. I sped up a lot of those songs. I joined that band and was on tour three weeks after I joined. Someone did a review and was like, All these songs are sped up because of this new bass player. Once I got it and was behind him [LaCaze], it was like, Oh wow.
Suplecs performs their annual Mardi Gras Day show at Checkpoint Charlie’s on February 17. Hymns Under a Blood Moon Sky comes out on February 20. For more information, check out @suplecsnola on Instagram and ripplemusic.bandcamp.com.
Top photo by Dan Fox: Outside of Checkpoint Charlie’s, Mardi Gras Day 2023. Left to right: Andrew Preen, Danny Nick, Durel Yates.
Bottom photo by Dan Fox: Getting ready for tour, fall 2011 outside of Fountainbleau Storage.
