There are few bands spookier or more melancholy than San Diego’s The Black Heart Procession. So we’re considering it luck that the band, touring for its new album Six, will be in town this Halloween weekend, playing Maxwell’s on Saturday and Bowery Ballroom on Sunday.
Adam Rathe caught up with Black Heart’s Pall Jenkins during a break in his touring to talk about the new record, Halloween costumes and smoking pot in the van.
You’re about to embark on your first world tour in three years—how does that feel?
It’s been interesting. We’ve gotten pulled over twice by border patrol—in Arizona, the dogs [picked] on our van because we occasionally smoke marijuana, but we know not to travel with it.
One of the guys had a case that once had marijuana in it and the dogs smelled it so they pulled us out of the van and went through everything. Then in Texas we got pulled over again in the same sort of situation. The cop asked ‘are you calling my dog a liar?’ I mean, we’ve smoked pot in there but there were no drugs in the van. One of us ate two joints in the van—filters on them and everything. They felt up our bass player—the cop smacked him in the nuts. The cops were being really aggressive. But the shows have pretty good.
What did eating pot do to him?
Nothing really. His eyes were really red later and he was wondering about that, but he said he didn’t feel anything at all. It was cheap, so it didn’t do much.
You’ll be playing Hoboken on Halloween—any big plans?
We’re throwing around ideas of what to do for Halloween—we’ve still got to get to some costume shops and figure out the real plan. I’m sure we’ll have something up our sleeves.
What do you look forward to when you’re in New York?
I love visiting New York but I don’t know if I could live there.
You’ve gone back to giving your record a number for a name, why?
Basically six is a good number, especially with the Black Heart Procession, it’s kind of an evil number. You don’t get a chance to do that very often, we thought it was appropriate to go back to numbering. We had thrown around some of the other ideas, like 'Witching Stone,' but that just became a song title. We were maybe going to call it Sixes or six spelled weird, but then we just stopped on six. In the album artwork, there are different versions of a six—we were just playing around with the number.
How has making this record been different than past projects?
This record, we went back to writing as a two-piece, me and Toby [Nathaniel]. The Swell was written as more of a whole band. We recorded this differently too. Two years I moved into a new space where I record bands, so the previous records were all done on a tape machine and this time we went straight to the computer with good microphones, so the recording process was a bit different as far as editing and being able to build the songs. Now playing them live, a little bit of it is building the songs as we go, so we have to figure out how to perform something live and little things will change. Some elements might be missing or might be played on a different instrument. It’s feeling good—we’re playing nine or 10 of the songs from the record. There are still some rough edges but they’re starting to work themselves out.
Do you ever get the urge to write upbeat music?
I think our records, a lot of people perceive what we do as all dark and for the most part they’re right. But there are some more upbeat songs on this record in tempo and mood. Lyrical topics generally stay darker, though. I have a side project called Mr. Tube, which is more Chicano, low-rider, stoner music. That’s a different project. With Black Heart we know when we’re there and that we are in a certain kind of mind frame. It’s just a format to write it, it’s not some intense lifestyle.
