Hangin' Round

At the height of their powers, Wollongong rockers Tumbleweed were an Australian institution, tearing stages apart with their kaleidoscopic, high-octane performances. Yet in 1996, after the release of their still-excellent back-to-back Galactaphonic and Return To Earth albums, the line-up fractured, with Richie Lewis and the Curley brothers, Lenny and Jay, going one way while guitarist Paul Hausmeister and drummer Steve O'Brien were left behind. It was an acrimonious split, and despite the release of Mumbo Jumbo in 2000, Tumbleweed never recovered.

Fast forward to this year, and not only is the five-piece back together after playing reunion shows at 2009's Homebake festival and the Big Day Out the following year, they're writing new material. If anyone suggested to Lenny Curley that they would be in this position in 2012, he would have laughed in their face.

“A couple years ago I didn't think it possible at all,” Curley admits. “At this point I don't think I'm amped, I'm just trying to get through it and get it finished. It's a workmanlike approach, we just want to get it out there, but it's hard to find the time to work on things. We aren't professional musicians in that we don't play our instruments every day, and we don't play a hell of a lot, plus there are now work commitments and different lifestyles than we had back then. But maybe we can make that work for us; we're doing things on laymen's terms now, with integrity. We don't desire to be rich rockstars, we just want to be artistic and creative.”

This mention of rock stardom seems incongruous to the long-haired boys that flailed around the stage as the Nirvana support back in 1992, yet Curley concedes that the idea of being on top of the world blurred their aesthetic so much that they lost sight of what made Tumbleweed great in the first place.

“I'd be lying if I said I didn't. I think that ambition worked to our advantage in those early days, we threw everything out there and were blown away by the instant success that we never expected. Once it did become a money-earning machine though, it changes things a lot. While we were excited about the possibilities, it took away from the original ideals that we set out to capture. We were right into the late-'80s pub rock scene of Sydney, and that's who we wanted to emulate – The Stems, The Church, The Celibate Rifles. But when we became these semi-rockstars, it was really weird, we changed a lot. We suffered from that.”

The breakdown certainly was a low point, and the overblown Mumbo Jumbo indicated how important Hausmeister and O'Brien were to the Tumbleweed sound. The series of events may not have been beneficial, but hindsight has led to reinvigoration.

“We're all wiser – there is no pretentiousness now,” Curley asserts. “We've all come down to earth in a big way and are open to each other's ideas. No one is trying to individually dominate proceedings, because there are a lot of songwriters within the band, but we listen to each other more than ever before. It's not a struggle to get your songs through because everyone is having their say which makes the process a lot quicker. And it has to be quick. I feel like we don't have much time. So there's been a conscious effort not to water the Tumbleweed sound down – if anything I think we've heavied it up a bit. I think we're getting older and want to prove that we still have the chops and that high-energy, groovy music that's really intense – that we still have the soul.”

The band have stated that the new material is closer than ever to the album that they've always wanted to make, an interesting statement seeing that their earlier work stands as some of the most iconic Australian releases of the '90s.

“The first couple of records were very rough. We didn't have the production we really wanted but at the same time we had the right attitude then, we were in the right headspace,” Curley ponders. “Then looking back the later records sound overproduced, we felt distanced from them. We're pretty critical of ourselves, so we feel like we never really nailed a really great record that represented what we were capable of live. We could've ignored that and just kept playing live, but after so many sets of that material there comes a time where you just end up sounding like a poor cover band of yourself. I think we've gotten a little closer this time, and now I feel justified in being able to play for a couple more years.”

The new material holds onto everything that made Tumbleweed such a powerhouse band, yet Curley admits that certain new influences inadvertently crept their way in.

“We've tried to keep the original Tumbleweed dynamics in place, which was playing late-'60s psychedelic metal heavily influenced by bands like the Stones, The Kinks, even Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix, but heavying it up with '70s punk rock which is where the high energy comes in,” Curley espouses. “But there are influences now that we didn't have back then that have crept in, even if it's difficult to hear them. For me, Tom Waits is someone I never listened to when we started out. Now I listen to Tom Waits more than anything else out there, and I can hear his influences in the record but it's shrouded in the more obvious Black Sabbath and Ramones influences. There's probably a lot more happening within the songs now, but at the same time we've tried not to do that, yet it's happened naturally anyway.”

Speaking of influences, at the height of Tumbleweed's success in the 1990s they were heavily marketed as an Antipodean exponent of the grunge explosion, yet in the cold harsh light of the present have been 'repackaged' as a stoner rock band. Curley believes this shift on musical focus is necessary for the public to get a grip on the band, but feels separate from both.

“I've never felt we embraced either of those genres, especially stoner rock. Can you name me one other stoner rock band? Bands like Rollerball we never really knew or had an allegiance to; I think we played one gig with them, that's it. No, I don't see us in that way, let alone there was a movement of any kind. I guess we were guilty of waving the marijuana flag and I think Kyuss were doing things around then, but that genre really confuses me, I really don't know what it is. You get labelled, sure, but I just see us as high-energy rock'n'roll, where you're really pushing things like a rusty old bike down a hill that's about to fall apart. Anything that has a groove and a feel – even funk, soul, blues – that's the excitement, that's what we try to create and enjoy.”

Tumbleweed will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 1 November - Kings Beach Tavern, Caloundra QLD
Friday 2 November - The Zoo, Fortitude Valley QLD
Saturday 3 November - The Spotted Cow, Toowoomba QLD