Party Animals

Over the last few years Rhode Island rockers Deer Tick have the shed the ragged country-rock persona which characterised their early years and become the epitome of the hard-livin', hard-drinkin' road hogs that have long existed on the fringes of the American rock'n'roll scene – the mantle once held proudly by their heroes The Replacements, as well as bands like Supersuckers, Zeke and other rebels of their ilk.

Their music has changed over time to reflect this transformation, their fourth album, Divine Providence, being ramshackle and sloppy in the best possible way, full of tales of reckless hedonism and calculated abandon. It's messy, occasionally silly – and there are moments where you'd swear they were trying to shoot themselves in the foot – but there's still a heart beating at the core of their songs, and moments of introspection that transcend the record's more overt party elements to give it an undeniable substance.

Still, the mantra of Divine Providence's opening gambit, The Bump – a shouted refrain of “We're full grown men, but we act like kids/We'll face the music the next time we roll in” – acts as a pretty clear summation of the Deer Tick ethos.

“We wanted to explore a couple of new things,” shrugs frontman and chief songwriter John McCauley about the tone of Divine Providence. “I mean even when War Elephant (2007) and Born On Flag Day (2009) came out and we were touring behind those albums, our shows were still really loud and very rock'n'roll – very debaucherous. We've just been playing that way live for so long, we had to see if we could capture it on tape and I think we did – it has its moments.

“I guess with any record that you make, as time passes you kinda wish that you'd done some things differently, but I think all in all it turned out pretty good – we're happy with it.”

McCauley is certainly not perturbed at having shed the 'alt-country' tag that followed them early on, not that you get the impression he loses much sleep over such matters.

“I'd consider us more of a rock band than anything else. I mean I love bands like Drive-By Truckers and we're playing shows with them later this month, but I kind of hate the term 'alt-country'. We'll play with anybody really – when we're doing a tour, it's always just important to like the band that you're touring with. We've done some great tours with bands like The Felice Brothers, Turbo Fruits – we even played a show opening for Nas once! That was in Providence, our home town, and we were friends with the promoter – it was actually a pretty awesome show, us and then Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and then Nas. They're the kind of shows we want to play!”

Which augers well for their impending debut Australian tour, which finds them sharing bills with San Franciscan rock duo Two Gallants – two different-sounding bands who nonetheless should complement each other well.

“We've never played together, but we know the guys,” McCauley says of the pairing. “They've come to our shows and we've gone to their shows and stuff like that, but this is our first tour together. I've been a pretty big fan of them for a while, so this is exciting. I think the two bands together will make for a good show.”

Deer Tick seemed to start as a solo project for McCauley and morph into its current incarnation over time, but he explains that this was always his intention from the outset, especially as nowadays the other members are contributing more creatively.

“It did start as a band but I just wanted to tour way more often than the other people I was playing with, so I ended up just playing alone a lot of the time. And then I was just grabbing people to join one by one when they became available to me – I've been trying to get Dennis [Ryan – drums] and Chris [Ryan – bass] as my rhythm section for years, and then I finally got them over. I've pretty much come to a decision that this is the line-up, and if someone were to leave the band for any reason, I don't know that we would continue, you know?”

Even Divine Providence's straightforward drinking anthem, Let's All Go To The Bar, was a co-write to some degree. “That was just this idea in my head and I was just having trouble writing some of the lyrics, so we hung around late at the studio one night and Robbie [Crowell – keys/sax] and Ian [O'Neil – guitar] and me finished the song. It's kinda funny because it's like the simplest, most boneheaded song on the record, but it's the one that we had to put the most effort into writing. But it's always fun to play live – it makes people do some stupid things. You've got to watch out for flying beer bottles and shit.”

So does Deer Tick actually get up to as much hell-raising on the road as these songs would suggest? “You know, shit happens,” McCauley smiles. “We've done some pretty funny things, on and off-stage. Shit like taking insane amounts of LSD and flooding our hotel room, and lighting our guitars on fire, whatever... Sometimes we're in the mood, sometimes we're not. I mean we always try to put on a good show, and when we don't we generally feel pretty bad about it. But I think seeing us live makes our records make a little bit more sense. There's not a lot of bands around now that do what we do, which is anything that we fucking want.

“I don't know, when I read The Dirt, that Motley Crue book, I was, like, 'Man, musicians today are a bunch of fucking pussies!' We get frowned upon for acting up and doing some of the things that we do, and it's just kind of, 'Well, look at who our heroes are!'”

But it's McCauley's list of musical rather than maniacal influences that goes a long way towards best explaining the Deer Tick aesthetic.

“I kinda have things in different categories – my favourite bands are, like, Nirvana and The Replacements and The Band, but as a songwriter I really admire John Prine, Townes Van Zandt and folks like that,” he reflects. “I guess part of how I come up with the songs that I come up with is that I try to write a good quality song that I would consider to be maybe half as good as a John Prine song, and then I kind of throw it through the machine of all those musical influences, and then it turns into something Deer Tick. Don't ask me how.”

Deer Tick will be playing the following dates:

Friday 8 February - Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW
Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 February - Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC
Tuesday 12 February - Perth International Arts Festival, Perth WA