Twin Peaks Get Lynchian & Talk Their Most Surreal Experiences

When they first got together, Chicago garage-rock crew Twin Peaks probably weren't expecting that the David Lynch TV show that shares their name would suddenly muscle its way back into the limelight by way of revival series.

While the extra Google power brought forth by the revival is probably both blessing and curse for the minds behind new album Down In Heaven (now you'll definitely have to look for 'Twin Peaks band'), it also provided The Music with a chance to get strange with members Cadien Lake James and Clay Frankel on their current Australian tour, presented by Budweiser, and talk about their most surreal experiences on the road. Both members rose to the occasion, offering distinctly bizarre — but wildly different — tales of oddity from their touring life.

"We played a show at Princeton University, that was pretty fuckin' psychedelic," Frankel begins.

"This was, like, a week ago. But this is only my understanding of the word 'psychedelic', which means 'out of place', 'nonsensical'… which, I guess, that's what that means. I wish I had a really good drug story for you but this is different.

"So the school pays us a good sum of money to play a show at the school, and it's like, we get there but we're playing at, like, 4pm or something like that. First of all, it's raining, OK, and the show, we get there and it's outside, it's like Greek pillars, you know, and we're playing on this porch, and… I mean, there's nobody there. It's just a house on the street, a university house on the street. It looks like a frat house, basically. It's also the first time I've been to Princeton. It's, like, Princeton University, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald, all this crazy shit; presidents come from there… and it's like spring break over there. It's just frat mayhem, and it's just, like, people running around the streets. So they put on this show, they give us all this money to come play this show on these steps—"

"I was counting how many people were there," James interjects. "It turned out being a couple more, but the first three-quarters of the set, I was like, 'We're getting $500 for each person here'. No one was there."

"Yeah, like, we got there, and we were just setting up the equipment," Frankel continues, "and there's just this group of, like, 20 men, just standing on this lawn, that aren't there for the show but are just standing on this lawn, and just drinkin', and they're all wearing suits, kind of, and they're each taking turns sliding on this slip'n'slide. So they're like, 'Yeah, you fuckin' pussy! Go slide down that thing!' and then we're like, 'OK, this is weird,' so we set up our shit and go upstairs.

"We're hanging out upstairs and these five security guys come in, and they give us, like, 'a lowdown', which, in all of our years of touring, we've never got a lowdown from security before. And they come in and they're like, 'OK, we're the security, my name's Jeff, my name's blahblahblah, we're the security for you guys tonight. Couple of ground rules we'd like to go over; please don't let anyone get on the stage' — like, what fuckin' stage? We're playing on some steps — but like he's like, 'Please don't let anyone get on stage; we've had bands do that before, it gets pretty out of hand.'

"But we go downstairs, I mean, there's, like, nobody even there! The only people that came were some kids from neighbouring suburbs that liked our band. Not a single Princeton student even came to the show. So we're playing on the steps, and there's, like, ten kids standing on this lawn, and then they have four of the biggest fuckin' security guards you've ever seen just standing there, and, like — it was weird, it was, like, grass, and then there was cobblestones, and then the stairs, and someone would walk up on the cobblestones and the security would all, like, get up in their shit. They'd be like, 'Can you get back on the grass, please?' and then they're like, 'Jerry! JERRY!' and like, 'Can you get back on the grass?!'

"It was so trippy, dude. It was one of those places where you just play and you just close your eyes and you just picture that you're somewhere else. I turned my microphone around to just look at Connor, our drummer, and I just played to him for the first half of the set. It was so uncomfortable."

"Yeah, I hadn't not rocked out in so long, but I really didn't give my all, at all," James agrees.

"I have a more conventional surreal story," he continues. "So we're playing in Mexico City, first time in Mexico — we've been back once since then. We find out you can buy lean over the counter in Mexico."

"That's what we really should have started with," Frankel laughs.

"It's, like, the real cough syrup," James explains. "Not some shit you can just buy in a store here or in America. Like, prescription, heavy robitussin, or codeine.

"So I go in, and I'm like — and I didn't know if you could actually do it — but I go in the medicine store and I'm like, 'Uhhh, my throat is fucked up, man, it's fucked up,' and he was just like, 'Here, it's four dollars,' and it had, like, DMX in it; the shit.

"So, I had never done this shit before; I had never tried it. I don't know. Later, I get told by my friend that we met down there, he was like, 'Oh, you always mix it in with a bunch of Sprite, you don't mix it with anything.' I didn't know shit. I took, like, four, five, swigs out if it. Big swigs. Then I take a nap. I wake up an hour later — purple, spinning. I swear. It was crazy. I could barely walk. We don't play that day, luckily, but I was walking to this shuttle to go to the festival, and I get in and we're driving to the festival, I'm looking out the window like, 'What the fuck is happening?'

"That's really it; later I just kept drinking tequila. It was a really weird night. And then later I told this guy, I was like, 'Yeah, I was on all this lean and now I'm drinking tequila,' and he was like, 'WHAT?! Never mix alcohol and lean; what are you doing?!' and I was like, 'I'm having a great time, man!'

"Really, the weirdest part about it was just waking up for the first time on lean. I took a nap, woke up and the world was literally just — not spins like liquor; it was much more fun than that. I was really freaked out for a second, and it was literally purple. You don't think that it's, like, a purple liquid, but for me when I woke up, everything was purple-tinted and doubling back, and I was trying to stand up… it was wild."

Twin Peaks play the Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, tonight, 10 May.