Ethan Miller E
THAN Miller has come full circle. After 20 years living in Oakland, he and his wife recently bought a farmhouse in Humboldt County in the far north of California, close to where he grew up alongside some of his future Comets On Fire bandmates. “There’s a saying about this place,” he confides. “They say it’s ‘behind the redwood curtain’. It means that you can get lost up here.” Miller laughs heartily when reminded that he’s about to enter his third decade as a recording artist. “Making it that long in indie music is like 10 lifetimes!” he reckons – and in his case, that’s not such an exaggeration. A member of at least five different outfits down the years, even his ongoing journey at the helm of Howlin Rain has been a particularly bumpy ride, with Miller regularly forced to recruit an entire new band. However, you sense that he relishes the turbulence, which feeds back into his music – always motoring, often at full tilt, navigating vibrant American backwaters with an infectious lust for life. “There’s a regeneration every couple of albums and hence a new aesthetic, a new flesh and blood,” he explains. “I try to carry the bones on from body to body to keep that original flame alive.” SAMRICHARDS
COMETS ON FIRE COMETS ON FIRE
TIM BUGBEE
SELF-RELEASED,2001
Spontaneousspace-rocktear-up thruststhefledglingbandintothe vanguardofNewWeirdAmerica Ben Flashman [bass] and I were playing in another group and it was getting a little wibbly-wobbly. I wanted to make a radical reaction to that particular musical predicament, so I said to Ben, “Let’s do a little project where we just blast this thing out – make it really fast and a little bit emotionally violent as an exorcism of this thing that’s bugging us.” We grabbed Chris Gonzales [drums] and went into this garage we were renting as a practice space in Santa Cruz. We basically put the four-track up and blasted through those songs pretty much first or second take, it just magically came together. We had one track left for the vocals and I asked Noel Harmonson to help me out. He brought the Echoplex in and we started foolin’ with that. And the minute he went bananas with the Echoplex, we were like, “That’s it – this is the whole thing.” And then of course instead of being just a little project, we were like, “Hey, we got a band here!” It was the 78 • UNCUT • NOVEMBER 2021
immaculate conception. We looked in the back of a Maximum Rock’n’Roll ’zine and found out how to press 500 records. We sent it out to some small distributors, most of which never paid us. Then finally Revolver in San Francisco came along and took 50 copies and a week later they came back and said, “Give us the rest of the pressing.” From there we were set. Every new band probably thinks they’re the greatest group on Earth, but to be met with success establishes a certain confidence and encourages bold moves artistically. So we were lucky to have that happen and it set us on a bold trajectory as a group.
HOWLIN RAIN HOWLIN RAIN BIRDMAN,2006
Afterthreealbumswiththe acceleratingCometsjuggernaut, Millercreatesanewvehicleforhis classicsongwritingurges I sent the first Howlin Rain demos to [drummer] John Moloney in the summer of 2004. Comets was getting a little bit emotionally intense – we’d been working really hard since 2001 and we all were looking to relieve some of that tension and have some freewheeling
Comets On Fire play the Middle East Club, Cambridge ,MA, September 2006
experiences with other musicians and whatnot. I wanted to reset my creativity and not put all of my desires and demands on those four other guys. We probably weren’t gonna bring in breezy ’70s AM popgold rock to Comets On Fire, and I love that stuff. So I wanted to create a space to do that with Howlin Rain. Comets was a democracy – we made all the decisions together, and there were certainly aspects of that where things could move really slowly. Sometimes it felt like for everybody to agree on something we brought it down to the lowest common denominator instead of entertaining a really wild idea. So I wanted to put a different blueprint together where I was kinda the bandleader; I would write the material and the band would try to endow it with their own spirit. John was the bandleader in Sunburned Hand Of The Man and I think he liked the idea of being a creative foil but not having to do the heavy lifting on the conceptual end. And Ian [Gradek, bass/banjo] was my next-door neighbour in Santa Cruz and longtime dear friend, so we had a very deep connection. He also came from Humboldt, and that first album is very much a Humboldt County sound. We’re very remote up here, we’re into the deep wilds of California where the old-growth redwoods hit the ocean. And that
first album reflected some of those feelings, both human and natural.
COMETS ON FIRE AVATAR SUBPOP,2006
Withthecracksalreadyshowing, thebanddigdeepforamasterful treatiseofgnarledcosmicwisdom Because Comets had got to a place where we’d been rehearsing Avatar for a year, the tracking was fairly embittered and difficult – it wasn’t that spontaneous, explosive process any more. But I think the album came out having a deeper emotional complexity because of that stuff. It was something of a triumph, but a destroyer for us also. We were coming to a place where it was gonna be hard for the band to continue if we couldn’t find a more unified place for ourselves, and that album ended up containing all those mixed emotions. At the time, I’d rather it were easier to do, but now I wouldn’t change the record – I think it’s beautiful as a statement. No band lasts in that perfect union forever. We tracked the entire album instrumentally before I wrote the lyrics, so for something like “Dogwood Rust”
