Tim Harrington hates sneaks. He not only hates them — he considers this hatred a “defining factor in [his] life.”
“In art school, there are these text-book critiques,” explains the frontman, who met his bandmates at the seemingly awesome-music-conducive Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
“‘Expose the Apparatus’ is a particularly ridiculous one, but it describes what we’re trying to do pretty well. We’re striking a balance between being direct and putting a lot of thought into something — being analytical, but not being sneaky.”
Harrington’s antics — humping furniture on stage, dressing like a cat, and massaging the feet of his adoring fans — don’t so much read as attempts to transcend overt intellectualism as spasms of psychic instability. But in true art-student form, the members of Les Savy Fav have put far more thought into their shows and music than a casual fan might surmise.
Over the course of five albums and countless singles, Les Savy Fav’s music ranges from the outright abrasive to the contagiously poppy. The latter variety has been greater cause for concern from the point of view of its members, who hail from what Harrington describes as a world of “heavy, punk-noise art-school bands.”
“At RISD, people thought our band was cheesy compared to other art school bands,” he recalls. When paired with a track like “The Equestrian” (from their newest album, Let’s Stay Friends), which invokes nearly maternal worry for Harrington’s suffering vocal chords, concerns about being too mainstream seem misplaced — unless, of course, you’ve ever been to a RISD party.
“There were no prospects for a straight-up rock band,” he says of the late nineties, when grunge-era leftovers appeared to have missed the memo that hard rock was on its way out. “But that’s what made it sweet in a way. When your only prospect is free beer, there are very few possibilities for sneakiness. Maybe someone in the band would get laid — that’s about as sneaky as it got.”
I’d rather be ‘that crazy jackass’ than some pompous guy. When pressed, I can get analytical, but I need to get worked up into it.
But the stage diving and crotch bearing doesn’t spring from a need to stand out as much as from needing to fill in the blanks, Harrington reveals.
“When you’re up there on stage and you don’t have an instrument, you feel like you have to do something.” Conveniently, Les Savy Fav strives for an authenticity to which total insanity in a performance is well suited.
“There can be a disconnect between three guys playing some sweet music and then one guy going crazy. But the thing that pulls it together is to try to do things that are non-repeatable.
“You work really hard to do something and hone something — try to maintain and be original — and then be prepared to be totally casual and throw it all away. That’s the whole idea — make a fortune and then burn it. Not a real fortune, of course,” he laughs, “but a creative fortune. Then throw it away.”
The first track of their fantastic album Inches, “Meet Me in the Dollar Bin,” aptly describes the band’s central dissonance. Over grinding guitars, Harrington sings, “There is no incident; there is no incident; there’s nothing incidental in this song. There is no accident; there is no accident; there’s nothing accidental in this song. There’s no coincidence; there’s no coincidence; there nothing coincidental in this song.”
The idea of something perfectly composed yet ultimately defined by circumstance verges on the Buddhistic; it also pervades beyond just the music and stage presence of Les Savy Fav. Inches, the aforementioned disc, was released in 2004 as a compilation of the various singles the band had released over nearly a decade — another example of playing with time and intention to create a product that is equal parts careful planning and happenstance.
Despite the band’s significant evolution over the intervening years, the albums falls together as though it were composed in the same time frame but in different moods or seasons. The resultant product is variegated but far from disjointed.
Their slow and steady rise to their status as “godfathers” of the Brooklyn post-punk scene (to the extent that men in their early 30s can be godfathers of anything) bears the same conspicuous signs of avant-gardism.
“We have gone out and found people on tour in our own way,” Harrington explains. “Very rarely do you hear someone say, ‘Oh, I heard you guys on your MySpace page.’ Usually someone tells someone that they have to come to the show.”
Notoriety by word of mouth is peculiar to Les Savy Fav. Although they make their music for a certain type of fan — few would accuse this band of pandering to the market — circumstance has complemented and played a part in their master plan.
By colonizing the New York scene before iTunes and Pitchfork muddied the waters, Les Savy Fav had a chance to spread their wings when people were still just talking about music.
“I think that is part of the reason why there is such a tenor to our shows. Not to sound snobby, but it creates a kind of private party feeling. It’s not like everyone is there because they read about it in Entertainment Weekly.”
And without a doubt, it’s the shows that cement Les Savy Fav’s (often fanatical) fans’ devotion to Harrington and his crew. Often described in online forums as one of the best live bands of its kind, something about Harrington’s cultured lyrics and guy-nextdoor voice — and the way he lays it over the band’s hard-rolling chords — brings out the gleefully unrestrained in even the most jaded onlookers.
Harrington characterizes his shows as small pieces of performance art: “In a live performance, you want to have one big thing — the show — but you also get infinite details. I go out into the audience and maybe I give someone a foot rub, and I know that only a few people are going to see this, and then maybe five other people will see something else. It’s impossible to document something completely.”
The spontaneity of the live show is at the heart of their slapdash aesthetic.
In response to the question of why so many journalists seem to miss the subtext of Les Savy Fav’s shows, Harrington giggles, “For the most part, I’ve learned to turn my ears off to the ‘that crazy jackass’ stuff” (a somewhat apt description that, in various forms, pops up in nearly every piece written about the band).
“On the other hand, I’d rather be ‘that crazy jackass’ than some pompous guy. When pressed, I can get analytical, but I need to get worked up into it.”
For the last few years, Harrington has largely avoided getting “worked up into it,” at least in the context of Les Savy Fav. Along with his bandmates Syd Butler, Seth Jabour and Harrison Haynes, Harrington has lately taken time to work on other projects.
Harrington and his wife Amy started Deadly Squire, a design company that creates everything from baby bibs to pot holders bearing versions of mid-century Swedish textile designs.
Syd Butler, the bassist in the band, steers Frenchkiss Records, which now in addition to Les Savy Fav represents bands like The Big Sleep, Thunderbirds are Now!, and The Hold Steady.
Haynes runs an art gallery in North Carolina with his wife Chloe and continues to paint prolifically.
But the band seems to be back together, and is playing more shows in anticipation of Let’s Stay Friends. Coming as their first album in two years, Harrington perceives more prospects on this one than what Les Savy Fav faced in the past.
“There are prospectors digging around now,” he speculates about the current marketability of bands of Les Savy Fav’s flavor, “so there are possibilities. The album’s title, Let’s Stay Friends, is in some ways a defiance of our professional-ness,” he says, implying that Les Savy Fav may not remain such a well-kept secret, circulated quietly amongst friends.
Putting their mixed feelings about the potential for commercial success aside, Les Savy Fav are forging ahead with the same mix of art-school erudition and effortlessly raucous rock and roll that has driven them to tour and record for the last twelve years.
And right now it seems clear that if pressed to decide, they would probably go with the latter. “Let someone else say the dirty words — aesthetic, authentic, all that artsy crap. And we’ll pretend like we’re just partying.”
– Story by Whitney Kassel, photo by Dorothy Hong