Photo via Southern Culture on the Skids - Facebook
Southern Culture on the Skids - King of the Hill
Southern Culture on the Skids, back in town on Wednesday at Vivarium, put out their first record 40 years ago but with a very different lineup.
Just the guitarist, and now also the main vocalist, Rick Miller, remains from the version of the young band that self-released the four-song Voodoo Beach Party EP in 1984. Miller was a graduate student in art at the University of North Carolina at the time, and he silk screened the covers of the first 500 copies of the EP. The same lineup would release a full-length album, simply called First Album, in 1985, but it fizzled out shortly afterward.
“We started the band when we were all in college,” Miller says. “Some people moved on to other things. I wanted to take it on the road and really focus on it, and other people had other things to do with their lives.”
Soon enough, however, Miller would be joined by bassist Mary Huff in 1987, and she would recruit her friend drummer Dave Hartman to the band in 1988, and the trio have been the core of the band ever since.
Remembering Dexter Romweber
Miller had a brief reunion with original SCOTS singer Stan Lewis, during a memorial for Dexter Romweber, the legendary rock’n’roller from North Carolina, who passed away unexpectedly in February at 57. He says he had a nice conversation with Lewis, who had also been his roommate.
It was appropriate, perhaps, that Miller would connect with his old bandmate at Romweber’s memorial. Miller says the Flat Duo Jets founder was an early inspiration for him and the band—even though Romweber wasn’t out of middle school at the time.
Miller produced three of Romweber's albums, the Dex Romweber Duo’s Is That You in the Blue? on in 2011 and Images 13 in 2013, both on Bloodshot, and his 2004 album for Yep Roc, Blues That Defy My Soul. But Miller had met Romweber many years before.
Born in North Carolina, Miller moved to the San Diego area with his mother when was 12 after his parents divorced. His father remained in the South, and Miller decided to go to graduate school in North Carolina. Once he arrived in Chapel Hill, however, he wasn’t sure he had made the right choice as he thought about all the great bands he had seen in San Diego and started thinking he might go back to California after graduation.
What Miller didn’t know, when he moved into a house in Carrboro in 1982, was that he had moved four houses down from the Romwebers and Dexter.
“I was sitting on my front porch about a week or two in when I was kind of questioning everything a little bit,” Miller says, “and I saw this kid walking down the street, couldn’t have been more than 13, dressed in black head to toe, with a giant quaff of hair kind of somewhere between Jeffrey Lee Pierce (from Gun Club) and Lux Interior from the Cramps. And he had a necklace made of chicken bones. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I should give this place a second chance.’”
Soon after, Miller saw Romweber’s then-band the Kamikazes opening for Jason and the Scorchers at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill. Miller says he was blown away and immediately had a new favorite band.
“He was a big influence on us when we started the band,” he says. “And he influenced a lot of other people. Jack White and the White Stripes, they kind of took the Flat Duo Jets thing and ran with it. Dexter was an important person musically.”
Working on a New Album
The studio where Miller recorded Romweber’s albums, his own Kudzu Ranch, serves as SCOTS clubhouse these days, Miller says, his focus now more on his own band. Over the winter, they set up the studio for recording again after moving equipment into Miller’s house, where 2021’s At Home with Southern Culture on the Skids was recorded, to work during the pandemic.
They hope to have a new album out later this year or early in 2025, Miller says. The album will likely see the band return to a similar approach of At Home that saw SCOTS focus on heavily garage, psychedelic and swampy sounds, Miller says. He’s also set up the studio so they can record live all together if they want.
“We’re jamming around a little bit more than we did on some of the last ones, and I think that might show with some more extended songs,” he says. “Have some fun.”
Southern Culture on the Skids perform Wednesday, May 15 at Vivarium, 1818 N. Farwell Ave. The Exotics open.
