In LA for two sold-out shows at the Teragram Ballroom, two members of the Dandy Warhols—frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor and keys/bass/vocalist Zia McCabe—chatted with High Times backstage before the gig.
The First Time
Courtney Taylor-Taylor: I was a ’70s kid, so I don’t even remember when I first smoked pot. I might have been 10 years old. Playboy magazines and black-light posters, hanging out in friends’ bedrooms, who knows when that was. Maybe I was 9… or 12—who knows?
Synergy and Sinsemilla
Zia McCabe: The band was the only thing for years. Constantly touring, packing and unpacking. There’s wonderful things about having a life in a place [Portland], but there’s also something wonderful about leaving that place from time to time, and when we get this just right, we get to appreciate both worlds. Getting along with other humans is not easy, and we aren’t even easygoing people. We have opinions, baggage, and grudges, but we also really appreciate each other and we love what we do together so much that it’s worth it. Somehow, what the four of us bring synergistically has created this project…that just keeps going and going.
CTT: Fans have flown in from all over the country and the world to follow us from LA to San Francisco and Oakland, to Portland’s Crystal Ballroom for the Cowboy Christmas. We’re playing a whole lot of new songs and if we switch out the first song, it’s gonna feel like a different set for the people following us… Right?
ZM: We’ll rehearse for an hour or so, then take a “break,” and when we get back our perspective may have changed, sometimes wildly, and it changes the way the music feels and the way we