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>>Boston’s Turpentine Brothers
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BEANTOWN BRETHREN: The Turpentine Brothers

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

The raunchy blast of Boston’s Turpentine Brothers on 2005’s We Don’t Care About Your Good Times was chock full of all the good stuff, proving that they were much more than just garage geeks with copies of the Nuggets comps tucked under their arms. Songs like “People Are Talking” and “Why Can’t I Do” rocked with unbridled abandon, while soul ballads like “One Man” added to their dynamics. The Mirror spoke to guitarist/singer Justin Hubbard over the phone from his home in Boston as he patiently waited for the follow-up to their debut to be released next month.

Mirror: The Turpentine Brothers started off as a cover band. Did you ever see it as the touring and recording band it’s become?

Justin Hubbard: Originally, Tara [McManus, drummer and Hubbard’s wife] and I just wanted an excuse to play together. We were doing things like old Charlie Feathers, Hasil Adkins and early R&B and country-type songs. We weren’t playing that many shows, but of course eventually we wanted to become more of a band, and somewhere along the line, the covers just kind of got shoved aside in favour of our own songs. I guess it did take a while before we said, “Okay, let’s do this for real,” and got Zach [Brines, organist] in the band.

M: Boston has always been a really good rock ’n’ roll and garage city, going all the way back to the late ’70s with the first garage revivalists like DMZ and the Lyres.

JH: Oh yeah, the Lyres are still playing today and are just as awesome as they’ve ever been—kind of weird, actually. One of the cool things about Boston in the past year or so is that there are a lot more mixed bills, with noisier or weirder bands playing with more kind of rock ’n’ roll-type bands. There definitely is a lot less division now, which can only be a healthy thing.

M: Thanks to bands like the Black Lips, we’re starting to see a new generation of kids getting into raw rock ’n’ roll bands.

JH: Well, the problem here is that most of those shows happen in clubs that are 21 and over, but there have been some pretty cool house parties that we’ve played that have been packed with kids. We just played with the King Khan and BBQ Show, and there were a ton of kids at that show I had never seen before.

M: You guys have played Montreal a lot. Does Montreal stand out for you?

JH: We love it up there. It seems that people in Montreal are more like audiences in Europe, where they’re more willing to check out a band that maybe they haven’t heard before.

M: It seems that people in Europe are a lot more aware of the history of garage and raw rock ’n’ roll than in the U.S.

JH: Oh yeah, people in Europe are less concerned with specific genres and will just make more of a judgment on what they like by actually listening to something instead of worrying about what genre it will fall in. Once they do like something, though, they tend to get a little obsessive about doing their homework. Like Montreal too, though people just seem a lot more uninhibited at shows and just have way more fun without worrying about looking cool or something.

With the Tampoffs and
the Confusers at l’Escogriffe
on Saturday, Jan. 12, 9 p.m., $8