Building a fanbase while touring can take time, something Electric Six co-founder Dick Valentine knows a thing or two about after two decades on the road.
“Each year I think Houston is a better and better place to be. Some of the earlier shows that we had were kind of smaller and I feel like we really built it over the last 20 years,” he says while walking around his city of Brooklyn tying up loose ends before hitting the road for the tour.
Electric Six will be on a month-long tour with the all female Canadian surf rock four piece The Surfrajettes and the bands will make a stop at The Continental Club on Sunday, October 1.
“It’s like one of the Egyptian pyramids really, so now we are really getting to the point where we are ascending the throne of Houston rock. We’ve done the legwork and put in our time so when you see us it’ll be the culmination. We will be placed atop of the pyramid and adorned with fine sashes and scepters,” says Valentine in his particular brand of offbeat humor that has made his prolific band a cult favorite.
Electric Six, originally from Detroit, gained attention with their 2003 debut release Fire featuring their standouts “High Voltage” and “Gay Bar.” Since then the band was determined to release an album a year and stay on the road as much as possible.
“We thought if we stopped making albums we would be forgotten about immediately so we wanted to stay relevant and we did not want to let go of the momentum we had in 2003 and never really actually stopped to look at what year it actually was at any point.”
Valentine describes how the band amassed a huge catalog of original songs realizing after 13 years that they had enough music to tour on for a long time if not forever. In 2020, Electric Six was working to release another yearly banger when the whole world stopped.
“We literally started it in January 2020 and thought we would have a record done in six months and then something happened so it sidetracked us and it took a lot longer for this album. We had more time to sit with it and I guess that was good actually.”
This month the band released their fifteenth studio album Turquoise on Metropolis Records, yet another testament to the bands versatility and ability to really do what they feel with no regard to genre constraints.
“We are kind of a smorgasbord and that’s always been the idea,” describes Valentine who along with long time members keyboardist Tait Nucleus? and guitarist Johnny Na$hinal writes the band’s songs.
“We are kind of a smorgasbord and that’s always been the idea.”
“When we sit down to do a record we just do the 12 to 15 songs that we wrote that year. We don’t sit down and say we’re going to do this type of record or that type of record, so if we have a country song fused between a bunch of dance synth numbers, that’s fine.”
On Turquoise, the Electric Six most definitely shows off this particular skill of theirs to wax and wane between intensity and speeds of their songs with fast tracks like “Hot Numbers on The Telephone” and the surprisingly chill “Units Of Time.”
Slower songs are not typically what the Electric Six puts out or leaves behind in the listeners memory as the high energy nature of the band seeps out in their albums, videos and performances. Throughout the past two decades they have seen their share of lineup changes no doubt in part due to the fast pace philosophy of the band.
“That’s a big part of it, people burn out. Most of the time people leave amicably but some of the time they don’t, but either way people leave and you just move on with other people who are fresh to it and want to do it. That said, there’s three of us who have done it for twenty years and we still get along famously and want to keep going.”
No matter who is in the band at any given point in time, Valentine knows why he started this project, and his intentions are clear with every song and lyric. “I have learned over time that people get into music for all kinds of reasons and all kinds of motivations but for me it’s been to have fun and have a good time. It’s been escapism,” he says describing how he worked cubicle jobs prior to being able to tour full time.
“You get people in my band or other bands and they take music way more seriously than I do and that’s fine for them but I’ve just never had that approach where this is life or death and has to be really important or really good, I just want to have a really good time that’s it.”
Electric Six will perform with The Surfrajettes on Sunday, October 1 at The Continental Club, 3700 Main, 7 p.m, $20-35.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
