Without a doubt, the Dandy Warhols is a band, a meeting of the Velvet-y minds with Brent DeBoer, Peter Holmström, Zia McCabe and Courtney Taylor-Taylor calling the shots. But drummer-turned-guitarist/singer Taylor-Taylor is its handsome face and baritone voice who pushed the band from graceful poetic garage music (1995’s Dandys Rule OK) to guileless glam (2000’s Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia) to sleek-yet-twisted ’80s-ish new wave (2003’s Welcome To The Monkey House). While the rest of the 20th century found the band drifting through three additional like-minded albums, the outfit has grown leaner and meaner with the focused, guitar-centric This Machine (The End). Taylor-Taylor, a ruminative lyricist with a caustic lean, makes the most of this particular Machine moment. He allowed novelist Richard Morgan to write the Dandys’ press notes and found his own icy literary voice in graphic set-in-Germany novel One Model Nation. Taylor-Taylor and his bandmates are also guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Holmström: Fender has been making high-quality small runs of specialized guitars and basses at their custom shop since 1987. Everything from replicating vintage models (that now cost more than a new car) to exact copies of famous interments (like Jimi Hendrix and David Gilmour’s Strats, Andy Summers’ Tele and Johnny Marr’s Jaguar) to one-off art guitars. Anything you could possibly think of has probably already been done by them, probably for Billy Gibbons. At the moment, they are refinishing a Coronado bass for Courtney. Soon I hope they will be making a couple of my far-out ideas!
