Will Rigby knows what it means to be misunderstood. The dB’s, the semi-legendary, avant-pop band he co-founded and drummed for, were often tagged as quirky just because they had a yen for slantwise, Beatles-inspired melodies at a time when the force-beat punk of The Clash and The Ramones was raging full-on. Even worse, The dB’s got lumped in with The Knack and other one-trick, skinny-tied power-pop outfits despite the fact that onstage they engaged in heady improv for a rock band, once performing a version of The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five” with each member of the group playing in a different key. Rigby’s biggest fear at the moment, though, is that people will treat Paradoxaholic (Diesel Only), his first full-length solo album in 17 years, as a comedy or novelty record after the fashion of Weird Al Yankovic rather than as the droll yet pointed song cycle it is.
“There’s a lot of humor in my songs, but they also have a serious side,” the North Carolina native explains, referring to the likes of “The Jerks at Work,” an acid-tongued jeremiad born of a particularly soul-sucking day job. “The jerks at work want genuflection from me / I’m all booked up, but my middle finger might be free,” Rigby sneers in a creaky whine akin to that of Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders. Then there’s “Leanin’ on Bob,” a swampy workout in which Rigby makes light of his obsession with Bob Dylan. “When I was young I wanted to be / Bob so bad it turned my hair curly.” Rigby’s inspiration for the song was his discovery of a Dylan newsgroup online where, pitifully enough, he found that some people really didn’t have anything better to do than make “such a big deal of” Bob.
Rigby, who’s played with the likes of Alex Chilton and Matthew Sweet, and who moved from New York to Nashville two years ago to become the drummer in Steve Earle’s band, links his writing less to musical than visual antecedents. Along with movies like Roger & Me and Atomic Café, minus the overt politics, he cites the work of William Steig, the cartoonist whose strips have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1930s. “What he does is really fun at one level, but at a certain point it sets in how serious all this stuff he’s making fun of is,” Rigby says. “That’s what I aspire to when I write my sort-of-funny songs.”
Rigby’s tendency to shy away from analogies between his work and that of other songwriters notwithstanding, a strong case can be made for a kinship between his new record and those of Vic Chesnutt, right down to the two singers’ wry phrasing and nasal tenors. Both are adept miniaturists, using a combination of wit and well-honed detail to illuminate larger truths. It’s an approach that also has an affinity with that of Ray Davies, particularly the former Kinks front man’s “slice of life songs,” of which Rigby cites “Two Sisters” and “Situation Vacant” as examples.
Rigby says he writes two types of songs, neither of which really overlaps; it’s that duality he was hoping to capture with the neologism he coined for his new album’s title. “Some of my songs are kind of funny, and some are really sad, but to me, they don’t seem to go together very well,” he says. “But that’s what I do, and I was trying to think of a title that reflected that so I just made up the word ‘paradoxaholic,’ which doesn’t really get at the point, but was the closest I could come.”
Most of Rigby’s “sadder” material can be classified as love songs, albeit not so much of the tender sort as the breakup or kiss-off variety—à la his man Bob’s “Positively 4th Street” or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” “Midas Beige,” for instance, rants about an imperious narcissist who loves herself so much that everything she encounters pales by comparison. “You turned my mind beige / You turned my balls beige / But you can’t touch my heart with your Midas beige,” Rigby snarls to the relentless riffing of a pair of buzz-saw guitars. Over the spongy groove of “Sensible Shoes” he rues, “I shoulda known I was of no practical use / Something to be thrown away after being seduced / I shoulda been tipped off by your sensible shoes.”
Paradoxaholic is rife with barbed wit and wordplay, as well as plenty of tensive, roots-based pop-rock to back it up. Long on muscle and drive, the production is certainly a far cry from Sidekick Phenomenon, the country-tinged field-recording-by-default Rigby made back in 1985 for the Egon label run by Yo La Tengo co-founders Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan. He subsequently released a trio of singles, one on former Hüsker Dü singer-guitarist Bob Mould’s Singles Only imprint, and a couple more, including the cult favorite “Ricky Skaggs Tonite,” on Diesel Only. Rigby also recorded an EP, hooked by the horny “Red Bra & Panties,” in 1996. Yet all of these efforts seemed off-the-cuff; by contrast, the arrival of his far more realized new album raises the question of whether the record is just a busman’s holiday for Rigby, or perhaps represents a new phase of his career.
Rigby, however, insists that he is first and foremost a drummer. “I’ve been writing songs for years—a lot of songs—but I’m still very much focused on being a musician,” he says, alluding to his current gig with Steve Earle’s band the Dukes. “If anything, I consider myself a singer-songwriter’s drummer. I’ve put a lot of thought into what songwriting is, and to what it means to stay out of the way as a musician. Staying out of the way is really what it’s all about when you play with someone like Steve.”
All of which is a mite self-effacing for a drummer who has worked with the heady likes of his ex-wife Amy, his old dB’s bandmates Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple and former Soft Boy Kimberley Rew. Today Rigby favors a lean, no-fills style of playing in the tradition of the great Stax drummer Al Jackson Jr.; back when he was a member of Sneakers and The dB’s, though, he used to rampage all over the kit like the second coming of Keith Moon. Indeed, the first edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide called Rigby “one of a mere handful of current rock drummers with a sound of his own beyond mere beat-keeping.”
A similar originality is evident in the songwriting and performances on Rigby’s new album. At 46, and with a teenage daughter to help raise, he’s doubtless not about to use the record as a platform for embarking on a full-blown solo career. But if anyone on Music Row or beyond is listening, surely they’ll understand the wisdom of giving the drummer some, if only in the form of a songwriting deal.
