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A Conversation with Dallas Good (continued)
PM: I like that you were playing some bender guitar on this record.
DG: Ah, yeah, thanks for noticing. Yeah, I love that thing.
PM: So who made that?
DG: Well, my particular guitar is this weird Frankenstein--the neck was custom done with my name inlaid by a guy named Don Windham, who is a luthier in Phoenix who just shared my enthusiasm, and got it done. I've yet to pay him. It's been ages. And then the body--I've put a bunch of hardware from a guitar I really liked into it, and the body I just bought because it had the B-bender on it already.
PM: So where did you find a body with a B-bender on it already?
DG: This guitar shop in Toronto called Capsules [capsulemusic.com] searched it out for me. I don't know if they used a computer to find it or what.
PM: [laughs] It sounds great, especially when you couple the slinky-ness of that with the stiffness of the banjo. I never heard those two together consciously before. I thought, wow, that really works!
DG: Oh, wow, thank you very much. That was actually the first song that we recorded with Gary. That was the only one that I could bring to the table thinking, "I think Gary will know what to do here."
PM: Right. I mean, that's right up his alley. Come on.
DG: I'd like to think so. I mean, I certainly would say that Gary and I share similar tastes. And I was hoping it would be familiar ground.
PM: Yeah.
I meant to ask Travis something like this but I didn't get around to it, but maybe you'd consider describing your current relationship with Travis. After all these years of working together, how do you guys keep making it work?
DG: I guess basically just the way anybody would make it work after 10 years of living in a cage on wheels and not sleeping or eating properly.
PM: [laughs]
DG: You got to be patient and forgiving. Not that we're much of either, but there's just enough give and take that I feel that at this point there's not a big difference between my relationship with my brother than there is to Mike and Sean.
PM: Right, brothers from a different mother.
DG: As long as we're not drinking, everything is fine.
[laughter]
PM: So in what ways are you and Travis most different, and in what ways most alike?
DG: Interesting. Our discipline falls into different emphases within the band. I focus much more on the lyrics and Travis is very disciplined with his guitar playing. So that lends itself to lots of demoing and stuff. But pace-wise we're very like-minded. But I guess I'd say the best way for me to sort of explain the difference between my brother and I would be, say, his love for the Grateful Dead, versus my love for -- well, actually, no, because I'm not much for the Grateful Dead, so I'd have to pick something that he doesn't like. So let me think about that. What do I like that he does not...?
[laughter]
DG: This is going to be tough.
PM: He's a Deadhead. I might have known that.
DG: I'm still trying to think of a band that he definitely hates that I definitely love.
PM: Because you both have punk in your roots, right?
DG: Exactly. He was a big influence on me there, growing up; I was very much inspired by his record collection.
PM: I noticed this time, as opposed to several years ago, that the brothers are interestingly different to speak with.
DG: Oh, yeah, well, we're over five years apart. And we've definitely pursued very different childhoods. But I guess the apple doesn't drop far from the tree. I don't feel that there's a failure to communicate, let's put it that way. We can talk for hours on end without really noticing, and then go days without speaking, without noticing. We have a very unique relationship with our parents, and my uncles as well, and that's one of the major differences between my brother and I. While I was sort of cutting my teeth in the city, he was pretty much full-time with my father's band at a point when they were very, very busy throughout Canada and Europe, touring and everything else.
PM: And at that point he was playing bass with them before he went to guitar, or--
DG: Yeah, exactly. He went bass, guitar, to basically a front man within the band before The Sadies kind of took predominance, I guess you could say. So The Sadies were already a band and had been playing for over a year before Travis joined.
PM: Well, I remember hearing that The Sadies were a duo first, with you and Sean. And then what happened after that?
DG: Well, the duo relationship was what really lent itself to the involvement of Travis on fiddle and second guitar; it was when we played as a three-piece that was a little more jarring. Basically, we've just always kind of been all over the map. Yeah, everybody works well.
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