“Were you anti-laser or pro-laser?” Jason Portera asks me over a cocktail in the non-revolving bar high atop the Landmark Hotel in Metairie. Suddenly, the shimmering skyline in the distance appears lacking, or at least lacking a big green laser originating atop Harrah’s casino. “We were totally pro-laser.”
“See if it was still there,” adds a mildly disappointed Brent Cambre, “we could have been sitting here watching it.
“I’ve been trying to find an old laser,” continues Cambre, bass player with Weedeater. “It’s very hard. I always figured there were so many old heavy metal bands with lasers, but nobody has them anymore. What the hell did they do with them? I want them; they’ve got to be cheap.”
Portera and Cambre, who along with new guitarist Scott Guion make up Weedeater, have a warm spot in their hearts for lasers. Maybe that’s a byproduct of growing up as self-professed “heavy metal kids” in the lower reaches of St. Charles Parish, not exactly a hotbed of cutting edge music. It’s even more surprising that St. Charles Parish managed to chum out a band like Weedeater, the most original, unorthodox band to come down the pike in ages: two guitars, bass, drum machine, no vocals, and a laundry list of influences that touches on everything from ’70s metal to experimental jazz to contemporary pop.
Portera, Weedeater’s guitarist and principal songwriter, and Cambre first started jamming as students at John Curtis Junior High in River Ridge. “We were the heavy metal kids,” Cambre says. “As you can imagine, we were incredibly popular.”
At first, Portera played drums with Cambre on guitar, but they were never able to find the right bass player. “For a while we would just both play guitar,” Cambre recalls.
“Eventually I started playing bass because everyone we knew played guitar, so it was an easier way to have a band. But then we couldn’t find a guitar player…”
Cambre soon went off to college and Portera took up drums with a few metal and quasi-metal bands-Sinkhole, Vas Deferens and Spent. ‘When Cambre got back in town in 1992, Portera, in the tradition of J. Mascis, had become more interested in playing guitar than drums. “Then we just couldn’t find a drummer worth a shit,” Cambre says, laughing. “So we got the drum machine half out of desperation and half because we knew we wanted it. I got it for like $200 from some guy in the projects who was getting rid of a ‘. lot of recording equipment. It sounds good for being so cheap and everything.”
Two months later, in July 1992, Weedeater made its debut at the RC Bridge Lounge. “We sucked so bad,” Portera says. “You wouldn’t recognize us now. It was just the two of us, and we were both singing.” . Weedeater became an instrumental band when Portera and Cambre came to a realization: “We can’t sing!”Portera says. “Then we had a crappy singer for a while, but we finally got out of it.” Just because they don’t have a singer, Cambre adds, doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to say. “I’m-not really so clear on what I have to say that I want to be announcing it and writing it down and singing it,” Cambre says. “If a song is just an instrumental, people can interpret it any way they want.”
In July, Weedeater had their closest brush yet with big-time, jet-set rock & roll. When Nitzer Ebb opening act Earth Eighteen canceled a day before the show, House of Blues called Weedeater to fill in. The band, which hadn’t planned any shows until September, had to fly Guion in from Austin, where he was on tour with his band Rigid. “I don’t even know how Jason got the number,” Guion laughs. “He called me Saturday morning and said, ‘You have to come back to New Orleans tonight. If you can make it to the airport, we can come up with some cash to get you here.’”
Cambre and Portera both give House of Blues the big thumbs up. “Every time we play anywhere, I hook up the drum machine and it takes the sound man at least 20 minutes to figure out anything,” Cambre says. “They always insist it’s not working. They just hate it because it’s a machine. The guy at House of Blues turned it on and had it working immediately. And they were nice. It was something else—sound men that don’t hate you.”
House of Blues even accommodated Weedeater’s multimedia show, which amounts to some old reels projected onto a sheet behind the stage. “See, any other club you tell them you want to hang a sheet-hang a fucking sheet-and it’s just chaos. ‘Huh? You’re doing what?’ We told House of Blues – and it’s not a wall you can just tack stuff to – and the sound guy set it up and it was the best we’ve ever had it. Took like two minutes and he was totally happy to do it.”
Cambre says that the projections have been a long-time interest, but he didn’t know where to get the films. Finally he realized that he could simply check them out of the public library. “The main branches still have all these films, and they’re getting rid of all these films because no one is using them anymore, they all use video. So we checked out all these different NASA reels and found this one that’s about a half hour long and it’s just great. It’s narrated by William Shatner, too. We never use the audio but we could some time. I checked it out and for some reason they put it in my mom’s name instead of my name, so my mom was getting all these phone calls like, ‘You stole our film’ and stuff. But they’ve laid off. They want like $200 so I told them I’d try to pay it.”
Weedeater’s latest demo takes the band even further into uncharted musical territory. “The songs on the last demo were written verse chorus verse,” Portera says. “That’s why we sucked for so long. We would write songs for vocals and then we’d do them live as instrumentals.
It was just fucking boring. These songs were written to be instrumentals.” While the tape hits you like a wall of guitar noise, melodies shine out from beneath layers of textured guitar and electronic percussion. “Bionic to a Fault” starts out like the Melvins, switches to Rush on Quaaludes, and then becomes liquidy new wave jazz before turning up the volume again. “A Is For Atom”sounds like Echo and the Bunnymen gone rave. “Great Caesar’s Ghost” is punk Woodenhead. On “Your Endless Love,” Portera gets his guitar to sound like Big Country used to.
Given the variety, what sort of musical antecedents inspire Weedeater? “You know,” Portera begins. “Melvins, Sabbath, Kiss, Voivod, Bjork…”
Bjork? Icelandic chanteuse Bjork?
“Bjork’sthe shit,” Portera says admiringly.
“Have you heard Bjork’s new album?” Cambre says. “It’s so cool. Like any really great writer-like Steely Dan as well-she knows exactly what to get out of studio people. Studio people are naturally cheesy, but Steely Dan and Bjork and any great producer knows how to get the best performance. Her new album has these string sections that are just unbelievable. 1 don’t know how anybody could have written them. I know I’ll never be on that level, but that’s the shit I aspire to.”
“We like extreme heavy music and like extreme wimp music,” Portera explains .• We just like extremes.”
So does Weedeater have any plans to hire a corporeal drummer in the foreseeable future? “Absolutely not,” Portera says . “A drum machine works so much better than a real drummer. If you listen to our tape,’ a real drummer can’t play that shit. We’d need a conga player and bells. With a drum machine, it’s so easy.”
