Dylan Sharp - Gun Outfit Interview
Are you originally from Olympia, WA? What was your childhood like?
Carrie grew up in Olympia, but I grew up in the small town of around 700 people called Carnation, Washington which is between Seattle and the Cascades. It’s a farming town that is in the process of becoming a kind of bedroom community for Seattle, although the lack of sewer there has kept it small so far. It’s probably most well known for being near the Snoqualmie waterfall and North Bend, the town that served as the model for Twin Peaks in the TV show. Certainly a bunch of dark and weird shit occurred there; I am thankful that I heard about it rather than experienced it. I moved to Olympia in 2000 to attend Evergreen State College and study Russian film and Anthropology. I grew up on a large farm with several outbuildings in various states of ruin. I had lots of room to run around and explore- except for a very short period, my family didn't farm. There was an abandoned house built for short people and filled with empty cologne bottles and teabags from the 1920s in the forest near my house that I hung out in a lot. When I was three I was on the news because I ran away into the forest and they had to call a huge manhunt to come find me. A helicopter found me sleeping in a field. Although this paints a kind of idyllic picture, this is just one aspect- the one I prefer to dwell on when I have the choice. The farm was my grandparents, when my grandfather died in 1988 (my father thinks its from spraying defoliant on the blueberries) and my parents got divorced, the farm went to my uncle and aunt, who charged us rent we couldn’t afford and we had to move out to a little rambler in town. Still a lot of time swimming in the river, but more of your typical Washington suburb lifestyle for sure.
My father was a Green Beret in Vietnam who was in the SOG (Special Operations Group), deployed in the secret war in Cambodia and Laos. He had PTSD and a drinking problem, and eventually developed prostate cancer from Agent Orange exposure. Thankfully he has overcome many of these conditions. I didn’t know much about his experience as a soldier growing up, as it was never talked about, but I came to learn about what all this meant in adulthood. I still don’t know that much, but at least I am able to talk to him about it now. He was certainly familiar with the Phoenix program and with all manner of atrocities perpetuated by the US government in the course of the war. There was tremendous tension in my family, partly as a result, such is the spillover of trauma created by American capitalism and imperialism which I have always since resented and struggled to refuse in a coherent an meaningful way. Carnation was in fact saturated with the lingering effects of the Vietnam war in a way I was never really cognizant of until much older. I had three very close friends from the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated high school, all were farmers and two were Hmong immigrants, the first of their families to be born in the US. Later I learned about the way that my friend’s father had worked as a scout and a spy for the US government, and that the Hmong immigrant community was directly related to my friends parents collaboration with the US during the course of the war. In my time, these families worked by growing vegetables and flowers and selling them at the Seattle Pike Place market. I spent all my time over at these kids houses, especially after I moved off the farm.
There were 8 kids living in a two bedroom house, and it was much more fun over there than the weird Christian TV people and damaged hick families who lived in the subdevelopments or at the end of long, dark driveways . My other friend’s grandmother would sit on the front porch and smoke opium in the mornings. It was all a lot of fun as a child- I didn’t have an incredible amount of supervision- the darker aspects appear only in retrospect. My mother was a former hippy- she was involved in the feminist Fanshen commune and hung out with the 'Seattle seven' in the 70s before moving to San Antonio for a bit. Her and my father met while she was on jury duty- my father was the bailiff After my parents divorced, she was in a lesbian relationship for most of my childhood. My mother’s partner had a baby who was 11 years younger. I am very close with my younger sister Edie- we’ve played in bands together and she’s toured with Gun Outfit a lot- and I half a half brother and sister from my father’s previous marriage who I am also very close with. My brother’s an electrical lineman and my sister is a high school English teacher. My older sister turned me on to the Velvet Underground and other great music when I was little. My brother introduced me to smoking marijuiana and the unsurpassed nature of being a good person. The family is very tight and thankfully we’ve avoided major catastrophe so far. The small town life started getting very claustrophobic in high school. I really wanted out of there because it was clear that I didn’t really fit in. I drifted away from my old friends for a bit and had no friends instead. Thankfully I went to running start after a couple of years and started spending more time on the Eastside, going to shows. I became very close friends with Dave Harris (currently of the mystic 100s), who also lived in Carnation but was a little older, and we ended up moving to Olympia together.
When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically guitar?
Although I love the sound of the guitar, I love it more as a means of pursuing genuine relationships. By this I mean the reason I play guitar as much as I do is because of the people that I get to be around in the context of playing it. The first record I remember getting obsessed with was Buddy Holly and the Crickets 20 golden hits. My mother was always into music- I was named after Bob Dylan and I in fact took a shit on a Bob Dylan record when I was a baby. She listened to a lot of John Prine, Van Morrison and things like that- stuff I still listen to a lot today. I started getting really into guitar rock in middle school- I went and saw Nirvana (with the Butthole Surfers and Chokebore) at their last US show in 1994 when I was 13 and that really set off the live music thing for me. Nirvana obsession introduced my to K records, the Meat Puppets, Flipper etc. I loved it because I felt like it was my own private thing. I would ride the bus into Seattle (I had to get a ride to the bus stop or huff it on my crappy bike because the only bus stop was 30 minutes out of town in Fall City) and go watch shows by myself- the Velvet Elvis Sunday matinees were key here. That was an all ages venue with 2pm shows- I saw Unwound and Karp and Godheadsilo and Bikini Kill and things like that which I was really into and kind of made me want to move to Olympia. In high school I was really into punk and could not stomach any classic rock or anything.
I was obsessed with Born Against and Mens Recovery Project, Shotmaker, Universal Order of Armageddon, kind of Ebullition records and Vermiform stuff and SST of course. My cousin had played in the San Diego band Pitchfork (which became Drive Like Jehu) so I found out about the San Diego scene early on and got into Gravity records and 31G. My sister’s boyfriend- Colin Spring- was an old punk who had become a folk singer, and he made me tapes of classic punk (Bad Brains and Black Flag etc) and also Townes Van Zandt and like Fred Eaglesmith and Hoyt Axton so I maintained an interest in singer songwriter music that had a 'laid back' feeling. I only mention this stuff because the process of finding about this stuff was very meaningful at the time. It was pre internet and I didn’t have a social network so it was all intimately related to my circumstances, as opposed to the way I’ve found out about music since then, which is basically looking at people’s collections through torrenting and assessing their affinities- or else by personal recommendation.. I don’t like the internet’s relationship with music for the most part and don’t use any streaming. The process of discovery is key for maintaining enthusiasm for me- it has to be tied to an experience of being in the world. Record stores fulfill that because they give you someplace to go in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Why would I want fewer things to do with my body or more reasons to use my phone?
I started singing in a hardcore band at 19. It was members of Teen Cthulhu (a black metal band who sang about D and D from West Seattle/Burien) and Jon Wiesnewski from Akimbo. That was an amazing experience for me, not only did the band slay (in my opinion) but it felt good to get the aimlessness and the aggression and violence out. We released one record which did not really capture the best of our sound which developed later on. We had two incredibly fucked up pre internet tours- one with the amazing straight edge band Cold Sweat. That’s how I ended up being involved in the music scene, which for me from 2000-2004 was much more the Seattle hardcore scene than the Olympia indie/twee scene. There was a big disconnect, I don’t think the Olympia hardcore scene had really quite flourished yet, although there was Behead the Prophet No Lord Shall Live, who were great and the Hoodwinks who became Wolves in the Throne Room. I would ride the bus down to Seattle every weekend to practice, but because my band was essentially a side project band it didn’t happen as much as I liked and I ended starting White Boss with Dave in Olympia to get more practicing done. I played drums (with much difficulty) in that band, which ended up lasting for almost 10 years. In Olympia I moved in with Joe and Kevin who were just starting the band Growing, and we became very tight friends. In 2003 I moved to rural Japan to teach English. While I was there I started making zines with drawings and long essays in editions of about 20 because I had no friends there and I wanted to stay in touch with my friends back home. I always identified as more of a writer and a filmmaker (or crude video-maker) than a visual artist or musician, but the latter two ended up being what I focus on more now.
When I was in Japan I took the opportunity to go to as many hardcore shows as I could- I saw Gauze four times, Warhead, Nightmare, Tetsu Arrey, Paintbox, Aburadako, Life, Struggle for Pride etc. etc. and also translated some lyrics for Forward, sang backup on a Muga record. This was all thanks to a fortuitous friendship with Koketsu who ran Devour records in Boston before being deported back to Nagoya, which was the city I was closest to. He is an amazing individual who booked a ton of shows and really helped me out when there. I began to see music as a vital way of connecting to people in a manner that transcending geography and culture. It really reinforced my commitment to it. I didn’t start playing guitar until I got back. I really was a complete novice guitar player when Carrie and I started Gun Outfit. I didn’t know how to tune. But I ended up being better at it than the drums. I’ve always loved 'crude' or primitive music (Wretched and Italian hardcore, Armagedom, Sorto, Psycho Sin etc) and the crude ‘cinema of garbage’ esthetic really informed my filmmaking. I intentionally didn’t try to learn any type of guitar or drum technique until I absolutely had to in order to keep myself interested (i.e. not write the same song a hundred times). I still try to avoid that stuff. Emotional and political resistance to the soporific is necessary. I love guitar because I love rock and roll and folk and the culture around it, and also the sound, especially of two guitars mixing. None of my family are artists really, although my mom had a few paintings she had done in college in the house. She did try to expose us to art, but my main influence in that regard was getting really into underground comix as a teen.
What is it about the pedal steel that fascinates you the most? Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to Gun Outfit? When and where did you guys first get together to jam and what was the initial chemistry like?
I like the kind of wide open pedal steel of Ben Keith, but also the super melodic runs of the Bakersfield sound. That being said, I got a pedal steel from Alex Coxen in exchange for making the No Nothing My Shelter video for Milk Music and tried to learn it but it was way over my head and I gave up quickly. Carrie and Henry both can play slide way better than I can. I'm more of a rhythm guitarist. After Homo Eradicus and White Boss, I played drums in a group called Study Buddies- which was really Anthony Atlas (later of the Nodzzz) band. This was when I finally started getting into postpunk and 60s psyche music in my mid 20s. Study Buddies was definitely influenced by the Fall. We never released anything, but it led directly to the formation of Gun Outfit when Anthony moved to Oakland in 2006 (?). Carrie and I just kept playing and I switched to guitar. We didn’t have a drummer for about a year. I had met Carrie in Budapest in 2004. I was Growing’s roadie for a UK tour, and then I went traveling on my own. She was with my friend the artist Jean Nagai. When we got back to Olympia we started playing together. I was living at a kind of ‘party commune’- a five acre piece of land that my friend Pat had bought. I lived there with Jean, Dave Harris, Pat and my sister Edie. We had a lot of shows. This was in the early days of Sex Vid and the new Olympia scene (which had nothing to do with K or Kill Rock Stars like the scene before) and we had a lot of hardcore and metal shows (No Fucker, Crom, also bands like Friends Forever). We eventually all got asked to leave for too much partying, not enough farming basically. I also played guitar in a hardcore band called Spiritual Warriors with Ben Trogdon and some other friends which pretty much encapsulated everything I wanted to do in the genre. 15 minute sets. I also played in some bands with the poet Reid Urban which were kind of performance art based. Jazz/hardcore/miming etc. Pretty fun.
When and where did you guys make your live debut and what was that experience like?
The first Gun Outfit shows- just Carrie and I- were at houses around Olympia in 2007. We covered Neil Young’s “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” (and that’s it) at our first show, our second show was at a party for the feature film “Klute” I was making- we covered John Prine’s “If You Don’t Want My Love” and did some originals. They were definitely super crude, I remember not having a guitar strap and kind of struggling to hold my guitar up. I was really nervous- doing a more intimate thing was much more stressful than a 'fuck you who gives a shit' hardcore show. That being said, I was relatively used to playing for no one and public humiliation, so we just went for it. Also Olympia was incredibly supportive of bands working through the awkward initial phases in public. It was an amazing scene in which people took the time to go see live music even when it wasn’t necessarily good. A lot of bands became good as a result. I remember one show where Birch (later of MSHR) came up and complemented our avant garde tunings, but it was really just that we were incredibly out of tune, unintentionally because we couldn't hear right. Gun Outfit got much better when Reuben Storey joined on drums.
From 2009 to 2013 the group released three studio albums, “Dim Light”, “Possession Sound” and “Hard Coming Down”. Can you tell me about these albums and those times during the band’s career?
We played a show with No Age, Sex Vid and Sisters at a house in 2007; Dean Spunt offered to put out our record after thatI thought the first 7” was good, the LP (Dim Light) wasn’t quite as good as the demo version of our songs and I think we should have waited a bit to record that in my opinion. I definitely wasn’t committed to the band or to music over making movies or anything yet. I moved to Istanbul, Turkey to work as an English teacher in 2007 before our LP came out. When it came out in 2008 we were offered a bunch of shows and I decided to come back in order to focus on music more. That definitely seems like a turning point for me, as I really enjoyed being in Turkey and it could have gone either way at that point. Possession Sound was recorded in late 2009 when the band was becoming more real for me. A lot of the songs I had written in Turkey. For me its kind of an intense record. We were practicing all the time and recorded it pretty much live to two tracks of a ½ inch four track and had two tracks to overdub, I think we had about a week. Dave Harvey is a great engineer and producer as long as he had some chips. Reuben was very good at arranging songs, and we were all writing the songs together for the most part; the potential for musical collaboration to alleviate the dullness of my own interiority and its feeble attempts at expression in other, more isolated, media.It is when the band became a real driving force in the decisions I was making in my life. I was falling in love with Carrie and could not admit it to myself, so there’s some struggling to be heard in the music. She was certainly not falling in love with me. Reuben quit the band a couple months after recording. He was just starting Christian Mistress and him and Carrie were no longer dating so it made sense. I caused a lot of drama when Reuben didn’t show up for practice and I barged in on Christian Mistress’ rehearsal to yell ‘what the fuck’ and stomp around. Luckily we got Dan to go on tour with us on very short notice and he has been integral to keeping us together since then.
We started touring a lot- booking all of our tours through the DIY scene, really we had an adversarial relationship with the booking agencies and some of the large bookers. I was also playing a lot of shows with White Boss at the time. In 2011 I toured nine months out of the year, and this was all DIY kind of crapshoot shows, no guarantees or anything like that- definitely not ‘professional musician’ status. I’d come back and work at the pizzeria a bit and go back out on tour. I loved traveling, the band became really an excuse to travel as much as possible and meet cool people, which we were lucky enough to have done. We made Hard Coming Down in Los Angeles right after we moved here from Olympia (or maybe right before?) with Cundo on a Tascam 8 track. I had been partying pretty hard before I left Olympia, and I think the album reflects both that and some depression and burnout. A close friend of mine died of a drug overdose, I was going through that late 20s junior midlife crisis of commitment (I had been working in restaurants and quitting jobs to tour and never had money) and I generally thought I was getting too old to be so confused. The cassette we made and sold on tour contains some of the songs from this album but recorded at Carrie’s dad’s house and the horse ranch she lived on. That maybe reflects this darker mood more. When it came out we were living in LA, it’s very much ‘goodbye NW youth’. It’s our first LP with Dan drumming, and it’s also our first record with bass. It’s the end of your 20s and you’re still hard rocking. It’s one of my favorites because I allowed myself to be earnest and emotional, which is a hard mode to perpetually occupy. Joe Denardo’s film ‘Wheres Anton’ is a good reflection of our process and specifically this moment in time- scripted dialog, much improvisation and an emphasis on collaboration and intersubjectivity in effort to capture the beautiful as the driving force of creation.
I want to jump ahead a bit to the band’s 2015 debut album, “Dream All Over” on Paradise Of Bachelors. Tell me about writing and recording that album. What was the overall vision and approach to this record? 2017 saw the very anticipated POB follow up, “Out Of Range”. What did you guys want to express with this album? How did the great Henry Barnes come to join the band?
We wrote Dream All Over during our first three years in Los Angeles, mostly after Dan moved down in 2013. I perceive it as being more chill, and attribute that to the fact that Carrie and I had started dating and we were living together in California where we had to totally reconfigure our lifestyles to adapt to the harsh reality of the city. We tried to solve the crisis of commitment and the problem of the absent community by making family out of the music- the band was both our personal and social lives. The city was overwhelming; I was getting my tips stolen by skaters and models who worked as my bosses at trashy grills while pursuing visual art and filmmaking in an extremely naïve way. There were all sorts of complicated interactions with rich people who wanted to glom onto our tenuous social scene and siphon out as much of what could possibly be considered ‘cool’ out of it before descending further into some mode of of private bingeing . The band brought some continuity and purpose to our otherwise stunned and groping existence. I was also entering my thirties and while I felt possibly more general anxiety about the future, I think the personal resentment or angst had softened a bit. We were doing a lot of marijuana smoking and acid and camping in the Mojave and Death Valley. It was very hard to find a bass player, and by the time Adam joined we had been practicing the songs on the record for quite some time. He is an incredible musician and encouraged the more improvisational side of our music.
After playing in a very stripped down mode (including without bass for a long time) we wanted to bring some more texture and density to the music, which was getting a little more comfortable with its more overtly folk and country elements. We were going for an interweaving that came through the capture of live playing rather than effects or recording techniques. We’ve always tried to implement constraints that encourage the best- most authentic feeling, or most emotionally resonant or accurate reflection of the human struggle for meaning and dignity- outcome. There is a lot of improvisation despite how generally rigid the song structures are. The process involves jamming until comfortable, with little attempt to control what anyone else is playing. Diversity of vibe within the limited range of our ability is our aim. The lyrics try to be rhetorically persuasive and reflect definite political and philosophical positions while also being somewhat poetic while still rhyming. After many songs this has become slightly more difficult. Around this time I also got obsessed with writing lyrics that could be understood in multiple ways through homophones or grammatical ambiguities. Thinking about that constraint has kind of been a curse. The cover is a mylar collage laid out on a mirror that I set up in my backyard. I met Henry because I went into the place he worked as luthier and asked him to fix a balalaika I got at an estate sale. I’d been obsessed with Amps for Christ since Thorny Path and the articles he used to publish in Error (Sam McPheeters zine) that combined practical knowledge of electronics with esoteric commentary and definite spiritual commitments.
I also appreciated how AFC blended noise and folk music- there was no one else doing it at the time, and when it was combined with both homemade instruments and electronics it reflected a type of whole-being commitment to the multidimensionality of music that seemed prophetic or visionary and very DIY. So I drove out to Claremont and we went on a hike on my birthday. Henry played sitar and sibanjar on some tracks on Dream All Over and we invited him to tour Europe with us. After that he has been in the band steadily. He can play all the stringed instruments and is resolutely improvisational and the songs are different every time these days. His ethos of 'all about feeling' is one we can certainly vibe with. We have learned a lot from him. He is enthusiasm and commitment to the band are essential to keeping it going these days. Out of Range was recorded pretty shortly after we wrote the songs that appear on it. Adam was moving to Eureka and leaving the band, and we wanted to capture the songs before he left. I had a job working as a security guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I spent all day watching people take pictures of famous paintings with their phones. I had a lot of time to stew over the lyrics, for better or for worse. A lot of the themes deal with struggling for authenticity while in the midst of a self conscious performance of and the various satisfactions of sub-virtuosity. Paradise of Bachelors is a great label and we've made a lot of friends through them. We played as Lavender Country's backup band a few times and are very into Jake Xerxes Fussell the person and the records.
What have you guys been up to more recently? I understand you guys are currently mixing a new album? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
We toured the country in 2019 with a new album’s worth of songs and with Kayla Cohen, of Itasca, on bass. She’s now been playing with us for four years but we haven’t released anything yet. We’d always been the kind of band to rehearse incessantly (though still have the potential to be wildly off) and record live to tape, but we decided we wanted to produce and record the next album ourselves during quarantine. We got a half inch 8 track and a bunch of gear off craigslist with unemployment money and rented an 80 acre ranch in Pine Flat California during October of 2020. The fires in the Sierras were burning 10 miles away from us, so the five of us spent most of that month indoors recording. Now we have about thirty five songs that we are slowly mixing. It’s been six years since our last new record came out, and the slow pace is kind of insane, but it is a result of a few factors. Carrie and I had a baby last year, and that has changed our lives in a profound way and made mixing in the casual way we had been used to much more difficult. Our commitment to an all analog production means that we’ve had a lot of equipment failure and learning to do in piecing together a home studio.
This commitment is part of a general anti-technological bent in our thinking that equates computer work with a sense of drudgery that overflows into the creative realm. We are precious with our music and our time and our band, as it is one of the greatest things in our lives. It’s a delicate equation to keep it interesting and authentic feeling enough for all of us that we want to spend a great deal of our time working on it. Technological thinking, especially in its association with capitalism, is a horrible colonizing force that flattens and removes distinction from fragile structures; we are sustained by unique and fleeting social relationships, and our music is borne out of a love that belongs to no individual and cannot be rendered as data or as a property. I could go on in that vein, but it's also just more fun to turn a knob than press a mouse button and to deal with the weird ambiguities of hearing rather than the definite visuality of the waveform. Anyway we are really hoping to be done mixing this record by the end of the summer. I guess we'll have three records or so done then? And then it'l be another year before it comes out? I have no idea. It's a lifetime project at this point, and never being financially successful means there's really no outside pressure (although I definitly apply my own anxious pressure to everyone because I want to get it done). I guess as a closing not I just want to say thank you for showing an interest to those who do, however slight. It means a lot to us, and I appreciate you encouraging meaning to exist!
