Watching ’70s TV On Mute With Wussy

Chuck Cleaver says that when all the members of the Cincinnati band Wussy get together for what’s supposed to be two hours of practice, it ends up being an hour and 45 minutes of just shooting the shit, and then 15 of actual playing.

So it also is with interviews. At various points in their conversation with Stereogum, Cleaver and co-frontperson Lisa Walker muse – sometimes randomly and sometimes with good reason – on such topics as Jeremy Allen White’s upcoming Springsteen movie, the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, “Try Try Try” by Cannonball Adderley and/or the Buckinghams, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, nearly every major cast member of Cleaver’s favorite terrible film Hillbillies In A Haunted House, and the fact that, while Cleaver absolutely hates the Eagles and “Hotel California,” Walker likes that it was apparently influenced by Steely Dan’s approach to lyrics.

During the phone interview, there are also two different TVs on “mute” in Walker’s house, streaming vintage crime shows, which also means occasional play-by-play. When, on the band’s latest song, “Inhaler,” Walker sings, “Mannix is on – it’s a fight with an old friend/ You run your heart through the blades of a blender,” that’s an actual slice of life, as are the reference to BBC Radio 6 DJ Gideon Coe and the song’s dark but hopeful vein of sorrow. The track is from Wussy’s eighth album, Cincinnati Ohio (no comma), the band’s first since 2018’s What Heaven Is Like. It’s also the first since the death of Wussy guitarist and pedal steel player John Erhardt and the first with new member Travis Talbert.

Out on Shake It Records this Friday — but streaming in full here a day early — Cincinnati Ohio continues an implausibly perfect streak of Wussy music dating back to their 2005 debut Funeral Dress. Originally formed by Cleaver (who was then still also fronting Ass Ponys) and Walker in 2001 to play a single song at a Cincinnati music awards show, Wussy are one of America’s great bands on the order of Wilco or Yo La Tengo, or maybe the weird aunt and uncles of Wednesday and Kevin Morby — strange and messy and beautiful and dark and noisy, with an exquisite core of songwriting. There’s no middle ground with Wussy: They are either one of your very favorite bands or you just haven’t heard them yet.

On the TV: Gunsmoke
Chuck Cleaver: That's Miss Beadle from Little House on the Prairie.
Lisa Walker: Oh wow.
Cleaver: She was younger then.

While the average Wussy song might be fueled by a TV reference, purely fictional storytelling, or just the way certain words sound strung together, the songs on Cincinnati Ohio were always going to be more personal.

“It’s very definitely a record for John,” Cleaver says. “It’s a mourning record. We had to make it.”
Most of Walker’s songs, including “Inhaler,” were written after the loss of Erhardt. But that wasn’t true of Cleaver, despite such song titles as “The “Ghosts Keep Me Alive” and “Please Kill Me.”

“Some of the stuff I wrote kind of sounds like it’s about that,” he says. “But the weird thing is, I wrote all that stuff before John [died].” This was not so much clairvoyant or coincidental as just the normal state of Wussy.

“If you look at our catalog, I don’t know who writes the most depressing songs, me or Lisa,” Cleaver says. Except he does know: “Yeah. Me. It’s just where I go.” He remembers a fifth or sixth grade music class where everyone was told to bring a favorite 45. One kid had Elton John’s “Levon.” Another, “My Ding-a-ling.” His was Danny O’Keefe’s “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues.”

Considering Erhardt also died in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cincinnati Ohio feels a bit like some of the 2001 records that were written and recorded prior to 9/11 but wound up feeling like they spoke to 9/11.

“Are songs prescient themselves?” asks Walker. “Or do people just retroactively put their own thing into a song, as they hear it? Like, a collective sadness that they’re feeling.”

On the TV: The Rockford Files
Cleaver: I’m thinking that guy is F. Murray… not F. Murray Abraham. M. Emmet Walsh.
Walker: Oh that is M. Emmet Walsh! I think Roger Ebert supposedly said that any movie with M. Emmet Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton is at least worth his time.
Cleaver: Wow, that’s a little risque.
Walker: Well, you’re only seeing legs.
Cleaver: You’re almost seeing her butt.
Walker: That’s The Rockford Files for ya.

John Erhardt joined Wussy more or less by “osmosis,” Cleaver says. He’d already left and rejoined Ass Ponys (which had finally called it quits around the same time Wussy released Funeral Dress) and then one day, asked if Wussy could use some more guitar.

“I remember thinking, he wants to play with us?” Walker remembers. “Like, is he all right? Because he’s really good!” (Collectively, Wussy suffer from a combination of sincere insecurity and false humility.)

Talbert, a well-traveled Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati player, wound up in the band kind of the same way Erhardt did: “He just sort of came one time and didn’t leave,” Cleaver says. To hear Cleaver and Walker tell it, Talbert also immediately became the band’s most proficient and professional musician, and was therefore flummoxed by those ramshackle rehearsals, as well as the fact that Wussy don’t make a proper entrance — aka a “walk-out” — when playing live.

Of course, at the time they finished up the record (Talbert appears on four songs, while Erhardt played on two before his death) nobody even knew if Wussy would play live as a full band again. Walker and Cleaver have been touring as a duo, mostly playing house shows. Then Guided By Voices invited them to open up a show in Covington, KY, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. You don’t do that acoustic. When they ran the offer by drummer Joe Klug, he specifically wanted to make sure that Talbert would be part of it, for emotional reasons as much as musical ones.

“I think he felt that Travis is a part of this band,” says Walker. “So it was about the sound, but also part of the healing process. It’s as much about feel or a spiritual connection as playing ability.”

In fact, Talbert has also replaced Erhardt as a source of calm and ballast within Wussy. “We have at least two wall bouncers in this band,” Cleaver says. “John was a peacemaker. He was the leveler. Mark’s the spirit. I’m the asshole.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Walker says.

But Cleaver knows. “You’re the force, man,” he says. “You’re the reason the band exists more than anything. I’m not trying to toot your horn too much, but you’re really the reason why I still make music.”

On the TV: Kojak
Walker: Is that Christopher Guest?
Cleaver: It is Christopher Guest! Good call. All you got was a profile.
Walker: But that’s his face. Wow. Everybody’s starting out back in the ’70s.

Until that Guided By Voices show, Wussy hadn’t played live since March 6, 2020 – mere days before everything shut down, including a planned East Coast tour. This past Saturday they were back at the Woodward Theater in Cincinnati for the Cincinnati Ohio record release show, a joyously raucous affair that released all the pent-up emotion of Erhardt’s loss and the pandemic. They opened with “Airborne,” the first song on Funeral Dress. The energy and volume of the crowd’s ovation after that song was Taylor-level (if not Taylor-sized): a band and its fans and its city finally back in the same room together. Many of them, as well as many more around the world, had previously gathered on Facebook, where Walker, Cleaver, and Messerly began a weekly Friday live stream during the pandemic, then continued off and on.

It became a tonic and a ritual for Wussy fans, a revealing glimpse into the band’s influences (the list of covers played just in 2021 is astonishing) and also — surprise! — the best possible rehearsal. Cleaver found himself playing guitar every day, which he never did in normal times. He got better at finger-picking and singing on key with Walker. But most of all, as with the band itself, it was about connection.

“We’ve had so many people tell us, man, you guys got us through the pandemic,” Cleaver says. “Wow. But it got us through the pandemic too. It was very therapeutic for us.”

And once it was possible to go back on the road acoustic, they found they also had new fans. “Sometimes when we show up at these house shows, people are like, goddamn, you guys have a lot of records!'” says Cleaver. “Well, yeah, we’ve been around 23 years.” And that includes a lot of singles and EPs and compilations, in addition to the eight official LPs. It’s a catalog the band is proud of, even to their own surprise.

“Over the last few weeks, I’ve been riding around a lot, and I just occasionally put on whatever’s in the car,” Cleaver says. “And, you know, sometimes it’s a Wussy CD, and I’ll be like, hey, this is actually pretty good! We’re just really fortunate that we have folks that want to listen to what we do.”

As with bands like Wilco, the Mekons, or Guided By Voices, there’s a whole lot to discover. Even after eight albums and 23 years, a band as old as Wussy can still be someone’s new favorite band.

“It happens all the time,” Walker says.

“It really does,” Cleaver agrees. “And it’s always so rejuvenating. It’s very flattering. And, y’know: It’s better than if people are like, ‘I didn’t even know you guys were still around!'”