The Whigs

Parker Gispert, Julian Dorio and Tim Deaux, an indie rock power trio from Athens, Georgia, just might be the buzz band of 2008. You won’t find their photos on billboards or magazine covers and, no, iTunes probably isn’t going to recommend that you but check out their just-released sophomore album, Mission Control, with every other purchase. Understated ethos and all, The Whigs seem bound for big stages and bright lights – and for all the right reasons. 

“We were recording in this Southern mansion in Athens that wasn’t meant to be recorded in,” remembers drummer Dorio about the now storied making of his band’s first album, Give ‘Em All a Big Fat Lip. “We had to buy a little bit of equipment off the Internet just to make [the recording] happen, and then ended up selling it on Ebay once we were done because, you know, we needed that money back.”

That was nearly three years ago, back when the band was attending the University of Georgia, taking their brand of economical garage rock wherever they could on the weekends.

“We drove to a warehouse in North Georgia and picked up 17 cases of CDs, which was overwhelming because we didn’t know how we were going to get rid of ‘em,” laughs Dorio. “With the first record we just wanted to make something we were all happy with. We said that if no one ever heard the record, if we were 50 years old and nothing came of it, let’s at least just make it something that the three of us like.”

You have faith in the songs and have confidence in them. ATO Records got their hands on [our first record] and started coming to shows. Nothing has really changed, though. We have a whole new team of people that we work with, but were still on the road, same as we were. That’s what we do.

We all grew up listening to similar but different music. The bands we had in common when we first met were great bands that didn’t necessarily have much to do with how we sounded.

We were pretty fortunate that we were able to get signed right as we were graduating from college. The next day [after graduation] is when we started a four and a half month tour. We’ve kind of been on the road ever since. We were fortunate not to have to get out of college and work for years and years.

It was pretty constant. As soon as the first record was released we started working on new tunes. These are songs we played on the road a lot. Others were written in May and June last year before we went to Los Angeles to record.

[Recording this album] was a polar opposite experience for us. There was a lot less pressure with Rob around. I could just be the drummer, and that’s all I had to worry about. We were having a conversation with the label, talking about producers for this record. Someone threw out Rob’s name; I’d been a fan of his for years – I love Elliott Smith and I’ve always been a fan of Beck’s Mellow Gold. We had interest in him, so it was really just that we get the record to him and if he likes it then he comes to a show. If he likes the show then you have mutual interest. We then hung out a little bit and we realized that we’d all get along well. It worked out nicely. We went out to L.A. to record with him.

I think people have a hard time describing the band’s sound because everyone is inclined to compare. I hope people sometimes bring up The Replacements or Guided by Voices, and I don’t think that’s wrong. We’ve actually come to like those bands lately. We definitely focus on songwriting. The band’s not very novel, we don’t have a lot of gimmicks or anything like that. It’s straight-ahead in most ways, but at the same time maybe hard to describe.

We hope that people want to, you know, ‘own this record.’ That they have to have it as a part of their collection. We hope this is the kind of music that will inspire people to want to own the album instead of downloading a few songs. Parker and I buy more records than you could imagine. We buy CDs endlessly. Even if I don’t end up loving a record, I have to have the real thing to fully appreciate it and understand it. Digital files are convenient, but it removes a lot of the art from what’s going on and something that people have put a lot of time into. It’s bad enough that people don’t buy vinyl anymore, but now they’re not even buying the CDs – it’s just tragic. If there is something I hear that I like even a little bit, I won’t sleep until I own the real copy.

We tried to make an album with an opening and a closing song, something that you listen to as a whole. We wanted to make something that people could listen to from beginning to end.

The Letterman show was awesome, but it was surreal. We were a little sleep deprived at the time, as we’d been doing CD release shows in Athens for two days before turning around to drive 14-plus hours to New York City. His show is all filmed in real time, what you see at home is how it goes, they don’t retake anything. We had all our equipment set up, they wheeled it out and we were ready to play in a minute. It was the weirdest thing ever.

It’s been a lot of fun playing since the record came out, knowing that people know the songs or can go home and listen to them. Now we’re just going to keep touring and going as much as we can through the year.

Written by G. William Locke