Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Robert Been Opens Up

Never before has 45 minutes flown by so effortlessly as it did last Friday when The Indy caught up with Robert Levon Been, the bassist, vocalist, and founding member of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. There was plenty to discuss (their four highly acclaimed and successful albums and opening for the Jesus and Mary Chain, for starters) before Been’s tour manager beckoned him to the stage, where the band went on to open for the Stone Temple Pilots, just as they will this Saturday at the Santa Barbara Bowl

The guys behind Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (often simply known as BRMC) met as teenagers in the Bay Area suburb of Lafayette, California, after guitarist Peter Hayes left the Brian Jonestown Massacre. The genre they most embody would be a well-calculated mix of rock ‘n’ roll, folk-revival, and shoe-gaze. Needless to say, Lafayette isn’t known for much, aside from the rows of tract homes Tim Burton featured so prominently in 1990’s Edward Scissorhands. It’s also just too far from San Fran to be on much of anyone’s musical radar. When asked if he thought this at all inspiring, Been thoughtfully replied, “I used to trash talk, but that’s what you do when you’re young. Now I’m proud. If you can co-exist in a place like that and come out of it with soul intact, it’s good for survival. We wanted to fill what was absent, what was needed. That’s what we still do.”

And BRMC’s brand of folk- and revival-inspired rock is definitely in demand. After the release of their fourth album, 2007’s Baby 81, the boys were invited to open a Los Angeles show for a band that some 23-some-odd-years earlier birthed the shoegaze/revival genre-the Jesus and Mary Chain. “It was [a big deal],” Been recalled. “I didn’t think about it too much before we did it. It was pretty special, there’s something about [that show] that’s greater than words. I can’t explain it. We need the Jesus and Mary Chain, they’re an important band. It feels like what they do is getting phased out by “nice” bands who aren’t gonna change anything. This hit me really hard when we played with them that night.”