Premiere: Miss Boating’s ‘Crew Cut Baby’ is a retro dream from the West Bottoms

Miss Boating. // photo courtesy the artist

Kansas City’s Miss Boating signed to High Dive Records back in November, and now the “5 piece basement pop band based out of a strange old house in the West Plaza neighborhood of Kansas City, just around the corner from the local gas/quick-mart,” is set to release Jewel in the Trash, their debut album for the label and first full-length in June.

That biography ought to be enough to pique your interest, but the instant you hear any of Miss Boating’s music, you’re immediately sucked into a world where every generation of pop music exists simultaneously, with grinding sax right up against glammy guitars. We’re excited to premiere the first single from the album, “Crew Cut Baby,” along with an interview with the band’s own Charlie Colborne.

The Pitch: Why did you all expand this from a duo to a five-piece after so many years playing together?

Colborne: We’d experimented with having a bass player before but once our buddy Evan Vhargon started jamming with us it just felt right. Then, Aaron Jones joined us on trombone for a couple of things at a Halloween party. Sax player Tim Gillespie worked himself into the mix. The additional people gave the songs more rhythm, depth, and definition, and that was a vibe change I think we’d been craving for a long time.

Evan sadly moved to the next realm. Phil Dickey heroically came along to keep us going. Bryan came in after Phil left. We think five is a good number. Who knows how many people will end up on stage with us, really? Are you busy next Wednesday?

What was the recording process like for Jewel in the Trash? It feels very “in the moment” and more freewheeling than The Vhargon Sidestep, but borne of a crack squad of musicians.

Our vision and sound was more coherent by the time we recorded Jewel. When you’re listening to each other, you can play looser, more freely. And play less. We had a blast and Ross is great fun to work with. What an amazing and patient dude.

Were these songs composed for the album, or did they come from throughout Miss Boating’s history?

These songs come from all the bands I’ve played with, including the Sleazebeats. Some go back quite a long time, some are more recent, like “Back to the Whorehouse.” The first band I was in was called the Larvae, and so we had a “theme” song, though I don’t remember if the song or the name came first.

While many of the songs on Jewel in the Trash have elements of genres long-since past, “Crew Cut Baby” is the most obviously retro. Why is the debut single from the album?

Archeologically speaking, the oldest song on the record is “We Are the Larvae,” but “Crew Cut” was written not long after. I remember playing it and thinking it had an early ’60s sound, and then adding the bit that’s reminiscent of “Twist and Shout.” The lyrics were kind of having fun with gender and reflected the new wave thing and attitude going on at the time. I remember there was a young woman playing in a local band called The Buckthrusters who had a crewcut. Stacy, I think.

Anyway, the song always had a Beatles/Kinks feel to me, that is until Tim’s sax solo really brought the American bar band angle to it. I think Bill’s Bruce Springsteen fetish sneaked its way into the performance and infected us, somehow. Bruce is, for sure, a hot daddy.

How’d you come to end the album with two back-to-back songs about insects?

The more obvious thing to do would have been to bookend these two songs I guess, but they feel good grouped together. They’re very different. “Larvae” was a punky gay thing, and really pretty nasty. “Bugs in the Garden” was really about bugs in my garden. I wrote it on a roommate friend’s Oberheim 8—a very cool old analog synth.

“Bugs” used to be played very slowly with ethereal keyboard sounds and had kind of a dreamy feel until Bill heard the repeat percussion effects on the Farfisa, then the song got quite a makeover, very different direction. Much more up. The little coda thing at the end was recorded while I was just fooling around in the studio, but it has a nice wistful feel and really shows some of the distinct, almost circus-like sounds of the Farfisa.

The release party for Miss Boating’s Jewel in the Trash in Saturday, June 29, at the Ship with Fullbloods.