A couple of questions with Adam Hatley of Those Peabodys
04/16/2007
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ALSO: Those Peabodys was featured in our The Best Albums You've (Probably) Never Heard feature.
Bullz-Eye: For those folks who are just learning about Those Peabodys now, can you give a nutshell summary of your career prior to its release?
Adam Hatley: Clarke Wilson and myself started what would eventually become Those Peabodys when we were teenagers living in Temple, Texas, a town just an hour north of Austin. We met at high school and had both been in various bands. Clarke, myself, and an older friend / bandmate / mentor of mine, James Wright, decided to get this side project going that would be super fun, where we would just get up and play some rock and roll…which was, at that time, quite different from anything that we had been playing. We ended up really enjoying it, and by 1998, we were playing under the name Those Peabodys. By 1999, Clarke and I had moved to Austin and really started to play whatever shows we could. In that same year, Those Peabodys left the state of Texas for the first time and did a short East Coast / Midwest tour with a box of tapes and shirts. We recorded the self-titled album late in the summer of 2000, and it was released in early 2001 on local label Post Parlo Records. Other than a split 7" with friends the Olive Group that was put out a couple of months prior, the self-titled album was our first release.
BE: Do you recall any anecdotes from the recording of the album?
AH: Well, up until the close of spring 2000, we were a fully-functioning four-piece band. We knew that our drummer at that time wasn't the one, so we booted him with hopes of joining forces with new friend (and amazing drummer) Erik Conn. It quickly turned out that Erik already had quite the full plate and was simply too busy to play with us. As the booked studio time to record the self-titled album crept closer, our second guitarist, Kiki Solis, was also too busy for us and quit the band. So with only Clarke, myself, and the batch of songs we had written remaining, we just said, “Fuck it, we'll make a record with just the two of us.” I am really a drummer, anyway, so we just had a couple of practices the week before recording and went in and did it. I played drums along with Clarke doing scratch-guitar, and the rest was just pieced on top.
BE: Did you expect the record to have a better commercial reception than it did?
AH: No, I don't think either of us really expected anything. Although we knew we didn't want to stop doing Those Peabodys, the future of the band was uncertain, and, at the very least, the album would exist as a document of what the band had done.
BE: Are you pleased to find that it still maintains enough of a following to make its way into this piece?
AH: Absolutely.
BE: What are you doing now?
AH: Those Peabodys are still here and seriously much stronger as a band than ever; look us up on youtube.com, as there is some very recent footage. We are a trio now, with myself, Clarke, and that guy Erik Conn who I mentioned earlier in this piece. We've been playing with Erik for over a year now ,and it's absolutely fantastic. Since the release of the self-titled album back in 2001, we've found new members, done, like, 13 tours of this nation, put out our second record – called Unite Tonight – on NYC's Tiger Style Records in 2003. Within three months of its release, our drummer Aaron Franklin left the band; we replaced him, and by the spring of 2004, Tiger Style Records was dead, along with our deal to put out the next Those Peabodys record. Along with these obstacles, our guitarist, JD Cronise, who had played with us for almost three years, peacefully went on to form one great band called the Sword. Since then, we've been enjoying performing as a trio. Those Peabodys made a third record in 2005 with local sweetheart Tim Kerr that we've been sitting on, and we'll be going in to record our fourth effort with local Eric Wafford in about one week.
Check out Those Peabody's official site for more info.