Making Time For Baseball

A lazy afternoon with a thick passage, fresh vegetables and Baseball who could ask for more. SAM FELL gets his hands dirty talking to Cameron post Animal Kingdom. Photos by BEN BUTCHER, from Russia with love.

Wednesday afternoon in Fitzroy is lazy. Brunswick Street bakes slowly in the late summer heat as people wander, lethargic and sweaty, from shop to shop. The cafes are full and there are cars and trams but it seems empty; like everyone is on autopilot, the heat drying up the exuberance you’d expect to see around here. I’m wearing thongs, for which I’m thankful. I walk in the shade from Johnson Street to the Vegie Bar on the corner of Brunswick and Rose, where it’s cool and dark inside, not too many people, just a mellow late-lunchtime buzz for it’s that time of day.

I walk to the bar and ask for Cam, and the girl working there points him out to me – perhaps I should have had a look around first; there’s no way you can miss that hair. Wild and untamed, it sits atop his head like a drunken sentinel, on the lookout for ideas no matter how crazy, to meld into musical madness. For this is what Cam specialises in. The girl behind the bar knows who Cam is because Cam works here at the Vegie Bar. He washes dishes. He’s a dish-pig. But don’t make the mistake of thinking this is all there is to this slightly ruffled looking, Perth-born young man, for Cam Potts is a musician. “Hah, who the hell isn’t these days?” you may scoff, and it’s quite a good point particularly around this part of town – and as a dishy to boot, he certainly fits the mould.

“But I believe that great music is always accidental, it’s always just expelled from a place you don’t know about at the time,” he says later on, having just told me how he never learned properly how to play his violin.

“I’m massively in debt,” he says first up dryly, when I ask him if he’s working hard. “I’ve been here about four years, which is good because I’m starting to get holiday pay now, which is weird for a dishy.” Four years is a lot of dishes. But the man’s in debt, and you’ve gotta pay the bills. The reason for the debt, and the fact he’s been scrubbing at the Vegie Bar on Brunswick Street for so long? The band, man the band. The band is Baseball, which is an odd moniker to be sure – they certainly have nothing to do with bats and balls and pinch hitters and home runs. “When I was little, I used to play T-ball and I was really bad at it,” he explains. “But I wanted to play baseball, and I met with the coach of the baseball team and he said I’d never play baseball. So I thought to myself later on that I’d play it my way.” This is accompanied by a loud, long, satisfied laugh – he’s certainly playing baseball now, albeit with Baseball.

The reason Cam (who’s stage name is Thick Passage, but we don’t go into that) and I are sitting in the non-licensed part of the Vegie Bar, empty aside from the two of us, is because we’re chatting about Animal Kingdom, the band’s debut long-player. It’s a record which has been some time in the making, and a record which, given the absolute ferocious mayhem of their live show, is quite an anticipated release. However, before we get down to the business of recorded music, we take a trip down memory lane – it’s quite hard to find background information on Baseball - and we need this to paint a proper picture.

“Originally it started with just me and Monika (Fikerle, bass/drum/backing vox),” Cam explains, his pale blue eyes never leaving my face. “That was in 2002, and essentially for a few years, we were a band that did tours on the back of Ninety Nine tours – Ninety Nine toured Europe two years in a row, so I thought of doing Baseball as a way of staying in Europe for longer after these tours. That was a way of doing that with Monika, who I was going out with at the time. We were serious about it, but it wasn’t something that took a serious role until 2005, when Ben and Ev joined and it became more of an Australian thing.”

Cam was, of course, a member of Melbourne band Ninety Nine, and band-sharing is a common theme amongst Baseball’s four members. Fikerle still plays with Love Of Diagrams and played with Jihad Against America, as did guitarist, Ben Butcher, while drummer/bassist, Evelyn Morris currently plays with Pikelet – it’s a mish-mash of a musical melting pot to be sure. “It’s always been the case,” Cam explains. “There used to be three bands, now there are six – it’s something that’s always been around, so it’s never really been an issue. It’s just a matter of looking at our calendars a lot. I mean, Evelyn is in a lot of projects, so we always have to keep abreast of what she’s doing. And I think the band (Baseball) is unique enough for us not to say, ‘Oh it’s too much, I don’t wanna do this’…we all know how well we operate and how good it feels to play, so we’re gonna keep that together no matter what.”

So from 2005 Baseball began to flourish and have ‘matured’ for want of a far better phrase, into what you see now – a collective of noise, an assault on all your senses plus some you didn’t realise you had. The Cramps mixed with the Dirty Three is how they’ve been described in the past, and if ever there was a phrase to coin a band’s sound, that one comes pretty close. “I haven’t heard much of the Cramps,” he confesses with a laugh, “but I’d have no idea how to describe our sound. The Dirty Three are definitely a huge influence on me, especially Warren Ellis. I think more his attitude, I think it’s really humanistic and I really respect that in an artist, he’s coming from a real source. But yeah, I never really thought how to describe our sound.”

“But I believe that great music is always accidental, it’s always just expelled from a place you don’t know about at the time,” he says later on, having just told me how he never learned properly how to play his violin (which he bought in Cairo) and was then told by a friend that he was playing in eighths. “It’s accidental because it’s a real release, it’s not premeditated.”

Does he think his music is like that? “Definitely,” is the confident response.

This non-conventional music then, this accidental greatness, has culminated in Animal Kingdom, the band’s debut long-player and one which does that most seemingly impossible of things – captures their live energy on disc. “I think if you want to do something, you will,” Cam reasons. “So we decided to be very focused in regards to keeping it honest in that way, and I think if you are honest in that way, it’ll really come across. We really wanted to do that, so it was just something that happened. We were very driven to do that.”

It’s interesting to note too, that Animal Kingdom is almost two years old for the band, as it was recorded towards the end of 2006. “Yeah, it took four days to record, but a year and a half to get out,” he says wryly in acknowledgement. “We went to get it mastered in the US, which took a couple of months because we were on a waiting list to get it in, and then when that came back we went on tour in Europe. Then Stomp, who we were talking to late last year (about releasing it), said we should wait until February. So that was another waiting period.” I ask, given that the songs are quite old for the band then, whether or not they’ve stood the test of time. “They’ve stood up yeah, but purely because we haven’t really been able to get together much to play a show or rehearse,” is the honest answer. “If we’d been rehearsing every week and been playing a lot more, I think those songs wouldn’t be here any more, we’d have a new set of songs. I love these songs, and I’ve got some new ones, but I still love playing these ones off Animal Kingdom.”

Back to the making of the record: “I think the main thing before going in to do that recording, was to try and keep it portable. Not do too many bells and whistles and overdubs, just keep it very straight and honest,” he muses. “Portable between the studio and the stage is what I mean, keeping it seamless. Trying to keep it as honest a live representation as possible, to the extent of it being identical.” I venture that people may not really appreciate hearing the disc replicated exactly on stage.

“Well I think the live show is very intense, and I think it’s another avenue of perfections as well,” he states. “I think it’s basic rock n’ roll in that way; playing the songs in the studio as they’d be played on stage, it’s very fundamental in the most basic sense.” He then goes on to say that in the future, freeing themselves of live restrains, so to speak, will become an option. But as it stands right now, what you hear on Animal Kingdom is what you’ll hear at a Baseball show, albeit with the intensity level cranked way up to 11.

The song-writing itself is another interesting aspect of Baseball’s make-up – the lyrics are all written by Potts (“I write all the time, every single day of my life,” he says), and he’s possessed of that rare gift of being able to say one thing while meaning another – the subtlety is a major factor in how these songs come together, fortified by his honesty. “I’m obsessed with the Middle East, predominantly the religions, and my childhood too, which was very Catholic,” he rambles. “I grew up in the late ‘70s, and I was beaten a lot at school, especially in Perth which was a backwater – the nuns and brothers and priests would just hit you at will. And at nine or ten that’s very impressionable…and I think I’m still dealing with that to a degree, and that has come out in my song-writing too. That angst that you would associate with Baseball.”

He’s obviously not afraid to let it all out. “No, not at all,” he agrees. “But I use a lot of double meaning in my lyrics. So on one level I can converse with the listener in a purely story telling sense, but (it can) have nothing to do with anything I’m actually thinking about. And all those songs have a very similar meaning throughout, and that is, ‘why do we have this bitterness between people?’ Between religions and countries? We’re still seeing that happen, nothing has changed after 3000 years. And it’s the same with my childhood; I’m just dressing them up as stories so it’s not overbearing for the listener, because that sort of thing can be too much.”

It seems the nucleus behind Baseball goes a lot deeper than meets the eye, but when combined with all the influencing factors, it emerges as a wonderfully free chaos – captured now on disc – and a chaos which is rapidly becoming one of Melbourne’s most sought after live acts.

It’s about here that Cam has to begin work, so we wrap up and shake hands and off he goes to take care of the business that allows him to take care of the real business. Then, after a minute or two as I’m bagging my notebook and dictaphone, he comes bounding back with mobile phone in hand, saying he’s just gotten the call to confirm their support for the Mountain Goats when they tour later this year. His big grin and wild hair say it all – they’re his favourite band, after all – and this sums it all up; an excited kid, who just wants to play Baseball, and he’s doing it man, he’s doing it.

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