Chuck Garrison of Pipe joined Aaron on Live and Local, ahead of Friday’s release of the band’s new album – its first in 26 years.
Click here to preorder the album on Bandcamp.
Pipe is one of the most iconic and influential bands in Chapel Hill’s music history. Made up of vocalist Ron Liberti, bassist David Alworth, guitarist Mike Kenlan (sometimes), and Garrison on drums, they emerged in the early 1990s, the hardest and most punk-forward rockers among an explosion of seminal bands that also included Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and Dillon Fence – to name only a few.
Their last album was 1997’s “Slowboy,” but the band never really went away – and now they’re back with new music, for the first time this century. That’s also a trend: Pipe is just the most recent in a string of iconic local bands to release new music for the first time in decades. (See also The Connells, The Veldt, and Archers of Loaf – who all ended long hiatuses with new albums within the last two years.)
“There was this general sense, when we were young, that someday we’d all be old and we wouldn’t want to do this anymore,” Garrison says. “And then after the dust settled, we looked around and realized: we’re all still here, we can still do this. We might as well just go for it.”
Garrison has been going for it for as long as anyone: even outside Pipe, he is himself an iconic figure in Chapel Hill’s music scene. Among other bands, he’s played with the Bad Checks, Zen Frisbee, Evil Wiener, and Mad Crush – and he was also the founding drummer of Superchunk. (In fact the “chunk” in the band’s name refers to Garrison, whose name was misspelled in a phone book.)
He says the new Pipe album is called “Ball Don’t Lie” – eleven tracks that prove that when it comes to rocking hard, the band hasn’t lost a step in thirty years. (Or twenty years, to be more accurate: Garrison says most of the tracks were actually recorded “eight or nine years ago,” but various delays kept them from finishing the album until now.)
The album is due out Friday, August 4, and the band will celebrate that evening with an album-release show at Cat’s Cradle. Shark Quest and DJLICIOUS will open.
Buy tickets to Friday’s show at CatsCradle.com.
Chuck Garrison stopped by Live and Local to chat about the album and play three tracks: “Ball Don’t Lie,” “Backstroke,” and “Good Foul.” (If you’re noticing a sports theme, you’re not wrong: the album has a picture of Rasheed Wallace on the cover, and also includes a UNC-inspired song called “Biscuits.”)
Listen:
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