Subtle is definitely not a word that can be used when describing southern hard rock band Nashville Pussy. Led in tandem by the husband-wife team of Blaine Cartwright and Ruyter Suys (for those who don’t know, that’s pronounced “Rider Size”), the Pussy has been blazing their own path, with their over-the-top rock anthems extolling the joys of sex, drugs, and booze. Their new album, Up The Dosage, hit stores on January 21st, and promises to be more of the same.
Ruyter took a few minutes out of their European tour to chat with us about vinyl, bassists, songs about diarrhea, and more. Her easygoing style and infectious laugh were a treat, showing us a rock goddess that just wants to play loud and have fun. Fair warning, we may have broken a TVD record for most uses of the word “fuck” in an interview. We wouldn’t have Ruyter any other way.
It’s been five years since From Hell to Texas. What’s Nashville Pussy has been up to?
We’ve been touring incessantly, as usual. We’ve toured like crazy with Nashville Pussy, and we’ve done, we’ve actually written and recorded four other albums since the last Nashville Pussy release.
Wow!
Plus we put out the re-release of From Hell To Texas, which involved the live album—we had a whole live album in addition to it, so that took a lot of gleaning. We had to listen to seventy hours of us.
Is it various cities, or all recorded in one place?
Yeah, it’s the best songs from an entire European tour, so we listened to it every night.
That’s a lot!
Yeah! It was pretty crazy, it was fun though, it was really good. It’s pretty surprising to hear how things vary from one night to the next, and pick out the best of it. That was a fun little project. We’ve also done Blaine’s old band, Nine Pound Hammer. They reunited to put out a record, called Country Classics, that we put out on Blaine [Cartwright] and my own label called Slinging Pig.
They toured Europe, Nine Pound Hammer toured Europe, then Nine Pound Hammer broke up. So Blaine started a whole new band with the remaining members of the band, and a few other people, called the Kentucky Bridgeburners. They wrote and recorded an entire album called Hail Jesus, it’s like his gospel album, and it’s pretty fuckin’ phenomenal.
A gospel album from Blaine could be a frightening prospect.
Yeah! It’s excellent, it’s amazing, it sounds like Nine Pound Hammer and Nashville Pussy. It’s fuckin’ amazing, and I got to play on like, I don’t know, eighty percent of it. I played mandolin, and I played guitar, I played keyboards…I can’t remember what else. I think that’s about it. We got to get a lot of our country shit out of our system on that album.
Cool. You’re also playing with another band, with an amazing name.
With Dick Delicious and the Tasty Testicles! [we both laugh]
How did you get involved with them?
Well, I’d like to say I lost a dare, but I actually did it willingly. Oh my god…it’s like the one band I will never be able to play my mother. Ever. [laughs] It’s straight up deplorable, but it was so much fucking fun.
They were one of our favorite band in Atlanta for ever. When we first moved to Atlanta, they were packing houses of about six people in their audience, and throughout the course of the evening they would manage to drive away the six! There’d only be two, but one of them would be on stage trying to go down on him, you know. Like, they would always have die-hard fans, but most people hated them.
They had, their claim to fame was they got voted, …Howard Stern gave them the Best Song Ever award. They wrote music to that old nursery rhyme Diarrhea, you know, “When you’re sliding into first, and you know you’re gonna burst,” that kind of thing? So they did this heavy, heavy metal song about diarrhea, and Howard Stern thought it was the greatest thing in the world, and brought them on the station, and they all proceeded to drop acid. They made complete asses of themselves and went down in Howard Stern history, never to get invited back again, and then they broke up. [laughs] Just a travesty walking, these guys.
They decided to come back together, and I had some time off, and I had been given this amazing fucking electric guitar that I could not play. It was an EMG guitar that I couldn’t play in Nashville Pussy, or they’d kick me out of the band. [laughs] So, I was like “What am I gonna do with this great guitar?” Dick Delicious was like “Why don’t you play it on these five tracks we just recorded?” I was like “Fuck yeah!”
So, I went into the studio with them. Recorded these five songs, sang backup vocals and stuff, and they were like, “Well, do you want to join the band?” They were floored that they had a real band for the first time in I don’t know how long. They’re like “This is so good! Join the band Ruyter!” I had nothing to do, and they never tour, ever. They never do anything, they had been broken up, so I was like “Fuck yeah, I’ll join the band.” I figured I’ll put my name on the record and I’ll never see these guys again, right?
As soon as I joined the band, they got all fuckin’, “Yeah, we’ve got Ruyter in the band! Let’s tour, let’s do this, let’s do that,” and they got all excited. I was like “Fuck. I just joined another job.” [laughs] I thought this was a get-out-of-work card.
Never is.
All of a sudden I got signed up for some really enthusiastic touring. So, we went on tour, we did two tours.
Hopefully with more than six people in the crowd.
Oh fuck yeah! But one night we played in Chattanooga, I think there was only two. It was fuckin’ amazing. It was really fun. We played some stinkholes. [laughs] We played some nice places too, but it was mostly stinkholes.
Sounds awesome.
Yeah, it was really great to just go out and have fun and not give a shit, not care. We basically tried to drink as much as possible before we hit the stage, and still play somewhat well. It’s mostly comedy, mostly just the guys just berating each other on stage. We’d try to interject and they’d tell me to shut up, me telling them to shut up louder, then we’d drink some more and play another song. It was really bad. [laughs] That took up some good time, huh? [laughs]
That’s alright by me.
I highly recommend that album. The last one I was on, it’s called The Vulgar Taste Of Obscurity or something like that.
A little nod to Pantera?
Yeah, it’s a little nod to them. It’s a great album, it’s pretty much all the songs that were written about farting and pooping. So if you’re into that kind of thing…
So Up the Dosage comes out next week [Jan. 21].
Yeah, I think it came out in Scandinavia like, yesterday.
Those Scandinavian bastards.
Yeah, they get it first. [laughs]
What can fans expect from the new album?
Oh! I don’t know…It’s still Nashville Pussy, just Nashville Pussy distilled. This is us at our most primal core, it’s kind of a diverse album, in that we play a little bit of country, a little bit of bluegrass, we play straight-up Nashville Pussy-style rock and roll, but I think somehow we’ve managed to capture the elemental basics of what we do, on this album. It’s kind of like a no-frills album. It’s a hard hittin’ punch.
Was your approach to this album any different from the previous albums, either the writing or the recording of it?
Yeah, kind of. We were under some time constraints, and we’d been doing a lot of recording, so I think we’ve gotten kind of a lot better at it, in some strange way. We’re just a lot more familiar with the studio, and the process is real simple now to us. For some strange reason we were really focused. I had the whole attitude of “Let’s just do it right the first time,” instead of beating stuff to death and not force anything.
It was very organic, everything came out really easily, there was a fuckin’ electricity in the air, and we just captured it somehow on this album. I think. I’ve been getting that response from people, they seem to hear it as well. I don’t know, I’ve just got this whole new attitude to recording. Just do it right the first time. No more fucking solos, and taking like the thirteenth one, I’m doin’ it right once, and its like “You better fuckin’ hit record, cause it’s here, and it’s done.”
That’s usually the best one though, the first time.
Yeah! I’ve done it before. I used to beat my fuckin’ head against the wall doing solos over and over and over again, and time after time I would pick the first one. It’s like, this is the best one, this one has the most energy, so this time I just “Cool,we’ll do it that way.” [laughs]
I think if you do it too many times, it becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, and it’s like recording on a tape, something gets lost.
Trying to capture that energy from the first time, it’s kind of like the first time. We honesty kept most of the first takes of everything. Even with my rhythm tracks, I just fuckin’ nailed it. I’d go in and double it, and I’d nail it. I was like “Next song, next song, next song,” it just went really fuckin’ fast, it was almost like an exercise in speed, it was really fucking fun.
I think I cut like seven rhythm tracks in one day, which is kind of unheard of. We just barreled through it. Same thing, almost all the solos were cut live, and there was this fury in the studio, and it got channelled through the guitar. It was great!
I’m personally looking forward to this album. Can’t wait.
Have you heard it yet?
Yes, I heard the advance stream of the album, and I loved it. It started off with an organ playing and that threw me off. I was like “Wait…is this the right album?”
No doubt, man. I know, a lot of those little parts are me. I was like, “Let’s put bagpipes at the end of this song. Let’s use an organ.”
It’s got a really crisp sound to it, like, if you go back and listen to Let Them Eat Pussy or High As Hell, you can hear the vast difference in production.
Yeah! We managed to somehow make this thing sound…louder. It’s cleaner and louder somehow, I don’t know how the fuck we did it. The guy who mixed it, Rick Beato, was like, “Well what do you want out of this album?” I was like, “I’m a guitar player, what do you think I’m gonna tell you?” He’s like, “You’re gonna tell me to turn up the guitars.” I said, “That’s it!” [laughs]
Of course!
Go ahead and do it. Of course.
Same studio and staff as From Hell To Texas, or did you all switch it up?
No, From Hell To Texas was done down at Willie Nelson’s studio in Austin. This was at Nitrosonic—I think they have it written incorrectly on our press release. They wrote it with an “M,” but it’s with an “N.” It’s a pretty title studio in Lexington, KY, and it’s owned by previous Nine Pound Hammer drummer Brian Pulito. We recorded Nine Pound Hammer, Kentucky Bridgeburners, this side project Blaine and I have called Buzzard, which has never been released, and then this album.
We’ve done a bunch of other shit there, too, but it’s kind of a home away from home. We keep all of our gear collection there. It’s kinda like our studio. We can go in there any time we want, and do whatever we want, it’s just a fuckin’ fantastic little place, and it’s full of all of our stuff now. [laughs] I think we’ve got all of our Marshalls, and all of our keyboards. A bunch of shit we don’t take on the road, it’s all there, like all the groovy guitars that we’ve collected over the years. the stuff that we don’t keep at home is all in Nitrosonic.
Nice. It’s gotta be nice to have that “sanctuary.”
Fuck yeah, man. My dining room had three keyboards in it. [laughs] Our house was getting really ridiculous. Amplifiers everywhere, and you gotta kind of make ’em furniture after a while. We had huge Marshall combos that we used, our very first Marshall combos that we took on tour with us, and were just playing little bitty clubs. We have that as a desk in our guest room, with a computer on top of it. Underneath our bed, there’s like ten guitars underneath each bed in our house.
Functional art?
Ha, yeah. There’s little Marshall mini-stacks in the corner, there a cabinet that I’m using, I’ve got shoes on a speaker cabinet, it just turns into furniture. Finally we were like “Fuck, man we’ve gotta use this shit. We just made a major trip up to Kentucky and dropped all the shit off at the studio. So, if you want to record on our gear, go to Nitrosonic! [laughs]
Exit (bassist) Karen Cuda, enter Bonnie Buitrago. How did that come about?
Well, Bonnie’s been a friend of ours since she was in high school, and we first started the band. She used to come out to gigs, and she was too young to get into the club. I didn’t remember this, but she reminded me of the first time she saw us, I had to sneak her into the show. She wanted to see the show bad enough, that she hung around, she knew what to do, and I walked her into the show like she was my little sister or something.
She managed to watch the very first show that we ever played in Los Angeles, from the side of the stage, because they wouldn’t let her into the audience, but she was alright right there, by my amp. She’s gotten the Nashville Pussy cat, the bobcat tattooed on her wrist, like fuckin’ fifteen years ago. Something like that.
That’s devotion.
She’s a die-hard fuckin’ fan from like way back when, and that’s her only tattoo, that fuckin’ cat. She actually tried out for the band when she was twenty-one. We flew her in to Atlanta, and we had her and Katie [Lynn Campbell] both try out and audition for the band, and we chose Katie at the time, mostly because Bonnie was too young.
This was back before Say Something Nasty.
Yeah, and she didn’t really have any experience. She was a great player, but she had’t really done anything yet, and we were concerned that we were gonna destroy her life already at twenty-one. [laughs] So, I guess we waited ten years to destroy her life. Now she’s like, since that time has passed, she’s started her own band, a band called Bloodhook, and they toured and did Vans Warped Tour, they did Europe, they started a studio, and she had to do everything herself. She bought the van, and she got the guys in the band, she drove around, she did all this shit and she gained all this fucking experience.
When Karen [Cuda] said she couldn’t tour anymore, we called her up, and we had always hung out with Bonnie when we came to L.A., when Karen said she couldn’t do this tour we phoned up Bonnie, and her first opportunity to tour with us was to get in the tour bus and tour with ZZ Top. So, it was like how could you say no, right?
That is cool.
You’d be a fool to say no to that!
So, the vibe with her has been pretty awesome for the band?
Yeah, man. It’s like she has definitely reignited something. She’s a fan of the band. She’s got that spark from the outside that she’s brought to the inside, which is really nice. And she’s got a great voice, too. She plays like I do. We’re both like these…she’s got a mane of black hair, and she plays like a punk rock spaz like I do. She’s headbanging on her side, and I’m headbanging on my side…fuckin’ great.
Nashville Pussy bassists have almost been like Spinal Tap drummers.
Except for all of ours have lived! [we both laugh]
That is true, nobody has blown up.
None of ours have died in a bizarre gardening accident or fuckin’ spontaneously combusted.
True! Has it been circumstance, or has it been tough to find the right dynamic in a bassist to go with you guys?
No, it’s always good while it’s happening, but it’s a fuckin’ rough road out there. It’s not easy being on the road, period. Katie was in the band as long as some bands have been together. Tracy, same thing. She was in the band as long as some other bands have been together. It’s almost like we have had four or five different bands, but me, Jeremy [Thompson], and Blaine have all stayed the same.
If you had to pick a favorite Nashville Pussy riff or song, what would you pick?
Oh, wow, I guess on this new album, it’s got to be “Rub It To Death.” That’s my shit, that one. [laughs] That’s my new opus, “Rub It To Death.”
How about one from the past, one you love to play live?
“Go, Motherfucker, Go” is a classic. That’s my other greatest riff that I ever wrote. That, and “Hate and Whiskey” and “Go To Hell,” both of those, I love playing those.
Those are great songs.
Yeah, they got a nice dirty dirge to ‘em. I get to really show off on those, playing the solos…I get to emote.
I’ve always loved the groove of “Can’t Get Rid Of It.”
Oh yeah, man.
I love that song.
Wow, yeah, we haven’t played that in a while. Shit, man. That’s a good one.
You should probably add that for the U.S. tour [laughs]
We’ll do it for you! [laughs]
Works for me! So, you’re originally from Canada—Vancouver to be specific. How did you end up with a guy from Kentucky?
Oh man, yeah…you now what, the truth is, we dared each other to get married. I was going to say how I wish Dick Delicious was a dare. It actually was. Blaine and I met, he was playing with Nine Pound Hammer, I was living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
That’s a long way apart.
Yeah! Really fuckin’ far apart. I had seen him once before, with an old boyfriend, and they were fucking great. I loved this band. They came back to Canada, and I was single at the time, and so I tried to pick him up. For some strange reason, both him and the singer walked me home that night, and I was like “Okay, I guess this is ‘Kentucky-style.’ So, I bid you gentlemen goodnight, and I’ll see you tomorrow at the show.” It’s like, this is a little odd.
The next night, him and I hung out, and he was great, and they invited me to travel with them to Winnipeg. I had never been to that city before, so I was like what the fuck, go along there. Him and I wound up dropping acid together, and we just fell in love. You know, it was really easy. I wound up chasing Nine Pound Hammer, I put a backpack on and chased them around all of fucking Europe, and by the end of it, we were definitely madly in love with each other.
So, I made him come back to Saskatchewan with me, in the dead of winter, in like January. We were married within a month, and it was a dare. We’d actually dared each other at one point to get married, then we realized, like holy shit, this is for real, we could actually do this. Then we shut up about it for a little while, then we did it. We just ran off and eloped one night. Then here we are, nineteen years later. Kinda crazy man.
Rock and roll romance story.
Yeah. Pretty bizarre. And our baby is Nashville Pussy. [we both laugh]
Has it been challenging to be a woman in the male-dominated hard rock world?
Yeah, to a certain degree. Also, there’s certain advantages. Like we get the better bathroom. [laughs] Yeah, you definitely get exposed to a lot of the boys’ club, which, as much as I have always been a member of, there’s still some shit which I could have not seen. [laughs]
There’s no filter around Ruyter?
Well, shit, man. I don’t know. I always dive right into the heart of it. I mean, I joined Dick Delicious, which is the biggest boys’ club in the world. I insisted that I be a member, so I asked for it.
Up the Dosage is coming out on vinyl…
Yeah! YAY!
Are you personally a vinyl fan?
Oh fuck yeah, totally man. We’ve got a wall of vinyl in our house. We had a wall before, but our house burned down, so we had to rebuild the wall. Our wall melted!
What’s one record that’s close to your heart?
One record that’s close to my heart…I guess my favorite vinyl record of all time would probably have to be Houses of the Holy. You know, that gatefold?
Oh yeah.
I used to stare at that thing when I was a kid, and I was sure that that was me on the cover. Like, I knew that one of those little kids, one of those little naked kids, the long-haired one, that was me. It looked just like me. I was like “How did they get a picture of me?” I used to ask my parents, “How did Led Zeppelin get a picture of me?”
I love that album. As I got a little older, you learn that gatefolds are for rolling your joints on. [we both laugh] I’d seen my parents do it enough times. So, we’re trying to bring back the analog style of rolling joints on a gatefold record. [laughs]
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PHOTO: KELLY HAYDEN
