Still Headless after all these years

By Daniel Okamura
South Coast Beacon

Few bands could say they’ve enjoyed constant success traveling outside the beltway of commercial music. Nearly none could maintain an audience playing just one or two concerts a year, especially playing music that delves into discord. But whatever tools Headless Household has used to carve its niche seem to have created an enduring gravure as the band busily celebrated its 20th anniversary this year with a new album, “post-Polka,” and three gigs within the past month and a half. Joe Woodard, guitarist and main composer for the group, sheds some light on the band’s eccentric success.

Daniel Okamura: How did Headless Household get started?

Joe Woodard: Back in the early ’80s, we were four musicians doing various things and … we all felt that we wanted to create a band that was completely different from anything we were doing or hearing in Santa Barbara. … It was sort of a coming together of people, of experimental musicians who wanted to try something fresh.

DO: What has this year brought for the band?

JW: Well, this year is kind of a big year for us in that this album took a lot of effort — it basically took two years. … I’m really gonna send it out and see what happens with this one. I think it might have more of a commercial life than our other albums, which tend to be more eclectic and hard for people to get an easy handle on.

DO: There are certainly more vocal tracks on this album.

JW: That’s true, and we might get criticized for that by some people in the more experimental and the new music world. C’est la vie (laughs). I believe you can mix it all up and get away with it.

DO: (The polka tunes) sound like they could be in a Danny Elfman film score. Are any of you Oingo Boingo fans?

JW: It’s more a matter of being influenced by the same things that they were. Like, I know that they were big Frank Zappa fans, and that certainly describes us. … But I would say that … as crazy as they could be, everything was pretty neat, whereas we like to get sloppy at times. … It’s almost like dancing on the verge of chaos without succumbing completely.

DO: What changes has the band seen in the last 20 years?

JW: I should qualify that by saying that a lot of years, we only played one concert. … Part of it was our changing environment because when we started, there were more places to play this wacky stuff.

DO: Was Santa Barbara’s music scene more open then?

JW: I think so. I think we grew out of that. Like, there was this great little quasi-Bohemian club called Baudelaire’s. … And it was run by this poet and novelist, Claire Rabe, who just passed away a couple months ago. ... I think that was more typical of that era. It was just more open and liberal. You didn’t have to fit into a specific style or play dance music and so that suited us perfectly.

DO: So what keeps Headless Household together?

JW: It’s probably the sparseness of our creative time that we put into this. It basically happens in concentrated doses. … If we were playing this all the time, I’m sure we’d burn out. Members have quit before, only to come back the next week. I think that there’s something about this project that’s stubborn and it won’t die.

I’m hoping to get this music out there as much as I can while still understanding that some people will just be confused or worse. … I don’t want to be a bother to anyone, but I think there are a lot of people out there who are yearning to hear something new.

DO: There are a lot of collaborators on “post-Polka.” How did that come about?

JW: That was part of what elongated the process. … What was so exciting, what kept us going in that direction was that all the musicians loved doing it ’cause they just don’t get a chance to do off-beat stuff, so when they do, they throw themselves into it.