5 Questions with Rat Jackson's Rusty Sutton

With a new full-length out on August 7 and a CD release show at Durham’s Broad Street Café this Saturday, it’s a good time to be one of the four members of Rat Jackson.

For this week’s 5 Questions, Diversions Editor Linnie Greene talked to bassist Rusty Sutton about the larger-than-life persona the band embodies, the group’s longstanding friendship and how Rat Jackson gets away with its brazen lyrics. Behind the brassy, cocky lyrics of songs like “Sexy Waitress” and “Sex All The Time” is a well-mannered, respectable group of local musicians — but if anyone asks, you didn’t hear it from Dive.

Diversions: Your lyrics are really rowdy and bold, especially on the new record — how do audiences usually respond to them?

Rusty Sutton: People recognize by watching us play that it’s a big put-on, that it’s thematic and a joke that some people get and some people don’t. Generally most people get into it. We’re not the kind of guys who do the things we sing about. It’s more like a comment on the big bold personalities that have always existed in the kind of rock ‘n’ roll that we play. They get that it’s a joke and they laugh at it in the same way you laugh at any comedian that has a style and theme that you know isn’t them, but they pull it off enough to keep you interested. We try to let everyone know that it’s a joke. This isn’t who we are, it’s just something that we find hilarious. It’s been a long time since someone’s come up to me and said “I think what you do is disrespectful.” It’s very tongue in cheek, you know.

Dive: What’s Rat Jackson’s songwriting process like? Do you start with specific ideas or concepts?

RS: It’s really just a general idea — it’s not like there’s like one specific band. A lot of the things we joke about, like bands like Guns ‘n’ Roses and Motley Crue, wrote serious songs about it in the ’80s. We just kind of came up with this persona. We try to write inside of it. Generally we’ll just come up with — it’s easiest to write the music, so we’ll come up with the tune, and Curt [Arledge], our drummer, writes pretty much all the lyrics. And he’s gotten this kind of character down at this point.

Dive: So what artists or bands would you cite as influences?

RS: We all grew up together, and we all grew up listening to punk, so we’ve all got a lot of big tastes. Will [Arledge], the lead singer, is really into Bruce Springsteen and a good amount of electronic music. Curt’s really into Phoenix and The Roots, Steve [Oliva] and I, we’re both really into garage rock, pop even. A lot of local bands have been big influences on us. It runs the gamut. It’s kind of hard to nail that down.

Dive: How and when did the band form?

RS: We all went to middle school, we all knew each other since we were 12, and Steve moved to New Jersey when we were 15 or 16. And then we all met back together in college at UNC, in like 2003 I guess. We did that on and off for about two years. We liked playing together but we didn’t like what we were playing necessarily. Curt and Will and I were in a band, it was called The Zombie Attack, so we scrapped all those tunes and brought Steve in. We tried to write new songs and make new things out of the old tunes. I guess this was all around 2006, 2007. We all got back together and figured out the whole persona that we were going after. I guess it was around 2007 that we formed Rat Jackson as it is now, but we’ve been in random projects and band since we were 11 or 12, middle school.

Dive: Do you think your friendship has an influence on the music you make?

RS: I think so. I mean, we’ve got a way of writing. Curt and Will write most of the tunes and bring them to me and Steve, and we flesh them out as a band. But we’re also all very open to ideas of how things should work and how things should go, both with the writing and how the band functions, because we’re all friends. Everyone can bring something to the table and it’s not a big deal, and because we’ve known each other for so long we also think the same way about how things should go. We’re open to one another in that sense because of the friendship we’ve had for so many years.