Cover photo by Mickie Winters.
This story originally appeared in our July 2018 issue. Click here to subscribe to Louisville Magazine.
“I need you to take a picture of me biting the head off this gingerbread cookie,” Scott Carney says, dramatically widening his eyes. Inside the NuLu Please & Thank You, he arches his left brow to a point as he brings the sugary victim — Jesus wearing cowboy boots — to his mouth. “We’re gonna need to get a picture of everyone before we get on the road, too,” he says. Carney and his bandmates — Corey McAfee (bass), Zach Driscoll (keys) and Dave Chale (drums) — pose together outside the trendy coffee shop. Carney has tucked his shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair into a toboggan. Gray speckles the 39-year-old’s beard. McAfee, also 39, stands next to him, sporting the same aging effect in his long curls. Driscoll, 28, and Chale, 38, lean in.
Together, the four make up the latest incarnation of Wax Fang, Carney’s art-rock band. Over the past decade-plus, he has released several albums and singles, played more than 500 shows and directed and produced music videos. The success, however, has come in waves. He has also dealt with financial struggles, the pain of band members leaving and the bittersweet feeling of being the band everybody thought would be the next My Morning Jacket. But he shows no signs of stopping.
It’s almost noon on Dec. 6, 2017. One hour later than they planned to be on the road. With coffees in hand, they pile into a white 10-passenger rental van. Over the next five days, Wax Fang will play a regional tour, which they’ll follow up with a spring tour in the UK and, on July 13, a Friday slot at the Forecastle Festival in Louisville. Chale, who also plays drums in the Louisville band Quiet Hollers, drives toward the first destination, Chicago. Driscoll co-pilots, his neon Nikes propped up on the vast gray dashboard. McAfee sits next to his girlfriend in the middle row. Carney and his red corduroy messenger bag take up space in the third row. The back is full of black cases carrying guitars, a drum kit, keyboards and other gear.
An hour into the trip, rolling past Scottsburg, Indiana, the picture of Carney decapitating a holiday cookie appears on the Wax Fang Instagram feed: “Chicago, see us TONIGHT,” it reads, “or meet your doom like this delicious cookie.”
“He always liked to shock people,” Lynne Carney says of her son. He attended elementary school at St. Barnabas Catholic School, on Hikes Lane. “In fifth or sixth grade, I got called into the principal’s office. The priest had come into religion class to talk about role models. Scott told him and the class that his role model was Freddy Krueger,” Lynne says. Scott loved horror movies, so she was not exactly surprised. “He was the kid who put food up his nose and the kid that stuck keys in the outlet. He was — well, adventurous and full of energy. He turned out great.”
 Scott Carney / by Mickie Winters |
Since 2007, Carney has lived in a house off Eastern Parkway, where he teaches music lessons and records music in a small, makeshift studio. As a “side hustle,” he rents the place out on Airbnb because, for the past year, he has been living in NuLu with his girlfriend. They met while she was working at the Germantown pizza restaurant the Post. “I call our courtship ‘love at first slice,’” Carney says.
One afternoon, in the open room where he teaches piano lessons every Thursday, Carney sits across from me at a gray, 1950s-style dining table, sipping hot tea. He has pushed his hair behind his ears.
“There’s something about being the singer of the band. For instance, Journey still plays shows without Steve Perry, but they found a guy somewhere on the planet, I think the Philippines, that no shit sounds exactly like Steve Perry. That’s probably the only way that band could go on without the original singer,” he says. Behind him, a plywood storage unit you could probably find at Target or IKEA contains books, including This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and Modern Recording Techniques. Atop the shelving stands a silver foldout picture frame, next to a wooden block with an AK-47 reading, “Hey, it’s America.” Inside the frame is a coffee-stained piece of paper with tiny words and numbers on it. The paper, a gift from his aunt who works at the Louisville Free Public Library, is actually the bibliographic record of his first album, Black & Endless Night, which he wrote, recorded and released himself in 2006. On line 500, the bibliographic record denotes: “All songs written by Scott Carney.”
“I don’t want to come across” — Carney deepens his voice dramatically — “like I am Wax Fang.” He returns to his normal, slightly nasal pitch. “I have enough trouble being a frontman as it is. There’s a psychology to being a frontman, and I don’t necessarily” — he hesitates — “enjoy some of those aspects, because I’m not — well, I hope I’m not a narcissist. I think you have to be somewhat of a narcissist to be a frontman, but there’s definitely the Steven Tylers and Axel Roses of the world that are attention-seeking, alpha-personality types. I’ve always struggled with that. Whereas your polar opposite might be someone like Kurt Cobain, who had a severe disdain for being a frontman. I’m kind of somewhere in the middle.
“There’s something about being more anonymous that you lose when you become the frontman. If you’re the voice, you’re the face.”
Carney’s mother describes him as someone who likes to “quietly stand out.” She says he likes to be “over the top.” In 2006, for example, Wax Fang dressed up as cheerleaders to open for My Morning Jacket on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. “He likes to stand out,” Lynne Carney says, “but he also likes to be in the background. He doesn’t like the focus on him.”
Carney grew up in Hikes Point. His father, Jack, worked as a sales rep for Hillerich & Bradsby, the company that produces Louisville Sluggers; his mother was an office manager. “We didn’t sing or dance,” Lynne says. “We really have no idea where Scott got it from.” His musical interest began when he was just a toddler. His mother says he would dance in front of the TV to Neil Diamond’s 1981 single “America.” He would also sing himself to sleep every night, annoying his older sister Laura. In fifth grade, Carney had his first proper guitar lesson at St. Barnabas. He and his best friend at the time were fascinated with the movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, especially the main characters’ band, Wyld Stallyns. “We played tennis-racket guitars, so I guess you could say my first guitar was a tennis racket,” Carney says with a laugh. Soon, he was taking private lessons at Bader’s Music Village in Hikes Point, with a teacher who, Carney says, resembled Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. Carney learned a lot, but, his mother says, “He was more into the harder stuff.” His first live show was at the shopping center where he took lessons, and the song he wrote was about how to be a grade-school dropout. “I was horrified,” Lynne says, laughing. “It was not a proud-mom moment, but I was OK with it as long as he sang about it and didn’t do it.”
On his own, Carney began learning other instruments: bass, piano, drums. During his sophomore year of high school at St. Xavier, Carney, who dyed his hair black, met McAfee, who later became Wax Fang’s manager and is the current bassist. “We occupied the same table in the cafeteria all four years,” McAfee says. “It was an all-boys school, and we were like the rocker weirdos.” They jammed in McAfee’s parents’ basement, rotating different instruments. “Scott could play everything. He was better at playing everything,” McAfee says.
Carney’s high school band was called Maggie’s Wart, named after a lump on the drummer’s dog, Maggie. “I brought it up as a joke and it stuck,” Carney says. “I’ve been upset about it ever since.” Maggie’s Wart played some shows, and perhaps the defining moment was at the St. X talent show, when the group wrote and performed a song about their school ID cards and Carney smashed his guitar at the end.
Halfway to Chicago, Chale and Driscoll are going on about a rhythm section in a David Bowie song while listening to the Kendrick Lamar song “i.” Carney’s asleep in the back, arms crossed like a vampire. McAfee sits sideways in the middle row, the massive window reeling flat Indiana farmland behind him. His square, black prescription sunglasses deflect the light as he slides white-sleeved records into album covers of The Astronaut, Wax Fang’s 2014 rock opera. The vinyl copies were made possible by a fan who gifted the band some money to fund future endeavors. McAfee has a box full of records to sleeve before the band arrives in Chicago.
Playing bass in Wax Fang is a recent development for McAfee, who has been a part of the band since its inception. “I’ve always filled in where I’ve been needed,” he says. He started out as Wax Fang’s manager in 2007, which he still does in addition to recording and performing. He first stepped into the role after the band’s second tour with My Morning Jacket. “They had a good buzz going and were gearing up to go down to South by Southwest. We went to New York to play for some booking agents and label people and find an entertainment attorney to shop us around for a record deal,” McAfee says. He set up meetings and talked to attorneys, getting one to come to a show in New York. “He pulled me aside and told me I had a good band,” McAfee says. “He said, ‘In the music business you have to follow the talent.’” The advice stuck with him.
“The thing about Scott is that he’s somebody who really can methodically sit down and figure out what needs to be figured out. Like how some people are really good at fixing cars or taking things apart and putting them back together? Scott can’t do that, but from a musical standpoint or a film standpoint, he’s going to see all the aspects of it and then have the focus and dedication to learn how to do whatever needs to be done,” McAfee says.
It’s 6 p.m. and dark on I-90 into Chicago. The road sparkles with red brake lights in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Horns honk and beep sporadically, but everybody is quiet inside the van. Carney is awake now, on the phone with a local radio station doing a pre-show interview. With the phone to his right ear, the right side of his mouth pulls higher than the left like a ventriloquist as he responds to a question about the band’s latest single, “Glass Islands,” an epic and eerie eight-minute song featuring a hip-hop backbeat and vocals from Lacey Guthrie, of the former Louisville band Twin Limb.
Positioning the phone to his right ear is intentional. The right one is the “good one.” Carney’s left ear only has about 15 percent hearing due to a birth defect. (He will later ask that this detail makes the story, as a kind of PSA.) “It’s really only loud social situations I struggle with,” he says. When people approach him, they sometimes talk into his left ear and he has to awkwardly turn and ask them to repeat themselves. Onstage, he stands so that everyone else playing is on his right. When Carney was 18, he had the choice to undergo surgery to correct his hearing, but he opted out and now jokes that his autobiography would be titled What?!
As the van rolls into the city, Carney and McAfee constructively argue about which song the band will open with: “Pusher” or “The Things I Do for Fun,” both from the band’s latest full-length album, Victory Laps, released in 2017. Chale guides the 20-foot-long van into a narrow alley behind the Empty Bottle, a dive venue on Western Avenue. The guys almost immediately shake off the six-hour drive and start unloading gear. One by one, they carry amps, guitars, drums and coils of wires into the venue through a small back door.
Carney hunches over and grabs a square-shaped case. He pivots and jumps from the back of the van, intending to land on both feet, but instead twists — possibly sprains — his left ankle and tumbles to the cold asphalt. He wraps his hands around his left knee, pulling it to his chest and shouting, “Fuck!” Everyone freezes. “Are you OK, man?” they ask. Carney looks pissed, but he stands and shakes it off like he’s used to this sort of thing.
As a kid, Carney was obsessed with horror and fantasy films. “But I wasn’t like a Dungeons & Dragons kid and I never read a Tolkien” — he pronounces it Toll-kee-in — “book,” he says. He grew up on Godzilla, King Kong, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans (“The original with Harry Hamlin, not the remake with Sam Worthington,” he clarifies). Carney’s music video for the Wax Fang song “Mirror, Mirror” follows a mysterious woman in a white slip who gets sucked through a mirror and into a mirror-walled dungeon full of humanoid creatures.
When he was a teenager in the late ’80s and early ’90s, MTV aired music videos, not shows about pregnant teens. “It was basically the Wild West, because it gave creative license to a lot of artists and filmmakers,” Carney says, mentioning claymation in Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” caricature puppets in Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” and “animatronic robot parts” in Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit.”
Carney made several films in high school. One was a PSA about smoking cigarettes. His mother calls it “a classic.” “Scott played the guy who smoked and went on the date with the girl,” she says. “His hair was all slicked back and he had on a nice shirt. There’s this pretty girl and they were drinking wine in a field at a card table with a nice tablecloth, and he starts coughing. It gets worse and worse. This stuff starts running down his face and, of course, it’s chocolate syrup but you think it’s blood. He collapses on the plate in front of him and the girl is horrified.”
Carney says he’s drawn to movies and music for the same reason: escapism. “They both cater to that in different ways,” he says. “I think what I take from the movies, in general, is…they are kind of boundless and you can kind of do anything, which is why I like to play with song structure and arrangement.” The 2010 Wax Fang concept album The Astronaut was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. “The Astronaut has very few words,” Carney says. “There’s a lot to be left to the imagination.”
After graduating high school, Carney went to Pittsburgh in 1998 to study film at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, where he became fond of directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman and Terry Gilliam. “My original idea was to make these musical films that were essentially music videos, but the twist would be that the soundtracks were meant to be performed live like in the silent-film era, where a musician would play in the theater accompanying the movie,” he says. Then he convinced his parents to buy him an 8-track tape recorder for his birthday. Carney would smoke cigarettes and drink coffee while writing for at least an hour every night on his Smith Corona word processor. “In my teens and early 20s, I dated some, but I was single for very long stretches of time — like years at times,” he says. “(Writing music) was what I did in my free time. I played the guitar and sang almost every day. I didn’t really feel complete if I didn’t do that.” Songs like “Sound Observations,” “Sweet Bloody Murder” and “Bi Polar Bear” began taking shape and eventually made it onto Black & Endless Night, described in a March 2006 Courier-Journal article by Jeffrey Lee Puckett as a combination of “glam rock, pop and surf riffs, with the dreamy ambiance of vintage Brian Eno and David Bowie.” “Der Conversationaliste” addresses the loneliness and boredom he was experiencing at the time. Carney sings, “Your chitter-y chatter is building suspense like a drip from a faucet. For now, let me out of this conversation. Let me out of this long small talk.”
After graduating film school in 2004, Carney returned to Louisville with the intent to re-record the songs he’d made in Pittsburgh and make an album for a “fantasy rock band that could either exist or not exist.” With recording equipment he’d accumulated in Pittsburgh, he set up a studio in the empty master bedroom of his childhood home, which his parents had recently put on the market. He was hoping to finish the record there, rent-free, but the house sold three months later. He moved his makeshift studio into the basement of the family’s new home near Southeast Christian Church, and finished some of the recordings in his rental house in Old Louisville. Months later, after delays resulting from a couple of cracked ribs from a fall down a flight of stairs, Carney finished tracking the album and was exhausted. He cold-called local recording engineer Kevin Ratterman. “I didn’t know about his music — he said he was kind of losing his mind,” Ratterman says. He agreed to help Carney work through his frustrations mixing the record but first went to see him play a show at the Water Tower. “It was just him and a pedal. I was just so blown away,” Ratterman says. “His voice was so surreal and the lyrics were so good. The music was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Avant-garde and kind of punk-y.”
Ratterman and Carney quickly became friends while mixing Black & Endless Night in Ratterman’s father’s funeral home in west Louisville. The two knew the songs needed to be played live and began a conversation about starting a band. Carney asked Ratterman, who had been in the band Elliott, to play drums. They got their mutual friend Jake Heustis, from the band Cabin, to play bass.
In 2005, the release show for Black & Endless Night was set to take place at Uncle Pleasant’s (later New Vintage, now a Cuban dance club). Carney was going to play under the name of Scott Carney and Heavy Friends. But he lost his voice the day of the show and was unable to perform. Instead, he sat at a table with handwritten responses on index cards to questions he was sure to be asked about his new band and the album he was selling. The crowd thought it was an artistic performance piece and waited for him to talk. “I make a lot of stupid jokes, but that was not one of them,” he says. “I wouldn’t cancel my release show.”
A few months later, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, which was starting its climb to jam-band fame, got his hands on the album. Carney received an email out of the blue from a friend congratulating him on making it into the New York Times. James had mentioned Carney in a story for the paper, and in The Fader. When The Fader followed up to do an official interview with Scott Carney and Heavy Friends, they decided they needed a new name. Carney has always kept a running list of band names and titles for songs and albums. Back then, the list included “Wax Fangs.” Carney made it singular, to have a sharper sound like Led Zeppelin. The band name is “sort of an oxymoron. It’s threatening but not. It’s got this kind of duality,” Carney says. (Though the group collectively settled on Wax Fang, Carney says his favorite name at the time was Electric Chariot.) In the fall of 2006, My Morning Jacket invited Wax Fang on a two-week Midwest tour. Carney and Ratterman piled inside Heustis’ beat-up blue Ford van, traveling alongside the MMJ tour bus. Carney remembers the band making $500 for each of the 10 shows. At the time, Carney was busing tables at North End Cafe, Ratterman was a self-employed recording engineer and Heustis worked for his dad at NAPA Auto Parts. “We paid for hotel rooms, meals, loss of income — you know, all the stuff people don’t consider when you’re on the road without financing,” Carney says.
After the tour, the band hunkered down and started working on La La Land, recording in Memphis’ Ardent Studios, where artists like R.E.M., Bob Dylan and the White Stripes have recorded.
After the release of La La Land in 2007, the band toured off and on over the next three years. Carney took out a line of credit on his house to help fund the band’s projects and travel. Money was tight. Carney remembers catching flak for using band money to buy a banana from a gas station while they were on the road. “It was 75 cents, and I was fucking starving because I didn’t have any money,” he says.
“My body and my personal health are not conducive to that kind of lifestyle. At the end of the day, I have to get up onstage and blow people’s minds or whatever. It’s really hard to do that when you haven’t slept in five days and have been eating like shit. Just being in a van sucks.”
Carney says Ratterman was the only one making money at the time. “He could make $300 a day with his recording studio. It would take Jake and I two weeks, working 40 hours a week, to make that kind of money. It was straining on all of our personal relationships at the time, too. It was sort of a point of desolation. I really wanted to do it, but how much was I willing to suffer?” Carney says.
In 2010, after finishing part of Wax Fang’s third album, The Astronaut, Ratterman left the band to focus solely on his recording studio, La La Land, named after the band’s second album. “Shit wasn’t looking good,” Carney says. “Before 2014, I hadn’t made any money doing this. I put pretty much all of my free time and energy and money into it. I sacrificed relationships and the idea of living a normal life. I was constantly broke, and because I was constantly broke I was pretty miserable. I didn’t need or want to make piles of cash, but I needed something. I needed anything. Kevin left the band, and it was like, ‘OK, so maybe this isn’t going to go on much longer.’”
Tired, broke and down a band member, Carney went to Pittsburgh to visit friends for his 33rd birthday. “I was pretty much done with Wax Fang at that moment,” he says. Then he received a phone call on the drive. Carney doesn’t answer unknown numbers, but the man left a message. It was Mike Barker, creator of the animated series American Dad! Barker, who had featured My Morning Jacket on his show, had come across a clip of Wax Fang, in Tron suits, opening for an MMJ Halloween show at the Yum! Center. He told Carney that “Majestic” pushed him through some creative struggles and asked to use the song in an episode. “I told him, ‘Of course, that’ll be $7 million,’” Carney says, laughing. Carney still receives a “nice paycheck” a couple times a year when the episode airs.
Wax Fang moved forward with Heustis and McAfee. In the summer of 2013, they began taking writing retreats to Heustis’ family cabin on the Kentucky River, an hour outside Louisville. On Labor Day weekend, they planned to start recording the material that would eventually become 2017’s Victory Laps. But when Heustis arrived for the long weekend, he let McAfee and Carney know that he would be leaving the band to pursue his career in visual arts.
“It was a bummer. I walked out to the woods and had a momentary existential crisis. I was like, ‘Here I am. Alone again,’” Carney says. “At the end of the day, though, I’m not going to stop what I’m here to do just because someone else doesn’t want to come along for the ride anymore. No. I just have to fucking pull myself up by my bootstraps and get back to work.”
It’s nearing 8 p.m. and the Empty Bottle is living up to its name: empty. A couple of tattooed Chicagoans linger around worn pool tables at the front of the poorly lit venue, but it’s unclear if they’ve come for the show. Promotional posters both forgotten and present plaster the thick black pillars throughout the main venue space — including the poster for the show Wax Fang is about to play.
Carney and the band are in the green room in the basement. The brownish-yellow concrete walls are covered in sloppy, handwritten band names and drunken notes like “Noah’s Ark was a spaceship.” Thrift-store couches against each of the four walls give off a mildew smell. Carney drinks herbal tea while elevating his injured foot. Driscoll dabs beet juice out of his Champion sweatshirt with a napkin. McAfee and Chale sip “Dad Lites” (Miller Lite). Carney and Driscoll make their way upstairs, lurking in the back while watching opening bands half Carney’s age. “When I’m onstage, I kind of turn into a space cadet,” Carney says. “It’s not that I’m detached from the present, but there is this weird balance I have to strike with being present in the moment and letting my muscle memory do its thing without overthinking,” he says.
At 11 p.m., the bandmates down a shot of El Jimador tequila in the green room — a Wax Fang tradition — before making their way upstairs. A crowd of about 70 — both longtime fans and new ones in their 20s — has filled out the space. Carney limps to a chair on the left side of the stage, unable to stand and play after hurting his ankle. A woman with long brown hair stands directly in front of the stage, unable to contain her excitement as she sways back and forth waiting for her favorite band to start playing. (“That’s Caroline,” Carney says later, describing her as Wax Fang’s biggest fan. “She’s a sweetheart.” She has traveled solo from Louisville to see them play. She has been to many Wax Fang shows in the past decade.)
Carney greets the crowd with an apology for having to sit during the show. He places his retro-looking guitar on his lap. Driscoll presses his fingers into the keyboard, playing the gritty opening notes to “Pusher.” Carney leans toward the mic. “Why don’t you come over and let me show ya all of the things you can only dream of?” he sings.
The original Wax Fang.
In May, Wax Fang was due to release a four-track EP of songs Carney wrote over the years that “didn’t cut the mustard” for any of the albums. But after recording the songs, Carney and McAfee found a slight imperfection with a guitar part on one of the tracks. Nobody else would have noticed, but they wanted to re-record because, McAfee says, they’re “inadvertently perfectionists. It’s always been, ‘It’ll get done when it gets done.’ What’s the point in doing it unless it’s going to be awesome?”
Jeffrey Lee Puckett from the C-J says that there aren’t many bands in Louisville that have lasted as long as Wax Fang and are still making new music. “As a music writer, you always want to know what Scott is up to,” he says. “It’s also been somewhat frustrating because he clearly takes his time with things, and there was a point when I thought they were going to be the next really big thing — and a lot of people were convinced of that too — but of course that’s super-hard to do. I don’t know if it really helps them that much that they were so deliberate with stuff.
“I just always felt they were one of the top three or four bands in the city, alongside MMJ, Will Oldham and Cheyenne Mize. I really thought they were going to take off.”
Carney, who turns 40 in October, gets asked regularly why Wax Fang isn’t more famous than they are. “That’s the way the cookie crumbled,” Carney says. “Not everyone gets as lucky as My Morning Jacket or U2 or the Foo Fighters or the Rolling Stones. Not everyone gets there, but that doesn’t mean that we’re less of a band or less successful.” He says that he plays the lottery from time to time. “I always attest that I don’t need the jackpot. Just give me a little to fund whatever projects I have, and I’ll take care of the rest. I don’t have these illustrious dreams of living in a mansion in L.A. or New York. My idea of success has always been to have the tools and resources to do what I need to do and an audience who appreciates it. I feel pretty comfortable where I’m at. I’m not going to retire early, but if I’m really lucky, I’ll be able to continue doing this until I decide not to or I die.”
Onstage at the Empty Bottle, Carney slumps over his guitar, rocking the ending solo of the nearly 17-minute song “The Astronaut, Pt. 1.” His loose hair swings in front of his face, a motion he once aimed to control with a white sweatband so he could see his fingers on the guitar frets. The crowd claps and hollers. Carney smiles, widening his eyes like a cartoon character. Someone yells, “Holy shit! That was awesome!”
“That was delightful,” Carney says in a playful tone. “Should we play more songs? We were going to stop there, but we can do a few more.” The crowd cheers. “Do you guys want me to hobble offstage, then you guys cheer and I’ll hobble back? Or can we just skip that whole part?” A fan yells for the song “Can You See the Light” off La La Land.
“Oh, we’ve never played that one with this group,” Carney says, referencing Wax Fang’s current lineup. “I probably couldn’t remember it honestly.” He lets out a laugh. “Next time we’ll put it on the list.” Carney strums his guitar and starts to play “Der Conversationaliste,” the song about loneliness and being stuck that he wrote in Pittsburgh more than a decade ago.
After the show, Carney is happy to spend an hour talking with fans and signing a couple copies of The Astronaut. “We don’t make music for mass appeal, so the fact that I found an audience is something I’m grateful for,” he says. “I’m happy to play the songs they want to hear, as long as I get to tickle my own fancy and play new stuff too.”
The band finishes loading everything into the van after 1 a.m. It’s an hour drive to the Best Western in Gary, Indiana.
