Antietam Comes Alive, for 40 Years and Counting 

Part indie rock pioneering epic, part love yarn and a whole lot of guitar godhead shred, the story of Antietam is indeed a sprawling one that’s fit to be told in either a memoir or rockumentary.

For a whopping and trailblazing 40 years (this year marks the Louisville-via-NYC institution’s milestone 40th anniversary), the trio led by longtime married couple, guitarist and singer Tara Key and bassist Tim Harris, with drummer Josh Madell have played a crucial role in ruling the underground rock roost alongside pals like Yo La Tengo. 

Antietam and Yo La Tengo are forever linked in sonic arms, having shared bills galore for decades on end, covering each other’s songs (check out YLT’s version of “Orange Song” and their take on “Naples’) and producing records (see the Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley-produced Burgoo from 1990). It also goes without saying that Kaplan learned more than a thing or two from Key’s own guitar-slaying heroics; in a just world, Antietam’s six-string face-melter undoubtedly would find herself on one of those best-ever guitarists lists. This is not to mention that Yo La’s very first gig in 1984 was at the legendary Hoboken club Maxwell’s with Antietam, who were recent transplants to New York playing only their third gig. 

And thus their path was paved, resulting in a hugely influential trajectory worthy of the punk rock bible of bibles, Our Band Could Be Your Life.

Antietam — initially featuring a lineup of Key, Harris, bassist Wolf Knapp and drummer Mike Weinert — were born from the ashes of Babylon Dance Band and No Fun in Louisville, before they all made their way to New York City. The rest, as they say, is history. 

Over its 40-year arc, Antietam has amassed an indie rock-defining catalog complete with records released by labels like Homestead (Gerard Cosloy signed them after seeing them open for Hüsker Dü), Triple X (where strangely they were label-mates with Jane’s Addiction) and Carrot Top. They’ve also gone through reinventions in sound, experimentation and aesthetics; no Antietam record sounds the same. On mid-eighties albums like Music From Elba and their self-titled record from 1985, Antietam spew out a beautifully strange and disjointed art-rock. Skip ahead to live document Antietam Comes Live! from ‘92 and ‘94’s Rope-a-Dope and prepare yourself for scorched-earth roots-rock shred courtesy of Key. 

 

 

Antietam has also helped spearhead myriad different movements and scenes, whether in Louisville, where they witnessed the local rise of Squirrel Bait and Slint, then on to New York and Hoboken where they were staples at CBGB’s, Maxwell’s, Brownie’s and other long-defunct hubs forming community alongside the likes of The Scene Is Now, Sleepyhead, The Special Pillow, the aforementioned Yo La and many more pals that, like Antietam, are still plugging away, albeit at a bit slower pace.  

For this interview, I met Key and Harris at their longtime rehearsal and recording space in midtown at the famous The Music Building. There was a lot to celebrate and dive into: their new gorgeous EP called Pitch & Yaw which they’ve put out themselves on their own Motorific Sounds label, the anniversary of the band and recollections of the last forty years. This much is certain: Antietam has no regrets. Key and Harris are humble, thankful for all the opportunities they’ve had over the years and funny as all heck. Over the course of our two-hour hang, hilarity ensued as they playfully bickered over memories, records and shows while finishing each other’s sentences with a sort of special telepathy they obviously share both personally and creatively in the band setting (you’ll get that vibe as you read on).  

Antietam are also prepping for shows this month. They’ll be playing in Catskill on August 31st at the second edition of Dromedary Records DromFest ‘24, a weekend-long celebration of indie rock taking place in the Hudson Valley, New York. Tickets are available here. They’ll also be playing a DromFest warmup show at Sleepwalk (251 Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn) on August 29th.       

 

You were saying that Antietam has been here at The Music Building since the ’80s?

TIM: We joined “the room” in the late ’80s, but current members of the Scene Is Now and Escape By Ostrich have been in here longer than we have. Although, I do have to say, the room moved at one point. 

TARA: Yeah, it was on the seventh floor. Sue Garner found this room.

TIM: Over the years, there have been, at least, 25 great NYC bands sharing it, usually three to five at any given time. 

TARA: Did we come here straight from the Jersey City basement? 

TIM: We did. 

TARA: So that was ‘88 or ‘87. 

 

Most of the Antietam records were recorded here?

TARA: I got serious about trying to figure out how to record us after seven studio records (and one live at CBGBs) including a spate in the mid-90s—Rope-A-Dope and my two solo records. Then we recorded much of the first Rizzo/Key record, Dark Edson Tiger, at our apartment and here, as well as Victory Park. 

I was getting tired of feeling time/money pressure in the studio and I also felt like if you’re going to do something, for now what has become forty years, become a good mechanic; I should know how to fix a car if it’s broken. Plus, we learned a lot about the what and why of sounds, so that the next time we did get to go into a studio (for Opus Mixtum and Tenth Life) we could be more focused on and knowledgeable about what we wanted. 

I love both situations—being able to go to a studio and just concentrate on playing, and, just as much, doing it ourselves, wearing the hat of engineer and performer. Both situations allow for different types of luxury.

TIM: Recording in a studio or in your own space both have their advantages. For Tara’s solo records we went up to Jon Williams’ cabin in Northern Vermont and lived there and recorded, and that was great immersion. There was less of that feeling of taking your SATs when you’re playing a guitar solo while paying money for studio time. But now in our place, you can play the guitar solo 500 times if you like, so that can be good or bad… 

TARA: But an interesting development on this last record (Pitch & Yaw) is I did not play the guitar solo 5,000 times. I was very focused, which was cool and different… 

TIM: I would say some of our friends, who have the wherewithal to record wherever they want, are recording in their own spaces because of the technology and… 

TARA: …the comfort level…

TIM: It’s like the means of production has become ours.  

 

So you record right here in this room and right outside is the hustle and bustle of 8th Avenue and Port Authority traffic?

TIM: Yeah, you get background horns and sirens and stuff like that…

TARA: But I don’t mind environmental sounds because I really like saying “here’s where we are and this is what we are doing right now.” And the activity five floors down is a good movie to watch on break.

 

Did you record the new EP here, Pitch & Yaw?

TARA: Yeah. I think I recorded everything here. I might have done a vocal at home. 

TIM: (to Tara) Did we record upstate at all?

TARA: Oh, right. We did the vocals for “Pitch & Yaw” up there and we did your “Cyrene” vocal up there. We have friends that have a place in upstate New York with a really lovely, big, very tall-ceilinged painting studio and I’ve done stuff there before, like guitar solos and paintings so I think we did vocals for two songs of the four up there. 

 

 

Let’s talk the milestone anniversary, 40 years as a band! Did you celebrate the 20th or 30th year?

TARA: I don’t think we did! Derby Day 1978 marked my first gig ever, with my first band, No Fun. (And Derby Day 1984 is the birthday of Antietam, when Wolf and Mike showed up in Hoboken and we jammed for the first time.) We would often go home to Louisville to play Derby weekend throughout the 1990s, both with Antietam and the Babylon Dance Band, and we often play on Derby Day, like with Wild Carnation at Maxwell’s in 2012, when, if you attended, we provided cheese straws and individual chess pie tarts that we baked for refreshments. So it’s always been a special day…

TIM: We went through a lot of different phases of our band. We released the first two records in 1985-1986, which were really different, and then Wolf left; we made Burgoo with Charles Schultz and Ira and Georgia producing. Then, the final phase began when Josh joined as an underage guy, end of 1990. 

 

Josh must have been super-young when he joined Antietam. 

TARA: He was 20. When we played at South by Southwest that first year, he went out to the van to get something and they wouldn’t let him back in. 

TIM: And now he’s been in the band for like 34 years. That’s kinda crazy. All but the first six years. 

TARA: I know!

TIM: So when he joined the band, we put out a ton of records from ‘90 to ‘95. We put out Everywhere Outside, Antietam Comes Alive! and Rope-a-Dope. Three Antietam records, and we put out two Tara Key records and we put out the Babylon Dance Band’s Four on One, on Matador— the Dance Band was our band from Louisville. So, we put out six records in those years. The Rizzo/Key record followed in 2000… 

TARA: …but not an Antietam record in almost ten years from Rope-A-Dope to Victory Park…

TIM: And a lot of people thought we broke up but we were still playing.

TARA: It’s so hard to explain why that happened! 

 

That was actually one of my questions, why there wasn’t an Antietam record for so many years but at the same time you all remained pretty active. 

TARA: It wasn’t a break. It’s often written that we broke up and reunited for Victory Park (I see you Wikipedia). The thing was, we didn’t have a label. We pretty much had always had labels, from the first Homestead stint to Triple X and Homestead again and then Bettina (Richards at Thrill Jockey) put out the Rizzo/Key record in 2000. But in terms of Antietam, it was a situation where we didn’t have money to make a record and we didn’t have a label. 

TIM: But that’s not totally true…it was actually a really busy time. After Tara’s second solo record, Ear & Echo, we returned to Jon’s studio and put out a single in 1996 and then we recorded another group of songs there in 1997.

TARA: …True. Which was kind of an extended EP. 

TIM: So we didn’t ever finish that and didn’t put it out. Then in this millennium, after that first Rizzo/Key record, Patrick Monaghan at Carrot Top Records in Chicago made possible Victory Park (2004 with Tara Jane O’Neil mixing), Opus Mixtum (2008, triple vinyl!), and Tenth Life (2011). A second Rizzo/Key album, Double Star, happened in 2010. Then Intimations of Immortality in 2017, His Majesty’s Request in ‘21 and now Pitch & Yaw. So we’ve been really busy in this century… 

TARA: The point being, for those ten years or so, we were practicing three times a week. We were playing darts, we were drinking beers; we were growing and refining as a band. We were also just happy being a band and we were playing live during that period, too… 

 

 

Yes, I remember you guys were playing CB’s a lot and Maxwell’s.

TIM: We always played throughout the late 90’s, also at Brownies, the Cooler, Tonic and places like that.

TARA: But the other thing too was just that that lost EP from Jon’s in 1997 was the first time in my life that I felt like “Yeah…no” and having that quality control instinct step in was kind of interesting. I listen to some of that stuff now and I think that we were a little too hard on it.

TIM: It wasn’t fully realized. 

TARA: It was like a half-baked cookie and it was obvious to us and then other things kind of came into ascendancy that sounded better to us and we worked on those and that eventually became Victory Park.

TIM: But we also did a lot of odds and sods tracks, like we put out our own single, we contributed to a couple of compilations…

TARA: …a Dead Moon compilation… 

TIM: …We played on other people’s records…

TARA: That’s another thing and a good point to make…

TIM: Josh played in a couple of other bands…

TARA: You played in The Special Pillow.

TIM: I played, for five years, cello in The Special Pillow. 

TARA: And that’s a really interesting distinction to make because up to that point, I don’t know whether it was insecurity or just needing this kind of weird focus, but I wasn’t really a jammer on other people’s stuff very often. I had a mindset of “we are a platoon, we have to make the platoon happen.”

TIM: …but you did play on Eleventh Dream Day’s…

TARA: But my point is this…

TIM: This interview is just gonna be us arguing…

(Laughing)

TARA: It’s like Rashomon (laughing)!. So…the point I’m trying to make is during that ten years, it really opened up my head and heart to jamming with other people, shape-shifting, doing things that weren’t necessarily in my comfort zone. And, ultimately, I think that threw us into this whole era where collaboration is very easy and common for us now. There weren’t that many guests on our records up to the point where I made the solo records and then that kind of started a reboot for me about how I wanted to work and how I am inspired.

TIM: That probably comes out of when we were in the Babylon Dance Band starting in 1978, and Tara was in No Fun before that, Louisville’s first punk rock band. It was us against the world, you know, punk rock band, it was really hard to find anywhere to play. It was really exciting when we started traveling out of town, coming up to New York. We did pretty great just in terms of getting gigs but it was always like that sense of the band over everything and then that band broke up. Tara and I moved to New York, we started Antietam and so for another decade, even though the membership changed, it was still always…

TARA: …the band!

TIM: …the band. And then when people asked her to do solo records, we were like, why not? With a bunch of people we knew. We’ve always had this strong image that people thought we were this one thing, based on Tara’s guitar playing power and then we…

TARA: …after so many years, you might want to take a look at doing something else (laughing)!

 

Yes, for a long time, you were known as or framed as, say, by the Village Voice or whatever publication, as more of a “live band” than a recorded-type band.

TIM: Yep, yep…

TARA: We will keep this conversation going with listeners and we will keep trying to put in their brains the same pop song that we’ve heard in our brains for forty years that will transcend all of this and take that right to the core (laughing)!

TIM: It’s an interesting perspective because we had a tag that we weren’t as good recorded as we were live and we sort of suffered from that. I think some of that was unfair because when you go back and listen to the records now, for one thing, I think they sound great. We just remastered those first two (albums) but things like Burgoo and Everywhere Outside, were sort of in that age of Nirvana, Alice in Chains and everything was, like, big guitar. But now when I listen to those recordings, they rock hard. 

The other thing I just wanted to say is, we in our minds, were always thinking about all these different kinds of music, like the stuff that’s on the Rizzo/Key records that’s very ambient, if you will, and some stuff from our roots that’s kind of southern or country with folky aspects. When we did Opus Mixtum, the triple album in 2008, we had collected a lot of material that didn’t exactly fit our band—Tara wrote a lot of it herself. We actually conceived of having this other record that was going to be the different stuff and then we combined it with our band material and put it together for this triple record (Opus Mixtum). Mostly people loved it but there were some responses that were like, “This is not Antietam!” 

TARA: Another response was “It should have been a different record!” But that kind of dichotomy has gone on for a long time. I write on acoustic. I write on electric. I write on piano. When I did the solo, more acoustic-based records, I got really tired of that being a separate identity and then it seemed like every time we played, people would say, “Now, is this the Tara Key Band or Antietam?” And it’s just like “Fuck!” It’s all happening from “here” so put it all in the same place, you know? 

The other thing too is I’m doing this to keep growing and I’m doing this because I want to pull different things out of myself or hear things in a different way. I look for challenge now rather than ducking it by sticking to the tried and true. I am really gratified that people want to come along on that exploration but it’s kind of like it might mean right now I feel like playing intensely strummed acoustic guitar for six months so the right now spark is always where it’s all going to come from and it might not fit into a tidy picture frame. 

 

 

Did you feel disrespected as a band?

TARA: No. I feel lucky to have all the ears we do. The mid-1990s that we were talking about in particular was a confusing time, because quite honestly, I know we have this thing. We’ve always had this thing which is “the woman playing guitar” hook, you know? And during that era, in particular, what I like to refer to as the “Brass Ring Era,” that was a calling card to pull out of your pocket. There was discomfort for me in that positioning; I’ve always just wanted to be a person in a band and so during that period of time where there was this grab bag of “maybe you could make it if you were this,” I feel that it was easier to get attention for that project (the TK project) than the band. That was just discomforting to me. Since then I’ve come to peace with the woman-in-rock thing. I had the privilege of having the very strong influence of my mother, who was a vital worker in the desegregation of the Louisville school system, and since I can remember, since I was the youngest at home, I was going with her to meetings where she was the only woman in a room of men. So that’s where I came from. But then I realized there are women, especially during that era, who may have been scared away, intimidated, from starting a band when it was a little less common for women to be playing (in a band). Now it’s kind of a non-issue. But, I had to acknowledge, “okay, this is kind of terrifying for some women and so we do need to honor that and talk about it.” But at that time, it just felt like, I don’t know, I was uncomfortable with it. If I was special I wanted that to be because of my playing.

Circling back to the disrespected thing: A, absolutely not, and B, It’s important to say that I am really grateful to be here doing this with these two guys and all of the collaborators and whatever the journey is, that’s what it is. Yes, if you had asked me in 1997 if I was frustrated that I wasn’t on a major when everybody was getting a deal, I bet I would have probably had a mealy-mouthed response, (which you could have read through) that said, yes. But it was really an awesome relief to move out of that era and lose those litmus tests and then have so much in front of us. I’ll never bemoan what we have now. I’ve been feeling this getting a little older, too: I feel like now it’s all kind of come full circle and I’m remembering the reasons why I did this in the first place. And that’s where I’m at now. It’s just a very primal thing of, you don’t have to do this, you choose to do this and it gives you incredible joy and so you do it and if a lot of people respond to it, that’s great. Plus it’s the thing I do best.

 

Even though it’s your 40th anniversary as a band, it sounds as if you reflect a lot on the band’s arc, in general.

TARA: I’m always referencing forward and backwards.

TIM: I would say the impulse really hasn’t changed for me since we started punk rock bands in Louisville in 1978. My friends from high school Marc Zakem and Chip Nold and I started the Babylon Dance Band. All of us were getting out of college and kind of going, “what are we going to do with our lives?” and considering different possibilities. And we were just all like, “this is the thing we want to do more than anything else, you know?” (Laughs)

I mean, not for a lot of good reasons but just because we did. 

TARA: It feels good–that’s the reason. Both in the sense of spiritually it feels good but also physically it feels good. Hitting a perfect shot in tennis, hitting an E chord or sinking a three-pointer–all those things are equal to me and the way they make me feel. It feels complete—successful—powerful. I still hit E chords—the other two thrills are suspect at this point in time. All kidding aside, we’re doing it because we want to do it and the it is whatever the it is, no strings attached.

 

Had you stayed in Louisville, do you think you could have done Antietam there or you had to move to New York for the band to happen?

TIM: Well, Antietam didn’t start until four Louisvillians were here. Louisville is also a really great music town and there’s so many great musicians from there. At the time we left, a lot of people left, like Janet went to Chicago and started Eleventh Dream Day and we moved to New York. 

TARA: There was a tight, beautiful scene there and we wore each other out and that’s happened several times through the years in Louisville. There’s been these incredibly productive cycles and then lulls and that was just a lull time. Also, we had both been in New York for short and extended periods before that. I was here when I was 16, was desperate to get back and I just didn’t really feel like I was going to be complete until I lived here. I was here for a summer going to Parsons–the 1974 summer when I was one of the winners of the RCA David Bowie lookalike contest in the year of the Diamond Dogs, which this year is now the year of the golden Diamond Dogs! (Laughing)

TIM: Louisville in the ’80s and ‘90s went through Squirrel Bait, Slint, Kinghorse and Rodan — there was a great scene. But at the time we left, there weren’t many places for us to play. There were big new wave bands who could get gigs… 

TARA: …also, we were coming up here with the Dance Band so we’d made connections, specifically with Steve Fallon at Maxwell’s, who provided the landing pad for us when we got here. Then we made a new family up here while keeping our musical family ties in Louisville as well. For better or worse, I don’t know, but it’s been hard for me to really ever play music with people that I don’t feel are friends or that I would get comfortable with having as friends and maybe we meet that way and we develop a friendship through playing that goes even deeper. 

Josh was underage when he joined the band. Now, he has a family and he’s had a really successful business with the store (Other Music). I’ve seen him grow up, I am seeing his daughter grow up, we’ve grown up and we’ve grown up together. Bottom line, I need to connect with the humans I am playing with and it’s essential that when we aren’t playing we are simpatico enough to hang out, share a meal, have some laughs and talk about…whatever…together. I know that shows in the jams.

 

It seems like Antietam built up a community here and for decades you’ve played with pals like Yo La Tengo, The Special Pillow and so many more…and so many of those bands are still around, as Antietam are, too…

TIM: …The Scene Is Now have been going for forty years or more. It was interesting. We had this real scene in Louisville and we played in New York when we were living in Louisville in the Dance Band at places like Danceteria and the Peppermint Lounge and Maxwell’s. Then when we moved up here we were in that mid-80s CBGB’s scene with Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. and all that. Then there was kind of a generation of the 1990s that included Sleepyhead and Love Child and a lot of wild child rockers who went to college then who were Josh’s age.

TARA: It’s incredible to think of all the rings around our tree, though. It’s mind blowing that when we were hanging with the crew of the 90’s, we were, in a sense, already like grandparents in terms of our experience (laughing)… 

TIM: …I like to think avuncular. 

TARA: Yes, avuncular for sure. But if you look at the genealogical tree, it’s like we had been through two incarnations of this already. 

TIM: I always laugh when you get up to the Strokes, who had a studio in this building. We were living through “the fourth return of the guitar.” Each time it would be like, “the guitar is back!” 

TARA: Yeah. 

 

You mentioned Homestead before. When you got signed there, even though it was sort of its second incarnation, did you think of it as a major feat since Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. were on there earlier, like you “made it”?

TARA: No, we were signed during that first classic incarnation of the label as well as the second in 1993. It was a big deal in 1985. The Sonic Youth and Dinosaur records both came out the same year as our debut. Gerard saw us at Maxwell’s with Husker Du a couple of days before New Year’s Eve 1984 and asked us to make a record on the spot.

TIM: Our first record was on our terms, a hit for us. We got a good review in the Village Voice, which was really important at that time. Then we made Music for Elba. Those two records, just working with Wolf and everything, it was wild. It was like none of us had a real preconception of what we were doing and we played two basses and we made lots of noise. It was very experimental and we had some songs and it was really an interesting conflict of Ideas. It wasn’t like one person going, “here’s my vision of what this music will be and ya’ll all do it.” It was like we were fighting with each other sonically and it was really cool. It was chaotic. 

TARA: It was music of collision, in the best way. 

TIM: Then when Wolf left the band we became a power trio. After those first two on Homestead—then we went to Triple X Records in Los Angeles for three albums and then we came back to Homestead for Rope-a-Dope and Tara’s solo records, which was a different incarnation of the label  Homestead. Steve Joerg was running that after Ken Katkin had been in charge. 

How weird was it to land on Triple X? I mean Antietam were labelmates with Jane’s Addiction? That’s a strange combo. 

TIM: Well, Triple X was a very weird place to land. So my friend Charley Brown from high school was the manager of Jane’s Addiction and when we were on Triple X, our labelmates included Jane’s Addiction, Bo Diddley…

TARA: …Of Cabbages and Kings…

TIM: Celebrity Skin. 

TARA: It was a totally weird place to land and it was kind of because Antietam needed somewhere to land…

TIM: …and Social Distortion!

TARA: …and Charley was helpful in us doing that. I think that the folks at Triple X—it was primarily a West Coast label at that point—I think they had an interest in doing something in New York. It was a fine collaboration but it wasn’t the most simpatico. 

TIM: Part of that, too, was Matador started and they signed many of our friends but Matador did not sign Antietam so we went with this West Coast label, we had a West Coast booking agent for a while and we did a bunch of trips…We did a lot of touring through those years and put out that flurry of like eight records. Matador did put out the Babylon Dance Band record that we made after reuniting in 1994.

 

Did you play with other Triple X bands at that time?

TARA: Just one label showcase here for CMJ. They were not ignoring us; it was a well-meaning conversation but I don’t think that everybody exactly understood each other. And I think it was a little more “businessy” of a label.

 

Were you bummed at all watching your friends sign with Matador where Antietam wasn’t?

TARA: I was never bummed that my friends got on Matador!

Never bummed about my friends. I can’t say that more strongly… 

TIM: And then Eleventh Dream Day was on Atlantic Records for a couple of records. 

TARA: The point being, every time somebody got signed to a label they made sure good things happened to their friends, too. 

TIM: In the end, we went through a lot of different labels, all of whom did really nice things for us and we appreciate it.

 

VIDEO: Antietam live at the Middle East 1990