Neo-psych rock three decades in the making. Meet The Dandy Warhols.

Hello, Portland!

What happens when you start a band in the early 90s in the Pacific Northwest? You start with zero rules. So when Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Peter Holström founded The Dandy Warhols in 1994 by mixing brit pop, 60s rock and a dreamy shoegaze sound‚ it made all the sense in the world. When asked why he started the band, Taylor-Taylon answered, “We wanted to make music to drink to.” Makes sense. And once Zia McCabe joined the boys as a keyboardist in ‘95, they started to take off. A term which had an entirely different meaning for their live shows, where clothing, at times, was optional.

The Capitol of LA.

After releasing a super successful first album Dandys Rule OK on a small indie label, the band signed with mega music behemoth Capitol Records. All three single from their sophomore album The Dandy Warhols Come Down broke into the UK Top 40. Which meant they were on the cusp of taking over the entire earth with the velvety, slightly psychedelic, daydreamy sounds. And with a new/current drummer Brent DeBoer, they’d finally founded the family that is still touring to this day.

World domination.

The Dandys’ third and best-selling album Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia catapulted the group into the hearts and ears of the masses. The single “Bohemian Like You” was featured on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a well as the indie film Igby Goes Down with Kieran Culkin. So what do you do all this new fame and success? The first thing that comes to any young band member’s mind: invest. Taylor-Taylor bought a massive, quarter-city-block PDX warehouse and dubbed it “The Odditorium.” Part rehearsal space, part recording studio and, most recently, part wine bar called Old Portland, Music AND drinks, check.

Into the stratosphere.

Throughout the 2000s, The Dandy Warhols collaborated with some of the greatest musicians in the universe, including a remake of Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat with David Bowie.  They made a new studio album was produced by Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran. They were subjects of a documentary film entitled Dig! that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. And over the years, they’ve collaborated with indie greats such as The Kooks, J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr, Spoon and The Bravery.

A new cardboard dimension.

As luck would have it, The Dandy Warhols aren’t afraid of weird. So when they rolled into Paramount Recording Studios and were presented with a full four-piece band’s worth of cardboard instruments, they plugged in and turned the whole thing into something strange and sublime. You’re invited to experience the Dandys on the cardboard Fender Strat, Tele, Bass, plus the Masters of Maple drum kit. The distortion-drenched elegance sounds like it’s coming from conventional instruments. But the Ernest and Signal Snowboards collaboration reshaped what’s possible with cardboard. As Taylor-Taylor put it, “It feels different when you squeeze it.”