RUYTER SUYS, guitar player from stoner metal legends NASHVILLE PUSSY, tells ALASDAIR DUNCAN about life on the road, and the seamier side of bonding with band-mates.

People never believe me when I tell them that Nashville Pussy are my favourite band in the world to interview, but the hard-rocking, fire-breathing, profanity-spewing Georgia natives are, quite simply, the nicest people in the entire world. Their enthusiasm is endless, their love of playing music is boundless, and their debauched tales of life on the road are spit-out-your-whiskey funny. Blaine Cartwright and Ruyter Suys, the husband and wife duo at the centre of the band, recently celebrated their seventeenth anniversary, so naturally, they did it with a bang.

“We played a show in Denver, for a whole bunch of snow-boarders who were there for a convention,” Suys tells me, laughing. “They were all powder hungry, just waiting for the first good snowfall so they could just go nuts. I don’t know how many of them had even heard of us before, but we were a rock band and we were playing there so they just got incredibly into it and super rowdy. Someone gave us a vaporiser for smoking weed, and we have a friend who’s a five-star chef who brought us food at our hotel, which was stunning. It was a good little anniversary weekend.”

Nashville Pussy have been stalking the highways of America since the mid-‘90s, and in any town where they pull up, they’re never short of an invitation to party. “Whenever we pull up somewhere, we always get ‘hey, come on by and we’ll fuckin’ barbecue this or that’, and I always think, I would love to do that, but we have this thing called a show.” It’s mostly cook-outs and keg parties, but sometimes, the offers are of a more adult nature. “The one I usually get is ‘I respect the hell out of your husband, but ...’ That’s the worst line ever!” Suys says, in a mixture of amusement and disgust. “You have to work harder than that to get me.”

Several years back, Nashville Pussy took on a new bass player in the form of tattooed punk rocker Karen Cuda. Of course, there’s a story there, too. “We tried to fucking haze her, but she wound up hazing us,” Suys tells me. “We wanted to see just how drunk we could get her, so we took her to our favourite bar, then another bar, then back to our house where we wound up drinking in the wee hours of the morning. She was sitting on the kitchen counter farting and we were passed out under the kitchen counter and she was still going. We were like, this girl’s good.

“We’d known her for one day when this happened. At the end of it all, and she just said ‘we broke the fart barrier – I think we’re going to be good friends!’ Since then, Cuda has been right at home in the Nashville Pussy family. “She’s professional, man,” Suys tells me. “She drinks harder than any of us and she wants to rock as hard as all of us, and she’s willing to ride the wild roller coaster that is rock & roll. We’re going to keep her as long as she’ll have us, man.”

NASHVILLE PUSSY play a benefit for the Sun State Roller Girls at The Zoo on Saturday Mar 6, alongside Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side, The Medicine Show and Sue Ray. I got so wrapped up in that fart story I forgot to even mention that they have a covers album coming out later this year, but look out for it. www.nashvillepussy.com

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