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It was a warm night in August with a cool Erie breeze when I sat down with the frontman from one of the most intriguing bands currently on the touring circuit.  Slim Cessna’s Auto Club play a sort of dark Southern gothic bluegrass/gospel that reaches for the soul the way less-inspired evangelists reach for the wallet.  Whether singing about murder by shovel or delivering an odd ode to Roger Williams, founder of the Baptist Church in America, they never fail to exhibit all of the joyous dementia that enraptures the spiritually gifted among us.  Rather than simply being a novelty act, their saving grace is they owe at least as much to Nick Cave as to the Carter Family.  Indeed the preceding concert had built to a frenetic elation as vocalists Slim and Munly proselytized and testified to the wretched bar patrons whose weakened spirits were in need of lifting, urging them to shed the shackles of sin and to tongue the other cheek.  The peculiar thing is that the band’s illusive irreverence comes full circle, by and by, and manifests itself as a strangely religious experience.   

Utter Trash: How did the name of the band come about, in particular the Auto Club part?
Slim Cessna:  Honestly, I’m not even sure how to answer that because it happened so long ago, maybe twelve or thirteen years ago.  I think maybe at first we weren’t really serious about what we were doing, so we though of anything.  In Denver there’s a lot of low-rider clubs and things like that, so you’d always see posters for like the Coyote Car Club or the Saint Mary’s Auto Club, and all these different groups of people with their own car clubs, which were all low-riders in certain neighborhoods in Denver.  So somehow we just called Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and I honestly don’t know why we did that.  I think we thought it was funny because we didn’t have low-riders – we had Toyotas and Subarus.   

UT: With your stage show, have any particular preachers or evangelists inspired your performance to where you’ve adopted some of their mannerisms or inflections?
SC: Performance-wise I’m not sure.  I think Munly and I have just fed off of each other over the last 11 years or so, and it just keeps building.  You know my father is a Baptist preacher, but he’s not that kind of evangelist Baptist preacher.  He’s more of a guy that stands at a pulpit and talks about God, so it certainly has nothing to do with him.  The content of songs has to do with him, but for the show business aspect, I think it is just Munly and I always trying to out-do each other and building it into what it has become.     

UT: Being raised Baptist, was it more of an aggressive or fanatical strain or…
SC: No, it was more conservative.  It wasn’t like a Southern Baptist; it was more like a Suburban Baptist. 

UT: So what does your family think of the band?
SC: It is hard to say.  They come to shows when we are playing in Denver, so they support me.  They want me to do well, and they want the band to do well, but I don’t really know.  I think that they struggle with some of the content and some of the hell-raising and things like that that happen.  All in all, though, I’m 38 and it’s not like I’m living at home anymore.  I think that we are all okay with each other, but we definitely had to come to terms with each other.  I had to come to terms with them, and I think that they had to come to terms with me and the band as well.   

UT: How did the band start?  Was it always you, Munly and Dwight?
SC:  Munly and Dwight weren’t there in the very beginning.  When we recorded our first record, which was about 11 years ago, they weren’t there, but they came in soon after.  Actually, the line-up that you saw tonight was the line-up that happened soon after, but then those other three guys (Danny Pants on bass, Ordy on the drums, and Rumley on the pedal steel) weren’t with us for the last three years.  We just got them back about a month ago.   

UT:  Where were they?
SC:  It’s very confusing.  There were other things that were happening for them over that time, so we had these other guys that were on the East Cast and brought the band and based it there for a while, and Munly was the only guy that had to come out to the East Coast.  It’s very confusing because we don’t live in the same place.  Now that we have the Denver guys back and Munly also still stills lives in Denver, Dwight and I fly out to Denver to rehearse, to record, and to start our tours.  I live in Pittsburgh and Dwight lives in Boston.  Before, Munly would fly out to Boston all the time, but now things are back the way they were three years ago.  I moved from Denver about 5 years ago. 

UT: Why did you leave Denver?
SC:  I needed to go for family reasons.  I’ve got a wife and two kids.  I’ve been married for 16 years, and there’s more to what I do than this.    

UT: How did you get hooked up with Alternative Tentacles?
SC: We’ve been on the label now for 5 years, I think.  This is our third album on the label.   It came about because we were friends with Jello before we were on the label.  He’s a Colorado guy also, that’s where he grew up.  He lives in San Francisco now, but any time he’d come home to see his parents he’d come out to see our shows if we were playing, and if we were in San Francisco he’d come to our shows there.  We were looking for a label to put out our records, and we were just talkin’ to him and it turned out that it was natural that we should be on his label because we were already friends with him.   

UT: Is that collage inside your CD something that you guys put together or something that the label did? 
SC: The label. 

UT: How do you guys jive politically?
SC:  I think that ultimately we don’t want to be a political band at all.  I think it comes out sometimes every once in a while, like there’s certain things that happen in our songs that do lean towards that, but I don’t know how it jives really.  I do lean towards that side, and I understand that we’ve got to get our president out of office right now.   

UT: I know that you’re fanatical fans are called “Cessnuts.”  So what is the most moving or creepy thing a fan has done or said to you?
SC:  Moving or creepy... I don’t know.  I think they’re all lonely people [laughs].  Nah, they’re not lonely.  They are all really nice people.  I don’t know what to say. 

UT: What can you tell me about the Blackstone Valley Sinners?
SC:  That is a side project that I do sometimes.  It’s Judith Ann who was in the Auto Club for three years, and her husband Rich Gilbert, who plays with Frank Black and the Catholics, but he’s busy and I’m busy so we don’t play together very often.  We put out a couple records and played a few shows, but we don’t tour.  It’s mostly kind of a Rhode Island based local band.  It’s country music with a drum machine.   

UT: I understand that Munly has written books.
SC: Yeah, he’s written one book of stories.  It is called “Ten Songs With No Music.” 

UT: What kind of stuff is it?
SC: Crazy Munly shit. 

UT: What other sorts of things have influenced your song-writing? 
SC: Lyrically and style-wise, it comes from our experiences.  For me it was growing up in the Baptist Church, growing in Colorado with how the landscape looks, how my friend’s bands sound, everything.  It’s hard to pick out anything that anybody would know about.  I’ve been playing forever.  I’m 38 but I’ve been in bands in Colorado since I was 18, so 20 years of experience influences an awful lot for me.  But we all come different directions, so our songs go places that we don’t even expect to go.  I grew up listening to country music and gospel music, and I also grew up listening to punk rock music: bands like X and the Gun Club were very important to me when I was a teenager.  I also think of Eastern Colorado, the high plains, and that certainly influences me an awful lot, trying to put visual things into words...  ideas into sounds.  

Visit the Slim Cessna's Auto Club website.