Interview: Pelle Almqvist on the Hives & ‘Randy Fitzsimmons’

A Vulture series in which artists share the stories and strategy behind their lead singles.

A Vulture series in which artists share the stories and strategy behind their lead singles.

There’s an amusing irony to the Hives’ “Hate to Say I Told You So” becoming the most popular song of their career. The Swedish garage rockers somehow didn’t think it was lead-single material. “We didn’t see the potential in it,” says front man Pelle Almqvist. Instead, when releasing their 2000 sophomore album, Veni Vidi Vicious, they were much more confident about “Die, All Right!,” a morbid and riotous foot-stomper. But when that track failed to chart or garner any attention, it served as an early lesson in single selection: Get an outside opinion. They really will tell you so.

This is a common scenario for artists, who have to negotiate a delicate balance between themselves and their labels when choosing the track to represent the album cycle ahead. The Hives had to contend with the process once again on The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, their first record in over a decade, which was released on August 11. There’s no simple formula to guide how a given act should decide on their lead single, and you can’t discount the impact of pressure applied by label brass. But the band’s approach changed forever after the “Die, All Right!” letdown: “It should be the song that people like the most,” says Almqvist, “and not the song we like the most.” In Hives-speak, that meant other people would help decide going forward. They sure as hell weren’t going to be blamed for another flop.

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When we were making Barely Legal, we played a lot of fast songs. It was almost in a hardcore/punk realm. We were young and excited. “A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T” had a feeling to it that we didn’t feel we achieved with the other songs. The idiot is me. It’s about not understanding why you make some choices that don’t even make sense to yourself at the time, but trusting that they will lead you right eventually. We were interested in having different stops, breaks, and arrangement bits. We spent a lot of time crafting it. It felt like a eureka moment: It was the first stop of the next evolution of our band.

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I don’t think our record company thought of us as something that could be successful. It was just the nature of how they did business — a song had to be picked and you made a video for it. I think the budget was $1,000. It was more of “what song do we make the video for” than it being a single that could ever be successful. That wasn’t in our world. We wanted to make a record and go play to people and blow their socks off. We wanted to scare other bands and impress people. Other bands scared us as well. We did some early touring with Refused, who were an awesome live band and so much bigger than us at the time. It wasn’t really a competition, but we were, in our minds, competing with them about being better at the show.

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We were almost unbelievably unpopular at the time since no one had heard us. There was no response, really, since the first pressing of the album was maybe 500 copies. We didn’t fit in with the other acts on the label we were on, so we were mostly met with confusion.

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We wanted our lyrics to sound like they were shouting punk or rock clichés — but kind of Trojan horse in some real emotional and philosophical content. The song isn’t actually about selling your body parts for money, if that’s what anybody thought. It’s more about youth as a currency and a commodity. That song ended up being kind of prophetic.

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When we made Veni Vidi Vicious, we felt “Die, All Right!” was better than what we usually do in the studio. It was batting above our average. We thought it had a great energy that flowed all the way through. It’s a slower one, and it’ll cleanse the palate before the other fast songs — and then “Hate to Say I Told You So” followed because it made sense. The first pressing of that record was in the low thousands, and the record company said it was too noisy to be commercially successful. No one was betting on us but ourselves.

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This is when we learned we shouldn’t pick the lead single. “Die, All Right!” didn’t really fly. “Hate to Say I Told You So” was obviously a worldwide smash hit. We liked the song, of course, but we didn’t see the potential in it. We saw the potential in us making awesome music and creating something we love. But the point of a single is making people hear the album and get involved with the band. It’s basically an ad. We switched our policy on that because of “Hate to Say I Told You So” taking off through the stratosphere. For all the talk about how much we brag and how egomaniacal the band is, it’s not about success. It’s about the pursuit of excellence or what we consider excellence in our minds. It’s subjective not objective.

After it came out, people started comparing us to bands we had never heard of, so we started listening to them to draw a comparison. We didn’t have much money. Buying music was expensive, and we couldn’t afford to know about every band. It was a fun sense of discovery, but it feels surreal that we had never heard the Stooges and the MC5 until people compared us to them. We thought, That makes sense. They’re playing the riff over and over and over again until it works. The advantages of repetition were forever ingrained in our minds after that. Rock and roll works best if you drink a couple of beers, but if you drink a couple of beers and listen to our early stuff, you can’t follow it. We became the band that we should be with Veni Vidi Vicious.

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We were dead-set on going the opposite direction sound-wise from Veni Vidi Vicious, because we toured for a very long time and became a famous band. We were interested in staying ahead of the curve to stay winning against the copycats. We also wanted to arrange the music so it sounded good in the bigger places we found ourselves playing. The first pressing of Tyrannosaurus Hives was over 1 million units. It was the first time we made a record where we knew people were going to hear it when it came out, so intense work had to go into it. Most of our friends worked in the factories and had a 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule. We figured, “Yeah, we’ll do that.” We got a house, and we stood there and played all day long.

“Walk Idiot Walk” felt good immediately. We loved the fact that it didn’t really have a chorus. The hook was in the verse. We’ve always been a chorus-averse band for some reason. I think the verses are always cooler. There was a lot of talk about the song being about George W. Bush — and after 9/11, we did think, Oh, American politics is going nuts a little bit. But it wasn’t particularly about him when we wrote it — it’s about leaders and teachers and anyone who thinks they know better than anyone else can dole it out. Either being an idiot follower or idiot leader, it was something we thought a lot about at the time. People said, “You should make a music video with Dick Cheney,” but that’s not what we do. We’re not really into politics.

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The magazines were going nuts about us. We were the next Rolling Stones. We were this, we were that. We went and played South by Southwest, and every top brass from every huge record company flew in on private jets to meet us. We decided to play “Walk Idiot Walk” at the show, and some music journalist wrote, “This is ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’” I think that article kind of picked it as our lead single because, after that, our record company wouldn’t hear us choosing something else. If you’re sitting on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that’s going to be the lead single. After our cock-up on Veni Vidi Vicious, we weren’t going to pick it ourselves. Also, because we didn’t want the blame to be on us.

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There was so much hype before the release. The response was great, but it probably didn’t do enough for a record company that wanted us to be the new Nirvana. Even before the record came out, we had every opportunity available to us in the world and we became increasingly insular and paranoid. We found joy and glee in turning pretty much everything down.

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I remember giving it to a good friend who said, “Well, basically ‘Tick Tick Boom’ is like ‘Detroit Rock City’ by KISS. If you have ‘Detroit Rock City’ as your outlook, it’s got to be first.” That’s why that song ended up first on the album. Musically, we were inspired by a band called Zeke that we really liked, as well as a bit of Depeche Mode, all filtered through the Hives sieve. Nothing inspired it consciously. We joked in rehearsal about it being the type of song that would be played in montages of sport tackles and action-movie trailers. And then it became true.

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Weirdly, when we were working on “Tick Tick Boom,” it was the first time we realized a song could be a potential hit. Jimmy Iovine played “Tick Tick Boom” to Pharrell, who was hot shit at the time, and said, “Oh, I really like that song.” It was kind of coincidental, but I think there was a big consensus that it was the lead song. We worked with Pharrell on some other songs on the album that were in the running as well, but even he thought it should be the lead single. I think that swayed the label. Even when we play it now, we usually play it late in the show and it gets the biggest reaction. That and “Hate to Say I Told You So” are tied.

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Right around the time when we released the song, pretty much all American radio stations that played rock music switched overnight. There was no airplay anymore like there had been in the past. In order to offset that, we started, for the first time in our career, saying “yes” to putting our songs in commercials. Up until that point, we turned down millions and millions of dollars because we’re punks. And then we’re like, “Well, if this is the only way for people to hear it,” so we started saying yes. “Tick Tick Boom” became every montage for NHL hits, Indianapolis 500 races, action-movie trailers, sneaker commercials, and all sorts of shit. It also had the advantage of making us a shitload of money. “Hate to Say I Told You So” got popular through a very traditional word of mouth. “Tick Tick Boom” got successful the opposite way.

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The first idea with Lex Hives was that we were going to make this as insular as we could and produce it ourselves, given all the collaboration that went into The Black and White Album. We were even talking about building a studio and the instruments. It was so geeked out. The idea was we would just stand in the room and play until we had something. We thought a lot more about classic rock lyrics. I love Bon Scott and all those great AC/DC opening lines. Something like “I’m hot, and when I’m not, I’m cold as ice” is so funny and stupid and brilliant at the same time. Or the Stooges’ “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.” It’s so overblown and awesome, and that’s the feeling we wanted.

While working on “Go Right Ahead,” we realized that it sounded like “Don’t Bring Me Down” by Electric Light Orchestra. We asked our manager, and he’s like, “The song is great. Fuck that. You’ve got to finish it. It’ll be fine.” So we finished it, and then he’s like, “Yeah, it sounds too much like that. We’ve got to talk to Jeff Lynne.” We contacted him. Mind you, Jeff Lynne had done the same thing. He blatantly ripped off “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye in ELO’s “Showdown.” So he had some experience with that type of thing. He cut us a deal. We have to pay him half for the publishing on “Go Right Ahead,” which is probably still more than it should be. But it’s also fucking awesome that we’ve now “written” a song with Jeff Lynne. He probably makes more money from the Traveling Wilburys and Tom Petty, but he does make a little bit of money from the Hives, which we’re fine with.

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We were producing the album ourselves and were quite a way through the process before involving a label. We worked hard at finishing “Go Right Ahead” so we could buy more time to finish the rest of the album. The label came in late and agreed.

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“Go Right Ahead” and its boogie-feel wasn’t as big of a hit as our past few albums, but Lex Hives is solid all the way through. Out of all those lead singles, it’s my favorite lyrically. It’s got a lot of fucking great lines. There was a bit more relaxation about saying stupid stuff like that. We’re shooting for a feeling where it’s so badass that it’s kind of ridiculous. I love the lyric that goes, “Our God is a zilla, our king is a Kong / The room’s about to crumble as I burst into song.” That sounds like a pure rock-and-roll lyric to me. But there was no massive major-label budget this time, which changed the amount of people who heard it.

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We wanted to just be us in the room again after a decade. Because Lex Hives was like classic rock, we thought to ourselves, Oh, that was a really mature sound. Now we have to do something really childish. If you go away for ten years and come back even more mature, that’s a failure to us. We should come back and be fucking idiotic and loud and brash and almost more childish than we’ve ever been. We spent a lot of time arranging “Bogus Operandi” and fiddling with little bits and pieces. It took a lot of work. We’ve had 30 years to practice being our favorite band, so if we wouldn’t have nailed it by now, we’d be pretty shit.

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It was a favorite during the process. No label was involved until the album was finished, so we played it to about a million people we knew, and they seemed to respond the most to “Bogus Operandi.” Once we got the intro right, it cemented its place. It felt exciting to come back sounding ominous and doom-y. It felt like the new Hives style while still being what we and everybody else had missed about us for the past 11 years.

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We’re really into the fact that we’re now a multigenerational band. Our last show was mostly 17-year-old girls. That’s good for regrowth. If you can get them in, you can also get the 17-year-old boys. All of those superbig, classic rock bands have several generations of fans. It feels like we’re reaching for that longevity. The response to our music has always been pretty gushing, but this feels like an even better reception. There’s way more interest than the last album. All we wanted was to get a new album out. Truly, we had no expectations beyond that. We’re just relieved that it exists and we can’t work on it anymore. There are big differences in how our albums were received — it’s usually not due to the quality of the music or what we’re doing, but the state of the music industry. To go from the lowest possible outside expectations of success on the first two albums to the most possible on the two following albums was, in hindsight, a trip. After that, we did two albums ourselves, and the fifth one was probably during the grimmest time ever for the music industry. This sixth one is so long after anybody stopped expecting anything from us. It feels like we are ambushing the world and winning.