Supersuckers: Spaghetti Western.

Must’ve Been Live is in stores now.

The Supersuckers have been pumping out high octane punk infused rock and roll releases for over 10 years. So when they finally get around to putting out a live album, you’re pretty fired up for some massive riffs and drunken wailing. So I was kinda surprised to find a country album lob onto my desk. Must’ve Been Live, as the name suggests, is a companion piece to their 1997 country long player Must’ve Been High. It’s a damn authentic sounding record, powered by the same passion and honesty that fuels their harder edged discs.

“It’s all kick ass evil powers of rock and roll type stuff,” laughs frontman Eddie Spaghetti. “We’re back in the quarry mining the rock for ya.”

“Most of the album comes from a show we did in Dallas. We did this country record at the end of the nineties or whatever it was, and when we first put it out our fans were pretty confused. I can’t say that they liked it too well. We did a tour on it in 2000 and our soundman recorded the shows. He gave us the tapes he made, and said listen to these. We decided to start up our own record label, and this was the first experiment.”

“We don’t really think a lot about what we should be doing, we just kind of do it. We’d been talking about making a live record for years, but not a live country record. Is it retarded?” he muses. “Yes.”

Must’ve Been Live features a swag of guest performers, including Willie Nelson’s harmonica player Mickey Raphael and former Black Crowe Audley Freed, and Willie’s daughter Amy Nelson.

“We didn’t plan it. Mickey Raphael just happened to be crossing our path, and he had done Must’ve Been High with us, and he said he’d like to come up to the show and play. We thought, great he’ll do a track with us, and he stuck around for the whole set. It was super cool. He just showed up and totally kicked ass.”

Do you think it’s important to keep live records pretty much warts and all without going back and fixing things in the studio?

“I think ethically it is, but had we intentionally made this record on purpose there’s a few things I’d like to go back and change. But with this record there was no way, and in the end I think that’s really for the best. There are so manly live records that aren’t really live records at all. I hear that Thin Lizzy’s Live & Dangerous is pretty much not live or dangerous at all. But goddamn it’s a great record.”

What’s the story with your label, Mid-Fi Recordings? Are you going to get all the Supersuckers back catalogue back into circulation?

“Hopefully everything we do in the future will come out on that. We’ll try and get some sort of agreement with our old labels to put our old records out, and if not we’re such shameless whores we’d go back in and re-record them just to put them out ourselves,” he laughs. “We have no ethics whatsoever.”

Are people keeping the tapes a little close to their chests there?

“They seem to think they have some sort of value. There was a record that we made back in the 1700s called The Songs All Sound The Same that we’ve put back out, and that worked really well. Hopefully we’ll be able to one day see a cheque from one of our records. It’s call to put out all kinds of stuff. We record a lot of goofy stuff that we like, that maybe a proper label wouldn’t think was appropriate for release.”

How do you guys write songs, how does it work?

“They’re not really written, more made up. Now we’re just sifting through those, sifting through old receipts with lyrics written on them and trying to put it all together. We just put em on the wall, and when we’re stuck we throw a dart. Whatever we hit is what goes in there. It’s worked for us for 13 years. Why fuck with it.”