Anyone who has claimed that "girls can’t rock" obviously hasn’t been to a Nashville Pussy show. Since becoming the lead guitarist for the Atlanta band back in 1996, Ruyter Suys has transformed into a fascinating amalgamation of Angus Young, Ted Nugent, and well, a raunchy blond beauty. If you ever have the opportunity to see a live Nashville Pussy performance, be prepared for a spectacle of the best kind. Some will be taken in by Suys’ scantily clad wardrobe, but it inevitably gets upstaged by her own gritty, bluesy riffs that are churned out throughout the night.
Nashville Pussy released their latest record
From Hello To Texas on March 3, and the album remains true to the band’s classic sound thanks to the songwriting team of
Suys and
Blain Cartwright. Considering that the guitar duo is also husband and wife, it did make us ponder if that has ever led to tensions on the road – during the songwriting process or otherwise. When
Suys talked with UG writer
Amy Kelly, she cleared up all of our curiosities about the husband-wife relationship and explained what life is like when you play in one of the hardest-working bands on the scene today.
UG: It’s been about 4 years since the release of your previous album Get Some. Have you basically been a touring machine since that time?
Ruyter Suys: Yeah, that’s probably the main thing. We work for a living! We tend to spend most of our time playing. When we finally get around to being ready to be in the studio, it’s always such a clusterfuck trying to get everybody together. We have our producer in New York, and then we got offered Willie Nelson’s place. That wasn’t open for 6 months. When we finished the album, we had to wait another 6 months just to go in for 2 days to remix! So it’s a really boring answer! That’s why it takes so long. We’re not really being pushed to put out a record every year, so we like to think we’re concentrating on quality.
One comment that inevitably comes up time and again is that Nashville Pussy is one of the hardest-working bands in the music business. Not to mention the fact that on YouTube I see dozens of posts that state your show is one of the best they’ve ever seen. For those who haven’t attended a Nashville Pussy concert, how would you describe the experience?
I don’t know if you’ve seen AC/DC recently, but it’s like that – only on a much smaller level! I like to think that every night is the only night basically. I don’t care where you are. I’ve even pretended to tell myself, “Go out and don’t give it all you’ve got tonight.” But I can’t do that! You’re only as good as your last gig. Every gig we play, we pretty much leave our guts on the stage. That’s kind of the goal. Basically a Nashville Pussy show is like hot-and-heavy, back-seat-of-your-car high school sex. You’ve just got to give it all you’ve got! I just try to one up myself pretty much every night.
"We tend to spend most of our time playing."
No. Actually I didn’t discover him until I was in my late 20’s. I grew up listening to your classic guitar stuff like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Jimmy Page was a massive influence. I got turned on to him when I was about 12. When I was really little, I was listening to David Bowie and Mick Ronson when I was like 6 and 7. My parents were hippies, so we had some pretty good music sitting around the house. I didn’t find Angus until I bought an SG. That was actually my introduction to AC/DC! I was more like a classic rock musician than a metalhead. I always thought that punk rock or even AC/DC was kind of beneath me.
When I met my husband, he was into The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. We just kind of converged. All of the sudden I realized that a lot of this punk rock shit is really hard to play! It’s totally not easy at all! I was like, “Wow, man. I can’t do this at all!” We kind of met in the middle. Once I bought the SG, it was like all of the sudden a door opened. I understood AC/DC. Just trying to play it was like, “Whoa!” It’s really simple, but it’s really difficult. It sounds like it’s simple until you kind of play it, and then you realize the intricacies are almost impossible. Like the underlay and what Malcolm does? Nobody can do what Malcolm does.
Once I got the SG and we got our drummer, I would try to figure out how to do the Angus stomp. You first get that one leg, but then you have to get that other one and the hip rhythm! The little Angus dance? It was like a fucking door opened. “Holy shit! I understand!” That was it. I’ve never looked back!
When you expressed to your family that you wanted to play the guitar, were they pretty supportive?
Yeah. I pretty much decided that I wanted to be a rock star at age 6. I went to school on Halloween and went as David Bowie. It was like, “Everyone will know who I am! Ziggy Stardust!” Everyone was like a gypsy and a witch and a princess and stuff. I was like, “Who the fuck are you?” They’re like, “I’m a princess.” “Well, I’m fucking David Bowie!” So I had the rock star thing in my eyes ever since I was really little.
I played piano. My parents put me in front of a piano at about 3 and had someone behind me say I was doing really well. I picked up the guitar at about 8. My dad had one in the house, and the parents were loaned this piano for like 5 years until their friends got a house big enough for it. When the piano got taken away I was like, “What do I do now? The guitar!” So I picked up the guitar and kind of learned by ear. My dad was like, “How did you learn to do that?” Of course, they were very encouraging after that. I had a teacher for a little while in high school, but I was mostly self-taught.
In a world full of so many musicians, it is still fairly rare to see a female lead guitarist who can riff with the best of them. Do you think you got to this point because of that family support system?
Yeah. That helped so much. My parents never ever told me that I couldn’t do it. It was only when I got older that I realized being a rock star is probably not the most responsible choice! I went to the university and I did fine art for awhile. So I got my degree in art – that was the more responsible thing! After I got my degree, I went back to playing guitar again. It was like, “Fuck it. I’m better at this.” I’ve never been able to hold a job, but I’ve managed to keep careers going pretty nicely. I can’t do 9-to-5, but 24 hours a day I can handle!
You have quite an interesting setup in Nashville Pussy, in the fact that Blaine (Cartwright, vocals/guitar) is your husband. It’s been said before that you should never work with a significant other, but you are living proof that it can work. Is it still easy to write and perform with Blaine after all these years?
Yeah, it definitely works for us. When we first got together, it was purely sexual. We called it a one-night-stand-gone-wrong, but we wound up getting married in like 3 months. The band thing was in the back of our heads, but it was like we were embarking on a cool adventure. He’s from Kentucky and I met him up in Canada. I hadn’t really planned on leaving the country! It seemed like a “what the hell” kind of thing. We kind of goaded each other into it. We didn’t start the band for another 4 years into the marriage before we started it. At that time, we were focused on his band Nine Pound Hammer because they toured Europe a bunch of times.
I was very enamored of Blaine in that he was like the opposite kind of musician that I was. From the first chord he ever played, he thought he was like the greatest guitar player in the world! He was like, “I have to start a band!” I was the opposite. I wanted to learn how to play everything, just in case I fucked up. I didn’t want anybody to ever question my ability. I wanted to make sure I was really good before I went onstage. Basically when you’ve got that attitude, it’s like there is no end to the amount of learning and you kind of fuck yourself. You can pretty much talk yourself out of being onstage with that kind of attitude.
Then I met Blaine. I was like, “Wow. This guy knows how to play 4 chords, he’s in a band, and he’s toured the world. I’ve been playing ‘The Rain Song’ since I was 9, and I’ve never done this shit. What do I have to do?” Then he saw me play and said, “What the fuck are you doing? Why are you sitting in your bedroom by yourself? You’ve got to take this to the world!” I was like, “Cool!”
"I pretty much decided that I wanted to be a rock star at age 6."
We’ve been married 12 fucking years!
Wow!
I know! That’s nuts! I can’t believe it. We’re going to have our anniversary in Holland this year. At the same time, we still feel like little kids. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long at all. It feels like we just started!
How does the songwriting process usually work within the band? Do you and Blaine consistently collaborate?
Blaine does the majority of the writing. He’s the one who’s got the songwriter problem. He can’t stop writing songs! I’ve got the riff thing. I’ll walk around whistling riffs all the time. Basically we don’t even really talk to each other about them. I just hear him doing things around the house. It might be a year later, but I’ll finally hear what he’s come up with. In that time, I’ve got a million things to go along with it because I’ve heard it a million times.
He doesn’t want to introduce anything to any of the other band members until it’s ready. He’ll have these things that he’s written and it’s like, “Cool. I’ve got all these riffs to go with it already.” He writes a punk rock song, and then me and Jeremy turn it into like an actual rock song. We’ll take the Ramones and turn it into AC/DC essentially. We take it from being a garage band and put it in an arena-sized stage.
Are you and Blaine still Gibson players?
I play SGs pretty much primarily, but I just got myself a Tele. Blaine plays a bunch of different kinds, like Les Pauls. He actually played with a 335, which was really nice. Then it got stolen from the airport. So he’s been playing with Les Paul standards these days. Yeah, we’re pretty much a Gibson family.
So you probably wouldn’t be someone who is drawn to an event like the NAMM convention, where it’s a gearhead’s paradise.
Yeah. I’m not much into new stuff – except for the Gibson Diablo! That was pretty! No, we don’t play any kind of cheesy stuff. We don’t play Vipers or anything headless. We’re pretty old school.
Do you also stick with Marshall amps most of the time?
We’re pretty much Marshalls. We’ve got a whole bunch of old 70’s 100-watt heads that we’ve got stashed all over the world. Marshalls are probably the only thing I’ll ever have tattooed on my body!
"I always thought that punk rock or even AC/DC was kind of beneath me."
It’s fucking awesome! It’s Lemmy, man! I don’t care what comes out of that man’s mouth – I’m going to say yes! Lemmy fucking rules. We did 2 tours with them in the States, and then we did a bunch of festivals in Europe as well. We’ve just run into each other over the years. We’re hoping to do some more stuff with them, but he’s one of my high school heroes. I quoted Motorhead in my high school year book when I graduated!
Just the fact that we ever got to meet the guy was a fucking miracle. Then for it to turn out that he’s just as cool as you think he is and he likes us – it’s the ultimate blessing. I even got to introduce him to my mother and she loved him. She was ready to lay into him, too. I don’t know what she had in mind, but she was going to call him on a bunch of shit. He totally fucking wooed her. He kissed her hand and the whole thing! She was like, “That Lemmy is a really nice guy.” I was like, “I’ve been telling you this since high school!”
I can imagine that Nashville Pussy fans can get pretty wild. Do you happen to have any interesting stories from the road?
We have a lot of fans who pop up all over the world. We’ve befriended a lot of them, of course. We’ve got this one guy from France who we’ve known through every bass player. So we’ve probably known him for a decade now. He videotapes all of our shows, and he even works for the French army as a mapmaker. He’s allowed to travel for free anywhere within France and to pretty much any of the bordering countries. He just has to pay like 50 cents or something to get on the army train. We noticed that like 2 weeks into the tour, he’s still there! We were like, “We should really get to know this guy!”
Then the next tour we did was in the States and he was there, too! Somehow he saved up his vacation money and traveled all the way across. He was following us from like fucking El Paso to Tucson to San Diego. It was like, “Dude, do you want to ride with us?” He’s got the most documented archive that’s the history of Nashville Pussy. He has more video of us than, I think, anybody! When we have room, we’ll throw him on the bus with us. He’s been with us for 4 bass players now.
You referred to the multiple bass players you’ve had over the years, and it seems like Karen (Cuda, current bassist) is doing a fantastic job. Would you say she’s in it for the long haul?
I fucking hope so, man! She’s absolutely perfect for the band. I really hope nothing goes wrong. It’s not the easiest of roads, and we’re not really ones to slow down. The life of a Nashville Pussy can take its toll on your regular life pretty heavily. She’s managed to adapt pretty easily to that, being an amazing rock chick. She’s doing a great job, and I hope she hangs in there!
Is it back to a steady touring life for the band now that From Hell To Texas has been released?
Yeah, we’ll probably pick it up. We have a lot of trouble saying no. Every time we think we have a couple weeks off, someone will come up and say, “Hey, do you guys want to play a festival in Greece?” So we’ll be gone for 2 weeks, and then we’ll hear, “There’s a cancellation in Alaska. Do you guys want to go?” It’s like, “Hell, yes!” I just love to play.
Interview by Amy Kelly
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