Deer Tick: Change Is Good

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When McCauley falls in love with a band, he falls hard. He’ll find an album he likes and listen to it on repeat for months, only stopping when he encounters a new record to obsess about. Nirvana and The Replacements are two of his enduring favorites, and it’s easy to see how their ramshackle tunefulness helped shape Deer Tick’s style.

He wears his influences proudly: Deer Tick has performed occasional shows under the name Deervana, careening through full sets of Nirvana songs and ingenious equipment destruction, such as the time they played a bowling alley and destroyed their guitars with bowling balls. The band titled their 2012 EP Tim in tribute to the Replacements album of the same name. And on the day of McCauley’s suit fitting, his Replacements devotion is worn literally: on his wrist is a yellow “Songs For Slim” bracelet, sold as part of an ongoing fundraiser for the band’s ailing guitarist Slim Dunlap.

Both of those bands, it must be noted, were notorious for their drug and alcohol intake, though it’s interesting to consider the two paths their singers ultimately took: The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg stopped drinking in the early 1990s and has sustained a modest but respectable solo career in the decades since. And Kurt Cobain … well, we all know what happened to him.

McCauley recently turned 27, which, as any rock historian will tell you, is not a good age to be a musician with substance abuse problems. Though he jokes about joining the ranks of dead icons like Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, his latest birthday did coincide, more or less, with his decision to clean up his lifestyle.

“I had just gotten to a point where it wasn’t fun anymore. If I felt anything, it was guilt or embarrassment,” he says.

McCauley says his low point came when Carlton had to hospitalize her dachshund after it contracted Lyme disease. He had been up the entire night before drinking and doing cocaine, and when he finally woke up in the early evening, he realized he’d slept through a day’s worth of phone calls from her.

“I was just like, What am I doing? I can’t even be there for a phone call. I had, like, a million missed calls from her,” he says. “It just felt stupid.”

After a period of unsuccessfully trying to curtail his drinking, McCauley says he finally underwent a cold-turkey detox at Carlton’s apartment.

“One morning, I was making breakfast, and I was trying to cut the butter, and my hands kept shaking, and I kept missing [the butter],” he says. “That was when I got really happy about what I was doing. I was like, ah, good. I really did need to stop.”

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Back in East Nashville, it’s a Wednesday night at The 5 Spot, a small but bustling neighborhood music venue. If the crowd seems unusually large for the middle of the week, that may be because McCauley is making an unbilled appearance that night with the house band of local luminaries. And in such a close-knit community, news travels fast.

Wearing a brown and orange striped shirt and light blue pants, McCauley takes the stage to applause. He swigs from the beer bottle in his hand, then lights a cigarette as the band launches into an old Faron Young hit that seems perfectly tailored for the singer.

“I wanna live fast, love hard, die young,” he sings, as he mimes pointing a gun to his head, “and leave a beautiful memory.”

His voice is clear and strong, and as he sings, he puts clever inflections into his phrasing, savoring the role of singer-as-interpreter. He seems a little nervous, but he’s having fun. During one verse, he does a little soft-shoe dance for emphasis.

“You boys sound excellent,” he says to the band, smiling.

McCauley’s hand is, intentionally or not, partially covering up the label on his bottle. But it’s a Kaliber, a nonalcoholic beer.

There are two paths, and tonight, McCauley is choosing his.

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