I. The Man on the Screen

When I visit Ethan Miller in the quiet Oakland, California apartment he shares with his wife, he leads me into the pantry, which on this October day, is an editing suite. The Howlin Rain frontman is assembling some stark video footage shot in a loft-style rehearsal studio. Miller appears onscreen in his enormous black beard, dark sunglasses and a black suit, twisting and writhing against the white space the way he does when he plays his bombastic guitar, as the band rocks and rages on beat around him. The image is startling – you could see this guy driving around Los Angeles in a big black car with Rick Rubin and Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top. He’s different from the child of the redwoods, the kind soul that, after getting to know Miller a little bit over the last few years, I think I know him to be. It’s incongruous, somehow disturbing. Yet, there’s something so right about this guy with the dark glasses, the suit and the outsized scraggly beard, singing this song, howling these lyrics. It fits. He looks like Miller sounds.

The video is for “Dark Side,” from Howlin Rain’s upcoming Rubin-produced studio magnum opus, The Russian Wilds. Now, three figures pop up at a strange angle – Miller, his chief accomplice Joel Robinow and Isaiah Mitchell, the accomplished lead guitarist for the ferocious space-rock power trio Earthless. A three-headed hydra, they sing the harmony – close, all high in the register. It’s startling, again: the tight harmonies from the version on the record that seem so richly layered, sung live. Live, these guys are going to just crush.

II. Crush

It’s the dead of summer in San Francisco – an unusually warm night in late July. Howlin Rain are set to play a warehouse gig at a hip art collective in the Mission District, with Sleepy Sun and Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound. People spill out into the side street to smoke. Poster artist Alan Forbes is talking to Noel Harmonson from Miller’s earlier, seminal psych-punk band Comets on Fire, and Nash Whalen of the Wooden Shjips.

An almost-hidden door in a nondescript industrial building opens into a wood-lined party space that feels like an art installation. The crowd crams into the basement – a broad but narrow space beneath massive beams hewn whole out of thousand-year-old redwoods at the turn of the last century. The entire room is wooden and jam-packed. People clog the wooden stairs. You can picture something along the lines of the Great White concert fire disaster with someone’s weed cinder sending the place up in flames, the panic up the stairs a bottleneck of doom.

Howlin Rain sprawls in a line onstage across half the room – separated from the crowd by load-bearing pillars – the big, burly bassist Cyrus Comiskey, Mitchell, Miller, the unassuming drummer Raj Ojha, and Robinow the trickster at stage left on the keys. The band rocks, hard. Assemble Head bagged – a member was home sick – but Howlin Rain invites the band’s Charlie and Camilla Saufley up and backs them on “The Chocolate Maiden’s Misty Morning.” Then the band returns to formation.

It’s a completely different set from the loose, laid-back material that they played the previous autumn. The band rocks in unison – super-tight and hyperkinetic. They blast through the changes. Miller wrenches and contorts his body as he wails, as if the guitar strings were the leads to his own marionette. It’s one of those moments that you can feel beneath the lights of history – a rare last chance to catch a supernova before it blows.

III. The Life and Times of Ethan Miller

The son of schoolteachers, Miller grew up in Eureka, California, in Humboldt County, the state’s northernmost coastal region, home to the world’s largest trees and finest marijuana. Miller gravitated to the hard and fast rejection of all things hippie, to punk and hardcore. It was not cool to be into the Grateful Dead at Eureka High. He took classes at College of the Redwoods while he partied and played in bands. But small town life was stifling – his ambitions were bigger than playing house parties until the cops show up. There was no place to go.

In the late ‘90s, at around age 20, he shipped off to UC Santa Cruz where he majored in modern literature. He also co-founded Comets on Fire, a band that sounded just like you think it would: hard and fast and loud and thrilling, a – psychedelic noise rock that ground the earlier iteration of psychedelic through all the punk and hardcore that had so fervently rejected it. Miller’s guitar was wham-bent, cosmic, and screaming, his voice a hardcore shriek. Everything was overdriven and full-throttle, underlain with feedback and synthesized noise. The band built a following. Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra re-released their self-made first album on Alternative Tentacles. They released two albums on Sub Pop. They toured the world.

As the band matured, the members had their own visions to serve. They started forming side bands. For Echoplex player Noel Harmonson, it was The Lowdown; for drummer Utrillo Kushner, Colossal Yes; guitarist Ben Chasny stayed focused on Six Organs of Admittance. Within Comets, things moved slowly. It was a democracy.

Miller wanted to play in a band that he could helm without having to wrestle against four other musicians’ visions. He’d embraced the warmer side of psychedelia. He wanted to play more open, melodic music. Compared to what Comets did, what he was thinking about could be considered light rock.

IV. A Short History of Howlin Rain

David Katznelson is sitting on a driftwood-like wooden structure in front of a cafe run by surfers and ex-punk rockers a few blocks from San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, on the N-Judah light rail line. He used to work in A&R at Warner Brothers. Now, he lives in runs his own independent label, Birdman Records, and puts out arcane reissues, like Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place.

Katznelson had The Gris Gris and a few other psych bands under his wing when Miller sent him a disc of his new side project, The Vultures – which turned
out to be the first Howlin Rain record. The album starts rootsy, jangly and loose – like a laid-back banjo band with Rod Stewart singing. Acoustic guitars shuffle. And then, a little more than halfway through the second track, “Calling Lightning with a Scythe,” the electric guitar roars in.

“I thought it was the most infectious song,” Katznelson says, “but it was when the guitar solo came in, which is like this lawnmower going off into a very close mic – it was the most noisy, wonderful guitar solo of all time, in my opinion. I was like, ‘God, this has to be on Birdman – this is exactly what it’s all about, for me.’”

After a night listening to the elements wail around his family’s cabin on the Eel River in Northern California, Miller renamed the band Howlin Rain and went on tour. At that point, the band was a trio, with Eureka homeboy Ian Gradek on bass and banjo, and John Moloney, of Sunburned Hand of the Man, on drums. Then, two weeks into the tour, Moloney quit the band and took the van, leaving Miller and Gradek stranded in Atlanta.

Miller brought in new musicians to begin making the next record. He began to pillage the prog-metal-stoner-rock band Drunk Horse – multi-instrumentalist Joel Robinow played keyboards while Eli Eckert contributed bass and guitar to the sessions. Gradek remained on bass. Another Eurekan, Mike Jackson, played rhythm guitar, and Garett Goddard played the drums.

That’s about when, as the legend goes, Rick Rubin – founder of Def Jam and Def American, producer of Run-DMC and Aerosmith, The Beastie Boys and LL Cool J, Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty and Slayer, he who changed music seven different ways – read Arthur magazine’s October 2006 cover story on Miller. Rubin liked how he thought, how he saw. Rubin had been a Comets fan. Now he reached out.

V. The Man Comes Around

He drove out from the madness and the traffic, rattled through the valley and the smog and down the scorched brown canyon. Past the peace signs and the hippie communes, the swimming pools, the beat up trucks and the gleaming machines. As he neared the sea, he found the turn. Through the scrub forest, up a narrow, winding road, tunes cranking and the window down, California in his nostrils, the hot baked clay earth, the manzanita and the salt. He announced himself to the electronic box and the iron gates swung open.

He wound up the drive, out of the canyon, over the top. A manservant led him to a chair overlooking the vast ocean. The sun was high in the sky. They brought him an enormous bottle of water. It seemed like it had come from the center of the earth.

And then he arrived. He wore sunglasses and a tan. His hair was thinning on top, shaggy and wild. Gray had begun to drip down the front of his dark beard. He was grizzled and large, sweatpanted, his presence enormous. He greeted him in a quiet voice,and touched his hand. He led him into the sanctum.

VI. The Long Follow, Part One: A Magnificent Fiend

I first saw Howlin Rain at the Great American Music Hall, in March, 2007. I had gone to see the Wooden Shjips open for Texas psych godfather Roky Erickson. Howlin Rain played second. They had a classic rock lineup, a Southern-fried rock sound reminiscent of The Allman Brothers Band or Delaney and Bonnie. With black hair, sizeable muttonchops and a long-handled moustache, the singer and guitarist looked like a raven Duane Allman. His voice was a hoarse growl, pitched at full throttle, like those old guitar rock records that you find buried in the stacks. Like Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac or Rory Gallagher. Like 1971. For a music writer with his finger to the wind, awaiting signs of the return of rock, it was a revelation.

I put myself on the beat. I hunted down Howlin Rain, got a hold of their debut record, which Birdman had released in May 2006. I learned that Rubin had just signed the band to American. I interviewed Miller by phone on September 13. He had been packing to fly to Austin the next day, to begin a tour opening for Queens of the Stone Age.

The band’s next record was already essentially in the can – and Rubin wanted it. Katznelson wasn’t about to stand between Miller and opportunity. He made a deal: American would release the new album on CD and Birdman would release the vinyl. Moreover, Rubin would give mastering notes. Miller sent the record to Rubin, but Rubin didn’t like the sequencing. He thought it hit “El Rey” and slowed to a stop.

“Rick just came out of the gates honest about what he loved about the record,” and brutally honest about the things that weren’t working, Miller told me on the eve of Magnificent Fiend’s release. “‘This is not a boring song, it’s a really good song, but you’ve got some boring stuff that’s doing tremendous damage to it.’ That’s hard to hear. Like, really? Fuck. I though that I just shit gold…No matter how much humility an artist has, they compulsively believe that they shit gold.”

Photo by Sonia Molina

Miller understood that to make music that is “universally more accomplished,” he would have to embrace such critique – and to yield some of his instinct to control.

“Rick said, ‘Hey, look, I want to tell you something about your music. I want to set something up where I will always be honest with you about how I feel about it…I want to be completely honest, so when I judge your music, [it’s] not because there’s something I want out of you and it’s not because I’m trying to put you down or elevate you. I’m trying to help you make the best art we can make.’”

Miller asked the mastering guy to do some edits. Then, he re-sequenced the record.

Magnificent Fiend was harder and tighter than the band’s basementy debut – a rock record. It was sonically lush – the song structures were complicated, not verse-verse-chorus. There were a lot of sounds, too: Rhodes piano and Hammond B-3 tones, certain lead-in beats, stuff that you could pin back to something else you’d heard somewhere in the annals of rock. It wasn’t folk music with lit-up Comets guitar solos.

This band seemed to be drawing on classic rock as a sonic palette and using it to construct something elaborate. The rest of the album was aligning closer behind Miller’s rusted old Chevelle of a voice – doubling it in some cases, and doubling the electric guitars, so that they sounded like KISS here and the Allmans there. By the end, big, elaborate horn sections blasted in. The lyrics were apocalyptic. It was a concept record about outlaws, shot through with anti-war sentiment, yet Miller left the lyrics cryptic, to carry the host of human emotion without being taken literally, without becoming rock opera. He thought of it as “cinematic.”

The album was resonant enough that at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., in early 2010, unscheduled speaker Dick Cheney bounded onstage to the blazing dual-guitars lead-in to its opening track, “Dancers at the End of Time.” The layers of irony may have been lost on the CPAC crowd – the song, which alludes to a series of Michael Moorcock sci-fi novels, had been inspired by the corruption of what Miller calls “the Cheney/Bush Administration.” Miller found the moment surreal and thrilling. He was characteristically generous. “Everyone deserves music, the heroes and villains,” he wrote in an email at the time. “I am glad those folks enjoyed the tune.”

At the same time, even as Miller felt that Magnificent Fiend was more accomplished and more deliberately arranged than the first album, his vision was for something even bigger, and even more cinematic and complex.

He had already begun sketching out songs with Rubin. Now, he went to ground .

VII. The Crew Lashed Him to the Mast

There is no single clear stylistic line that runs through Rick Rubin’s discography. Still, if you listen to his most resonant albums – the Chili Peppers’ Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magick or Cash’s The American Recordings – Rubin seems to be able to put his finger on what’s essential in an artist, and encourage that artist to amp up those qualities and strip out everything else. The result is essential work.

“For the very first session that we had, I took an acoustic guitar and played [Rubin] tunes – raw tunes with some chords … bangin’ it out,” recalls Miller. "You know:

Miller: [sings] ‘We all live in a yellow submarine – how do you like that one?’

Rubin: ‘I don’t. Next.’

Miller: ‘OK, [singing] show me the dark side, show me the dark side, ya ya ya,
show me the dark side.’ Whaddya think?’

Rubin: ‘OK, that’s good. You need to work on the chorus.’

“[It was] the very raw, basic thing of what people imagine a songwriter and a producer sitting in a room together would be like: this is good, this is a great lyric, fuckin’ don’t like that one, next!”

Meanwhile, a new Howlin Rain lineup was forming.

Miller and Robinow worked from the demos that had passed Rubin’s watchful gaze. Bringing Robinow’s old friend Ojha aboard on drums, they continued to arrange what were becoming quite complex songs, experimenting with flavor and speed.

Then, partly at producer Tim Green’s urging, Comiskey signed on. Howlin Rain was becoming a hard, tight rock band with complex capabilities and a jazz tendency. A band that could serve Miller’s vision of a dark, complex rock and steer it through all the hairpins.

More and more, the band began to invite Mitchell – he’d played with Drunk Horse, too, in the early ‘00s – into the studio to lend a vocal harmony or a guitar lead. When Howlin Rain opened for (and then backed) Terry Reid at an Oakland gig in May 2010, Mitchell ran leads alongside Miller. The music seemed funkier, more rooted in soul. The interplay between the two underground guitar heroes was enthralling.

It felt like an iconic lineup, with each player archetypal in his own way: keyboardist Robinow – son of the Oakland shipyards, who grew up on jazz and never even heard rock until he was 17 – could pick up just about any instrument and play it, as Mitchell says, better than almost anybody else.

Comiskey, the big, longhaired bassist with a supernatural sense of timing – an inhuman obsession with meter, as Miller explains.

Ojha, the Charlie Watts-like drummer – quiet and reserved, with a deep arsenal of tasteful licks, and the focus and drive to study and master, say, exactly how the timbales are supposed to come in on a salsa part.

Then, there was Mitchell of the mighty Earthless, the explosive power trio axe slinger brought in as a ringer.

All of that contextualized Miller, with his uncanny classic rock rasp and his interstellar guitar assault, as the visionary leader of a whip-tight rock outfit of serious players who had the theory, the technical understanding and the chops to realize his long vision – the complex, cinematic work that Rubin was helping him to isolate.

As the process of writing and arranging, and then recording the album stretched from year to year, Miller looked wilder and skinnier. His hair grew long, his beard became bushy and thick. He looked drained or enthused, alternating between excited or like he was being run through the ringer – or both. This record was a serious ordeal.

The literate Miller read Moby Dick, Melville’s brilliant and disastrous epic about a sea captain chasing the white whale.

VIII. The Long Follow, Part II: Across The Russian Wilds

When Miller told me that he and Katznelson had begun reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace together, I joined the party. We compared notes about how hard it was to get through the first 50 pages meeting character after character, each referred to by at least three different Russian names. And then, after the initial disorientation, Tolstoy’s mastery of the complexities of history; the razorine eye with which he describes complicated human emotion. After about four months, Miller and I met at a cafe and discussed the novel in full. And he gave me a burned CD – the new album: The Russian Wilds.

At first listen, the album was perplexing. It was challenging and difficult to follow. Whenever the band hit an intriguing groove, they hit it for maybe four measures, maybe two – then completely shifted gears. And the sounds were all over the place: an echoing blues riff that could have come from the ‘80s, a chorus with a three-part male harmony that sounded like Journey with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s female backup singers behind that. Vocals that sometimes broke with a tight, Steely Dan reverb and falsetto voices wavering above that on the chorus.

The record seemed to be stitched together from pieces of rock history. Another song sounded a bit like Freddie Mercury, Miller singing in falsetto about a shotgun in his hand, and then alarm bells that were reminiscent of the bass line to “Flash Gordon.” In the middle of the record was a cover of a James Gang tune. They’d filled it out with lush harmonies and made it sound like church. It took a little while to remember the name: “Collage.” That seemed to be what they were doing, like Rubin had taken that suggestive rock tone quiltery that appeared on Magnificent Fiend and amped it up.

I listened over and over with headphones until I could make out lyrics. The song with those Queen allusions was called “Strange Thunder.”

Now I’m gone…
I left you a Rorschach on the wall
And a song…
In the blood and bone and strange thunder rolling down the hall

Then, the bass pulses in like an air raid. The drums trip in and turn time inside-out. The song becomes an enormous, all-guns-blazing rock assault that sticks in your mind for days at a time.

It’s a strange thunder
Rolling through my head

Oh. It was a man who had already done the deed, singing as the frag still rumbled across his brain. This album was darker and more hauntingly fucked up than I had realized. “Cherokee Werewolf” is told from the creepy perspective of a murderer hunting down his love and singing to her as he kills her and buries her. The triumph he hears in his head is a full-blown Journey harmony with the girls from Skynyrd rejoicing behind him – like it’s 1983 and you can see his mullet, and his Camaro, and his beard, and Mitchell is pulling these fat riffs in call-and-response:

Laura, my love, I found you
Laura, my love, not a sound from you
The maggots and worms are crawling you
From under the ground around you

It is twisted. The whole record is dark and grim-faced, but with a dry sense of humor that uses allusion; a fusion of different rock styles and forms; and an epic, novelistic approach to song structure, to tell what seems to be a loose cycle of stories about hard, dark men and the women who are the objects – and sometimes the targets – of their passion.

The Russian Wilds is a big, complex rock record – it may be the first true classic rock album of the twenty-first century. Such densely-layered production hasn’t come back in rock since punk ran it through with the switch-blade. Now it’s being repurposed by a reconstructed punk rocker. It’s disorienting. It doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. Which is why your ear reaches for anything that does.

“The first thing you get is this bombast,” says Katznelson. “It straps you in. It’s like, ‘Come on! We’re going for a ride.’ And then, as you get used to it and know it more, the complexity and the brilliance comes out, and all the melodies really come out.”

Katznelson talks about playing the record for friends of his in England. “What they all come back to saying is, ‘We have not heard a big rock record like this in a long, long time. We didn’t even know that it could exist anymore.”

Epilogue: The Darkness

“There is a larger subject matter,” Miller says, back at his dining table in a room lined with record stacks and artwork and books. “The Howlin Rain songs – the lyrics – have always come from a personal place, but a lot of times, they’re written about more fantastical stories and subject matter. A lot of the songs on this are more personal, less fantastical. I tried – with the issue of love and loss, loss of faith and going to what’s beneath human loss – to delve back to something as a source that wasn’t just simple love or betrayal, but maybe memories that were uncomfortable or humiliating, or, as you get older, possibly even shameful. Seeing that sometimes destructive elements from things that seem glorious in youth, as it all unplays, become simply destructive and decaying over time. And even if not literally, then sometimes just the memory becomes a destructive resonance as it lingers in your heart. It can become regret.”

On “Can’t Satify Me Now,” the narrator sings a deep, gospel apology for once having reveled in a lover’s pain and anguish.

What Miller seems to be saying is that the beast is not all that far beneath the surface. That, in any of us, whether it’s cruelty or the ambition of the self made man, clawing and scratching with his two bloody hands, or some other dark thing, the beast is just not as far beneath the surface as any of us might like it to be. And, like Cash sang, it’s caged by frail and fragile bars.

And then there’s that wild man on the video screen, writhing and howling and laying it down on the guitar. The guy that Ethan Miller has sounded like all along.