Bottlecap Mountain: ‘I think it’s an interesting record – the way it flows, there are some surprises’

Austin, Texas soulful rock band Bottlecap Mountain have released their charming and heartwarming single ‘I’ve Got Loving For You’, the lead single from their album Electric Love Spree, which will be out on 4 June.

The band comprises Stewart Gersmann (vocals and lead guitar), Chris Stangland (bass),Yvonne Love (organ, backing vocals) Doug Pena (rhythm guitar, backing vocals) and Ray Flynt (drums). Gersmann and Stangland have known each other the longest and met working at Starbucks around 20 years ago. Gersmann, Pena and Flynt know each other from playing in a former band together, called The Spoiled.

Their band name has a lovely provenance: ‘My dad was in a band back in the late 60’s called the Bottle Cap Mountain Boys,’ Gersmann said. ‘I liked it, I always thought it sounded kind of mysterious, like an actual mountain.’ I say it sounds like a group of guys up to no good drinking beer up a mountain somewhere and he laughs: ‘That’ll work, that’s pretty accurate! Actually, that band, it’s a pretty good story. They had one big gig that they were gonna play in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1969, they got booked to open up for Steppenwolf. The night before that, the guy that was the leader of the band found Jesus, or was born again (laughs), so he fired my dad and everybody in the band the night before they were gonna open up for Steppenwolf. So that didn’t go too well for them, which also kind of appeals to me. You know, it’s sort of a rebirth of the name. When I first started, I had to kind of prove that I could do it. These days, he’s very supportive. I think he thinks it’s pretty cool.’

‘I’ve Got Loving For You’ is a huge blues and soul infused old school gem with gospel-like backing vocals and is, ultimately, a sweet tribute to Gersmann’s wife: ‘I think probably a lot of my songs are about my wife. Unless it’s a song that’s very clearly not a love song (laughs) or that’s not about her. This one I would say is but also I think it’s kind of for anybody and everybody. You know, if you’ve been in love, if you’ve experienced that, it’s who it’s for.’

‘On a good day, something starts to present itself, usually it’s a chord progression or some music and then a melody forms’

The song started by Gersmann just ‘messing around with the guitar’: ‘Something will kind of happen, usually within 20 minutes or so; if nothing happens, I’ll just noodle around and then put the guitar down,’ he said. ‘On a good day, something starts to present itself, usually it’s a chord progression or some music and then a melody forms. Usually, if a lyric comes out of that melody, I know I’m on to something and I’ll keep going until I finish. This song is one where I didn’t really do a lot of editing. It sort of came out the “I’ve got loving for you”, the repetitiveness of it and I just rolled with it.’

I say that it has a lovely old school vibe and that if he’d said it was a song his dad has written back in the 60’s, it would be easy to believe: ‘I’ll tell him you said that, he’ll appreciate that, that’s very kind. We worried when we first started working it up that maybe it was too much like something else: had we heard this before? It tips its hat to some older stuff but we realized that this is our song. And hey, you know, if Paul McCartney thought that somebody else had written ‘Yesterday’, then you know it’s always been that way a little bit! In the past, I probably would have made it something a little more involved lyrically, maybe a little more mid-60’s Bob Dylan but I’ve just gotten to a place where I’m like: “No, don’t mess with it too much”.’

‘This record is definitely influenced by a lot of things from the 60s and 70s’

At the start of the track, you hear a motorbike revving up and roaring away, which ties into a broader theme across the upcoming album: ‘I hesitate to say retro but this record is definitely influenced by a lot of things from the 60s and 70s,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘We recorded the whole thing to analogue tape using old microphones and old equipment. The motorcycle thing was inspired by The Kinks’ record called Face to Face that came out in 1966, the one with ‘Sunny Afternoon’ on it. That record has sound effects on it like waves crashing. Ray Davies had wanted to start every song on that record with sound effects but the record label wasn’t into that, so only a couple of them managed to get on there (laughs). So our record has a couple of songs that start with sound effects.’

There’s a fantastically hooky guitar solo around two minutes into ‘I’ve Got Loving For You’, which is played by Gersmann and I ask what his workhorse guitar is: ‘That’s a Gibson SG, the classic like Angus Young. It’s red, I like a red (laughs), it’s a pretty one. Lately, I also have a Rickenbacker that I really like. Those are the two that I mostly use live and a lot in the studio, they’re very different but they complement each other.’

Gersmann has been singing for as long as he can remember: ‘I was always the little kid that would jump on the coffee table and sing Stevie Wonder songs to my parents, friends and stuff like that. Always maybe a little bit of a ham when it comes to music! Everything else, not necessarily (laughs), I don’t know where it came from. I think I ended up with a pretty good voice. My dad can sing pretty well, although he was the drummer in the band. I think if he would have decided to be a singer, he would have been really good. But otherwise, my mom has no musical ability, nor do grandparents on either side. Nobody has any, it’s really just my dad and I. Ray, the drummer, his dad is also a musician. Actually, Doug’s dad is a musician too, now that I think about that. Ray’s dad, Ron Flint, was in a pretty big band called 20/20 in the late 70’s, they were on the same label that Tom Petty was on early on. It’s fun coming from having somebody in your family that is a musician because you get all the stories, I feel like you’re ahead of the curve a little bit.’

‘I guess it’s our summer of love record!’

Of Electric Love Spree, which features nine tracks, he says: ‘It’s a very fitting title, I think, when you hear the whole record. Love is certainly the theme of the album, with one song that I’d say veers away from that a little bit. I guess it’s our summer of love record! The sentiment is certainly honest, I think, at least for me. I think it’s an interesting record – the way it flows, there are some surprises. There are certainly some songs on it that I would say fit with’ ‘I’ve Got Loving For You’ pretty well. I’m a Beatles nut (laughs), and The Beatles never made a record that had 14 songs that sounded exactly the same. There are no rules but at the same time, I think it’s cohesive. If you listen to the White Album, it sounds like that period of The Beatles.’

A couple of tracks on the album break the mould at seven and a half minutes: ‘One of them has a big, epic guitar solo at the end of it, it’s actually a song about my grandparents,’ he said. They both passed quite a few years ago. They were both born in the 20’s, my grandfather was born in Denmark and my grandmother was from Pennsylvania here in the States. They were just lovely, wonderful people and I miss them a lot, so I felt like they needed a song. It’s called ‘Peace Of Cake’ – it’s really about their influence on me, it talks a bit about where they came from and who they were as people but mostly it’s about me living in a world without them and what they would say to me if they were still here. The feel of the song is fairly long and drawn out, mid-tempo until the bridge where it picks up a bit. It’s pretty atmospheric, there’s lots of reverb! It starts pretty sparse and builds into the guitar solo at the end, my best version of the solo at the end of ‘Purple Rain’!’

Gersmann’s favourite song on the upcoming album is ‘Tsarina Tsarina’: ‘We have a song from a couple albums ago (Fib Factory, 2022) that’s called ‘Tsar Tsar’, the chorus to that goes: “There’s a tsar in my heart, there’s a tsar in my head”. Somebody that is controlling you, so this is sort of a continuation of that idea. It’s the only song on the record that isn’t love themed, it’s about somebody that’s losing their mind. I guess I’m fascinated with the whole Tsar Nicholas thing (the last reigning Emperor of Russia), I’m a bit of a history buff. Sometimes, things just pop into your head and they fit and you roll with them. This is the bleakest song on the record but what happens at the end is left up to interpretation, it’s a little mysterious.’ ‘Tsar Tsar’ is about someone losing their mind and ‘Tsarina Tsarina’ is them after they’ve lost it – the Tsar/Tsarina part is really just a metaphor for feeling like your mind is being controlled or ruled.’ 

‘I think songs come out of the ether and I get the feeling from both of those guys that that’s how they feel about it, too’

Growing up, he spent a lot of his teenage years listening to The Cure and The Smiths. ‘My big inspirations, other than the Beatles, are Elvis Costello – one of my favourites, for sure – Prince, he’s big,’ he said. ‘Stevie Wonder’s another one that’s really big for me and I’m a big Stones fan and of The Who and The Kinks.’ I ask if he ever covers The Beatles. ‘No, not really, just learning them throughout the years at home but we’ve never covered them live. It’s something I don’t really touch, it’s a precious kind of thing, don’t let me ruin it!’

He mulls which musician he’d like to go drinking with: ‘The two people that come to mind are also two of the scariest (laughs). I think I’ll say John Lennon and Bob Dylan, although it’s slightly terrifying to think about because they would either like you and you would have a great time or they would just destroy you! I think I would ask them if their experience writing songs is the same as mine, which really is just that there is no rhyme or reason to it. I think songs come out of the ether and I get the feeling from both of those guys that that’s how they feel about it, too. I think sometimes songs are just there and they’re just waiting for somebody to jot them down. I think that it’s you filling in the gaps, what’s coming from you, personally, would be different if it was somebody else that managed to grab the idea. Lyrically a little different because most of the time you sit down and you think: “Oh, that’s a song”, you just have to figure out how it all goes together. And then sometimes you sit down and nothing happens and you go: “Okay, well, nobody was floating around today!”‘

(Photo from left to right: Chris, Stewart, Yvonne and Ray. Photo credit: Kate Spenstar.)