Interview with 87 Nights: ”We like playing old blues songs pimped up’

Brooklyn, New York, gritty rockers 87 Nights are gearing up to release their second album, Can of Worms. 

The band comprises Zane Acord (vocals and guitar), Johnny Holliday and Preston Johnson on guitar, Mac Dickson (drums), and Shane McCoy (bass). What started off as a college band in Charleston in 2019 – their name is a reference to their small practice room in Dickson’s house, located at 87 Morris, where they spent a lot of nights, became a kind of experimental laboratory where friends could jam and work on their setlist.

Earlier this month, they released their single ‘Make You Mad’, which explodes with an infectious, fuzzy bass line, courtesy of an old ’67 Fender Coronado before Acord comes in on vocals. It would be easy to say that there’s something of The Black Keys’ frontman Dan Auerbach in his voice but that wouldn’t do him justice as he slides from mellifluous to raspy in a way that Auerbach doesn’t, making the track hooky, edgy and sexy in equal measure, the kind of song that the crowd would sing along to enthusiastically: ‘It’s our best song to date, we nailed it,’ Acord said. ‘We hope it becomes a fan favourite, it has different rhythms, it’s tough to emulate live.’ McCoy nods: ‘We were playing the song for a few months live before releasing it and getting a good response,’ he said. It’s full of surprises, too: just when you think the song is winding down around three minutes in, it reboots with a crashing wall of guitars.

Essentially, it’s a song about lusting after a girl: ‘We had so much fun with the lyrics,’ Acord said. ‘Wolfy, our producer, and I had a bunch of different ideas we wrote on our last tour, dumb stuff you write down (laughs). It’s about a girl I was hanging out with who gets whatever she wants. The whole song is loosely based on her. I kept going back to her, even though I knew I shouldn’t.’ I ask if she knows it’s about her. ‘I hope she knows it’s about her but you want to keep the lyrics vague enough,’ Acord said. McCoy jumps in: ‘It started with the guitar,’ he said. ‘That riff after the chorus, the “da da duh”, I had it in my head for a while and didn’t know what to do with it but I kept it alive. That was the foundation for the structure.’ Acord agrees: ‘I recorded it one day and tracked the demo and we sat on it for a while,’ he said. ‘I had the drums, bass and 3 guitar stack and a shit $150 Epiphone bass (laughs), I blasted it and ran it through the interface. Now there are 8 guitars layered in it, Wolfy loves adding layers in!’

As the song kicks off: “You’re an animal with your silver teeth and a ruby tongue right between your cheeks, gonna feel real good biting into me, looking for that taste you can’t repeat, girl.”

‘Johnny is really good at creating ambience and beefs up those parts’

However, their live version is slightly different, not least because they don’t have 8 guitars on stage: ‘We play it a little differently, we have three guitars colouring those parts in,’ Acord said. ‘Johnny is really good at creating ambience and beefs up those parts.’ McCoy agrees: You have the line “you don’t want to glide away on your electric rollerskates”, then you have Johnny coming in on his attention-building guitar!’

Other tracks, such as ‘I Ain’t Your Man’ hook you from the bluesey distorted Rolling Stones-like riff that forms the backbone to the song: ‘It was one of the first songs I ever wrote in 2017 when I was about to move to Charleston,’ Acord said. ‘That was when I started taking music seriously. I was just young, full of energy. I felt that I’d wasted the two years prior. I was taking a leap of faith, it’s raw and full energy.’ McCoy weighs in: ‘With ‘Make You Mad’, we’ve come full-circle,’ he said. ‘We’re four years older now, we’ve finished college and moved to different parts of the country.’

‘Make You Mad’ marks the second single from their upcoming 10 track album Can of Worms. Other potential song titles – nothing is set in stone – include ‘Gas Can’, ‘If I Were You’, ‘Waiting’ and ‘Afternoon’ and their plan is to release a single broadly every month for the next few months before bringing out the album next year. Next up will be their single ‘Karsu’: ‘It’s about another girl,’ Acord said. McCoy is laughing: ‘It’s going to be hard to know that it’s not about her – that’s her name!’ Acord laughs: ‘She was a videographer for us a few years back and we collectively fell in love with her. I’m a bit scared now! Normally, I write about my girlfriends (laughs), so this is a bit different!’ Sonically, it’s very different to ‘Make You Mad’: ‘It’s more of a ballad,’ McCoy said. ‘Yeah and there are soooo many more layers,’ Acord added.

‘We like playing old blues songs pimped up’

‘Hollywood’, which they released as a single earlier this year, is probably their bluesiest song to date, with an incredibly hooky G and C major backbone riff. It’s another track that’s hard to unpick, given the number of layers in it but with all of their trademark energy and fast-paced percussion that sounds like clapping, alongside heady guitar riffs. It’s also about a woman who’s not good for you, with Acord lamenting: “She’s no good, Hollywood” over and over. ‘We tracked it live for the most part,’ Acord said. ‘We like playing old blues songs pimped up (laughs), we wanted to find the right one for us. I like writing songs capturing the moment. I like variety, why wouldn’t you see how weird you can get (laughs)? I have a slew of influences, like The Beatles. I grew up on and love Mick Jagger, I love how his voice works. You shouldn’t overtrain your voice, the more you do, the more bland it can become. Lennon was a big influence for me. I didn’t think I had a great voice for a while but he talks about capturing a song in a take and if you like it, that’s good enough.’

McCoy grew up on bands such as The Beatles, Cat Stevens and Grateful Dead, which he describes as ‘a really good mix’: ‘I’m self-taught, I didn’t pick up a bass until my late-teens but my parents are music heads, my dad wasn’t allowed to play Trivial Pursuit because he knew all the music questions (laughs). There’s no music I don’t like. Yesterday, we listened to, like, 35 Beatles songs. You never know what’s going to come on next in our van!’

If he could have a pint with anyone, McCoy picks John Lennon: ‘I reckon John would be the most fun Beatle to have a drink with,’ he said, mulling it over. Acord is thinking: ‘Bowie, he was always a hero to me, he did shit that no-one else thought of. Think of all his alter-egos, he didn’t half-arse it.’ Their dream line up would match their energy: ‘The Stooges would be good,’ McCoy said. ‘The Strokes would be fun, so would the New York Dolls. We just watched Woodstock 99 (the documentary about the music festival of the same name), it was crazy!’ Acord is laughing: ‘Yeah, we could headline!’

Funny moments are par for the course for this energetic quintet: ‘Gosh, there’s sooo many,’ Acord said. ‘We have endless nicknames for each other – Bork, Glop and Brumpo, to name a few! One time in the hills of North Carolina, we met a man named Salamander, which we naturally found hilarious, and him and his friends taught Preston how to hula hoop. He then proceeded to put on a show for the band until he lost the hula hoop and it rolled perfectly down the entire hill. Mushrooms may or may not have been involved!’

(Photo from left to right: Mac, Johnny, Zane, Preston and Shane.)