Chris Ballew
Vocalist, Bassist - The Presidents of the USA
Chris Ballew, best known as lead singer and bassist of The Presidents of the United States of America, asked to be photographed at Neumos, so we obliged. The Seattle band formed in 1993 and released six albums between 1993 and 2015.
Before PUSA, he played in Boston and Los Angeles with artists including Beck, Mary Lou Lord, and Mark Sandman. Back in Seattle, the band broke through with playful, hit driven rock.
After PUSA, Chris formed The Giraffes with Mike Musburger and Jason Staczek, later releasing We Hear Music in 2015, a 33 track collection of unreleased material. He also records children’s music as Caspar Babypants with 19 albums, and has released four solo records.
Photo by Rachel Crick at Neumos (aka “Moe’s”) where PUSA played many times
Transcript
This story begins with my friend Mary Lou calling and telling me that she was aware of this guy Beck, and he was looking for a backup band for a North American tour. He was about to get signed, or he had just been signed. I sort of ignored her, because it's like somebody calling you, and you answer the phone and they say, "Hey, there's this guy named, you know, Piglet Jones, and he's gonna be huge. Do you want to play bass in his band?" You'd be like, "I don't know who Piglet Jones is."
So anyway, of course, Beck, aka Piglet Jones, became huge, so I made the right decision by saying yes to the opportunity, and I met him in Seattle, and we hit it off after I saw him play live. I loved the psychedelic nature of his lyrics. I hallucinated what he was singing. I could totally get into that aspect of his songwriting, and we bonded over that, and eventually after an audition at Calvin Johnson's house down in Olympia, playing slide and bass on the album One Foot in the Grave, I was accepted and hired to be in his band.
So we toured all over the place, and during that process I remembered this experience that I had had, because Beck's incredible talents started to outshine my confidence, and I remembered that when I met him I had just done a doodle of two sharks fighting over a king, is what I saw in the doodle. That was doodled the night that I met him at the Crocodile in Seattle. You know, eventually when he called and said that I could join his band and would I like to go on tour, I had this amazing moment where I said yes, hung up the phone, walked outside, and there'd been a windstorm and there was debris in the yard, and I bent down and picked up this folded up piece of paper. I opened it up and it was a child's drawing with a little caption, and it said "One time two sharks were fighting to see who was the king," and that was what the picture was, two sharks and a king. It was almost exactly like the messaging of the drawing I did. It turned out to be Beck and I were the two sharks and the king turned out to be my self-confidence and sort of self-assuredness as a songwriter, which was, you know, being slowly, you know, melted down and burnt to a crisp by the ultra-hot, radiant talent that Beck possessed.
So eventually I quit being in Beck's band, went back to Seattle, rejoined the presidents of the United States of America, the band that I was already doing when I went off to play with Beck, and the rest is, as they say, history.