Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers are currently working on a new album that they are aiming to release in early summer 2017. But they are also celebrating the 20th anniversary of Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy, the major label debut of Clyne when he was The Refreshments, the predecessor of Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers.
Clyne said that they don’t have a name for the new album, but that they had just finished a big rush of recording for the album prior to speaking with the News-Press. It will be the group’s eighth studio album.
Currently, the group is on tour in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy, and are coming to the State Theatre on Saturday, Oct. 15 as part of that tour. They have Andrew Leahey and the Homestead, who were profiled in the News-Press recently, opening up for them on tour.
“So we’re opening the set with that album top to bottom and it’s been received really well,” Clyne said. “You see a lot of old friends who we haven’t seen for a long time and a lot who we have seen and a lot a new people, too, so I’ve got no complaints. It’s been a blast.”
Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy, released on Mercury Records in 1996, peaked at 97 on the Billboard Top 200 chart and featured the radio smash “Banditos.” The group disbanded two years later and some of the members came back together to create Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, but the group’s legacy lived past 1998. The song “Yahoos and Triangles,” for example, was the theme song for the legendary Fox cartoon “King of the Hill.”
“It’s a joyful surrealness. I can’t believe that fast,” Clyne said. “But I feel honored that the album stood the test of time for so many people. Certainly every artist hopes to make something that will do that. That will stand up and do that and be as substantive or as fun or whatever in the decades following its release and I feel very fortunate that we hit that mark.”
In addition to the new album that Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers are working on, a tribute record commemorating Clyne’s first release is also in the works with contributions from Miles Neilsen and The Yawpers. Neilsen did a cover of “Blue Collar Suicide” and The Yawpers did a cover of “European Swallow.”
“That was actually Alice Cooper’s idea from some years ago. He and I worked together with a charity called Solid Rock, which actually his charity in Phoenix. And my band was his backing band for ten years at that event,” Clyne said. “Anyway, he got on stage and performed one of our songs and he said ‘If you ever re-release that I want a shot at it.’ And we were talking late last year about the album coming out and he said ‘Remember, I’ve got first shot at that.’ So he actually recorded that song and we haven’t released it yet. Although we recorded it first, we’ll probably release it last.
“And then we started talking with friends and other sort of coconspirators in rock n’ roll who we’ve toured with or have an affinity for and we gathered a list, you know a loose crazy confederacy, and…it’s just going to be really fun. I think it’s a lot more difficult than we thought it would be…but it’ll come together little by little.”
• For more information about Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, visit rogerclyneandthepeacemakers.com.
