One music critic recently described powerpop legend Bleu’s Sargeant Pepper Grinder as one of the best albums ever made about grief, but it’s not exactly Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, Eels’ Electroshock Blues, or Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. It actually might be the funniest album about grief as well.
So, it totally tracks that during his LPTV interview, when he’s not ruminating about death and loss, self-confessed “unabashed nerd” Bleu is randomly and hilariously debating whether Oasis or Extreme can be considered powerpop, expressing his fandom for The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, or singing the praises of Mutt Lange and Max Martin (as seen in the full interview video above).
And the fallen friends that inspired Sargeant Pepper Grinder wouldn’t want it any other way.
“This whole record is a tribute to some friends of mine who have passed, so I think everything surrounding this record is very emotional. And today was definitely no exception,” says Bleu, aka William McAuley III, as he relaxes at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records after celebrating Sargeant Pepper Grinder’s release with his first live show in about four years. (He admits that performing in public after such a long hiatus made him “super-nervous,” although he plans to play out more in the future, including a gig in his old home city of Boston on Nov. 20.) “But the approach I took is maybe a little bit different, in that I wanted to write songs that they would have liked. That really was my goal. And both of them liked upbeat, rockin’, exciting music. I think that’s what makes this record maybe a little bit different than a lot of the grief records.
“They were both very funny people, and we shared humor. When we got together, we were mostly laughing. A vast majority of the time that we were together and we spent a lot of time together was laughing,” he continues. “It just didn’t make sense to me to write this down, depressing record, because that’s not what they would’ve wanted and that’s not how they would’ve wanted to be celebrated. … I’ve already gotten so many comments from people saying that either Scootch or Ducky would’ve loved and been proud of the record and these songs, and it would have amused them.”
McAuley is referring to two longtime collaborators: his college friend and frequent cowriter Alex “Scootch” Scutro, who officiated McAuley’s 2017 wedding, and his studio partner Ducky Carlisle, a three-time Grammy-winning drummer/engineer/mixer and “rabblerouser” who was McAuley’s best man. Carlisle, “an amazing person and incredible friend who knew how to inspire and encourage people,” who McAuley worked with from the very beginning of his career, inspired several Sargeant Pepper Grinder tracks. But the one that probably would have amused Carlisle most is “Start a Band.”
The groovy boogie-rock of “Start a Band” is as earwormy and infectious as one would expect from a veteran songsmith like McAuley. After all, along with his own eight acclaimed Bleu albums, he’s written for Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Hanson, the Jonas Brothers, Big Freedia, Michelle Branch, Kate Pierson, and K-pop boy band NCT DREAM, and has received multiple Emmy nominations for his screen composing. “Start a Band” even boasts a “D.U.C.K.Y.” singalong that ought to inspire an arm-spelling dance a la “Y.M.C.A.” or Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” But, characteristic of the gallows humor that runs throughout Sargeant Pepper Grinder, the powerpop bop comes to a dead (pun intended) halt when McAuley sings: “He always wanted to start a band… but then that fucker died!” When McAuley blurts that line and then pregnantly pauses for effect during his Licorice Pizza performance, a few awkward giggles can be heard throughout the store — before the music resumes and McAuley insistently sings, “He would have thought that was funny!”
“Start a Band” is about a very funny dream, which Carlisle never fulfilled during his lifetime, to form a monkeys-themed (as opposed to Monkees-themed) tribute act. There’s even a line in the song in which McCauley imagines this band singing, “Hey, hey, we’re the Shock the Monkeys!” McAuley chucklingly reflects, “[Carlisle] was obsessed with this idea that so many huge bands have songs about monkeys! I mean, the Beatles have ‘Nothing to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.’ The Rolling Stones have a monkey song [“Monkey Man”]. George Michael had a ‘Monkey’ song. There’s [Peter Gabriel’s] ‘Shock the Monkey.’ He had this exhaustive list. What is this rock ‘n’ roll obsession with monkeys? Anyway, that was his point of reference, and he had always wanted to start a cover band that just did all of those songs. It was a funny thing that he always talked about. As I was in the horrific process of cleaning out his house with another friend after he died, that was one of the things that I was thinking about — the idea of this song, to sort of cheer myself up to help me get through it.”
When LPTV suggests that, possibly to celebrate Carlisle’s birthday or commemorate the anniversary of his passing, McAuley play an all-monkey-song tribute show at Licorice Pizza – and maybe even broaden the concept to include the actual Monkees, Arctic Monkeys, some Gorillaz’ hits, or Troy McClure’s Planet of the Apes musical from The Simpsons — McAuley enthuses, “Absolutely! I mean, if you open it up to all primates, we could do a five hour-set of this.”
“Shiny Dimes,” which guest vocals from Bleu’s son, is a more sentimental and less silly Carlisle homage. “It is about this myth that a lot of people don’t share now, so a lot of people don’t necessarily know about this,” McAuley explains. “I say ‘myth’ loosely, because I really believe in it. It’s about people who have passed leaving shiny dimes for us from the afterlife. I find shiny dimes all the time since Ducky has passed, so I do believe that he is sending his love and appreciation from the afterlife. He had such a huge laugh, and I can still hear it. I can still hear him laughing at all the stupid jokes.”
Scutro obviously inspired the eponymous Sargeant Pepper Grinder track “Scootch,” which cold-opens with the blunt refrain, “Alex woulda liked this song… but he’s dead, so he can’t hear it.” Later in the almost jarringly, relentlessly cheerful tune, McAuley deadpans (again, pun intended): “A bit too clever, but you liked it that way/‘A bit too much is on brand,’ you’d say/But you’re a bit too not-alive today.”
“Alex was incredibly smart, too smart for his own good, some might say. He was incredibly funny, insanely charming, and he was a complicated person. I really appreciated about that. I didn’t even really understand how complicated he was until after he died, to be honest. I felt so lucky that we had such an uncomplicated and unfettered relationship for so long. It’s making me really emotional,” says McAuley, pausing to collect himself.
“It’s OK. I’m glad that I can still be emotional about these guys,” he continues. “In a weird way, it’s like [Scutro] kind of chose me. I was his person that he chose to always stay best friends with, and it means the world to me. It really still does. He was always there for me. Being a full-time professional musician for as long as we’ve done this, it has a lot of ups and downs, and he always knew the right thing to say to keep getting me back on the horse.”
After a quarter-century in the business, making music on both major labels and with his own self-contained indie projects (sometimes crowd-funded, thanks to his cult-hero status in the powerpop world and his diehard fanbase), McAuley also does a lot of his own mid-life stock-taking on Sargeant Pepper Grinder. There’s the sardonic and psychedelic ballad “This Song Won’t Sell,” in which he parrots back jaded industry advice that, ironically, he’s “not supposed to write a sad song.” Consider it a companion piece or sequel of sorts to “I Don’t Hear A Single,” a 2008 song by a supergroup comprising McAuley, Mike Viola, and Carlisle called the Major Labels.
And then there’s “Deathbed,” in which McAuley, who was a “massive, massive hair metal fan” in his youth, looks back to his teens when “White Lions roared and Black Crowes soared” and muses: “On my deathbed looking back/How will I remember that?/Rose-colored glasses or cataracts blurring the past.” The album comes to a poignant close with the resigned yet triumphant survivor’s anthem “I’m Not Dead.”
“I am getting more used to and more comfortable with just being like, ‘It’s OK. I’m a 50-year-old guy, and this is who I am and I can’t change it. And a lot of you people who are watching this [interview] are 50 too, and here we are, just trying to be ourselves and enjoy our life together, right? Becoming comfortable with what that is really big for me. But I am also happy to say that we’re seeing such a resurgence back into physical media,” says McAuley, who pressed his new album’s vinyl at Licorice Pizza. “This idea of consuming records also seems to be coming back, even more so with some of the younger generations, so it does feel good to be still swimming in those waters and to know that this idea of real blood, sweat, and tears put into making longform, human records… people are still passionate about that.”
Bleu obviously felt passionate about his friendships with Scutro, who died in 2022, and Carlisle, who passed just one year later — “These people were just so important in my life that when I lost them, I needed to write songs about them” — but he was still processing and reeling from those two losses and finally “fully ready to release” Sargeant Pepper Grinder” when “another huge tragedy happened.” He says he’s “not really comfortable” talking about it just yet, but this ended up delaying the album for another year. However, he now realizes, “In a weird way, I think there is some subtext [about the third tragedy] there, for sure. It has been many years, but I think the advantage of that is that I am able to laugh more than cry now, if that makes any sense.”
Now that Sargeant Pepper Grinder is finally out in the world and he’s starting to play Bleu gigs again, McAuley believes “it all happened the way it was supposed to happen, and I’m glad that it’s happening now. In a weird way — because it’s been so many years, because the memorials have passed, all of the tributes on social media are long gone at this point — for [this album] feels like such a nice way to continue to keep [Carlisle and Scutro’s] memory alive. And that’s something that I’ll never stop doing, but this is obviously the most meaningful way that I can do that.”
