(relaxed guitar music) Hey there, welcome to "Monograph."

I'm your host, Jennifer Wallace Fields.

We're at Standard Deluxe in Waverly, Alabama to check out their print shop and talk about the dozens of performances they put on every year.

Scott Peek founded the screen printing business in a cotton warehouse downtown in 1991 and it's since evolved into a multifaceted cultural institution with a strong gravitational pull in East Alabama.

Scott's busy printing a job, so I met with his wife Amy to get a tour of the space and talk about their history in the area and the impressive community they've built.

So Amy, thanks so much for giving me a tour around Standard Deluxe.

I love getting to see all of the buildings and the property.

I wondered if you could just kind of give us, just start at the beginning, like what is Standard Deluxe?

Standard Deluxe is first and foremost a silk screen print shop and design house that has been around since '91, headed by Scott Peek, the Artistic Director and President of Standard Deluxe and so the history, the roots are always in the design and the visual art and the screen printing.

Scott loves music of all kinds and live music.

The love for the two and the emergence of those, music and screen printing and design has always been at the core of Standard Deluxe.

And then over the years, the grounds, the artistic grounds have developed.

So Waverly becoming the home of Standard Deluxe many years back when they were looking for a space and then over the years, acquiring different buildings and spaces in this little gem of a spot.

-Yeah.

-And community collaboration and community has always been very key to the health and the identity of Standard Deluxe.

So many collaborations with local DIYers, local artists, local creatives, local academics that have helped to really make each little chapter come alive.

Because Scott is just a DIY builder.

It's one thing after the next, you know?

-Yeah.

-Depending on the resources -that are around you.

-Yeah.

I think that's pretty apparent after our tour.

-Yeah.

-To see all of the things that he's made happen on this property.

I was also curious about, you mentioned that it started as screen printing.

When did the music, the live music part come into play?

I don't have an exact date or year.

I know that 2001 was the first Boogie and that was when Standard Deluxe was still operating out of downtown.

I'm pointing, downtown is right over there and so it was a very organic process.

Scott and Standard Deluxe is a proper music presenter now and there are many great relationships with agents and managers in the touring circuit.

But that grew over time, right?

And so it was very organic.

But the old 280 Boogie starting very much as a community party and Standard Deluxe facilitating it and welcoming different artists and then it just growing over time.

[Jennifer] So the Boogie, is that just a once-a-year, kind of big blowout festival?

Yeah, so we've had a Fall Boogie and a Spring Boogie but the old 280 Boogie has always been in April.

So we are coming up this next year, 2026 will be the 25th year of the Boogie.

-Wow.

-And there was one year during COVID when we didn't have it, right?

So the 25th anniversary and that has always, the original Boogie has always been in the spring.

But we produce outdoor shows and shows here in the little house throughout the year.

Well, thank you so much for your time and for talking to me today and I am about to go catch up with Scott in the print shop.

[Amy] Sounds great, thanks Jennifer.

-Thank you.

-Yeah.

(upbeat guitar music) [Jennifer] Speaking of building a community for music and creativity, here is Vice Cooler, who was instrumental in fostering the 90s DIY scene in Mobile.

(fast tempo drumbeat) My name's Vice Cooler.

I work in all forms of art.

Musician, producer, writer, sometimes session player but also photographer, artist, director.

♪ Three, two, one ♪ All of those things in a way have been an excuse for me to stay around creative people because that was what I always wanted to do.

I wanted to be where things were being made, where people were making things and where ideas were being explored.

(fast drumbeat) So I grew up in the late 90s in the Mobile, Alabama area.

I loved weird music and art and I was convinced that if I could somehow figure out how to get these things into where I lived, people would be able to like learn from it and enjoy it and also have something to do.

(classical music) The building behind me is the previous location of Satori Sound.

This structure was a very significant cultural oasis for people who were interested in the arts and what I mean by that is that it was a record store that had an insane collection of records inside for sale but it also had a great used collection and on top of that, the owner Chuck was very enthusiastic and supportive of people just hanging out in there, leaving flyers, putting on shows.

Me and my friend Alicia, who we would shortly after start XBXRX together, we came in here and found a flyer just under the used desk that was like "This Friday in Mississippi in Biloxi."

I ended up seeing Deerhoof, which was the first noisy band I ever saw, which I really identified with because I identified more with the emotions of sound in music rather than like a technical thing.

It really blew my mind and I went over to the merch booth and I think I maybe had like eight or $10 and they gave me all of their merchandise, said "Keep the money."

And they were like "We encourage you to purchase a guitar and start a band and if you do that, we will book a West Coast tour for you and tour with you."

And I was 14 or 15 at that time and so that really inspired all of us to immediately start writing music and like trying to record it.

We were always saying to each other, "As long as we start and stop at the same time, that's what matters."

And we had interpretive dancers and all these things and all these ideas weren't necessarily cohesive or hyper-focused.

It was just these weird ideas that we had as Alabama kids.

I think we kinda stumbled into all these weird people because they saw teenagers in Alabama that were like "We are going to make something happen."

And it was weird.

It confused everybody and I think there was something naively charming about it.

(steady static) Growing up in Alabama, it was not out of the question to drive six hours to Atlanta to see a band play and then drive back because me and my friends wanted it that bad and that also is symptomatic of how starved things were at the time here for getting access to art.

In the late 90s, myself and a few other people, we started bringing acts through the Gulf Coast that would not have stopped here otherwise.

(relaxed music) My inspiration for setting up shows was to basically try to have a space to bring people together where we could build a similar community of interests in art and politics and things like that.

♪ Walked by their gate ♪ Having access to places like this and a few other coffee shops, Tillman's Corner Community Center and eventually a bar, the Splash Lettuce set up shows there, being able to like have a center point that's like entertainment, you're learning, you have weird art coming through, those things were really inspirational to me and my friends.

-(relaxed tempo music) -(steady tempo drumbeat) (relaxed tempo music continues) One of our first out of town shows was with Quintron and Miss Pussycat and they were great people to learn from and they were like very important examples of like how to become an adult and how to treat people and how to build a community and how to support your friends and how to make things and like execute those things and finish them.

I have been fortunate enough where I've picked up so much learning by being in rooms with people and by people being very generous with their time and their life experience, sharing that with me that I try to be generous in offering those things to people I care about and know.

Be prepared to just be bad at what you're doing for a long time and be comfortable with that.

Be comfortable at like trying out things and just being absolutely horrible at it and then that way, there's two things that happens.

One, you learn what you want to do and you don't want to do and then two, once you do something and you know you want to do it, you know you have to get better at it and then you can focus your time on doing that.

-Hey, Scott.

-Hey, Jennifer.

-How are you?

-What you doing?

-I'm good, how are you?

-Good.

What are you getting into?

We're gonna attempt to set this, print this old design here, two-color truck design.

-Cool.

-I'm gonna throw some ink in the screen and see what it looks like.

[Jennifer] Awesome.

What would you say your favorite thing about screen printing is?

I think the sorta immediacy of the color and the print, you know?

How did you get started in screen printing?

There was a high school professor that screen printed in his garage and asked me to help him and it was just a one-color press similar to this, just one, one head, one color and I helped him for the summer and then just kept doing it.

So I worked at different shops and got outta college and still wanted to print and started Standard Deluxe.

And then at what point did you get into having shows around Standard Deluxe, live music?

[Scott] It was in the early 90s, around '94 and we were having t-shirt sales and would have a band play bonfires and potlucks and then we started printing for bands and then we started printing for touring bands and it just sorta snowballed a little bit.

We were walking around and I noticed all of the buildings that you've saved from being like torn down and that you've reclaimed and you talk about it very casually like anybody could do it but to me, it's really impressive and it seems like a lot of hard work.

What do you think the value of reclaiming these buildings is?

[Scott] Just to save 'em, you know?

The integrity was there of the building and I just see a lot of quality pieces and quality materials that are worth saving.

[Jennifer] Yeah, like you were pointing out the walls that had the hand-planing.

-Yeah.

-You know, things that just aren't done like that anymore.

Or just the house next door, you know?

We used the roof for the siding and the siding for some of the walls and it's just an art project also.

-Yeah.

-You know?

So Scott, I think I'm ready to get my hands dirty.

Do you mind if I give it a try?

Sure.

(Jennifer giggles) You can do your first print on this one that I've already printed the blue on.

[Jennifer] Okay, it'll be the second color going down?

Actually you can do that one, I'll do this one.

-Okay.

-Some people, this is called flooding the screen where you pull the ink and you fill the stencil.

So screen printing is a stencil making process.

So you're pulling ink through a stencil and some people like to pull.

I push a lot of times, it's less on the gut.

Okay.

So basically you're filling the screen and then you're pushing ink through it and it's pretty hard and there's different mesh screens to lay down more ink.

There's finer mesh screens for more detail and there's a whole science with mixing ink.

-You can mix it thin or thick.

-Wow.

-So.

-It sounds complicated.

You want to pull or push?

-I'll push.

-Yeah?

I'll push.

Okay, so I need to flood it first.

[Scott] Now you can flood it.

-Is that enough?

-Yep.

-All right.

-And then all the way down and then really hard on that edge.

[Jennifer] Okay.

-There you go.

-Oh!

[Scott] Keep going, keep going and then just pick your screen up and do it again.

-You don't have to flood it.

-Okay.

[Scott] Yeah, quick.

All right.

-You got something.

-Hey, that's not too bad.

(Jennifer laughs) Here's another Auburn alum who's become an iconic cornerstone of the Alabama music scene.

I've at this point played like 3400 shows in 51 countries and you get to meet all these people that you're like, "Oh, you got infected by the same crazy virus with music and punk rock that I did."

So you just connect so instantly with those kind of people.

(punk rock music) ♪ Ow ♪ My name's Brian Teasley and I'm a musician and a club owner.

Music was always something that was a solace, something that was always something that would provide meaning to a lot of situations that were either unclear or didn't have a meaning otherwise.

People use the term "soundtrack of your life" way too often but I was just kind of always struck by that, especially listening to AM Radio early on as a kid.

I would make the family put on a Christmas concert every year and I think when I got about 11 or 12, my mom said I was making everybody practice too much and too hard.

♪ But do you recall ♪ ♪ The most famous reindeer of all ♪ ♪ Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer ♪ ♪ Had a very shiny nose ♪ ♪ And if you ever saw it ♪ ♪ You would even say it glows ♪ And one year, my uncle got upset and quit and that was the end of our Christmas concerts.

In the early 80s when I first started playing music as a kid, the other kids in my neighborhood played guitar and the virtuosity of like tapping and hammering on that was so prevalent, like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen, I was like "I'm never gonna be able to do that but I can bang those things."

And plus it was diversifying my CV of a nine-year-old.

We had an old dresser cabinet that had a mirror on it also in the garage so I could see myself playing, which probably has made my drumming overly visual in a way, in a sense of demanding attention that doesn't necessarily always need to be there.

That's as much of a criticism as it is a strength I guess.

Christmas of 1991, I had gone home for Christmas and I went up in the attic and I went through my folks' old LPs and they had a lot of stuff like Duane Eddy and Link Wray or The Ventures especially and I just thought that stuff was so cool and there again, it was kind of fast and had an energy to it.

There's that yin and yang to everything.

You're influenced by the things you love and then you're also influenced by what you don't want to be and the things that you just have a bad reaction to and a lot of the music that you were hearing was overly earnest, overly sharing of this sort of like, "My dad didn't come to my T-ball game and I'm gonna sing about it" kind of music and we were like "We don't want to be that and we should probably solve that problem by being an instrumental band."

You know, just completely dodged the issue and then hearing all that instrumental music that had such an appeal to us was just a vehicle for or at least a foundation of what we based our music off of, even though it like evolved to a much different place eventually.

(punk rock music) The one thing we've always said with Man or Astro-Man?

is "We're bringing you yesterday's technology tomorrow."

(punk rock music) (punk rock music continues) (punk rock music continues) The other thing we were doing a lot is putting on shows for bands coming from out of town.

Famously, we did Green Day in a bedroom on a stage made out of old antique doors.

It was a really cool time because that's when you could meet people from these places you had never even been to before.

That was great because then you would meet people and the way it used to happen, just like trading b-movie videotapes, is you would trade shows with some band you had met from Lincoln, Nebraska and slowly build together a network of people and I'd call a lot of clubs as a manager or as a fan of the band and be like, "Hey, you know when they're playing there or this or there?"

He's like "Oh, who is that?

We haven't heard of 'em."

And then call back and be like, "Hey, we were coming through town" and like kind of already have the wheels pre-greased for some kind of receptiveness by a club.

When we had our first seven-inch out, I sent a postcard to John Peel, who is like probably one of the most famous DJs in history.

Sent it to him at the BBC and I said, "Hey, please don't play our record."

I included a copy of the record of course and I said "Please don't play this record 'cause we don't want to be one of those flash-in-the-pan bands that gets hot in the UK and then sizzles into nothing."

Knowing that (chuckles) he might have a better chance of playing it that way, and he did.

I didn't even really realize how much of an effect that his show in particular with the BBC Worldwide, like how many people heard that stuff.

(punk rock music) Starting, getting into the club side of the world and putting on shows, it was really something I never thought I would do and it wasn't even necessarily intentional that, oh, that will be something else that will be part of my life.

But really it came out of like, let's quit saying that there's not some of these things here and create the place and maybe there's 30 people that will come out and support it.

Merrilee Challiss and I were talking a lot of like, hey, it would be really cool if there was a vegetarian restaurant mixed with a small club that could also do art exhibits and kind of this hodgepodge of all the things that we were really into and then we would just try to combine the punk rock ideals that we had with Southern Hospitality and then with this kind of European communal vibe that I had gotten from touring over there a lot and luckily, I had been in so many bands at that point that had been connected to a lot of different booking agencies and labels and things like that that I got to kind of call in a lot of favors and be like "Hey, can Mudhoney come play this little tiny place?"

And there's so many bands that went on to be significant or huge that played what is now the Soda Fountain section of Joyland.

(crowd cheers) Well after Bottletree, I never thought I would do another music venue and I walked by going for a walk from my house and saw the building that's the venue part of Saturn now and then the space nextdoor here became open and I was like "Oh, what about if we could Kool-Aid Man style smash through the walls and connect the two buildings and create this one space that was like a place that did something during the day and then was open late at night?"

And "Oh, then there's this space above it."

'Cause one of my caveats was that people should be provided a place to be able to stay overnight as part of their experience, you know?

Like people don't realize, and I'm talking about bands that are famous, like top level bands, like even that live in the lap of luxury in a lot of ways, it's hard to tour and it's hard to tour for a long time.

It's not a natural life, you know?

It's a constant barrage of noise and sound and aggravation and being on all the time and also having every bad possible thing you can do in life constantly around you.

Never lost on me when a band shows up here that I don't know what they've been through but I bet it's hard.

I bet maybe they had a 13-hour overnight drive from Austin and they're just worn out.

Maybe they just want a safe, quiet place to be able to chill.

Maybe they need some space to get away from each other.

Something that Steve Albini always instilled was this is the path.

It doesn't have to be exactly your path but there's a way to do this where you're honest and fair and treat people right and feel good about what you do and have it be fulfilling.

I'm so thankful I got exposed to that.

I'm so thankful that there's still people that care about it and I constantly find my people that I've been looking for.

Still meeting people that have the same crazy thoughts about art and music is still why you do it, it's still why you do it every day and sometimes it's easy to forget but it's something that I should try to recognize and wake up every day and kiss, well, I don't know if our stage has been mopped today but kiss the ground of the stage to like be thankful that I'm connected and have met all these people.

[Automated Voice] End of Quiet Groove.