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Kinks leader Ray Davies has been banned from America, bored of the 20th century and, at times, bigger than the Beatles. Davies may not be like anybody else—his songbook is one of rock’s greatest treasures—but he’s finally figuring out who he is. Interview by Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan

At one point during MAGNET’s interview with Ray Davies, the great songwriter stopped mid-sentence to peer out the window of the Dream Hotel overlooking 55th Street in Manhattan at dusk. Something had caught his eye.

“Isn’t that light out there like Edward Hopper lighting? Is that Edward Hopper time or not?”

Observing light, life and human nature with superhuman focus is Davies’ stock-in-trade. His best songs feel photorealistic and sound suspended in time. They are sometimes nostalgic and beautiful, and other times they are cynical and brutal. Davies himself is just as contradictory: combative and sensitive, a shy, self-examining middle-class hero from north London who’s had no problem indulging in rock ’n’ roll excess and showmanship. He’s often called a creative genius and a control freak, which are both compatible and necessary traits for the life he’s led.

The Kinks started in 1963 and soon became mop-topped soldiers of the British Invasion but, as it turned out, they fought too well: The sight of Ray and younger brother/guitarist Dave trading punches onstage didn’t compare favorably to the public profile of the affable Beatles. In 1965, the Kinks set out to conquer America with “You Really Got Me,” a revolutionary hit single that broke the sound barrier by introducing amplified distortion to a guitar riff, earning a reputation as the first heavy-metal song. While touring to promote “You Really Got Me,” however, a punch-up between Davies and a union official on the set of the TV show Where The Action Is resulted in the group’s banishment from U.S. stages. The Kinks—Ray and Dave, plus equally combative drummer Mick Avory and bassist Pete Quaife—wouldn’t be allowed to perform in America until 1969, effectively sidelined for much of the most important decade in rock ’n’ roll history.

Davies continued to battle from his British island, and his songwriting in the latter half of the ’60s became deeply emotional (1967’s “Waterloo Sunset”), satirical (1968 pastoral-pop masterpiece The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society) and ambitious (1969 song cycle Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire)). These artistic triumphs didn’t always translate to commercial success—especially in the U.S., where the Kinks’ English quirks were not well understood—and the band’s troubles were compounded by bad timing. Village Green was released the same day as the Beatles’ White Album and was virtually ignored by critics and the listening public. Written for a TV musical and poised to become the first rock opera, Arthur was delayed and ended up getting tagged as a pale imitation of the Who’s Tommy, which was released five months earlier.

Given the increasingly personal tenor of his songs, it’s no surprise that Davies answered with 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, an album whose songs take bitter jabs at the record industry but is leavened somewhat by classic gender-bending love song “Lola.” Alt-country antecedent Muswell Hillbillies, its title a nod to the Davies’ childhood home in London’s Muswell Hill, followed a year later, but 1972’s Everybody's In Show-Biz began a string of less-than-stellar concept albums and sprawling rock operas. The Kinks barely survived the ’70s (an onstage overdose of barbiturates nearly killed Davies in 1973), and turmoil reigned as Ray and Dave continued to feud.

By the late ‘70s, the Kinks were playing arena rock and courting American audiences again. They scored an early MTV hit with the Caribbean-flavored “Come Dancing” from 1983’s State Of Confusion. Just as the Kinks had become resurgent, however, Davies turned his attention to making a music-video-style film, 1985’s Return To Waterloo, and drummer Avory was fired after yet another fight with Dave. (Quaife, the Kinks’ peacemaking bassist, had left the group in 1969.) In 1993, with only Ray and Dave left standing, the Kinks quietly issued Phobia, their final album.

While the Kinks lay dormant, American listeners slowly rediscovered the band’s catalog—particularly the jangly, idyllic tones of late-’60s albums such as Village Green—and developed a cult-like reverence for Davies’ songwriting. Within the confines of indie rock, the Kinks’ forever-underdog status and Davies’ malcontent worldview resonated perfectly. In 2000, Davies returned to the stage with Hoboken, N.J., trio Yo La Tengo as his backing band, performing Kinks songs and working out new solo material at the Jane Street Theater in New York. He subsequently took YLT on the road with him.

Four years later, Davies was living in New Orleans and writing songs for his first solo album. While walking in the French Quarter with his girlfriend, he was shot in the leg as he tried in vain to apprehend a purse snatcher.

“Wrong place at the wrong time,” Davies tells MAGNET of his attempted act of heroism. “Tried to defend a lady’s honor. I didn’t like the way he was shouting and shooting his gun at the ground. I’d had a bad day, and he was the last thing I needed.”

The scariest moment of the entire ordeal occurred in the trauma ward of Charity Hospital. “They were worried about me because I’ve got a really slow heartbeat,” says Davies. “I went down to about 24 beats per minute, and I was really frightened because I could see they were frightened.”

Davies rebounded to kickstart his solo career, which has so far produced 2006’s Other People’s Lives and the recent Working Man’s Café (New West/Ammal), the latter of which came as a result of Davies recording in Nashville with co-producer Ray Kennedy (Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle) and an all-American band of studio musicians. Just as the Kinks wryly observed English life, Working Man’s Café finds Davies surveying his American surroundings (the New Orleans-inspired “The Voodoo Walk”) and talking globalization politics (“Vietnam Cowboys”) while taking stock of his own legacy (“Imaginary Man”). No matter where he is in life—in England or America, celebrated or unjustly overlooked, with the Kinks or on his own—Davies has never stopped looking around.

MAGNET enlisted Yo La Tengo singer/guitarist (and former music critic) Ira Kaplan, a man who both knows his way around a Kinks tune and a journalist’s tape recorder, to interview Davies. The two began with a discussion of how the landscape of Manhattan has changed since Davies, who turns 64 on June 21, last visited.

Kaplan: I’m never comfortable being asked—and won’t ask you—about what you make of America and the changes. Davies: Artists that came out during the mid-’60s, it was a time of change, it was a time of revolution. We weren’t really trying to change the world, but the times dictated that we would seem to be. And the world was changing. I don’t think the world would’ve been any different had the Beatles not evolved. I think they happened to be the signature on the document that said the world changed. I think it would’ve changed anyway. How do you feel about that?

I don’t know. I’m more the kind of person who thinks every little thing somehow adds up in ways you can’t quantify. I was watching A Hard Day’s Night on the Independent Film Channel. I’d never seen the film. When that came out, I was really busy learning how to write songs and trying to keep apace of my own life. But it’s pretty incredible when you look back. There was almost a religious moment at the end of A Hard Day’s Night, when the Beatles are singing and the audience is screaming. I went through that with our shows. We didn’t hear ourselves play for two years ... A Hard Day’s Night was so charming, the way it was portrayed, so innocent. It was a really simple story about four blokes getting on with their lives, finding this method of communicating that touched a nerve in society. To add to what I said, society was ready to be touched by them and the music explosion.

Did you write songs before the Kinks? My whole songwriting journey started with insomnia. My sisters used to take turns walking me around when I was a baby, trying to get me to sleep. The only way they could get me to sleep was to play gramophone records. All night, as long as it took. It was a wind-up record player. When it wouldn’t work, one of my sisters just moved it around with her fingers, like a rap DJ. I feel like I came into songwriting because I couldn’t sleep. Because I wanted to be something else other than a songwriter. I wanted to be an “artist,” in a kind of innocent way. But [songwriting] was something I could do at one or two in the morning. There wasn’t all-night television (back then). There was nowhere to go. I wrote “Tired Of Waiting For You” and the chords to “You Really Got Me” when I lived with my sister.

Before there was a band to play them? Yeah. I did it as a pastime; I never thought about writing songs properly until our second single. We did a Little Richard cover as our first song (“Long Tall Sally”), but it was enough to get us started. It wasn’t until “You Really Got Me,” our third single, was a big hit that they actually said, “We want you to write another one.” By then, I didn’t want to write songs anymore. I just wanted to be normal. But I said, “All right, I’ll come up with another one.” The next song I wrote, while my publisher was waiting in the next room, was “All Day And All Of The Night.”

That’s one of the things I’m curious about: the incredible pace of the old work. You’d have a recording session booked at two o’clock so you’d write the song at one o’clock. It wasn’t a matter of hours. We had a matter of days to get it together. I remember we were going up north to play a gig, and I went to see my publisher because the royalties hadn’t started coming through. “You Really Got Me” was the first success, and you had to wait a year for the royalties to come. By then I was already foolishly thinking of getting married and trying to get my own home. I lived in a little apartment that was $15 a week, what they call a bedsit. So they wanted me to write another single because “You Really Got Me” was going up the charts. I wrote [“All Day And All Of The Night”] the following day, rehearsed it at a gig in Birmingham, came back overnight and recorded it. It was all very fast. But still, it wasn’t the notion of being a songwriter. I was fulfilling a role.

When do you think that changed? When journalists and media people put their tag on you: the guy who writes hit songs. It took years for me to realize that other people had insight or thought into the psychology and emotions of the songs in the same way I felt them when I wrote them. Maybe it’s something to do with my nature, but I don’t give away emotions easily. When people said they liked “Waterloo Sunset” or they had a fondness for songs like “This Strange Effect,” which was written for someone else (British teen idol Dave Berry), it suddenly occurred to me that other people had these emotions, too. What a great communicating vehicle it is. It’s like a secret message going through the radio to some listener somewhere: I feel the same way as you do. That was a real revelation.

Weren’t you reacting that way to the songs that you heard when you were young? No, I don’t think so. In the house where we grew up, my older sisters would just dance and move to the music: bebop and ballads. I was interested in song structure, but putting the emotion into the song hadn’t occurred to me until I got feedback from people who’d heard it.

What about, say, (1965’s) The Kink Kontroversy, which sounds different than the earlier records. Did you feel like a songwriter then? That had to be done very quickly.

There’s a real mood to that record. Is that accidental from writing it so fast? I think it is, and through a bit of life experience. I remember how “Till The End Of The Day” came about. I had a bit of writer’s block, and my managers were getting worried because I hadn’t produced anything in almost a month. [Laughs] They sent Mort Shuman ’round to my house, one of my hit-writing heroes. He wrote “Save The Last Dance For Me” with Doc Pomus. This mad, druggy New Yorker came ’round to my little semi-detached house in London. He said, “I’m here to find out what you’re thinking about. I’m not interested in what you have written; I’m interested in what you’re gonna write.” He was completely paid off by my managers to say it. I thought it was ridiculous that there was so much importance put on it. If I don’t want to write for a month, I won’t. To say the least, I was pressured into doing it. Then I went off to stay with my sister and bought a new toy, a little upright piano, and wrote “Till The End Of The Day.” That song was about freedom, in the sense that someone’s been a slave or locked up in prison. It’s a song about escaping something. I didn’t know it was about my state of mind.

That’s the last Kinks song written in the “You Really Got Me” style. Was there pressure to write “You Really Got Me” version seven? I think it’s good to repeat the style if you take it somewhere else. It’s an interesting choice, that album (The Kink Kontroversy), because we’d had all our bust-ups in America. It was a wonderful time to experiment. Of course, in parallel, the Beatles were doing their experiments with George Martin, reversing tapes. In those days, you didn’t have ProTools or plug-ins or any of that. Lots of big sounds were put together in the most basic way, like the music workshop rather than the modern scientific method.

With “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion,” were you just being ornery? Like, “We’re not gonna give them ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ again.” There’s a lot of venom in that song. You don’t have to be in Metallica to write venom. It’s as venomous as satanic heavy metal, but it’s done with humor.

Did the Kinks rehearse at the time, or did you just go into the studio and play? We’d play at soundchecks. I’d try an idea for a new song at a soundcheck jam. “All Day And All Of The Night” was in the back of a car, in a classic Buddy Holly mode. It’s the way a film director would want to shoot it. It had to be done that way. The only way I could teach them the songs was in the car on the way to a gig.

Do you have a vivid memory of a song that sounded completely different when the Kinks played it than when you imagined it? I mean, you said “Till The End Of The Day” was written on piano, but you must’ve had some idea of what the Kinks would sound like playing it. A lot of the time, I write records. In those days, particularly, I had the idea of what the record sounds like. I suppose (it’s like) the way Phil Spector does, as well. We had a producer, Shel Talmy. Shel was more like a soccer coach. He would stop us from doing [a take] too many times because he was aware we had to pay our own studio costs. It had to be cheaply done.

The Beach Boys notoriously rebelled against what Brian Wilson was hearing and didn’t want to play what he wanted them to. Did that happen with the Kinks? Yeah, after a while. With my brother, particularly. But in the end, he’s a smart kid and always knew when it was a good idea and always got on with it but protested bitterly. I just went through a really sharp phase in my life where my brain was working spot-on and just knew what I had to do. I knew what (1966’s) “Sunny Afternoon” looked like before I wrote the song. It was written on that same piano. It was a flat top; the notes were quite mellow. It was more like a celeste than a piano.

So even by the time of “Sunny Afternoon,” that’s a song that you bring into the studio and it’s just played a couple times. Yeah. I was so clear about what I wanted in my own head. Mick the drummer and Pete the bass player—not so much Dave—went along with it because they trusted I knew what I was doing. That, to me, is the important part of collaboration: to surrender your own wishes sometimes because you know there’s a vision. It takes really smart, talented, sensitive players to go along with that. And they were, those guys.

People like me think back about that time, when bands were making three records per year. The output just seems so … It was four singles, an album, possibly an EP (per year). It’s all those weird record deals in those days. For the most part, they did come quickly because I was so rushed around doing things. If it took more than half an hour, I had to do something else. When you write, do you go into a room with a tape recorder and play until you get inspired?

No, we couldn’t be more different. Mostly, our band writes together. We just jam and see what happens. If I do something separate, I’m never together enough to record it. I try to write it down in some pidgin notation so I can remember it the next time I play it. It’s different. I’ve even got an old manuscript with “You Really Got Me” on it. I wrote that at my parents’ house, and we didn’t have a tape recorder.

Why wasn’t “You Really Got Me” your first single? Well, it existed in musical form, with the instrumental part written two years before we recorded it. But we were doing all these covers. I didn’t even want to sing in the band; Dave was the best-looking, so he sang. And we had a road manager called Jonah, who was a neighbor. Jonah looked really cute; we let him play maracas and sing. (At shows) I just stood on the side and did the occasional vocal. We did “Long Tall Sally”; I sang that. It wasn’t until we opened for the Beatles that we ended with “You Really Got Me.” That was the only song that got a reaction. People’s heads turned; they stopped screaming for the Beatles.

Do you think the lack of precedence for that song stopped you guys from doing it at first? At first, you’re doing what other people are doing, then you’ve got this thing that no one’s done before. Certainly not in the way we did it. It’s an old story, but the bass speakers were blown on our gramophone, so all the records sounded fuzzy. Dave stuck needles in [his amplifier] speaker, with no knowledge that somewhere in this country, Link Wray was doing a similar thing. It made us sound so different. People were drawn by the sound rather than what the song was doing … The record company turned the demo down, said it had no chorus.

Was it a demo that sounded similar to … Like all demos, it’s lo-fi and foggy-sounding. But it’s not until they came to see us play it live that they got it. The day we recorded it with Shel at Pye Studios, in a posh studio, it sounded awful. They wouldn’t listen to us. I said, “It’s not the way I hear it.” It’s the same old sort of upstart thing. My publisher said, “There is a way you can stop it. Don’t grant a publishing license.” In the end, they relented, and we went in and made it the way we wanted to do it. The scariest part was when I did the vocal; the backing track sounded exactly how I wanted it, but I’d forgotten how I wanted the vocal to sound. Just before we start taking it, the tape ran, and I heard the first riff and drums come in. I thought, “I’m not going to sing it big. I’m going to sing it small.” When I was an art student, I did a bit of drama at school, and there was kind of a secret radical guy who taught me how sometimes, when you step back in the photograph, you get noticed more. Or when you speak quietly, people will listen. So I decided to play it small rather than go with that testosterone, which I’m not good at anyway. I went small, and it fit perfectly in the pocket for the rest of the song. Because I did a small vocal, it allowed the music to be bigger.

You brought up earlier the whole thing about the revolution of the ‘60s and the experimentation, but at the same time, the Kinks always feel a little cut off from that. You’re recording with your wife (Rasa, who occasionally did backing vocals) and your brother; there’s a real family aspect to it. To me, you’re always part of the time but separate from the time. Was that a decision or instinct or both? It was the only way I could function, really. I still like to have a family unit. A band is a family, I guess. It was essential for me, because everything was so driven by my family. I used to play my first songs for my dad. I’m probably one of the only people of that time who actually wanted parental approval. I wanted them to like it. Normally, you’d say, “If parents like it, it’s uncool.” But I thought the fact my dad could sing “Sunny Afternoon” in the pub was absolutely fantastic. I’ve got this great book of folk songs, and they tell you how to play at the beginning. It says, “Play this intimately, as if among friends.” And that’s my little rule for songs. If you can get it past those people, you can get it past a lot of people. Because your family can be your strongest critics.

The notion of writing albums as albums seems like something you did with Village Green and Arthur. I fought against having to write all the songs for the first album. I thought we had to have covers because it was part of our set. Then I got into albums; inevitably, there had to be a common unity between the songs. It’s called an album, it’s a collection of works. I think the Kinks were diverse with every single, which worked against us. Village Green was when we were banned from the United States, and there was probably no likelihood we’d ever get back to play here. So I moved to a place in the real northern suburbs, almost the country, and lost myself in being English, with no aspirations of ever coming back to America. I wanted to write something so entirely for me. I didn’t care if anybody liked it or not. It was a fabulous time but worrisome for my managers, obviously. In the end, it turned out to be a much-loved record, even though it wasn’t a gold album and didn’t win Grammys. But it sustains to this day. People listen to some of the songs, their jaws drop because it’s bold to do a thing like “Phenomenal Cat” and then “Animal Farm.” Even on that record, I wrote for the way something should sound. “The sky is wide” is a line in [“Animal Farm”]. I knew I could just about reach that note, and to me, the whole record is the way I sing that line. I knew that before it was recorded. I must’ve been so confident, so sure of myself. But there was a lot to worry about: We were banned from the most important market in the world and not getting a great deal of airplay in the rest of the world. And there we were, making this ridiculous record about wicked witches and a village green somewhere that didn’t really exist on the map.

You mentioned managers being resistant. Within the band, what was the reception to Village Green? They probably thought I was not very well. Mick would always say, “Let him do what he’s doing, because nine times out of 10, it’ll work out in the end.” Dave enjoyed the experimentation, and Pete just went along with it.

You didn’t play the songs from Village Green in concert, right? That’s one album we didn’t play live. We didn’t play “Sunny Afternoon” live until it went to number one. Maybe I was going through a difficult phase. People say the live act was fun to watch, but they were worried about us when they left the gig. There was a song, “You’re Looking Fine,” that Dave sang; it went on for 15 minutes—solos in the key of A, drum solos. When you think of the time it was made, 1968, I think the world was a bit like that: disorganized and on the edge and suicidal. But we got through that and got back to America in 1969.

What were you expecting to find when you got back to America? Well, I’d heard about this festival called Woodstock, which, if we’d been allowed back, we obviously would have played. I heard about some of the new bands emerging: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the James Gang. When I walked onto the stage of the Fillmore East, which was our first gig when we came back, I’d never seen monitors onstage. We just had a PA before. So that was a culture shock for us. The whole atmosphere around a rock concert had changed because of (concert promoter) Bill Graham, who led that music revolution in this country. It had turned into something else; it was more political. A lot more guys coming to gigs, no screaming girls—or not so many, anyway. It became another counterculture, as opposed to pop.

The Kinks were a legendarily loose live act. We didn’t need the Fillmore to make us loose. [Laughs]

Was everyone united in the looseness, or did you want it to be tighter? I’d have liked it to have been a bit tighter, yeah. I was going through a guitar crisis at the time. I was playing a Telecaster, but I was uncomfortable with it. I’d have liked to do more acoustic songs.

I want to zoom forward. Please.

There was a long period of time without a record by you. What happened to you, plus Dave’s stroke (in 2004)—those things must’ve been a catalyst. What? Getting shot?

Or just the mortality. Oh, mortality is just beginning to affect me. Not because of getting shot, but because of all the things on my mind not being dealt with prior to that. This new record is the songs I would’ve recorded if I had not had the accident.

Are the songs on Working Man’s Café new? A lot of them were written while I was in New Orleans in recovery. “Morphine Song” is a song about self-survival, because I wrote that in the hospital. I got a notepad from the nurse, and then I didn’t change a line. “You’re Asking Me” was demoed in 1999, and it’s about someone continually asking me what it was like in the 1960s. Of course, I don’t have the answers.

When we were rehearsing with you for the shows at the Jane Street Theater (in 2000), quite a few of the songs changed from version to version. There’d be an extra verse or bridge. Were they finished? Jane Street was a very interesting time. A lot of the songs were being written on the spot. I still think our Jane Street version of “Vietnam Cowboys” is one of the most successful versions of that track. Some of the guitar you did was very exploratory, like a scenic landscape, which is perfect for what I wanted ... [Working Man’s Café] was like going back to the old way of making a record. I tried to work in that straight and contained, you’ve-got-three-hours-to-do-this frame of mind. The only thing I had to put up with was the culture surrounding me. I’ve never recorded with four Americans before. I was the only English person within miles.

Ray Kennedy is the co-producer, right? He wanted to do my first (solo) record. [Working Man’s Café] had to be done quickly; I found out the record company (V2) was going out of business, which is a whole other nightmare that we won’t go into here. It wasn’t happening in London, so I got on a plane and flew to Nashville. It was a good test for me, coming from a family-unit band to the other extreme: players for hire, good players, nice guys.

How expressive are you to these musicians about what you want? After all these years, it was interesting to find out whether I’ve got these talents (in the studio) or whether it’s an acquired way of doing things. With the Kinks, I went through a phase of being a bit too dictatorial. These (new) people didn’t grow up with me. So I had to be dictatorial in another way, like standing back and being louder. Because heaven knows I don’t want to get a bad reputation.

What’s the difference between being in the Kinks and making a solo record? The Kinks I can see, I know what it looks like. It’s got boots on the letter K. Ray Davies, I don’t know what it looks like, don’t know who it is. I haven’t worked out the identity yet. In a band, if you do something bad, you’re only 25 percent responsible. [Laughs] If I do something I think is bad now, it’s all me. A lot of it is in the head. Maybe it’s always been Ray Davies making the records and I’ve been a coward, not wanting to accept responsibility. But like I said earlier, I don’t think I could’ve made any of those earlier records without the input of other people—or even the lack of input. Because it takes a great talent to know when to step back. I think the best musicians are the ones who’ve got humility. Same with the best actors. You can tell when a person is playing a few notes that they really mean it.

When selecting the songs for Working Man’s Café, did you choose the ones that held together thematically? I went down to Nashville and had 35 songs. [Kennedy and I] mutually picked the songs. I surrendered a little bit. I was trying to be not the combative Ray, but the guy who says, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” With the Kinks, we didn’t have demos to choose from, because we had to do something quickly. But boy, the changes in some of that music—“All Day And All Of The Night” next to “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion”—that’s why it was so hard for us when we came back to America. People hadn’t grown with us, so we had to do it by the hard slog. There was no MTV. Ironically, it was MTV that broke us completely here. But again, it killed us. I remember the phone call from (Arista president) Clive Davis. Clive said, “We’ve got real good news, and we’ve got a big problem. The good news is ‘Come Dancing’ is a breakout single. We’re putting it out because we can’t get it off [MTV]. The bad news is that you’re not a top-40 crossover anymore. You’re a pop band.” There’s a different dynamic to that. In a sense, gaining that chart success was a downfall.

You described writing Village Green, thinking that people weren’t listening. You’ve got to do that. In the Arista days, we knew Clive was listening to it. He used to send records out to this testing place in Atlanta or somewhere, where people sat down with buttons going, “Hit. Miss. Hit.” So you knew someone would be listening to it. But “Come Dancing” is a song I wrote for my family. It’s a polka, really—a fast polka. It became one of our biggest singles in America, singing in a Cockney accent. Detachment in songwriting is good, though. Because if you’re writing in that inward, spiritual way, the right people will get it. Even though you think no one is listening, there is a voice there, and there is a receptive audience.

Special thanks to Doug Hinman, author of The Kinks: All Day And All Of The Night (Backbeat Books)

Twenty years ago, Mudhoney made Superfuzz Bigmuff, the landmark recording that launched grunge and put Seattle on the musical map. Here’s what really happened.

Who’s Who In the Mudhoney Story: Jeff Ament (Mother Love Bone bassist); Mark Arm (Mudhoney singer/guitarist); Nils Bernstein (journalist, record store owner); Jennie Boddy (Sub Pop publicist); Ed Fotheringham (illustrator, Thrown Ups singer); Stone Gossard (Mother Love Bone Guitarist); Jay Hinman (journalist, fan); Steve Manning (fan); Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth singer/guitarist); Bruce Pavitt (Sub Pop co-owner); Dan Peters (Mudhoney drummer); Charles Peterson (photographer); Jonathan Poneman (Sub Pop co-owner); Bettina Richards (Atlantic Records A&R person); Steve Turner (Mudhoney guitarist)

Before everybody loved them and everybody loved their town, the guys in Mudhoney were just another group of Seattle music-scene misfits and castoffs. At the beginning of 1988, the phrase “Seattle music scene” didn’t have quite the same meaning as it does now. Singer/guitarist Mark Arm, guitarist Steve Turner, drummer Dan Peters and bassist Matt Lukin ushered in the grunge era with the August ’88 release of “Touch Me I’m Sick,” Mudhoney’s debut single. The snotty, motorized garage-rock blast wasn’t exactly a shot heard ’round the world, but it was heard by the right people, and the subsequent Superfuzz Bigmuff EP, issued two months later, cemented the gloriously sloppy sound and beer-goggled vision that would make some other people in Seattle (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam) very famous. The members of Mudhoney were like the Monkees, except they were all Peter Tork. Their perpetually drunk, stoned and dumbstruck shtick belied the acumen of four gifted musicians, true rock ’n’ roll believers and world-class smartasses. On the 20th anniversary of Mudhoney and the founding of the local record label it helped get off the ground, Sub Pop has released Superfuzz Bigmuff: Deluxe Edition, a two-CD reissue of the original artifact, plus demos and live recordings from 1988. Concurrently, Sub Pop has released Mudhoney’s eighth studio album, The Lucky Ones. Though Lukin retired from the band in 1999 (he could not be reached for comment for this story), Arm, Turner, Peters and bassist Guy Maddison clearly aren’t running on fumes; The Lucky Ones opener “I’m Now” finds Arm wailing, “The past made no sense, the future looks tense,” riding a sweet fuzzbox guitar riff, as gloriously confused and confusing as Mudhoney ever was. MAGNET’s oral history of Mudhoney’s first 18 months begins with Arm and Turner opting out of Green River, their band with Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, who’d later go on to form Pearl Jam. Steve Turner: I met Mark in 1982 when he was just a punk who went to my high school. He had a mohawk, a kilt and big boots with bandanas wrapped around them. He was straight edge and so was I, at least theoretically. I was really into Minor Threat and discovered that, “Wow, there’s other kids out there like me that aren’t fucked-up punks.” We were all in line for a TSOL show in the fall of 1982, and [a mutual friend] introduced me and Mark. He introduced us to each other as both being straight edge, and we both rolled our eyes … [In 1984], me, Mark and Jeff Ament had formed Green River with Alex Vincent, and then Stone Gossard joined a few months later. I quit about a year after that. I just didn’t like the music. They were growing their hair long, and I shaved my head. They were wearing makeup, and I didn’t want to do that. I thought we were still a punk band, but then we weren’t. I was really into the Replacements and wanted to be a fun punk band, but along the way it got metalized. Mark Arm: Steve quitting Green River was a wake-up call. We had this West Coast tour set up. The second-to-last show was in San Francisco, and I blew out my voice. The next night we went to L.A. and opened up for Jane’s Addiction, and I think Jeff had reached out to some people in the A&R world. Expectations were, “Hey, we can show off our talents to these people and maybe even get signed!” Of course, I’d totally fucked myself the night before. I had a one-or two-note croak, and I’m not a great singer to begin with. Jeff and Stone thought I would hold them back from realizing their dream. As history proves, they made the right move. Nils Bernstein: Green River was a fantastic band, but there was tension between Mark’s irreverence and refusal to pander to the audience, and the band’s ambition to do something more varied and classic-sounding. Charles Peterson: With Green River, Mark had been forced into trying to be the lead singer of a glam band—or a band going in the glam direction. Toward the end, he was just going through the motions; it didn’t suit him. Arm: From my perspective, I got the boot from Green River. I contacted Steve, who at that point was going to school up in Bellingham at Western Washington University, and was like, “Hey, if you ever wanna start another band, I’m available.” Turner: I dropped out of college and moved back to Seattle, and me, Mark and Dan Peters started practicing. Arm: We started getting together in November (1987) and had heard that Matt Lukin was leaving the Melvins or being left behind by the Melvins; we weren’t sure of the story. I’d known him since the days of an all-ages club in Seattle called the Metropolis, which would have been around ’83 or ’84. We asked if he was into playing bass with us, and he was like, “Sure, why not?” He was coming to Seattle for New Year’s Eve. Turner: Matt had been going to school to be a carpenter, and that’s what he does to this day. Dan was the youngest in the band when we started. He was 21; the rest of us were a few years older. Dan Peters: We went to see a Motörhead and Alice Cooper concert for New Year’s Eve. Nobody knew that Motörhead had cancelled, so we ended up having to sit through a bunch of bands like Faster Pussycat and Armored Saint. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I had to leave even before I saw Alice Cooper. Arm: The very first practice with all four of us was New Year’s Day, 1988. That’s where we mark the birth of the band. That’s our anniversary date. Peters: The next thing we know, Matt’s driving up from Aberdeen every week or so. We went into the studio and recorded a batch of songs before we even played a show. We knew that we could at least put out a single with Sub Pop because they had just started up and we knew they were interested in the band. Bruce Pavitt: Before I did Sub Pop full time, myself, Mark Arm and Jonathan Poneman all worked for a foreground music company, Yesco, that later got bought out by Muzak. It was just a steady job with benefits. A lot of the grunge crew worked there. I remember Mark came in, maybe in January of ’88, with a tape and he said, “I started this band Mudhoney.” The first song was “Touch Me I’m Sick.” Bernstein: I have a clear memory of sitting in a friend’s truck with Mark one night, and him saying that he was going to form a band with Steve again, and it was going to be the greatest band in the world. That would sound dorky in retrospect were it not for the fact that their first single was actually one of the great debut singles of all time: a totally complete, infallible musical statement. I remember thinking, in the truck, that the way Mark talked about Steve was really sweet, almost wistful. There were so many influences they shared that neither of them was doing much with musically at the time, whether it was heavy Australian stuff like Feedtime and the Scientists or San Francisco and Texas hardcore or Billy Childish. Turner: There really wasn’t much of a scene at that point. Seattle was basically the dregs of the punk-rock scene. Sub Pop released some early Green River and Soundgarden stuff, then they actually got an office. Jonathan Poneman came aboard (Sub Pop) about the time we were forming. Bernstein: Most of the early grunge bands had been around for a while before everything took off: Green River, Soundgarden, the Melvins, Bundle Of Hiss, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, etc. So to Seattleites, Mudhoney was kind of a supergroup: the “punk” half of Green River, the bass player for the beloved Melvins and the best drummer in Seattle. Even before their first show, there was no question that they were going to be amazing. Pavitt: [Sub Pop] didn’t have a lot of prospects for the future. At that time, our big release was Rehab Doll by Green River. We had put everything we had into that release. Right around the exact day that we opened the office, Green River called to notify us that they had broken up, so that was an awkward place to be. Our big release was by a dead band, so we were hoping that Mudhoney would turn into something worthwhile. Arm: Steve and I had seen a bunch of Russ Meyer movies, from The Immortal Mr. Teas to Supervixens and, of course, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. There was a repertory theater that had a Russ Meyer night, and the main feature was Faster, Pussycat! with Mudhoney first. I thought, “I’m kinda hungry,” left the theater to get a bite, came back and, of course, missed Mudhoney. But that name stuck with me. It was the perfect name for a band that I would want to be in. Bernstein: Dan and Mark would sometimes come to movie night at my apartment in the mid-’80s. On occasion, we rented Russ Meyer movies, which were hard to find. I seem to remember that when they named the band Mudhoney, they hadn’t actually seen the movie, so we rented it one night. I was pushing for them to name the band Common Law Cabin, after another Russ Meyer movie, but that’s why I shouldn’t name bands.

“I feel bad and I’ve felt worse/I’m a creep, yeah, I’m a jerk.” —“Touch Me I’m Sick”

Turner: The word “grunge” was definitely a touchstone for the scene at the beginning, since a lot of bands just wanted to get down and dirty. It wasn’t really punk rock, even though it was played by punk rockers. I think the best term for it is “post hardcore.” Bands like Killdozer, Naked Raygun, Big Black—people who had been in the hardcore scene but needed to do something different.

Arm: In Seattle, audiences responded to bands they really liked. People were slow-motion rolling over each other with big grins on their faces. The (psychedelic drug) MDA might’ve had something to do with it. Turner: [Sub Pop] really wanted to think big, which is rare for a small indie label. The slogan “World Domination Now” was tongue-in-cheek, but it was also something they felt should happen. Jay Hinman: In 1988, Sub Pop had their publicity machine cranked up. When a new single would come out, it’d be like, “This is the greatest thing since God!” Pavitt: If Mudhoney had sucked, Sub Pop would have gone out of business. Turner: Bruce suggested we go to a real studio since Mark had been bringing him shitty-sounding cassettes. Bruce suggested we go to Reciprocal Studios with Jack Endino and do some recording. Pavitt: At the time, we did give bands advances, but they were incredibly modest. We paid the studio $50, and Mudhoney recorded “Touch Me I’m Sick.” Turner: “Touch Me I’m Sick” is certainly not an original riff or anything. There are other bands that have similar riffs: the Stooges, the Yardbirds. That was always my favorite stuff, that real gnarly ’60s garage. Pavitt: “Touch Me I’m Sick” was the rare time we released an original version (of 800 copies), then we did a second edition with different packaging. People would call and say, “We want more copies,” and we’d say, “OK, if you want more copies, you’re going to have to send some money up front to make sure you get our next limited-edition single.” Thurston Moore: “Touch Me I’m Sick” was in a plastic sleeve: no pictures, just a plastic holder with brown vinyl, totally fucking ugly! But there was this window display at (Hoboken, N.J., record store) Pier Platters. The entire front window had all these brown vinyl seven-inches covering it, and it said in big letters, “MUDHONEY HAS ARRIVED!” It was ridiculous. I mean, who the hell had even heard of Mudhoney at that point? Jonathan Poneman: Mudhoney’s early stuff was very simple, very concise, with an emphasis on momentum and explosion. The way they employed a fuzz pedal went beyond anything Blue Cheer had ever done. There was also an unpredictability, which may be due to them being a young band that was just finding its footing. Turner: Our first gig was April 19 (1988), with Das Damen and Blood Circus, after we recorded “Touch Me I’m Sick.” Pavitt: Jon and I saw Nirvana’s first show in Seattle, right around the same time, and there were three people in the audience: me, Jon and the bartender. They were fairly mediocre. We thought, “OK, maybe we can do a single by these guys.” But when we saw Mudhoney for the first time, we looked at each other and knew we had a real record label, because we’d have at least one incredible band. Stone Gossard: I was glad Steve and Mark had found each other again and were making music that was more natural for them. It was different than wherever I or Jeff were going. I remember thinking I should have paid closer attention to what they wanted to do in Green River. Jeff Ament: I saw them at (Seattle venue) Motor Sports Garage when it was blowing up. Part of me was jealous. Steve Manning: The first time I saw them, I knew I’d never miss a show by this band again. I’ve probably seen as many Mudhoney shows as anybody, besides the members of the band. I didn’t know them; I idolized them. Sub Pop reissued Superfuzz Bigmuff plus singles a few years ago, and there’s a picture of Steve Turner lying onstage with his guitar and somebody spooning him. That’s me. Ed Fotheringham: They were exciting. They were funny. Matt Lukin always slapped his ass. This was a big thing to him, slapping his own ass. There was an irreverence to them that was palpable and appreciated. Peterson: As a photographer, you couldn’t really ask for much more: the long hair, the ripped jeans, the pseudo-sarcastic thrift store T-shirts, just that unbridled energy. Matt didn’t really care what he was hitting; he was more interested in swinging his bass over his head than playing the right notes, and it worked part of the time. You don’t go to a Mudhoney show to have them replicate the album note by note. It’s about what kind of car crash is going to happen. Capturing that car crash at that moment was what was great about photographing Mudhoney. Arm: The Boxing Club gig (on July 8, 1988) was crazy. I don’t know who rented the space, but we get there and find this door to the basement with all this S&M bondage gear: crosses with straps, all these cabinets with handles for dripping wax on people, crazy shit. Peterson: It was dumb, but it wasn’t stupid, you know? It was off the rails but without being too contrived. Even just the use of the Super-Fuzz and Big-Muff, which are both somewhat corny guitar effects. And singing about dogs and sickness and sweet young things. They really captured the spirit of teenage rebellion. I just think it’s their personalities. Mark is really smart and has a super-dry sense of humor. Steve is totally goofy. Danny’s this super-sweet guy who lives to drum. Matt was played up as the guy from the woods. But Mark and Steve secretly have these huge, huge, huge record collections that they drew inspiration from. “Pull down your pants if you like us.” —Mark Arm, Berlin, Oct. 10, 1988 Peters: I’m not sure if it all happened at the same session, but we had a bunch of songs—“Touch Me I’m Sick,” “24” and “You Got It”—and gave them to the Sub Pop guys. The next thing you know, we’re in the studio recording an EP. Arm: I remember Steve coming over to my apartment, playing our electric guitars acoustically, without any amps. We didn’t have any. A song called “By Her Own Hand” was a definite first song. I remember calling “No One Has” “The Wipers Song,” because that’s what it sounded like. One was called “The Human Cannonball Song,” after (Butthole Surfers song) “Human Cannonball.” “In ‘N’ Out Of Grace” was “The Blue Cheer Song.” Bernstein: The line in “Mudride” that goes, “I’ve got a belly full of ouzo, a head full of hurt,” is when a bunch of us drank ouzo at our friend Julianne’s house, before going to see Girl Trouble at this bar near the University of Washington, then ended up at this college party where Mark threw his head back through a window. Bettina Richards: For me, the triggers (of Superfuzz Bigmuff) were the huge, fat guitar sounds and Dan’s unbelievably propulsive drumming. It just really connected, in part because when a lot of people were looking to strict punk icons, they were harkening to garage rock, to ’70s rock like Creedence and Blue Cheer. These were records that I heard on classic-rock radio, but I probably would have dismissed them as not as cool. Then suddenly it was like, “Oh, this shit is really cool.” Pavitt: As someone who used to read the NME indie charts, which were usually exclusively British releases, I remember when Dead Kennedys got on there and thought, “Oh my god, there’s an American release on the indie charts.” Superfuzz Bigmuff ended up going to the top of the NME indie charts and stayed there. It was pretty unheard of. Ament: At the time, I couldn’t appreciate [Superfuzz Bigmuff], because there was a competition going on. There were some things said from Mudhoney’s perspective about us that were hurtful and totally not truthful. I couldn’t help but stand on the other side of the line that was drawn and say, “We’re better.” [Laughs] When Green River broke up, [Arm and Turner] stayed in the Sub Pop camp, and we kind of weren’t allowed in the Sub Pop camp. So we went and found our own deal. It worked out for everybody. Pavitt: In July of ’88, Jon and I went to the New Music Seminar (conference in New York) with very little funding. We met the gentleman that was organizing the Berlin Independence Days festival. [The German promoter] flew the band, Jon and myself out to this festival. It was an amazing bit of luck, and Mudhoney pretty much blew everyone away. From that show, they were able to land a two-month European tour. Turner: The Berlin festival was one of those weird things that was funded by the government. We played a good-sized venue there, and it was a lot of fun. We drank a lot, and I think all six of us (Mudhoney, plus Pavitt and Poneman) were in one hotel room. It was a real decadent city. Arm: We never, ever adjusted to the time in Berlin. We slept all day, woke up at 6 p.m., then stayed up all night. We discovered hefeweizen beer on that trip. We’d been drinking nothing except Schmidt’s or Olympia beer. I look over and Bruce has this giant glass of beer nearly a foot-and-a-half high, and all of us were like, “What’s that? Wheat beer?” “Happy New Year, losers. All you’re going to do is have your shitty old jobs back tomorrow.” —Mark Arm, Seattle, Dec. 31, 1988 Turner: Almost immediately after Berlin, we went on tour with Sonic Youth. We brought Bob (Whitaker, who would later be Mudhoney’s manager) along with us to entertain us. He was just some party guy we knew. We figured he could get us places to stay. He was a lot more outgoing than us. Hinman: Early on, Bob was definitely the ringleader, egging them on to drink more and to new lows. Moore: Bob was there for one reason: to have a lot of fun. We’d make fun of our differences: We were a dour, Velvet Underground-listening, black-wearing, book-reading kind of band in the van, whereas Mudhoney were torn shirts and jeans, going out and getting completely drunk, then rolling around in the parking lot, and buying records all the time. So we used to talk about their van as this pot-smoking, beer-drinking, cassette-tape-listening party machine, and our van as sort of like this mood-lighting-and-reading-Charles-Dickens experience. Turner: For the longest time, the only thing we had on the rider was beer and peanuts. Club owners would be like, “Well, don’t you want sandwiches or something?” Richards: Dan always blew my mind in the amount of beer and liquor he could consume and still play drums like a mother. A ton of bands that followed completely imitated the kind of accelerated drum roll that he did. He really built the foundation for this fever pitch that drove people to jump off the stage. Arm: The first tour we did, just after Superfuzz came out, we played Lexington, Ky.—and even went on the local college radio station before the show to yak—and no one showed up. We made $14, a six-pack of soda and two packs of cigarettes. They were like, “Sorry man, it’s all we’ve got.” Pavitt: They all had a great sense of humor, and that’s one of the reasons they were so popular. Mark Arm was hilarious onstage. Matt Lukin was so unusual, like Andy Kaufman but more of a backwoods, redneck conceptual artist. Sonic Youth were completely enamored with Matt Lukin. They were these sophisticated people from New York, and they meet Lukin, who was from Aberdeen, a creative genius, but kind of crazy. Richards: Matt was kind of in his own zone in every way: wearing really tight, straight-leg jeans and big, bold striped shirts; seemingly oblivious to everyone around him and making random comments into the mic. Steve wasn’t bothered by all the people jumping on the stage, but I don’t remember him jumping off the stage like Mark. What always amazed me was the number of dudes getting up and flailing around onstage, then jumping off real quick. They fed the fire, for sure. I hadn’t really been to a show where I’d seen lemurs like this running up there and jumping off amps, wanting to be onstage for 30 seconds. Arm: MTV totally wrecked it, though. Our first tour, you’d go around the country, and each town had its own weird way of reacting to the bands. Then a couple of years later, it was like MTV showed people how they were “supposed” to behave, and that’s what everyone did from that point onward. Or just the stupid Lollapalooza giant-mosh-pit thing. Lame. Pavitt: In late ’88, Nirvana’s “Love Buzz” single came out, and they opened for Mudhoney on some West Coast dates. I remember Steve Turner coming back and saying, “Kurt Cobain played the guitar while standing on his head,” a complete impossibility, and Charles Peterson ended up having a photo. If I hadn’t seen the photo, I wouldn’t have believed it. Arm: New Year’s Eve at the Central Tavern was a very, very, very—as you might imagine—drunken show. After that show, Dan told me, “You should talk less between songs.”

“We came all the way from America just to fuck up.” —Mark Arm, London, March 24, 1989

Turner: Back then, if Sonic Youth said that you were cool, everyone thought that you were cool.

Pavitt: Sonic Youth and Mudhoney wanted to do a split single together, they wanted to tour together. Sonic Youth was pretty much the band of the moment in terms of the British press. That really helped popularize Mudhoney and Sub Pop, so there was a series of lucky breaks. Within nine months, Mudhoney went from the cassette demo to big in England. It was unusual. Arm: The U.K. was crazy, and Sonic Youth, at that point, were like total walking gods. The previous tour, they had Dinosaur Jr with them, which made that band in the U.K. They could bring someone over and basically anoint them, so we were really lucky they decided to bring us. (Famed BBC disc jockey) John Peel was playing “Touch Me I’m Sick,” so people weren’t totally unfamiliar with us. Moore: Mark used to try to mythologize Sonic Youth’s profile. I remember him being in my hotel room on tour and calling up different bands staying in the same hotel at three in morning, saying he was me, asking people to come up and hang out. They’d be asleep, not very into it, and he’d be yelling into the phone, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Thurston Fucking Moore from Sonic Fucking Youth, and I demand that you come up here and hang out with me!” And then hang up the phone. I’d be like, “Mark, please don’t do that!” Peterson: It’s always the case that if a band breaks somewhere else, people in your own backyard will sit up and take notice. Sub Pop played it pretty smart. Mudhoney going over and doing that first English tour, which was such a riot, really added to that mythic quality they had at home. Arm: The very first show in Newcastle is where I learned that British audiences don’t have a sense of irony and sarcasm. Before we left the stage, I made a few comments like, “Sonic Youth’s from New York. In the old days, if you wanted to show appreciation, you’d spit on the band. We’re not into that thing, we’re from Seattle.” Evidently, Sonic Youth got spat on—tons—and (guitarist) Lee Ranaldo was fucking furious. It was something I never thought anyone would do because of something stupid I said. Moore: Our music wasn’t as consistently rock ’n’ roll as Mudhoney’s; we were definitely playing some weirder, slower stuff. But the audience didn’t care. It could have been Peter, Paul And Mary for all they cared. They were gonna slam dance the entire length of the set. And stage dive and do what punk rockers do—or what they thought punk rockers did, anyway, which was to really get in your face, spit, slam into you while you’re playing. I remember that being a bit of a consternation for Lee. Arm: Stage diving had never occurred [in the U.K.] before. We were used to it from punk shows from the early ’80s. We played a show in Nottingham, and there was a security moat between the stage and the audience. And a platform, with a little queue forming, mostly young boys who wanted to climb up onto this platform, then politely dive off into the crowd. That was insanely funny. It wasn’t always the case, but it was like, “Please, sir, can I take a turn at this stage-diving thing? I would like to give this a go!” Moore: At a lot of gigs, we’d just be getting started on our first song and Mark would come flying across the stage and do a backflip into the audience to get the riot started. It was totally awesome. Peters: We were in Europe for nine weeks. We had two days off in those nine weeks, and they were used for driving. The best thing about it was we all went insane at the same time. Arm: A later show we played (with Nirvana) at a school in London was called a “riot” by the British music press. My smartass mouth got us into trouble again. The crowd was surging forward, and our stage was kind of a makeshift thing. The kids were getting up on it, trying to jump off, which was, of course, getting in the way of us doing our thing. So I was like, “Hey, let’s get everyone up on the stage,” thinking they’d realize that 400 people wouldn’t all fit up on this tiny little stage. Well, they all charged up onstage, we got pressed up against the back wall, security had to move everyone back, and we had to patch everything up and get hooked into the PA again. This was all because some kid got up onstage and unplugged one of my boxes. So everything calmed down, the song ended, then I was like, “Hey, let’s everyone get on top of the PA!” And they went, “Of course!” Making my ridiculous statement even more ridiculous. So the kids surged forward again, and my friend Keith told me that he had to physically restrain one of the security guards from beating the shit out of me. Peters: I think that show is more legendary now. People talk a lot about it because it was Nirvana’s first show in London, and hindsight has changed the show into something it actually wasn’t. I remember it being a great show for us. We were kind of “the band” there at the time. Nirvana opened up, and TAD played as well. Nirvana broke strings left and right, they were barely able to finish their songs, they were just having all kinds of technical difficulties. They did smash up all their gear at the end. The next day, the papers reviewed it and said Nirvana was no good. The people who reviewed the show back then are now saying it was the best thing ever. “What do you fuckin’ want? You want me to bare-ass it, dontcha?” —Tad Doyle, Seattle, June 6, 1989 Arm: Our Seattle shows were at small clubs, but when we got back from the European tour, Sub Pop decided they wanted to do something called Lamefest with us, TAD and Nirvana at the Moore Theater (on June 6, 1989). We were like, “You’re crazy.” The only punk bands we’d ever seen play there were Dead Kennedys; that was as big as it got. I couldn’t imagine where this audience would come from, and yet it sold out, and this is long before anybody knew who TAD or Nirvana were. It was around 1,200 or 1,500 capacity, a huge jump from 200. Poneman: It was seen as a daring act to rent out the Moore Theater for three of our bands that previously had just played bars and house parties. The show sold out, and everyone involved was really stunned that the show did as well as it did. Pavitt: Lamefest was the definitive turning point in the Seattle music scene. Arm: I just couldn’t figure out where all those people had suddenly come from. I guess it’s really exciting that people turned up and were starting to get into it, but it felt kind of odd to us. I’m not precious about having a small scene or not letting outsiders in, but we were like, “What were your interests before this?” Pavitt: The manager of the Moore told some of his security staff to go home. He said, “A local show has never sold out the Moore, so I don’t anticipate many people showing up.” It was complete mayhem. Arm: Security was just fucked at that show. It was these guys we kind of knew, a group of guys called the Fallen Angels, who modeled themselves after the Guardian Angels, wore berets and military garb and were always doing security at local shows. They got hired again for this show and were just beating the shit out of kids. Manning: Things changed quickly. Lamefest wasn’t that far off from Mudhoney’s first show. It didn’t feel like things had blown up yet. It was like the coming together of a bigger community and almost a celebration of Sub Pop as an entity. Pavitt: The sound engineer for Sonic Youth was doing sound, and he looked at me and said, “You know, you’ve got something going on here. This is really phenomenal.” He’d been traveling the world with Sonic Youth, which was the biggest indie band in America at the time, and he said, “I don’t know what you guys are doing, but this town’s about to blow up.” Gossard: Steve Turner was saying, “We might be doing good with Mudhoney, but check out Nirvana. These guys have got real hits!” Poneman: A lot of times, when people are writing about the evolution of Seattle music, they mention how Nirvana put the pop back into the music that was being made in Seattle. But I would argue that Mudhoney did that much more obliquely and was every bit as successful as Nirvana. Jennie Boddy: Mudhoney was the biggest seller on Sub Pop. We were always getting our phones turned off. I remember Bruce walking around wondering, “When is Mudhoney putting out another record?” Mudhoney would always save the day. There would be no Nirvana releases or anything else without Mudhoney putting stuff out. They were the saviors of the electric bill.

Interviews by David Bevan, Jonathan Cohen, Corey duBrowa, Andrew Earles, Jason Ferguson, Matthew Fritch, Tim Hinely, Pat Hipp, Bruce Miller and Noah Bonaparte Pais

Many are called, but few are chosen. After four albums of classic new songs and another summer of onstage heroics, My Morning Jacket has become America’s best live rock ’n’ roll band. By Noah Bonaparte Pais “You are putting your life in danger.” It’s well past midnight on the third and final night of Lollapalooza 2007, and the only things missing from Jim James’ Almost Famous moment are a suburban swimming pool and a plastic cup of acid-spiked Kool-Aid. On the Kennedy Expressway, one of several primary traffic arteries feeding Chicago’s downtown Loop, a white limousine carrying James’ My Morning Jacket crew is speeding away from the city. Tonight, along with the usual suspects—MMJ drummer Patrick Hallahan, keyboardist Bo Koster, guitarist Carl Broemel and bassist Tom “Two-Tone Tommy” Blankenship—the band’s entourage has expanded to include a few new faces: Craig Pfunder (frontman of Louisville, Ky., homeboys VHS Or Beta), Peter Bauer (organist for New York City rockers the Walkmen) and MAGNET (packed like a sardine between the bear-sized Hallahan and his exceedingly gracious wife, Brigid). Twelve of the people inside the 10-passenger limo are seated obediently, heeding the urgent and oft-repeated warnings of our safety-minded Middle Eastern chauffeur. Not James. MMJ’s normally reserved singer/songwriter is standing obstinately upright, the top half of his not-quite-six-foot frame protruding through an open sunroof, whooping and hollering at the top of his lungs and soliciting long horn pulls from the 18-wheelers passing by. If this isn’t a perfect screen capture of Billy Crudup’s LSD-laced rooftop rant in Cameron Crowe’s rock ’n’ road picture, then the surreal scene surely evokes Leonardo DiCaprio’s bow-climbing exaltations in Titanic. It’s not that difficult to forgive James for feeling like the king of the world. Given the events of this fast-dwindling weekend, “golden god” isn’t out of the question, either. Six hours earlier, from his perch on Lollapa-looza’s main stage, James was waking up tens of thousands of worn-down revelers. He howled the falsetto R&B outro to “Wordless Chorus,” the streamlined opener to 2005’s sleek Z, with all the soul-sapping anguish of a mortally wounded Marvin Gaye. He gently fingerpicked “Golden,” the gorgeous acoustic track from 2002 barnburner It Still Moves, just as the sun fell behind the Sears Tower, forming one of the world’s largest silhouettes. He even covered Curtis Mayfield (“Chicago’s favorite son,” James likes to say) for the set’s climactic curtain-dropper. And he did all of this with 18 high-school students from the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra—a grandiose assemblage of violins, violas, cellos, horns and upright basses—punctuating his band’s every musical phrase. So it follows that our driver, seemingly aware of his regal rock cargo, silently raises the privacy shield and ignores the juvenile antics. You see, he isn’t actually our driver at all. By this point in the trip from the band’s Hard Rock Hotel to the Debonair Social Club, a Milwaukee Avenue nightspot that Pfunder selected as our after-party destination, the collective conscience has awakened to the fact that we all somehow just ended up in the back of this limo. A quick survey of the clueless faces reveals Pfunder as the instigator. “I flagged him down on the street,” he says with a mischievous grin. “I asked him how much, and he’s like, ‘$15 per person.’ So I’m like, ‘How’s about 60 bucks and a big fucking tip?’” Pfunder pauses for effect. “‘Get in.’” Twenty death-defying minutes later, we’re dropped off in front of the Debonair, a wannabe exclusive joint with a disheveled red carpet winding its way up to a pair of forbidding bouncers. Inside, it’s Night Of The Living Roxbury. Remixes are blaring a repeated boom-chik-boom-chik bass line as film projectors throw arty, cut-up images onto bare walls. Every so often, a woman stumbles into the light, squints at the beam and starts to wildly gyrate. This isn’t the kind of place where you’d expect to find purveyors of shape-shifting, soon-to-be-classic rock, fresh off headlining America’s biggest alt-rock festival gig of 2007. It is, however, exactly the kind of place where you’d expect to run into R. Kelly, and we have. He’s right over there, circled off by bodyguards. He has a towel over his head and is flapping his arms in time to the music and swigging from a bottle of Patrón. “Where the hell is Andrew Bird?” asks Dave Kissner, MMJ’s irritated soundman. It’s a ridiculously rhetorical question. Bird, a friend and tourmate, isn’t here, of course; he’s likely still at the Hideout, a nearby music venue that was originally on our itinerary before Pfunder, whose dance-happy VHS Or Beta meshes better with these kinds of surroundings, made the detour to Debonair. Kissner isn’t pleased with the change in plans. “This is bush league,” he mutters to no one in particular. Others in the posse aren’t so pissed off. Brandon Jones, a member of Louisville rock band Follow The Train, can’t stop exclaiming, “I just cheers’d R. Kelly! I just cheers’d R. Kelly!” “You’re too old for him,” jabs an anonymous jokester. Both Bauer and Christopher “KC” Guetig, another Louisvillian and a onetime MMJ drummer, are moving well to the music. “He never dances,” says Bauer’s wife, giggling. Fearless bandleaders Pfunder and James are nowhere to be found. Off to the side, Koster is standing by himself. With a glassy-eyed stare, he puts into words what everyone else—exhausted after a weekend of nonstop rehearsing, performing and, on this night, partying—seems to be feeling. “I want to take my eyeballs out and eat them,” he says before heading toward the four-deep bar, presumably in search of something to wash them down with. “God really outdid himself here, huh?” Two weeks before the Lollapalooza limo ride, one of the Red Rocks Amphitheatre’s resident graybeards is kindly giving MAGNET the 10-cent tour. We’re mostly just killing time, counting down the hours until the venerable Morrison, Colo., venue’s most iconic concert in some time. Unlike many heavily publicized rock shows, the hype for tonight’s booking isn’t hyperbole. Red Rocks has, over its 100-year history, played host to the likes of the Beatles and U2, but when it comes to musically bridging the generation gap, tonight’s twin bill of Bob Dylan and My Morning Jacket is nothing short of the Golden Gate. It’s impossible not to gawk at the natural wonder of Red Rocks, mere minutes removed from the metropolitan bustle of Denver. Cradled between three giant outcroppings of crimson stone, the stage imparts the same rarefied air of divinity as Athens’ Acropolis or Rome’s Coliseum. The juxtaposition of high-tech lighting against the stage’s natural sandstone background resembles something out of Planet Of The Apes. Still, it’s obvious the venue has gone to great lengths to conceal the seams separating its organic and synthetic aspects. Girders supporting the lighting rigs are painted a perfect shade of red-rock red, while the cubbyhole-sized green rooms are blanketed in various shades of brown. Moving through them feels like burrowing deep into the Earth itself. When James emerges from the backstage area, he resembles nothing of the hair-farming shaman you’ve seen onstage and in magazine photos. His hair is cropped, and he’s damn close to clean-shaven—a foreign, fresh-faced appearance that makes him look younger than 29. He’s soft-spoken, with a down-home Southern accent that creeps out in punctuating curses from time to time. The three gigs My Morning Jacket is playing with Dylan—back-to-back nights at Red Rocks followed by a show in Telluride—mark the end of a month-long Rocky Mountain vacation spent holed up in a cabin two hours away in Colorado Springs, where the band isolated itself in June to map a course for its upcoming fifth album. The as-yet-untitled LP will be recorded later this year and released on ATO Records sometime next spring. “I’ve got about 22 songs,” says James. “We’ll get it down to 17 or 18. Once you do the real recordings, some of them work and some of them don’t. The toughest decision for us is whether to make a record that is full of variety. If you look at any of our other records, you’ve got your rockin’ songs, your softer songs, your weird songs, whatever—you’ve got a mix. I like that, but part of me wants to make a really tight, eight-song, fucked-up funk record, and then a really tight, nine-song, quiet record. I’ve always liked records like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, where you just know you’re getting 40 minutes of peace. Or if you’re ready to go crazy, you put on fuckin’ Paul’s Boutique or something. So that’s the notion we’re toying with.” James stops short of describing which direction he’s leaning; somewhere between the Boss and the Beastie Boys will have to do for now. But he’s happy to paint a picture of MMJ’s familial relations in the cabin, which included plenty of intraband male bonding: cooking dinner, making demos and hanging out each night. “I think that’s one of the things that makes this work so well,” he says. “We all really love being with each other. No girlfriends, no cell phones, just working on the record, man. We really enjoy our time together. But it’s good that we’re gonna split apart now, come back for Lollapalooza, then split apart again. I think that works best for us.” Of MMJ’s summertime commitments, James casually says that Dylan’s people “just called and asked if we wanted to play” and that ever since appearing with the Boston Pops for a series of shows in 2006 (including an appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman), several orchestral outfits—including the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra—have contacted the group about potential collaborations. This is a small taste of what life has been like for arguably America’s Best Live Band. Receive an e-mail from one of the country’s most renowned orchestras, which wants to turn your next concert into a symphonic spectacle on network television. Field a phone call from the most revered songwriter alive, who asks you to open three sold-out shows in paradise. And though Dylan doesn’t appear in his own biopic—the new Todd Haynes-directed I’m Not There—James does. The film, in which Dylan is portrayed by various actors including Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett, also features James performing “Goin’ To Acapulco” with Calexico as his backing band. James can be spotted wearing a floppy hat and white face paint a la Dylan during the ’75-’76 Rolling Thunder Revue, and “Acapulco” appears on the film’s soundtrack alongside other Dylan covers by Eddie Vedder, Cat Power, Willie Nelson and the Hold Steady. In between two summer-closing festival gigs at Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits (MMJ passed on the chance to attend Bonnaroo for a fifth consecutive year), James also appeared at New York City’s Beacon Theater in August alongside Spoon’s Britt Daniel and the New Pornographers’ Carl Newman for the Revenge of the Book Eaters benefit. The concert was a charity event for 826NYC, the Brooklyn outpost of the education-promoting nonprofit founded by novelist Dave Eggers. “He’s my favorite (author) right now,” says James. “I love [Eggers’ 826 Valencia] store in San Francisco. It’s a pirate supply store, but it’s also a center for reading and tutoring kids in creative writing. I just think that’s so fucking awesome. I feel like more and more kids are just watching TV, getting their minds melted and forgetting about reading. People like Eggers are doing so much good, making it fun and cool to read and write creatively.” After Austin City Limits, James and his girlfriend plan to drop off the grid for a month. They’re heading to New Mexico to reside in an Earthship, an eco-friendly, U-shaped structure made from recycled and natural materials. “It’s kinda hippie-dippie,” he admits. “But it also sounds sort of cool. I don’t know if I’ll like the Earthship thing, but I do like the idea of buying a lot of land somewhere and building a house on it that’s completely self-sufficient.” Then the band will work without pause until its next record is in the can. Veteran engineer Joe Chiccarelli (Beck, the Shins) had signed on to co-produce the album with James. “Some places have no vibe and great gear,” says James. “Other places have great vibe and no gear. We met with a couple guys from the label at the cabin, and it was good just to talk about it. I’m really excited about the scope and possibilities of this record. There are so many directions we could go. I just want it to be weird.” One noteworthy change in the making of this album is the stretch of inactivity between the writing and recording periods. A break in the band’s typically breathless routine was called for. “We made a vow to take some time off,” says James. “The last couple records, we did so much our minds kind of melted. I needed time just to write. That’s kind of our new pact: to not drive ourselves crazy with this thing.” “Death is the easy way.” There’s a point at which any touring band reaches terminal velocity. Dilapidated Dodge vans, cramped quarters and shitty Chicago nightclubs only serve to press down on the pedal. Yet My Morning Jacket has never been healthier. The evidence is everywhere: in the respectable deal it brokered with major-label subsidiary ATO; the reputation it’s earned as knock-down, drag-out performers via annual cross-country marathons; and the four increasingly varied albums it’s made since 1999, each garnering more praise—not to mention sales—than its predecessor. But My Morning Jacket did come close to breaking up once. Around the turn of 2004, after almost five years of near-uninterrupted touring, 40 percent of the band—keyboardist Danny Cash and guitarist Johnny Quaid (James’ cousin)—decided to hang it up, even with the group’s popularity on the rise and It Still Moves breaking through to a much wider market. The rollercoaster had taken its toll, and Cash and Quaid wanted off. “You can’t keep that up for more than six months at the most, and they’d been doing it for four-and-a-half years,” says James Agren, founder of Southern California-based Darla Records, which signed MMJ in 1998 and issued its first two albums. “Danny and Johnny just stepped out. They were like, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ It was painful, I’m sure.” “We didn’t really know whether we would keep going,” says James, who describes the split only as “amicable.” “We thought, ‘Maybe we’ll do it as a three-piece.’ I really didn’t know. It would’ve been different. I’m glad it happened like this.” A friend suggested the band hold auditions for the two vacated spots. “I was pessimistic about it,” says James. “We tried out maybe eight or nine people, and (other than Broemel and Koster) a couple of them were OK. But none of them really worked. The whole rest of the audition went just like I thought it would.” Except for those first two: the unknown keyboardist from Cleveland and the guitarist recommended by singer/songwriter Bobby Bare Jr. who came in able to play every song in the band’s catalog. “They knew everything, more than we did,” says James. “They just fucking nailed it. Anything could’ve happened. They could’ve been dickheads or drug addicts. I felt like Bo and Carl were sent to us to keep it going.” “Had I stayed or had John and Danny stayed, I don’t know if they’d be where they are today,” says Guetig, who drummed for MMJ from 2000 to 2002. “This band, the way it is now, is the way it’s supposed to be. Pete’s a better drummer than me, Carl’s a better guitar player than Johnny, Bo is leaps and bounds better than Danny on keys. This band is amazing.” MMJ’s now-solidified lineup is the latest in a long list of James’ bands since grade school. Cutting his teeth in roughshod Louisville rock outfits Hotel Roy and Month Of Sundays, James has since fashioned four versions of My Morning Jacket. Everyone has a story about the first time they heard one of James’ bands, and each one starts differently. But they all end up talking about the lone common denominator: James’ voice. “It was a Sunday morning, and I’d woken up early to do what I called the ‘demo derby,’” says Agren. “Going through trash bags full of cassettes and DATs and giving each a 20-second listen. It was around Valentine’s Day, and Jim made us a valentine, this ‘Dear Darla, let’s make beautiful music together’ thing. I played his tape, and it was instantly like, ‘Holy fuck … Where’s the letter?’ There were a couple hundred demos. I woke up my wife Chandra, my partner in Darla, and I was like, ‘You’ve got to help me find this letter. I have to call this guy right now.’” Guetig remembers one early performance at a high-school music festival: “[James] had no facial hair, short hair. And he’s running around the stage, screaming—basically a young, unformed version of Jim as he is now. Then, as [MMJ] got bigger shows, I would go to all of them. I worked in the library’s media department, so I would steal the digital camera and take photos of the band and post them to the Web site. I was a fan of Jim before I was in the band, I was a fan of Jim while I was in the band, and now I may be an even bigger fan. I think everyone knew he was bound for big things. It was just that energy, that voice.” James’ voice, at once inviting and armor-piercing, carries equal amounts of reverb and remorse through MMJ’s first two albums, countrified beauties The Tennessee Fire (1999) and At Dawn (2001). It Still Moves revealed James’ rock chops, and on Z, he was the emcee of a keyboard-crazy dance party. If the emotional trajectory stays true to form, album number five just might end up a funk-drunk disco. Or maybe James will save that for after his Nebraska. “When it started, it was just Jim,” says Agren. “He always did more than I ever expected as far as the quality and volume of the output. He was like, ‘I’m gonna put together a band with my friend Danny and my cousin Johnny. This guy Two-Tone Tommy’s gonna play bass, and this guy from around here, Jeremy (Glenn), is gonna play drums.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure. Whatever.’ The next thing you know, he’s got the band together and they’re touring. And it’s good.” “Watch out now; take care, beware of falling swingers.” George Harrison’s warning—the opening line from the second platter of All Things Must Pass, Red Rocks’ tasteful pre-show PA choice—comes 10 seconds too late. Hellbent on staking a claim to the choicest of the auditorium’s nearly 9,500 seats, a horde of hippies rushes into the amphitheater 59 minutes before show time, almost trampling the graybeard as we aimlessly admire the surroundings after sound check. Apparently, general-admission tickets to see Bob Dylan are all some baby boomers need to give peace, love and understanding the great fuck-off. We bolt from the front row just in time to avoid certain disaster, missing one panting loon by the length of a single Birkenstock. Row by row, the dozens of crescent-shaped benches quickly begin to fill up. “They’re all like this,” says the graybeard matter-of-factly, preempting the question. Anticipation for the show is at a fever pitch by the time the members of My Morning Jacket, looking dapper in velour dinner jackets, take the stage. Storm clouds have been stalking Red Rocks all afternoon, and the wind picks up as the band begins its set. It soon starts to feel as if James’ wails are conjuring the rain. The tarps covering auxiliary sound gear balloon up with each gust, giving overweight stagehands a workout between songs. Onstage, MMJ has a clear personality divide: Broemel (blonde with sharp Germanic features) and Blankenship (whose modesty translates perfectly to an inscrutable bassist’s brood) are the stationary rocks, tending to their instruments in workmanlike fashion; Hallahan (a latter-day Gregg Allman) and Koster (mostly hidden behind dark shades and an engineer’s cap) are the hype men in back, undulating their bodies to the rhythm of the music. James stands alone stage left, at times closing his eyes while cradling the mic for a high note, at others facing Hallahan for an impassioned, leg-on-the-kit guitar solo. The sky is crying when James leads MMJ into closing song “Run Thru,” a hard-and-heavy blues number from It Still Moves that erupts into a Can-like drum-and-bass breakdown. It’s likely the closest krautrock has ever gotten to Colorado, and Blankenship lays waste to the Sturm und Drang bridge. As they come off the stage to thundering applause, James and Hallahan hit manager Jamie Sampson with loud high-fives. “They killed it,” says Sampson. Sampson is correct, but then again, they usually do. MMJ’s already gargantuan hooks have a way of inflating to fill any arena, no matter the size, and its Godzilla-like drum fills and guitar riffs play so well at festivals that the band practically has standing invitations to play Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits. Following MMJ’s killer set, there’s a fast change, and amid a light-yet-steady shower, Dylan materializes at center stage. He’s looking down at the ground, sporting a black suit and a white fedora as the lights come up on him and his band, a 10-deep contingent of guitarists, supporting singers and percussionists. Without pause, Dylan croaks out the first few words to a double-time rendition of “Everybody Must Get Stoned.” Like lemmings, everybody does. Halfway through the set, I meet up in the crowd with Koster, who’s still high from the evening’s performance. Koster shares personal thoughts about having just finished what likely was a defining moment of his professional career. Over the harmonica, I manage to make out every few words: “Dream come true … Red Rocks and Madison Square Garden … Miles Davis and Bob Dylan are it.” His ear-to-ear grin says it all. I bid Koster farewell before Dylan’s final encore, the scowls from people around us serving their purpose. Surely, they seem to be suggesting, Satan reserves a special place in hell for music journalists who attempt interviews during Dylan concerts. “So much goin’ on these days.” Roosevelt University is housed in a stately building facing Grant Park’s west side on Michigan Avenue, the Loop’s lakeside drag. It’s noon on Friday, the inaugural hour of Lollapalooza’s first day, and My Morning Jacket is in class. On one side of Roosevelt’s 10th floor is the erroneously named Large Ensemble Rehearsal Room, a smallish space where the band is conducting a no-holds-barred practice with 18 high-school students from the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. On the other side of the 10th floor is the university library. “If you see someone running through here waving a stapler in the air, that’s why,” hollers Scott Dodson, director of development and marketing for the CYSO, over the racket. Plans to practice in the Chicago College of Performing Arts auditorium, a roomier locale next door, were scrapped when the air conditioning went on the fritz. Says MMJ tour manager Mike Frye, “I’ll sacrifice a couple years of hearing for a couple hours of AC.” The Rehearsal Room contains an interesting mash-up of items from the rocker/student mix. Carpet-lined guitar racks lie next to interlocking baby-grand pianos. Curvy orchestral-instrument cases rest on crude, black rock boxes. Near the blackboard along one wall stands a seemingly out-of-place three-foot-tall bear statue. The bear is fast becoming a source of amusement for MMJ; someone has already outfitted it with a Mexican shawl and Frankenstein mask. Facing the board with marker in hand, Smokey appears to have been charged with drawing up today’s set list. My Morning Jacket is positioned in the center of the room: Guitarists James and Broemel are at the far sides, flanking bassist Blankenship in the middle; all three are playing in front of Hallahan’s and Koster’s respective drum and keyboard platforms. At the end of the rectangle, CYSO musical director Allen Tinkham is doing his best Leonard Bernstein, conducting and cueing violin and viola bows with gusto. During each violent twist and twirl of his baton, the mop of curly black hair on Tinkham’s head threatens to take flight. There are more than 300 students involved in the Youth Orchestra’s four ensembles. One-third of those are in the most advanced section, and from that pool, 18 members were selected to sit behind My Morning Jacket at Lollapalooza. So it should come as no surprise that these players, the cream of the CYSO crop, could enter the room, pick up their instruments and immediately sound like they’ve always been part of James’ band. Hairs raise the first time the string section enters “Move On Up,” the Curtis Mayfield song that will close MMJ’s Lollapalooza performance. The levels aren’t quite right, however, and the band calls for a break so roadies can attach miniature microphones to each instrument, in effect evening out the sound scales. Downtime is filled with renditions of the Golden Grahams jingle and “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late),” for which the group intones a credible helium-high wheeze. “Is there a Christmas program we don’t know about?” kids CYSO general manager Joshua Simonds. Actually, it’s just the usual holiday fetishizing from MMJ, which released 2000’s My Morning Jacket Does Xmas Fiasco Style EP and has plans to issue a charity-benefiting picture disc this season. Afterward, Blankenship and Broemel (whose father, Robert, is a former principal bassoonist of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and a CYSO grad) are flipping through a picture-laden novelization of The Karate Kid Part II, a gift from Hallahan’s schoolteacher spouse. “Does it have that one scene at the end?” asks Hallahan, his interest piqued by the sight of Ralph Macchio in a kimono. “Live ... or die!” On the other side of the room, Simonds is ripping on the local media’s lackluster press coverage. “WXRT said something like, ‘And My Morning Jacket is playing with ... a youth orchestra.’ A youth orchestra?” He mentions the initial collaboration between MMJ and the CYSO in November 2006, a direct result of the band’s association with the Boston Pops and the impetus for Lolla’s duet. “When we did the Riviera (Theatre), no one had mics,” says Simonds. “It was like, ‘Oh, look, there are kids up there. And the band is wearing tuxedos!’ You couldn’t hear much.” This time, they’re prepared. When practice resumes, the difference between the two sessions is like comparing a VFW to Carnegie Hall. There are huge smiles all around during the second, amplified run-through. “Sweet pickles!” exclaims James on more than one high point, prompting bewildered chortles from the orchestra. When the set gets back around to “Move On Up,” he instructs the players to take the coda and make it their own. “This is the last song, so you can improv,” says James. “Go buck wild!” Emboldened by his advice, the string section almost saws its instruments in half during a ferocious eight-bar fermata. At 6 p.m., a stack of pizzas arrive: pepperoni for the kids and cheese for James, a vegetarian for the better part of the last year. It’s announced during this dinner break that a consensus has been reached to cancel tomorrow afternoon’s rehearsal. The guest players have integrated themselves so well that another session doesn’t seem necessary. Before leaving, several of the students finally drop their straight-faced, all-business demeanors. “Will you sign my sheets?” asks Amy, a violinist, thrusting her music forward. “On ‘Gideon’—that’s my favorite song.” Another girl, Betsy, is gathering autographs for friends. “Oh my god, they’re gonna die!” she gasps. “You guys rock,” says Amy on her way out the door. James and Hallahan, friends since the fourth grade, share a hug, while Koster rounds up takers to cross the street and catch French duo Daft Punk, whose set starts in 15 minutes. “We’re ready,” says James. “I see you got our order right.” Joshua Simonds enters My Morning Jacket’s Lollapalooza trailer and is immediately given a magnum of Grey Goose vodka. He smiles. There are certain jobs at the mammoth Chicago music festival that anyone would want. Board operator for the Hold Steady isn’t such a bad gig (along with the stellar sound, the rowdy Brooklyn-via-Minneapolis band morphed its Saturday set into a raucous outdoor birthday party for its head engineer), and prop master for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs promises to be entertaining (sporting various metallic headdresses and a leather leotard, singer/sex goddess Karen O resembles the S&M love slave of Cher and Gene Simmons). There also are certain jobs that no one in their right mind wants. Like, say, crowd control for the Stooges (“Thanks a lot, Ig,” vents one frustrated security guard corralling the throng of band-invited stage crashers) or sign-language translator for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (frontman Alec Ounsworth’s unintelligible lyrics are often interpreted by a shrug). And then there’s the person who must navigate nearly two dozen impressionable teenagers and their pricey instruments through Lollapalooza’s backstage sea of debauched rock stars, free-flowing draft beer and open doobie rotations. Lucky for Simonds, the kids in the CYSO are pros. At the south end of Grant Park, an errant Rex Grossman pass from Soldier Field, Simonds and two pupils are living out every wet-behind-the-ears music journalist’s dream: They’re conducting an ABC News interview with MMJ inside the band’s trailer. Before going on camera, the students, Dave and Betsy, hand James a list of questions to prescreen. “First one, nope,” says James in straight-faced jest. “Second one, no. Third one, definitely not.” He does actually nix one, however, about the origins of the band’s name: “Not necessary, really.” (Incidentally, it’s not James’ favorite topic; more than one magazine profile has cited a jacket he found with the letters “MMJ” stenciled on the back, while James tells MAGNET it’s just a non sequitur he remembers scrawling down in a middle-school notebook.) Four of MMJ’s five members are crammed onto a couch in the cozy room. (Blankenship, who has a well-known wizard fetish, is off conducting a separate radio interview. The station’s call letters: WZRD.) In a chair next to the band, the CYSO’s representatives are holding a microphone and looking very much the part of intrepid field reporters. The segment’s producers gently suggest to the kids that they give their introduction a dry run before the tapes start rolling. Ever the pragmatist, James has some advice for ABC, too: “You’d better record the practice intro, just in case it’s so fucking awesome.” The subsequent interview turns out to be similarly inspired. James opens up to the kids about the band’s early influences (“We were lucky to grow up during a time with great commercial radio, Nirvana and R.E.M.”) and the geneses of his songs (“It’s like this fetus just pops into my head, and the guys turn it into a real child”). On the subject of becoming a successful musician, he shares some personal trade secrets: “Make sure all your equipment is subpar, then get a shitty van and drive around the country. That’s what we did.” Closing out the segment, the producers request that everyone engage in one of those awkward, “everyone say the same thing and make it sound spontaneous!” TV promos. With a few groans, they comply. “We … want our ABC … News … now,” stutters the band, completely out of sync. “Well, that was fucking retarded,” says Koster. They try it twice more with little success. With groans of their own, the producers mercifully give up and leave. The CYSO performance is just one of several youth activities planned for the festival weekend. MMJ took the day off Saturday, but James still stopped by the Kidzapalooza Stage to entertain future hipsters with his banjitar, a half-banjo/half-guitar hybrid that he played during his four-song acoustic set. (Says James, “Most nerve-wracking thing I’ve done in a while.”) Earlier today, Broemel participated in the Gibson Guitar Shredding contest, in which young fans took turns having a Hendrix-style six-string conversation with the MMJ guitarist. (The winner was awarded a gleaming, golden-hued Les Paul Epiphany.) It’s now 15 minutes before show time, and back at the trailer, Hallahan is doing his best to dispel the band’s kid-friendly reputation. “You prepped the kids, right?” Hallahan asks Simonds and Dodson. “‘Whatever you do, do not look them in the eye … Look down, look down!’” Everyone gathers in front of My Morning Jacket’s mobile home away from home, which is undecorated save for a bare card table and a couple of folding chairs. Next door, Perry Farrell’s trailer has a faux-beach playpen replete with baby palmettos, high-powered fans and an elaborate, web-like shade overhead. Twice, Farrell gallivants by with his entourage, sipping from a coffee cup and singing loudly to himself. Two blonde boys passing through draw shouts from someone in his posse: "Hey, Peter! Bjorn!" "Ooh, it's a scorcher," says Hallahan, having exited the trailer to an instant sheen of sweat. "Nice day to wear suits." Not just any suits, mind you. Browsing at a thrift store, James came up on five vintage eggplant-shade tuxedos. The CYSO, in turn, sought out similarly colored scrubs, and together they look like Barney Goes to Woodstock. James welcomes the entire orchestra into a massive huddle, a MMJ pre-performance ritual. He whispers a few inaudible words that get everone fired up, the circle breaks with new energy, and the masses begin to mobilize. Walking with a purpose, the five rock stars in purple three-piece suits et off toward the noise, a field of fans awaiting their arrival and a host of high-school prodigies in tow.

Spoon is America’s most unsinkable rock band, a juggernaut of near-flawless albums and iron-clad hooks. Behind it all is singer/guitarist Britt Daniel, alone with his broken heart, self-doubt and relentless pursuit of perfection. By Corey duBrowa Why am I down here dicking around with my pedals? I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m killing the moment. Britt Daniel genuflects before 2,500 or so fans, mere moments away from one of the most important sets his band has ever played. As he adjusts his guitar knobs in a last-minute effort to get the sound right, this is the thought roaming through his head. That and, “Are my father and stepmother comfortable?” (They’re out there somewhere in the frothy, capacity-plus crowd.) Scattered across the outdoor stage at Stubb’s BBQ in Austin, Texas, on the final night of this year’s South By Southwest festival, Daniel’s band—drummer Jim Eno, keyboardist Eric Harvey and ex-Get Up Kids bassist Rob Pope—busies itself with final preparations for tonight’s gig. Spoon is the last group between the rapidly swelling audience and its date with Iggy Pop and his reformed Stooges, the eagerly anticipated headliner for tonight’s Esquire magazine showcase. Earlier this evening, the line to get into Stubb’s backyard wound up, down and around three city blocks, and it’s now clear that hundreds of people seeking a way inside—even with the venue’s laissez-faire approach to calculating fire-safety-compliant maximum capacity—will instead be turned back at the gate. In keeping with Esquire’s glittery reputation, the VIP crowd has already made the prologue to Spoon’s show something of a my-parents-are-away party for the rich and semi-famous. Ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha slouches at the bar, ordering a drink and looking bored beyond belief, answering questions from the well-meaning bartender as if manning the drive-through window at a bank. Spider-girl Kirsten Dunst and her new boy toy, Razorlight singer Johnny Borrell, are chain-smoking in the corner, staring fixedly at one another as if there was no one else in the place. Austin homeboys Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey have appeared. And there’s R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, arm-in-arm with wife Stephanie Dorgan, owner of the Crocodile Café in Seattle (the place where this story ends, two months later). All the while, some random garage band plays a blaringly bland variety of Southern-fried rock a la Kings Of Leon—right down to the muttonchop sideburns—which is somewhat ironic considering that the Kings themselves have just wrapped up a set outside. From this surreal set of tabloid images, a realization emerges: Although Stubb’s amphitheater is packed with ardent admirers in Spoon’s hometown, the sweaty, semi-clothed crowd surfers are clearly Iggy’s people, politely acknowledging Spoon’s set while biding their time in anticipation of the main event. Daniel, his Gibson hollow-body guitar slung low, swaggers into the rolling groove of “Don’t You Evah,” one of three songs Spoon will play tonight from its forthcoming album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The band moves through its one-hour set like a shark silently and effortlessly circling its prey. Spoon’s spare, linear sound gives the impression of complete control and little wasted effort, whether toying with the catch-and-release tension of “The Beast And Dragon, Adored” from 2005’s Gimme Fiction or the slinky new “Rhthm And Soul,” which features backing vocals provided by actress/Amy Winehouse look-alike Yasmine Kittles. (More on this connection later.) Even the barrelhouse keyboard hook to “The Way We Get By,” a song from 2002’s Kill The Moonlight also heard in last year’s underrated Will Ferrell movie Stranger Than Fiction, leans more toward “precision” than “party.” Along the way, Daniel sheds his black military jacket and works in some between-song banter about Public Enemy, which performed last night as part of the SXSW festival. “Did you guys see those S1Ws? Insane!” Merge Records, Spoon’s label, will later post a completely incongruous photo on its Web site of Daniel hanging out backstage with Flava Flav. Spoon heads for the turnstiles with another new song, the George W. Bush-baiting “Don’t Make Me A Target,” before wrapping up its set with a rousing take on Gimme Fiction’s ominous “My Mathematical Mind.” Then, just as efficiently as they took the stage and worked it for the alcohol-sodden crowd, the four members of Spoon walk off, allowing the shirtless, occasionally pants-less Iggy to assault the gathered throng with old favorites (“No Fun,” “1969”) and new, uneven material from underwhelming comeback album The Weirdness. By the time the Stooges have invited the audience to crash the stage for final number “Fun House,” it’s clear their buzzsaw sound (marred when bassist Mike Watt’s amp appears to implode mid-set) and group interplay are secondary to the creation of the perfect environment in which to behold the almighty aura of the Ig in the flesh. Across the street from Stubb’s, there’s a raging after-party in progress at what is euphemistically called a “green room” but functions as more of a safe house owned by the venue’s booker, Charles Attal. Strangely, the only person who appears even remotely responsible for the place is the silent door guy letting people in and out. Musicians, managers, scenesters and other assorted characters wander through at will, passing by the living-room foosball table on their way to the kitchen to grab a beer. There’s a pay-per-view boxing match on a big screen in one of the bedrooms, opening act Paolo Nutini is being carried around on the shoulders of one of Stubb’s bouncers (evidently on the way to his next stop for the evening; Nutini’s shoes have gone missing, and he’s refusing to walk any further), and three-fourths of Kings Of Leon are downing beers by the fistful. Buck patiently explains why R.E.M. played a cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” during its recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (“The Stooges should be in there already; we played it in protest”), while Daniel stands near the fridge—alone, naturally, with nary a bandmate or friend in sight—fretting over his set and wondering whether Spoon really delivered the goods. As it happens, Daniel lives in terror of letting people down, and in his view, tonight was not one for the ages. “It was a little rough,” he says regretfully, taking a pull at his beer. “When someone first suggested that we should open for the Stooges at Stubb’s, I was psyched. Can you imagine a better show? But once we were onstage, there was so much anticipation for the Stooges.” He pauses. “Obviously, there wasn’t that kind of wall-to-wall intensity when we were playing. I understand; people grew up on this music and thought they’d never get to see this band again. So it was cool, but it definitely wasn’t a typical hometown show for us.” And with that, Daniel stalks off into the night. No time to be fancy or cute; these are gonna have to be “speed mixes.” Type Foundry Recording is a deceptively large, cozily appointed studio facility in an industrial corner of Portland, Ore. Surrounded by metal-sided warehouses in an upstairs location accessible only by what appears to be a converted fire escape, the 3,000-square-foot studio is easy to miss and has the distinct aura of a place where serious people get down to serious business, as evidenced by the wall-mounted CD inserts of all the artists whose albums have been created here, including M. Ward, the Decemberists and the Thermals. On this otherwise nondescript, rainy afternoon, that’s precisely what’s going on inside as Britt Daniel rolls up his sleeves and goes to work. Clad in Oregon-issue winterwear—dark sweater, dark utility trousers, dark Converse sneakers—Daniel is hunched over the studio’s main mixing board with a set of earphones on. The skeletal, piano-based strains of a demo of his new “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” streams overhead. Lounging on the control room’s hand-me-down sofa is one of the studio’s four partners, Norfolk & Western frontman Adam Selzer, who occasionally offers technical advice. In this elegiac, demoed version of the song, falsetto vocals fly in and out of the mix—sometimes overlapping or harmonizing, more often echoing off of one another with delay effects—and the tune’s heartbroken core is revealed in a way that’s never approached on the finished product’s more up-tempo arrangement. Through the addition of a few lyrics and a bridge Daniel will later excise from the altogether more cryptic album track, it’s obvious what we’re listening to is a break-up song: “I’ll always want you/My Japanese cigarette case/Since I saw you in the flesh/I knew my life was a mess … Oh, I’m never gonna see you again/I tell myself it’s over/Yet I want you back again.” Daniel recently split with the longtime girlfriend he followed to Portland two years ago, and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is consequently littered with the relationship’s nuclear fallout. (The album’s improbable title is taken from the name of an early demo of “The Ghost Of You Lingers,” another somebody-done-somebody-wrong song.) Despite the emotionally fraught content of the track, he remains focused on plowing through the mixing chore, given he has the studio for only one day and nearly a dozen tracks to mix down for use as b-sides and import singles. Calling Daniel “obsessive” is like labeling Jimmy Buffett’s outlook “78 degrees and sunny.” When it comes to his music and band, there’s no detail too small for Daniel to sweat. Over the course of the afternoon, he’ll play back the track a dozen times to ensure the disorienting, ping-pong vocals he hears in his head—and in his earphones—are as closely replicated as possible. He moves on to an acoustic recording of the Jon Brion-produced “The Underdog,” breaking out a yellow legal pad full of meticulous notes documenting the four-track demo tapes he stores in a white box for safekeeping. Each of these tapes is numbered and corresponds to flurries of handwritten thoughts that help him decode the tracks later. “I finally broke 100 with this record,” says Daniel of the tapes that go all the way back to his earliest recordings, made 18 years ago. “A star means it’s worth listening to again. An X means it’s not worth listening to again.” “It can’t all be wedding cake/It can’t all be boiled away/I try, but I can’t let go of it,” Daniel’s voice pours urgently out of the speakers, insistent in its distinctive, scratchy-throated cadence, pitched halfway between Kurt Cobain’s howl and Prince’s cooed come-ons. This song, too, provides evidence of the emotional trauma that sits just beneath the surface of nearly every track on the album. “I felt really desperate, to be honest,” says Daniel. “We broke up while I was making the record, and when I was listening to some of the rough mixes over Christmas, I immediately thought, ‘Yes, this is exactly how I feel right now.’ I don’t know that I’ve ever really had one of our records hit me like that.” It’s a time-worn cliché that emotional hardship produces the best work of an artist’s career. Spoon’s 13-year overnight success story proves Woody Allen’s old saw about perseverance (“80 percent of success is just showing up”), and the band has often done its most compelling work with its back against the wall. Born in the coastal Texas oil town of Galveston in 1971 and raised a few hours north in Temple’s hill-country environs, Daniel arrived in Austin in 1989 as a freshman at the University of Texas. In between classes, he started a band called Skellington (after the Julian Cope album of the same name) and eventually ended up with a degree in radio/television/film and a lengthy DJ stint at KVRX, the student-run station. Through a mutual friend, he met drummer Eno, a former microprocessor designer and the only other band member on every Spoon album. The two ended up playing together in the rockabilly-influenced Alien Beats before trying their hand at collaborating on the songs Daniel had been writing since his teens. Daniel and Eno’s full-length opening salvo as Spoon—the name came from a Can song, necessitated by “a show we booked on a Friday, so we sat around Thursday night and just picked one,” laughs Eno—was the Matador-issued Telephono, which ended up selling only 3,000 copies despite the fact that Spoon’s hard-charging, Pixies-influenced post-punk sound had also attracted the attention of Geffen, Interscope and Warner Bros. By the time the band had finally gotten over its major-label misgivings and signed with Elektra in 1997, it had been through a prolonged legal wrangle with bassist Andy McGuire for a share of songwriting rights to Telephono. (McGuire ended up with a third of the album’s royalties and advance money instead.) As Daniel and Eno regrouped with new bassist Josh Zarbo for 1998’s lean, angular A Series Of Sneaks, it was clear that Spoon’s tenure on Elektra would be a stormy one. First, the band’s manager, Pat Magnarella, who was also working with the Goo Goo Dolls at the time, told Daniel that his new batch of songs had “taken a real step backward” and fired Spoon. Then Ron Laffitte, the Elektra A&R rep who had championed the band, left the label, and Spoon found itself dropped a mere four months after signing, its major-label debut instantly relegated to forgotten status. “At the time, you could find that record in just about any cutout bin in America,” says former touring bassist Roman Kuebler, who currently fronts the Oranges Band. “It was sad.” “Britt has a long, particular memory about that era,” says band manager and Post-Parlo Records founder Ben Dickey. “He and Jim call those ‘the Locust Years.’” Two years passed before Daniel and Eno finished the material that eventually became Spoon’s Merge debut, Girls Can Tell, which, when paired with the near-simultaneous release of the Love Ways EP, documented the evolution of the band’s sound toward a sparer, more pop-oriented style. Daniel’s songs were slowly revealing more of who he was, albeit in sly, non-obvious ways: “1020 AM” and “The Fitted Shirt” reflected obliquely upon the impact of loss (Daniel’s paternal grandfather had died that year, and the funeral proved a watershed moment), while the album’s closing track, “Chicago At Night,” showed an uncommon emotional depth and a spooky way with atmospherics and studio technique. Girls Can Tell caught the attention of critics and established expectations while Spoon’s comeback took shape over the next several years with the minimalist Kill The Moonlight and the darker, more expansive Gimme Fiction. As the group began to fill increasingly larger venues, Daniel’s self-assurance grew. Suddenly, Spoon became “one of the handful of bands you must pay attention to whenever they release something new,” according to Greg Glover, co-owner of the Arena Rock label and host of Portland’s KNRK Alternative Mornings program, one of terrestrial radio’s most influential indie-rock shows. “I don’t think they’ve ever made a bad record.” After this period of relative success and progress, the unraveling of Daniel’s personal life has formed yet another setback. “It was hard,” Daniel says of his split with his girlfriend, his voice heavy with regret. “It’s still hard.” A long silence ensues before he picks up the conversation. “What was the question again?” h says, laughing at the obvious nature of his evasive action. “We both had our problems, like most break-ups, probably. Being in Austin for five months recording certainly didn’t help any. I would have come back here a lot more often if we hadn’t broken up, but we did, so I just stayed away.” Overhead, an unreleased track called “Dear Mr. Landlord” wafts by, its repeated motif (“Be a man, kid/Do what’s right”) reminding Daniel of his emotional tumult of the last year, his move to Portland and his effort to pick up the pieces. “We tried and tried, but we just couldn't make it work,” he says. Daniel's precise meaning—the relationship or the song?—is unclear, and his words hang in the air conspicuously until he explains further: “You can tell I was just learning the song when we cut this.” Outside, the rain pours down on the studio’s corrugated roof, sounding like the roar of the ocean as Daniel clamps his headphones on and buckles down to work. Good evening and welcome to the acoustic show by the guy who can’t really play guitar worth a damn.=]]]]]]]]]]] For most musicians, confidence is an elusive thing. No matter that he’s done dozens of them over the years, solo shows are always among the most nerve-wracking affairs Daniel willingly tackles. “I’m in my room practicing,” he texts from his hotel prior to the evening’s show. “I need the practice.” Daniel is something of a text-message addict, having dispatched a series of quirky observations from the road during Spoon’s recent tour. “Just saw Wesley Clark at 15th and 5th, all alone, hailing a cab”; “Bob Barker just sat down across from me here at DFW”; “Just played Tufts University. Worst onstage sound I’ve ever experienced. Afterwards some German (?) guy told Rob, ‘Your new lead singa is not as goot as the olt one.’” Daniel has agreed to headline a muscular dystrophy benefit concert and now stands alone at the foot of the stage inside the Crocodile Café, peering out into the darkness. Various plastic bugs and rubber snakes hang by their threads from the ceiling, alongside a giant glow-in-the-dark arrow pointing toward a devil’s mask. The smallish room is filled with admirers, many of whom have had their albums signed or snapped camera-phone photos with Daniel earlier in the evening. “For those of you who faced the dilemma of whether to go to the Velvet Revolver show or come here tonight,” cracks Daniel, “let me assure you that your money is going to a much worthier cause.” Even with a recent 10-shows-in-10-days East Coast tour behind him, Daniel’s work ethic remains almost Amish in its inexhaustible appetite. His acoustic guitar strapped high to his chest, he proceeds to knock out 25 songs in an hour and change, with a set list covering the entirety of Spoon’s career and a great cover of “I Am The Key,” an obscurity by cultish Liverpool pop outfit the La’s. In contrast to his typically enigmatic persona, Daniel—either despite his nerves or because of them—is clearly enjoying himself, fielding requests (“Do you want to be witness to a disaster? I really don’t know that one!”), tossing off one-liners and gleefully taking risks he’d usually avoid with Spoon. There are a few flubs, some timing miscues with the boombox playing beats behind him and occasional flashes of brilliance, such as the set’s final song, Kill The Moonlight tightrope walker “Paper Tiger,” which Daniel sings with nothing but the naked beat ricocheting off the walls. Suddenly, the song ends, and the assembly stands there transfixed, clapping, but not yet making a move to leave. Winding down after the show, Daniel sits in the Crocodile’s tiny dressing room, having just performed his one self-described stupid party trick: removing a beer cap with a plastic water bottle. “(Merge’s) Mac McCaughan taught me that, and it’s the single best thing I’ve learned in the last decade,” he laughs. A tall, beautiful woman is practically throwing herself at Daniel as he goes through the motions of making small talk. She brazenly asks for his home address (“I moved here eight years ago,” she explains. “The allergies in Portland almost did me in”) and all but climbs in his lap, at one point telling him, “You’re not as tall as they say,” despite Daniel’s thin 6’2” frame towering over hers. For his part, Daniel politely concludes the discussion, acting as though he’s seen this movie before and arching his eyebrows conspiratorially as she leaves. Reconciling the playful, relaxed version of Daniel with his more inscrutable public persona is part of Spoon’s mystery and mischievousness. At one point, Pitchfork posted more than 15 different stories about the band over the three-week period in which Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was still being called Trouble Minx, Stroke Their Brains or It’s Frightening, depending on the source. Entertaining anecdotes pour forth about Daniel’s various antics over the years. A former tourmate remembers a late-night episode at New York’s LaGuardia Airport involving Daniel wheeling himself around in a courtesy wheelchair, acting as if he had a speech impediment and asking a hapless Au Bon Pain cashier if the restaurant granted handicapped discounts. Another details a late-night call to a friend during which Daniel pretended to be despondent in order to extract some intimate personal information from his victim, then revealed that he had obtained a police scanner and rigged the phone to be played to an audience of friends who listened to every word on Daniel’s car stereo. As alluded to earlier, Daniel encouraged Eno and Pope to propagate a rumor at South By Southwest that bandmate Harvey and British singer Amy Winehouse were an item. When confronted about the veracity of the story, Daniel casts doubtful glances and sidesteps the question. “That was Yasmine Kittles,” admits Harvey, chagrined that the story still has legs. “We were hanging out backstage like a couple of starstruck teenagers while Iggy walked around in a towel. I’m pretty sure Amy Winehouse was outside on the Kings Of Leon’s tour bus, arguing over who wore the tightest pants.” “Britt has successfully put a little bit of old-fashioned mystery back in this thing,” says producer Jon Brion, who met Daniel when Spoon played a show at Amoeba Records in Los Angeles, next door to the studio where he and Kanye West were recording. “Spoon is the antithesis of your usual indie-rock, three-minute great white hopes for commercial victory. What they’re doing is classic; it just happens to be in the rock idiom. Britt reminds me of Neil Young in that I can hear him fully committed to following his whims, making the kinds of records I’ll still want to hear 10 years from now.” Given the serious-minded nature of the band’s body of work, “Spoon” and “whimsy” are hardly the most intuitive combination of words in the Encyclopedia of Modern Rock. If anything, Daniel’s quest for discovery and sense of reinvention rivals that of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Both bands are releasing their respective sixth albums this year, have shared a manager (Tony Margherita) and have pledged allegiance to the vinyl LP, sequencing songs to reflect an a-side and a b-side. Both carefully select album artwork that shapes perceptions about what’s inside—Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga sports a moody black-and-white photo of American industrial artist Lee Bontecou—and have even recorded different songs titled “Reservations.” “We’re all a bunch of perfectionist assholes,” laughs longtime Spoon producer Mike McCarthy of the comparison. “Spoon tries to outdo themselves every fucking time, and for it to survive, to grow, it has to continue that way. Britt works harder on his music than anyone else I know. He’s at it daily.” True to his pointillist attention to detail, Daniel has been laboring on a solo record for so long that he now characterizes the project as “completely self-obsessed and non-existent.” Even with Spoon, it’s difficult to know when the music is finally ready for prime time. “We worked on ‘Target’ as a song for Gimme Fiction,” he explains. “I wrote the original riff in 2004, and we probably did it 10 or 15 different ways—the verse, the chorus—before I took a year off from it. It was like putting a puzzle together that we couldn’t get exactly right. Later, it became obvious to me what needed to be pulled out, what wasn’t working. Every song has to have some kind of unique angle to me. In my mind, I think there should be an element that makes a song a single. Like Prince’s ‘Kiss,’ where you hear it and your first reaction is, ‘That’s a fucking hit.’ For me, that’s always the driving thing.” With the dark, dazzling Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon has saved its best work for a time when more potential fans seem poised to embrace the band than at any other point in its history. Given Spoon’s previous jousts with fame and its attendant downsides, the sense of déjà vu must be profound. Yet Daniel remains guardedly optimistic about the future. “I’m always surprised with each step getting better or easier,” he says. “We’re doing all the same stuff we’ve ever done: touring, putting care into the recording of the album, thought into the presentation. I don’t know. Maybe now’s finally our time?”