FEATURES

2008 was a historic year for Van Pierszalowski, singer and songwriter for Port O’Brien. For the first summer in his life, Pierszalowski didn’t join his family on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where he usually works the season on his father’s salmon boat. Cambria Goodwin, also a singer and songwriter for the waterlogged folk-pop band, wasn’t at her mainland cannery gig, either. They’ve got a good excuse, though. Port O’Brien’s “I Woke Up Today,” from the band’s self-released second album All We Could Do Was Sing, is getting a lot of attention. Recorded in summer ‘07 prior to Pierszalowski’s last Alaska sojourn, All We Could Do is equal parts string-band hootenanny, woozy sing-along and meditative balladry. Acoustic instruments dominate, but the album also indulges in lush strings and the occasional fuzzed-up electric growler, firmly rooted by bassist Caleb Nichols (who was recently replaced by Ryan Stively) and drummer Joshua Barnhart. While Pierszalowski’s romantic muse sometimes lends a high sentimentality to his lyrics, the band’s clanky, unscripted musical performances anchor the proceedings. Pierszalowski and Co. began riding a wave of word-of-mouth buzz in 2007 when M. Ward wandered into a Port O’Brien gig in San Francisco and recommended the band to Conor Oberst, who quickly tapped it to open for Bright Eyes at the city’s venerable Great American Music Hall. Suddenly, Port O’Brien was getting enough work that the Kodiak Island salmon industry needed extra hands this season. All We Could Do manages to trap a small part of that solitary culture on tape. The album’s only non-studio recording is short closer “Valdez,” cut by Pierszalowski in a skiff in Alaska on a cheap cassette recorder. The hard water sloshing in the bilge provides a solemn, offbeat counterpoint to the fragile melody. “Working out on the skiff, away from the main boat, it’s impossible to describe how isolated that feels,” says Pierszalowski. “My dad’s installed a satellite phone, so it’s easier to contact each other, but you get to a point where you become so intimately familiar with your own head that it becomes hard to communicate when you’re around people again. When we dock for a few days, it’s like you can’t even make yourself understood. It’s incredibly frustrating.” That sense of isolation and communication breakdown permeates All We Could Do, whose primary themes are loneliness and the desire to live a settled life in the midst of unsettled work. This isn’t an LP about the convivial beach or the romantic shore. The album’s images are derived from the vast sea, from things in life that feel as vast as the sea: deep and murky, boiling with oddly shaped life beneath the surface. “I’ve been coming [to Kodiak Island] all my life,” says Pierszalowski. “I know this area, every bay, every rock formation. I know which tides are best for fishing in which parts of the island. People talk about that element of the music like it’s a storytelling device or something, like the Decemberists’ thing. But to me, this is the way that talking about the world makes sense.”

—Eric Waggoner

Sex, divorce, feeling inadequate—when it comes to her lyrics, Jenny Lewis has never held back. But somehow, between Rilo Kiley, her rootsy solo work and frequent guest spots (Postal Service, Bright Eyes, Elvis Costello), the demure, 32-year-old former actress continues to keep intrigue high. Her latest solo album, Acid Tongue (Warner Bros.), is no exception. Buffered by snaky guitars, pumping bass and harmonica, she sings about taking LSD, regretting lies she’s told and even matricide in a quivering soprano. Despite being open about vices in her lyrics (whether they’re real or not), when MAGNET reached her in Los Angeles, Lewis shyly asked only one question: “Can it be a fiction sheet?”

Lewis Tracked Down Her Estranged Father, Eddie Gorgan, To Play Harmonica On Acid Tongue. I’ve always written songs about my parents. They are such fascinating, odd people. On (2006 solo album) Rabbit Fur Coat, I really wrote a lot about my mom. I started unconsciously writing a little bit about my father, and that led me to asking him to come down and play on the record, which was a really lovely experience for me. I’m still kind of getting to know him. And what better way than to play music with your dad?

Lewis Made Her Stage Debut In Las Vegas. I heard a couple great stories [about my parents’ ’70s-era lounge act, Love’s Way]. One involved a wardrobe malfunction while my mother was pregnant with me. Apparently, there was some sort of button problem, and her dress fell to the floor while she was onstage at the Sands Hotel.

As A Teenager, Lewis Collected Hats, But Now Has Just One Favorite. I donated [my hat collection] to Goodwill, then slowly bought back the hats over the years. Not the exact same hats. I have one hat that I wear all the time, a Borsalino. I bought it in a pawnshop in Cologne. It’s just a great old hat. You can hide under a hat. From the rain.

Lewis Occasionally Plays Impromptu Music With Other Musicians In L.A.’s Laurel Canyon. Every couple of months, we go to a house that my friend Jonathan Wilson has, and we just sing cover tunes all night. We sing J.J. Cale tunes. Grateful Dead songs. The Watson Twins came up a couple times. Some of the guys from Wilco. Different older guys who have been playing in L.A. for a long time. It’s really fun. And there’s a bunch of pretty girls sitting around, watching. That always helps.

Lewis Recorded Acid Tongue In A Studio Known For Legendary Recordings As Well As Legendary Debauchery. There are only two rooms at Sound City [Studios], one of which is the big room where Nevermind was recorded and part of Rumours and a bunch of Tom Petty records. The console is the same for all the records that were made there. I think a couple lines of coke were probably snorted off that. [Laughs] I thought you were gonna ask me if I did a line of coke off the console. I didn’t, just so you know.

Lewis Owns Five Koi Fish. I got two a couple months ago. Their names are Oreo and Peaches And Cream. And I actually got three more last night. Two are unnamed, but one is called Golden Man. He’s really small. I also have two bullfrogs and one nameless catfish. They’re in a pond, which is, like, 500 gallons.

—Kory Grow

Searching for existential meaning in modern pop music can often feel like a spelunking expedition in an empty swimming pool. By contrast, Son Ambulance’s explanation of the appropriately meta-sounding Someone Else’s Déją Vu (Saddle Creek) comes straight out of the deep end. “Joe (Knapp) just started talking about the familiarity of music, about a jukebox in a room playing this song that’s never been made before,” recalls drummer Jeff Koster, who shares co-writing credits with band founder/singer Knapp on Son Ambulance’s third album. “He was imagining this room and this weird feeling coming from the jukebox, but you’re not really hearing anything. It created in our minds this dreaminess, like, ‘What is music?’” If this seems like a rather weighty question for five twentysomething rockers to tackle, consider that the Omaha, Neb., outfit does have one elder in its midst. Koster credits 53-year-old bassist Dereck Higgins with expanding the group’s musical horizons. “He’s a staple musician of Omaha,” says Koster. “He’s been in a lot of important bands. He’s become like the Triforce.” His quarter-century of seniority notwithstanding, Higgins is part of a recent infusion of new blood. He and saxophonist James Cuato joined Son Ambulance’s ranks during the recording of Déją Vu, which also features contributions from members of Omaha stalwarts the Faint and Tilly And The Wall. “The band is so new, we don’t really know any old songs,” says Koster. “It’s a mixture: (Knapp’s brother) Daniel is the only other member from (2004’s) Key, and I’m the only member previous to Key. We’re now trying to learn to play what we made in the studio. It’s actually quite difficult.” Coming after a two-year hiatus, Déją Vu signals a fresh start for the sextet. The balladeering of Key and 2001 debut Euphemystic has been transformed on the new album, wrapped up in the mind-altering trappings of ’60s Tropicàlia and ’70s psych pop: chirping birds and choro rhythms; fluttering vocals and funhouse reverb. The evolution didn’t stop at the studio. Says Koster, “(Producer) A.J. (Mogis) came to one of our shows—well after the recording—and was like, ‘Whoa, if I’d known you wanted to do that, I would’ve done this.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, if we had known we wanted to do this, we would’ve done that.’ It’s a little more lively (now). We’ve added more melody. It’s more soulful and a lot bigger.” It’s also not uncommon for songs to begin in one decade and end in another. “Legend Of Lizeth,” for example, starts with golden oldie “Earth Angel” and finishes at Pink Floyd’s “Welcome To The Machine.” “That’s the thing about influences,” says Koster. “We’re not trying to rip anything off, but all these melodies are stuck in your head, whether they’re new or a commutation of something else.”

—Noah Bonaparte Pais

It’s not unusual for dedicated directors to spend months or even a few years following musicians for a documentary. Steven Sebring took that concept to extreme lengths in creating Patti Smith: Dream Of Life. Sebring, a high-end fashion photographer with no formal filmmaking experience, tailed Smith around the globe for 11 years, not so much chronicling her life but living it alongside her. In 1995, Sebring was assigned to photograph Smith. She was emerging from a difficult time in her life—her brother Todd and her husband, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, died the previous year—and was ready to release Gone Again, her first record in eight years. Sebring visited Smith’s suburban Detroit home, and the two spent most of the day at a coffee shop talking. Only at the end of their time together did Sebring shoot a few rolls of film. Several weeks later, Smith invited him to see her perform in New York City. “She comes out spitting and reading poetry, and I was like, ‘Is this the same woman?’ I couldn’t believe it,” says Sebring. In a moment of spontaneity, he asked if he could start filming her. “She sort of laughed at me. I know she has been approached by filmmakers in the past, but she always says no. I didn’t put a contract in front of her; I just started showing up.” Without much of a plan and running up huge credit-card debt in the process, Sebring followed Smith everywhere, from France to Israel to Japan to New Zealand, over the course of more than a decade. He was always there with his camera, capturing her visit to Beat poet Gregory Corso’s gravestone in Italy and Rimbaud’s birthplace in France. Dream Of Life works best in its quiet moments. We see Smith hanging out in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea, where she displays the cremated remains of photographer and longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe. We see her with daughter Jesse and son Jackson, who seemingly grow before our eyes during the film. Such intimate moments are usually reserved only for close friends and family. “We’ve become like brother and sister,” says Sebring. “We can talk about anything together.” Sebring tossed out the conventions usually associated with documentaries, such as the talking-head-type experts offering perspective and chronological history. In Sebring’s estimation, the lack of an agenda helped sell him to Smith. “There’s not a lot of stuff on Patti for a reason: because she doesn’t like to have a lot of stuff out about her,” he says. “And she also knew that I wasn’t into making a film to make money or exploit her.” Dream Of Life portrays the 61-year-old Smith in all her roles: mother, performer, artist, activist. We see her at anti-war demonstrations, in concert, backstage with her band and hobnobbing with the likes of Flea and former beau Sam Shepard. Sebring employs a hodge-podge of film styles: color and black-and-white, high and low resolution. It’s often like browsing through a gorgeous coffee-table photo book. (A companion book of photos and quotations has also been published to coincide with the film.) Despite its many palettes and tendency to zigzag in time, Dream Of Life is very much in keeping with Smith’s philosophy. As Sebring notes, she often says, “Life is not some vertical or horizontal line. You have your own internal world, and it is not neat.” All this, of course, makes the 109-minute Dream Of Life, which comes out on DVD in January, a harder sell to audiences beyond card-carrying Patti Smith fans. “This is the only document of her that will ever exist,” says Sebring. “So as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter about [the tough sell]. It matters that it’s something from my heart, Patti’s heart.”

—John Elsasser

Even after being shaken from sleep by MAGNET’s early-morning phone call, Jolie Holland has a unique way—part eyeshades-wearing analyst, part streetwise tough girl—of getting her point across. “I don’t give a shit about so much art, because it doesn’t give enough, doesn’t sacrifice enough,” says the 32-year-old singer/songwriter, who recently relocated from San Francisco to Brooklyn. “I don’t bother writing about something that’s not important to me.” On The Living And The Dead (Anti-), Holland’s fourth album, “important” is just another word for nothing left to lose. For death. For the life-altering events that form the core of the all-too-human drama Holland writes about with a storyteller’s knack for dramatic narrative and a Basement Tapes junkie’s taste for creaky melodies. Since leaving acclaimed Vancouver old-time act the Be Good Tanyas in 2001, Holland has charted her own strong-willed course, fearlessly blending the musical traditions she grew up with in the South (folk, country blues, Tex-Mex, roots rock) while giving voice to a cast of characters whose lives have been lived in the shadowy back alleys of what writer Greil Marcus once called the “old, weird America.” On The Living And The Dead, this assumes any number of forms, from ruminating about an old friend whose drug addiction has grown so desperate that Holland fails to recognize him on the street (“Corrido Por Buddy”) to a woman whose jealousy moves her to murder her lover (“Love Henry”) or the traveler whose Kerouac-like exploits have left a breadcrumb trail of human wreckage behind him (“Mexico City,” co-written by M. Ward). As it turns out, a key part of tapping into the macabre vibe required for such an album came in the form of the vintage instruments Holland used to create it and the longtime heroes, such as guitarist Marc Ribot, with whom she collaborated. “I have a 1948 Epiphone archtop acoustic, [which is] the guitar you hear on most of the record,” says Holland. “I was a street kid; my experience as a musician is that I never had any lessons, so friends taught me stuff; I played music on the street, stayed in squats. All my friends are these broke-ass, derelict artists, and that background gives you a certain mentality: ‘You can’t really afford anything nice, but you can probably find something free that’s old, and maybe even nicer than something expensive and new.’ Dead people have played [that guitar], which is weird to think about. I live for that kind of stuff.” Holland comes by her fascination with morbidity honestly enough. Her Scottish forebears moved to Texas on a Spanish land grant several generations ago, and her experiences as an itinerant Southerner (with stints in Houston, Austin and New Orleans) have given her a unique perspective about how this lifetime relates to those that came before it. “My family’s from New Orleans, and part of that family is African and Native American, which forms the cultural roots of voodoo,” she says. “One of the spiritual pillars of voodoo culture is that your ancestors are always with you. People may not necessarily remember (my grandfather) Julius Otto Jackson, but they’ll have this image of a badass Texas tough guy, whose spirit local priests then mediate so that he becomes part of the community. Then you pay that mediator dude in chickens and goats.” She laughs. “He communicates with your ancestors on your behalf, who might tell you to go take your goats to be inoculated or something.” It’s exactly this kind of cockeyed, patchwork-quilt worldview that’s colored Holland’s work since the release of 2003 solo debut Catalpa, a collection of home-recorded demos that earned her a Shortlist Music Prize nomination from fan and labelmate Tom Waits. Each album has been bolder than the one before it, unleashing Holland’s voice, an amalgam of Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton. On The Living And The Dead, it serves an observant-yet-wandering eye that recently landed on a fellow seeker and Southerner. “I’d never heard Daniel Johnston before I started recording this album,” says Holland, who received a mix tape of Johnston’s outsider pop songs from guitarist and friend Stefan Jecusco. “It totally changed my life. Within five minutes of listening to his tape, I’d written a song. It’s like getting the right food at the right time. Your body is like, ‘Come on, man, I’ve gotta make more tears, so where’s the nutrients?’ You eat the right thing and you’re cool again for a while.”

—Corey duBrowa

Robert Diggs—known to fans by his Wu-Tang Clan handle, RZA—sits in a dimly lit corner of his tour bus in Portland, Ore. Ten nights into his North American tour in support of Digi Snacks (Koch), his third LP in character as futuristic cartoon-like superhero Bobby Digital, Diggs launches into an explanation of what’s happened to the Wu-Tang Clan since the recording of the group’s fifth album, 2007’s underrated 8 Diagrams. “I haven’t worked with the Clan since,” he says quietly. “I’ve done some shows with them, but that’s mostly what we’re planning from here on out. Our creative ideas are going in different directions.” The Wu-Tang Clan once bowed to the RZA’s rule. The legend of the nine-man rap aggregation’s meteoric rise includes cutting a Robert Johnson-like deal with Diggs, giving him complete creative control over the group and its members’ respective solo efforts for five years in exchange for a place at the top of hip hop’s Darwinian wild kingdom. But the other Wu-Tang members took shots at him in the press after 8 Diagrams was released, citing everything from business disagreements to Diggs’ supposed disregard for their creative input. In the wake of this uncharacteristic infighting, Diggs now appears to have something to prove. “Once, all we had was a sampler,” says Diggs. “Now I play guitar to express my feelings. I got a band now, and it can get a little sloppy sometimes because I’m new with it. I’m learning.” If Digi Snacks represents learning, it’s graduate study of a very high order. The album employs a barrage of sounds, from gospel vocals to synthesizers. “Booby Trap” could almost pass for a backward-masked spy theme, though it changes into a party-down pounder in a live setting. The stretched-out cadences on “Good Night” resemble one of Diggs’ patented time-warped jazz samples, while the bent piano riff and wobbly female vocal on “Drama” demonstrate how far his musical journey has taken him. “I’m really comfortable with what we’re doing right now,” says Diggs. “We can change it up at any moment: ‘Know what? This band shit’s not cool anymore, I’m gonna go hit the reset button.’ But for now, I’m having a great time.”

—Corey duBrowa

Wild Combination: A Portrait Of Arthur Russell is as apt a film title as you’ll find. Russell—an avant-garde composer, singer/songwriter, cellist and disco producer—was a gay, flannel-wearing converted Buddhist from Oskaloosa, Iowa. He collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, David Byrne and Phillip Glass, among many others, in a thriving New York City art scene in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Wild combination, indeed. Russell died from AIDS in 1992 at age 40. His vast music catalog—he left behind thousands of tapes of partially finished songs—was largely overlooked until recently, when a series of reissues, compilations and tributes were welcomed by a new generation. After learning about Russell from a friend, New York-based filmmaker Matt Wolf felt an instant, visceral connection to his music before even hearing it. The seemingly contradictory character—the Iowa farm boy who becomes a Buddhist and downtown scenester—was fascinating. “That image was enough to intrigue me, but then of course, hearing Arthur’s music really sealed the deal,” says Wolf. “Arthur’s music is so intensely intimate and personal that I wanted to know more about the artist.” With a background in experimental filmmaking, Wolf initially sought to make a purely visual interpretation of Russell’s vivid, gracefully hypnotic music. The focus changed after Wolf reached out to Tom Lee, Russell’s longtime partner, who still lived in the East Village apartment the two shared next door to Ginsberg. Wild Combination, which had its world premiere in February at the Berlin Film Festival (screenings are expected stateside throughout the year), explores Russell’s artistry and background. He was an unhappy teen with severe acne who kept to himself and read Timothy Leary. Wolf traces Russell’s steps from a San Francisco commune to New York, and he includes footage of some of Russell’s early performances. Living in New York in the ’70s, Russell became a fan of the Ramones, the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. (He played cello on an early version of “Psycho Killer,” which didn’t go over so well.) Despite the apparent pretentiousness of some of Russell’s cello-fueled endeavors, he yearned for commercial success. Then along came disco. Under the name Dinosaur (one of several monikers he used), Russell wrote and produced “Kiss Me Again,” the first disco single released by Sire Records. Russell later co-founded Sleeping Bag Records, which issued a variety of hip hop and oceanic dance music in the early ’80s. Regardless of the times, Russell’s music (even tracks created for the dance floor, such as hypnotic 1981 hit “Go Bang”) holds up surprisingly well today. “Arthur was always looking toward the future, and there’s a futuristic quality to his music,” says Wolf. “When I listen, I don’t sense a time or a place; there’s a transcendent aspect to the music.” Russell is affectionately recalled by a host of friends and fans, including Ginsberg, Glass, Lee and Jens Lekman (who contributed a cover of “A Little Lost” to last year’s Four Songs By Arthur Russell tribute EP). Perhaps most touching, Russell’s parents were interviewed in Arthur’s childhood home in Iowa. “I wouldn’t call Arthur an underdog, but I think he was always on the brink of success,” says Wolf. “More than anything, his collaborators, family and partner wanted to see him actualized or recognized in this way because Arthur wanted that. I can only imagine how rewarding and validating it must be to have this renaissance happening more than a decade after Arthur’s death.” With the 71-minute Wild Combination, Wolf was able to help reconstruct Russell’s life and times for increasingly admiring audiences. “It’s never easy to make a visually driven, archivally dense film about a gay Buddhist cellist from Oskaloosa,” he says. “And I’m still sometimes shocked that we pulled it off.”

—John Elsasser

In the 1980s, the Go-Betweens were every bit as brilliant as R.E.M. or the Smiths, making smart, jangly pop music that never found as wide an audience as it deserved. Led by singers/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, the Australian band broke up at the end of the decade, only to stage a vibrant comeback in 1999. But just as the duo began writing its 10th album in May 2006, McLennan died of a heart attack. Forster recalls the serendipity that put the Go-Betweens together again. In early 1999, the Go-Betweens’ record company decided to put out a best-of album called Bellavista Terrace. Before the record’s release, my manager phoned me at my home in Germany and asked what we could do to help publicize it. I suggested a whistle-stop world tour by myself and Grant. The idea was to hit small clubs in major cities around the world, doing interviews by day and playing acoustic shows by night. My other suggestion was that Grant and I do it under our own names—no “Go-Betweens” on the marquee. This was to take pressure off us and allow Grant and I to play what we wanted, even if that meant playing Go-Betweens songs all night. Also, with our solo careers still going, we weren’t thinking about the Go-Betweens. We approached this tour as solo artists and friends. The tour started in Sydney, and the first night was a disaster. Sydney was a key town in the band’s life; it was where we’d recorded our last album, 16 Lovers Lane, in 1988, and it was where the band broke up the following year. So everyone was there to see us, and we weren’t all that good. We were stiff, busy relearning how to move and relate to each other onstage, and we weren’t all that convincing. But we quickly got better. By the fifth show of the Australian leg of the tour, we were tight and happy and had a fantastic set of songs, two of which were new: one from me called “He Lives My Life,” one from Grant called “Magic In Here.” In Melbourne, something unusual happened. After soundcheck, Grant asked to come to my room because he wanted to talk about something. We were staying at a lovely Novotel hotel down by the beach at St. Kilda. I was in room 508 with a view of the sea. Grant came in and with little hesitation said we should restart the Go-Betweens. I looked at him half-stunned and half expecting it. I said we should, too. I was caught up in how good we were sounding, plus in the back of my mind was the fact that I had asked him to join me in the band back in ’77 and here he was asking me to join the band in ’99. There was symmetry to it. So we agreed but kept this information to ourselves. This gave the tour an added twist knowing we were going to restart the group. It also meant that we began to scout locations to record. The next stop was Europe, and both Grant and I started having surreptitious conversations on the benefits of each city we passed through as a possible location to make the Go-Betweens’ “comeback” album. London didn’t feel right, nor did Paris or Dublin or Berlin. We were looking for something—a feeling—that we couldn’t really verbalize. The U.S., which was the third big leg of the world tour, offered up the last hope of finding somewhere. By this time, Grant and I had resigned ourselves to the fact that maybe we weren’t going to find the dream place to record. But then we hit Seattle. As most musicians will tell you, one of the great displeasures of their touring lives is the interview at soundcheck. It’s even more groan-inducing when the publicist you’ve employed hasn’t told you one has been scheduled. So when the hapless interviewer approaches the musician as he/she relaxes at the venue with wistful thoughts of the gig or a far-off loved one with the news it’s interview time, total enthusiasm from the musician may not be forthcoming. I found myself sitting down in a booth at the back of the Crocodile Cafe opposite a person named Larry Crane from a magazine called Tape Op. I had heard of neither. By the third question, this person had my attention. He wasn’t asking normal rock-interview questions about motivation, song themes or career paths. He wasn’t trying to dig into my soul. He was talking about the records I had made. The sounds of the records. The decisions behind the sounds. He was gently probing my technical knowledge of recording, which I found beguiling and interesting. In a natural and unforced way, he indicated that he owned a studio called Jackpot! and that it was situated in Portland, Ore. Then he told me he’d recorded Sleater-Kinney, and I became even more interested. I must insert some background here: I had been living in Regensburg, Germany, for the previous three years. It’s a beautiful small city on the Danube River in Bavaria, a fairy castle land far off from the world. One thing that had glanced this remote kingdom and come to my attention had been Sleater-Kinney. I loved their third album, Dig Me Out. It was to my mind the best rock-pop record I had heard in 10 years. It was invigorating, tuneful, aggressive in new ways and had a poetic force that somehow rang bells in my head. So when Larry said he’d recorded or even knew Sleater-Kinney, I got excited. I thanked Larry for the interview and walked into the soundcheck with a few ideas buzzing in my head. The next day, we were at the airport waiting to fly to San Francisco for that night’s show at the Great American Music Hall. There was a young woman at the departure gate who was looking at me. She came over and said she’d seen us play the previous night, that she worked for a record company called Kill Rock Stars and that her name was Jessica. She had a drink in hand. I asked her what it was. She described a whiskey-and-soda concoction that she said she only drank because she’d read somewhere that Richard Hell drank it. I immediately thought this was the first person I’d ever met from an American record company who was on my wavelength. I asked her what she was doing at the airport. She said she was flying to San Francisco to pick up Sleater-Kinney, who were coming back from a Japanese tour. While I took in this information and coincidence, she added that they were all planning to come to our show tonight. I was gobsmacked. Things were spinning and colliding almost too fast. Grant and I had managed to keep the news that we were going to restart the Go-Betweens primarily to ourselves, but word was starting to leak out. We needed to say something. That night, I made an announcement from the stage that we were going to make a new Go-Betweens record together. When we came offstage, one of the first people into the dressing room was Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss, who immediately offered to play drums on the record. I nearly fell off my chair. I couldn’t believe it. It was too perfect. I’d stared at the Dig Me Out back-cover photo in Regensburg for so long, trying to work out the dynamics of her band and where these women came from, and here they were in the dressing room amidst a gang of people excited about what the Go-Betweens had done and could still do. Sleater-Kinney singers/guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker talked about Larry Crane and recommended Jackpot!, piecing together as they did the basic fragments of the whole scene in my mind. And that’s how the seventh Go-betweens album, The Friends Of Rachel Worth, came to be. In early 2000, we flew to Portland and entered Jackpot! to record. It came out of the clouds in a way. A wintry world, at the very start of the millennium, far, far away from anywhere we’d ever recorded before. That was the way it had to be.

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)

The golden age of Ray Davies and Co. may have ended with 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies, but there are essential tracks scattered among the hit-and-miss LPs that followed: “Sitting In My Hotel” from Everybody’s In Show-Biz (1972) “(A) Face In The Crowd” from Soap Opera (1975) “I’m In Disgrace” from Schoolboys In Disgrace (1975) “Full Moon” from Sleepwalker (1977) “Misfits” from Misfits (1978) “In A Space” from Low Budget (1979) “Art Lover” from Give The People What They Want (1981) “Heart Of Gold” from State Of Confusion (1983) “Summer’s Gone” from Word Of Mouth (1984) “Scattered” from Phobia (1993)

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

For a brief spell in the early ’90s, Jellyfish was more than happy to play grunge spoiler. That much was obvious from the campy, funereal organ that kicks off Bellybutton, the San Francisco band’s effusively melodic 1990 debut. “We went to a church in L.A. that had a massive cathedral organ and recorded it right there,” says Jellyfish keyboardist and cofounder Roger Joseph Manning Jr. “Jellyfish was actually the most punk-rock statement I ever made. We were always outsiders, musically. But unlike the sort of music geeks who would’ve gotten into jazz, we really loved classic pop.” 1993’s Spilt Milk, the band’s second and final album, is a blustery, meticulous tribute to the hook-crazed nostalgia of ’70s fandom, mining inspiration from the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Queen with a theatrical flamboyance that bordered on parody at times. While Spilt Milk confirmed Jellyfish’s immortality in the eyes of power-pop fetishists, it failed to capitalize on Bellybutton’s modest commercial success. That was enough to send band members scrambling for the exits. “We made no money with the first album, and financial pressure was looming over us,” says Manning of the issues leading up to Jellyfish’s 1994 dissolution. Compounding the monetary woes was singer/drummer Andy Sturmer’s autocratic hold on the group. “Now I can look back on it and see that without wisdom, maturity and maybe some counseling and therapy, we could’ve never worked through our problems,” says Manning. “Had there been more money coming in, it would’ve justified some of the pain.” Original guitarist Jason Falkner was the first to bolt, leaving prior to Spilt Milk and eventually forming the Grays with budding “it” producer Jon Brion (who contributed guitar to Spilt Milk) before moving on to a solo career. “I just kind of evaporated,” says Falkner with a giggle. “I was told that Jellyfish would be an equal three-piece, with us writing and playing everything. That turned out to be a total joke. I felt like I was duped.” Notoriously press shy, Sturmer has opted for a low-key post-Jellyfish job as a TV theme-song composer for cartoons such as Transformers and Batman. He also serves as a writer/producer for obscure and overseas acts, including Japanese pop phenoms Puffy AmiYumi. “Andy never wanted to be in the spotlight, but he was never honest with himself,” says Manning of Sturmer’s vanishing act. “With Jellyfish, he couldn’t have been in more foreign territory.” Manning initially divided his time between guitar-heavy glam outfit Imperial Drag and Moog Cookbook, the latter of which produced a pair of densely textured, often hilarious albums—one covering alt-rock hits (1995’s The Moog Cookbook), the other classic-rock tunes (1997’s Ye Olde Space Bande). Recently, Manning has taken his synth-soaked sideline a step further under the remixing alias Malibu. The recent Robo-Sapiens (Expansion Team) is a pulsing, dance-floor-ready tribute to such formative influences as Kraftwerk, Herbie Hancock, Gary Numan and Thomas Dolby. Manning and Falkner have each released solo albums in Japan and recorded and/or toured with a lengthy and diverse list of artists, including Beck and Air. As for the likelihood of a Jellyfish reunion, Manning isn’t optimistic. “Except for Andy, we all speak to one another,” he says. “Some of us make music together (Falkner and Manning are collaborating as TV Eyes). But nobody is interested in working with Andy in a personal or creative capacity. It would serve no purpose, but I don’t say that with any animosity or sadness.”

—Hobart Rowland

The Duke Spirit creates the kind of record-collector rock that’s usually explained with mash-up descriptors that sound like they were written for a music-industry version of Robert Altman’s The Player. “We’ve had some weird comparisons, like ‘Björk fronting Meat Is Murder-era Smiths,’” laughs guitarist Luke Ford, who grew up outside of London reading hype-afflicted U.K. music magazines. “One of our favorites was, ‘A crack whore fronting an Oasis tribute band.’ It wasn’t very positive, obviously, but we thought it was pretty funny. We almost put that on a sticker on the front of the album.” But on an album like Neptune (Shangri-La Music), which was recorded in the California desert with Queens Of The Stone Age producer Chris Goss, it’s difficult not to point out obvious touchstones. Over the course of a dozen tracks, there are easily identifiable elements of Sonic Youth’s poppier moments, the neo-girl-group harmonies of the Raveonettes, shades of the shoegazers and cinematic ballads that would’ve made Lee Hazlewood proud. If those reference points weren’t obvious enough, the Duke Spirit’s website features photos of the band holding up albums by the Modern Lovers, Black Sabbath, Ronnie Spector and Sly And The Family Stone. “It’s about sharing your influences with people who are interested in your band,” says Ford. “Some of my favorite artists did that, like the Jesus And Mary Chain or Thurston Moore. They would talk about people like Captain Beefheart or Suicide, and then I’d go out and buy the albums and be really into it. It’s not about being anorak-y or the kind of record collectors who want to prove how cool they are.” Yes, Ford did say “anorak-y,” which is a British term that describes the High Fidelity crowd of übergeeks. “There’s a certain kind of guy who hangs out at the venue at 3 p.m. with records to be signed, waiting for the band to arrive,” he explains. “They’re all very sweet people, but they usually wear the same type of garments and might go out trainspotting later.” Sure, but they’re also the people who would buy five different versions of a Duke Spirit single to get the various b-sides, aren’t they? “Exactly,” says Ford. “And I’d never want to say a mean thing about those people. They really are sweet.” Ford should know, because he’s met enough of them. The Duke Spirit takes great pride in its live show, which it brought to North America for the better part of 2006 while touring with Ted Leo And The Pharmacists. “You can hide behind a MySpace page and have people write thousands of paragraphs about how cool you are,” says Ford. “But if you can’t play, you can’t connect and it’s all bullshit, really.”

—Michael Barclay

On first inspection, there’s nothing that unusual about Meric Long when he sloshes in from a rainstorm to take shelter in his neighborhood taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District. Look closely, however, and you’ll spy huge, pointy talons jutting out from his fingerless gloves. “They’re my dragon nails—fake but really strong,” explains Long, who employs them in plucking a tinny old National guitar in his anachronistic folk/punk duo the Dodos. “I used my real nails for a while, then we left on tour; after two shows, they just broke. So now I even have a manicurist, but I poke through everything.” He claws the air for emphasis. “I can’t help it! I’m dangerous, I tell ya!” Look even closer, beneath the ash-pale 27-year-old’s shaggy black bangs, and some subtly exotic features become evident. “My mom is from Tahiti, but she’s Chinese,” says Long. “And my dad’s from Oakland, but he’s white as snow.” For an entire summer, Long relocated to Tahiti, worked at his uncle’s bread shop and soaked up as much culture as he coud, which could account for the far-off, tribal feel of Visiter (Frenchkiss), the Dodos’ second album. “I went to some drumming ceremonies in Tahiti, and the drumming is really random there, not polyrhythmic like African drumming is,” says Long, as his own powerhouse percussionist, Logan Kroeber, ducks in out of the rain to join him. “But they have dancers who are really the centerpiece of it all, so it’s pretty much just drummers and one beautiful woman, shaking her butt faster than humanly possible. It’s incredible—everybody in the audience is transfixed, just watching her butt.” Long studied West African Ewe drumming, experimented with difficult Asian devices such as the two-stringed erhu and wound up playing with a gamelan ensemble. But once he stumbled upon vintage blues artists such as Mississippi John Hurt, his retro fingerpicking style was set. Meeting the metal-minded Kroeber led to 2006’s Beware Of The Maniacs and now Visiter, whose name and childish-scrawl artwork were taken from a gig the Dodos played for a special-ed class. Long’s music is every bit as unorthodox as his background, with the only constant being his classic-crooner singing voice. There are a few gentle janglers, but Visiter is all over the aesthetic map, with arena-rock stomp (“Jodi,” “Paint The Rust”), tom-tom pounding (“Winter”), locomotive chugging (“Red And Purple”) and even a rumination on shuffling through a city park unnoticed (“Park Song”). This eccentric-yet-accessible approach is tailor-made for today’s heavily hip-factored TV-series soundtracks, and it seems a long way from the sounds of Tahiti. “I’m gonna try to make it back there someday soon,” vows Long. “Come to think of it, I don’t know why I ever left. I should’ve stayed there.” At which point Kroeber’s hand shoots up like a rocket to interject. “Uh, hey, if you don’t mind, Meric, I wouldn’t mind going to Tahiti.” After all, what cruel fate could ever befall a friendly Dodo on some scenic tropical island?

—Tom Lanham