I was looking at the two Merge Records anniversary compilations (Rows Of Teeth, from 1994; and Oh ,Merge, from 1999). In the latter, your friend Phil Morrison wrote some great liner notes where he said, “This one is about the plucky, can-do indie community.” So how would you describe the upcoming 15th anniversary compilation?
Oh, that’s a good question! The first two CDs of the three-CD set are songs previously released—“Merge’s Greatest Hits” kind of thing—so they go all the way back. The third CD is new stuff. The album is called Old Enough To Know Better, and while there’s no great meaning behind that—15 is a kind of teenager age, so it seems to make sense—there are certainly some “plucky, can-do” people still involved, and there are also a lot of people who have kind of been through the wringer. At some point in the mid-’90s there was definitely a sense of, “Oh, this kind of music could be genuinely popular!” People would start bands thinking, “I can make a living doing this.” But no one in the right mind starts a band thinking that—at least not when we were starting out.

There was a shift in the mindset in the mid-’90s, and it was everywhere: All of a sudden you have bands that form in order to get signed. That’s their goal, as opposed to making music or creating art. “I sign, therefore I am.” How’s that for a fucked-up existential philosophy?
Right. And while there’s still some of that mentality left over, I think the people who are really making music because they want to make music are still trying to find ways to do that. Like I said, maybe they’ve been through the wringer, say a band like Spoon who was on Matador then got signed by Elektra and got totally screwed by that. And then they’ve made the best records they’ve ever made since then. One person new to Merge that comes to mind is Richard Buckner, who’s made records for cool indies as well as majors, and we’re doing his next record. These are the kinds of people we started the label to be involved with in the first place. They don’t make music as a means to some other end, and if things go well, that’s great, and if they can sell enough records to live off, that’s great, too. But you get the impression from someone like Buckner, or Dan Bejar from Destroyer, that they have to do it.

In selecting tracks for the three CDs on the 15th anniversary comp, what was the thinking or selection process that went into that? People around the Merge office casting votes and tallying the ballots?
It really wasn’t even that calculated. It was more me sitting there [laughs]. And a lot of times it was easy because a certain song might come to mind when you think of a band. We weren’t trying to make this an obscurists’ collection. If you want a retrospective that’s a greatest-hits kind of thing then you want to make it great to listen to all the way through, and fun. Someone said to me, “Make it the best mix tape you could make of Merge artists.”

Did the bands get involved?
We didn’t want to consult the bands too much, frankly. People in bands—myself included—have their own idea of what their best or most representative song is. But that rarely matches up with the public’s opinion.

The “you’re your own worst critic” syndrome.
Exactly. And this compilation wasn’t made for the bands to listen to, although hopefully they’ll like it. It was made for the fans. So we were careful about not putting the list out there for debate because if you got into it with every band—“Weeeeellll, we think this song is our best one, although our drummer likes this one, and ...”—we didn’t want to open it up to that kind of thing.

My personal favorite I’m glad is represented: Shark Quest, one of the great underrated N.C. bands.
That’s probably for a couple of reasons. They don’t tour, and it’s instrumental music, which isn’t the easiest sell in any case. But their new song on the third disc is amazing. And their [upcoming] CD is really great.

Any bands that got away over the years? Any bands Merge pursued but for whatever reasons could not sign?
I’m sure there are some I’ve forgotten about. But Sebadoh, around the time of the Soul & Fire EP, is one; we were originally supposed to put that out. Then they signed to Sub Pop. It’s not that we had a contract or anything, more like, “Hey, we recorded these songs, our first real studio thing!” I was a huge fan, and Superchunk of course had done that EP of Sebadoh covers [1991’s The Freed Seed]. So it was, “Yes! Let’s do it!” Then some time went by and they went, “Well, we decided to sign with Sub Pop.” Of course we get stuff every week that we’d like to put out but we just can’t.

Well, that’s your fault. On the Merge Web site it says you accept demos. Some labels won’t take demos and will only talk to high-powered managers and attorneys.
I know, I know. But you just can’t say no! Some of the best stuff we ever put out was unsolicited demos. Although just because we say we accept them doesn’t mean you’re gonna get a nice letter back from us! [Laughs]

What about fantasy artists you’d like to have on your label? And don’t say “Rolling Stones, Beatles and Bob Dylan.”
Well, it’s actually hard to think of someone contemporaneous. Some of the ones I would have said 15 years ago I’d love to do, we actually ended up working with. We signed the Clean, which is, “Wow!” And David Kilgour has a new solo record coming out in the fall. And I can’t believe we put out a Buzzcocks record.

Let me move on to some of the more “list-y” things I wanted to ask you. First, I’m curious to know how old you are now, and when you were a teenager, what were you listening to?
I’m 36, and since we’ve been talking about North Carolina, one of my favorite records of all time from North Carolina would be Animosity by Corrosion Of Conformity, from ’85. That record and that band at that time, whew—that lineup, the trio of Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman and Reed Mullin. I would see them in New York (where McCaughan attended Columbia University) at CBGB. Thurston Moore would be there; I remember Mike Watt being at a COC show. And I would think, “That’s so cool, this band from North Carolina, these people all want to come see this band.” They were just blowing people away. There was no hardcore band that I ever saw that came anywhere close to that, and I’ve seen plenty of hardcore bands. They were just completely insane. That record has a weird production because each side of it was recorded at a different studio, but Animosity is still an amazing hardcore record. A little metal going on, and it’s got the Pushead sleeve, too.

And there was an Ugly Americans reunion show recently too, I understand—speaking of N.C. hardcore.
Yeah. It’s funny too, talking about Shark Quest a minute ago: The Ugly Americans was one of the first hardcore shows I went to, and Chris Eubank was in the band then, and now he’s in Shark Quest. And Sara from the Angels Of Epistemology is in Shark Quest; Laird Dixon from Zen Frisbee is in Shark Quest; and now Chuck Johnson, who was in Spatula, is in Shark Quest. All these people from all these bands from over the years. A supergroup. But yeah, I was into a lot of hardcore when I was 18: Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, of course. As well as stuff that I still listen to now: AC/DC kind of hard-rock bands of the time. The funny thing is, everything is so divided up now, but at the time, if you were into music that was other than “album rock”—it wasn’t really called “alternative” yet—it didn’t matter what it was because “at least it’s not being played on G105!” ([G105 was the Triangle area’s leading classic-rock FM station.) Every week we’d try to get into these shows which we technically wouldn’t be old enough for, like Meat Puppets, Rain Parade and Joe King Carrasco, then on Sundays we’d be going to the hardcore matinees. But it wasn’t weird at the time if you were into COC but also into Let’s Active. That wasn’t strange; it was just a different kind of music. If you had a club like the Cat’s Cradle you had to hope that the same people coming to see the Replacements were also coming to see Let’s Active and also to see Black Flag. Who else ... I’d gotten the first couple of Dinosaur records and I was going to see them live when I was going to school in New York. And now Merge is reissuing the first three Dinosaur records this year.

Any “great lost Tarheel bands” that you can think of as long as we’ve been talking about some older groups?
Well, the Angels Of Epistemology, even though they were around for a while. We put out that CD with a lot of what they recorded, and had that band stuck around and toured they would have gotten some attention because they were so unique. I remember Satellite Boyfriend (a Raleigh pop group) did some great shows and had some really great songs.

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