While leading the oft-poppy, part-punky, always-amusing Young Fresh Fellows and the darker, Beach Boys/Beatlesque Minus 5—as well as playing in scattered supergroups and one-off projects during his 20-year-plus career—Scott McCaughey has proven to be an underrated, endearing lyricist and a musician skilled enough to regularly perform and record with R.E.M. This year’s revamped reissue of the Minus 5’s Minus 5 In Rock (Yep Roc)—a quickie LP originally released in 2000 and limited to 1,000 copies—is further proof McCaughey can stand with any songwriter of recent vintage.

Like his peer Bob Pollard—who contributed vocals to “Boeing Spacearium” on the 1997 Minus 5 record The Lonesome Death Of Buck McCoy—McCaughey is prolific and insanely busy, a lost soul who shoots himself with rock ‘n’ roll not so much because he wants to but because he must.

“If I can’t write songs, I’m pretty much fucked,” says McCaughey from Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, where he’s contributing to R.E.M.’s upcoming record (as well as imbibing a few tropical beverages). “It just seems like that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. Writing songs has to happen for me or else I feel really useless, even though it doesn’t really matter if I ever write a song again. I’m not putting myself down or anything. I’m just saying the world could go on without another song about booze. But it’s not going to because I’m going to keep on writing them.”

Speaking of booze, a hungover McCaughey begins our conversation by apologizing for missing the first scheduled appointment.

MAGNET: Are you having a rough time down there?
McCaughey: Um. Hmm. In a way. [Laughs] No, actually it’s going great. But we somehow stayed out really late last night and didn’t wake up. I don’t know how this happened.

You started the Young Fresh Fellows around, what, 1982?
Actually, (guitarist) Chuck Carroll and I made the first tape of the Young Fresh Fellows in 1981. In 1980, we bought a four-track and started recording a bunch of the songs that were on the first record, and we sent them out to our friends. Then we thought, “Let’s make an album.” It was a couple of years later, like in ‘83, that we started recording for a record, and [The Fabulous Sounds Of The Pacific Northwest] came out in 1984. We weren’t really a band when we started making the record, we were just goofing around. [Laughs]

When people think of the Seattle scene, they immediately think of the grunge era, but what was it like when the Fellows began?
It was pretty lame. There were some bands that were really popular that played in taverns four nights a week and did mostly covers. People would go and get drunk and dance to them and all that, and that was fine. There weren’t a whole lot of bands playing originals. The ones that did were kind of punk-rock bands that would play like an art gallery or something or rent out a hall for a hundred bucks and have the police come and shut it down. [Laughs] The cool thing about that was that all of these bands, these little punk-rock bands, were making their own singles. There weren’t really any labels, so it was a total DIY kind of thing. We were one of the first bands that made a record and then started driving around the country and playing shows. There were a few other ones around the same time, like the Fastbacks and the U-Men, but it was a pretty tough scene as far as just playing. You couldn’t really play and make a living unless you were in one of those bar bands.

What did you do for a living at that time?
What all musicians do: work in a record store. [Laughs] I actually played in a band in Seattle before the Fellows called the Dynette Set, which became pretty popular. We played in the taverns, four nights a week sometimes. We did some originals, but it was mostly a girl group. We did the Phil Spector stuff, the Shangri-Las and things, but with two guitars, bass and drums. It was more of a Stones approach to that, and we had three women singers. We made an album, too, which isn’t that good, but we were a rocking band and did really well.

What do you recall about the making of the first couple of Fellows records and what you felt you accomplished?
With the first one, we were making it just because we wanted to, for fun. We wanted to send it to our friends, and that’s really all we were doing. (Producer) Conrad Uno, who I met when he was doing sound sometimes for the Dynette Set at some of the clubs we played at, heard that Chuck and I wanted to make a record. He said, “If you let me put it out on my label (Popllama), I’ll let you record it at my studio for free.” We were like, “Right on.” [Laughs] We just thought that we made a really cool record, and Uno said, “I’m going to send it out to radio stations.” We were like, “What are you talking about?” [Laughs] But he did. All of a sudden, we were getting played on all of these college stations around the country, and we couldn’t believe it.

By the time (1985’s) Topsy Turvy was done, we were a little less naïve, I suppose, and there was actually another label in town that was bigger than Popllama that wanted to put it out, and we sort of licensed it to him. That was probably one of the first real learning experiences we had as a band. [Laughs] It probably would’ve been better if we had just put it out on Popllama, but we were trying, I guess, since we had that little taste of success, we were trying to further it. Really, though, we were pretty much still saying, “Let’s just make a record and have fun and go out and play shows and get drunk.”

What happened with the label that you called the learning experience?
Well, I don’t want to get into it too much, but it was just that things had been in our control and then we put it a little bit out of our control. Somebody else paid for it, you know? Before that, the Fellows and Uno, we were kind of a team and we shared all of the expenses and all that, and we had full control over everything. So this took it a little out of our hands, and we didn’t like that necessarily. Of course, we did it again many times later. [Laughs]

So you didn’t really learn anything.
No, not really. [Laughs]

(1987’s) The Men Who Loved Music is a classic. At the time you made that record, did you know what you had? When you were done, did you think, “We really nailed it”?
To me, that record sounds like the Young Fresh Fellows. It just sounds like us playing songs that we’d been playing all over the country for a while. We went in and just knocked them out. Most of the lead guitar is live. That was kind of like our first peak. We’d been a band long enough that we were really, really good, and we had a batch of songs that had sort of a thematic element to it. There wasn’t any tension with putting out that record. We slammed it out.

If someone was listening to the record on a superficial level, they would hear songs like “Beer Money” or “When The Girls Get Here” and think maybe you guys were some sort of novelty band or a joke band. When that record came out, did you get that kind of reaction a lot?
We always got that. In hindsight, I realized that people are always going to think that about us because when they see us live, we’re up there laughing our heads off and having such a great time and doing stupid things to entertain people because we like to entertain. [Laughs] So if it means that right before the show starts, I tape every plastic cup in the backstage area to my body and then put sandwiches inside them and then go out and play the show, then people are going to think we were silly. And we were silly. We like to have a really great time. After that record, we were like, “People think we’re a novelty band, people think we’re funny” and blah, blah, blah, so we kind of let it get to us and tried to make a more serious record with (1998’s) Totally Lost, which I think was a really bad idea because The Men Who Loved Music was a serious record, you know? It was just serious in a different way, I guess.

That was actually my next question, as Totally Lost does seem pretty melancholy, from the title on down. So you did that on purpose?
Yeah, we sort of did. It wasn’t like we sat there and talked about it, but it was an obvious kind of backlash thing, like we were sick of people thinking we were a joke band. The other thing that was happening during that record was Chuck was getting ... I don’t want to say he was unhappy with the band, but he was thinking, “I’m getting old, I should be doing something serious in my life, I should have a career,” that kind of stuff. He was more unhappy with the group, and he wanted Totally Lost to be a real step forward commercially. It was the first record we recorded at a 24-track studio. We were all up for it at the time, and then we went and toured our asses off on it and pretty much burned him out completely. He was pretty fed up by the end of it and ready to move on, which is what happened. We kind of thought we would break up because it didn’t seem like it was a band without Chuck, but (bassist) Jim (Sangster) and (drummer) Tad (Hutchison) and I realized after a month or two that we still really wanted to keep playing. We started recording stuff as a three-piece and then (guitarist) Kurt (Bloch) came along, who was a really good friend of ours and whose band, the Fastbacks, wasn’t really busy at the time. We said, “Hey, why don’t you play with us?” and we got really, really fired up again because he was so awesome.

(1989’s) This One’s For The Ladies was the first record with Kurt on it. How different was the band with him in it?
When Kurt came in, he was so fired up to be playing and touring and recording that it just made it that much more exciting. He’s a totally different kind of guitar player than Chuck. He comes from more of a punk-rock and heavy-metal kind of school, where Chuck was from a sort of Beatles, ‘60s garage, country-rock school. They’re both great guitar players, but we became sort of a louder, faster band, I suppose, with Kurt. I’d say Kurt brought in that Buzzcocks kind of thing that the rest of us all loved anyway. I think he wrote some of the best songs we ever did. “Lost Track Of Time” from This One’s For The Ladies is maybe my favorite Fellows song ever.

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