MAGNET: Let’s do it from the very start. How did you and Ray meet? What kind of musical common ground brought you together?
Mulcahy: Well, our musical common ground was that I was the drummer in a band and Ray’s father had a big truck. As soon as we saw his truck we hired him as a roadie so we could use the truck! [laughs] Until we wrecked his truck ... but by that time we’d become good friends. It’s a real Blues Brothers rock ‘n’ roll story. So we became friends and he and I were in a couple of bands together where I was the drummer and he was sort of the guitar/keyboard player.

Why a drummer? That would surprise people who don’t know the backstory and only know you from your singing. The transition to frontman: every musician has an ego somewhere that needs to be burped, so did that appeal to you more than being back behind the drum kit?
I always played drums. High school band, all the way—drumming, drumming, drumming! But I didn’t have a big desire to be a frontman—or even particularly to write songs. I was happy playing drums, and I still play them as much as I want to. I’ve played on a couple of records the last few years. So it wasn’t anything of wanting to be out front or thinking I could do better. The whole thing really happened by accident. Not to compare myself to him, but Robert Wyatt was a drummer and then he couldn’t drum anymore and started singing. Well, it’s the same theme: It’s hard to be a drummer—for anybody, if you’re not writing the songs, it’s real hard to control your own life when you want to do it as a lifetime pursuit. You’d have to be an amazing drummer—which I’m not—to get the really good jobs.

So you and Ray had decided to head off on your own and do your own songs?
Right. Ray and I were in a band together with Kirk Swan, who’d go on to do Dumptruck. He decided to disband that group, and by that time we’d been in so many groups, as the kind of two guys in the background, that’s what made us start a band. And even though didn’t really have any big desire to start a band, because every band we were in broke up, we just said that’s it, we’ll try our own band. We started as a two-piece Miracle Legion. Then Kirk and Seth [Tiven] started Dumptruck; I ended up being the drummer in that, and on the first album. I was in both groups for awhile, and I really didn’t know which one to commit myself to. They were living in Boston and I was gonna have to move to Boston, but I kind of kept hedging so finally they got a drummer.

I read that you were walking past a sign that read, “Until she talks,” and that’s what inspired you to write your first song.
It was just something somebody had scrawled on a post in New Haven, and I never found out what it meant. But that was our first song and we called it “Until She Talks.” It became a U.K. b-side. It was almost a Gun Club-like sounding song, like that first song on the first Gun Club album. For whatever reason, at that time, that was the band we were kind of imitating. We may have ended up being like R.E.M.’s little brother, but we really started out trying to be like Gun Club, more influenced by the Gun Club, Mission Of Burma, Hüsker Dü and the Clean. Ray and I were always big Clean fans, too. That was probably the biggest common denominator in our music we had. Because they were the kind of band that could play any kind of song.

What was Ray’s musical background? He’s a phenomenal guitarist, super versatile.
He really was like a guy that took some guitar lessons, and I don’t know if he played a lot, or if he was particularly playing that much when he was our roadie, but he was a big fan of music and he just got into the music scene itself. He wasn’t really thinking of doing much either! So it was just one of these things when two guys come together and made a whole. To be really dead honest ... we started out as a two-piece, maybe using a drum machine, and I certainly didn’t have any anticipation that we’d continue for very long.

Were you both promoting shows in New Haven at this point?
I suppose in the band I was the mouthpiece of it all, but we both spent an equal amount of time on booking, and we both lost the same amount of money.

Steve Wynn told me he had a theory that it’s not as special now like it was (in the ‘80s) when a band would come to town: You maybe had a record by them, and you’d go out on based on that curiosity and desire to see something you’d never seen before. Nowadays, people would just as soon stay in and watch videos.
Maybe. A few years ago I did a tour with Frank Black—of course, two of his guys were in Miracle Legion—and it was me, Frank Black and Mike Watt. I’d talk to Watt in the dressing room and he laid out the history of touring. According to him he invented it, on some level! [laughs] Not like he was bragging about it ... The Minutemen were one of the first groups to be in a van and drive all over the place. Touring was invented in the West, so by the time we were doing it, some people had gotten hip to it and had found some venues. You could even go further back and talk about bands like Blondie, who were touring as well. So yeah, by the time we got out there we had some places to play. We were also booked by Frank Riley [Venture Booking], who was kind of the main man. He had all the clubs and all the college gigs and everything—when we were touring Surprise Surprise Surprise we played almost every night on an eight-week tour. Maybe one or two days off in there. That’s amazing, to go across the country and play, like, three gigs in Alabama, three or four in Texas—places that are way out there.

Backtracking for a moment, what was the local Incas label all about? Did you just give them your demo tape and ask them to put it out as The Backyard EP?
No, it was even a lot less than that. There was a band called Lost Generation, a punk band, and they put out a single on Incas, started the label. We said, hey, rather than start our own label, too, how about we just put “Incas” on our record? They said sure. So we did, and a few other bands did, too. It was just this weird kind of Good Housekeeping, “I’m-from-Connecticut” seal of approval. Nobody really ran it. There was no office. It was all do your own, and if you look at the records, you’ll see that each Incas release has a different address on it, for each band. If you were good enough to be on Incas, well, that was basically you just call up and ask if you could be on it.
We did The Backyard, which was [funded] by a guy who ended up being our manager, Brad Morrison. He was a businessman. He found a label for us in England, Making Waves, and various other opportunities for us. The guys at Making Waves were super. They did the Georgia Satellites, too. And because of being in England, then we really looked like we had something cooking. Going over there we did some touring and it was amazing—playing to maybe two or three hundred people in Manchester or something.
Still, that whole thing was supposed to turn into a big label deal, but it didn’t. So we came back and went back to our normal things and didn’t go back to England for a while. We started making Surprise. Then we had some other label interest because we’d had a video for “The Backyard” that got on MTV. It was actually on regular MTV and not just 120 Minutes. We made it with a friend of ours, just a homespun, simple video. We brought it to MTV and asked if they wanted to play it. They said, “Well, we’ll let you know.” And then right away it was on! During the day, at night too. Not like a million times a day, but it was on. You wouldn’t be surprised to see it on at any point.
A lot of sort of organic things were happening that weren’t from anybody’s particular efforts: somebody knew somebody, and somebody liked us, that sort of thing. The problem, though, was that we didn’t know how to make the records available to anyone. We had this great thing going that everybody dug but we didn’t have that end—how to get it to people—down. When that video was on MTV, we didn’t have any records left to sell!
Anyway, we went on making Surprise, and we had some labels that were digging us, including majors, principally this guy at Elektra. We were making this record and he kept saying, “Maybe, maybe ...” And then one day we had driven back from Raleigh to New York, for a gig at CBGBs that night. We were fried from driving all night, got into town at 7 a.m. and went to this guy’s office at 10 a.m. “What, are you signing us or not?” Really pissed off! He said, “I don’t know, I just don’t know.” “Well, fuck you then!” We were pissed off, and we went to this gig, and that night we were really at the end of our rope in a way. And the guy from Rough Trade was there, Geoff Travis. He saw us and said, “I want to sign you guys.” We were like, “Yeah, fuck you too!” [laughs] And he showed up at our hotel the next day. I think he probably liked all the “fuck yous!” He hung in there and went on tour with us for a couple of days, and I think we were just treating him really badly. Maybe we didn’t even realize we were doing that. But I think he thought that was good.
So we got in with him and we did three records with [Rough Trade]. If I’d know then what I know now ... [sighs] That was just the best circumstances. Even though we had all kinds of wars with them, it was like, “You want to make a record? Here’s the money, go make a record.” We’d make it, turn it in, they’d go “Thanks a lot, we’ll put it out and do the best we can!” Just like that, and to me that is just perfect: a record-to-record contract, no having to sign a long-term deal. If you needed a drum set or an amp or something, a little bit of money to get T-shirts made up front, things like that. Not like big things. We would mount full tours with a couple of roadies, some production, a soundman and we went as far as we could go doing it.

I recall your ’87 show in Charlotte, with this elaborate lighting set up, lights strung looped over and around the stage for this very unusual look.
We were totally into doing as much as we could, as cheaply as we could figure out. But that stuff wears you down, setting all that up every night, taking it down afterwards.

You were known for mixing up your set lists every night, too. Did you feel a need to entertain yourselves as well as the crowd?
I did. Ray always hated that, though! [laughs] He wanted to get into, you know, a groove. Almost like stadium rock, where you knew what was gonna happen and you really could concentrate on what you were gonna do in the show because the music was almost rote: “OK, here comes the next song.” And there’s nothing wrong with that, although I don’t particularly like it. I remember seeing some bands and being bummed out because I saw them do the same thing twice in a row. But I always loved playing the gigs. Despite all the stuff that goes wrong. I know that Frank Black once said, “It’s a long day for one hour—so it better be a good hour.” That just about sums it up, because the rest of it, man, you’re having a hard time driving around, getting along with everybody, the van breaking down, etc.

Was that why Steve and Jeff left? [Steven West and Jeff Wiederschall, the bassist and drummer]. They quit on the eve of the Sugarcubes tour, right?
Yeah, I think it was like I was saying earlier: If you’re not writing the songs, you get a little less out of it, maybe. Steve was never really a bass player; he started out a guitar player, and I think maybe it sounded like a good idea in the beginning to him ... or maybe he just wanted to get on with his own life. Plus, the overview of it all was that we really had a lot of ebbs and flows, like everybody. We had a lot of success, but then we’d have a year and a half where nothing would happen: no record label, no record … Then it would look real great and something else would happen and it would be grim again.

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