The downtime has killed many a band over the years. I wonder if that’s key to understanding why Miracle Legion ran its course.
You can spend a whole lot of time getting a deal. Then if you get a deal, you’re back to zero again. So next you spend all this time making a record. Then you make a record and you’re back to zero. So you spend all this time trying to get the record out. Then you get it out and you’re back again ... you see? It’s like this continual up-the-ladder, down-the-ladder thing.

The Sugarcubes tour and the You’re The One Lee EP you recorded with them—that all must have been a big deal.
Yeah, and it’s funny how that propelled us into being a two-piece again. We started out as a two-piece, of course. The Sugarcubes liked us doing it that way because they wouldn’t have to deal with any stage setups and stuff. And it was really one of the greatest tours I’ve ever been on. We were just kinda drunk all the time. And they really drank, too. I don’t know that Björk was like that; she was kind of “a step above” the whole thing. But the rest of ‘em, man, well, saying they’re a big drinking band doesn’t mean they can hold their liquor! No Johnny Cashes in that band.

So now I picture you and Ray after the tour, looking at each other and saying, “Well, what next?” “Let’s do a record.” How did you wind up recording at Paisley Park?
Because we had that tricky manager. He had good ideas and was very focused on getting things done. Me & Mr. Ray was a really good record because we had a plan. We approached that record as a two-piece and insisted that no one else play on it. We played everything except for this one guy who played a little slide-guitar part. We knew the songs we were gonna do. We always had a box full of songs, and it was almost like we didn’t use our best ones!

The contrast between that album and your earlier ones was quite striking. A lot more acoustic stuff, for example, compared to Surprise, which had a lot of unusual sonic textures, even venturing into dub territory.
Surprise, well, I know people love it and I’m not going to say anything bad about it. But it just has a funny feel to it, maybe the production, a purely technical thing. With Mr. Ray, we didn’t know when we were doing something different. But we knew exactly what we were doing. I don’t know if we actually pulled off what we said we were gonna do. But Paisley Park was pretty interesting, and we ended up finishing it with Paul Kolderie at Fort Apache, and he was great too, a real pro.

You didn’t see Prince himself darting down the corridors at Paisley Park, did you?
Actually, we did! I said hello to him once. He looked at me, we were walking next to each other, so I said, “Hey!” One night he came downstairs dressed up fully Princed-out and he hopped in this T-bird, the one that was in the “Alphabet City” video, and just took off. He came back in 10 minutes—the studio is not in Minneapolis, but more like 25 minutes outside of it—and I’m saying to myself, “Where did he go?!?” Also, I was talking one night to my friend in Connecticut, and he told me he was going to see Prince that night in Hartford. I said, “He’s right here, man!” He was still there, and it was kinda late in the day. He’s a mystery, even if you’re looking at him.

He probably would just shoot off to the 7-11 and get a Slurpee like the rest of us. Every afternoon, all dressed up, down to get his drink: “Here he comes again, for his daily Slurpee.” OK, so you do this record for Rough Trade. At what point did Dave McCaffrey and Scott “Spot” Boutier come into the picture?
We did Mr. Ray and we’d kind of had our fill of being a two-piece. Ray never liked doing it because he didn’t want to handle all the musical chores, and I wasn’t sure if we were making a real impact on people as a two-piece. So we finished the record and wanted to get a group together. We got them with the line that we were going to do a tour with Pere Ubu in Europe. [Ray and I] actually did Europe, but then they did England with us, then it was back to America and we toured all over.

And I saw you in Charlotte in December of 1990. That was a really powerful lineup.
It was great. It was a different kind of band. Those guys came from a kind of Hüsker Dü background. From Providence, Rhode Island, a band called What Now, also an Incas band. We did a lot of touring with them. Of course, that’s when Rough Trade went bankrupt and we weren’t too clear of what to do.

What are the conversations you have when you first get the word that you might not have a record label any longer?
The crew in England for Rough Trade was amazing, just real hard workers over there. But they got a whole bunch of people at the American office who didn’t have the same kind of work ethic. Plus, being an indie record label was like a suicide mission anyway: If you didn’t work to death, if you weren’t working really hard, it could be tough, you know? So the first thing that happened was we tried to get our records back. The guy told us, “Oh, those are all rumors.” Then they went out of business a couple of days later. And that was the first painful reality, that our records weren’t going to be in print and (would be) tied up in bankruptcy court as assets.

Was it demoralizing, not having any kind of immediate future you could see? This kind of thing has happened from time to time to other bands, of course.
Well, Miracle Legion is a real survival story. There were a million gigs where I said to myself, “This is it. It’s gotta be our last gig. It can’t go on like this. It’s so shitty.” You know? Then something good would happen and, boom, you’d be back on the horse again. So yeah, that was one of the times when ... we were sending out little packages of demos to anybody and everybody. Just through luck, we’d sent a tape out to some label, and the guy who was the designated “tape goalie” [laughs] ended up becoming the A&R guy for Morgan Creek. We were the first band he signed.

I understand that after you’d signed with Morgan Creek, you showed up at the Rough Trade auction to try and buy your master tapes back ...
And they became an asset that Morgan Creek ended up buying. Morgan Creek bid against us! We were trying to buy back the rights to our records. Those records they bought at the auction—just like you’re auctioning off a chair! We did buy the actual vinyl and cassettes, however. But now [the master tapes] are who knows where. Just lost in a room somewhere, waiting for someone to put ‘em out.

And Morgan Creek was a kind of vanity thing for the Morgan Creek film company, too, at least that’s always been the common wisdom. You know, “Let’s have our own little major label thing here.”
Beyond vanity! They had first put out that Robin Hood soundtrack record—the Bryan Adams song that became the biggest-selling record of all that year. So that was a pretty good start for the label! They had a bunch of people they’d hired from the old music game, from this label, that label, the guy who broke Bob Seger, the guy who’d worked on this and that. I mean, when they opened the doors they had about a hundred gold records on their walls! From all these guys that had been in the music biz so long.

Yet they didn’t understand some of the indie bands they were signing, perhaps?
They probably had some kind of take on what was happening in music at that time. “We gotta have this kind of band, that kind of band ...” To fill in different slots. When they put our record Drenched out they took out a big ad in Billboard and said they weren’t going to bother doing anything at college radio, and they just had this weird, wrong attitude. They thought we were just going to break right onto commercial radio. We did the Letterman show. But I don’t know what happened. The whole thing didn’t pan out the way they wanted it to.

However, by 1991-92, there was a very real feeling in the air that this so-called college rock, this alternative rock, was suddenly commercially viable. After Nirvana, that became reality. Steve Wynn said that it seemed like all of a sudden there was light at the end of the tunnel for bands.
I don’t know if I saw it that way. Because when our record was coming out, U2 was the alternative band. U2, the Cure and R.E.M. was the alternative scene. There was 120 Minutes, for example, and so we made a video at that time for our record—and it got played one time! Once, on 120 Minutes. It wasn’t like, “OK, we’re looking for things to fill up the alternative spot.” Because by then MTV had plenty of the super-duper groups. The next kind of round was when U2 became a Rolling Stones-level band. Nirvana, I suppose, was the next thing after that.

Wynn pointed that out too, about how very slowly reality hit: most of the smaller bands were not going to get their shots after all.
It could make a funny kind of sitcom: Old-time music guys get together with a millionaire movie producer: Who Gets Screwed? But I hate doing an interview when I sound like—I mean, I don’t have any sour grapes or anything. Living in it, man, it was suicidal. But you know, there’s a lot worse things than wishing you could make another record. And how it all ended up, which is where I am now and everybody else is now, I think everybody is perfectly fine. I don’t want to think that my whole life revolved around some place in Beverly Hills. And also, Morgan Creek did a lot for us. They spent a ton of money and really elevated our whole profile.
The biggest regret I have: I didn’t know Hollywood, free dinners and staying at fancy hotels, but the one thing I should have known was how to make a good record. And I wish that Drenched had been better. I tried to stick up for it a few times but I didn’t even know how to stick up for it. John Porter, when we got him, he was “the guy who’d done the first Smiths record.” I mean, if somebody offered that to me today, I’d say yes. I love that record. But he’s into the blues, and into the guitar, and he’s not into the vocals. Also, there’s a certain kind of producer out there who’s a company man, and they’re really working more for the record label than for you. That’s somebody really to watch out for. You’re making art with a guy that’s kind of keeping track on things to make sure the record label is happy.

Years later, a band says to itself, “What were we thinking?”
Yeah. The only thing that makes that thing real tangible is that we made the record with Paul Kolderie. He was really great and doesn’t give a shit about what the record label wants; that’s what you have to make sure of when you get a producer, that it’s you and him, and not you and the guy who’s reporting to the label. The demos for Drenched we did with him, I’m hoping to some day put out to prove that could have been a good record. And knowing what I know now, I’d just put those out as the record; there’s a lot of great feel to it, just perfect. But the label was, “No, no—we have to redo it, we have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars because that’s the only way to make a record. We have to go to a big studio and use that and make sure they gets whatever they get.”

Nowadays the White Stripes have proven you can do a record for $5,000 and labels will listen to you.
At the time, I don’t think anybody had made a record that had actually succeeded that wasn’t very expensive. If you didn’t spend a lot, they didn’t seem to know what they were doing.