Since Morgan Creek doesn’t exist as a label now, does that means the earlier records will never see the light of day?
I have no idea. The Backyard, they don’t own that. We could do that. But as much as you dig it and other people dig it, I just don’t know. I was gonna try to do all that stuff when I started this label. If I could put out those Drenched demos, I would, because nobody’s ever heard ‘em. And there’s a whole bunch of plans to put out a video compilation, the videos we made and this documentary a guy made—it’s kind of a grim thing, about when we were not getting off Morgan Creek and when we were making the Portrait Of A Damaged Family record. There’s a lot of stuff people have never seen or heard, but I don’t know how many people would actually buy a Miracle Legion CD.

Portrait: Was that done while were still on Morgan Creek but kind of in limbo? You’d asked to get released from your deal. You’ve got a pretty funny/tragic account of that period up on the Mezzotint site.
It was done during some of the legal limbo time. We decided just to get on with things, and that way if we ever got out of limbo we’d have a record ready to put out. The “musician never learns” part of this thing is, even after Portrait, we still were sending that around, trying to get on another label. Starting a record label is something I just wish I’d done a long time ago. People always say, “Well, you don’t sell as many records.” But it’s more like you don’t have an opportunity to sell as many records. Just because you’re on a major label and in stores doesn’t mean you’re gonna sell it. So anyway, we finished Portrait but couldn’t get a deal for it, so I just said I’d try putting out the record myself. That’s why I started Mezzotint.

Do you think at that point the band had about run its course anyway? The protracted legal thing taking its toll and all that. If you’d gotten Portrait onto another label, would the band have continued?
Well, Dave and Scott were already in Frank Black by that time, and that’s been really great for them. He’s a good fellow. Not some crazy rock star. Ray started a family, and I think he’s happy doing that. To be dead honest, when we were touring Drenched, it wasn’t super well-attended. The second tour we did, which we did more on our own, the way we normally did things, that was much better. But even still, as much as people may go, “Oh, where is Miracle Legion now? What happened to them?” it seemed like there were less people coming to shows by some point in time.

There was a musical climate change, too. Mitch Easter indicated that by the early ‘90s anyone coming out carrying a Rickenbacker was looking to get his ass kicked. By the time of Drenched, had the audience for well-crafted pop-rock with lyrics and hooks and choruses simply dried up?
Eventually, but not when we were still playing. That happened when Korn and that kind of crap on MTV was constant. Like turning a microphone on in a metal factory. I mean, I remember when we played a gig with Soundgarden, around their first or second record, and I thought they were horrible at the time—I later liked them—because just seeing them live, the guy screaming his head off, and that heavy-metal lead guitarist, and everybody just pounding their heads. And that was “alternative.”

And “alternative” had become meaningless as a distinguishing point. It was now a mainstream marketing label.
There’s something to be said for, as David Thomas once put it, “Man, there’s too many records. Too many bands. Too much to keep up with.” Pretty soon, people who were trying to keep up with music just go, “I can’t keep up, I’m out of touch, I don’t know what’s what.” Ray said a great thing in that documentary. Something like, “You used to know each band. A band would put a record out and you knew it.” You’d know that the dB’s put a record out, or you knew that Glass Eye put a record out—or probably half the bands in this MAGNET article. Now, it’s just like a wildfire, the number of people who think they should be in a band. David Thomas called for a moratorium: no new bands, no new records, and it would give you time to catch up. But I guess that way you’d miss some good new bands, like the Music Tapes and bands on Elephant 6, for example. Good music happens, and people do figure it out. They found Elliott Smith and Vic Chesnutt.

Yet it does seem that the music industry succeeded in turning music from being the soundtrack of your life to just another lifestyle choice. Might as well be a video game.
Meaning it’s not as important as it maybe was to you or me. And maybe it doesn’t even matter anymore. There’s plenty of ways to look around for bands. I do think that MTV has been the death—the irony of them being called Music TV is not lost on people. It killed people going to check out music since they could turn the TV on and see music all the time. I just don’t think that’s been very good. By the way, I just don’t want this to be like some interviews I’ve done where it ends up sounding like, “This guy slugged his way out of some fucking horror story, and even though the music business was out to squelch everybody’s world ... he made it even though he’s been fucked left and right!” Well, I haven’t been. With everything that went wrong, many things went right, and I’m happy because I got into it to make music, and I’m still making music. So at the end of the day, I win. I’m real lucky, and I’ve done other things too. I did the TV show for a while, for example.

Tell me a bit about that, how you got involved with The Adventures Of Pete And Pete. It’s currently being rerun on Nickelodeon’s offshoot channel, Noggin. I get to see you, Dave and Scott every night on TV, as the band Polaris, during the opening credits.
The people behind that show said they wanted Miracle Legion to do the music for it. But at the time, things were pretty fuzzy about Morgan Creek, and everything was kinda grim. I said to Ray, “Hey man, we got offered this thing, do you want to do it?” And he said, “You know, I really don’t want to do it.” So I said, “Well, I’m going to try doing it myself.” He said, “Go ahead.” I recorded the first season just me and the drummer, Scott. Then the next year and the final year was Dave too. It was writing songs to order: “Can you write a song about a crush? One that’s upbeat and about good times at the beach?” That kind of thing. But it was coming from a guy who was a huge fan of music, and I guess Miracle Legion as well, not some Hollywood type person who goes [in fey voice], “No, no, it needs to be more ‘bouncy,’ you know?” I felt like I was writing music that I liked, and most of them would have been songs I would have written anyway.

There was one episode on the TV show, however, where Ray does show up in the garage with you guys. I noticed you have that clip up on the Mezzotint Web site.
Yeah. [laughs] Even though Polaris was this three-piece TV band, when we did that I just thought, “Let’s all get out there with our mystery guest.” You know, I consider the three things to each be their own distinct thing. Miracle Legion is its own thing; Polaris is its own thing; me, my own thing. It’s interesting to see how some people who are into Polaris come to it all. Because that’s a completely different music fan, they came to the music through this TV show so they have a certain idea of what it is and how the music relates to their childhood and all these different things. So they find either me or Miracle Legion and become big Miracle Legion fans through Polaris. Just a strange route to take, I think.

So you did Pete And Pete. [Note: In 1999 Mezzotint released a CD by Polaris titled Music From The Adventures Of Pete And Pete, featuring re-recordings of the music that Mulcahy composed for the TV show.] Miracle Legion comes back together to record Portrait Of A Damaged Family while waiting around on the Morgan Creek thing, then breaks up after it comes out. You record your first solo album, Fathering, and a year or so later after it’s out, in 1998 it becomes an unexpected hit in England.
Yeah, and I hadn’t gone to England in five years, since Miracle Legion had done Drenched. So I went over there because of the band Unbelievable Truth, and those guys sort of hunted me down—Andy Yorke was a big fan, and Thom [Yorke] had been a fan of Surprise so as an older brother he’d probably turned Andy on to it—and asked me if I wanted to go on tour with them. “Yeah! Sure!” They were doing pretty well then, and all of a sudden I was doing solo gigs in front of 300-400 people, which was amazing because I didn’t have anything like that going for myself on my own. I was just making it as best as I could. The last gig I played was at this club in London, and it was like history repeats itself: This guy from the label Loose came up and said, “I’ll put your record out.”
The next record, Smilesunset [on Mezzotint in the U.S., Loose in the U.K.] did fine, too. I did my own tour on that record and it was a pretty well-attended tour. So the next record is moving ahead slowly. I’ve been working on this opera, too, with Ben Katchor, The Slugbearers Of Kayrol Island. It’s really more like a musical. I did the music and it has projections of his drawings as the setting. Ben Katchor did that comic strip “Julius Knippel, Real Estate Photographer” in the Village Voice.

Do you ever feel like you’re in competition with your old band?
When I was first doing my solo stuff, yeah. And I would really ignore Miracle Legion. I refused to play any Miracle Legion songs. I think that’s what people do sometimes. That might have turned some people off from coming (to shows), thinking it’s not going to be the good old days. That’s too bad, I think. And I don’t feel like that anymore. I’ve done these things since then. I feel like it’s this way: I did this Miracle Legion thing for such a long time, and it was the only thing that I really knew. And then that just fell apart on its own organic—or non-organic—way. And I got a sort of second chance to start the whole thing again.

You hooked up with him last year when you were on tour in the U.K. How was that?
It was early last year in Edinburgh—Ray lives there now. We sorta practiced a little bit in the dressing room. I did my set first, then I said, “OK, I’m gonna do some songs with my old buddy.” Maybe a few people there knew what was going on. I was actually gonna play guitar, too, but then I said to myself, “Man, I’m just gonna soak this dude up for these five or six songs!” Because I’d watched him on some level [in the past] but had never really watched him, you know? And it was just so entertaining to watch Ray fall right back into it after all this time.