From PackageThf@aol.com Fri Aug 8 23:25:22 1997 Date: Thu, 7 Aug 1997 03:26:50 -0400 (EDT) From: PackageThf@aol.com Subject: martinis on the roof Hello Chunk fans! We interrupt this regularly scheduled mailer to bring you a special announcement! The Superchunk eMailing List is celebrating its two year anniversary! (give or take a week) To celebrate, the List brings you a special interview or, perhaps more appropriately, special conversation with Mr. Jon Wurster of Superchunk. Actually, it's just Part I - Part II will be out next week, plus special news on shows in September and some other goodies. I just wanted to take a moment to give special thanks to Mr. Matt Ransford and Mr. Jon Wurster who have both been invaluable to me in putting the list out and helping to make it what it is. You guys are the greatest. Also thanks going out to Mac for his help; Spott, Ben, and the gang at Merge for all their help with my random questions and for just being Nice in general; Jim and Laura for just rocking out; Rocky, for shoving Superchunk down my throat all those years ago; everyone who's help to contribute to the list in one way or another; and to all the list subscribers, especially the long-time AOL die-hards from Day One - I wouldn't be here without all of you. So, without further ado... -----------> PART I DaveKrinsky: When you were recording the Laughter Guns EP, I remember you had mentioned the possibility of re-recording some of the songs for the new LP. What made you change you mind on that? JonWurster: Actually, we never discussed it beyond that first time we kicked the idea around. It was never discussed after a month or so after Laughter Guns came out. We didn't have that many new songs together at the time Laught er Guns was released and that was just an idea that we tossed around, `maybe we should record one or two of these songs over again'... because the number of copies that came out of Laughter Guns was only 5,000 or so. So not that many people would have heard those songs, but we just got on a roll and kept writing songs and so, at that point, we actually forgot about re-doing them. I think those songs that are on Laughter Guns wouldn't really fit with this album, in the context of the other songs. DK: Considering that you had just recorded the Laughter Guns, you hadn't been out of the studio for all that long. What made you decide to head back into the studio? JW: Well, we just put the Laughter Guns out mainly just to have something new in stores while we were doing a tour in October. We wanted to have something out to tour behind. We knew our next record probably wouldn't come out until the next year. We recorded Laughter Guns about a year ago- DK: Has it really been that long? JW: Yeah, it came out in, I believe, late September, but we recorded it in August of last year. DK: Then I guess it's been longer than I remember since Laughter Guns came out than I realized, but what did make you decide that the time was right to re-enter the studio? JW: We knew we needed something - and then we heard from Touch and Go [who distributes Merge] who gave us a date by which we would have to have something in order to have a September 2nd release. So it gave us a due date. DK: You worked with John Plymale on Laughter Guns, but you don't usually work with the same people for more than one recording session. What made you decide to work with him again? JW: We were pleasantly surprised - surprised is not the right word because we knew he was good - but pleasantly surprised at how well we interacted. I think him being a local guy helped and we'd known him over the years. None of us really knew him that well, but it just helped that we were on kind of the same wavelength from the get-go. We just liked what he did on Laughter Guns and the Suburbia song, so we thought we'd try it. We knew we were going to be recording in Bloomington[, Indiana] by this point. We just thought about what it would be like if we brought John out there...fortunately it came together very easily. DK: What was his experience before this? Obviously, he had to have been doing work somewhere. JW: Pretty much local stuff until recently. He's doing a lot of bigger projects now. Actually, he was the leader of a little-known ska band here from 1981 to around 1987 called the Pressure Boys. One of the great unsung ska bands that no one will ever hear of. DK: That was before ska got "hip." JW: Many, many years before! DK: What made you decide to record in Indiana? JW: Brian Paulson, who did Foolish, recommended the studio out there, which is called Echo Park. He had just done the current Son Volt record out there. DK: Did you get a chance to check the place out before you went there to record? JW: We just went out there... DK: Essentially just rolled the dice and saw what you got? JW: Basically. Brian really knows what he's doing, so we knew it was a good studio when he recommended it. DK: You had, what, 7 days to record it? JW: I think it was. That sounds right. DK: But you had 2 weeks for Strings- JW: It was actually 7 days to record, 5 days to mix. One or two more days would have been perfect, but this was fine. We had the luxury of coming back to John's studio in Durham to mix it. STRINGS was actually 10 days to record and mix. DK: John? JW: John Plymale. He works out of a studio here in Durham called Overdub Lane. DK: I didn't realize that was his. JW: Actually, he's not the owner, another guy owns it, but he does most of his work there. We even had time to go out and shoot some baskets in between mixes, which we never would have had the time for on previous records. It's the little things, I know... DK: That's still not a lot of time to record. Do you have to lock yourself in the studio and work on a timeline or do you just try and get done as much as you can? JW: We are always aware of the clock and how much time we've got. It helped a lot that I had 4-tracked a lot of the rehearsals - we rehearse in my basement. That way we could figure out what worked. I'd give a tape to Mac every couple of days - he was still trying to write the words and all that stuff and come up with leads. He's work with that and I'd also make a tape for Laura and Jim so they could fine-tune their stuff. By the time we actually recorded, we knew what worked and what didn't work. I don't think we ever did more than three takes of anything. We had our act together going in. DK: The music is written before the lyrics, traditionally? JW: Yeah. Usually, we don't even hear the vocals until he's recording them, which is kind of a weird way to work. DK: I would think so. The songs work well as instrumentals, but obviously there's a real vocal foundation. So I would think doing the songs vocal-less would be really strange. JW: He seems to usually complete lyrics for a few songs just before he records his vocals. For instance, there was one song I was just certain was going to be a b-side. He actually didn't record the vocals for it until we were in the mixing process. It was the last song mixed and the last song he put vocals on - "European Medicine." When I heard the melody and the vocals, we thought 'This has to be on the record!' So that edged out "With Bells On." DK: Speaking of "European Medicine," is the one lyric about the drummer ["one drummer turning blue"] about you? JW: I've wondered.... I've never turned blue - as far as I know! DK: I've always wondered when bands, in songs, mention a certain musician, like a drummer, if they're talking about their own drummer. Like in "If You Can't Rock Me," by the Rolling Stones, there's the one line about "the drummer thinks that he is dynamite" and I've always wondered if that was about Charlie Watts. JW: Or the line from Pavement, "have you seen the drummer's hair?" DK: Actually a lot of lyrics about drummers! So it may be about you, but maybe not. JW: You know, this just struck me - Since it's called, "European Medicine," I wonder if it's about the drummer for Seam, who we were touring with in Europe, because he had an accident during the trip and had to go to the hospital. But it wasn't anything where he was turning blue - he broke his hand. I don't want to start any false rumors here.... DK: Some of the songs have a different vibe from past Chunk albums, particularly "Martinis On The Roof." Actually, that song hearkens to me of Blondie - I don't know why. And it's not even one particular Blondie song, just parts from different ones. JW: Wow, Blondie never came to mind for me on that one. Actually, Laura came up with that riff, the chord structure. When she was playing it the first time, it totally reminded me of that song that "Tainted Love" segued into, "Where Did Our Love Go?" It totally reminded me of that. But when I finally heard the Soft Cell tune on the radio, it didn't remind me of that at all. It's funny how your memory gets screwy over the years. DK: That's probably true. The Blondie songs it reminds me of are all on "Autoamerican," but I'm sure that if I played it, it wouldn't sound it all like I thought it did. But in any case, the vibe is still different. Did you have something influencing you or was it just a shift in songwriting? JW: This album, more so than any other, was really a group effort in terms of the songwriting process. We've always come up with our own parts for songs, but this was really the first time where just about every song was constructed from the ground up by the four of us from a "kernel" of an idea. For example, Laura came in with that main part, Jim came in with the main part for "Unbelievable Things," and I came in with main part for "With Bells On." And, of course, Mac came in with the main part for several of them. This was the most democratic by far. It wasn't an example of "too many cooks," as that is always something that can spell disaster - "my part's better than yours." That has never happened with us, thankfully. DK: So you think that's what accounts for the new vibe? JW: It was also that we had enough time in the studio to experiment with stuff. We were able to track down a vibraphone and use that. Plus, the studio had some cool old keyboards that we took advantage of. So we had time to experiment and if it didn't work, it was okay, we would just let it go. It really helped that each person was coming in with ideas. DK: On the album, there's a song called "Song For Marion Brown." So who is Marion Brown? JW: Marion Brown was - or is - we're not sure, there's a rumor that he died recently - but he was a jazz saxophonist in the free jazz medium. He made a lot of his own records and, like most of his contemporaries, was bigger in Europe. Pretty obscure here. He played on Artie Shep's FIRE MUSIC album, which way maybe his best-known performance. That's really about all I know about him. DK: So he's the inspiration for that one? JW: I think Mac - well, Mac is very much into jazz. DK: Well, that's pretty obvious from the last Portastatic album. That kind of came from out the blue, that album. JW: Mac's into a lot of that stuff - free jazz and the more above ground stuff like Coltrane and Miles Davis and that sort of thing. So I think he liked what he'd heard of Marion Brown and became a fan. I'd be interested in knowing the more personal stuff about him. DK: Obviously there are songs that didn't make it to the album, but are there songs that never make it out of the rehearsal space? Or do they never even make it to full songs? JW: This was the first time that we ever had a tape of just bits that we were working on. They could be from 10 seconds long to a couple minutes. That's how a lot of these songs came about, but there are probably about ten little bits that didn't get used. For instance, we'd be working and we'd say, "Oh, that sounds too much like a Stiff Little Fingers song." DK: It never makes it into a full song. JW: I don't think there was anything that we abandoned a week or two before we went to record. I think we knew what we wanted to do at that point. DK: How many tracks did you record on? JW: We used probably, on average, 20-21 of the 24 tracks. We use a lot of them. DK: How do you divide up what goes up on each track? JW: Drums usually take up 8 tracks or so - bass drum would be on the first track, snare on the second, rack tom on the third, floor tom on the fourth, the high hat - everything has its own track. DK: I know you played some of these songs live before you went into the studio. Do you do that to fine-tune the performance of the song or to test audience reaction? JW: It's usually just to see if we can play them! It's rarely for reaction. Usually... - I was going to say that we almost never play live before we record, but that's not the case. We toured our way out to make ON THE MOUTH, we toured our way out to make FOOLISH, but for these last two records, we didn't play live much before we recorded them. It's usually just to see how the song goes and to see if it needs to have something cut out or something changed. We'd only played maybe five of these songs live - there's one song that didn't make it on the record that was the first song that we even wrote for it. We were playing it as early as last November in Australia... called "The Majestic." It's all mixed, along with another song - I'm not sure what the name of this one is, but the working title was "The Thunder Skunk." DK: Sounds like something from the Road Kill Cafe. How do you decide what becomes a b-side and what goes on the album? JW: It's how it all fits together. There are those two songs, plus one other, that we recorded that weren't included. We'll still put them out, but I'm not sure when. Probably as b-sides or soundtrack stuff. It's hard to remember the names of all of them, as each song has a working title and a final title. So it's even weird for me to refer to "Under Our Feet" as that, when it was always called "Laura's Least Favorite." DK: Why is that? JW: She just hated it the first time we played it and then she liked it, but it's still known as that. "With Bells On" was known as "The Luminator," for reasons I'm still not sure of. DK: When you're going through the songs, how do you decide what the single's going to be? JW: We played a couple of shows the week before we recorded the album, just local shows. People seemed into "Burn Last Sunday" and, by that point, we were really into it, too, so we thought that was going to be the single. Going in to record it, we still thought it was going to be the single. But when everything was done and we were mixing, we just all started thinking that "Watery Hands" was the most obvious single here, which was a total surprise. When we were writing it, it didn't seem like a single to us. DK: The first time I heard "Watery Hands," when I heard the acoustic guitar, I thought 'what is that?' It didn't sound wrong, but it did sound strange. So, on first listen, I thought it was a strange choice for the single, but on second time through, the chorus just grabbed me. Then it seemed real obvious. And even though I already knew what the single was, if I had to pick, I would have picked "Unbelievable Things" as the single. JW: Those were the two that have gotten the strongest responses, but I think that "Watery Hands" is just immediately catchier. We also had to think in terms of getting radio play. DK: What do you mean by immediately catchier? JW: I think that the chorus to "Watery Hands" is really memorable, maybe a little more so than "Unbelievable Things." I think "Unbelievable Things" is darker, in some ways. The chorus to "Watery Hands" might be the catchiest thing Mac's ever come up with. DK: Obviously, when in you're in the studio, you record music that you think is worthwhile and not necessarily commercial. Yet, when you're done recording, you do have to be concerned with selling records. What's your approach to that? JW: All we do on that end is just to try and get the music out there. There's a joke from when we were writing - we'd do one riff or something and one of us would say "Oh, that sounds like Weezer or Smashing Pumpkins, forget it!" and the counter to that would always be "Well, they are popular" So that's how "The Popular Music" got it's name. Although I can't say that that tune brings to mind anyone in particular. DK: Where the hell did the Wet Wurlitzer Mix come from? [A remix of "Watery Hands" that appears on the CD single] JW: The original plan for that was to record it where I would play along with a drum machine that I had programmed. Then we were going to sync that up with a sequencer and add samples to it, just little samples of things. In the end, we didn't have time to do that. By the time we already finished mixing it, we decided there was enough on it already and it was fine. We deconstructed it and rendered it almost unrecognizable from the original. Actually, Mac did most of that himself, the mixing of that one. Kind of a crazy experiment. I think it's really funny. --------------------------------------- Whoah, Nelly! That's a lot of info, so I'll let you cool your brain cells before you read Part Two, out next week! In the next part: the "Watery Hands" video and its special guest stars, touring in and out of the US, media exposure, and, of course, Superstars In Your Pants. Special bonus: Why MTV refused to air the "Untied" video! All next week! In the meantime, check out the recently updated HERE WITH SUPERCHUNK at http://www.monkey.org/~chunk/superchunk to see exclusive pictures of Superchunk in the studio, plus some cool new graphics for the site. So, until then...