Capsule review: Evil superstars - Hairfacts EP (1994)

Has, in 25 years since its release, lost not a speck of its violent joie-de-vivre. 'I'll suck your nose clean from snot' as humanist crede. We're in this together. Nice feelings now.

Capsule review: Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Orange (1994)

Maximum impact gurnin'. 'I wanna dance'. 'Bellbottoms' is the one for the ages. No lyrics, just slogans. Good riffs.

A brief history of lo-fi... part 5

The anti-Daniel Johnston, Bill Callahan’s earliest, late ‘80s efforts (‘A table setting’, ‘Cow’, ‘Sewn to the sky’) were self-released cassette albums. Unlike Johnston, Callahan refused his tapes to those that wanted them and chucked them at passersby avoiding eye contact. Just the kind of visionary Dan Koretzky was on the lookout for to complete the Drag City roster.

It took much haggling. Callahan wanted the Smog records to be released in sandpaper sleeves. Koretzky: ‘They’ll be ruined before anyone can hear ‘em.’ Callahan: ‘The records suck and it serves them right for being Smog fans.’ Finally a deal was agreed upon. In the meantime Callahan recorded a heartfelt goodbye to his tape machine (‘Tired tape machine’) which he immediately disowned as sentimental mush. ‘Sentiment has no place in music.’

Drag City debut ‘Forgotten foundation’ was recorded with Kenny Buttrey on drums and cuddly-misanthrope-for-hire Jim O’Rourke. Buttrey: ‘After working with Dylan and Jimmy Buffet this felt like a vacation with the happiest campers I ever met.’

Then came the incidents. Backstage at Monsters of Rock, Callahan pulled a gun on a cop who asked him if he was having fun. His defense ‘What did he expect? It was a total set-up’ only made sense to lo-fi aficionados. The judge was not one. Callahan used his prison experience as inspiration for lackluster comeback ‘Macrame gunplay’ and – after a falling out with Koretzky - ‘Julius Caesar’.
Callahan pulled it all together for triumph ‘Wild love’, containing amongst others the definitive Prince/self-portrait ‘Prince alone in the studio’ which analyses an artist lost in creation as clinically as anyone ever managed.

Callahan is still on the road, but after Smog reunited without him, he’s out under his own name, still chilling the heart of true believers.

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Birth place of the saxophone, US president Clinton had always had a soft spot for the kingdom of Belgium. With concern he noted the mid-90s evolution in the local music scene, which reflected the lo-fi underground in the States.

Antwerp band dEUS were at the center of a new vibrancy in continental Europe’s alternative rock scene. Their 1994 debut album ‘Worst case scenario’ and attendant underground hit single ‘Suds & soda’ had catapulted them into the role of press darlings, proud ambassadors of a new surrealist movement. Great things were expected. Then they went a little weird, announcing their next project would be an improvised soundtrack to a porn movie.

Except the porn movie didn’t exist, there was no soundtrack, the band was really working on a disjointed lo-fi mail-order mini album called ‘My sister = my clock’, the product of five days of unprepared mayhem in a local studio, all band members contributing compositions and ideas.

Beck passed by and heard an advance tape. Two days later Clinton was informed. He took a firm stand: ‘This is not the way forward for our befriended state. Lo-fi ends here. Not one domino shall fall. Except for the label Domino which I will topple personally.’

The movement was outlawed immediately by the Belgian military dictatorship. Artists were forced to ‘clean up or clear out’. Two of the scene’s figureheads – dEUS singer Tom Barman and guitarist Rudy Trouvé – were effectively banned and exiled to the UK. They eventually returned and dEUS continued on a slightly less weird path. Times change – Tom Barman is now the country’s minister of culture.

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‘Awful things were about to happen,’ remembers Robert Pollard, ‘I had to get it all out on tape before it would be too late.’

Hence 28-song Guided By Voices magnum opus ‘Alien lanes’ (1995). ‘I was reading about what was happening over on the continent, in Belgium. I thought, they’re never going to get away with that over here. But I was wrong. I didn’t realize how hostile the general population had become to the lo-fi scene. They wanted us gone.’ In winter 1995 Clinton announced a recording tape moratorium. Henceforth tape would only be made available to selected studios of impeccable standing. ‘It was Prohibition all over again. Like they took away our beer,’ recalls Pollard.

Normally not one for political commentary, ‘Alien lanes’ is filled with protest songs like ‘They’re not witches’, ‘Evil speakers’ and ‘Big chief Chinese restaurant’ (with its incisive chorus ‘Excuse me Napoleon / But I gotta know / Where I gotta stand’). The album was sold under the counter, so no official statistics are available, but sources speak of sales in the hundreds.

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It had been a rocky trail for Pavement after the initial lo-fi success. Spiral’s blues purism drove a wedge between him and the more ‘rockist’ side of the band. ‘They said I was like a museum guard,’ says Kannberg. When Spiral got arrested during the initial lo-fi crackdown the band used his absence to record a radio-friendly country rocking second album ‘Sweet California rain’. Then they accepted a lucrative offer to support the Eagle on their ‘Hell freezes over’ tour. Spiral, just released, joined them but upset the sponsors. When he mooned Glenn Frey, Pavement was thrown off the tour. That same night, in a Scandinavian hotel room, he gave the band his ultimatum. They refused and he left the band. ‘Oh well, it all turned out for the best,’ says Kannberg, who switched to bass and together with saxophonist James Chance, formed narcoleptic groovers Morphine, a favorite of president Clinton.

Pavement scraped together whatever recordings they had for third album ‘Wowee zowee’. ‘With our connection to the Eagles, we managed to get at least some recording tape, but it was tough. We had to compromise and record in a studio, and we included a lot of older recordings, just making up the difference.’

‘It wasn’t comfortable. Now that Spiral was gone, no one felt up to filling that hole. You know, who’s going to do quality control, who’s going to write the lyrics? A lot of the songs have almost no words, just screaming and moaning,’ says Stephen Malkmus, now de facto head of the band. ‘Also, I was smoking a lot of grass at the time. Thank God that wasn’t illegal yet.’

Nevertheless, ‘Wowee zowee’ is a truly majestic album. ‘Everything said and done, it might even be my favourite,’ admits Kannberg, 'I taught them well.'

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With the spectacular success of the ‘Kids’ soundtrack the final rot set in. Under attack from the political establishment, re-appropriated by older musicians, without access to recording tape, and now, as some would allege, betrayed by one of their own, the lo-fi scene suffered an internal feud that would lead to the genre’s demise.

The choice of Lou Barlow as musical director for such decidedly mainstream entertainment as Larry Clark’s ‘Kids’ may seem counter-intuitive but Lou was riding high as a reality show host and anyway, he could always charm the pants off any industry big-wig. The movie chronicles Michelle Pfeiffer’s efforts as an inner-city school teacher and follows four focused and motivated students who have sex and volunteer in local animal shelters. Results don’t lie, Barlow’s groove experiments and selected tracks from the lo-fi canon (Daniel Johnston, Slint) complemented the movie beautifully. The public agreed and sent the soundtrack and theme song ‘Natural one’ (a Stevie Wonder sample) up the charts. Even the president had nice things to say about its ‘Oval Office groove’.

In the lo-fi scene reactions were mixed, often hostile. Daniel Johnston felt typecast: ‘People may think Casper the friendly ghost is all I write about. I’ve got many strings on my bow. I also write about King Kong, Captain America and Bambi.’ Bill Callahan rejected the movie’s ‘lewd and lascivious’ portrayal of young people motivated to build a better society. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he added, threatening to picket the movie. Palace’s Will Oldham: ‘I protest strongly to that song [‘Natural one’] which has the singer stating repeatedly ‘I am the one’. There is no room for two lo-fi artists with messianic pretenses. That’s my schtick, so back off, Lou!’ Scott Kannberg: ‘Lou should use his money and influence to improve the situation for all of us lo-fi artists, not make multi-platinum selling hit songs that mock the principles of the blues.’

At the heart of the dispute was the fact that fame and fortune gave Lou access to all the recording tape he craved. Instead of sharing the wealth he was stockpiling the scarce commodity up in his turkey farm, indicating he planned to control the world’s supply of recording tape. All lo-fi recordings would henceforth be at his mercy. Rumours circulated Lou was in cahoots with the president to control lo-fi and snuff out all radical recording.

A brief history of lo-fi... part 4

Ask Motorpsycho’s Bent Saether – author of such early works as ‘Lobotomizer’ and ‘Fleshharrower’ – and he’ll tell you there always was a sweet side to the band. ‘That’s why we covered that Mamas & Papas song ‘California dreaming’ early on.’ But what about the distinctly heavy metal vocals on that cover, Bent? ‘Yes, not sickly sweet like you lovey-dovey temperate climate people. Sweet like the eternal snow of the arctic tundra, like bathing in a boiling geiser and rolling amid the frozen pine twigs.’

‘Demon Box’ is Motorpsycho’s valentine album – a love letter to the ancient demons haunting the deserted halls of the WWII submarine base they use as a rehearsal space. It starts off deceptively innocent with fiddle-and-flute enhanced folk singalong ‘Waiting for the one’ (reprised later on the record as a screaming punk track). But further songs like ‘Feedtime’, ‘Come on in’, ‘Step inside again’, the Moondog-via-Janis Joplin pagan ritual ‘All is loneliness’ and the record’s two epics ‘Demon box’ and ‘Mountain’, make clear exactly what disembodied presence they’re waiting for.

All recorded with the best production Norway could offer in 1992 (at least at this volume), which qualifies for lo-fi anywhere else. Bent has grown increasingly in touch with his feelings since then. Recent albums like ‘Little fluffy death unicorn’ and ‘Heavy metal fruit’ with the cover showing him biting the head of a teddy bear, are proof of that.

Proof there really is something special about Scandinavia, ‘Demon box’ was reissued as a 4CD+DVD box set on Rune Grammofon. Now that’s sweet.

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No one knows Beck Hansen. Not really. Even after all these years, it’s still unclear whether he was really a government mole in the lo-fi scene. What is clear, is that sax loving president Bill Clinton just couldn’t get along with lo-fi. ‘They never even heard of Teddy Wilson, I bet’ is just one of his disparaging remarks. On another occasion: ‘No one’s going to have sex to static.’ (Strangely, this did not lead to rapprochement between lo-fi and the republicans.) But did he really order a covert FBI operation to smoke out sex-hating lo-fi radicals?

‘Maybe there’s nothing to it,’ says author Nick Broomfield, ‘maybe Beck was just the John Fred and his Playboy Band of the early ‘90s. But there’s something just a little too pat about his story. Like he was grown in some sick lo-fi plantation or something. What’s clear is Beck suddenly sprang up seemingly out of nowhere and became the crown prince of lo-fi, releasing a raft of albums ‘Mellow gold’, ‘One foot in the grave’ and the truly incomprehensible ‘Stereopathetic soul manure’. Where did he come from? How did that happen? Something’s not right with this picture.’

In the following months the state cracked down on lo-fi. Calvin Johnson was arrested for washing his clothes too often. Scott Kannberg for owning illegal blues magazines. Smog’s Bill Callahan pulled a gun on a cop who asked him if he was having fun. (His defense of police solicitation did not stand up in court.) ‘The disappearance of Kurt Cobain’s Daniel Johnston t-shirt was not an accident, believe me. Courtney knows what I’m talking about,’ claims Broomfield, who has a movie on the subject coming out, ‘Who killed Kurt Cobain’s t-shirt’. ‘The truth will astound you.’

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1994-95 was lo-fi’s Indian summer. The hard work of the pioneers paid off for some, while others were left in the dust. As Wayne Coyne trod the hallowed boards of the stage at the Peach Pit, Beverly Hills 90210, a thought flashed in his head. ‘Work now before the long night of death.’ ‘I was doing it for all of them’, says Wayne, ‘for Daniel and Lou and Spiral. It was the culmination of something or other…yadda yadda…cosmic balance…fleck of dust in the machine of creation.’

In truth, the seeds of lo-fi’s dissolution were already present. When Sebadoh’s ‘Bubble and scrape’ overtook Pearl Jam’s ‘Ten’ at the top of the Billboard top 100 it felt like the end of an era. MTV’s David Fricke: ‘It was probably the last real rock and roll social revolution. One generation of indulgent, decadent poodle rockers was superseded by this radical, post-feminist, individualist movement. A changing of the guards. Suddenly everything was either before or after.’

But the old guards –the Nirvanas, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees- did not feel like going quietly in the night. ‘Suddenly you had this weird motion of reappropriation,’ says Fricke, ‘Nirvana wanted desperately to play with the Meat Puppets which obviously turned out disastrous.’ Curt Kirkwood recalls with horror: ‘I sat down with [Nirvana manager] Danny Goldberg to discuss their ideas and all I heard was they wanted to play ‘Lake of fire’ with a cello amid a field of graveyard flowers and incense candles.’ One night a drunk Mike McCready turned up backstage at a Palace Brothers show and wanted to jam. ‘It turned ugly,’ says Fricke.

Not as ugly as the old guard’s desperate attempts to adapt to the new musical trend. Health nut and Red Hot Chili Peppers auxiliary John Frusciante’s ‘Niandra Lades and Usually just a t-shirt’ was a brave leap into the unknown, according to Jann Wenner’s rave review in Rolling Stone. No one else ever heard the record [I certainly did not, ed.]. Scott Weiland’s ’12 bar blues’ was filled with Linda Perry co-writes. Nirvana transitioned smoothly into post-lo-fi hit machine Foo Fighters with three minutes of your life you’ll never get back ‘Marigold’. Best of all fared Pearl Jam whose singer Eddie Vedder was a real fan of lo-fi at least, later inducting Beat Happening into the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame. He pushed and prodded the band to include ‘Bugs’ on their third album ‘Vitalogy’ – the only example of a classic rock band successfully reappropriating lo-fi principles into their sound?

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‘Does anyone remember Lou’ was the appropriate title of MTV’s 10-years-on special reuniting the stars of success series ‘How Lou can you go’. There were happy stories and less happy stories. Mike Diamond had found himself in the Beastie Boys, despite a first round elimination in Lou’s show. ‘I didn’t fit the lo-fi pitch,’ he remembers, ‘I had friends, a social life, a purpose, some motivation… It was a mismatch.’

John Darnielle had made it to the final three, primarily on the strength of how much he creeped out the other contestants, but it proved a hard-to-commercialize asset. He drifted into the financial sector and finally fulfilled his potential as one of the instigator of the 2008 market crash. ‘The greatest pop art happening of the 21^st century,’ he asserts.

Others fared less well. People really took to Omaha’s precocious lo-fi toddler Conor Oberst. He spent the next decade in Bright Eyes. ‘I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,’ he admits.

But what of legendary coach Lou Barlow himself? Curiously absent citing ‘other responsibilities on his turkey farm’, it wasn’t long before rumors swirled out of control. His former bandmate J. Mascis issued a reluctant statement: ‘Now that I think about it – I didn’t get any turkeys these last three Thanksgivings either. It’s a shame. He was a funny fella.’ Paul McCartney: ‘It’s a drag. Does this mean I get my copyrights back?’ Courtney Love: ‘It’s not what you think it is, and I assure you I’m not involved.’ Nick Broomfield: ‘Has anyone considered the possibility that Courtney Love may be involved?’

Remember him at his height.

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‘Timothy’s monster’ dares to be sentimental for real, where ‘Demon box’ was just plain paranoid.’
Tommy Olsson

Their last album ‘Demon box’ had been an overwhelming success upon release in february 1993, shipping more than twice the total sales of their previous release during the first week. The band all of a sudden found themselves the darlings of the press, a favourite on the live circuit, and actually selling records for the first time. This was the height of the ‘grunge’ era, and all of a sudden there was fame to be enjoyed and money to be made by young men with guitars if they played their cards right: the world wanted scuzzbags with long hair, and every indie-label in the universe was looking for the next Seattle-ish scene and hoping to become the next SubPop.
Bob LeBad

So Motorpsycho left their label, cut off their golden locks for a clean cut boy next door look, said goodbye to band member DeathProd (aka Helge Sten, cause even in Scandinavia that’s not a real name) – the Throbbing Gristle presence who memorably coloured ‘Demon box’’s sound – but kept him on as a studio auxiliary, and made a warm, friendly, part lo-fi, part hi-fi, triple record (actually five sides of vinyl) that was a real step in the unknown. Fortunately it turned pretty darn amazing.

A brief history of lo-fi...part 3

I can laugh when Thurston Moore confuses lo-fi with hip-hop, but Sonic Youth’s ‘Tuff titty rap’ was the first hip-hop track Adam Horowitz (AdRock) heard. It led his band, the Beastie Boys, from a promising career playing toilets on the hardcore punk trail to international fame. ‘At first we were a manufactured band,’ admits Mike Diamond, his bandmate, ‘I tried all those shows, X Factor, How Lou can you go… Then I met Rick. Rick was a fame magnet. But he did good things for us. Without his input our demo ‘You gotta fight (for equal rights [for Tibet])’ might never have been heard.

After consecutive smashes helmed by Rubin and the Dust brothers, the Beasties wanted to expand into ‘whatever was hip at the time’ (dixit MCA). Their next two albums, ‘Check your head’ and ‘Ill communication’, are not strictly lo-fi, but ransack the genre for ideas. If lo-fi artists are usually too poor or bereft of social skills to record outside of their homes, then the Beastie Boys sound like extroverted homeless guys who have no choice but to live in their studio.

The idiosyncratic mix of styles (AdRock: ‘I call it a B-Boy Bouillabaisse’) stands up today. It’s not lo-fi, but you can hear the connection and the Beastie Boys became something of a cause célèbre among the lo-fi scenesters, particularly after the band treated all seven of them to a vacation in Tibet.

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Where to begin with a band like Ween – actually scratch that, there is no other band like Ween. A band who introduced themselves in their first bio: ‘Ween plays gospel music. Ween is here to spread the word of their lord, the demon-god Boognish’ and who titled their first album ‘God Ween Satan – the oneness’. Helpfully the sleeve indicates ‘In the event that it becomes too much (?) for you, Ween has listed their address on the record so you can write for guidance’. Their first two albums are near unlistenable not because of hiss but because of pure sleaze. The second record’s cover art memorably parodies a Leonard Cohen greatest hits set, with added gas mask. Both were recorded in an undisclosed location called ‘The Pod’ (also the title of their second album).

But with third album ‘Pure guava’, also recorded at the Pod, they hit upon the pot of gold. A rich feast of obscenities and stoned perversions, rendered with the tender pen of a poet – makes you feel guilty for singing along to such wrong ideas as ‘Hey fat boy (asshole)’ or ‘I saw Gener crying in his sleep’. ‘Push th’ little daisies’ was even an underground hit. Ween would build on this success, but after ‘Pure guava’ they left the Pod behind. Some would say, they left a little bit of their ink black heart behind with it (or maybe it was just their stash).

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The Silver Jews have to be included simply for recording, in their first two Eps ‘Dime map of the reef’ (1991) and ‘The Arizona record’ (1992), two of the most lo-fi of lo-fi records. Pure tape recorder set up in the middle of the living room and everyone shouting from their corner to get heard – goodness.

Stephen Malkmus – under the alias of Hazel Figurine – had hoped to set up the Silver Jews side-gig to channel his Cheap Trick aspirations, away from the increasing blues purism of Pavement. ‘Too much potassium in the delta,’ as they sing on early stream-of-consciousness mess ‘SVM F.T. Troop’, ‘I had this dream/ I walked the stadium / the crowd was crying for the band’. Boy, did things turn out differently. A bad case of agoraphobia left fellow band member D.C. Berman confined to their apartment. The band sideswiped Malkmus’s objections – ‘they told me it would sound just like a studio recording, and I believed them’.

It proved a problem as the Silver Jews set out on the road, where enthusiastic fans would invariably request ‘that one that sounds like a dying airplane with someone screaming in the distance’. Riots would break out when it turned out there were actual anthems underneath the tape hiss. ‘ We had our fair share of Judas moments,’ recalls Bob Nastanovitch, ‘Then we started our drunk show tradition, and it turned out fine. Guess we figured out what the fans wanted.'

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Robert Pollard’s Guided by Voices had a slow start. Their debut album ‘Devil between my toes’ had appeared alongside the Bevis Frond’s debut back in 1987. But while Nick Saloman scaled the heights, Pollard’s band seemed stuck in first gear. ‘It was very difficult,’ explains brother Jim Pollard. ‘That first record was done in a great studio, but it was clear that Bob wasn’t functioning in that environment. You’d prop him up to the mike, the tape was rolling and nothing came out. Eventually we retreated to a more homely set-up and even then it was like pulling teeth to get him to record anything.’ Robert remembers: ‘The problem was that I had a massive writer’s block all through those years. I could barely get the 50 tracks a year done that they expected. I had nothing left.’ Albums ‘Self inflicted aerial nostalgia’, ‘Same place the fly got smashed’ and ‘Propeller’ are aural evidence that the well wasn’t gushing.

1993’s ‘Vampire on Titus’ was the turning point. ‘It didn’t have to be so perfect anymore. I finally realized I had to make the songs shorter’, laughs Robert, ‘now an unfinished song was suddenly a finished song.’ The record’s a giddy, irrepressible fun fair with all the hallmarks that people found in its successor, breakthrough ‘Bee thousand’, already present.

With twenty years hindsight, Robert is now more at ease, less tortured than ever. Guided by Voices is still going, though it’s been awhile since we heard anything from them. ‘The songs are now so short most people can’t even hear them.’ He waves in the air. ‘There. That was another one… and another.’

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Later buffoonery as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, the court jester of indie, shouldn’t detract from the elemental lo-fi goodness of Will Oldham’s early career as Palace / Palace Brothers / Palace Music, which catapulted lo-fi back into the pre-industrial age. The music soon became a touchstone for a generation of fake lo-fi artists ransacking American musical traditions that surely didn’t deserve such treatment. There was as much studio wizardry in most of these records as, say, in any Thin Lizzy live album. But let’s not get distracted.

Asked why he only accepted roles in Amish dogfood commercials in his early career as an actor-for-hire, Will offers the enigmatic ‘It’s not like I had any choice’. Unable to find satisfaction in his line of work, Oldham drifted off on a vaguely planned Scandinavian holiday and experienced a breakdown of some sort. ‘To this day I have no clue what was wrong, but the car just wouldn’t start’.

Stranded in the outback he hit upon the idea of a musical career. Back in the States he set to work on early work ‘There is no one what will take care of you’ and ‘Patience I’m learning how to play’. Then came the self-titled ‘Palace brothers’ (confusingly later renamed ‘Days in the wake’).

Nashville session drummer Kenny Buttrey picks up the story: ‘I played on a lot of the early Drag City records. Royal Trux, Smog and all that. Those cats couldn’t play for shit, they needed some studio sweetening. Dan [Koretzky, label boss] liked me from my work on Jimmy Buffet’s ‘Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes’. But the Palace Brothers session was crazy. He arrived with no songs written, hauled up in his room for hours… We were playing pool, board games, anything to pass the time. Then he comes down and plays a two minute doodle about how he’s a duck quacking on the lake, that doesn’t need any drums in the first place! Crazy. I did love recording ‘Come a little dog’… Christ, I don’t know how many cats and dogs get killed in that one song. He wanted a real Native American vibe. We got strung out on herbs and spices. I was lying on the floor, hitting the cymbals from underneath, playing a tuba with my feet. Loved it, man’.
And there you have it.