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.
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