Capsule review: Mudhoney - My brother the cow (1995)

Great unheralded rock and roll record. You knew they had it in 'em. Bonus track is the entire record backwards.

Capsule review: Alex Chilton - A man called destruction (1995)

Chilton starts late career hot streak spanning solo albums, Big Star and Box Tops reunions. All just fronts for the best rock'n'roll stylist of his (late) age. 'What's your sign girl' - my jam.

Capsule review: Nemo - Popmusics (1995)

Throwaway gold from inner Limburg slacker that could be you. Could be me. Popmusic's what it's all about. Noise from the basement. 

Capsule review: Mike Watt - Ball-hog or tugboat? (1995)

Mike Watt is an indie scenester - the musical!
More of an adventure epic than a duets record. Crazy trip. And, as you'd guess, peaks and valleys.
I know I shouldn't sing 'Piss bottle man' out loud in public, but it's damn catchy.

Capsule review: Boo Radleys - Wake up (1995)

Autumn of their years, and they know it.

Capsule review: Soul coughing - Ruby vroom (1995)

It's too late now to discover Soul Coughing. The luster is gone. But, in desolate nights, seeking oblivion of the now in memories, I listen mostly to the sample/keyboard work of M'ark de Gli Antoni and the brisk drumming of Yuval Gabay. ('Screenwriter's blues', 'Bus to Beelzebub', 'Janine').

Capsule review: Nemo - Popmusics (1995)

I never heard this at the time, but it still takes me back. All sorts of medium talented bands seemed to have one or two sub-Lou Reed indie rock earworms in 'em like 'You'll be Sharon' and 'Popmusic'. The rest is EP filler, but still on my good side. I too was young once. Sometimes I remember those days well.

Capsule review: David Bowie - Outside (1995)

Anyone picking up a Bowie album made this side of the election of Ronald Reagan, knows exactly what to expect. I will not pity such a man or woman. This is the only one I have time for, knowing full well that after a strong start (title track, 'The heart's filthy lesson', 'A small plot of land', 'The motel') I'm in for 40 minutes of punishment, with titles 'I'm deranged' and 'The voyeur of utter destruction (as beauty)', before he redeems himself at the end ('Strangers when we meet'). Wretched guitar (as beauty).

Capsule review: Beatles - Anthology 1 (1958-64 + 1995, 1995 released)

When I was briefly in a professional recording studio on my own dime, my band vowed to watch Anthology videos all night. Seemed like the most rock'n'roll thing to do ('xcept I fell asleep). 'But', said my bandmates, 'not the early ones. Skip to the good stuff.' How wrong we were.
'Free as a bird' is Beatles worthy.

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.