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SHUDDER TO THINK is the band I’m most associated with. We managed to get pretty far with our thing considering what we were up to artistically. Shudder To Think was born in Washington DC in ‘86 or thereabouts: Mike Russell on drums, Chris Matthews on guitar, Stuart Hill on bass, and Craig Wedren on the mike. I wasn’t involved at that point, but was on the scene with my far more traditional hardcore band Swiz and I was a fan. Craig and I went to the same high-school; he was a year older than me and I thought he was a super cool cat. Girls dug him, all those older girls who wouldn’t give me the time. Before we were pals, I saw him play with an earlier band called Red Room, and I reckoned he was a great singer. As two of a smallish group of punk-wavers at our school, we naturally gravitated towards one another, and became very very close friends as time went on (one might say best friends if you accept such a term). We spent many weekends making arty four-track recordings at his Dad’s place, or cruising girls at the 9:30 Club or the DC Space , unsuccessfully for the most part . That misguided trying-to-pick-up-chicks-as-a-posse thing rarely works, though when it did, we generally wound up drawn to the same girl, a pattern which would color our relationship in years to come. THE SCENE
These clubs we hung at were host to a real renaissance period in the DC music
world, populated by fantastic local bands like Rites Of Spring, Scream,
Ignition, 9353, Beefeater, Bad Brains, later on Fugazi, all direct descendants of
legendary groups from DC’s first punk wave of the early ‘80’s, such as Minor
Threat, The Faith, S.O.A, etc. Local as well was the blossoming Go-go scene ;
Trouble Funk, Rare Essence, E.U., the Junkyard Band, and Chuck Brown amongst
others. 1987 The summer of ‘87 was referred to by locals as “revolution summer”. Come to think of it, so was the summer of ‘86. Now I’m confused. Anyhoo, this “revolution summer” thing seemed kinda fuckin cornball at the time , and we’d goof on it , sure , but in retrospect was the most important, emotionally charged and aesthetically thrilling periods of my life. This was in no small part due to being a randy , urban 17 year old kid, but certainly something powerful was in the ether, and I’m sure many who were around then would concur. We were in heat. And it was hot. You kicked it at Fort Reno park, checking the free shows. You made the midnight walk from the 9:30 Club to the subway home, exhilarated, your heart on fire. DC bands were crafting a new genre , the intensity and resonance of which I can only fully realize now, and it was all unfolding on a nightly basis. Craig and I ran an ice-cream stand that summer with our friends Zoe Rosenfeld and Karen Trister, both very very smart and very cute young ladies. Fronted by Craig’s dad, who owned a hamburger chain called Little Tavern, our ice-creamery couldn’t have been a more profound failure as a business venture. Never stood a chance. We willed the customer away, crouched behind our cart in Georgetown, eating the product, bumping the Circle-Jerks or Fear on a shitty , gaffer-taped ghetto box, scribbling abstractions in a series of notebooks known heretofore as THE ICE CREAM DIARIES. THE ICE CREAM DIARIES The four of us; Zoe, Karen Craig and me......we happened to fancy ourselves writers; and it turns out we were damn good ones, all of us. Even today I can look at the prose/poetry/scribblings we were churning out without the usual embarrassment that accompanies an examination of oneself at that age. I look back in fact with a great deal of awe; in THE ICE CREAM DIARIES we were purging our fury, heartbreak, self-loathing, unrequited puppy-love, hallucinatory lust, flaunting our smart-assed teenage indestructibility. The DIARIES were directed at each other: we worked in shifts, and would leave a new entry or two for one another to find, perhaps expand on. It was a form of psychic sexual contact, a seduction. Love triangles, squares and lines formed, broke off. It was competitive, playful but intense, with a pervasive sense of one-upmanship. Creating the DIARIES was in a sense the first manifestation of the philosophy that would inform Shudder To Think’s music in years to come; sensual, impressionistic nonsense by turns violent and lovely, confrontational, devoid of categorical meaning. As well, the DIARIES represent a good analogy of the burgeoning dynamic between myself and Craig. Who can write the craziest shit? Who can wow the ladies? The feeling then was that the two of us were pretty slick with both the writing and the wowing, and for all our individual ambitions, what one lacked the other could compensate for. It was with this skewed but heartfelt brand of mutual admiration that we came together again later on down the line, and this blurring of sexual and artistic prowess that both fueled and complicated our collaboration. Or maybe this occurred only in my mind, and it was just summertime, and there we were, not selling ice-cream, sweaty in our lowriders’ bandanas. VAN LIFE Done now with high school, Craig’s off to NYU, and I hang around DC for another year before myself making the New York move. We’ve both got our own scenes, not seeing too much of each other; I’m working at a shit-ass frozen yogurt shoppe uptown, trying to get through night classes at Hunter College, answering musician-wanted ads in the Village Voice, playing with this and that band, just kicking around. In ‘91, time comes for original Shudder To Think guitarist Chris to quit to pursue archeology, and Craig asks me to come aboard; I’m psyched, I love the band, of course I’m way into it. Craig was living in a collective on 7th st, and I basically moved in and set about learning to play the guitar. I had really been a bass player till that point, and my method of self guitar education was akin to an improperly set broken bone: it hung together, but not quite in the manner intended by Jah. That is to say, I played wrong. But for the material Craig had been working on, and the stuff we were soon to begin together, wrong was right. We were quickly all fired up , with a singular purpose: to make the wrongest rock possible that still managed to rock. FORMING So: low budget touring begins in earnest, van-living. Rehearsals in DC, intimacies with the Peter Pan Buslines New York-Washington run. America end-to-end. European tour equals: London, Amsterdam, and a month in Germany, doing each and every crap little town seemingly twice. Sleep at the venue amongst stoned promoters, plant your feet and shit in a hole. Coffee in a french-press, with German colored cream. Audiences silent as ghosts, sometimes screaming in a language not your own. We worked hard, we toured . We got ourselves in the middle of a riot between squatters and skinheads in East Berlin. We steered the van with our knees, fumbling with the radio. I’d wake up at the wheel by the side of the road, having passed out while driving, having almost killed everybody, who sleep like babies in the back, on a slab of plywood slapped across our amps. Personnel shifts: original drummer Mike Russell is replaced by former JAWBOXian Adam Wade. Mike’s a sweet guy who used to make beer in his bathtub. We readjust, writing songs as we go along, tour some more. Adam fits right in snug, it’s all fun, and all a bit of a blur, things recalled like an old Super 8 , missing frames; stopped by the cops, our pal and soundman Nick P. heroically shoves a baggie of weed up his ass, though the pigs still manage to tear apart our van, leaving our gear strewn across the highway. Dropping green gel acid in lunar New Mexico, watching a Stealth fighter, like a matte-black skate, arc above our heads. Clouds rotating by, like goats roasting on a spit. I take a polaroid, later to inspire the name PONY EXPRESS RECORD. Adam and I, off our heads in Venice beach, caught in the floodlights of an LAPD helicopter , illuminating the Dr. Suess palms, illuminating two white boys looking for something, anything. Many discussions re time-travel, the Illuminati, extraterrestrial mind-control. Craig and I hit the Nyquil hard, blotto watching the red landscape peel by like a Moebius strip. Truckstops yield precious things. I’m convinced I see ghosts everywhere, behind every gas-pump, there, in the corner of a motel room. I’m not sure I’m totally sane, and can’t decide whether this is particularly important. Craig is a nude contortionist. Bassist Stuart Hill emerges as the solid one, dependable, able to drive, handle the money, consult the map. The rest of us huddle and giggle and explore the interiors of our skulls. We play shows, we play them faux-fearless and infuriating. Craig is masterful, tense, at ease, quick to draw milk from the uncomfortable silence or indulge a lengthy, babbling improvisation. I discover and embody an alter-ego, developed to protect me on stage: not very kind , with unwarranted anger focused at a point above the crowd, sexually threatening, liable to spit. We rock ugly: beauty occasionally breaks through, but for the most part it’s all tangled up, mired in something dark. We’re developing an approach. This is 91-’93. And then , soon enough, the inevitable: A DANGLING CARROT CALLED BIG TIME
About a year after I joined Shudder To Think, everybody with a guitar was
getting high-level recording contracts lavished upon them, a trend which would
rebound hard on the music industry five years or so down the road. We had
friends, kids we grew up with, on MTV, playing Budokan, buying houses, fucking
movie-stars, getting in public rumbles with Axl Rose. Henry Rollins doing Gap
ads. We had been on Dischord, and in retrospect I should have been far far more appreciative of that situation; but like a whole slew of “minor-leaguers” we became the subject of corporate attention, got all wound up and starry-eyed, and signed with Epic Records. In the moment it seemed foolish to pass up, and perhaps it was; but when you enter that big arena you open yourself up to Super-sized highs, and Big Gulp lows, and there’s really nothing that can brace a posse of cocky 22 year olds for what comes of it, be it Olympian success, total failure or (as was our case) something right smack in the middle. AUSTIN 2004 present day: i sit in a hotel room in Austin Texas, March the 19th, and in scanning the schedule of countless bands slated to play here at South by Southwest this year, I have an observation. I know a fair amount of these bands, many of them new to the world; but those who have survived the eighties/ nineties , for the greater part, are bands who never went the major-label route. I have some theories on this, but I won’t expand on it now. VIRTUAL MONEY So you get a fat wad of cash thrown at you. You can remove yourself from that dirt-ass group-living situation, buy a proper amplifier, some new clothes. Your parents , who have probably been ignoring you , having given up when you were 17, perk up. Suddenly they’re proud. It’s heady stuff, as cool as you try to appear at the time. It’s much too simplistic to make flat statements about the Evils of the Recording Industry.....like everything else, it’s neither good nor bad , but simply is what it is. A business, a structure with which to sell a product, might as well be athletic wear, or farm equipment. Certain axioms apply, and things aren’t structured in your favor, the house always wins, sure......on the other hand , you get to make expensive records, do videos, enjoy wider distribution. Flip it around again: it’s really your money being spent, and almost all bands never see a dime after the initial influx of cash, as you rarely recuperate the costs incurred recording , making videos, etc. You henceforth own nothing. You can be dropped like a hot biscuit at any time, you can be slowly ground down, or hustled out the back door in the dead of night. All this is true, but none of it is inherently “wrong,”. It’s all there in the contract, spelled out pretty clearly: it’s just that this is information you’re not necessarily privy to when you enter into such an agreement with these companies, though it’s a decision that will impact the rest of your life one way or another. It’s not necessarily in the interest of the manager or the lawyer who is in negotiation with these large entities to point out all the downsides to you. They’re getting a commission, yeah, they want to wrangle you a good deal, sure: but first and foremost they want their cut, so they certainly don’t want you to bail out entirely. They want to get the deal done, with the max amount of cash up front. So the average musician will enter into an agreement in happy ignorance. They may not be misled deliberately; frequently they’re only too happy to not be bothered by the details, and their handlers are happy to indulge them this. So , like many others before and since, in we dove. THE BACKLASH comes quick when you hail from a well-established and venerable punk scene such as DC’s: fucking sellouts! How could we betray the cause? Did we think we were some West Hollywood hair-band? Did the community we’d worked so hard to take part in suddenly mean nothing, that we would pimp ourselves and by extension our fans to the man? Actually very few people gave a shit. Why should they, really? But we were on the defensive, me especially, so on the rare occasion that the question arose, I was always willing to toss out something unbelievably stupid: stuff like “When it comes time that you gotta go out in the real world and pay the rent, then your tune will change in a hurry”, implying that any band, given the opportunity, would do the same if they weren’t fucking idiots. Foolish stuff; this kind of material owed as much to the teenaged “always be contrary” punk ethic as it did to defensiveness, not to mention the nagging voice in the back of my head, telling me I’d made the mistake of my life signing to a major: that my detractors, real and imagined, were all the way right. I shouldn’t have been surprised when folks were fast to quote me on this, as Mark Jenkins did in his 2002 book about the DC punk scene, much to my embarrassment. Depressing; is this how I’m to be remembered , then? Did I never tell anybody back then how much I just wanted to belong, be accepted? Had I never been thankful? PONY EXPRESS
Ok but I digress. Shudder To Think signed up with Sony, by a hotshot young
A&R fellow named Michael Goldstone, who was currently enjoying a period of great
sway at the company due to a string of smart and lucrative signings (Pearl
Jam, Rage Against the Machine etc). Really it was due to his clout that we were
left unmolested as we began work on PONY EXPRESS RECORD down at the
Ted and I hit it off from the outset. After a locally successful run with the Tommy Keene band, Ted had worked the counter of a record store called Yesterday & Today. I frequented the store as a kid, getting my first glances into this new (new to me) secret subset of musical culture. Despite our age difference of 15 or so years, Ted and I shared a binding, all-pervasive paranoia. Grey aliens abducted us nightly. Spirits would strangle us in our sleep. That headache, that headache was a massive tumor, malignant and pulsating. The man on TV, he was talking about us. We were universally loathed for crimes we’d forgotten committing. I had just taken a deep hit in my personal life, so I lived at the studio during the recording, not being required elsewhere. Ted slept there too; and we would stay up well into the night, filling ashtray after ashtray, talking about women, Mick Ronson’s guitar sound, Roswell, the grassy knoll, whatever. |
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Ian Mackaye and Geoff Nelson of Dischord Recods were showing folks how
an independent record company should be run , releasing album after album of
kick-ass local shit , all with an unpretentious air of political awareness,
fairness, and a genuine pure devotion to art that continues to the present . Nati
onally, popular music was changing at a slow and steady rate, ramping up to
the grunge coup-d’etat of 1991, and DC was always a stopover for all the best
bands of the day; Black Flag, X, the Dead Kennedys, Jane’s Addiction, The
Pixies, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth. It was a brilliant spot in which to be a
young punk / music-lover, and despite (or perhaps due in part to) the proximity to
the offices of the oppressive Reagan/ Bush Sr. regimes it felt like a
wide-open town artistically, where pretty much anything could go down.
What was going on? This was the realm of Motley Crue, Elton John, Van
Halen; giants striding across a mythical, cocaine-dusted dimension not made of
mortal hands. Had some sort of interdimensional portal come ajar? Was the
kingdom up for grabs?
now-defunct Oz Studio in Baltimore with producer Ted Nicely. Prior to this, we had a
trail run with Ted (think it was early ‘93?) making a track for the Victoria
Williams tribute SWEET RELIEF. Ted had already made quite a few great records
with our friends Fugazi and Girls Against Boys, so he was on a bit of a roll when
we came to know him.