gunter glieben glauchen globen

Of Montreal (Boston Phoenix, 9/7/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:19:14 +0000

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: From the ’90s-era Elephant 6 days to this month’s release of 10th studio album False Priest, Of Montreal have stoked a flamboyant fire in indie rock.

“I’ve always been drawn to a density of ideas,” states Kevin Barnes, plaintively. If you have even a passing familiarity with Barnes and the music he’s made for the past 15-plus years with his glammed-out-chamber-pop Athens (Georgia) ensemble Of Montreal, then you probably retorted to that line with an emphatic “Duh!” If you aren’t familiar with the man, let me spell it out: Barnes’s music is overstuffed with “a density of ideas” the way Picasso’s Cubist paintings occasionally had some cubes in them. It’s all part of how he fills every microsecond of every Of Montreal song with little pieces and parts and zigs and zags, until listening to one becomes a minefield of whizzing thoughts and changes.

Placed in context, Barnes’s kitchen sink fits: as a somewhat latter-day participant in the loose collective of bands and musicmakers known as Elephant 6, Of Montreal were of a kind with fellow over-creators like Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Apples in Stereo. “When I was around all of those guys, in the ’90s,” he explains, “the idea when making an album was, you know, ‘Just fill that CD up with as much material as possible!’ Seventy-two minutes, or whatever the limit is! I was surrounded by all these creative people bounding with all of this stuff, and it seemed a shame if you made an album and it was only 45 minutes.”

Even from the start, though, there was always a crucial distinction between the doe-eyed psych of the rest of Elephant 6 and the restless theatricality of Barnes and Of Montreal. Perhaps it was the way that “Panda Bear” (from 1998′s Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy) and “Jacques Lamure” (from 1999′s The Gay Parade) veer off in a thousand directions, each refracting bright light or dark matter, depending on how hard you listened. Or maybe it was the way Barnes was beginning to inhabit quasi–alter egos in order to discover new methods of expression.

“For a while,” he says, “I had a lot of musical ideas that were all about falsetto singing and sort-of-sexual content. So I kind of used these other characters as a device — but it’s organic, it’s just this thing that sort of happens, a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing. I sort of become this character, and I’m familiar with that character, and I don’t censor it, I don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I can’t say that in a song.’ Instead, it’s like, ‘Oh hell, yeah, okay, I’m gonna do this now.’ It’s really exciting and liberating and empowering in a strange way.”

Most Barnes-ologists would place the moment of his ultimate liberation at the release of the band’s eighth album, 2007′s bizarrely accessible Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Not that the band hadn’t been moving in accessible and revelatory directions, starting with 2004′s darkly playful Satanic Panic in the Attic (try listening to that album and getting the twisted chorus to “Chrissy Kiss the Corpse” out of your head) and going on with 2005′sThe Sunlandic Twins, wherein you might surprise yourself by tapping your toes to songs with titles like “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games).” But Hissing Fauna is where Barnes got personal — and unleashed Georgie Fruit. The album’s success not only put a newfound spotlight on the band, it had pundits scratching their chins at this bizarre persona, who rears his pan-sexual head in the midst of Fauna magnum opus “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal.”

“People somehow think that personas are not genuine,” Barnes explains. “But I don’t agree. I think that there’s nothing you can do that isn’t a part of you, there’s nothing you can do that isn’t genuine.”

Perhaps it was all part of coming to grips with success after years of fighting perceived failure, or at least a lack of acceptance. “My first record, Cherry Peel, was a very personal, and it got slammed across the board by what little press it got. It was like being beat up on the first day of school. The next day, you think, ‘Fuck it, I’m not talking to anybody, I’m gonna keep my head down and wear all black.’ And my way to wear all black was to don a kaleidoscopic trenchcoat — because I think that there is always a part of me that needs to hide in an alternate reality.”

Barnes’s latest retreat into a world of his own creation, the lavish and majestic False Priest (Polyvinyl), shows indications of his fissure with ’60s psychedelia, as the blatant new wave and funk of tracks like album opener “I Feel Ya Strutter” and “Godly Intersex” see him dip his toe in the pool of conventional hitmaking. But don’t be fooled by those indicators — for every tease of “normality,” there is a bizarre dunk in the weird tank like album closer/headscratcher “You Do Mutilate,” a mutant that displays Barnes’s recent infatuation with all things P-Funk.

“Yeah, I feel like we don’t make it easy for people to like us. I think we’re a very polarizing band in that way. A lot of people might have actually liked us if we had seemed less pretentious or less theatrical. Like, you know, if they were stuck on a desert island with the records, they had no references, no concept of what we were about, it might be easier to like them if it was just the songs. I think when some people see the whole thing, the presentation and the way we are — we aren’t the kind of band that just anyone can love.”

OF MONTREAL + JANELLE MONAE | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | September 16 at 7 pm | $25-$35 | 888.693.2583 or hob.com/boston

Of Montreal: Live theatrics no staged act (Boston Phoenix, 9/7/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:16:30 +0000

Of Montreal came into being in the late ’90s, when so-called alternative music was entering a period of fallow commercial bloat that followed the pop overthrow of 1991 — The Year That Grunge Broke.

“Alternative” was in many ways a reaction to the outlandish extremes of ’80s culture, from the Day-Glo synthetic-ness of new wave to the eyelinered leather tease of hair metal. Like late-’70s punk repudiating disco and prog-rock, early-’90s rock was a roots-return maneuver, and a relatively austere one at that, as a generation of youngsters became interested in music-biz ethics and flannel accouterments. Which of course made the stage spectacle of Of Montreal in particular and the Elephant 6 collective in general seem all the more jarring. Barnes and company have always filled their albums to the brim with insanity — but for many of their fans, it is the band’s live show, flamboyant and bizarre, that’s kept them coming back.

“In the early years especially, the live show had been a real thrown-together hodge-podge,” Barnes points out. “There were a lot of ideas, but they weren’t very refined. It would be like, ‘Okay, these pigs will come out on stage, and then this man with a gas mask will come out and gas them all, and then a cowboy will come and shoot them all’ — but it was all thrown together like a Benny Hill sketch.”

The past tense there suggests that for the False Priest tour, the band are looking to class up their act. “Well, sort of,” Barnes qualifies. “This record is really cinematic, and so while it was being made, I was thinking very visually, and we’ve been brainstorming this production for months. It’s become an intricate process, coming up with visuals and theatricals and dancers for every song.”

Which is still a far cry from the lumberjack dress code that prevailed through so much of ’80s and ’90s indie. (Even if there was a freak-flag strain in there, whether it was the Butthole Surfers’ surgery videos and topless go-go dancer amid drug-fueled mayhem or the playtime carny juvenilia of the latter-day Flaming Lips.) For Barnes, it’s all about finding a way to express “a powerful positive energy. I mean, I’ve been really into Parliament and Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder, and I just love the freedom that those artists have. They just sort of stuck their ass out and didn’t care. It’s just about allowing yourself to just be, just celebrating all things in life without being full of insecurity.”

Interview: Steve Albini of Shellac (Boston Phoenix, 9/6/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:03:15 +0000

Daniel Brockman: Hey Steve! So it took seven years after 1000 Hurts until you guys released Excellent Italian Greyhound in 2007. Is there a new album in the works?

Steve Albini: Uh, no– I mean, we’re still basically working at the same pace we always have. We have some unrecorded songs that we’re probably going to record. I don’t know how those sessions are going to go and if we’ll have enough to warrant a record. So basically, the same as always: get together every few weeks and play, and a couple times a year we organize some shows, and every now and again we make a record.

At this point, you guys have been around almost two decades; do you ever listen back to your albums over the years and find them emblematic of the period during which they were recorded?

Hmm. There’s some strange little performance quirks that creep into the songs over time, and every now and again, like if we review an older lp recording of a song, we’ll be surprised that there’s a thing in there that we usually do that we didn’t do when it was recorded. Like a song has grown an extra set of balls in the interim. And I think that that’s actually a good thing because it means that we’re still sort of invigorated by all our songs, the ones that we’re still playing still have the potential to change and retain our interest.

Are those the songs that become kind of the warhorses of your live set?

You know, there are certain songs that we stretch out a lot more when we play them, sometimes. It’s weird, which particular songs that that is has changed over time. There was a song called “The Billiard Player Song” that we would play a lot, and it seemed like the middle part of that song, which is quite short on the record, would sometimes become like a significant fraction of the set. But for some reason, which I can’t explain, we just haven’t felt inclined to play that song at all in the last year, and so other songs have had their little expressionist bits stretched out. It seems like we have a compulsion to fiddle around with the way we play the songs so that they have at least the potential to maintain our current interests.

You know, there’s something to be said for, like, if a band writes awesome songs and they just knock ‘em out, and they’re 100% reliable in that regard, there’s something to be said for that, in that you were not necessarily expecting a new experience every time you hear Cheap Trick play one of their awesome songs. You just want to hear them do it and have it be awesome. And I respect that, but I also don’t think that our music lends itself to that. I think that our music is much more characterized by the individual performance than by the formal nature of the song, or whatever. So it seems like we could do a good or bad version of our songs, whereas it seems like Cheap Trick songs are all awesome, and they’re awesome, and they never have a bad show.

Do you feel that fans that come to a Shellac show expecting “the hits” are misunderstanding things?

No, I feel like it’s totally natural if you’re into a band and you’ve listened to their recordings a lot and you want to hear certain things, I totally understand that. From a fan perspective, I’ve often been the same way. When I finally got to see the Stooges, for example, there were certain songs that I really wanted to see them play. So I totally understand that. But I think that we’ve been around long enough that everybody sort of gets the way that the band operates, which is that as flattered as we are that people have come to see us, we’re basically doing it for ourselves. We’re basically going to do what we’re inclined to do, and I feel that we’re granted an awful lot of leeway by our audiences. Every now and again, we run into an environment that’s– well, not necessarily judgmental or hostile, but isn’t down with that program. But it’s pretty rare for us, it seems like we can get away with murder!

You started off with Big Black in the 80’s, and then moved on to Rapeman before starting Shellac. And it’s interesting because your bands are always kind of pegged as “confrontational”– do you see it that way?

I feel like there’s been a thread of continuity in that frame of mind, the way that those bands all operated was according to their own internal logic. To be confrontational implies that you’re taking particular note of the way people are orienting themselves, and you’re charging against that. And I don’t necessarily feel like those bands did that. I’m also not too concerned that other people think of stuff that I do and bands that I’m in. Another way of putting it is that none of those bands made concessions to show business or what might be expected of them. And I feel that even during the punk and hardcore era, a lot of bands were making those concessions, an awful lot of bands, and of course it got much worse when things got more commercialized in the 90’s. But I feel like there were a lot of bands that were doing things in one particular way or another based on what expectations were held up for them or some imagined notions of propriety.

It’s interesting that you mention the commerciality of the 90s, because it seems like when you get into the ground rules of Shellac– and you are a band with ground rules– a lot of that seems to have been laid out in the early 90s. And not just your equipment fetishism, but the ethical rules and such.

Well, we do behave slightly different now than we did then– in the beginning, we were inspired a lot by bands like Fugazi and The Ex and other sort of– I don’t know how to describe it, but other bands who wanted to be accessible to everyone. We wanted our shows to be a bargain, we wanted the opportunity to play basically anywhere, we wanted everything to be open access to everybody. And I feel like we’ve held fairly true to that. The economics of touring have changed really dramatically, and we used to be proud that we could pull shows off for 5 or 6 dollars. Now, the carrying costs of being on the road and some of the insane costs of putting shows on in certain venues means that the ticket prices have crept up. That’s one thing in particular that bothers– well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it bothers me, but one thing in particular that has not gone unnoticed within the band is that it now costs more to see us than it used to. I have some regret about that. But we’re still operating the same way in so far as our internal consistency goes. We’re still just trying to cover costs and be fair to the promoters and the people that help us out, and we still try to keep things small and manageable. It’s just that when I see how much it costs to see just your average regular band now, it kind of bothers me that things have gotten so expensive. So there’s that.

When we first started, we didn’t really have a touring methodology, so we tried a bunch of things. And one of the things we decided on early was– well, we tried playing a couple of festivals and they were horrible experiences, so we said “No festivals, just skip them.” And then All Tomorrow’s Parties came on and they really had to twist our arm and convince us that it was a totally different experience. And as it turns out, it is a totally different experience from the way festivals were organized before All Tomorrow’s Parties, and I think that ATP has completely changed the landscape of the larger festivals. And there are now quite a few very well run curated festivals around the world where the patrons and the fans are treated very well, and the slate of artists are all working in sympathy rather than just being, like, the big pop names and the big hyped names. And there are festivals around the world that never could have existed without All Tomorrow’s Parties showing that it could be done logistically and profitably. So that experience kind of changed our experience on festivals, and now we if we’re offered something we have to figure it out, like, “Is this one of those weird corporate kind of things where it’s sponsored by somebody and it’s going to suck, or is it something that’s being done by a community of musicians and it’s going to be awesome?” So it’s gotten more complicated because we now have to consider things that we originally were comfortable just writing off entirely.

For a Shellac fan, it isn’t easy to see you guys– you aren’t going to just come through town every year, and you don’t put out records very often. And that kind of has built a mystique– the supply is low, which makes the demand somewhat high. I think it’s been 8 years since you’ve been to Boston, for example. Is that just part of the band’s aesthetic?

There are a hundred things that overlap on that. The most significant one is that everyone in the band has regular jobs and regular lives, which means that our touring options are going to be short-term and small scale. So we have to figure out, you know, if we have two weeks to tour in the fall, where should that be? Do we go to Italy and put on 20 lbs? Do we go through the South, and, uh, suffer the South? So we have to make very crude choices on what to do with our time, so there are many places on Earth that we don’t get to very often. We enjoy playing Boston, we always have good shows there, although it’s hard to do a show there. The Middle East is pretty much the only friendly venue for us– meaning not corporate-controlled and that doesn’t have a bunch of insane curtailment policies in place that prevent you from behaving like a normal band.

So, you know, our options are limited on both ends. But also, I feel like a lot of bands tour so much that they come to resent it. And then they’re capable of throwing off perfunctory shows– whereas we tour so little that it’s a total fucking blast for us. So we’re less inclined to do a throw-off not-give-a-shit show because we know that we have so few shows on our schedule, so we’re trying to make them all count. So I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with being reserved with how much you play. The thinking is that bands want to play for as many people and as big an audience as possible, and that kind of thinking is used to justify all kinds of boorish behavior and all kinds of pandering. And I said that I didn’t necessarily better when you lay it on with a ladle and spattered every potential person with your band. I know from my own existence as a fan that the bands that I have loved the most and the longest were bands that I found on my own, not bands that were sprayed at me. So I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with doing your thing and letting your natural audience find you. Whereas for a while, during this commercialization period in the 90s, a lot of bands were just trying to do as many catwalks and Calvin Klein ads and covers of Spin and shit as possible to get people to pay attention to their band. And I just feel like there are very few bands that can survive that kind of wheat-paste fascist-poster style.

It seems like a lot of bands are like Pinocchio: they feel that if they don’t do enough stuff, they won’t graduate to being a “real band.” It seems like for you guys, you have day jobs and whatnot so you don’t deal with that. Does that seem accurate?

You know, we don’t really discuss it that much. We’ve known each other for so long that a lot of things about our tastes and our personalities are unspoken. And between us, we all know what things are going to drive the other ones insane. Like there are small things that get under our skin and they’re as much a part of our band make-up as the way we conduct ourselves in business or the kind of instruments we play.

Like, there was this thing for a while which is still sort of lingering but not as prevalent as it used to be where people, completely unaffiliated with a show, would design, print up, and sell a poster, ostensibly promoting but really just referencing a show that they were completely uninvolved with. And that poster because a separate commercialization of the event. And every time that would happen to us, and it happened a few times, one of us would make it known to the dude who had set up outside the gate to sell posters of the gig that that was a parasitic behavior and that that was no different than any other kind of gross commercial culture capitalism. Trying to find something with its own cachet of popularity, creating something outside with no relation with it and trying to capitalize on it. Now, we’ve had very good poster artists as friends do posters for our shows. I’m not opposed to having nice posters at shows, I think it’s very cool that this culture has developed of gig posters, I think it’s an interesting facet of the music scene and band culture. What I don’t like is people opportunistically grafting themselves into that culture. That’s the sort of thing that if you asked us, when we formed the band “What is your opinion of show posters?” I don’t think we would have had an opinion of it.

Like, I don’t give a shit if our music appears in some student film or some independent thing or whatever. It doesn’t offend me or bother me, and I don’t necessarily think that I need to be paid for it or anything. but if someone asks my permission, suddenly I have to take it seriously, see the movie, see if I want to be associated with it or not. And now I need to make a decision about it– and most things suck, so most of the time my decision is going to be “no”, right? But the only reason the guy had us say “no” was because he asked us! If he had just put the fucking song in his film or skateboard video or whatever, we probably would have never found out about it, nothing bad would have happened to us, and we never would have cared.

It seems like you guys set out in an unspoken way to not participate in a capitalistic band system. Lots of bands have tried that, but those wishes always butted up against the problem of scale when faced with trying to make things bigger. Do you think that by your band’s not participating or associating, this is how you’ve been able to keep this Shellac thing not capitalistic?

That’s a total reasonable read on it. The way that we would probably describe it is that we want to keep all of our relationships on the personal and human level: every single one of them. The relationship with the audience should be a normal regular human interaction, it shouldn’t be primarily a business transaction. The people who book shows for us, the venues, the people that work with us, the sound guys, whatever: all of those relationships, to us, are normal regular human relationships that you would have with your friends or your barber or your cousins.

For us, that’s the way we want to conduct ourselves. It’s not necessarily that it’s anti-capitalist, although it works out that way. It’s not necessarily that it is pro-community, although it works out that way, and I’m fine with it. To be really active within the community of musicians requires more effort than I’m willing to bring to bear on my existence. But I think the very least I can do is be square with everybody, to be honorable. And a lot of bands conduct themselves that way all the time, it’s just that when the scale gets bigger and the stakes get bigger, a lot of people can find either a rationale for behaving differently, or there are people that they find themselves allied with, either within the business or within the band, who don’t think that it’s within the band’s best interests to behave that way. So they succumb to some kind of pressure.

We’ve just never been in that position, we’ve always, all of us, agreed that the best way to do things is to treat people like people at every stage. And all the trappings of the music business, show business that have been applied to the rock band thing, they’re all artificial, they’re all alien. You know, when bands get together in their early stages and everyone’s helping each other out, sharing equipment, it’s all done very fraternally and no one’s in competition with anybody. The only reason that that changes is that someone makes a conscious decision to change. And we just never made that kind of a conscious choice.

By the same token, though, it seems like in the rock and roll world, “Hey, that’s rock and roll” is a catch-all excuse to excuse all sorts of behavior. A band trashes things, or a band member treats people badly or acts in an outrageously egotistical manner, and it’s like “Hey, that’s rock and roll!”

Right!

People would forgive anyone for that– in the black metal world even murder can be forgiven.

Right. On a personal level, you run into people like that every once in a while, who do bad things and go “Hey, that’s me, that’s the way I am!” Like you know, they don’t justify the behavior on its own merits, it’s more like “I have chosen to behave like this because I have chosen to behave like this, and everyone else has to deal with it.” I dunno, I guess I’ve known enough musicians who were nice, normal rational people not to have any presumption that they were going to act like assholes just because they’re musicians or because they’re in bands. But yeah, you do see people use that as a justification. And I think it says more about people making that justification than the people who are subject to that sort of behavior.

I think it’s the cultural thing, the cultural box that people put musicians in.

Right, most people have never been in a band, so they don’t know what it’s like. So if some journalist tells them that if you’re in a band, you’re going to behave like a crazy sex-mad drug freak, well the general public would have no reason not to believe that. So the lore of the misbehaving musician gets canonized because it’s reported by people who aren’t in bands about experiences that they haven’t actually had or observed and it’s reported to people who have no frame of reference by which to evaluate it, so they buy it. And every now and again, you find musicians who have grown up in that vacuum of experience, and when they finally migrate into the actual music scene, they presume to behave that way because they believe that that’s the correct method, and they’ve been taught, academically, that that’s the way rock stars should behave.

But people who came up through punk rock did not experience music that way. They experienced the music primarily as fans and the general cultural perceptions of what bands were like didn’t enter into it, because each band had to create its own method. And I don’t want to put too much emphasis on it, but I think the fact that the three of us in Shellac had experiences in the actual punk rock era, both seeing bands and knowing bands and being in bands before it had become a caricature, I think it tempers our behavior a lot. The three of us know that playing a show is mostly about the show, not the party afterward.

You and Bob Weston are both engineers as your day job– do you think part of your world view in terms of this stuff was shaped by that role, i having to babysit rockers at their most vulnerable moments?

A little bit. But I also feel like, because I’m around bands every day, because they are my normal clientele, I have a pretty realistic perspective on how bands behave. And it’s pretty rare that bands actually behave like the petulant crybabies that they are often presumed to be. It happens, once in a great while, but it’s not an everday thing. The every day thing getting on to the task of making a record, taking it seriously, trying to be careful about their decisions, and trying to do everything they can to make a record that lives up to their expectations. So all the externalities and extra-musical stuff is vanishingly small as a fraction of the experience of being around bands, in my experience. But because that’s the part that’s more apparent to a music fan or someone in the general public, the behind-the-scenes stuff is always presumed to be hijinks with groupies and snorting cocaine off of coffee tables and abdomens. And the amount of that that I’ve seen in the 30 years that I’ve been making records has been a really trivial amount, relative to the amount of actual hard work, dedication and sincere effort in service of art.

Now, maybe in certain circles, it’s a bigger fraction; but again, I attribute a lot of my experiences to having come up in punk rock. I mean, sure, there was a lot of crazy mayhem and drug abuse and all that kind of stuff; but it wasn’t necessarily associated with being in a band. It was associated with a lifestyle thing, and the misbehavior of the era.

You have a very recognizable and singular guitar style in Shellac– but your playing and sound have definitely evolved since the early 90’s, with many moments that are not as caustic or as discordant as early Shellac, or Big Black. Do you ever work on music and think “This riff is cool, or this song is cool, but it won’t work for Shellac”?

Well, I basically don’t work on music except for Shellac. I’ll fiddle around with things absent-mindedly. But Shellac is literally my sole creative musical interest. Between the three of us, we’ve never defined any parameters or anything that we wouldn’t be willing to do. It’s just that, you know, when we get together to work on stuff, we tend to zero in fairly quickly on things that we agree are worth pursuing.

The direct answer to your question is “No”. I don’t ever think “I’d like to play this, but it’s not worthwhile for Shellac.” Basically, if, as a band, we decide that we want to play something, then that qualifies for Shellac. And I’m not interested in playing music apart from Shellac.

When you guys formed, did you have an inkling that it would be that way 17 years later? Did you think at your first rehearsal “This is it”?

With us, at least, we didn’t set a goal, like “Alright, we’d like to do this” and accomplish it. What we do is we get started on something and try to come up with a process or a method that we’re comfortable with and that’s satisfying on its own. And whatever happens, whatever the result of that is, whatever music we end up, whatever shows we play, is satisfying because the way we got there was satisfying.

And that works on every scale. On the very small scale of “These are my skills as a guitarist and this is what I’ve come up with, so this is what I’m going to play.” And that works on every level. And if you asked us when we started playing together “do you still think you’ll be playing in 20 years”, I don’t know what we would have said. But if you asked us now “Do you think you’ll still be playing in 20 years”, I would say “Well, the odds are yes.” It’s a much higher probability that we’ll make it to 40 years together, having made it this far, than, in our first couple months of playing together, making it to 15 or 20 years.

So I don’t have any expectation or goal in that regard, but it seems like the way we’re doing things is satisfying to us, and I see no reason to stop.

I remember reading an old interview with you where the interviewer was questioning you on your band’s minimalism, and whether you felt limited by it. And you said something to the effect that you didn’t feel that you had come anywhere near exhausting the possibilities inherent in the guitar/bass/drums format. Do you still feel that that is true, for you and Shellac?

I’ve never felt limited by the format of the band, I never felt like there was anything that we couldn’t do. Maybe that’s a failure of my imagination, but I’m not going to expend any energy trying to find ways to be dissatisfied with my band. It’s like looking for flaws in your wife: what’s the point? I’m 100% content, why would I start trying to figure out what would be better otherwise.

I guess that goes against the concept of the unhappy artist, that you are supposed to be unhappy in order to make art of merit. That being unsatisfied is the fulcrum that makes art happens.

The simplest way to explain how the band operates is that when we get in a room together and start playing, we will start gravitating towards things that we like and don’t like. And sometimes there will be some discussion, like “Oh, I liked that thing you did earlier when you did that” and then we get feedback within the band. But I think it’s kind of important that there’s nobody in the band that feels in charge. Because there’s no one person that has to answer to everything, I think it gives us a little more freedom to do things that might be individually embarrassing. You know? Like you don’t necessarily think that anyone else has to take responsibility for it, and you don’t ever feel like you’ve been told to do something. So you’re not doing anything under protest of any kind. And I know that there are some bands that there will be a big brouhaha about some decision and then one guy says “Fine, it’s a decision, whatever, I’ll put up with it.” And we just don’t operate that way. There’s a consensus about stuff, or we don’t do it. Sometimes the consensus made can be “Well, in this bit, everybody can do whatever the hell they want, and nobody else should have any opinion about it.”

I guess otherwise, the band’s music results in this inner tumult. Much great music comes from that, but they are miserable doing it and it doesn’t last long.

Every now and again you see a band and you think “Wow, these guys have a concept for their band, and they’re gonna burn through that concept within a year, and then they’re gonna have to look for a new concept for the next record, you know?” And when you see that, it seems like such a closed system. Like “Wow, this is the new Gary Numan, I guess!”

When I was younger I was really into a band that was really threatening onstage, and I remember finally talking to a member of the band and being like “Wow, you guys are so threatening and intimidating onstage” and he said “Oh, that’s because we all hate each other”!

I dunno, man, I couldn’t imagine being in a band where I didn’t enjoy myself every second. I would just find another band! It’s not like being in a band is so rewarding financially or culturally or in terms of status or whatever. Basically the only reason to do it is because it’s awesome. The only reason to be in a band is because being in a band is great! You get to hang out with people you like and you get to do creative stuff and play shows and travel. Being in a band is essentially its own reward, and I can’t fathom it any other way.

I guess for most people in bands that get somewhere, the band becomes a job, and sometimes people work jobs they don’t like.

Yeah, and if I was in a job I didn’t like and I had other job options, I would quit that job and take another one. And if you’re in a band you don’t like– the number of bands available is unlimited. You can basically start a new band any time you want. So, no reason to stay in a shitty band.

Shellac (Boston Phoenix, 8/31/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:52:58 +0000

NO APOLOGIES “We tour so little that it’s a total fucking blast for us, and we make those shows count,” says Albini (right, with Todd Trainer and Bob Weston).

“It seems, in a sense, like we can get away with murder.” I’m talking on the phone with Steve Albini as he relaxes during a rare respite from his engineering duties at the studio he owns and operates, Chicago’s Electrical Audio, and he’s describing how things operate with Shellac, the band for whom he’s played guitar and sung since the early ’90s. His statement is made in the context of how much leeway the band’s audiences have given them. But the murder that Shellac have gotten away with isn’t confined to the stage — for almost two decades, Albini and company have been showing the world that it is possible to do, as a band, whatever you want to do, entirely on your own terms, and still come out on top.

Of course, it helps that they formed on a wave of underground hype. When Big Black, the controversial punk/industrial hybrid Albini had formed with two friends and a drum machine when he was in college, broke up in 1987, they were at the peak of their popularity. Their farewell disc, Songs About Fucking, remains a pinnacle of post-punk ferocity. Albini’s explanation at the time was that they broke up “to prevent us from overstaying our welcome.” But the truth is that the legend of Big Black ballooned only in their absence — and that legend wasn’t just about the music’s relentless pummeling but also about the irascible and scabrous mind of Albini, as a musician, a pundit, and a recording engineer.

By the early ’90s, Albini had become an in-demand studio engineer (a term he preferred to “producer”), recording high-profile albums for the Pixies, Slint, and the Jesus Lizard while also engineering countless sessions for more-obscure acts. He put Shellac together as an act that would be able to work on the sidelines of his burgeoning day job. That suited the other members just fine: bassist and Waltham native Bob Weston was and is himself a successful engineer, and drummer Todd Trainer managed a warehousing and shipping company in Minneapolis. The band’s plan was simple: play only the shows they wanted to play, put out records only when they felt like it, and divorce themselves from the co-opting of underground culture by major labels and mainstream media.

“The thinking, at the time,” says Albini, “was that bands should want to play for as many people and as big an audience as possible, and that kind of thinking was used to justify all kinds of boorish behavior and pandering. And our thinking was that music culture isn’t necessarily better when you lay it on with a ladle and spatter every potential person with your band. I know from my own existence as a fan that the bands I have loved the most and the longest have been bands I found on my own, not bands that were sprayed at me. So I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with doing your thing and letting your natural audience find you.”

The Shellac plan was genius when you consider the high demand for all things Albini (and that especially after his engineering of Nirvana’s 1994 album In Utero). But it didn’t hurt that the music itself was revelatory: while ’90s guitar rock was drowning in baggy shorts and limp-noodle over-compression, Shellac were providing a no-nonsense treble fest, with crisp, dry recordings of their caustic yet hypnotic blasts. Live, they cut an unusual figure: Albini and Weston both sporting aluminum Travis Bean guitars run through gigantic homemade amplifiers; Trainer hitting the skins with the precision of a gymnast, the power of a rhino, and the mad grin of a lobotomized chimp. The band’s first statement of intent took the form of the 1993 seven-inch releases The Rude Gesture: A Pictorial History and Uranus. Both are essential post-punk platters, combining Trainer’s ungodly thud with the band’s skronky yet sinuous guitar attack, the whole pinned down by Albini’s trademark raspy howl, at times shrieking and wounded, at others a plaintive voice of reason amid the din.

Shellac released their debut album, At Action Park, in 1994, but they’ve since spaced out their releases, causing agonizing waits. It was four years till their follow-up, Terraform, and the gap between 2000′s 1000 Hurts and their most recent album, Excellent Italian Greyhound, was seven years (all on venerable Chicago indie Touch and Go). They tour only sporadically, often playing bizarre locales rather than making grueling cross-country treks. “I feel like a lot of bands tour so much that they come to resent it,” Albini explains. “And then they’re capable of throwing off perfunctory shows — whereas we tour so little that it’s a total fucking blast for us, and we make those shows count. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with being reserved with how much you play.”

In a lot of ways, it’s this reserve that makes the band so intriguing, especially when juxtaposed with the unreserved belligerence of their music. What comes through, whether live or on record, is their sheer exuberance — and the fact that they’re doing it their way. “Look,” Albini concludes, “it’s not as if being in a band is so rewarding financially or culturally or in terms of status. Basically, the only reason to do it is because it’s awesome. Being in a band is essentially its own reward, and I can’t fathom it any other way.”

SHELLAC + HELEN MONEY | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | September 6 at 9 pm | $18 | 617.864.3278 or mideastclub.com

Shellac: A Steve Albini vitriol sampler (Boston Phoenix, 8/31/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:50:20 +0000

Big Black

The Steve Albini of today is a relatively jovial figure: hard-working, straight-talking, practical — but with the contented air of one who’s been able to find his own way in a tricky field. So why is it that if you Google “Albini” + “asshole,” you get nearly half a million hits? It might have something to do with the fact that, as a snarky occasional ‘zine contributor in the ’80s and early ’90s, Albini said what everyone else was afraid to say, in a manner anything but delicate. I’m sure he would cringe at seeing these selections in print again — but for the erudition of our younger readers, here are four reasons people still approach the man with trepidation:

1. JUST BECAUSE HE RECORDS A BAND DOESN’T MEAN HE LIKES THEM |To Forced Exposure magazine, he described Surfer Rosa, the 1988 Pixies album he’d engineered, as “a patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top-dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock.” (He later admitted to regretting this statement.)

2. HE HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN THE MOST POLITICALLY CORRECT PUNDIT | In a 1992 Maximum Rock and Roll interview, he described the experience of being courted by Depeche Mode, who were eager to have him man the boards of their next album: “At the time, I had never even heard them, so I went to go see them at this big sports arena in London. After about two songs, I thought that ‘this is horrible, these guys are the worst. What are these young homosexuals doing?’ So I just split and told them that they had the wrong guy.”

3. HE IS NOT A FAN OF NON-ANALOG RECORDING METHODS (OR CDS) | As he so eloquently stated back in 1987, at the height of the shoulder-padded days of DAT tapes and banks of electronic effects chains, “The future belongs to analog loyalists. Fuck digital.”

4. HE WAS NOT INCLINED TO EXPLAIN OR DEFEND THE OCCASIONAL SHOCKING LYRICS HE PENNED IN BIG BLACK | From the 1992 liner notes of the posthumously released 1987 live album Pig Pile: “Anybody who thinks we overstepped the playground perimeter of lyrical decency (or that the public has any right to demand ‘social responsibility’ from a goddamn punk-rock band) is a pure natural dolt, and should step forward and put his tongue up my ass.”

Black Pyramid: Warswine (Boston Phoenix, 7/29/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:45:54 +0000

With a rattling echo that conjures a battle cry skittering off the walls of a great Viking hall, Andy Beresky’s repeated wounded howl of “War! Swine!” at the 4:20 mark of this eight-minute epic is a sound to behold. Off a Serpent Records split 12-inch with Kentucky metal duo Old Ones, “Warswine” works as a sampler of everything that Beresky’s Northampton doom crew BLACK PYRAMID do right — punishing fretwork and low-end stuttering riff yawns, sure, but also multiple dynamic shifts, fist-pumping vocal-anthem blasts, and chasm-bridging lead breaks that flicker and lick your ear like fire flares bursting out of a gurgling lava trench. Let BLACK PYRAMID singe your cochleae this Wednesday at Allston’s Great Scott on yet another crucial Born of Fire gig that’ll see them share the stage with Valkyrie, Earthride, Elder, and Phantom Glue. Meanwhile, you can grab the “Warswine” MP3 below.

DOWNLOAD: Black Pyramid “Warswine” [mp3]

Interview: James Williamson of the Stooges talks Raw Power (Boston Phoenix, 8/24/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:41:54 +0000

Daniel Brockman: So you were a driving force behind the Raw Power album — but as awesome as that album was, it was not successful during its time. I’ve seen interviews with Ron Asheton from the first Stooges reunion a few years ago where he described the Raw Power period as being bittersweet for him — in part due to the album’s lack of success, and in part because he wasn’t playing guitar. Do you find that period to be bittersweet, in retrospect?

James Williamson: No, I don’t think I look at it that way at all. I mean, the band was basically dissolved in 1971 and at that point in time, I was back in Detroit and the Asheton brothers were in Ann Arbor and Iggy went to New York to try to get some kind of a record deal and get something going. And we had had some discussions and our plan was to form a new band. So when Iggy finally did get a record deal, he called me up and we went over to London. And, you know, he was signed with MainMan management and so it wasn’t until a couple of months over in London that we determined that we really didn’t want to work with the musicians that were available. I suggested to Iggy that we bring the Asheton brothers over and have them be the rhythm section. And I know that with Ron, you know, in later years this didn’t sit well with him, but I think at the time he was very happy to get the job. So “bittersweet” is not a word that I would use. I think we all thought it was very sweet: we were working, we had a record deal! I see those times as being very special because, you know, it was my first album and I was able to make up music of my own and work with Iggy and make that album.

When you started working on the material that became Raw Power, did you have a trove of riffs that you had collected, or did you kind of start from scratch?

I had been writing my own music since the beginning, when I first started playing guitar, and I think that’s one of the reasons why my guitar style was distinctive, because it was my natural way of playing. And I found out quite early going on that it was easier for me to write my own stuff than to play other guy’s stuff. In fact, the first time Iggy met me was at a gig where my old band was playing — and Ron Asheton was playing bass in that band!

Was that The Chosen Few?

Yeah, The Chosen Few. Iggy was at the gig, and I played him some of my own material on guitar and I think that that kind of stuck with him — and later on he tapped into that. Even in 1971, I was writing songs with him for the band, although not much of that was ever recorded. So it wasn’t all sort of brewing up inside of me, it was just a continuous effort.

Your time in the Stooges was incredibly prolific, although only eight songs made it onto Raw Power, and the rest has had to make do with being bootleg material.

Yeah, we were very prolific, because we always thought that we would make another record, so we recorded a lot of other songs, wrote a lot of songs that only were played live. So yeah, we were prolific, but we were also very impatient, so as entertainers we would always tend to play the new stuff and not play the old stuff, which is not a very good formula for success because nobody who came to see us ever knew what they were listening to!

James Williamson, circa 2009 (photo: Robert Matheu)

What were Stooges shows like? I mean, for someone my age, we’re used to punk and metal and all — but back when you were doing it, it was somewhat uncharted territory. Who was coming to your shows, and did you guys see what you did as just a variant of rock music?

Well, to us it was rock music, but we had a different sound and a different style. We felt that it was really important, and we felt that we liked it so other people ought to like it too — but it wasn’t like that. There was a hardcore group of people who did like us, and were almost kind of a cult. But outside of that, there was very little acceptance of us, but we just went out and did it anyway. So we played to some pretty hostile crowds — quite often, really, which was really captured on that live album, Metallic KO. Which I’m not really that proud of, I have to say, because I kind of feel like we contributed to some degree to the violence and whatnot that went on in the punk scene, that everyone kind of romanticized. But by the same token, that kind of thing was probably going to happen anyway — after Altamont, everything got kind of… dark.

It’s interesting that you put it that way — a lot of people would probably see The Stooges’ music as dark, but really it’s kind of just life-affirming rock music, even if there are songs like “Death Trip”!

Yeah, I don’t really see what we did as being dark. I think that what The Stooges were about was playing our brand of music and not completely annihilating ourselves in the process. We were more successful at some of those things than in others.

Even though you joined the band after their second album, you knew them from the beginning, back when they were known as the Psychedelic Stooges and were even more primitive than the sound on the first album — what were they like back then? And what was it like joining them and fitting your style into what they did?

Well, you know, I did know The Stooges in the early days, back when Ronnie was in the band I was in, The Chosen Few. We all knew each other when we were in high school and all that, and I had a pretty continuous relationship — well, I didn’t live in Ann Arbor, but I was at their house when they first started the band, and so I’d come sit in on their practices and hear them, and that was the Psychedelic Stooges. Which was just a really really bizarre art thing. I mean, Iggy played a vacuum cleaner and an Osterizer blender, mic it up — he’d do anything to get across to an audience. He was just — the band was like nothing else I’d ever seen before, some kind of weird combination of Sun Ra and, I don’t know, John Cage and god knows what. But then they slowly learned to play their instruments a little bit, and I think it was this showmanship that first attracted Danny Fields, who was the A&R guy for Elektra. When he came to town to sign the MC5 he saw The Stooges and he was just bowled over by that.

So they got an album deal, and you’re right, they played very primitive stuff because they were not that technically proficient on their instruments. But they always had a unique style to it, it was always rhythmic, and a lot of that material was really groundbreaking in it’s own way — so I don’t want to minimize in any way what they did on those first two albums, they really changed the kind of music that people were listening to, and every kid that was trying to playing guitar, it was the first thing that they would learn, because it was something that they could actually play. So a lot of people came up playing that stuff. When I got involved, when I was asked to join the band, I came in with more technical skill. I had been playing guitar a lot longer and I think I had a certain style that appealed to Iggy, so it’s almost like its two different bands, because like I said we were gonna start a different band.

So when we worked up all this new material, it didn’t sound anything like the previous band, even thought the singer was the same and the drummer was the same, and with Ron on bass. It was the same bunch of guys, but all of the sudden, a really different sound.

You and Iggy went to England to find a rhythm section, but you didn’t like what you saw. Why is that– it seems like there was so much awesome rock music coming out of England in those days?

Yeah, we didn’t relate to what other people were doing, we played our own style of music and you know, part of being in a band is being in a gang or something. It’s a family or a gang or a group of people who can relate to each other on a whole bunch of different levels and can stand to be around each other. I mean, you really can’t play music that’s any good with people you don’t like. That’s just a fact! So, you know, everyone in those days was all flowery shirts and poofy frilly big hair and all that kind of stuff, and I just couldn’t relate, personally, to any of these guys that we were auditioning. I think Iggy might have viewed it a little bit different from me, but in the end I just wasn’t having it and I said “I think we oughtta call up Ron and Scott”. And he didn’t disagree with me — if I wasn’t around, he might have picked something differrent, I dunno. You’ve got these guys like Trevor Bolder from Bowie’s band with the big jowels and all this stuff and — it’s hard for me to explain, but this was a much better choice for us.

When you joined the band, during the Raw Power era, it seems that the power dynamic had changed, and Iggy had a lot more control — or at least more focus was on him. Is this the way you saw it?

I think it’s more of a perception thing: you know, the fact is that Iggy has always been a dynamic performer. And really from when I was involved in the band, whoever was managing us or whoever the record company was or whatever, they always wanted to make Iggy a star, and the band was kind of like — oh, I don’t know, like Big Brother and the Holding Company or something. They really wanted to make the singer the star. And that ruined that whole situation and it would have ruined us too, but that’s the way it was. And so even though we never called ourselves Iggy and the stooges, we started being called that by external forces, because it was easier for promoters to promote gigs and all that sort of thing. So even though it was Iggy who got the record deal and got signed to MainMan, that is what MainMan wanted him to be, a David Bowie singer with some side guys, and Iggy never looked at it that way until much later. So I think we were able to survive that, and the unfortunate part of the whole equation is that no one bought the record. It didn’t matter what we wanted to call it, if you couldn’t sell records back then, you couldn’t survive.

But even though the album didn’t sell, you must have known when you recorded it that the album ruled, right?

Oh, we did, we loved that record. But the thing is that we were completely delusional! I mean, really, that record was so far ahead of it’s time that it really literally is pretty amazing to me to see how many people sort of imitated the style and the sound enough so that it now sounds contemporary. Because the sound has been established by so many bands, but in those days it didn’t sound like anything, and actually there’s never been anything that sounds like it before or since, even though there have been many who have tried. So it’s satisfying, at least we get recognition at some time in our life. I like to say that the album was a success, it just took awhile!

It was your first experience in a big-time recording studio, right?

Yeah, Raw Power was the first time I went in for an extended period of time and made an album, so it was very exciting for me. But the only reason that the album sounds the way it does is because by the time we got to that point, MainMan was busy breaking David Bowie in the U.S. and they weren’t paying attention to us, so we got to make it without any adult supervision!

The sound of the album is distinctive in The Stooges’ catalog because of your lead work, and the way it pierces through the mix. What were you going for with the layering of guitar tracks and whatnot?

Honestly,I was just trying to make the other guys happy. We’d go in there, and after the rhythm tracks, I’d be overdubbing solos and just keep doing it until everyone was nodding in the control room, and that meant that it was time to quit and move on to the next one.

How did the situation come about where Bowie was brought in to remix the record — and what was that experience like?

Well, what happened was that we did the album ourselves, and we made lots of mistakes because we were inexperienced in the studio, and Iggy was pushing the envelope with the mix. I didn’t have any frame of reference — like I would now if I was trying to mix that album take a different approach. The engineer, you know, his hands are tied because we’re the client telling him what to do: so we made a mix, and we liked the mix, but MainMan didn’t understand it and couldn’t relate to it and they thought “This is never gonna fly”, so they brought in their golden boy in hopes to salvage it, because we owed the album to CBS. So on some days off from his U.S. tour, David Bowie came over and did it in L.A., and you know, it was a really really bizarre approach to the mix that he did.

But I have to say that if we had actually had something that we thought should have been done differently, we should have spoken up, because we were both sitting there in the mixing room for the whole thing. And secondly, a lot of times you get in the studio and you think “Oh man, that sounds great!”, and then you get outside and think “Oh my god, this is awful!” And David Bowie, he’s very stylized, everything he does — and the thing about the album is that it sounds really different. But ultimately, the beauty in that album is in the songs and the performance, and so no matter how you do it, it still comes through and sounds good.

It must have been weird for you in the ensuing decades to watch the endless debate about the mix of the album, with superfans passing around bootlegs of the alleged original rough mixes, that sort of thing.

You know, it is kind of weird, and frankly I’m happy that Sony/Columbia has re-released the original mix, because I think historically that’s an important thing. But if it was up to me, I’d just release all the tracks and let the guy who buys it mix it for themselves. I mean, it’s like “why are we arguing about this for 30 years?”

How does it feel to be playing those songs now?

It feels great — we’re, I think, all in our 60’s, and I think that there’s an opportunity for a little bit of closure and we’re having fun doing it. I mean, how many victory laps can we do? I don’t know. But we’re having a good time this year and I guess we’re going to see you guys pretty soon in Boston.

Do you think you’ll end up doing a new Stooges album?

We’ve all kind of agreed that we’d like to only release new material if we all really like it. So, you know, The Stooges bar is pretty high, and we don’t want to put out material that isn’t of that kind of quality. We’re working on it, and even if we don’t put out an album, but put out some singles, I’d love to do it, but only if it’s something that we all feel is in keeping with the level of the quality that we’ve done before.

The Stooges: Getting into the mix– three more that fans want raw (Boston Phoenix, 8/24/10)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:37:09 +0000

Raw Power is viewed by many as one of the all-time great rock albums — but its hyper-trebly, David Bowie–mixed brittleness has been almost as infamous as the musical mayhem on the wax. At first, the band self-produced the record. James Williamson explains, “Our management was busy breaking David Bowie in America, they weren’t paying any attention to us. So we got to make the album without any adult supervision. But they finally heard it and said, ‘This isn’t gonna fly,’ so they brought in their golden boy in hopes to salvage it. Bowie came over to LA on some days off from his US tour and did it — and you know, I have to say, he really took a bizarre approach to the mix.”

The ensuing decades saw the album’s legend grow, with an endless parade of bootlegs purporting to offer the “real” mix before Ziggy Stardust had got his bass-stifling hands on it. In 1997, Sony reissued a “definitive” version overseen by Pop himself, an overblown monster that hit the ceiling of digital distortion. Fans who’d lived with the Bowie mix and their bootlegs for decades were irate. Williamson and Ron Asheton were both openly critical.

This year’s remaster of the Bowie mix puts a sheen on the original vinyl release — but for most fans, agreeing to disagree is just part of loving Raw Power. “If it was up to me,” says Williamson, “I’d just release all the tracks and let whoever buys the album mix it for themselves. I mean, why are we arguing about this for 30 years?” Amen, James — but aren’t arguments part and parcel of being an obsessive rock fan? With that in mind, let’s look at three more of rock’s most controversial mixing jobs:

THE BEATLES | LET IT BE [1970] | Near the end of their seven-year dynasty, the Beatles’ January 1969 attempt at a return-to-roots album flamed out in confusion and miles of magnetic tape. Wall-of-sound producer Phil Spector fashioned the spaghetti into a hit album, but with tacked-on string sections and other cheesy touches that rubbed fans the wrong way for decades — until a Spector-less version of the album, Let It Be . . . Naked, was released in 2003, sans cheese.

METALLICA | . . . AND JUSTICE FOR ALL [1988] | Metallica rebounded from the death of bassist Cliff Burton with this double-platter breakthrough album thanks to the crossover hit “One.” But amid the MTV adulation, many fans noticed a distinct lack of bass guitar. Perhaps the band were just hazing new member Jason Newstead, but whatever the cause, fans still wonder whether there isn’t some kind of alternate mix that includes an audible low end.

NIRVANA | IN UTERO [1993] | Kurt Cobain and company’s choice of Steve Albini to record what would be their final studio album seemed a logical choice, especially with Cobain wanting to avoid a repeat of the grunge-o-matic sheen that Butch Vig had left on their previous multi-platinum long-player. But the tracks the band brought back from their Minnesota sojourn did not please the label overlords. As Cobain put it, “The grown-ups don’t like it.” Nirvana eventually remixed a few tracks after Geffen’s consternation crumbled their resolve.

The Stooges (8/29/10, Boston Phoenix)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:31:20 +0000

WORLD’S FORGOTTEN BOYS: Millions now bow to Raw Power’s majesty, but in 1973, it and the Stooges were considered a flop.

It’s hard to fathom now, when their music has achieved such godhead status, but in 1971, Ann Arbor’s legendary Stooges had dissolved in ignominy, dropped by Elektra after the seemingly indulgent commercial failure that was 1970’s howling Fun House. Ron Asheton (canonized by Rolling Stone shortly before his passing in 2009 as #29 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time) and his drumming brother Scott languished at home. The new second guitarist, James Williamson, was back in Detroit, marveling at his brief foray with the late band. And ringleader Iggy Pop was in New York, hustling for a solo record deal.

What happened next is rock scripture: Pop, with the backing of some new rock superstar named David Bowie, would convene a slightly reconfigured Stooges to record a third album that would atomize even their previous two earthshakers. It is immaterial that the album failed to get noticed outside of an enlightened few, even though its failure led swiftly to the Stooges’ demise. Its legend has mushroomed since, and millions now bow to the altar ofRaw Power majesty.

When I spoke to Williamson over the phone, on the eve of the reunited Stooges’ tour (it comes to the House of Blues on Tuesday) to celebrate that 1973 disc in all its glory, I was expecting him to view the triumph of the record as bittersweet, given that it was so unheralded in its day and was created amid such turmoil. I was wrong.

“No no no, ‘bittersweet’ is not a word that I would use at all,” he says. “I think that, in fact, we all thought that time was very sweet. We were working, we had a record deal, and so I see those times as being very special.”

It was a particularly special time for Williamson: when Pop got a record contract (CBS) and a management deal (Bowie’s MainMan), he took Williamson with him to England to draft a new rhythm section. They auditioned scores of foppish glammed-out rockers, but Williamson wasn’t impressed. “You really can’t play music that’s any good with people you don’t like. That’s just a fact! Everyone in those days was all flowery shirts and poofy frilly hair and all, and I just couldn’t relate to these guys. Iggy may have seen it differently, but in the end, I said to him, ‘You know, I think we oughtta just call up Ron and Scott’ — and he didn’t disagree.”

The Asheton brothers were enthusiastic, but they had to adjust to the new rules: Ron Asheton moved from guitar to bass, and this time out, Iggy was the star. Williamson views the whole thing pragmatically: “You know, the fact is that Iggy has always been a dynamic performer. And whoever was managing us, or whoever the record company was, they always wanted to make Iggy a star, and the band was secondary. Luckily, Iggy never looked at it that way, at least not during Raw Power.”

Williamson’s contribution to the Raw Power sound cannot be understated — whereas the group’s prior incarnation was notable for its primitivism, the 34 minutes that make up this album see lunkhead riffs getting replaced with serpentine friction and hip-moving thunder, and the Stooges re-emerging far sexier and darker. Sinewy shakers like “Death Trip” and “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” erupt with Motown violence, Williamson’s guitar spewing endless mirror shards all over the proceedings.

The title track and “Search and Destroy” are now the kind of canonized rockers that infants play along to on Rock Band — but in 1973, this was dangerous stuff, in some ways too dangerous for the music business to know what to do with. The album, like Fun House, was deemed unlistenable. “Back then, if you couldn’t sell records, you couldn’t survive. And no one bought the record. When we made the record, we didn’t care — because we were completely delusional!”

That delusion may have fueled the album’s creation, but its head-on collision with reality meant the death of the band in 1974. Williamson went on to work with Pop on projects that included 1977’s Kill City and 1979’s New Values. But the end of the ‘70s saw him leave the music business — at least until Iggy extended an invitation to revisit RawPower one more time.

“The thing about that album is that it’s so far ahead of its time,” Williamson reflects. “And it’s amazing to me to see how many people sort of imitated the style and sound — so much so that now the album sounds contemporary. In those days, it didn’t sound like anything else around. So it’s satisfying, definitely — I like to say that the album was a success, it just took a while!”

IGGY & THE STOOGES | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | August 31 at 8 pm | $45–$65 | 888.693.2583 or hob.com/boston

Katy Perry: Teenage Dream (8/24/10, Boston Phoenix)

danielbrockman — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:22:20 +0000

Contrary to common perception, there are only two genres of popular music: music written and performed by teenagers, and music written and performed by people trying to remember what being a teenager was like. Count Katheryn Hudson, d/b/a Katy Perry, in the latter category. Although she spent her actual teenage years trying to make it as a Christian pop star, her 20s are being put to use reimagining her teens as a time of being a sassy and mouthy pop brat.

Her first stab at temporal re-creation had her spending three years with an army of producers on a major label’s dime throwing songs at the wall and seeing what would stick. The resulting debut album spawned two #1′s — ear borers helmed by producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke. Her sophomore outing shows greater focus: Teenage Dream is front-loaded with synthetic whump-pop that fuses Perry’s singular vocal nag to irresistible songsmithery. Martin and the good Doctor are mad geniuses at a certain style of dog-whistle pop making: what might sound like a grating shriek to some is dance-floor gold to the music-buying public. Which means that prior to this album’s release, most of the country is already involuntarily humming along to audio crack like “California Gurls” or the title track on the gym’s stairmaster.

In some ways, however, the initial cavalcade of hits and would-be hits is a Trojan horse: you may be sucked in by office-Christmas-party-anthems-to-be like “Last Friday Night,” but 20 minutes later, you find yourself slogging through somber relationship bombshells like the zesty-yet-uncomfortable dumped-ex anthem “Circling the Drain” and the existentially weird “Who Am I Living For?” In the latter, Perry intones, “I march alone to a different beat” — and even though the song’s lack of pep signals the deflated-balloon portion of the album, the sullen ‘tude finds her talking, at last, like an actual teenager.