Ep. 342: "The Scrappy Sessions"
And we're back.
Hey, it's part two.
John is taking us on a journey, catching up on, how would you describe it?
The band stuff you've done in the past, how you got to where you were eventually with The Long Winters.
And we left off with you watching a band called Algie with a girl doing interesting stuff with a guitar and singing.
Yeah, her name was Stephanie.
And the Bunn family players were kind of coming to...
We were in some ways the most popular we'd ever been.
We actually had fans.
People made jackets with our name on it.
I think Kevin always imagined that we would be rock stars.
That was his template.
And I didn't have a different one.
At first.
And I don't think anybody in America really had a different one.
That was what was so astonishing about DIY and punk rock was that they had a vision for themselves as musicians that wasn't to be rock stars.
But that didn't trickle down to me for a while.
But a lot of people it never trickled down to.
And I remember The Offspring became a big band.
And the story was that Dexter Holland, the singer, was also some kind of, he had a master's degree or whatever, a doctorate in.
Oh, he's like a helmet guy.
Is that keep him separated?
Yeah, keep him separated.
He was some kind of, I don't know, physicist or chemist or something.
And Kevin really identified with that because he had a very strong feeling that he needed to have an advanced degree in order to have fulfilled his commitment to our smarty pants suburban upbringing, right?
That at some point in his youth, he targeted, he set a baseline for himself of a master's degree and
Because that was a kind of baseline.
And all of our friends were getting advanced degrees.
And so Kevin went off and got a...
advanced degree in sociology conflict resolution i'm seeing him here uh i believe tell me his name again horning kevin horning oh i've seen dexter holland here i'm on a page at online phd programs.org of the top 10 rock musicians with phds and i'll also use this opportunity to say i apologize i didn't mean helmet i i meant uh meant to say uh bad religion
A bad religion.
Sterling Morrison.
Milo from Milo went to college.
He super went to college.
Anyway, continue PhDs.
Well, so that all happened along... And that was part of the reason that I felt like maybe I had... Maybe...
being in a band or having Kevin be my collaborator was in some ways like an inhibiting thing for me because he went off and got a master's degree.
And during which time I kind of got a, I just started doing drugs because, you know, and I should have been collaborating with people in Seattle, but I didn't, I didn't understand it.
So, so we're talking about now 1997.
And the Bunn family players got invited to play Bumbershoot.
We thought it was like happens to a lot of bands.
Um, you're, you finally got a big show.
You got the big show.
You got invited to the big show.
And we went to, um, we went to Bumbershoot and we were playing in this giant hall and we showed up and there was a band called King of Hawaii playing and they had like, uh, fake palm trees on stage and they were playing a little surf rock and
And the audience was enormous and it was going to be by far the biggest show we'd ever played.
And watching King of Hawaii, we were like, oh man, we're going to come on after these guys and we're going to mop up.
And we also thought...
That because we were playing after King of Hawaii, it meant that King of Hawaii was opening for us.
Because this was the world that came from.
If I remember correctly, even then Twisted Surf Rock, at least in the Southeast, was super hot.
It was super hot.
Manor Astro Man used to come through town and just put on these fucking insane shows that would just rock the house.
Dick Dale would come through town.
And people would just go fucking crazy.
Yeah.
And that's what this was.
I mean, it was, they had 800 people or something and they got done and we, and we'd been, we'd been playing since 1994, right?
We, we had a group of fans.
We were within our little subculture, like one of the five big bands of anybody we knew, which meant we could get 130 people out on a Thursday night.
And feel like, wow, it's happening.
And King of Hawaii got done.
And as they were moving their amps offstage and we were moving ours on, we watched 800 people leave the venue.
Because it's a festival and people go from thing to thing.
It's difficult to parse that in a way that's positive.
You know what I'm saying?
It's one thing to go like, oh, the crowd was a little bit cool to us.
It's a very different thing from like, holy shit, I just watched the audience live.
are the interest in us in the audience from an audience be decimated i watch them walk away well and they were doing it before we'd ever played a note right so so we didn't so this feeling we had like we're about to make 800 fans turned into because our friends who were all downtown baristas and whatnot um they didn't go to bumper chute
So we watched 800 people leave a 1000 capacity venue and be replaced by 70 people.
And we played this Bumbershoot show, which we'd been for months, you know, we got invited to play Bumbershoot and for months we'd been like, here it comes, baby.
We played this show and it was like such a colossal bummer.
We went back to the club scene afterwards and we're playing our, you know, our biggest shows ever.
But there was a real sense, like the alternative magazines had never written about the Bunn family players.
It was the stupid name for a band that came out of my personal desire to parody music conventions.
It was in some ways a punk rock gesture of,
Because there were lots of bands at the time that had names like that, Green Apple Quick Step and, you know, Cherry Poppin' Daddies or whatever, all this Barenaked Ladies.
and this what bun family players was like kind of like lol they all sounded like they've been like generated by a basic program like a random a random noun generation and bun family players was a name that that that kevin suggested because we were toying we're trying to figure out names we were called three hour shower for a while
Now that's pretty good.
I like that.
We were trying to come up with names and Kevin was like, all these names are stupid.
Why not just call ourselves the Bunn Family Players?
Like it was the dumbest thing you could think of.
And I was like, that's the name.
You know, it was just, it was that you're 25, 26 and just thinking like you're smarter than everybody.
But we had no press.
Our fans were 100% word of mouth fans.
So we played this show and the writing was on the wall.
You know, the band just...
There was something dark that had come in, and we'd had a lot of fun.
But I met this girl, Stephanie, and we started, and after the show, I know for a fact I've told this story, but they were opening for us.
And nobody had ever, I'd never heard of them, they'd never heard of us.
And I watched their set, and it was really,
it was really intriguing.
Like she had this incredible voice, this great stage presence.
She, she was not like, uh, she didn't play anything amazing on the guitar, but she had a guitar in her hands and was, and had a, had a, I don't know.
She just, she just cast a vision.
And after their set, but before hours, uh,
this is back in the, like the first band's done and there's 20 minutes before the second band even starts setting up their stuff because shows always went to two o'clock in the morning.
And I'm, and she's at the bar getting a drink after her first after show drink.
And I said, Hey, that, that was amazing.
Oh no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I've got this wrong.
I watched their sound check.
That's what it,
And I was like, oh, this band's got something, which is rare.
You know, you don't, you play with a lot of bands and you hardly ever go like, whoa, this band's got something.
And so she came back to get a drink at the bar.
That's right.
Before the show.
And I'm sitting there because it's one of those bars that people just go drink at too.
You know, you wouldn't, you're not necessarily there to see the show if you're drinking at the bar.
And I said, hey, you know, I heard your song or I saw your song.
It was really good.
I liked it a lot.
And, you know, she was attractive lady and she kind of looked at me and was like, yeah, thanks.
You know, thanks punter or whatever.
Thanks dude at the bar bearded dude at the bar and just gave me just absolutely, you know, shine me on.
And I was like, oh yeah, well I kind of walked away somewhat smiling because I was the headliner and she had treated me like a, like just some sleaze.
So a creep is what she treated me like.
Yeah.
Cause she was definitely used to getting creeped on.
Anyway, after the show, after she had seen the Bunn family players play, you know, she came up and she was like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry that I like blew you off.
I was like, don't worry about it.
It's just cool that we're like, we know each other now and it was a cool show.
So we got together and we, and, and we played some of my songs together.
Because she was like, I want to, you know, I want to try and sing on some of your songs.
And we just did acoustic guitar, me on acoustic guitar, the two of us singing.
And it just felt like it felt like magic just to have another voice because I'd never had a harmony.
No one had ever sung a harmony on my songs.
And it felt like the first, I'd been playing music now for a long time, but it felt like the first time that I was hearing a sound that I hadn't heard before.
Really, a sound I hadn't heard before.
Our two voices.
And almost immediately, it was like, we need to put a band together.
We're a band.
And what was weird was she said, I don't know how to play the guitar.
I'm a piano player.
I play the guitar in my band because I like the way it looks or whatever.
You know, I need to play the guitar because I'm a front woman and I'm not just going to walk around up there.
So I've got other people in the band that play guitar and I'm going to... And I just like... It's plugged in and I play stuff, but it's not my... You know, I don't know how to play it.
And I said...
well, in this band, you're going to be the lead guitar player.
And she was like, no, I don't know how to play the guitar.
And I was like, exactly.
You're going to be the lead guitar player.
And she told me this not very long ago.
She said, we were sitting at a bar and I stood up and kind of grabbed her by the shoulders and was like, you are the lead guitarist.
Own it, be it.
You're going to get up there and you're going to play lead and it's going to be killer and you're going to blow people away.
And she said, you know, she was just like shivering with fear at the prospect, but, but she said, I was so confident about it.
And you know what, you know what Merlin, I was just confident in the concept, right?
That whole, that concept that like, you can just do that.
You can just say to somebody, pick a, pick a person out of a crowd and say like, you're the lead singer and it, and, and you get lucky.
Or just by virtue of saying it, it becomes true.
And I don't know, for whatever reason, at that moment, in the way the bands of Seattle were shaking up, I knew Michael Schilling already.
He was this drummer that played in a variety of bands.
He was always better than the band he was in.
He had a comb over.
A really, really, really prominent Donald Trumpy band.
ear-to-ear, hairspray, lacquered down.
I can't even imagine it, because I only know him from the powerful look that he actually rocked later on.
And it was, I think, the dying days.
This was right before bald became super great.
Normal people, like punk rockers thought you were a skinhead, and normal people thought you were in a cult.
Yeah, what's wrong with you?
Why are you bald?
You got Yul Brynner,
and telly savalis maybe a lewis gossett jr but not a lot there's not a lot of guys who are going to rock a full ball you just named all three of them i think i was trying to think who i left out i'm sure people will let us know but it was not i mean it's it's it's so crazy now to look at look at somebody like uh the bad what's his name the badge guy the steel guy the badge guy the fx show guy you know what's it called what's the show called the tv show with the bad cops
His whole life changed when he shaved his head.
He's like a different human being.
Well, this happened in this instance.
All through the 90s, Michael had this hair that was tragic.
And he'd gone bald at a very young age.
And he, I think, self-identified as kind of a shoegaze kid.
Stuart Copeland was his first drum hero.
And there just wasn't a way to be bald in history.
any of those genres as far as he could tell and he was you know he was friends with all of these guys that had beautiful hair and were beautiful men and they were part of a scene that it was the kind of first scene where straight dudes were wearing glitter and fingernail polish and you know like sparkle um a kind a new style of glam the girls were sort of wearing
I mean, it was – I called them the Egyptians because they had that – they just had that like orientalist weird co-optation of a thousand different looks to make a sort of –
uh, Erykah Badu thing going on, except among white kids.
Talk about a look that's hard to pull off.
Really crazy, right?
And Michael was right in the middle of it with this, with this comb over.
You gotta pick a lane.
In that time, you had to pick a lane, though.
The difficult lane was you shave it all off and go, this is a thing that I do.
And what are you gonna do?
You gonna wear a fucking baseball hat?
No, you have to do like an Allen Berg.
You got to like do like a full like like cover most of your face in his case to cover up a scar.
But yeah, 1997 or something before anybody even tried it.
There was a guy named Dan Spills in Seattle.
He was from Anchorage who played in a couple of big bands, including MockTube.
And he had alopecia.
And so he ended up bald.
But Dan is like a very confident, fun guy, smart guy.
And his baldness was it went along with kind of the quirkiness of the bands he was in and his own sort of quirkiness.
But it stood out.
When I was in college, I feel like you were almost more likely to see a girl shave her head than a guy.
Right.
It was Sinead O'Connor, at least.
Yeah, I remember there was this girl in one of my poetry, she's in several of my poetry classes, and she was actually a really good writer, but she looked like a wood nymph.
She was just this gorgeous little large-eyed creature who was probably like not even five feet tall.
And everybody was like, oh, my God, whatever her name was.
I don't remember.
Like, Tracy, you totally shaved your head.
And she says, yeah, it's like grass, man.
It just grows back.
It's like a bold statement in 1988.
Guys wanted long hair.
We wanted to look like Michael Stipe.
Come on.
I dated a girl in 88 who had cut her hair, you know, who had shenaded her hair, and it was exactly the same situation.
She was like hippie love child and just like, oh, man.
She was, yeah.
So Michael had just... His little tight group of friends had finally convinced him, like, just shave it.
You'll be happier.
And it was happening.
People were shaving their heads.
Michael Stipe is a great example of somebody who quit trying... He's got a good-shaped head.
He's so lucky.
And so Michael did it.
And it kind of transformed him.
And I knew him.
He was a Bunn Family Players fan.
He'd been following...
My progress, we used to have coffee together and he would say, you know, I think you're the songwriter in town that I most identify with.
I want to like, I hope one day we can make music together.
And Michael brought in this guy, Bo, who was a bass player.
He played in a band called Severna Park.
And Severna Park was very much everybody in the band wearing glitter and fingernail polish.
And they were playing super duper pop punk.
And their claim to fame was that they were on MTV's The Real World.
There was some scene where real world Seattle, the kids went to a club and Severna Park was the band that was playing.
So they were on TV.
And they had a lot of fans in the sort of pop punk.
They were all wearing black jeans.
You know, it's that school.
We called them Romulans because they all wore Romulan haircuts, like black bowl cuts with sharp, with pointy sideburns.
And, you know, there's actually...
In the song Medicine Cabinet Pirate, there's a reference to Romulan.
I was going to ask.
I was going to because I know you're a Star Trek fan, but oh, God, that's OK.
But that's a reference to that style of of mid late 90s indie punkers that all looked, you know, they were like totally rocking that straight across bangs black hair look.
Mm hmm.
Anyway, Bo and Michael came in and Stephanie and I were working on these songs and they were like, we're going to help you guys make a record.
That's what they said.
They didn't say they were going to be in the band.
They said they were going to help us make a record.
And I think I still had a vision of making a record that created a scene that got me out of Seattle, that
that became my job that made me a made me the voice of a generation you know i still believed that and i maybe believed it more even because my experience with the bun family players was that i tried to have the beatles in a hard day's night it hadn't panned out and now i just wanted to get some good musicians together and make a record and and it would uh and maybe that's what it should have been all along
so we started to mess around we went into the studio with phillac and we made its five song demo and we played our first show opening for a band called um uh sycophant who were friends of mine and sycophant was a big band at the time it was a kind of a sold out show in a club and we were second of three
And as soon as we took the stage and lit up our guitars, it was clear that we were the thing that I'd been waiting for.
We were a band where all four people were on the same page.
And you could tell from the second we started playing, from the audience response, that we were making a music that no one had heard before.
We were making a music that
Um, well, it had its own sound.
We weren't imitating anybody.
And we became enormously popular right away within a very small universe.
Again, if we had gone to Bumbershoot and opened for King of Hawaii or played after King of Hawaii, nobody would have stayed.
But within this, this little club universe in Seattle, um,
Speaking from the Bunn Family Players era, where it took me three or four years to build up 120 people at a show, the Western State Hurricanes played our second show and there were 200 people there to see us.
And it felt like we might as well be, you know, this might as well be like Nirvana's first show at the Paramount or something.
It just felt like so much energy.
And Bo and Michael immediately dropped the pretense that they were just helping us make a record and were like, we're in this band.
Bo left Saverna Park, which felt like a crazy career move.
But it was a situation where the four of us were in competition with each other.
And you said this earlier that bass players...
tend to be showboats.
The good ones.
The good ones, right.
And Bo was a great bass player and a total showboat.
Like a showboat, he wasn't like up at the front of the stage wagging his tongue.
His style of showboat was he stood his ground on the stage and looked kind of nonplussed.
He didn't really dance.
He didn't really...
He had a smile.
He didn't look mean.
But what Bo was doing was playing the bass.
I know it's not the same, but I'm thinking of John Entwistle.
He would be so still and just doing the craziest shit.
And Entwistle looks severe, whereas Bo looks very approachable.
He did.
He looks like a bird of prey with a water bottle.
Two water bottles.
But his fingers, his right hand would freak me right the fuck out.
You've listened to John Entwistle bass parts soloed?
You know I have.
Yeah, I know you have.
Him and Paul, I will go and listen to, I might have sent you this, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, the bass part on that.
Which, unless you're really listening, you would never know.
But you go and listen to something like, what's the song from Live at Leeds that's so good that he sings, that opens Live at Leeds?
Oh, um... You know the song I mean.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He sings.
But, you know, exactly.
And so you got a laconic guy?
Well, I mean, he certainly was smiling and engaging.
No, what his thing was, was he didn't ever... If he could avoid playing the root note of a chord... Sure.
Because the root note...
was too obvious.
But also, like, if my song went dang-a-dang-a-dang-a-dang-a-dang-a-dang-a-dang-a, Bo's bass part would go, boom, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum.
He was creating separate rhythms.
Yeah.
Separate parts all together.
Magic.
And so the songs were just like, what?
Like, I was doing this, and he's doing that, and then Michael would follow
or according to Bo, Michael never followed anybody.
Michael's kind of in his, Michael also a very showy drummer.
Just playing... Basically, at the start of a set, he would start playing a fill, and the fill would go until the end of the set, and sometimes a little bit over.
It was very loud, too.
He could be a very, very loud drummer.
And also... He would really fill a room.
Amazing time.
He never slowed, he never flagged, he never... I think it's something like Cinnamon, where I still... You've explained, I think you've explained what the fucking rhythm on Cinnamon is to me on half a dozen occasions, and I still...
I can't count that song.
I know it's easier probably than it seems or simpler than it seems, but I still have no fucking idea what's happening in that song.
Well, and Michael's not a... Is it 3-4 against 4-4?
What's happening?
3 against 4, yeah.
Oh, shit.
It's so fucking weird.
We'll talk about Stuart Copeland, right?
I mean, synchronicity.
That's where it comes from.
And Michael taught himself to play the drums on his pillows.
Like, he didn't... That was his tennis racket.
Yeah, his tennis rack.
He'd sit on his bed with drumsticks and his pillow and learn all the police stuff.
But he didn't, he'd never, you know, he's one of those like, I never had a lesson, guys.
And he'd never been in a situation, because he was the best drummer in any band he was in, nobody ever tried to restrain him.
And I didn't try to restrain him because it sounded like music to me.
And what was amazing about Stephanie was her melodic sense.
She was a classical piano player.
And her harmonic sense was very... Your brain gets wired different if you're a very good pianist.
It makes guitar players look like such fucking idiots.
It's like we're just hitting a wall with a ball-peen hammer compared to what a pianist is doing.
Like I'll sit there and watch a YouTube video where somebody will show like there's that famous Leonard Bernstein one, which is like, here's like all these different levels to how you could play this arrangement.
And you're like, I don't even understand how your brain can work like that.
I have no idea.
So you've got to hear and feel music very differently.
If you're really a piano player, like a gifted pianist, it's a different frame of mind.
I could go like, oh, I think that's a G and then a D with added F sharp.
And they're like, well, yeah, but then there's this inversion in this thing.
And this note that's sort of like hinted at with this particular inversion.
And you're like, you're from another planet.
Her thing was just her melodies, her melodic desire was not to be sweet and not to resolve.
Yeah.
She didn't, she did not give you a Beatles harmony.
She didn't give you a Simon and Garfunkel harmony.
She, uh, in a way like her harm, her harmonic nature was, was almost metal.
Um, she would get in close on, on my vocal and instead of doing like a Sean Nelson harmony where she's, if you listen to Sean Nelson's harmony parts soloed,
they sound crazy because Sean is leaping from one sweet harmony to another.
That's what's so bewildering about the beginning of car parts.
It's like how many vocals, who's high, who's low, which part is a organ-ish keyboard sound.
That's why that song is still so breathtaking to me, is when that first stacked chord of singing and music happens.
It's utterly emotionally overwhelming to me, not least because...
The bewildering part, which is you would think Sean sings the high part on that, right?
You would think.
Well, not you, but you know what I mean?
The listener would go, oh, obviously Sean's singing the high part.
But then you're like, no, wait a minute.
John's singing the high part.
Sean's singing the low part.
And there's this thing that turns out to be like a squeaky organ.
And you're like, what is that?
Again, different brain.
Well, Sean would do, if I went up, he would go down.
If I went down, he would go up.
And Stephanie didn't do that.
Stephanie got in real close on
at some you know at a third or a or a
ninth or something, she would find a place against my vocal and then would shadow me in a way that I can't do.
You know, if I'm singing along to a song on the radio and I get in close against them on a harmony and I know where their vocal melody is going to go, I can't stay close because as they start to move, I don't know how to keep up with their thing anymore.
at that immediate distance.
Like, if you listen to her... It's one thing to sing a fifth, and it's another thing to do.
It's called close harmony for a reason.
Try singing along with exactly one of the Everly brothers.
It's really, really hard.
Well, and she would start at the beginning of a part and sing along with me to the end, right?
She's not just throwing harmonies on the sweet bits, right?
She's co-lead vocals in a way.
Mm-hmm.
Well, so we started playing shows.
We had this kind of crazy combination.
We had this drummer that every other band in our scene really envied.
A bass player who was very creative and very... The thing about Bo was he was very cool.
Like, he didn't get... Bo never broke a sweat type of thing.
And he was cute.
Cute guy.
Stephanie was...
was our lead guitar player and was playing.
She was telling me the other day that she remembers the first time that she played a lead on a Western state song where she went from one string to another, like the first five or six songs, all of her lead parts were just moving up and down one string with one finger as you do.
Yeah.
Because she didn't, that was all she felt confident doing.
And then she like,
Came up with a part where she switched to two to a separate string.
And like as she was coming up to that moment, she was like, here we go.
We're going to jump to the we're going up to the D string and did the jump.
She was like, yes.
You know, she was walking me through all this.
And we had a lot of success, right?
We got written about in the paper.
The new music editor, The Stranger, hated us and wrote articles disparaging us every week that only brought more people to our shows because everybody hated him.
Oh, man.
We got offered a recording contract with Sub Pop in the first month or two of being a band.
We were cool.
We got invited to cool parties, but we...
I mean, we didn't care.
We worked.
We practiced three, four days a week.
We practiced for hours and hours at a time.
And the competition was between us.
Everybody in the practice studio was trying to make the song better in their way.
So Bo didn't care what I had in mind.
Bo heard my song and was like, I'm going to tear this apart.
I'm going to make this
I'm going to make this better and I'm going to work my ass off to improve this song with my bass play.
And Stephanie said,
She was working six hours a day, six days a week, trying to get up to the level that she thought this band was at.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, you're describing this all over this long arc, but this feels so different in numerous ways from your other adventures with bands.
Different.
Real different, how it felt, how it sounded.
And then it sounds like all of you adapted to the idea that this could be great.
Immediately, immediately.
And like Stephanie had a kind of thing she did on stage.
Michael plays every drum part as a march.
Like Michael just has this way of taking, you could give him any song and he could just put a march into it.
You know, he will go there with his fills and Stephanie just unconsciously
started to actually march on stage while she was playing her guitar.
She would just march in place and, and it was very striking.
You know, she was a, she was kind of a, she, she fashioned herself as a sort of, um, what would you describe her look?
She did this thing, which was,
you know, a little bit Liz fair, a little bit, who was the, who was the girl that was famous for wearing glasses?
The leads, the girl, Lisa Loeb, right?
She was this, she was kind of a hard rock Lisa Loeb.
Um, you know, she would wear vintage t-shirts that, um, that had, you know, that were just like super fuzz, big muff or whatever, but, but she just combat boots and, and, um,
And horn-rimmed glasses, right?
A thing that... It's just so striking when you see it and really was at the time that communicates like, I'm the fucking lead guitar player in this band.
And she did inhabit it.
I think she never was 100% confident because she was working outside of her... She was always working outside of her comfort zone.
But boy, on stage, you'd never seen anything like it.
And then...
you know, at the center of this band is me.
And I was like, so full of rage and emotion and just like, just internal conflict, self-loathing.
I've been sober for three years, maybe.
Um, so I was just in the, I was, I was just a storm of feeling, but it was all a storm of feeling.
And that was coming out, uh,
Um, like if you squeezed a hard boiled egg in your fingers where the, it was just this, I was, I was extremely ratcheted down too.
I mean, it was, I, I was super intense because I didn't have, there was no healthy outlet for my emotion except for screaming into a microphone, scream singing or not, but I wasn't screaming.
I was fucking just singing loud.
Um,
And so in the moment, in the room, there was not a feeling that the four of us were friends.
There wasn't really even a super strong feeling that we liked each other as people.
We all wanted...
Not to be big stars, although we did want that, but we wanted to be making this music and we wanted to blow people away.
We wanted to blow each other away.
You know, this was a thing where the four of us came together and were throwing everything into this.
And it wasn't necessary that we like each other.
It wasn't necessary that we socialize.
Which is also one of the secrets of the sports stuff.
I looked at the sports guys from a previous episode.
I looked at the sports guys and said, well, I wish I had that kind of conviviality.
But I mean, I can look at my own local basketball team and go, sometimes those guys super don't get along.
And they somehow find a way to have all five people handle the ball on this assist.
Yeah.
And it's real good.
And sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.
But they're trying to outdo each other.
They're playing a very high level game.
And it's not necessarily about friendship in the long run.
That's a very, what an interesting idea to watch something like that.
I mean, there's some kinds of bands like, again, one of my favorites I'm always bringing up is Silkworm, where by the time Silkworm was starting to break a little bit, well, break.
They were starting to kind of get big, and I think they were on Matador at the time.
But famously, when I saw them in Tallahassee, they were in their wearing black suits phase.
And they were a very passionate band, but Joel R.L.
Phelps was so fucking over it, if memory serves, he did a reverse frip.
In his black suit, I believe, he would sit on a chair facing the wall when they played.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
You tell like these guys are making this amazing angry music, but like there, there's some dynamics in these relationships that is, it ain't friendly.
No, and we didn't dislike each other.
You know, we didn't... But it wasn't based on friendship.
It was based on the music.
It started with the music, right?
And the possibilities.
It was not the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night.
We were not... At the end of the show, we each went to a different place in the bar and talked to the people that wanted to talk to us.
We did not stand there arm in arm...
you know, can't wait to get out of here to go to the bar.
And the thing is, we did go to the bar afterwards.
We did meet up just to talk about the band.
But you didn't retire to the treehouse to talk about the next phase of your like, oh my God, oh my God, like we're so great, right?
We would talk about what we were going to do, like what we were going to try and accomplish musically.
But what that also meant was that there was, you know, I had a lot of arrogance and
But my arrogance was matched by the arrogance of my bandmates.
Bo thought he was the most interesting thing in the band.
And Michael always thinks he's the most interesting thing in the room.
Stephanie was in some ways maybe the most interesting thing in the room.
But she was also like very not ambitious as much as just like she was busting her ass.
And so there wasn't a – they weren't following me.
I mean they were dependent on me.
I was the front man.
I wrote the songs.
But Bo was one of those bass players I'm very confident that was like the most interesting part of any song is the bass line.
And he said the reason he wanted to be in this band so badly is that we were the only band that had lyrics.
That's like somebody who's raised on a radish farm saying, like, the only thing I care about in salads is radishes.
Is a radish, right?
So, you know, we were offered this recording contract with Sub Pop.
I kind of famously blew it or I didn't blow it because I didn't want it.
I felt like Sub Pop at that point was kind of beneath our dignity.
Wow.
I really did.
I felt like Sub Pop, yeah, that's a thing from the 90s, but what have they released lately?
The Scud Mountain Boys?
That's great and everything, but this band is too good for that.
It was a musical confidence that we were doing something that was creating a scene, and it was.
And it was something no one else was doing.
It was, it turns out now, it was bridging post-grunge and indie.
It was both things simultaneously.
We were loud.
We had big amps.
We played big, big, big chords.
But it had the song structure, the anti-pop song structure of Built to Spill.
Every song had ten parts.
There was a lot of, I mean, my guitar, even though it was big, it was often cleaner than most, you know, it was kind of a pavement level of clean sometimes.
So we went into the studio, and it was the most ill-conceived thing, I think, looking back at my life, the most ill-conceived thing I ever did.
Stephanie had gotten a job at the guitar store.
Now, if you want to think about how radical that was in 1998, that this Lisa Loeb through Led Zeppelin girl was not only the lead guitar player in a band in Seattle, which as far as I could tell, she was the only one that wasn't in an all-girl band.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah.
It was a dude band with a dude sound, and she was front and center.
You could have a girl playing bass, and she should be named Kim.
You could very occasionally get a girl playing drums.
You could certainly have a girl playing second guitar.
But like, yeah, it's at the time.
And this all sounds silly.
Why am I saying this bullshit?
Well, go back and look around like that's that's what was there.
That's how it was.
And she was also singing co-lead vocals like it was.
She was extraordinary.
And then she went to the fucking guitar store, the trading musician, the dudest of all dude things and got a job selling guitars.
And you, all you had to do was a guy would, you know, you'd just watch it hour after hour.
Guy would walk in and be like, yeah, I'm looking for Les Paul.
And she would go, well, let me take you over and show you some Les Pauls.
And the guy would be like, what?
I mean, I don't want to talk to the receptionist.
I want to like talk.
And she would, you know, she, she just, she dealt with it with such cool.
Like she just didn't give a fuck.
Right.
But so a guy that worked at the trading musician by the name of Scrappy, this dude that was just a fucking mook, you know, just a fucking dude.
No more, no less.
Starts talking to Stephanie at work about how he's got a recording studio in his basement.
He didn't say his basement.
He's built a recording studio, a professional-grade recording studio in a space.
And he's willing to record our debut record for free in order to get exposure.
And at this point, we've got juice in Seattle.
We could have gone to pretty much anybody and made a deal with them to record a record.
Chris Walla had come to us and said, as soon as I'm done with the first Death Cab record, I really want to make the first Western State record.
Oh my gosh.
In our studio in Bellingham.
And in the same exact way that I kind of poo-pooed the sub-pop contract, I was like, that's sweet of you, kid.
But we're looking for a little bit of a bigger sound than your death cab for cutie sound.
As much as I like... I can hear the scare quotes around that.
Yeah.
But this guy, Scrappy, somehow... And for the life of me, I cannot get back inside that moment...
And I honestly think that the only operative word was free.
I will record you for free.
And somehow I thought that getting recorded for free, well, clearly was better than paying money for it.
Because basically all recordings were the same.
We were a great band.
You couldn't fail to record us.
Because recordings were just put up.
This is before I'd made a record, right?
I'd never made a record at this point.
You put up microphones and you record the band, right?
I mean, what else is there?
That's clearly what's happening on a ZZ Top record or a Jane's Addiction record.
They put up, the band was good, and then they put microphones on them and recorded them.
So why would you spend all this money doing it when a guy is willing to do it for free?
That's really stupid, but the logic makes sense.
Those other bands need all that sweetening.
Or something.
Or something.
But in your case, why would we go and spend $5,000?
Because we're good.
If these microphones get set up right and it gets recorded to tape, we're good.
We're good.
I mean, at the time I was making $900 a month.
I thought I was rolling in it.
My rent was $350 a month and I, and I think we paid $200 a month for the practice studio.
I didn't drink anymore.
So my main expenses were, Oh, and I got my coffee for free cause I knew every barista in town.
Oh, so my main expenses, yeah, I had to pay for cigarettes and I had to pay for milkshakes, diner food, you know, but I,
If you're making $900 a month, $5,000 to make a record or even $2,500 just feels like, are we going to get that money?
So we go into this guy's studio and it is in the basement of his house.
It's in the middle of winter.
It's freezing cold, but he's got 10 drum kits in his basement and guitar amps stacked against the wall.
It looks like it's supposed to look good.
And on the desk there, he's got a big reel-to-reel machine.
And so walking in, it's like, yeah, all right, it's a recording studio.
Like, you know, I've been in a reel one a couple of times.
I made a demo tape with Phil Ek.
You know, the Western State Hurricanes tried to, or I'm sorry, the Bunn family players tried to make some demos on a dat player.
Like, I got no experience here.
Mm-hmm.
He sets up his mics.
We start to play.
I don't like Scrappy.
He is not a fun person or a friendly person or what I would think of as an interesting person.
He had these crazy rules, like his wife got home from work at 6 and she needed the house to be quiet, so we had to stop recording at 6 p.m.
every day.
His studio was all the way out in Ballard, so we had to get out to Ballard every day.
Um, like I say, it was freezing in there.
And so we recorded this album and it was not a fun process, but we were a great band at the time.
And so we just, you know, we just went for it on every track and
And we'd been invited to go to South by Southwest, which was the go to go to.
It was like getting invited to Bumbershoot for the Bunn family players, except bigger.
This was a national event.
Well, yeah, and it was before it was, you know, all about computers and entrepreneurs.
It was like, it was one of the bands in Tallahassee got invited to South by Southwest, and it was a huge deal.
Huge deal.
It was like, you know, not exactly getting called up to the big game, but not too far off.
No, only the top rank of Seattle bands got invited to go to South by Southwest.
I had never even heard of it before being invited to go to it.
And we were going to try and finish this album in time to have it made and take it to South by Southwest.
At which point we were certain we were going to hand it out to a bunch of people from Sony, BMG, Universal and whatnot.
And this was it.
This was where the record deal came from.
So November, December, we're in this freezing rain.
The band was only six months old.
And we were making this record and we got, we weren't done.
We didn't finish the album, but we had enough tracks that we could, we were going to mix them and master them and take them down there as like a five song demo.
So we get these tracks.
And this, just to be clear here, this is different from the Phil Eck demos.
Different from the Phil Eck demos.
This is... These are the Scrappy Sessions.
Scrappy demos.
And they're not meant to be demos.
No.
This is an album.
This is a real studio, the Scrappy Sessions.
So I take these tracks to a man named Rick Fisher.
And Rick Fisher was the main engineer...
For the Steve Miller band, post-70s, like... Abracadabra?
He was the Abracadabra era Steve Miller band, like...
Archivist and recording engineer and this guy who had decided he was going to get into mastering, which is a black art.
It's an arcane process in record making where you mix a record, it's all done, and you take it to this magic person.
Bob Ludwig.
who runs the record through some boxes and turns some big knobs in incremental little clicks and clicks and clicks.
To me, it might as well be going to a witch doctor for a blessing.
It's exactly what it is.
It's like, wait a minute, what did you just do?
I not only can't hear what you're talking about, but I can't even see on the meters what you're talking about.
that's why I mentioned Bob Ludwig I mean like there's those names like there's only so many names you see in certain jobs and remember but like it is it's the black art you go to the person who's gonna make this sound good and with CDs it got even harder because there's no compression I mean there's no you know what I mean there's no analog compression with CDs like you gotta get this thing up to this loudness point but then they all gotta be the same and it's like I don't even fucking understand how it works but I know it's hugely important
It's crazy.
And mastering is the entire album, right?
They master each song, but they're also mastering the record.
And the difference between an unmastered record and a mastered record when you put them on the stereo is night and day.
But like you say, beats the shit out of me what's happening.
And I sit on the couch while my records are being mastered and we talk about things and...
You know, and the mastering engineer says, well, what about this?
And I go, hmm.
And then he clicks the knob one tiny little click.
And he's like, what about that?
And I go, yeah, that is.
You ever get your eyes examined?
You ever get your eyes examined?
And they do the thing where you eventually get to the point where they say better or worse, better or worse.
And they show you two.
And like my thought always is, OK, we must be close because now he's just seeing if I'm lying.
I don't know why I would lie, but every time I've ever gone to the eye doctor, I get to the point where I'm like, okay, I'm pretty sure he's gaslighting me to find out if I'm some kind of like a, I don't know, a bad person.
But that's the entire thing with what you're describing.
It's all better or worse, better or worse.
It all literally sounds the same to me.
The eye exam thing is like, there always gets to a point where it's like, well, neither of these are good and they're not different from one another.
Or I mean, they're different from one another, but neither is better.
And the eye exam person always says like, well, just pick the one that seems... And then like a total dick.
Then they flick to the one that's in perfect focus.
And you're like, why did we do that last one?
What was that?
Now, of course, you know this one works.
You knew before you asked me that this works.
But the mastering is a magic.
It really is magic.
And taking this record to Rick Fisher, it was the first time I'd ever been in a mastering studio.
I didn't know what that was either.
And I remember sitting in the chair.
We're on our way to South by Southwest.
I just need to get this record mastered.
And I knew a guy who had a CD maker.
And I should say that that Philek demo that we recorded six months prior, we put out as a cassette tape.
And this was going to be a CD.
Like this year, 1998-99, was the year when...
Bands went from cassette tapes to CDs as demos or as things to sell at shows.
And my whole life, you know, you bought a cassette tape at a show.
uh and so getting it onto a cd was such a black art my band's first cd was 98 second cd was 99 and like but it was such a black art and unfortunately our second cd was not very well mastered and some of the songs were really loud and some were really quiet and i hate it till this day sounds unmastered yeah now now i hear the difference thanks still yeah no but you're right it was like because because cassettes you'd sit there and dub a bunch of cassettes and you'd sell them for five bucks or three bucks or whatever yeah
And this was, you had to go down to the edge of town in a warehouse.
And there was a guy that was making CDs with a crazy machine that he bought.
Anyway, I'm sitting in the studio with Rick Fisher.
And Rick is listening to the songs.
And he's saying, and Rick Fisher, let's be honest.
I've known Rick Fisher for a long time since this.
Because Rick Fisher started a mastering studio called RFI.
And we tried to work together with The Long Winters.
And eventually, Rick hired Ed Brooks, who took over mastering for him gradually.
Ed Brooks is a great man and one of my favorite people in the world.
He's the guy that does all the mastering for all the Pearl Jam live stuff that they put out.
Ed is just a genius.
Rick is an asshole.
And Rick and I used to fight.
during the long winter's days this is my first experience of rick and he was listening he was matt trying to master this thing and he was like um there's not much i can do with this this record is recorded so badly the scrappy sessions the scrappy sessions oh god that there's just you know that's not what you want to hear i can't really get it to sound good i don't there's no technology in the world
And I was sitting there saying like, well, what do you need from me?
Like, what can I get you that will help you?
Or like,
And he's like, well, there's nothing you can get me.
This was recorded.
I was re-watching some old Deadwood last night, and it would be like basically going to the guy saying, you know what, your claim's not going to play out.
You're like, oh, so should I get some different pans and pails?
He'd be like, no, you're not understanding.
Like, you got played.
I'll swear engine played you.
Like, there's no gold here.
And you're like, oh, okay, so like, what are you going to do?
Buy different lands.
Mm-hmm.
That's you.
Here's you.
You.
This is you.
Go find other land.
Because that's so depressing.
After all that fucking work and driving and being cold to hear that the dude is not going to be able to do anything with it.
That's the worst.
I didn't know what I was doing.
And it turned out nobody in the band did either.
I don't know about drum sounds.
I don't know about bass sounds.
I didn't know about...
tape machines I was just still just like my songs and here we are and we're a great band now and it's proved by the crowd the crowds we're getting and the fact that people love what we're doing and I can hear that it's great what do you mean this record doesn't sound good and Rick Fisher said the drums sound like cardboard boxes and the bass isn't even on the tape really
um so so just to trace this back if you're not a super dumb uh nerd um so it's something where like you know in a lot of cases if he didn't like the mix of the way stuff uh have been mixed you could go back and change the mix but he's saying it was poorly recorded well so here's what i learned later scrappy his professional recording studio was based around a 16 track
Quarter-inch tape recorder.
Oh, and half-inch is the standard.
Well, two-inch is the standard.
That's the big gray boxes.
The big gray box that has the big tape...
Oh, shit.
So there's... You break... Oh, shit.
And it's almost like with a four-track in the sense that you're putting way... You're trying to get a lot of information onto too small a piece of real estate, kind of.
You basically have in a... It's not going to sound like a revolver.
No.
In a... Like, an eight-track quarter-inch would be...
At the time, a kind of prosumer level thing.
A 24-track 2-inch became kind of the industry standard.
In the kind of mid-70s, it was a 16-track 2-inch.
So 16 tracks of information spread across 2-inch wide tape.
But this was 16 tracks of information spread across a quarter inch of tape.
Oh, my God.
Meaning that it doesn't matter how well you played.
It doesn't matter if it were miked and recorded.
Well, it doesn't matter how well it was miked and recorded.
You're basically trying to do a very, very large Baroque painting with an 8-bit video game system.
There's not enough information on there to do anything with.
There's less tape.
There's less space of actual tape than on a 4-track game.
cassette recorder yeah like like if you do it like in the ratio of like if you slip if you slip the tape by tape well i didn't know that that's why you that's why you hire a scrappy to take care of that i've got 16 tracks and i was like wow that's you know that's how that's as many tracks as they used to on night at the opera or whatever yeah and so rick fisher did what he could and
We put some of the Phil X stuff and some of the scrappy stuff together on a CD.
Rick Fisher could not make them sound anything close to one another because the Phil X stuff was recorded on 24 track two inch.
Proper.
Big boy tape.
Well, so we went to South by Southwest and it was a really hard trip.
Didn't have a van we did I didn't have the good sense to rent a van Stephanie's mom had a minivan we took the middle seat out and laid our amps and guitar cases flat on the on the floor of the minivan and covered them with pillows and blankets and drove down to Austin on the drive down and
sort of at the end of a day when the sun was going down, I pulled over at a rest stop somewhere in Eastern Oregon or, or, uh, Nevada.
And I said, well, that's about it for today.
Let's roll out our sleeping bags here somewhere under these picnic tables and get some sleep.
Tomorrow's a big day.
And the other three were like, what?
Like my sense is that the other three members of the band had never stayed in a motel.
It was they were already scared of the roughing it that would be involved in staying at a roadside motel that we didn't know what it was going to be.
Wow.
And my thing was up until that point, all traveling that I'd done when it was time to go to sleep, I unrolled my sleeping bag under a bush.
I'd never stayed in a motel either.
But because it was a luxury, it was too much.
It was too great an expense.
And they said, no, no, we're not going to sleep outside.
And I was, I was like astonished.
What do you mean?
Where are we going to sleep?
We don't know anybody in Nevada.
And they were like, you know, hotel.
And it was, we'd been a band now for, for seven months.
And this was news to me.
That I was going to have to get hotels for people.
With what money?
Yeah.
So I did.
I got them hotels, but I was like, I was shocked.
Yeah.
And they were shocked.
I think shocked that they had to share hotel rooms with each other.
I mean, I got a hotel room that had two beds in it.
And I don't remember whether we moved all this stuff in from the van at night.
I think we probably did.
Anyway, we got to South by Southwest.
We played our show.
And after the show, and the show was a success, after the show, there was a big line of people that wanted to talk to us, and they were all waving their business cards from their record labels.
And we were handing out our CD.
And I started collecting these business cards and talking to these label heads.
And I realized that they were all label heads that
and band managers at the exact same level that the western state hurricanes were like they were not from universal records or sony it's like that line in it's like the line in roger and me where the sheriff who's evicting everybody says don't marry anybody poorer than you exactly it was exactly that don't like they are hoping that the western state hurricanes will be the thing that helps their fledgling label a little bit like scrappy like scrappy yeah you're gonna stick it to the big time
And it was a disappointment.
Oh, shit.
And then we had a tour, our first tour, which was with Death Cab for Cutie on their first headlining tour back from South by Southwest to Seattle.
And we played, you know, six, seven dates.
We played Bottom of the Hill.
We played Spaceland.
We played all the, you know, all the venues that we would later come play triumphantly as the Long Winters.
And by the end of the tour, we were exhausted.
We hated each other.
and nothing had worked out this record that we made sounded terrible nobody it sounded terrible we didn't want to listen to it the trip to south by southwest had not produced any great leads the tour was hard we didn't enjoy i mean and mostly it was that i didn't understand that i needed to provide for these people it was my it was my band i needed to make them comfortable
I didn't see that as my job.
We all were so independent of one another that I was like, well, now at what point am I the one that has to
pay for everything it was like well somebody has to the band has to so so right at the point when you are most stuck in these spaces physical and mental together or automotive um it's also when some some things that maybe should have been fundamental discussions are are going to come up
I didn't even know about a drum sound, let alone how to manage a band.
So there's a shared sense of disappointment in each other by the end?
Well, it was just like... Because you're going to blame each other eventually, right?
I mean, you get to the point where it's like, well, that didn't work out and now somebody's going to Monday morning quarterback that into, well, you know, the blame game about why the drums weren't good and we only met a bunch of losers in Austin.
It was... What happened was we got back to town and Stephanie and I both said...
Well, we need to fucking double down.
We need to go back into the studio.
We need to write a bunch of new songs.
We need to take another swipe at this.
And this time, get it right.
And we got back to town.
We went into the... Because after we got back from the tour, we didn't... We were like, let's take a couple of weeks off.
We don't need...
uh, to get right back at it.
Cause that was hard.
But here we were, it was spring.
Now the birds were chirping and we all met at the practice studio and we went in and I said, okay, I've got a couple of new songs.
Cause I was writing like crazy.
I was so inspired at this point in my life.
And we sat and we, we worked on some new songs.
We practiced for a couple of hours and then we took a break and we all kind of went out in front of the practice studio and smoked some cigarettes and
At which point Bo said, I should tell you that I'm leaving the band.
And Michael said, I am too.
Oh, wow.
And they were like, we talked about it and we kind of just don't want to be in the band anymore.
And Stephanie and I were just like, what?
Are you talking about?
We've all tried to be in bands our whole lives.
And now we're in a band, a great band, a popular band.
We're really at the beginning.
We're only two steps up the ladder.
What do you mean you're leaving the band?
And they each had a story about like, oh, Bo got offered a job at Microsoft as a technical writer.
Michael...
was doing something, writing a thing for somebody.
And it was just over.
And I, and I remember saying like, why did we just practice for two hours?
Right.
In that moment.
Yeah.
And they were like, well, you know, just figured, I mean, in a way it was, they were so lackadaisical that they sort of felt like, yeah, let's practice for a couple of hours and then we'll break up the band.
Like it,
they just were, it just was, it just seemed crazy to me.
And you know, the story from that moment on, I went and quit my job.
I left, I moved out of my apartment and like two and a half weeks later, I was walking across Europe.
I left it all.
So about two years later,
after i'm in harvey danger and after i've started you know working on the first long winner's record a guy named chuck robertson who was a harvey danger friend who took the photographs that were on the cover of where have all the merrymakers gone like chuck was their roommate and took all those pictures chuck came to me and said
The missing Western State Hurricanes record is the great record of its time.
And the fact that it never came out is a tragedy.
And I want to see it released.
Because the tools have changed, right?
This is only two years later.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
And I said, the record is garbage.
I don't even know where it is.
You should leave it alone.
It's like somebody wanting to release a boutique photo book of you and your ex from a few years earlier.
It's like, who would buy that?
Right.
I'm on to a different thing.
I don't care about this.
I'm working on a different thing.
Well, it turned out Scrappy had moved to Texas and had taken the tapes with him.
And Chuck was so convinced that this missing record was the secret album that was going to be huge in Australia that he flew to Texas and went to Scrappy.
And Scrappy said, well, I recorded this record for free on the condition that it be put out, but it never came out.
And so if you want this record, you have to buy it from me.
Because I put all my blood, sweat, and tears into it.
Oh, jeez.
And Chuck paid him.
Everybody's got an angle.
Chuck paid him.
What?
$5,000.
Holy shit.
For an album that wasn't worth $500.
And he brought it back.
And he got John Goodmanson, the great recordist, the great producer.
He was a Harvey Danger guy, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, producer.
He made the Harvey Danger record.
He made the Slater Kinney Records.
He's a famous dude.
And they got two days in the studio.
They went in.
They had to find a machine that would play these tapes.
They spent two days trying to mix this album.
And John Goodmanson said, not only is this album unmixable and unlistenable, but it's what broke up the band.
Because to make a record that sounds this bad would discourage you to the point that you wouldn't want to be in a band anymore.
Oh, God.
And he was right, you know.
So the tapes went up on the wall at the hall of justice and they sat there for 10 years.
And anytime somebody said, Hey, do you want to do anything with those tapes?
I was like, you can throw them in the garbage, but nobody ever did.
Chris Walla one day was having all the bands come down and take their tapes out of the studio.
After he took it over, I went down and got them along with a bunch of long winters tapes and other tapes and took them and put them in my mom's basement where they sat for another 10 years.
They ended up in a storage space.
And last year, a guy named Pete Greenberg called me up and said, the lost Western state hurricanes record is the great record of its time.
And I said, I'm afraid you're wrong.
It sounds like garbage.
And he said, no, I think that it is.
I think that it's the missing thing and we need to resurrect it.
And I said, here are the tapes.
I don't care about them.
I don't want to ever hear them again.
If you want to put effort into it, you will discover that it is terrible.
Pete went and found a machine that would play those tapes, which he had to rent from a museum.
They took the tapes into a recording studio.
Oh, God.
They baked them, which means that the tapes were no longer playable, but if you put them in an oven for five hours, you can play them a couple of times.
Yeah.
I mean, you're used to hearing that about old films or something, right?
I mean, this medium was never meant to be archival.
Or if it was, it had to be in a temperature control room.
Right.
It had to be in some kind of vault under Nevada.
Yeah.
They put these tapes into digital computers.
Everybody listened to them and said, this is the worst sounding record.
How long till the next one comes along?
But Pete Greenberg called Eric Corson and said, Eric, you're a recordist now.
If I give you these tapes, is there anything you can do with them?
And now we get to the point where computer technology becomes a component.
Because Eric says, I can use Michael's drum parts as triggers.
Holy shit, right.
To trigger sounds.
so that Michael's playing is preserved.
It's almost like a player, it's like a digital player piano.
It's hit, it's going to hit samples of John Bonham's drums or Stuart Copeland's drums that have been manufactured.
And so basically the drums just create a MIDI pattern of velocity and tempo and you assign it to the samples and you
It plays.
So I went over to Eric's one day and he called up a song and he played it, but it had these samples in it and you can hear their samples, but all of a sudden the sound, the songs were alive because we were a great band and the guitars were recorded.
Fine.
The guitars were just for, you know, 57 onto an amp.
They don't need a ton of, uh,
not like bass and drums.
And the vocals all sounded fine.
Well, so Eric and I listened to a couple of tracks and I'm like, are you telling me that computers can save this unlistenable disaster?
And Eric said, yeah, I think so.
It's going to suck.
It's going to be a lot of work.
And then Eric said, but I don't want to do it.
I don't want to do this.
This is too much work.
The capturing from tape or the turning it into making it good?
Turning it into making it good.
Because it's not just like... So he could provide some updated digital assets that could let somebody do it.
But it would be just so much work.
Yeah.
Because he can't just... It's not just set it and forget it.
If it goes... It's just like, this is just the...
pessimist and project manager and me would want to ask the question.
And so if this goes not only flawlessly, but 10 times better than we expected, the positive result will be what?
Right.
So it sat there and two months ago I said, you know what?
This is as close as this has ever gotten.
And if I don't do something now,
about this no one ever will again and so i said to pete greenberg and to chuck robertson and to everybody in the world except scrappy who i don't want to talk to i said i'm gonna just take over this project right now for a second and i rented a studio and
And it was Hall of Justice.
And my friend Floyd, who recorded Putting the Days to Bed, he and I went in and we started to see what we could do.
And it was a mess.
But we started adding samples.
We ran the bass out through a big bass amplifier and put a mic in front of it and recaptured it.
but recorded in a room with a good mic.
We started layering samples.
After a couple of days at Hall of Justice, we moved over to Litho, which is Stone Gossard's studio, and we took the sampled drums along with the original recordings and ran them out into the main room through giant speakers and re-recorded
The sound of the drums being played in a giant room.
This is insane.
We ran that back in along with the samples and the original drums.
And then put the drums and bass together out into the room and recorded that back in.
And this is, to state the obvious, this is creating a much more live sound than what was originally captured.
And we're getting it like, and we have the information now.
Now, it's not perfect, right?
Because the drums were recorded so badly that you can only do so much.
And Michael's playing is so distinctive.
You can't just sample in some, it's not just like throw in some beats, you know, his, you have to have his nuance.
Right.
Right.
But you can add kick drum, you can add snare, you can add stuff.
So I started working on this and, you know, I'm paying modern studio rates.
But it is incredibly cathartic because this band comes alive.
The songs are all there.
And these are the songs of the first Long Winters record, except recorded by
this crazy band, this hard rock band where all these songs were, where, where they all originated.
And as it comes alive, I'm just sitting in there day after day.
Like,
you know, not exactly tears streaming down my face, but I know now how to listen to this and realize we were a good band.
I know what a baseline is now.
And I recognize that both baselines are amazing, right?
I understand what Stephanie was doing now and I can't believe that she was doing it.
I love Michael's drumming.
And, and also I can't believe what I was doing.
Like we were awesome.
So five days into it, I've spent thousands of dollars.
Really?
And five, six, six days into it.
And it is the best thousands of dollars I ever spent.
Oh, wow.
It's like going on a freaking vacation to 20 years ago.
And in a way, getting a do-over.
So I work on this stuff.
Ben Gibbard comes by one day and sits in the studio with me all day listening to songs.
And here's what we've done and is bouncing off the walls because this band was formative to him, right?
This was the first band he ever went on tour with really.
And he's like, it sounds like the band.
It sounds like the hurricanes.
You know, there's no record of this band really, except for that cassette.
Right.
So I start, so the, the hurricanes themselves come down one at a time, Beau, Stephanie, Michael.
And they sit and listen to the tracks and we start talking.
And Bo says, when I broke up that band, I thought that everything I did was going to turn to gold and that I was going to leave the hurricanes and I was going to start another band.
And it was also going to be the biggest band in Seattle.
And I was, everything I did was going to be a success.
But he said, this was actually my peak at,
I never played this well again.
I never was in a band this big again.
Um, after I broke up the band, like three months later, I stopped getting invited to parties.
Like this was it for me.
And I heard it from everybody.
Like this was it.
So two days ago, I finished the album completely mixed with,
It is 10 songs.
Almost all of them you've heard.
There's one song that didn't end up being a Long Winter song.
But they are a completely different animal.
It's a rock band, not a studio project.
And now I have this album.
Wow.
This album that in a way is like
I mean, it's all these things.
Any fan of the Long Winters already knows these songs.
You've seen these songs played a hundred times.
And you know, the live Long Winters were a completely different band than the recorded Long Winters.
Also, it's a record of this weird time between rock and indie.
And it's a band that nobody's really ever heard of.
And making it was its own reward.
But I have a fucking album that I've been kind of busting my ass on.
And it sounds amazing.
And so I'm in this weird, it's almost like finishing my book about my walk across Europe.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, now what?
I mean, it's like getting that diploma in the mail.
Mm-hmm.
like oh this was this took me 20 years uh but like playing it for my bandmates you know they were crying it it healed us in a weird way i didn't you know we all felt repaired
Well, that's interesting.
What the fuck?
I mean, just so many false starts.
And what's the phrase you use?
A vacation to 20 years ago.
Yeah.
And it sounds like... Well, I don't know what it sounds like.
You tell me what it sounds like.
I mean, you know...
Yeah, like, so where does that leave you now?
Because just based on the past two hours and 26 minutes of talking to get to this point, I'm guessing this means more to you than something you'll put into a pretty slipcase and put on the bookshelf, or that it's animating something else in you that maybe surprised you.
What's it mean to you today?
I mean, I could ask you the dumb, obvious question, so what are you going to do with it?
But I mean, what does this make you want to do right now that you didn't have the same feeling about a couple months ago, for example?
Well, Pete Greenberg wants to put it out, and there's a method of this where I will just hand it off to him and he'll print it on vinyl.
Of course, he wants to do a crowdfunding thing, and he wants...
the crowdfunding thing is all going to come from me, right?
He doesn't have any crowdfunding capacity.
So I'll be out there like, Hey, I've got this record.
If anybody wants to buy it and you can buy it here, click the link type of thing.
Right.
And so surely we will do that.
But I actually went and took some tracks down to a studio and
yesterday and talked to a recording engineer that i'd never met before but that is a contemporary of mine and said like here's some tracks what do you think we could do with it and he said let's make a record i sent my book off to a girl that i knew that that was a listener to our program a gal i've known for a long time she came to seattle this winter and at one point said you know i love roderick on the line so much and i want to help you
so much.
And I'm an editor.
Why don't you give me your book and just let me edit it.
And I said, I said, like the Western state hurricanes record, the book is garbage.
It's just like a long continuous journal entry stream of consciousness.
And she was like, I'm sure it's amazing.
Let me just go in and do a really hard edit.
I'll just take out all the terrible stuff.
And then you, and then you'll have a jumping off point to like work on the good stories.
And I said, sounds good.
And I gave it to her.
And at the time she said like, well, I won't be able to get to it till March.
And I said, no problem.
And yesterday I sent her a text and I was like, hey, how's that coming?
And she wrote me an email and she said, well, unfortunately the book is not very good.
And I was like, I know.
And she said, I thought that it was going to be full of campfire scabetti party stories, but it's really just a long journal entry.
And I was like, right, I know.
And she said, so I'm really not the one to help you.
And I was like, oh, oh, oh, okay.
Well, thanks, I guess.
You know, like that.
And it was like, it's been a week of hard lessons.
But I think the Western State Hurricanes record is going to come out.
I think it's going to come out on vinyl.
A thing which didn't even exist in 1999.
This is the 20-year anniversary of it.
Also, this is the 20-year anniversary of my walk.
Like on this day in 1999, I was somewhere in the area around Munster, having just left Seattle because of the failure of this album that I'm working on.
And so the book and the album...
are both 1999 products.
I'm 20 years away from them and I'm thinking about them both and working on them both.
And I don't know, that doesn't feel like a triumph.
You know, that feels like a person stuck, stuck, having spent 20 years stuck.
But I'll tell you what, Merlin, working on this record, it did not feel like stuck.
It felt like,
It felt like a strange gift to be able to do it.
That was a hell of a week.
Does it... So if we bracket the very understandable bits of closure, for better or for worse, potentially, that this represents for you, possibly, does it also make you want to make new, different... How can I put this?
How does this change what could become your focus in the next few months?
I didn't realize it's very early, but, like, okay, so let me toss it out.
Like, if I found myself listening to something like that that I had thought was dead for a long time ago, my first thought might be, oh, my God, I really want to go play a live rock show.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, it could be something that's slightly more than just, like, oh, I want to, like, put this on the market.
Like, I could see this making you want to, maybe learning that about the book could make you want to say, you know what?
What if I started by acting like I was writing an article for The Atlantic and that's the thing I want to do?
You know what I mean?
Like, does it stimulate...
Is it still too early or does it potentially, and you certainly have your big June coming up, what does it stimulate in terms of what you might want to, what does it make you want to do?
Well, so Stephanie has some kind of debilitating condition now that she fears prevents her from playing the guitar.
And so when we started talking about doing a show together, a Western state show, she said, I don't think I can play the guitar.
I can't hold it.
But Ben, in listening to the track, said, don't worry, I'll play guitar in the Western State Hurricanes.
Send me the tracks, I'll learn all the guitar parts.
Wow.
So there's a version of the Western State Hurricanes with Ben Gibbard on guitar that is available for shows.
Um, I don't know if I want to do, I don't know if I want, I certainly, that would be one or two shows, right?
There's no market for that anywhere except Seattle on a Saturday night in, in September.
But it's a, it's a possibility.
The, the, the realization that the book is garbage isn't really a real, a realization, but the idea that you just said, which is like, well, why not?
Like if people like campfire spaghetti, spaghetti party, um,
Why not start there?
Yeah.
And write, you know, I always wish that our show had, that there was some kind of transcription software that actually would transcribe things.
But I've told a lot of the stories of my walk on the show in ways that would be great jumping off points if I just had a transcript to work from.
I could figure that out somehow, you know, and just not try and work from the manuscript, but just work from memory.
Mm-hmm.
do i want to make a new record yes but i'm just as i'm just as i love being in the studio i love making music i'm just as impacted and and my insides are just as as inhibited and fractured as they were six months ago about the prospect of going in with a new song and partly merlin it is that i don't know what i want it to sound like yeah
I don't know whether I want it to be a band or a guy with an acoustic guitar and some strings or a grunge or, you know, I still don't know whether I want it to sound like Billy Gibbons or not.
But the...
This is why I said, for better or for worse, some kind of closure.
Because it's interesting, I mean, like, as somebody who's just hearing this now, I mean, and according to this, as you're telling of the story, but, like, on the one hand, there's this thing that you were existentially cock-blocked about for over years and years and years and years, which is, like, you knew in 1999 that, like...
This is what made your band break up in some ways.
It's like, okay, this thing is shit.
We can't do anything with it.
There's nothing to be done to this.
You've had these other things come up over time.
So, you know, I mean, to get to a point where you listen to it, your bandmates listen to it, you know, and everybody's excited about it.
So that's one that was unresolved.
that certainly turned out kind of cool and interesting and promising.
Because there could be different worlds of possibility that come out of that.
I can imagine five or six different things you might choose to do in the near to medium term as a result of that going positively.
And on the other hand, you get your news from the editor person about the book, but that's another kind of closure.
The closure in that case is, like in some way, the one that's much more dangerous is the Western State Hurricanes record.
In some ways.
Like, the one that's actually, like, really promising in some ways is the book.
Like, for that book thing to be, like, you thought in some part of your head all along, oh, yeah, I think this sucks.
It'd be nice to get an attaboy out of this.
And instead, you didn't get an attaboy.
And you got a, hmm, you know, I don't know.
I'm not the person for this, right?
There's kind of closure in some ways.
And holy shit, can't that be kind of a relief in some ways?
And who knows what this kind of stuff could stimulate in you?
It's interesting.
It must feel like a perilous time.
I mean, having possibilities in your life can seem strange and foreign.
It's part of living my life without ever having a plan or a target or a goal is that these things that don't get finished
They're, they're these boat anchors, but if they were all finished, you know, the losing the college degree as an unfinished thing and putting it into the finished camp did exactly what I thought it would, which is for a few weeks I was like, huh.
And now it's just like, Oh yeah.
Yeah.
like i i i don't have the ability really to feel triumph or i've never allowed it or i just don't have it you know i can't be it's very hard for me to be proud and so these things are done if they get done i'll be like wow for a little bit but
In a way, maybe I don't – I mean, I'm afraid to not have any albatross or any boat anchors.
Right, right.
But also – You might just float into the sky.
I never, ever, ever felt the feeling that I felt finishing this Western State record, which was that some psychic damage got repaired.
Right.
It's like a thing I always go back to my old girlfriends at some point and say like, hey, you know, and I'm not trying to hook up with them.
I'm legitimately like, hey, a lot of time has gone by just hoping that like we could be friends or that we could sit down together and review our relationship and maybe come up with some answers or some reason that it still feels bad to me because it still feels bad.
And I wish it didn't.
And I would like you to tell me that I was okay or that you understand or that you're fine now or something that we could sit there and maybe cry or just go through it again, but in a way where we are older now and better.
And, you know, 99% of the time, the person I'm seeking that from goes, no, thanks.
Mm-hmm.
And I go, really?
You don't, I know you feel bad.
I feel bad.
You, there's nothing, you don't think anything could be gained by just like, I don't know, just, just getting a chance to remix that record somehow.
Like, I like, believe me, I don't want to get into a thing with you.
I'm just trying to solve this hurt and nobody wants to do it.
And, and,
And so I carry around all this luggage of hurt.
And this was a big luggage of hurt that I finally got to unpack.
And, you know, my book is also, it's the same.
It's just a big bag of hurt.
And the hurt is both in the book and also in the fact that the book never got completed.
And every attempt I made to complete it just added more hurt to the bag.
instead of ever getting taking it out and so the only thing that can that can release that hurt is i mean i don't know what it is people tell me that what it is is to forget it to take the book and throw it on a fire but i don't feel like that would unpack the hurt i feel like the only way to do it is to finish it somehow and this hurricane's record it just
It feels like that.
It feels like if this thing makes it all the way out and comes out and people either applaud or don't, I won't feel any pride past about three weeks out.
It will immediately be like, huh, yeah, just as I feel about all my records.
Like, yeah, I mean, I did those things.
Could have been better or whatever.
But I won't feel that pain.
Like the Long Winters records, I don't feel any hurt about the things that they missed.
You know, they are what they are.
And they could have been different, but they aren't.
There's no bag associated with them.
This record just coming out in any capacity will like
So much pain will drain out of me and I've never lived a day pain free.
I don't have no idea what that would be like.
I don't even, that's a weird goal.
Um, that was never a goal until I just said it.
Mm hmm.
then maybe i would make a start a new record i don't know maybe i'd send some tracks to amy man i mean you know i don't know merlin what am i here for why are we on this earth