MERCURY REV HAVE SUDDENLY FOUND themselves the hottest name in rock. It's an extraordinary turnaround for a band best known for the chaotic experimentation of their live shows and the frankly weird cast of their three previous albums - and all the more extraordinary given that a couple of years ago, following 1995's pivotal See You On The Other Side, the group effectively ceased to exist, collapsing in upon itself in a welter of anomie and disaffection. Disillusioned with their continuing lack of success and the (not entirely unconnected) lack of record company support from their American label, Columbia, the Rev's commitment had all but drained away. Flautist Suzanne Thorpe quit to return to college. Bassist Dave Fridmann had already retired from live performance due to the demands of his other career as a studio owner/engineer (recent commissions include work with The Flaming Lips and Mogwai, as well as Deserter's Songs itself). As for the band's original drummer, Jimmy Chambers, he drifted away during the recording of the new LP.
| "One day, he just walked out of the studio kitchen and didn't
return," recalls the band's singer and chief songwriter, Jonathan Donahue.
"Nothing was said - I mean, we still talk all the time - but I think the touring was
going to be too much for him: he's married and needs to spend more time at home, and he's
got some of his own music he's pursuing." As things fell apart, Donahue himself - pictured on the rear sleeve of See You On The Other Side despondently loading a revolver - suffered a couple of nervous breakdowns. The band's lead guitarist and resident oddball musical genius, Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak, meanwhile, checked into one of the dozen or so monasteries near their Hudson Valley home in New York State for a few months ."I went into a Jesuit monastery for a little mental cleansing," Grasshopper explains. |
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"It's a rigid lifestyle - you have to wake up really early and do chores and gardening, and copy things long-hand from one book into another. It's not something I could do permanently; some of the people I met in there had been there for years, but for me it was just a nice getaway."
Returning from his "nice getaway" to a still unstable situation which found the band between deals, Grasshopper seized the opportunity to release his own album, The Orbit Of Eternal Grace, with a group, The Golden Crickets, whose line-up reflected the transitional state of the parent band - with Thorpe, Fridmann and Donahue all helping out alongside new Rev members the Russo brothers, Jason (bass) and Justin (keyboards).
In many ways, it's something of a throwback to the earlier Rev style of audacious pop experimentalism, compared to the stately new sound of Deserter's Songs.
"That was done when we were between Columbia and V2," says Grasshopper. "I did a few of those tracks for the Excursions And Ambiences series, but Sony wouldn't let them be released, so when we left Sony I took the opportunity to do some of that stuff before we signed to V2, just to get it out of my system."
MERCIFULLY, JUDGING BY THE BAND'S RECENT LIVE shows, Grasshopper hasn't completely eradicated his more experimental impulses from his system. Whether punctuating songs with discreet wah-wah chops, or getting into full-on Neil Young mode for the set-closing cover of "Cortez The Killer", he always brings a little extra to the party, ready to vault into the musical unknown at a moment's notice. This impulse - a tendency which, admittedly, he shared with the entire group - was the defining characteristic of the band's shows from its earliest days in the late Eighties, when the Rev was formed from a bunch of friends at various colleges in and around the Buffalo area.
"We were all friends, the original six of us, and somewhere along the line we just started making music, playing at parties and so on," recalls Donahue. "But we couldn't afford to spend too much time in a studio - that's why the first album [Yerself Is Steam, 1991] took three years to make. It was probably only 15 days' recording in total, but we could only afford to go in once every four or five months. We sent it to a few American independent labels, like SST and Homestead, and either got nothing back, or rejection letters. We thought, 'This is going nowhere fast."'
"We did Yerself Is Steam on our own money, working to earn enough to record it," adds Grasshopper. "I worked in a plastic factory, making plastic bottles and stuff, and Jonathan used to give blood and do jack-hammering, construction, stuff like that. Then, whenever we had some money, we'd book some studio time."
They made as much use as possible of their college connections, recording at Fredonia State College's studio, where Dave Fridmann was the engineer, and using film student Grasshopper's expertise to record on to 35mm magnetic film stock, which they claim gives the music a slightly warmer feel than usual.
"My course was pretty much about avant-garde filmmaking techniques," explains Grasshopper, who studied under structuralist film-makers Paul Sherrits and Tony Conrad, the latter famed as much for his minimalist collaborations with LaMonte Young and German avant rockers Faust as for his invention of the "flicker film" the precursor of the strobe-light - which was used by The Velvet Underground in their early shows.
With such airtight avant-garde credentials, it's hardly surprising that Mercury Rev's early albums should be such delirious, other-worldly mixes of the tuneful and the chaotic. Playing rock music as if it were jazz, they cracked open formal pop structures to reveal the songs' beating hearts through exhilarating improvised excursions which, as often as not, tumbled headfirst into sonic chaos before being dragged back by their fingertips to something approaching normalcy. They were uncommonly open to bizarre musical strategies: at a Royal Albert Hall gig supporting The House Of Love, for instance, they hung three guitars above the stage, feeding the instruments' resonant noise into the live mix. At times, it seemed as if they were playing two completely different pieces of music at once, in the manner of American classical composer Charles Ives, who sought to evoke the sound-clash of several marching bands as they paraded through the streets.
"There's certainly some of that," agrees Donahue, "plus the influence of people like Gordon Jenkins and Ray Ellis, who did arrangements which are left of centre, but not quite avant-garde. There's certainly a few dream-like takes to every song - not in the sense of instrumental takes, but mind-sets or ideas; within each song, there's two or three different streams of consciousness going on, so at times it might seem as if there's several different songs playing at once. But we're trying to make them less competitive with each other than they might have been in the past."
EVENTUALLY, THE GROUP SIGNED IN 1991 TO JUNGLE Records, a British label mostly dedicated to punk-rock reissues; not wishing to be considered thus, they asked for Jungle to put Yerself Is Steam out on the band's own Mint Film imprint. It was enough of a success for the band's contract to be bought by Beggars Banquet in the UK and Columbia in the US. A second album, Boces, followed in 1993.
"Boces," explains Donahue, "is a school system in New York for kids who are more inclined towards vocational skills -fixing cars, hairdressing, masonry. Parents would threaten that if you weren't good they'd send you to Boces, because that's where all the pot smoking kids would go, the ones who didn't have the motivation to get through public school. The way we were doing that album, it just seemed more of a vocational album, a hands-on thing, so it seemed to ring true. Boces was recorded while we were in the middle of touring Yerself Is Steam, which is why it's the bizarre metal machine music it is: we were coming back from long foreign tours, which we'd never done before, so we were just completely emotionally fried, and we'd go right into the studio and get crazy."
The first cracks were starting to appear in the band, however, and by the time of the third album, See You On The Other Side, vocalist David Baker had left. Oddly, his departure stabilised both the band and the music for a while, resulting in a much more controlled, tightly-structured sound than before.
"I think it was more the fact that Grasshopper and I were sharing an apartment," believes Donahue, "and we finally had a place that was like a safe haven from all the turbulence and chaos of Boces, so it became a more serene record than in the past. And, with David leaving, it was a lot easier manoeuvring through musical ideas. David didn't have a large part in most of material on the first two records; lyrically, when he sang, it was all him, but musically it was all us. It became frustrating for both him and us to try and style songs for someone you basically weren't communicating with any more. So, with See You On The Other Side, it was basically Grasshopper and I sitting down and just doing songs that we'd always wanted to do, and hadn't previously found an outlet for."
See You On The Other Side was a lovely record, full of strange, poignant songs in which the group's musical influences became more detectable. The single, 'Everlasting Arm", for instance, started off like an out-take from Pet Sounds, all inquisitive piano chords and gothic scat-singing, before developing the kind of mournful horns Garth Hudson used to contribute to The Band's more wistful moments. Indeed, there were distinct parallels with the way The Band played with the accumulated vernacular of American music, prefiguring the eventual collaborations with Garth Hudson and Levon Helm on Deserter's Songs.
Before that could happen, however, things fell apart. Dispirited with the poor sales for such a splendid record, they took the opportunity to leave Columbia, who had allowed them their head artistically, but failed to promote them adequately. They found, too, that they had less and less in common with most of their peers, who seemed set on a different course completely.
"There's a line in 'The Funny Bird' that goes, 'Farewell golden sound,’ which reflects how I felt like an outsider from a lot of the music that was being made," says Donahue. "I didn't think that people were looking back and remembering some of the great music that had been made. A lot of groups seemed to be trying to escape history, rather than learn from it. "
Feeling ever more alienated from the current music scene, the group disappeared.
"We imposed our own exodus on ourselves by moving to the mountains," explains Donahue, "in a way as a 'f*** you’ to all the people around us at record companies who were wanting us to be Pink Floyd #3, when we just wanted to be our own band. It got too much, so we just left the scene completely - we left record companies, we fired managers and accountants and lawyers, turned off our phones and split the programme. Like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, we just left and began our own war in the mountains!"
HENCE THE TITLE OF THE LATEST ALBUM, WHICH derives from a reference in Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic to a journalist who described The Band's early albums derogatorily as " Deserter's Songs".
"It seemed to take on a new meaning within our group," says Donahue, "for the way we deserted each other during the past three years, and hurt each other real bad, and how we felt like we were drifting far outside a lot of the music that was getting on the radio and becoming popular - and how we didn't feel connected to, or inspired by, a lot of the music we heard, how we felt ourselves just slipping away."
"The word 'deserter'," adds Grasshopper, "comes from the early Jewish and Christian mystics, who would go out to the desert because they didn't fit in and wanted to do their own thing. Sometimes we feel like that, that we're operating on our own." But not quite on their own: ironically Donahue and Grasshopper found themselves close Catskill neighbours of The Band, whom they invited to play on the new album.
"Levon and Garth were already there, they had split the programme about 20 years ago," explains Donahue, extending the Colonel Kurtz reference, "and they were still living up there with the natives! So now we're one big exile programme in the mountains!
"They're great people to work with, real down to earth, no pretensions, a bunch of good ol' boys."
The collaboration crystallised an influence which clearly ran deeper than most people realised.
"The last song on See You On The Other Side, 'Peaceful Night', that's where we began trying to hone some of our Band craft, as it were," agrees Donahue. "it has certain Band elements, because we love the same type of music they do - blues, polkas, that Salvation Army lazy feel. The lyrical style, too, and also some of Richard and Rick's vocal styles, the high falsettos and things like that, where they're not necessarily on key, but there's so much genuine sincerity there that you can't replace."
Not everyone could see the logic of their working with such whiskery relics as The Band. "It made a lot more sense to us than to certain people around us at the time," admits Donahue. "They'd say, 'Why would you be working with Levon and Garth when you guys are an American avant-garde group?' But we never thought of ourselves as experimental or avant-garde, we were just pursuing the timeless song, like they were."
"The reason so many musicians like The Basement Tapes," he continues, "is because that's what a lot of songs sound like before they ever get to the album, a lot of laughter and giggles and rude comments and bathroom humour mixed in with lyrics and jokes. It's that spur of-the-moment, immediate imagination. Especially growing up where we did, in the mountains where they were recorded, those tapes are like Biblical references to us, just like the Velvets would be if you grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan - all those references in The Basement Tapes, and in some of the other Dylan and Band records, all those places are near us. Maggie's Farm is just down the road from us, it's where we buy gas now!"
A SIMILAR COLLABORATION IS HOPED FOR WITH JACK Nitzsche, the legendary arranger for Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound recordings, who described Deserter's Songs as one of the best records he'd heard in years. It was Nitzsche who inspired the band to feature the eerie strains of the bowed saw so extensively on the album.
"I think the bowed saw is my favourite instrument of all," claims Donahue. "Easily, hands down. We’ve used theremins in the past, but theremins always sound so cold and electronic to me. The bowed saw just has a more organic quality that comes closest to the female voice, which in my opinion is the greatest instrument of all. We used Dave Fridmann's wife, Mary, who's a soprano and can hit the kinds of notes I didn't think were humanly possible; that combination of bowed saw and soprano came closest to what I was trying to get across."
As well as the bowed saw and soprano, Deserter's Songs is characterised by the ghostly sweep of strings, through the band's use of violin and the synthetic strings of the Mellotron and the Chamberlin.
"Both are vintage string machines," explains Donahue. "The Chamberlin, I believe, was actually a predecessor of the Mellotron. They're both tape-oriented strings, but the Chamberlins have a higher, reedier sound, while the Mellotron has a more mellow, rounded, sound. We used them both, with live strings on top, to get a different feel. And, on a lot of things, the strings are backward, for an ethereal feel that is not necessarily common to most string arrangements.
"One of our tests for how well a song is developing is to play it backwards, and if it sounds interesting and intriguing backwards as well as forwards, that's generally a good sign. We've used strings and orchestration before, but on this one we've stripped a lot of things away and just tried to be more focused, coherent and concise; we've concentrated on what we really wanted, and erased everything else. "
On Deserter's Songs, what they really wanted was to evoke some sense of the Proustian timelessness of great music, the way an innocent fragment of melody can summon forth a great wave of turbulent memories. Accordingly, he looked to his own childhood memories when composing the songs.
"My mother used to listen to a lot of American and European popular standards on the radio, from Sinatra to Bartok, and it used to be embedded in my brain, " he says. " I used to rebel against it, but now I half-remember certain feelings I used to have about that music when I was five or seven, and a lot of these melodies are based on those half-remembered impressions. We're trying to treat our music in a way which has a timeless feel to it, a kind of universality to it, so that people everywhere can find something that reminds them of something else - of a memory, of a girlfriend, of a smell, of a childhood experience.
"Trying to capture that is very frustrating; but, when we do hit it, it's very rewarding."
With Deserter's Songs, they've hit the bull's-eye.
Deserter’s Songs is out now on V2
| A KISS FROM A NEW
FLAME: The Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands on Mercury Rev "I FIRST heard Mercury Rev when I was at university, which was around the time of the first album. A friend at college turned me on to them. I liked the songs and the sounds - they've got so much going on, there's a lot of effort put into the way they're constructed. I like the way the early records keep changing so you never quite know where they're at. I think they make very interesting rock records; they share the same level of interest in sound that you get in electronic music. it's very exciting, hanging-by-its-nails music. "We worked with Jonathan for the first time on 'The Private Psychedelic Reel' on Dig your own Hole. It came about because we'd had the basis of this track around for quite a bit. We wanted to have layer upon layer of instruments building up until we had this saturated sound, and we immediately thought of Mercury Rev. We’d gone as far as we could with the original version of the track, and we thought Jonathan was on a similar wavelength and could bring something different to it that we wouldn't think of, so we called him up out of the blue and he was really into doing it. We sent them a version of the track, and they recorded loads of different parts which we sifted through, edited it all together and remixed it. "We've just done a track with Jonathan for our new album. We'd written this track and it was getting a bit confused. Then Jonathan came in, sang, played some guitar, piano - and we mucked around with it. it's kind of a lullaby - the lyrics are all about going to sleep so we might put it at the end of the album; a bit of respite! "We also remixed Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp from Deserter's Songs for them. Our version is quite neo-Balearic, I suppose. We worked on it for about four days, and at one point it sounded like Krautrock Then we realised it had a blinding piano riff on it, so we went for kind of a house mix. We did it ages ago, but 1 don't know what V2 are doing with it. They should put it out: the number of people who've asked us for copies is incredible. We keep telling V2 they should release it now while there's such a buzz about the Rev album. "Get it out for Christmas, we say!" Michael Bonner |
Reproduced from Uncut, January 1999