After
seven album releases and a slew of singles collected into two
more albums, Superchunk is one of the most enduring indie bands
in circulation these days, and they’re still going strong.
Formed by Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance in 1989 in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, they helped define an emerging scene there
they called “young rock” which was soon known all
over the country. They called themselves simply Chunk at first
until a conflict with a New York band caused them to change
it to Superchunk. They made an immediate impact with their song
Slack Motherfucker on their first album, further popularized
by Firehose’s cover of it on the Live Totem Pole EP. The
song captured a generation’s feelings about the frustrations
of working for or with someone who doesn’t carry their
weight. This could have resulted from when Mac, Laura, and Chuck
all worked at the same Kinko’s in Chapel Hill. Shortly
after Mac and Laura started Merge Records and put out the first
7”s, they signed a three album contract with Matador that
saw the releases of a group of outstanding albums of punk-influenced
rock that were noisy, melodic, and usually fast. The second
album, No Pocky for Kitty, was produced by outspoken indie legend
Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac). At Albini’s
suggestion, they left his name off the credits so it wouldn’t
hurt their sales.
When the Matador contract expired, Superchunk decided to start
releasing all their material on Merge, which had grown into
a healthy little indie label by that point. They found that
rather than being the step backward many thought it would be,
their next album Foolish sold even better than On the Mouth
had. Indie labels were being gobbled up by majors right and
left at that point, and Merge was one of the few labels - along
with Superchunk as a band - to spurn the trend. They rightly
saw that there was no long-term future in being associated with
a major, since so many bands were getting picked up and quickly
dropped and falling apart. Superchunk even managed to survive
the romantic break-up of Mac and Laura a year before Foolish,
though many fans speculated that it gave Mac an endless source
of new writing material and might have been a blessing in disguise.
Superchunk fans tend to be fairly loyal, since the band hasn’t
been real high profile. Everyone in the band is fairly reserved
and low-key offstage. A lot of people remember them from one
album or another - or just Slack Motherfucker - and didn’t
keep up. For those people, hearing the new material would be
something of a shock, but it’s been a natural progression
all the way. Ian MacKaye of Fugazi noted the same thing about
his band, saying that the musical progression of their records
makes perfect sense to fans who have been along for the ride.
The fifth album, Here’s Where the Strings Come In, was
the least-hyped but maybe most brilliant work. Indoor Living
marked a turn toward a slightly less noisy sound, though it
still contains fult-tilt thrashers like Nu Bruises. And while
the new album, Come Pick Me Up, is their most sophisticated
pop album yet, it doesn’t abandon the noisy dueling guitars
that have been Superchunk’s trademark.
I talked to Mac and Jim before their show at the Crystal Ballroom
in Portland, Oregon, with Jon coming in toward the end. From
other interviews I’d seen, I knew Jim could make things
difficult for me if he was in one of his ornery moods. Mac once
described him by: “Jim is sort of a curmudgeon. He sort
of prematurely turned 50 or something.” All the band members
are articulate and intelligent, but have limited patience with
dumb interviews or interviews at all.
Heckler: Superchunk seems to strip things down, keep life
simple, and I’ve noticed in some interviews that you get
a little cranky with all the bullshit of the music industry
and things you have to deal with being a band. Is that why you
tour so much, is the purest, simplest thing about being a band
to get out there and play?
Mac: I don’t know if it’s the purest, simplest thing,
‘cause there are a lot of things about it that are a drag.
From the point of view of being in a band and also running a
record label, touring is the thing that sells records the best.
More than videos, reviews, or taking out ads, touring is the
most direct way to get people’s attention. I think if people
see a band live and like them, it sticks with them a lot, more
strongly with them than if they hear a song on the radio they
like. Especially coming from an indie label, where you don’t
have the promotion.
Mac: Yeah, touring’s definitely the most effective way
of getting your name out there. And part of our reputation is
from playing live, so we’ve gotta keep doing it. In some
ways it’s a necessary evil - there are fun parts about
it - but you don’t really have a choice. Jon mentioned the growing age disparity between the band
and the audience in his tour diaries, feeling a little weird
about it one night.
Mac: I’ve never really thought about it.
Jim: Jon might feel weird about it. I don’t think about
it. The audience alternates every night.
Mac: That’s the thing, because we’ve been around this
long, and the reason people started liking us in the first place,
and hopefully the reason people still like us, is because of
our songs, and our records, and our shows, and not some gimmick,
so it’s possible that every night there are going to be
people coming to see us who were there when we toured for our
first record. Probably not that many, but most of the people
at the shows aren’t just there because they heard the new
record, it’s not like a new thing every time we put out
a new record we get a new crowd of people. Hopefully you get
some new people every time, but it’s a pretty loyal audience.
I feel the audience is pretty well mixed. There are young kids
there, and it is bizarre when you think, wow, this kid’s
14 years old and he’s at our show, that is kind of interesting,
but it’s not like you look out and it’s all 15 year
olds.
Jim: We’re not very fashionable. It’s not hip to like
us. What I’ve observed lately, being roughly the same age
as you guys, is that it seems to be an advantage to be a band
that’s been around a fair while and has a link back to
the vibrancy of punk rock and indie rock of the 80’s, versus
a band just starting out today without those reference points.
Mac: I think you’re right. And not just musically, though,
I think if you grew up listening to music when we did and you
went to see bands like the Replacements and Husker Du, you saw
that they toured all the time, you saw that they did all this
stuff, even the ones that eventually signed to major labels...
so that’s your model, rather than bands who get huge on
their first record. If that’s where your coming from I
think it does influence what you do now, like I said, even if
it’s not musically. We listen to music from all different
periods, new bands, old bands, but I think you’re right,
the general concept of being an independent band then is different
than it is now.
I saw an interesting interview with Peter Prescott (ex-Mission
of Burma and Volcano Suns) a few years back when he was first
starting up Kustomized, and he was saying that he wanted to
throw out all the shit that had happened in his past ten years
and get back to the spirit of ‘79-’83. Not the music
he was doing then, but get back to that raw spirit as a starting
point.
Mac: That’s hard to do, though, because no one else wants
to go back to that. They might be forced to at some point, because
everyone’s failing so massively, but nobody wants to. You
know what I mean? He also had a good line about ‘I wish more people my
age would play fucked-up music and continue to rock in some
fashion. I would like to think that you don’t have to turn
crappy as you get older.’ Mac:
It’s true. I think there are a lot of bands like Yo La
Tengo, ourselves, Sonic Youth (and of course, Fugazi- ed.) that
are examples of that, even though I don’t feel old, or
older. I’m not as old as Peter Prescott, but I know what
he’s saying, people don’t abandon it when they should,
maybe? I imagine Jon probably just meant the age thing as a joking
observation, because I certainly don’t think of myself
or you guys as old. You got started in ‘89, whereas bands
that started in ‘81, those are the guys I think of as old.
You’re fairly fresh in my mind. What bands you grew up
on inspired you the most?
Mac: I don’t know, there were all different bands from
all different times, hearing Led Zeppelin -
Jim: - Dinosaur Jr, AC/DC -
Mac: - yeah, the stuff you listened to from five to fifteen
is probably a lot different than what you listened to after
that, though I still listen to some of the stuff I did when
I was younger, like the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin,
AC/DC, but then in terms of punk rock groups, bands like Minor
Threat and the Minutemen, they were probably the biggest. And
Dinosaur Jr and Husker Du, and bands that were still around
when we got going. Also, a lot of really poppy bands like New
Zealand bands like the Chills and the Clean and stuff like that,
and Sonic Youth...I buy so many records and there are so many
bands that it’s impossible . Talking about your new album, Come Pick Me Up - we had an
indication, Mac, from your work with Portastatic, but how high
can your voice go?
Mac: (laughs) I think Tiny Bombs is the limit. There’s
a note on Tiny Bombs which is the limit of how high my voice
can go. Was that a natural direction that went with the songs you
were doing, or were you tired of your voice previously?
Mac: It’s generally the melodies that I wrote for those
songs. Sometimes I would get in the studio and realize that
I couldn’t sing them at a lower octave or they just didn’t
sound as good. Usually it’s just that’s how the melodies
were written and that’s how they sound the best. There
are other songs where I might have written the melody lower
but when I tried to sing them and project with any sort of volume,
it just didn’t work, so I had to go up and octave and sing
it in falsetto. I also think it sounds good when there’s
both going on at the same time.
I’ve noticed you guys grow a bit testy in interviews when
questioned about your beliefs and commitment to indie rock.
People cast you as some kind of standard bearers for the indie
movement because of Merge being one of the great DIY indie labels
along with Dischord and Touch and Go. In contrast to Ian MacKaye
or Steve Albini, who are articulate mouthpieces about espousing
a set of principles or philosophy behind being indie, you seem
to go along with a more low key “it just makes sense for
us as a band” attitude.
Mac: I think they would say the same thing, too, though they
might be more vocal about laying out the rationale behind certain
theories and decisions. Well, yeah, that’s what it comes down to, is that it
makes sense to do it yourself.
Jim: It’s sort of amazing that in anybody’s everyday
life, that maybe they don’t think about why they do things
the way they do.
Mac: A large majority of people clearly don’t.
Jim: Why do you do anything? That’s the point, is that
when it comes up, do you think about what you do? Don’t
you organize your life in a way that makes sense to you? Or
do you just let things happen.
(Here Jim is warming up to that state of testiness he can be
known for, though I’m unclear who he’s directing his
scorn at. Me, for bringing up the topic, or the general public.) That’s what I don’t understand -
Jim: It’s not like a big mystery.
- about the whole state of the industry as far as that goes.
My sister and her husband - who writes fairly mainstream music
- formed their own label to market his work, because they realized
it was the only way that made sense. He wasn’t likely to
get a major label deal, and even if he was, he wouldn’t
make much money at it. I was amazed one day to hear my sister
- who never had anything to do with the punk or indie scene
when she was younger - reciting the famous article that Steve
Albini wrote explaining in great detail how a $200,000 major
label contract didn’t amount to squat in the end. Mainstream
press like Spin and Rolling Stone, that finally in this decade
deigned to acknowledge indie music at all, still refer to it
as this quaint, unusual approach of people “doing it themselves.
How odd, how bizarre.”
Jim: Well, those are celebrity magazines.
Mac: For them to cover people who don’t make much money
or don’t make much money for other people, it’s not
in their interest to do that.
Jim: They want someone who’s going to help sell their magazines,
who’s going to get more advertising in. Can’t blame
them for it, that’s what they do. My point is that it’s considered normal to relinquish
control over your life to a major record label, to a set of
faceless people, versus having total control of what you do.
How strange is that?
Jim: (interrupts strongly) I’m talking about someone who
works at a factory. Anybody. Every single person on this planet
has to live in a way that makes sense for them. If you don’t
think about it and you don’t conduct your life in that
way...it’s part of being human! It doesn’t make any
sense. “Why would you do that?” Why is it an issue?
It’s just sort of silly...and clearly it’s not. I’m
just being kind of arch here. (Yup. They do get testy about
this topic.) When you strip everything down to its elements,
there are only two decisions to make in life. I don’t know
what they are, but there are not that many. It’s not like
it’s complex. Jon said in his tour diaries that he was reading the Julian
Cope autobiography and that the rivalry between Echo and the
Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes was kind of like the rivalry
between you guys and Ben Folds Five. Facetious, obviously, but
what do you think of the most successful artist out of Chapel
Hill?
(laughter) Jim:
I think it’s accurate. What did you mean by that, Jon?
(Jon and Laura have wandered in and are giving the interview
a wide berth.)
Mac: Yeah, which one of us is Teardrop Explodes and which is
Echo and the Bunnymen?
Jon: I want to say we’re Echo and the Bunnymen -
Mac: - yeah, cause they -
Jon: - but they were more wild.
Mac: - cause Teardrop Explodes only had three members. So lots
of drugs. (sarcastically) Yeah, that’s accurate.
Jim: It’s a little known fact, that we’re a major
drug band. We do loads and loads of drugs.
Mac: It’s the one subliminal message that no one’s
ever gotten from our records.
Jim: Do lots of drugs. We advocate ‘em.
Alcohol is mentioned a lot in your songs -
Jim: That’s just to wash them down. We’re talking
about pills.
Mac: That’s a red herring.
Jim: We’re talking about Nembutol. We’re talking about...I
don’t know, I can’t think of any more.
Mac: Zantac?
Jim: We do a lot of aspirin. What do you think of Ben Folds?
Jon: I try not to. I always equate him with Billy Joel. I never
think any further than that.
I dated his ex-wife for a little while, Anna Goodman. She works
- or used to - as a legal secretary at MTV. She turned me on
to a lot of the Carolina bands. She grew up in Winston-Salem.
This was all before he made it big. She gave me a copy of one
of a 7” he did awhile before he made his debut album, and
she was pushing the same line as he does about it being “punk
rock piano” like he calls it “punk rock for sissies.”
I couldn’t fathom what it had to do with punk at all. By
early 80’s standards, you guys are punk rock for sissies,
which makes Ben Folds just sissy music for sissies.
Jon: There’s something very high school drama club about
that guy. You mentioned once in regards to people expecting you to
put out the same music every record, how much you appreciated
Bad Religion’s second record, Into the Unknown, coming
out with something that sounded like Todd Rundgren, a total
shock to their fans.
Jon: I thought it was great that they did that! They were soon embarrassed about it -
Jon: -oh yeah, they totally disowned it.
Then they came out with Back to the Known, which was great,
but it was definitely, “okay, that failed massively, let’s
be safe”.
Jim: And they’ve been doing it ever since. Well that about wraps everything up.
Jim: You’re not going to ask about the pederasty charges? Nope. I was going to ask Laura about her painting (each album
cover is one of her paintings), but she’s not around.
Jim: It’s kind of hard to get her to talk about anything. I wondered how much she paints, if she’s done shows,
or if it’s just for herself.
Jim: She paints when she has to for album covers. Otherwise,
Laura doesn’t have free time for anything, in her own mind. Okay, thanks very much for taking the time to do this. I’ve
got a book to give you for some reading material on the road.
Jim: Cool. We’ll cut our lines and roll our joints on it.
The show attracted at least 500 fans, and was an amazing blend
of new and old material. The songs off Come Pick Me Up were
considerably more raucous than on record, and otherwise they
played a good balance of stuff from all their older albums.
The off-stage reserve gave way to unabashed youthful enthusiasm
when they were playing, with Laura bouncing around most of the
time like a human pogo stick. They played a ripping four-song
encore, culminating in Slack Motherfucker. There’s no doubt
about it, Superchunk is still at the peak of their form.
After
seven album releases and a slew of singles collected into two
more albums, Superchunk is one of the most enduring indie bands
in circulation these days, and they’re still going strong.
Formed by Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance in 1989 in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, they helped define an emerging scene there
they called “young rock” which was soon known all
over the country. They called themselves simply Chunk at first
until a conflict with a New York band caused them to change
it to Superchunk. They made an immediate impact with their song
Slack Motherfucker on their first album, further popularized
by Firehose’s cover of it on the Live Totem Pole EP. The
song captured a generation’s feelings about the frustrations
of working for or with someone who doesn’t carry their
weight. This could have resulted from when Mac, Laura, and Chuck
all worked at the same Kinko’s in Chapel Hill. Shortly
after Mac and Laura started Merge Records and put out the first
7”s, they signed a three album contract with Matador that
saw the releases of a group of outstanding albums of punk-influenced
rock that were noisy, melodic, and usually fast. The second
album, No Pocky for Kitty, was produced by outspoken indie legend
Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac). At Albini’s
suggestion, they left his name off the credits so it wouldn’t
hurt their sales.
Mac:
It’s true. I think there are a lot of bands like Yo La
Tengo, ourselves, Sonic Youth (and of course, Fugazi- ed.) that
are examples of that, even though I don’t feel old, or
older. I’m not as old as Peter Prescott, but I know what
he’s saying, people don’t abandon it when they should,
maybe?
Jim:
I think it’s accurate. What did you mean by that, Jon?