Popdefect
This article originally appeared in NFH #21 in
the winter of 1991.
I first heard of
Popdefect at a Magnolias gig at the Casbah when their drummer Nick walked by and
stuck a flyer in my hand. I told him I wrote a fanzine and asked him to send me a
record, and forgot all about it until a couple weeks later when a package arrived
with their Live With This lp. A great lp; filled with these moody, tense pop songs
that convey a feeling of desperation and hard times...titles like "One Thin
Dime", "Jumpoff Joe", or "Futility Train".
Popdefect are a three
piece with Al on guitar and vocals, Nick on drums and Charlie on bass. They're
based in LA now, though all the members are from Seattle to begin with. Nick and Al
had played in a band called Psychopop with Tom Price (later of the U-Men and Gas
Huffer). Tom feared (with justification as it turns out) that Al would go away to
college after he finished high school and didn't want to be left without a band, so
he quit to start the U-Men. Nick and Al then found Charlie to create Popdefect. It
was November of 1980.
The band say that
they started listening to bands as diverse as XTC and the Avengers. That seems like
a broad span going from one of those to the other.
"Does it?",
says Al. "Well, put yourself in the frame of mind of being in your early to
mid teens and trying to get your hands on anything that is slightly obscure, and
both of those are great to listen to. I like them both. Nick was sort of like the
beacon, out scouting ahead and every week he would come in "Oh have you heard
this band!" and come up with something obscure. So those go hand in hand in my
mind...I'm sure I heard them on some cassette compilation that Nick's put together
from his record collection. I have "The American In Me" and it goes
straight into "Statue Of Liberty". It seems like they would be on the
same K-Tel Greatest Hits Of 70s Underground Music to me. We were into all that
stuff...early Cure, Jam, Buzzcocks, Pere Ubu, Normal, god, I can't even remember.
It was fascinating. I don't know what it did as defining our sound, but potentially
that's why it took so long for us to find our own sound, because we weren't
listening to any one sound."
Popdefect played a
number of gigs around Seattle and released their first single with "Live With
This" and "Ricoco Krispies" in 1981. Then Al left for college in LA,
Nick to school in Seattle, and Charlie to Evergreen College in Olympia. They all
missed playing in the band terribly, though, and eventually the others joined Al in
Los Angeles in 1982. They've been playing together ever since. To last this long,
they must be incredible friends.
Al has a laugh at
that idea. "It would probably be a more accurate statement to say that we've
all gotten beyond hating each other. I always hate this and it sounds real stupid,
but...we're like family. Family in the sense that you may hate your brother or
sister, but they're still your brother or sister. You may have ongoing personality
problems, but the fact that you come from the same gene pool means there's some
kind of connection there. It's sort of like that. I used to joke that if Popdefect
ever broke up I would probably never hang out with either of those guys. The band
is the thing that keeps us together. I've known Nick since the seventh grade. I
would probably still see Nick; I'd see Nick more than I'd see Charlie. We have a
lot of differences in philosophy and approach. That tension is good for the band as long
as we keep it an expression of the three of us and no one personality dominates,
because that sort of tension produces some interesting ideas, but at the same time
it's often very frustrating for all of us. If we weren't playing in a band, I don't
know how much time we would spend together."
"But
essentially, we did all grow up together. The maturing part of growing up...we all
moved to LA and got a house together and for the most part that was our first
experience of living away from home and having roommates, so there's all of that
tension of working out boundaries and space. And the fact that we were trying to do
something creative together and we were a long way from home and we didn't know
anybody. So we had to turn to each other for support, but at the same time there
were some terrible battles. That first year down here there were various times when each
of us wasn't speaking to the others, with all three of us attempting to exist as
though the others didn't. Things got about as bad as they would get. But the one
thing that everybody always held on to is that music is rewarding at some level,
and it's the most important thing that we have, and it's nothing to be thrown away
lightly. So we'd weather those things. We still have personality conflicts and
things get bad at times, but we all know that they've been bad before and we all
know that they'll pass, so they aren't real devastating, and I think everybody is
pretty much resigned to the fact that we'll all still be doing this when we're
about 70 if we're alive, because we're all too stupid to stop."
In LA they maintained
(through no desire of their own) a pretty low profile for quite a while. This was
the era of hardcore punk, and LA was pretty much the center of it to the exclusion
of a lot of other types of bands. Their 1983 ep "Playing For Time" wasn't widely
noticed. Says Al: "I still like it, but at the time there was more hard edged
stuff going on. NOW there's more hard edged stuff going on. But we were doing more
of a straight pop thing. It was quirky but it was not real upbeat and it wasn't real
brash. We played around, but we didn't create a heck of a lot of interest. We had a
hard time for a lot of years getting into the clubs in LA."
Popdefect found the
way to reach an audience even though LA was ignoring them. They went and found it.
They decided to go on tour, and so they called every club they knew of throughout
the west and midwest. This netted them four dates and a lot of incredulous
responses. "Look, we'll be there!" they'd insist. "Yeah, sure",
replied the club owners. Undaunted, they took off with four confirmed dates. Six
weeks later they'd played 35 dates. They'd slept on the roof of a club in Dallas
for five days waiting for a weekend gig. "We'd pull into a town and if we had
a few days to kill between another confirmed show somewhere we'd say well let's go
to this town", says Al. "You'd pull into town, look for the local
fanzine, look for the college area, find out where the clubs were, go and have a
beer, hang out, find out who was booking it, schmooze 'em up and try to play!
Or you'd show up someplace that you had talked to that had been skeptical that
you'd ever show up and you'd say "I'm here, how about a show?". And they
were pretty impressed by that. So they'd put us on a bill."
They played for free
almost everywhere, but sold records and T shirts to make ends meet. Money from T
shirt sales poured into the gas tank and got them to the next town. Beer flowed
freely for them, people put them up for the night, and the result was a great time
for all.
"It was very
makeshift and in retrospect it seems crazy and I don't know if today I would do
that", says Al. "Knowing what I know now and having toured as much as I
have, that seems absurd. But the other side of it is that I don't think we would
have made the contacts and gotten where we've gotten on our own if we hadn't done
that. Everywhere we went people put us up; we made a lot of good friends and a lot
of contacts so that we had places to go to when we would come back. So the second
tour that we did instead of having four confirmed shows, we know had 20 or 25 confirmed
shows and then some dates to fill in."
Along the way they
met up with a band called the Tricycle Thieves who were to aid their fortunes quite
a bit. The Tricycle Theives were a run of the mill bar band, but they carried with
them a list of contacts for bookings throughout the US, and they let Popdefect copy
as much of it as they wanted. This became the basis for a database that Popdefect
still maintains and title the Tour Bible. Armed with the Tour Bible, Popdefect are
able to regularly set up tours for themselves that take them to smaller towns
throughout the west and midwest.
They've found they
like these smaller towns and the smaller towns like them. The big towns sometimes
have a jaded audience and a jaded booking system, where the booking people know
they can get anybody and they just want to sell as much beer as possible, while in
the smaller towns like Bozeman, Spokane or Missoula where they're so happy to get
anything at all that if they get something good it's a real bonus for them. Seattle
has been good for them since it's their home town, and Chicago has been another big
city that has received them well. But by and large, Popdefect seem to be a small
town favorite.
There's been a steady
flow of Popdefect singles lately, to the point where it seems that they must regard
themselves as a singles band. "The last three singles had all initially been
album tracks for this album we've been working on", says Al. "But we
could never get together the finances to do it all at once, and we wanted to keep
visible. So we'd put out another single. We'd be writing more material so we'd say,
well, let's put this out, it would be a good single. So consequently, we had always
had the idea that we'd release it as a single but we can include it on the album if
we want. But it got down to time to doing the album and we thought, god, we
don't want to release all the singles on the album...what's the point? So we're doing new
material for the album. Somewhere down the line we might put together a cassette or
something of all the singles."
The album will be out
on Flipside, hopefully later this fall. The band is paying the recording costs but
Flipside takes care of the manufacturing and distribution. For a band that has for
a long time handled the whole process from songwriting through invoicing
distributors, having a label to shoulder part of the load is a big help. There's
also a Flipside single due out in early September with four tracks; it's called
"Third Degree Roadburn" and was recorded on a four track cassette
recorder in Chicago. They weren't expecting much out of it, but it came out really well so
they've decided to release it.
Their best single is
probably the one that pairs "Without" with "To Each His Own".
This one has three different sleeves, to make your job of finding it a little more
confusing. "The reason for that was that like a lot of things that we do as a
band, each on of us has equal input, so sometimes it makes it difficult for
agreement. It's like a three way argument, and sometimes everyone wins and
sometimes everyone loses. That was probably a case where everyone lost. No one
could agree on what they wanted for the cover art, so for fun we decided that
everybody would design their own cover. We thought this would be great, this would
confuse the public. Initially we had an elaborate idea for a folded sleeve like a
gatefold in three direction, and depending on which way you folded it back up
you would have all three covers printed on it, and there would be directions
printed on one side, so the consumer could decide which cover they liked the best
and put it back in their record collection that way. I thought that was a great
idea, but cost once again ran in the way."
This fall,
Popdefect's bi-annual tour will be a little shorter than normal. Last year, after the band
did a tour they found that on returning work was not so easy to resume, and Al
actually went nearly six months without a job. As a result, the financial situation
has left them unable to do a big tour now, and so their strategy is to finish
recording the lp, do a short tour, and then do a bigger one in the spring. The
situation with money, always critical for independent bands, is no less so for
Popdefect. And they've been at it long enough so that realism and a long term view
of their life has to come into play.
"Every band
struggles with that", says Al. "We've been doing a lot of talking about
whether the band is a career or if it's a hobby, and at this point I'm pretty
committed that it's a hobby. We're very serious about it and if we can make some
money at it, that's great as well, but we're not paying the rent and eating from
it. And the way we're going about doing it, I don't see that as being incredibly
likely. So then you have to weigh whether it has value as it is, and I think that
it does. We're doing what we like and I think there's an audience that appreciates
what we're doing, so that seems like a great setup."
"I think it's
healthy to think about the audience every now and then, but as sort of a secondary
consideration. It shouldn't be the primary one or you're dead. Charlie more than
anyone in the band is really committed to that. He goes "I don't care what
anybody thinks, it's what I want to do". But at the same time, he's very adamant:
"I want this to be my job". And Nick and I say, well, we're not going
about this the right way. If you want this to be your job we should have a
different plan and we should be going about this in a different. We should be
talking to some bigger labels. And we had decided somewhere down the line that we
weren't interested in signing with a major label or wasting time pursuing that, whether
they would want to sign us. The larger labels probably turn my stomach more now
than they did when we decided that. But at the same time, is that the only way to
make money? But Charlie says "I never said that! If they'll pay for it, let's
do it." So we start talking about compromises, and suddenly you're not
producing your own stuff; they will find a producer for you and they'll give the
money to him, and he'll make the record and it will be done when he says it's done,
not when you say it's done. And Charlie says "Well, we won't sign that kind of
a deal". But who knows how practical that is."
It's probably not
very practical. But we'll leave all that to the future, and for the moment you can
chase their cool singles and be watching for that lp, and catch them on tour if you
can.
