Superchunk
This article originally appeared in NFH #22 in
the winter of 1992.
It's only about 8:30
on a Saturday early in February and the tiny Casbah is already starting to get pretty
crowded for Superchunk's second pass through San Diego in about a year. The first time the
place was totally packed, so I can't imagine how all the people who come tonight are ever
going to fit. Later between bands I find myself trying to count the crowd...the sign over
the door says the capacity is 75 people but I count to way over 100 before I give up and I
haven't even considered the people in the pool room behind me, where there must be another
30. Seems like Superchunk are destined to be a San Diego favorite for a while yet,
especially if they keep putting out records with the catchy, energetic type of stuff that
fills their recent No Pocky For Kitty record.
Superchunk's sound is
a fairly familiar one these days...they fall into that Husker Du meets Dinosaur, Jr meets
Moving Targets sort of thing, but they do it so well that after the first couple times
through their records you no longer find the comparison feeling so obvious.
Singer/guitarist Mac pushes his voice to the point where the strain is almost painful, and
live he only sort of stays in tune, but it doesn't seem to hurt anything...it's obvious
that he's intent on driving home the songs both in his guitar playing and in singing.
Bassist Laura forms a fitting counterpart on stage with their two rather smallish forms
bounding up and down in time with the songs, Mac jumping back from the mike every chance
he gets. Their new (ish) guitar player Jim, who has been with them since just after the
first lp, is more reserved but still works hard, while their REALLY new drummer Jon plays
a basic style, but hits hard.
Superchunk formed in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of Dean Smith's Tarheels. It seems an odd spot for a
band like this to start. How'd it happen? "Laura and I wanted to start a punk rock
band", says Mac, speaking in a dungeon-like storage room under the Casbah where the
sound of cue balls flying off the pool table upstairs made it seem like a hardhat would be
a good idea. "I'd been in other ones before, but for different reasons...people moved
away and stuff like that...none of them were in existence. One summer we started playing
with Chuck who lived down the street and played drums. I wanted two guitars definitely,
because most of the bands I'd been with before were trios and I was sick of that format.
So we got a friend of mine named Jack to play the second guitar. We played a couple of
shows that summer; I think it was 1989. We recorded a single, and then I went off to
school for my last year, so the first year we played some shows when I was home on
vacation...we played in New York on New Year's and we recorded our album, but we couldn't
really tour and do a whole lot of stuff because I wasn't there."
"Then the
following summer, Jack decided he didn't want to tour, so we called my friend Jim, who was
from Connecticut and who I knew through friends at school. And Jim said he would play
guitar so he's been our guitarist since then. Then we went on a tour with Seaweed and
Geek; sort of a two week east coast and mid-west thing. At this point all we had out was
the first single and the "Slack Motherfucker" single. Since then we've just been
touring and touring; doing two weeks here and three weeks there. We did a six week tour
last spring, sort of like the one we're on now. That's when we recorded our second album,
which came out in November, No Pockey For Kitty."
"After that we
weren't getting along with Chuck and were finding it difficult to write new songs because
he never wanted to practice, so Chuck got the bail and now Jon plays drums for us."
Those first couple
singles were on the Merge label, which is run by Laura and Mac together. "We mainly
just put out seven inchers. We're putting out a couple of albums...that's been going on
since the beginning of Superchunk; it's not necessarily related because the first thing we
put out wasn't a Chunk single. We're going to put out a Superchunk singles album in April
with all the stuff on it that you can't get anymore. Everything that's come out on seven
inch up to this point including the Matador 7 inch. And we're also putting out an album by
a band called Polvo, a Chapel Hill band. You may have heard of them. That's a great album
and it's going to come out in May. We can only afford the time to deal with 7 inchers at
this point. But Touch and Go is going to manufacture and distribute the albums, so we can
still be touring and doing all the stuff we're doing with Superchunk and we can still put
out albums, which is a good deal."
As Mac describes it,
starting in North Carolina was not the disadvantage that might have been expected. They
played a lot of gigs at a club called the Cat's Cradle run by a fellow named Frank in
Chapel Hill. The club has actually been based in a number of different buildings, but the
club's approach has consistently been to get local bands on bills as openers for touring
groups, and in Mac's view Frank has been pretty fair about giving a lot of different bands
a chance. The result is that these days their can be a bill with three local bands and
there's a decent chance to get 50 to 100 people for it. Which is pretty good even by the
standards of considerably larger towns. Like mine.
Out of these humble
beginnings, Superchunk has found their way to a deal with Gerard Cosley's Matador Records.
Cosley used to be the main man behind Homestead, who were handled through Dutch East India
and Merge was set to do a deal with Homestead in which Homestead would put out four Merge
albums, including the first Superchunk lp. But before Merge signed, Gerard left, and with
their main contact no longer around, Laura and Mac were understandably worried about
signing with Homestead. So they gave a tape of the Superchunk lp to Chris Lombardi, who
was starting Matador, and he liked it enough to sign them for three lps. Then Cosley
joined Matador so their association has resumed.
That first Superchunk
lp (they used to be called Chunk but were forced to change their name because of the
existence of some New York ensemble of the same name) cost $700 to make. It's got a tasty
batch of thick, driving guitar rock songs on it, highlighted by the superb "Slack
Motherfucker". Lots of the songs build a strong, moody tension to them the same way
the best Moving Targets stuff does, but others have more of a fun feeling to them. The
first lp is pretty potent stuff, but you should probably hear it before you go onto the
new one, which is faster still.
"It's
funny", says Mac, "because we still play a lot of songs from the first album,
but then if I hear "Slack" it seems so slow. But it's not a conscious thing,
because there's slow and fast songs on both of them, but the ones on the new record are
more realized than the songs on the first record, which were written in the same amount of
time but recorded by a band that could only practice together for about two weeks before
we recorded. When we recorded No Pocky we had done tours and tours. We ended up
having to write a couple songs during that last tour, because we recorded the album while
we were on tour when we got to Chicago, but most of them we knew better because we had
played them a million times. I think that helps. But I don't know why it's faster. We have
new songs that are slower and poppier, but we also have new songs that are really fast. I
don't know what the difference is."
My first impression
of Superchunk was that these guys don't sound like something Gerard Cosley would
like...his tastes always seem more oriented towards art-rock bands. I asked Mac what he
thought of this. "Well, I'm sort of surprised that Gerard likes us as well", he
replied. "I know that Gerard doesn't sit down and say "I don't like guitar
bands, I don't like this, or this". Cos he signed Dinosaur, Jr. Obviously he likes
some of it. I'll send him a new Merge single and I'll say "I don't think you're going
to like it, it's very rock" and he'll say "I like rock music!". But I think
he does like some difficult stuff and I think a lot of times he's deliberately abrasive
about what he does and doesn't like to an exaggerated point because it's more fun to make
a point that way for him, and he can do it. But I think that he does like rock and punk
rock along with everything else that he likes. So in a way I'm not surprised, but in a way
it seems like the sort of thing he'd totally slag in Conflict. So I don't know what the
difference is."
Built around a really
simple but totally effective descending three note riff, "Slack Motherfucker" is
the obvious centerpiece to the first lp and it got plenty of attention in reviews for its
title, which seems to be a selling point for some (myself included) and a focus for
derision for others who thought it was a cheap way to catch attention. I told Mac of a
conversation I had with members of another band in which they had made this statement. He
bridles at this. "Well what other song has had the word "motherfucker" in
the title and has sold, is the question? We got tons of reviews like that. There was a
review that said we threw in the cuss word to make our mothers mad, as if we're like 17
years old and just learning to swear. It's so silly. Usually what happens with songs is
that we'll make up the music and then in practice I'll just start singing random stuff and
see what fits, and that just happened to be what it ended up being. If they think that I
said "We've got to write a song with a cuss word in it because it'll be really
tough" obviously they have their head up their ass. If that's how THEY write songs,
well...It's not like we're the Dwarves, making obscenity our main selling point. It's not
like all of our songs are "blank motherfucker"."
Jim, who has been
sitting quietly throughout all this, is obviously irritated about it, too. "There are
millions of records, just about any punk rock record, look at the titles and one of them
is going to have shit, fuck, bitch and that doesn't make it an instant anything."
The new lp, with the
odd name No Pockey For Kitty, plays considerably faster than the first one. It
features a lead-in track that's every bit a match for "Slack Motherfucker", the
killer "Skip Steps 1 and 3" which tosses out an irresistible guitar hook and
some really catchy lyrics, especially the part about "You've been sucking wind so
long it makes you feel full". Live it seems almost too fast, and Mac is gasping for
wind himself to try to spit out all the words. No matter...the best live shows don't have
to be technical masterpieces to still rate well.
When they recorded No
Pockey they had barely enough songs for an album and in fact had to write a couple on
tour. This is an approach Mac would rather not repeat, for as well as the lp turned out,
it seems safer to have the luxury of leaving out a couple tracks if they don't come out
right. They've been working towards getting more new stuff together and played four or so
new songs in the show, the best of which was the opener, "Pretension". Mac says
they've got seven new ones and he's hoping for another 7 or 8 by summer, when they'll
record again. "It goes pretty quickly when we're home and we're practicing. It
doesn't really work out when you're traveling. But we left for this tour with some new
ones to play, which is good. Makes it more interesting for us to have more songs to choose
from. But it's weird playing shows and playing songs like "Slack" or "Skip
Steps 1 and 3" with people dancing and then playing a new song and everyone stops and
looks like "Uh, I don't know this song". Some places it's not like that and
people go crazy all the time, but in some places people only want to hear what they
already know. That can be a drag, but I'd rather play new songs."
I went fishing for
band stories and got this one: "On our first tour we played in Flint Michigan...a
totally depressed ex-automotive town. We played in this ancient theater. We played in the
lobby of the theater because the theater itself is just gigantic...it's called the Capitol
Theater. It was us and Seaweed and Geek in this tiny town in Michigan, playing to about 30
people, most of whom sat outside because they didn't want to pay two dollars to get
in...all these punk rockers sitting on the sidewalk. So we played on the floor of the
lobby and it turned into a big water fight, mostly during Seaweed’s set. But it was
one of the more memorable shows just because we were in such a fucked up place and there
were such weird people there, most of them sitting outside, so it was mainly the bands
watching the other bands. And we slept in the theater, and they told us just to close the
doors behind us when we left. It was this huge place...you could go up on the roof, go in
the projection booth where there were still projectors. It was bizarre."
"It would have
cost them too much money to have security in the place", recalls Jim. "I can't
remember the story, but it was like the sheriff in the town owned the lease on the
building and never cleaned it up...he said it cost too much money. So just lock the door
when you leave!"
I could almost see
Superchunk breaking through to be one of the bigger bands on the indie scene and maybe
with a lot of luck hitting it like Nirvana have. I asked Mac what he thought of their
progress. "I like doing the indie thing. It does get frustrating when the label can't
press enough of your album, can't keep it in print, can't pay you, and people come up to
you at show and say "I can't get your record". It should be in all the stores,
and obviously Teenage Fanclub records and Nirvana records are in all the stores. But at
the same time we've talked to people like the Screaming Trees or Dinosaur Jr. who aren't
too happy that they're on a major label and whose label isn't doing shit for them. I'm
happy with what we've done in two years, that we can come to the Casbah or some random
place in Oklahoma and pack the place."
"We're just
taking our time and going as stuff happens. You have to calculate to a certain extent what
your next step is going to be, like whether you want to do this or that. You can't just
sit back and see what happens. But we don't have any master plan, like we've gotta get
signed by this date or sell this many records. We're just doing what we're doing and it
seems to be going well so far."
