Famous Quotes Vol. 49: October 2023
Veteran rock critic Jim Sullivan looks back on a career of epic interviews in the latest installment of his inquisitive column
It’s the 49th edition of Famous Quotes, a little quiz where the basic question remains: Who said this?
It’s a deep dive into my published and non-published archives, quotes culled from 40+ years of yakking with rock ‘n’ rollers of all stripes – on the phone, in a bar, at a restaurant, backstage, scenarios from the penthouse to the pavement as the old Heaven 17 song has it.
I give you the situation and the quotes; you guess who spoke those words back when.
1. This band has conjured up many a dark soundscape – some deeply rooted in emotional bloodletting. Moody. Disturbed. Dissonant. Alluring, but nightmarish. Siren-like. Or, as the hyperbolic English music weekly Sounds put it in 1991, describing their latest album as having a tone much like the previous one: “a dark, claustrophobic shriek of guitar and emotion . . . desperate, unhappy music but not music that made you unhappy to listen to.”
It was the spring of that year and I was having lunch at a Boston restaurant with the two female co-leaders of this New England art-rock band. They were looking back at their formative years, their teenage years when they started the band.
“When you’re 14, you just do things,” explained the group’s singer-guitarist who is the band’s chief songwriter.
“You’re not really goal-oriented,” added the other, who plays lead guitar and sings. “We’re not really goal-oriented now, but you’re really not when you’re 14 or 15, know what I mean?”
Back to the first speaker: “We played parties like every other band. We thought we were like a high school band. Till we played our high school.
Second speaker: “That was the first backlash. It was our first experience hearing that we were strange. Up until then I really honestly thought we were doing straightforward rock songs.”
Their original influences, they say: The Clash, the Beatles, Violent Femmes, Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Little Richard, Patsy Cline and the Kinks.
How did the kids at their high school take to the nascent gigs?
Second speaker: “They were polite.”
First speaker: “Afterwards, they told people we were really weird. They called us ‘the art chicks.’ “
And you saw yourselves as . . .
“Art chicks,” admitted the first speaker.
“Really ugly, uncomfortable girls,” added the second. “That’s how we saw ourselves.”
(The two women had success in their original band; each has also recorded solo discs and formed other, quite successful, bands.)
2. They were one of the most successful disco acts of the ’70s. They were nominated for nine Grammys, won one, and notched four No. 1 singles. They were also, to most rock fans, the epitome of the disco scourge, a nonstop wave of rhythm-happy funk lite, overly preoccupied with the concept of booty shaking.
But there was now a frontlash and they were starting to be considered hip now. When did this happen? In the mid-1980s, when English art-rockers Shriekback discovered and covered one of their big hits? Gradually, over the past year, as upbeat dance music not too dissimilar from their own came to dominate the pop charts? Gradually, over the past year, as Rhino Records re-released its exhaustive series of ’70s pop hits called and a kitschy form of ’70s nostalgia took hold.
“What we do is not any different from what the Beatles, the Supremes, Elton John, or you name it, do,” the band leader told me, dapper and fit, a small cross dangling from his left ear, during an interview in a Boston hotel room earlier in early 1991, “It’s rhythm and blues. The majority of the population at that time the ’70s didn’t realize what rhythm and blues was. Now, they do.”
Does he find any kitsch in it? Or camp?
“I don’t think ‘Please Don’t Go’ is kitsch or camp,” he said. “We put out commercial records. The Beatles put out commercial records. ‘She loves you – yeah, yeah, yeah’ – that sounds like kitsch and camp to me, too.” He admitted the singles were pretty fluffy, but album tracks, which tended to get ignored, contain “a lot more depth than people realized.”
There was considerable misfortune in the ‘80s, financial and otherwise. “But,” he said, “when I get depressed, I don’t kill people or think about committing suicide. I write a hit song. I may not like something that happened along the line, but I can’t be bitter about it. What right do I have?”
And if fame comes calling again? “I think, yeah, I can handle it a little bit better,” he mused. “I don’t think I handled it badly the first time around. I dealt with it pretty good. But this time I can – maybe not, I don’t know – I want to think that ‘Yes I can.’ I would hope so.”
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3. He’s a famous, shaggy-haired guitarist, who made his bones – and a pile of dough – in a famous alt-rock band which came to life in the college rock era of the early 80s. In his mid-60s now, he continues to tour as a member of various entities, even as his main band has long since retired. But here he was in 1986, stepping out of his guitarist role to produce an album for one of his favorite bands. This is what he said in 2009 about working with them 23 years ago.
“They’re smart and opinionated and also kind of quiet. Sometimes things weren’t going right, but you can’t figure out what because they won’t tell you. ‘Why are you unhappy?’ You could tell something was wrong but I couldn’t figure out is it too fast. ‘Should we change instruments? Do we need a break? Give me a clue as to where we need to be to make this a good experience.’ It worked out fine.
“What I want is the band to be happy with what they’re doing. We figured it out, we talked about it. Sometimes, it’d be something really simple. [The two co-leading guitarist-singers] had open ears as to people overplaying, just a tiny bit. Maybe, [I’d say] ‘You’re playing one note too many in this chorus,’ but they wrote the song. That’s fair. We had discussions about that stuff.
“Whether they were in the wilds of New Jersey and I was in a small town in Georgia, we grew up listening to the same stuff. Stuff that changed our lives, the Velvet Underground and Stooges and later Patti Smith, all those things that were from the edge of the world. The fact is we had that same language in common.”
4. The band’s t-shirt was worn by Steven Adler, drummer for Guns N’ Roses. He sported it in Guns N’ Roses’ hit video, “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” which was played a lot on MTV during the late- ‘80s.
This t-shirt – with a big imprint of the band’s four-letter name on it – has probably had more impact on their success than any other single factor. The irony and idiocy of this does not escape its singer-songwriter Joe Wood.
“Let me tell you what happened,” the singer-guitarist tells me in 1990. “Their drummer was living with our drummer when they did that video. [Our drummer] asked him to wear the T-shirt in the video. He said, ‘I can’t do that, they won’t let me do that.’ Two weeks later, the video came on TV and he had the t-shirt on. The funny thing about it is that was probably one of the best things that ever happened to this band. It’s unfortunate – first of all because MTV has that kind of power and, second, for all the record company people we have behind us, some guy wears a t-shirt on a video and that’s the most publicity we ever got. It is ridiculous. You would be surprised at how many people come to our show either to buy that shirt or just see our band because he is wearing that shirt. I think it’s just amazing.”
But, of course, the translation is this: Guns N’ Roses thinks this band is cool, so this band – out there for 12 years at this point – must be cool. As it turns out, the equation holds water.
Still, the singer understands if people don’t quite get it. “Everybody is kind of confused about what [our band] is,” he admitted. “But we’ve always considered ourselves a hardcore rock ‘n’ roll band. We brought more of the blues influence in with the punk roots. It eventually evolved into the new album and, I think, the best we’ve ever done. And the only album we’ve had a real budget to do our music with.”
Answers: 1) The band, Throwing Muses, the first voice Kristin Hersh, the second Tanya Donelly. 2) KC (Harry Wayne Casey) of KC and the Sunshine Band, 3) Peter Buck of R.E.M., on producing The Feelies’ second album, The Good Earth, 4) Joe Wood of TSOL.
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