A conversation with Jim Sclavunos of The Bad Seeds/Grinderman from 2010

Nick Cave's long-time drummer reflects on a storied career that's seen him work with everyone from Sonic Youth to Alex Chilton

Mar 06, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Today at Pitchfork, I wrote about the new album from Montreal-via-Calgary maverick John Sebastien Audet, a.k.a. Yves Jarvis, who continues to create weird and wonderful music, even when he’s trying to copy John Mayer songs.
Elastica released its debut album 30 years ago this month, and M.I.A. released her debut album 20 years ago this month, which means it’s now been 10 years since I wrote about the (ahem) connection between the two for Pitchfork (a piece that also doubles as your periodic reminder that The Menace was waaaay underrated).
Notes on this week’s arrivals on the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
- Click here for the Apple Music version of the playlist.
- Yves Jarvis, “All Cylinders”: As I mention in the aforelinked Pitchfork review, this song answers the question: “what if you wrote a tune about peeling down an Alberta freeway to hurry home to see your girl, but made it sound like a dainty Dreamworks-era Elliott Smith tune if he listened to as much There’s a Riot Goin On’ as Abbey Road?”
- Marie Davidson, “Contrarian”: The climactic highlight of the recently released City of Clowns sees the Montreal electro agitator forsake her usual sardonic social commentary to deliver a manic, mantric ravey rager.
- Logo, “Glass”: Discovered this one through an inbox cold call. Logo is an L.A.-based artist who, based solely on the merits this debut single, specializes in an ethereal-pop/glitchtronic fusion that sounds like The Weather Station as produced by Start Breaking My Heart-era Caribou.
- Cloakroom, “The Lights Are On”: The centerpiece track on the Indiana trio’s new album, Last Leg of the Human Table, is a grungegaze epic that strikes the perfect balance of heady atmosphere, grinding riffage, and cloud-busting groove.
- Panda Bear, “Venom’s In”: If Person Pitch was the proto-chillwave Pet Sounds, then the cheery tropical pop of the new Sinister Grift sees Noah Lennox settle firmly into his “Kokomo” years—but this dreamy outlier track taps a deeper emotional vein.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Jim Sclavunos

The date: August 31, 2010

Location: I was in my apartment in Toronto, Jim was calling in from New York City

Publication: Eye Weekly

Album being promoted: Grinderman 2

The context: When you write about music for an alt-weekly, you get used to being told by publicists that the only member of a band available to do an interview is the drummer. And in those situations, you can’t help feel like you’ve been handed a consolation prize, since, in many cases, drummers aren’t intimately involved in the songwriting process, so you get a lot of answers along the lines of: “Well, you’d have to ask [the singer] about that.”

So when you’re offered an interview with Grinderman, presumably, the first person you want to talk to is Nick Cave, with Warren Ellis a not-too-distant second. But when I was informed Jim Sclavunos would be handling this phoner, I was just as happy to partake—because, on top of being a beast of a drummer, Sclavunos has a musical history every bit as rich as that of his more celebrated bandmates. After all, this is a guy who played with Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Alex Chilton in Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, and in an early iteration of Sonic Youth before becoming Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ resident stickman in 1994. And then in 2007, he joined Cave, Ellis, and bassist Martyn Casey in Grinderman, the Bad Seeds offshoot that released two albums of glorious garage-punk noise—which, in hindsight, proved to be a last-gasp display of Cave’s feral impulses before he and The Bad Seeds entered a prolonged period of meditative musical exploration. So Sclavunos is the best kind of drummer interview: a guy who’s amassed a wealth of knowledge, experience, and war stories, and who can provide both an insider and outsider perspective on the people he plays with.

So the Grinderman tour kicks off here at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto in November. Are you enjoying the calm before the storm?

I can’t say I’m really enjoying it; in fact, there’s even a degree of dread. I hate the rehearsal phase—that’s when you have to figure out how to do everything. Our music is largely improvised in the studio, and then we overdub on top of the improvisations, and that leaves a trail of mystery that has to be unraveled when it comes time to actually implement the mechanics of presenting it as one thing. It’s a very synthetic process in the studio—it can only exist in the studio environment and come out the way it does. To render it as a live performance, we have to work backwards and figure out how we did things.

That seems to be consistent with the whole Grinderman concept—it feels like this band is an experiment in unlearning for everyone involved.

For some members of the band. One of the things I’ve been trying to unlearn is not to rely so much on the backbeat. Not that I have anything against the backbeat, but there are other things drums can do. So I guess there’s some evidence of those explorations on the new album. Nick undertook guitar playing on the first album—he’s almost actually getting too good at it. We might have to come up with something weird for him to play, like a flugelhorn. When we made the first record, Warren tried to not play violin. I guess Marty’s the one lazybones in the whole bunch, he just played bass. Who’s going to argue with Marty? But yeah, we all tried to do different things. I played a little bit of synthesizer-drum on the new album—that’s got to be a first for any record I’ve been on, let alone a Nick Cave-related musical effort.

Grinderman was initially positioned as a more primal offshoot of the Bad Seeds, but the new album really opens up a lot of new sonic possibilities, whereas the last Bad Seeds tour in 2008 was just as heavy as anything you hear on the Grinderman record.

I’m wondering who did that positioning? I guess it was implicit in the grunt of the band name, but we never really saw it that way ourselves, and never wholeheartedly embraced that perception of the band—although it was great to see people responding to what they saw as a more back-to-basics kind of thing. But it wasn’t like this was our “return to the garage” or something. We never saw it that way. Part of that also came from the fact that, because Nick had just learned how to play the guitar, there was sort of a rudimentary aspect to his scratchings and scrabblings that kind of grounded a lot of the stuff in a very basic way. He kept it from becoming too highfalutin. We saw that as a good thing—but it might’ve misled people into thinking that’s where we were coming from, and that was going to be the goal we were pursuing.

In talking about the new album, Warren’s been throwing around names like Sly Stone and Amon Düül…

Yeah, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in that—just because it happens to be in your iPod shuffle at the moment you’re working on a record doesn’t mean it’s a bigger influence than all the other millions of things you’ve listened to and absorbed over the course of your life. And I don’t think we set about emulating a Sly Stone record any more than an Amon Düül record. We’ve been around collectively and individually a long time, so we’ve heard a lot of things, and a lot of things we really like, and all of that becomes a part of the fabric that we weave.

When the first Grinderman album was made, was there an expectation that there would be a second record?

Well, we went into the studio to figure out what Grinderman was—it didn’t even have a name at the time. We knew that we wanted to try making a record together as a four-piece. We had been playing in this Nick Cave solo band for a couple of years and it was sounding very different from the Bad Seeds and that was encouraging us and getting us excited about the prospect of, “Well, what would happen if we went into a studio and not only played like this, but wrote a bunch of songs specifically for this band?” For Nick especially, this was quite an adventure, because he had really only been in these two bands in his entire life—The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds—and his career was pretty much defined by those things, which had stretched for decades. I’d been in hundreds of bands, so I took it in stride, like “oh, another band—cool!” But for Nick, it was quite a leap of faith, and in fact by that point we’d all been in The Bad Seeds for a long time.

So to make a long story short, we didn’t even know what the first album was going to be or if it was going to work. But by the time we left the studio, we were ready to do another one straight away. We were very excited by the results, and the fact that it’s taken so long to make a second one is no indication of anything other than the fact we’ve been doing a lot of other things: We did a Bad Seeds record in between, I’ve been doing a lot of production work with different bands, Nick wrote a novel, some soundtracks, Marty’s done a Triffids reunion. It wasn’t for lack of desire or energy or glorious exalted ideas of what the second album could be like. One of the reasons we thought it was a good idea to name this album 2 is that it implies there would be a number 3 and a number 4, etcetera. I think some people have misconstrued Grinderman 2 as a sequel, like the awful return of some monster that you thought you killed in the first album, but it wasn’t meant that way at all. It wasn’t meant in cinematic terms, it was meant more like Led Zeppelin II, III, etcetera… or like Chicago!

But then you’d have to get up to like 17 or 25, or whatever Chicago made it up to.

That’s because there was such demand for so many Chicago albums. The mind boggles!

Do you think the Grinderman vibe rubbed off on Dig, Lazarus, Dig? It seemed that album had a little more swagger in its step.

Yeah, I think so. I like that word—swagger. There was definitely some more swagger in The Bad Seeds. There was a lot of trepidation about what the implications [of Grinderman] would be for The Bad Seeds, both inside the band and outside, and I think in the end it was only reinvigorating for The Bad Seeds. It’s an exciting prospect for us to see how this next Bad Seeds album is going to play out.

So there’s no hard feelings for those Bad Seeds that are sitting on the sidelines while the rest of you do Grinderman?

There might be… but, tough. What are we going to do about it? It’s too late. As a member of both, I just see it as another facet of something I do—I’ve been in a lot of bands, and work on a lot of different productions. It comes quite naturally to me to do a lot of different things. To have two different bands where you’re playing with the same people is actually a great luxury. We’re not alone among people who go down this road—there’s Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre, for example, or the multitude of bands Jack White has overlapping personnel with, like Raconteurs and Dead Weather. I think it’s something musicians enjoy doing and they should be allowed to do it. At the end of the day, why would you want to stop them? Having different band set-ups breaks down habits and allows different things to enter the picture, and that can have an influence on the other band, and each one enriches the other. I see it as a positive thing all around. And yeah, it’s going to make people who feel excluded in the personnel potentially uneasy about it, but on other hand, I think that’s much ado about nothing.

Is there a new Bad Seeds record on the horizon to assuage their hard feelings?

I don’t think there are hard feelings. I only see them when I make a Bad Seeds record, and so far, nobody’s punched me in the mouth. At the risk of being proven terribly wrong, I imagine we’ll be working on a Bad Seeds record in 2011, presumably out by 2012. It’s not like there’s a timetable mapped out for us. It’s not like we can meet deadlines anyway—we’ve proven that time and again. This new Grinderman album being a perfect example of it. For once, we thought we were on schedule, but then some distractions came up and we were listening to the mixes and we thought, “you know what, it could be a little bit better, and we could do this and we could do that.” As late as February of this year, we were still adding on drum parts and vocals. That’s very unusual for us, because we play largely live, and then do a few overdubs on top. This time, we played live and did a lot of overdubs on top, and replaced them with a lot of things. We normally work very fast—this last Grinderman record was quite unusual in that we spent a lot more time with it than we normally do when we’re making albums. But usually in the studio we hit the ground running—like with Abattoir Blues, which was a double album, we somehow had that wrapped up pretty much in a week. We still had the studio time booked and we weren’t quite sure what to do with it. That’s how the choir came into the whole thing, because we had all this extra time. The band itself finished their work in less than seven days.

The blues are a big part of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman’s sound…

So they say! Well, the blues is a big part of rock music’s history…

But you came out of a no-wave scene where there was a real rejection of traditional blues-based rock music…

Yeah, I kind of worked backwards. As a young snot-nosed brat, I embraced anything that sounded like sheer noise—the more obnoxious it was, the better. And growing up in New York in the early ‘70s, there was plenty of that going on: the free-jazz scene, various art rock things—it was a great period for New York minimalist composers, from La Monte Young to Steve Reich to Phillip Glass. They were all coming up during the late ‘60s through the ‘70s, so there was plenty of stuff to feed off of. There were no bluesmen around, at least not authentic bluesmen—whatever ones might’ve been around had already been championed by a previous generation, with the whole British blues scene. Chicago and Memphis had thriving blues scenes, but New York didn’t really—we had the butt end of the folkie thing. So the stuff that seemed exciting to me was really noisy stuff, and then around the time I started playing with Sonic Youth, I met Alex Chilton, and he lured me down to Memphis, and I got quite interested in roots music through him. He even tricked me into joining this ridiculous psychobilly band that I’m quite proud of, even though I think their reputation might be a bit dubious: Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. Chilton was one of the founding members—he basically got this guy Tav Falco, this extroverted eccentric from Memphis, to live out his rock ‘n’ roll fantasies. Some people say it was a cruel joke on the world of music, and others say it was genius! Suffice to say, that’s how I got into roots music, but up until that point, I had been largely unreceptive to it, and certainly not exposed to a lot of it. And Alex Chilton and Tav Falco and people like that were a great, great education. Tav knows this stuff inside-out, and his perception of it was very different from the reverential, academic perception of it, he saw in it a very renegade, avant-garde spirit, which I could really appreciate. When I started getting into music, it was just around the time of the demise of the Velvet Underground, and Iggy and the Stooges were kicking around, so as far as rock music goes, that sounded like the most exciting stuff for me. And from there, I moved into more obscure corners of rock and jazz and modernist composition.

And here we are today.

And here we are today… still fuckin’ playing rock ‘n’ roll! You think I would’ve learned something after all these years! Speaking of the blues… when they tried to update Howlin’ Wolf with that really weird record with the really long title, the results are really musically interesting but he didn’t like it! So I don’t know if there’s any kind of lesson in that… we certainly wouldn’t ever be able to pander to the expectations of a label or an audience, so in a way, we’re lucky that, doing the kind of music that we do, that to us sounds good and feels natural to play, just happens to have been well received by people who maybe weren’t even Bad Seeds fans. There seems to be a whole group of other people out there who’ve welcomed Grinderman, even though they might not even like The Bad Seeds, and that’s fair enough.

Well, hey, Grinderman have done Letterman—did The Bad Seeds ever get to do that?

Yeah, we’ve done Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien—I think that’s the gamut. If only we’d done the Carson show—and I don’t mean Carson Daly. Letterman’s kind of funny—he puts people on that are quite interesting, like Captain Beefheart. He also puts on people that are pretty uninteresting who I won’t name. It’s not actually adventurous TV, but he doesn’t have to put some of these people on, yet he chooses to. So I have to respect that. I gotta admit, I only spend about half the year in the States, and if I turn on the TV, it’s usually the news. But it’s one of those things I’m fleetingly aware of, because I still haven’t managed to figure out which channel things are on, so I have to push the button and arduously scroll through every single channel until I find the Weather Channel. So I get a flash synopsis of American culture every time I channel surf.

That’s funny, because Nick’s writing has become pop culturally focused.

There are a lot of pop-culture references, particularly on this album, but I think some of that stuff is meant to be examining archetypes and reinvesting them with some of their power. Especially monsters—there’s a lot of monsters on this record that, in a sort of humorous way, regain some of their potency.

Like Oprah Winfrey?

[Laughs] She never lost any of her potency. Her potency only seems to be in the ascendancy. I saw a tabloid headline the other day that she’s having an affair with Barack Obama. Who knows what the future holds?

ENCORES

That Grinderman gig at the Phoenix remains one of the hands-down greatest rock ‘n’ roll shows I’ve ever experienced, and I still agree with every word my over-excited 2010 self wrote about it for SPIN.
In the 15 years that have passed since the last Grinderman album, Cave and co. have dropped various hints that a third album may be afoot, but for now, Grinderman 3 remains a Chinese Democracy-level myth.
The Bad Seeds’ North American tour in support of Wild God (which I reviewed for Pitchfork) kicks off next month, and includes a return visit to Toronto’s Meridian Hall (which was still called the Sony Centre the last time the band played there in 2014).