A conversation with The Breeders from 2002
Revisiting an era when Kurt Cobain's favourite band had yet to become Olivia Rodrigo's
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the ‘90s and ‘00s and present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. 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
My contribution to the Best Albums of 2024 So Far conversation:
In last Thursday’s Toronto Star, I wrote a retrospective on OddFellows, a restaurant that I visited on a near-weekly basis between its opening in 2008 and closing in 2011—and the story may be of interest to non-Toronto readers, too, as this restaurant essentially created Fak from The Bear.
I’ve been listening to this new IDLES single on repeat:
And now it’s time for my first correction! It has come to my attention that the drummer for Hershel Savage and the American Flag when they opened for Guided by Voices at Toronto’s Opera House in 1999 (as discussed in last week’s newsletter) was not Jon McCann, but rather future Broken Social Scene time-keeper Justin Peroff, so the American Flag/BSS analogy I made in the post was even more on-point than I realized. (I didn’t actually meet Justin until two years later, so, in Inside Out terms, his presence didn’t filter into my core memory of that ‘99 show.) McCann replaced Peroff in the American Flag mere weeks after that Opera House show, before going on to join GBV.
New arrivals to the stübermania 2024 playlist: my favourite tune from the delightful self-titled Redd Kross double album on In the Red (more on that in next week’s newsletter); a harmony-punk head-rush from Austin’s Being Dead that sounds like The Mamas & The Papas being thrown into a circle pit; a teaser from the upcoming album by soft-psych dream-weaver Luni Li; a sundazed jam from Wand tailormade for zoning out in a sweaty fever dream during your next heatwave; a mesmerizing mess of a track c/o the Dirty Three; and another cosmic spoken-word reverie from the new Mercury Rev record, which is shaping up to be a Kaputt-styled ambient-jazz opus.
Apple Music version (click on the image):
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, and José Medeles of The Breeders
Date: March 27, 2002
Location: The Grand Hotel at Dundas East and Jarvis, Toronto. I remember it being an unseasonably warm and sunny day, so we sat on the lobby restaurant’s patio.
Album being promoted: Title TK
The context: Title TK was the first Breeders album since 1993’s Last Splash, which transformed this one-time Pixies side project into an alt-rock institution in their own right, but also ushered in a turbulent period of hard touring, substance abuse, high-profile arrests, and members quitting. So naturally, any conversation with The Breeders in 2002 centred around the question of why it took Kim and Kelley nine years to release a follow-up. And as I discovered during this chat, it’s a question that takes the better part of an hour to answer, as Kim laid out the arduous step-by-step process of rebuilding The Breeders with two latter-day members of punk-rock perennials Fear (guitarist Richard Presley and bassist Mando Lopez) and their fellow East L.A. denizen José Medeles on drums.
Talking to the Deal sisters is an interviewer’s dream and a transcriber’s nightmare. Which is to say: a total joy in the moment, but a daunting task once you playback the tape to search for succinct, usable quotes for an 800-word feature story. They speak with the exact same hyperactive zeal on display in Kim’s field-hockey speech on Surfer Rosa, which means they’re often talking over one another, finishing each other’s sentences, or veering off into tangents. And in this case, the process was complicated by the fact that I had accidentally set my dictaphone to its voice-activated setting, which meant the tape stopped and restarted depending on whether anybody was saying anything. Thankfully, with the Deals, there were few moments of dead air—you may notice that, in the 4,000-word transcript below, I get in maybe five questions.
This interview for Eye Weekly occurred a few weeks after the band’s Canadian label, The Beggars Group, bussed a group of music journalists down to see The Breeders perform a small warm-up pre-release show at The Magic Stick in Detroit. (Ah, the early 2000s—i.e., the last time in history that record-company largesse trickled down to lowly alt-weekly writers. Though it’s not like the Beggars expense budget was big enough to cover accommodations for the night: The bus started rolling back to Toronto at 2 a.m., and as everyone else around me fell asleep, I was growing increasingly antsy over the fact that we were driving into a snowstorm in the dead of night on a desolate stretch of the 401 with near-zero visibility, so I sat upfront with the driver the whole four-hour ride home—if we were going to slide off into a ditch, I at least wanted to be the first to know.)
With the Last Splash line-up now back in place, this interview serves as a time capsule of that early-2000s moment when The Breeders were in the transitory phase between being Kurt Cobain’s favourite band and becoming Olivia Rodrigo’s. (It’s also a snapshot of a time when Kim was shit-talking ProTools with a venom and disgust that most musicians reserve for Spotify today.) The interview tape started rolling in the middle of a conversation where Kim is talking about going to a Van Morrison concert…
Kim: ...but I didn't recognize a single song.
Kelley: That's no fun.
Kim: I mean, he didn't have to do “Brown Eyed Girl,” but...
José: We kept that in mind when we put our set together. We didn't want to overwhelm people with all our new material.
Kim: Because I don't like that and you don't like that either.
José: I mean, we're not selfish.
Kim: How would you like to see Roy Orbison and he plays only new songs...
Kelley: I don't care if he sings the alphabet! It doesn't matter. It's about that voice.
José: But it's cool to be able to play Pod songs, Last Splash songs, and new songs—but they all sound like they’re coming from the same band, right?
Kelley: I'm gonna learn how to play violin, though, so we can play “Drivin' on 9.” [To Kim] Quit looking at me like that! People really want to hear “Drivin' on 9” a lot.
Yeah, people were shouting for it at the Detroit show.
Kelley: Yeah, but it means we've got to have a whole person [playing violin] just for one song. Or I could play the drums during it and [to José] you can play the violin!
So is touring something you have to psychologically prepare yourself for? Because in the history of The Breeders, it seems like touring was where the dark clouds started rolling in…
Kelley: That's a misnomer, but I appreciate that people think that. I was in my computer programming job, I remember being in a meeting at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And I have top-secret clearance, and this is a meeting about Linux, it's basically a mathematical computer program that plays wargames, you know? If planes get broken in the supply line, can we get them fixed? How many men are going to die, and how much manpower is it going to take to replace it? So these are wargames we're playing. And the night before I did X [ecstasy], I stayed up all night. I'm wearing the exact same thing I wore the day before at work. So I'm wearing this yellow blazer, you know, and I'm walking into a meeting in the morning and I'm... so, I mean, yeah, touring gives you a lot of time to indulge in it. But that's not what got me indulging in the first place. Touring is not where my problems started.
[At this point, my dictaphone cuts out and resumes recording just as Kim is talking about she and Kelley doing a three-song session with the late Steve Albini in 1999.]
Kim: I was at Albini's and we did that thing, those three songs, and then I met the [Fear] guys in March 2000. I met 'em right when I stopped looking for a band. I was just visiting New York City, and I was in the studio, and then I ran into them. We jammed all night in March 2000. I moved out to Los Angeles in June of 2000. Kelley came out in July of 2000. We jammed with José in November of 2000 and then we were at Albini's in March 2001. So once we got everybody...
José: We were quick. We worked so hard. It was great.
Kelley: Once you found the people, it all came bang-bang-bang.
Kim: Yeah, it was hard to find the people… like, we just heard that song on the radio last night—an alternative kind of band—and their tambourine was fuckin' triggered off of ProTools!
José: At least when people put on our new record, they're going to hear what a 1942 snare sounds like.
Kim: You're not capturing the sound [with ProTools]. You captured the calculations that get Xeroxed to reproduce that sound. But it's not a recording. It's just mathematics in a graph. In New York City, when I was trying to find a band, I was trying to record things, and nobody wanted to go analog. And in the late-’90s, there was nobody around like José that would just sit around and play a song over and over. "Yeah, let's try the chorus one more time." Why would they do that? They can fix it in front of their monitors. Why would anybody go to practice and be in a room with five people? The music's in your closet, in your B room, where you're sitting in front of a [computer] keyboard. That's how everybody was creating music. It was really frustrating to try to find people who would come down and just try to play the song live and work on it.
Why didn't you just stick with Albini? Because his recording philosophy seems very much in line with yours.
Kim: Well, I didn't think it would be that much of a problem [to find other people to work with]! We had just worked with Albini [in 1995] on Pacer [credited to Deal’s side project/alter ego, The Amps].
Kelley: Yeah, so it's not like you want to do the same thing every single time.
Kim: And I was in New York City and he lives in Chicago. I was trying to find people to play with. I couldn't find anybody to play with. All these studio owners, they just bought their new ProTools gear, and for house engineers it's like a new toy. So they really were hesitant to record analog. They really wanted to work on the ProTools stuff. It was really, really hard for them to not open their new Christmas present and have it working for me. And they really believed, in their hearts, that they were doing me a favour. When I would ask, "Is this going to be an analog session?" They would be like, "okay..." And then the next day, the computer would be on, and I would say, "why is the computer on?" "Oh, I was just doing my bills this morning." "Oh, okay."
Kelley: “You can turn that off now!”
Kim: Well, I left it on because I didn't want to be some sort of weirdo, you know? They might have to do some more bills later on when I'm working on a part. Like with the compressor, you can tell them, "I don't want anything compressed," but then you see the light on the box is still on—the indicator light.
Kelley: I've been in there with her before where the producer's said, "Well, I'm not using [the compressor], nothing's going through there." "Okay, then it won't hurt you to press the power button and turn it off!" "But I'm not going through there!" "I don't care, turn it off!" Because you'll go back in and four takes later, while you're doing the bass, and you're not listening to the drums anymore, because the drums are fine, you're listening to the bass now… and then, for some reason all of a sudden you hear: "Dude, play that again… okay, the drums are compressed—why are they compressed?" "Well, actually it was recorded to tape with the compression on it..."
Kim: That used to be the worst thing. Now, they can actually put you on digital music without you even knowing it. The only reason I knew it is because I was outside most of the time and my friends stopped by and they went, "did you know this is coming off the digital machine?" But mainly I couldn't find anybody to play with, because everybody would be sitting there... all the drummers now had the ability to, like…
José: ...get any drum sound they wanted. They didn't even need a good set.
Kim: You just download the drum sound you want from the computer.
José: A friend of mine who did a pretty big record was blown away. He's like, "I could have any sound I want!" I remember going, "That's kind of weird." He goes, "I just brought in whatever kit was there, and I could have any drum sound I wanted." I mean, it's neat but if you're kind of a purist, even a little bit, it makes you go, “why?” But he was working with such-and-such producer, and he was going through the motions.
Kim: So he would play, and they would just trigger the sound? That's been going on for a long time. Then what happens now is, not only is he not really playing those sounds, but nowadays he would probably only play a couple bars!
José: That was another thing that he had mentioned: how easy it was. His tracks were done in a couple of days. And they would just put it in the computer and fix whatever, or throw around this fill that sounded maybe better there.
Kim: They wouldn't have to work that out in practice. So wouldn't it be really annoying, if you were a drummer, and that's where your head was, and I was asking, "Try it again. Let's try a little slower, or try to throw in more of a B-52's feel—something sparse." You can imagine the eye-rolling, right? He's probably thinking, "you know, I can do this in two minutes and just take this home to ProTools.” So The Amps record came out in '95. I toured that, went to Australia, toured for like a year and a half. So in the middle of '97, I went to New York City, tried to find a band, and I couldn't find anybody, so I learned how to play the drums-ish. I mean, I'm not a drummer, but I learned how to play the songs that I play, and I went to Albini, and Kelley was there, so we did three songs, but then came more questions... Of the three songs, one of them is on [Title TK]. "The She" is the one that I did at Albini's. And then I noticed, "oh these three sound good... oh, shit—what happens if I finish the record like this [by myself]? I don't have a band! Who would I tour with? Would I pick up session players?" So I was like, "okay, Steve, these three sound good." You have to know your parts on everything, not only drums. So three at a time seemed like a good amount. I lived in Dayton at the time, so I could just drive up to Chicago, but that didn't make any sense: If I finished the album like that, then who would play with me? I would be like Sheryl Crow… no offence to her or anything, but I would be like, who will play with me?
You'd have to get Kenny Aronoff or Jim Keltner..
Kelley: Who the hell's that!?!
Kim: Exactly! For God's sakes. Would they play live with me? How much would that cost?
José: Neil Young can afford Jim Keltner. You know what, Jim Keltner's a very organic drummer.
Kim: Is he? That's good.
He's on those Traveling Wilburys records...
Kim: I like Traveling Wilburys. But I doubt that they do everything without any kind of digital shit because they've got the guy from ELO in there.
The Wilburys are all dying off, sadly. [Note: this interview happened just a few months after George Harrison’s death.]
Kelley: I saw Roy Orbison play. I saw him play on a Sunday night, and he died on the Tuesday. He sounded exactly like his records. He went up there and he sang, and his voice... it went through you. It's the most beautiful sound.
Kim: Tom Jones sounded exactly like his record, too. Isn't that something?
José: Freddy Fender, too.
Kim: So then in the summer of '99, I finished those three songs, and then I quit looking [for a band]. I lost my mind on Nantucket, and in March of 2000 I went to New York City to visit LoHo [Studios]. My friends had just built this beautiful studio with the drummer in mind, which I thought was very brave in the '90s. They were building this in '97, '98, '99 and I was just like, "Man, I can't believe you're building a drum room in New York City! You know, this is like financial suicide, right?" My friends would always go to this one bar, and I never went. It was only a couple blocks away, but they had this great studio and a refrigerator—I don't want to walk down to a bar. But I decided, "Okay, this one night I'll go to Motor City.” So I walked into this bar in March 2000 and there was the manager for The Hellacopters and the manager for Fear. And I thought, "Ooh, I'll go up and I'll tell ‘em about this cool drum studio. Certainly, Fear and The Hellacopters people would like that!”
Kelley: She thought they were the roadies.
Kim: And certainly the manager might have huge rosters of rock bands that are maybe looking for a studio in New York City. So I walk over and say: "Hi, my name's Kim Deal, and there's a beautiful studio a couple blocks away, what are you guys doing, blah blah blah?" "Yeah, Fear just played a show—some of our guys are standing over there." So I walked over there: "my name is Kim Deal, blah blah blah." Then we started talking, because they're just cool and everything.
Kelley: Now here's Richard [Presley]'s side of the story. Richard and Mando are sitting. Richard's the guitar player, and Mando's the bass player. They were at the bar and Mando looked over and said, "Is that Kim Deal? That's Kim Deal talking to Kevin [their manager]! No don't look... wait, she's walking over here!" It's cute to hear them talk about it. They were so excited. So Kim said the magic words: "There's a studio down here, I got some beer, you want to go jam?"
Kim: Well, it's four o'clock in the morning, so the New York bar closed, and I’m like, "you guys want to keep drinking? The studio's only a couple blocks down." And [the studio owner] Victor's so nice, and Mando and Richard will tell you: He just opens up these closets full of all these great old vintage cabs, these old Orange cabs. Just everything. We played all night. Well, we started at four in the morning and they left at nine. We just played five hours. But it felt like all night. And then we before they left, we exchanged information, and I said, "where do you guys live?" And they go, "East Los Angeles." And I go, "I may go out there, and we can keep jamming together."
Kelley: Lee Ving from Fear wanted to get back into his acting career. So Mando and Richard were like, "yeah, we're into this, because Fear is kind of doing less and less." Also, one of the reasons why you wanted to jam with them is that Mando was doing this song, and one of the guys there said, "No, what I think she means is this," and Mando just handed him the bass like this, and said, "Okay, show me what you mean," instead of saying, "I got it—I know what I'm doing!"
Kim: Richard and Mando have been hanging out since junior high school, so it was such a cool thing. I didn't know if they were roadies or not at the time. I wasn't sure... I didn't think they were Fear guys, because they would have to be 50-60 years old! And so then I took my car and my U-Haul, and I drove out…
Kelley: In March, I get a phone call: "Kelley, I met these guys, they're really great. I'm gonna have Richard call you and talk to you, he's a really nice guy. I'm gonna be moving out there. I'm gonna take my stuff and move out there in June. I want you to come out. I'm moving out June 1st—you come July 1st." Oh, okay! Sounds good to me. And so we went out there.
Kim: We got set up with a two-bedroom apartment.
Kelley: I go back and forth because my fiancé, my home, is in Dayton, so I fly back and forth a lot. So then there were three people she was jamming with... the drummer, the bass player, and the guitar player. Andrew [Jaimez, also of Fear], Mando, and Richard. So we started jamming with the five of us, and then we find out a month and a half down the line…
Kim: Drew's mom had died recently, he didn't want to go on tour, he didn't want to leave home, he felt like a homebody, and it was really cool that he came over and said, “I don't want to tour.” And then in August, we're in East Los Angeles—me, Kelley, Richard and Mondo, and we don't have a drummer. Then Fear was going on a tour. And then...
José: Kelly Lemieux played in Fear before Mando did, so Rich knew Lemieux, and when Lemieux was in Fear, I was playing in a band with him called 22 Jacks.
Kim: So Richard called Kelly Lemieux and asked "do you know any good drummers." And Kelly Lemieux said: "José Medeles."
José: Because I toured with the guy and recorded with him. So Richard called me up.
Kim: Richard's on tour with Fear. We're bumming. They're on tour, we don't have a drummer...
José: So Richard called me up and said they were looking for a drummer, and I wasn't doing anything. I was actually ready to find something to commit to that I really believed in, most of all. I mean, being a drummer in L.A, I could play every night, if I wanted to be quite honest with you. But finding something that you believe in is a lot harder.
Kim: Isn't it weird that you were wanting to actually be part of a real band... like, you said, you could work every day in L.A., but you wouldn't be in a band…
José: I'd be touring to just pay my phone bill and that wasn't attractive. I did that about three or four years ago, and I hated it. I want to be a band guy, and to have that attitude in L.A., you might go hungry. Because I like the struggle, especially with something I believe in. If you're gonna sacrifice so much time and be away, it might as well be something that you're totally into—to sit in the rehearsal room for four hours, learning stuff that you're not into, is very torturous, let alone going out every night playing your ass off and feeling like a monkey up there. It's almost faking it. And I admire drummers that do it, but I knew it wasn't for me.
Kim: Isn't that funny that at the time that you were having trouble trying to find a band, I was having trouble finding people who wanted to be in the band?
José: That was one of the things she first said to me when I initially met Kim in her apartment...
Kim: You have to warn people, because I'm used to people saying, "If you pay me, I'll practice."
José: She said, "I'm looking for a drummer that's going to join the band, that's going to do the record that's going to tour. I'm not going to pay you for rehearsing..." I hadn't played in a band in probably eight months, nine months. I was working in a drum shop, I started my own band to play, just to have fun again.
Kim: Check this out—you know, since we've been doing interviews, I didn't know you were struggling trying to find a band, but I did know one of the first things where I was like, "José is probably gonna be fucking cool" is he's a drummer and he starts a Hank Williams cover band and it's called Crank Williams! They do all Hank Williams songs like rockabilly, like fast cowpunk. Just pedal to the metal.
José: It's funny. At first, I couldn't understand why [The Breeders] couldn't find a drummer. "Oh, that's weird... they went through drummers on the East Coast; Andrew, who's an amazing drummer, probably one of the best drummers that I know, steps away from the gig…" So I'm all like, that's really weird…
Kim: I had been feeling like that since '98!
José: So I thought it was quite odd. But I went in there and I heard the new stuff, which was amazing. And the way I felt in the room was: This band wants to work hard for the music, which was so appealing… I was in a room with four other people where all that mattered was the music and it being so right—not just parts right, but feeling right, the way it pushes and pulls. So it was opening up more challenges for me as a drummer, and at the same time enlightening my view of music. I fell back in love with music, and what my role was as a drummer. And them being so patient, because they're all just amazing players and amazing people, you know? I mean, you can actually hang out with them.
Kim: We hang out all the time.
José: No egos. I can see where a drummer would walk into that room, and if he didn't check his ego at the door and just be there for the purpose of surrendering themselves to the music, I could see where it would be a hard gig for a lot of drummers to do. They could have done this record with anybody. They could have toured with anybody, there are so many great drummers out there. But it's that little, little, little leeway of going, "You know what? Yeah, I get it. I'm gonna work on this, so it feels right." The part might be right, but making it feel right is a whole different ballgame.
Kim: You have worked with a lot of different bands out there, but didn't you tell me some of the bands would be influenced by the fact of wanting to build songs based on a standard format?
José: Oh sure, yeah. Nothing against the bands I played with, but the idea of being risky, or taking chances, was thrown out the window, especially when a producer came in. It was really weird, and it put a bad taste in my mouth, and that's why I didn't play in a band for eight or nine months. I was ready to be a barber, you know? I'm all like, "you know what—screw it, man, I've done some cool stuff…"
Kim: He played with Joey Ramone.
José: And I was like, "Hey, I've done a couple of things, I could cut some good hair, screw it." But then I got in The Breeders, and it's just amazing. I just can't believe it. I'm just talking about music sensibilities, you know? I'm just talking about the core of what's real.
It sounds like you've all arrived at the exact same place at the exact same point in your lives.
Kim: Yeah, it's weird, isn't it, to find a drummer who doesn't get mad if we need to try something over again, because it just kind of sounds stock, you know? Let's try it again. Let's try it super, super-fast. And José's like "Okay!" Now, let's try it real slow. "Okay!" It's ridiculous, but we'll spend hours doing that. But hopefully it doesn't seem like that on the record.
Kelley: I've talked about this before because it makes so much sense to me. It explains it to me in, like, a couple sentences where you've got five instruments, and the drums are as important as the vocals, which are as important as the melody, which is as important as what the lead guitar is doing, which is as important as what the bass is doing. On "Little Fury," José lifts his leg up... I don't know how that worked out, but when he did that, Kim was like, "That's it!" So every time he plays the song, he has to lift up his kick-drum pedal really high, because it gives it the right amount of delay and stupidness at the same time.
José: It's so funny, because it's one, or maybe two notes. But I remember when I hit it... you get confused sometimes, but when you get it, it's like going through the finish line. It's the feeling of: That's it. It all makes sense!" Whereas I could see guys going, "What are you talking about?!?"
Kim: It's like: if that [drum part] doesn't have the right feel, then how can that vocal line pop off that?
[interview tape runs out]
ENCORES
Revisting this interview was a bit bittersweet, given that much of the conversation involves Kim, Kelley, and José expressing how fortunate they were to find one another, and yet José’s tenure with the band would only last for one more full-length record (2008’s Mountain Battles, which I happened to review for Pitchfork). So I’m happy to see that José appears to be living his best life as a drum-shop owner and music historian. In 2022, he corralled a cast of indie all-stars—including M. Ward, The Decemberists’ Chris Funk, and avant-guitar wiz Marisa Anderson—for a John Fahey tribute album.
I’ve only issued three newsletters/interviews so far, and yet this is already the second to discuss the relative merits of Jim Keltner. I cannot guarantee any more Keltner-related content going forward, but don’t rule it out completely.
Next week’s Headliner: Redd Kross!
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I was on that bus…