For fans of power pop, few labels had quite as solid a track record as Not Lame. Almost everything the always-enthusiastic Bruce Brodeen put out through his label ended up hitting the spot for a small but dedicated legion of pop aficionados. Still, once in awhile, a release would emerge which would leave some of the purists within his bunch of buyers scratching their heads, wondering why their beloved Bruce would step outside the straightforward power pop that helped build his label’s reputation.

For my part, I was always a little surprised that he put out Reddy Teddy’s Teddy Boy CD. I mean, I bought it because I was intrigued by the description and I ended up enjoying it well enough, but it’s definitely not something I’d hold up as sounding like something you’d expect to find released by Not Lame.

Funnily enough, Mark Helm had convinced himself that the songs on his album, Everything’s OK, weren’t power-poppy enough to warrant a release on Not Lame. Even now, a decade after the release of the record on the label, I think he still thinks they weren’t. In the long run, though, I’ve found that the power doesn’t matter nearly as much as the pop, and based on these pull quotes from these various reviews of his album, it seems pretty clear to me that the pop was decidedly up to par:

* “Elegant…more hooks than a fly fisherman’s vest…” – The Washington Post

* “Everything’s OK: a brilliantly diverse collection of harmonies, humor, horror and hope.” – Fufkin.com

* “Mark Helm…writes the kind of ballads that put a smile on the face of blind ambition.” – The Los Angeles Times

* “The complete package: the vocal harmonies, the soothing melodies, the shining hooks, and bouncy, jangly mindset….and Mark Helm reassures you that there are great songwriters out there that still care about giving the listener the complete package…” – In Music We Trust

* “Often recalling Neil Young and even (dare I suggest it) Brian Wilson at their most sublime, Mark Helm offers a series of songs which reveal themselves to be near crystalline in their unashamedly fragile beauty, (and) pure, simple majesty. In other words? This is an album that deserves to be heard far, wide, and as often as possible.” – Dead Flowers

See what I mean? Mr. Helm may remain uncertain about whether or not Everything’s OK was an appropriate release for Not Lame Records, but when I read reviews like those, I have no doubt that it came out on the right label.

Mark and I struck up an E-mail friendship thanks to the wonderful world of Facebook, and I can offer no end of apologies for how long it’s taken me to get this column finished, but I’ve been a fan of his record since the first time I spun it, so once he and I began to chat online, I knew there’d be a “Hooks ‘N’ You” dedicated to Everything’s OK eventually…and, at last, that time has finally come.

What’s your musical background? Do you come from a musical family, or is music something that you stumbled upon as a kid and just found that you loved?

I can’t ever remember a time when there wasn’t music playing. I grew up in South Jersey near Philly, so the radio stations were amazing. As for family, well, my maternal grandmother, my mom and my aunt Charlotte all played ukulele in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. I remember them singing old standards and hamming it up in the kitchen when I was a little kid. (They were hip to the uke long before George Harrison made it cool again post-Anthology.) Later, my aunt, who was something of a hippie and hugely artistically talented, picked up guitar and was always walking around the house singing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young songs…and playing them well. Her younger brother, my uncle Barry, had the deepest and most lasting impact. He’s ten years older than I and he had a great collection of 45s and LPs. I lived at their house for a good bit of my childhood and my uncle Barry was always having attic room dance parties. The soundtrack to that time was a lot of Stones, Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, Box Tops, and Hollies, and lesser known bands like The Foundation, The Cowsills, Spanky and Our Gang, The Rascals, American Breed, The Buckinghams…I could go on forever. (Despite losing several thousand LPs in the recent flood, I managed to save about 1,000 45s!) Also, listening to my stuff you might not imagine this, but when Barry came home from college for the first time around 1970, he sat me down and played me the first two Chicago records. Those records STILL blow me away. I’m also a massive Yes fan, but that came later.

Do you recall if there was a particular album or song which first made you decide that you wanted to pursue music as a career?

Deja Vu by CSNY, After the Goldrush by Neil Young, and, of course, anything by the Beatles.

I know you were in a band once upon a time, but how did you go from being in a band to taking on a solo career?

I had always been in bands, ever since I was 15 and my 27 year-old guitar teacher’s group lost their rhythm guitarist to a heroin over-dose a week before they were booked to go out on a summer-long tour. This was a hard-working Jersey Shore cover band that did everything from CSNY to the Beatles to the Eagles to Steely Dan. I joined up and ran away from home for a summer in 1977. I started out as “the kid” in that band, playing rhythm guitar and singing back-ups. By the time I was 18 or 19, though, I was co-front man. There were three of us who traded off lead vocals and sang 3 part harmony; I was the showman and by far the least accomplished vocalist. At the time I didn’t have any great desire to write my own tunes. The stuff we played was so musically and vocally challenging, and the tunes were so good. We were doing stuff like “Wooden Ships” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” “My Old School,” and “Bodhisattva.” Killer tunes. It seemed unfathomable I could ever write anything myself that I’d find more satisfying to play; back then, I couldn’t write because I was so in awe of my heroes that my own creativity was stifled.

I stayed in that band all through college. Eventually, I got a full scholarship for graduate school and, semi-reluctantly, I split the band and concentrated on my studies for a few years. I resigned myself to becoming a college English professor/writer…which, to me, was a close second to rock star…but I couldn’t shake music, and by the time I hit my mid-20’s, I was itching to be in a band again. At the time, I had moved away from Jersey and was in Washington, DC, teaching part-time at The American University and working on a creative writing degree. D.C. had a truly magical music scene back then. The bands were all great, the songwriters were brilliant, and the players were world-class. I mean, I could walk five minutes up my street on a week night and see Danny Gatton for $3 in a little dive bar, or go see bands like the Pixies or Jane’s Addiction at the old 9:30 club, which only held 300 people. It was heaven.

One day, I saw an ad in the local City Paper. You know, the usual: “All original alternative band seeks lead guitarist…influences: U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Beatles, and the Buzzcocks.” I auditioned and got the gig…and a wardrobe change. I had showed up to the audition in ripped hippie jeans, a white t-shirt and a ‘50s thrift store cardigan. My white Strat had surfing stickers all over it. Within a month, I was wearing all black, playing a big, black Gibson ES-335 and opening for Let’s Active at the 9:30 club, sharing the famously rat-infested dressing room with Mitch Easter and company. In no time, we were regulars at the 9:30 and getting rave reviews in The Washington Post. The band, radioblue, became really popular in DC really fast. It was a little surreal at first, suddenly becoming a “somebody” in a big city music scene, but it was a lot of fun, too…for a few years, anyway.

See, I wasn’t the lead singer…or even “a” lead singer. I think I secretly hoped that, as with my first band, I would graduate and eventually co-front the group. Although lead singer James Lee (a really wonderful writer and musician, by the way) and I wrote many of the band’s songs together, the guys in the band wanted to keep the format the way it was. And, frankly, that made a lot of sense: James was a very unusual, striking-looking front man, 6’ tall, rail thin, shoulder-length jet black hair, Asian. Having me sing some leads would have been confusing, I think. And we were trying to land a record deal. It wouldn’t have been smart to mess with the formula. Even so, things didn’t pan out and it ended up being the same old story: we never landed the major label deal and the band folded.

Towards the end of radioblue, I started writing a set of songs for a solo project, songs that were less Britpop and more Americana/alternative. Less Mighty Lemon Drops and more Lemonheads. I felt a strong kinship with bands like Dinosaur Jr., The Lemonheads, and Uncle Tupelo, bands that were into Neil Young and Big Star and Gram Parsons. So I grabbed the drummer from radioblue and a couple other top-notch local musicians and formed Super 8. Songs on Everything’s OK like “Galaxy of Cars” and “Week of Days” were written for that band. Somewhere in the middle of that, though, my good friend and sometime songwriting partner, Jamie Blake, got signed to A&M. In a whirl, she took me off to L.A. to do pre-production with her and Josh Freese. Super 8 dissolved, and I was suddenly a solo artist.

So it just kinda happened very gradually…and not at all by design!

By the way, I was involved in Jamie’s record for well over a year, and from the very beginning. If memory serves, our first pre-production sessions were done in an A&M parking lot: Jamie, Josh Freeze (the amazing drummer who has been behind the kit for everyone from Devo to Paul Westerberg to Perfect Circle to Sting) and I just sitting on the asphalt, working stuff out. Then sessions with various producers, wonderful times in the Charlie Chaplin lot in A&M’s studio A (or was it B?), Jamie and A&M putting me up at the infamous rock n’ roll Roosevelt Hotel for weeks–in the mornings, Jamie and I would roll up to the imposing A&M studios security gate. The guard would ask for our names and I would say, “Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli,” or, “Eric and Patti Clapton,” while the guard searched in vain for our names before I fessed up and told him who we really were; it was funny the first dozen or so times. Months later, Jamie was generous enough to fly me up to Boston for more work on the record at my old acquaintance Gary Smith’s Ft. Apache Studios. I was fortunate enough to be alone in the studio with Jamie, Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie, producers of artists like Warren Zevon, Radiohead, Goo Goo Dolls, and tons more. Working on and contributing to this record fulfilled a life-long dream: I got to have a genuine, top level, major label recording experience, and I owe it all to Jamie…who actually earned both a speaking part and musical performance on “Beverly Hills 90210″ because of her work on this record. But for a drift in the winds of luck, Jamie would be a superstar today. She certainly has the talent.

Time for a short segue into a story from Mark’s post-radioblue / pre-Everything’s OK years. As it turns out, our man Mark has a small connection to a big name, albeit one who would’ve been bigger had he not died far too early. Rather than relating the story to me himself, however, he steered me toward a website featuring a very interesting tale from the aforementioned Ms. Blake. Granted, it’s more about her than it is about Mark, but I have a feeling it may make some of you swoon more than a little bit.

“I was a college student at the time at American University in D.C.. I was also the music editor of a paper there called The University Reporter that went to 60,000 school kids in the area. I had an especially good relationship with a local rep from Sony. They were really pushing me to do an article on Jeff Buckley. They sent me live at sine, and at first I didn’t get it, but agreed to meet him at a dinner before the Black Cat show at Dante’s. As it turned out, one of my college professors at school was his opening act, a solo artist named Mark Helm. He was mentoring my songwriting. The two of them met at sound check that night, and Mark must have told Jeff about me. The dinner at Dante’s was for local press, all women. The label was working his beauty factor. He really was beautiful. I was sitting at the opposite end of the table from Jeff. The table was long with about 15 women around it. I hadn’t said a word, everyone was rifling questions at him. I was drifting into space when he calls out, ‘Who here is the musician?’ I said nothing, thinking, of course, ‘He doesn’t mean me.’ He then said again, holding a glass of red wine, ‘Who here is the musician?’ I think I raised my hand and managed a squeaky ‘me.’

With that, he made the women next to him move out of the way and called me to sit next to him. Everyone was still there, but for the rest of the night we only spoke with each other. He had an amazing ability to make you feel special, like the only one in the room. At some point, I realized Mark was going on the stage soon, so I got up to leave, and Jeff said he wanted to come, too. We left everyone behind and walked to the venue together. It was probably only a two block walk, and I remember every word of the conversation. He was telling me about how he got signed, talking about his skull and bones necklace, and about great music in general, continuing our conversation from the restaurant. He asked me if I would come on stage later and sing with him. I had a very limited musical education at the time, and we couldn’t find a song we knew in common, so he said, ‘You’re going to sing ‘Sweet Thing’ with me and just wing it. Repeat after me or something.’ So I sat to watch Mark perform, Jeff thought he was brilliant, and I remember him paying close attention to the lyrics, and commenting on them. Mark is an amazing lyricist. They actually ran into each other later, overseas, and Jeff was wonderful to him.”

Raise your hand if you swooned. Hell, *I* almost swooned. But as great as Clare’s story is, I still felt like I needed to get Mark’s own recollections of the evening, not to mention the story of that later meet-up between him and Jeff.

I’m including Clare’s story, but I figured I should also ask you for a firsthand recollection about the experience of playing with him in DC. Also, she mentioned that you and he crossed paths again later when you were overseas. How did that happen? And did you guys actually keep in touch at all?

Jeff was very nice to me when we met. Of course, he wasn’t famous then, although I’d been a fan of his dad. Only a few people really knew him. The crowd that night was maybe 100-150 people and half were my fans/friends; the other half were folks who knew Jeff’s Live at Sine EP or, like me, were Tim Buckley fans who were curious. It would be a gross understatement to say Jeff exceeded my expectations that evening. It took about two minutes into sound-check before I realized I was in the presence of a VERY rare talent. And he was a sweet guy. After the show, we discussed each others songs. I was flattered that he remembered phrases and lyrics from mine. And he was gracious as I fawned over him. Even then, he was used to it.

We did keep in touch at first, mostly through Jamie Blake. If I’m not mistaken, she told him I was going to be in Oslo the same few nights when he and his band were playing there – this was after Grace hit – and, amazingly, he was playing in a club about 100 yards down the main harbor in Oslo, Norway. We met in the afternoon and hung out before and after the show. My gig ended before his, so I got to see most of the show and he played / dedicated “Kanga-roo” to me, earning me heaps of cred among my Norwegian friends. As I recall, we partied some after the show…or maybe it was before. But it was the last time I heard from or spoke to him. It was very sad when he died. It would not be fair to characterize him as a friend, only an acquaintance, but the meetings we had were at key times in our lives and, like I said, he was a very sweet, warm guy, the kind of guy who gives you a big smile and a hug. A couple of times, we just sang and jammed. We liked the same stuff. He was one of the few guys I knew who got excited about Crosby, Stills & Nash and stuff like that. He was amazed I knew “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” I feel lucky to have hung out with him.

How did you find your way to Not Lame Records?

To be honest, when I got signed to Not Lame, I was relatively new to the whole “power pop” thing, although I was, without knowing it, already a full-on power pop geek. My friend, the brilliant guitarist Pete Kennedy, introduced me to the whole scene. He, Eric Sorensen, and Alan Haber, who had a power pop radio show and was the first to play my demos, organized weekly listening sessions called “Pop Shoot-out” in the DC area. They invited me, discovered my music, and helped get it to Bruce. I couldn’t have done it on my own.

My memory is a bit fuzzy on exactly how it happened, but I do remember that I suddenly got this email from Bruce one day totally raving about my music. His comments were so over the top, I was sure it was a friend taking the piss. Also, I was a huge Not Lame fan, especially Myracle Brah, Doug Powell, and the Shazam. I wanted to be on that label so bad, but I was afraid my stuff wasn’t power-poppy enough…and, as it turns out, it wasn’t! But the people who got it were great.

Tell me a bit about the evolution of Everything’s OK. Had you actually begun the recording process of the album when Bruce pitched the idea of you coming onto Not Lame, or did it not begin in earnest until after that?

For the most part, the songs on OK had already been written, with the exception of “Sweet Dreams, Baby,” “Isolation Day,” and “Everything’s OK.” About half of the record had already been recorded a few years earlier in Denmark, with my friend Henrik Krog Christensen engineering, co-producing, and playing the truly tricky bass and keyboard parts. Bruce signed me on the strength of those Denmark recordings and about 20-30 demos I’d cobbled together into a mock double CD called Record Stores and Girls.

An obvious one: I know you’re legally allowed to fall back on the old “my songs are like my children” response, but I still have to ask you if you have any particular favorites on the album.

Nah, my children are my children…and I do have favorites! For me, it comes down to what holds up when all the strings and fancy harmonies and stuff is stripped away. “Nevermind,” and “Sweet Dreams” hold up pretty well, I think. Yeah, I can still live with them.

Which song evolved the most from when you began to write it to how it ended up on the record?

Probably the title track, “Everything’s OK.” That started off a lot more straightforward and neo-countrified. I recorded a full band version in L.A. with my friend Dave Newton, the Mighty Lemon Drops’ guitarist/songwriter, producing and engineering. That version sounded like it could have been an out-take from On the Beach. Months later, in the studio in D.C. (Mike Harvey’s Actiondale), the tune became a lot more psychedelic. I still thrill when I hear the synth solo from the NL version. It’s so groovy.

Okay, so what’s the story on “What Holds the World Together”? AllMusic.com says that you co-wrote it with Mark Eitzel, but that’s apparently not the case…?

Mark Eitzel did play a small personal part and had a big influence in my early solo career, but he didn’t co-write “World.” We just wrote different songs with the same title at the same time. His may have been released first, but I can’t remember. I know I played it live before his song was released when I opened for American Music Club at the Birchmere when they toured the Challenger album, so he may have noted that…or maybe not. He did watch the set, though, and was very encouraging. At the time, I was still with radioblue, and Eitzel encouraged me to “go solo.”

Another funny Eitzel story: I think it was Amsterdam, and AMC was headlining a gig my friends The Blue Aeroplanes were opening for. Eitzel and I had met, and I asked him to play something…maybe “Why Won’t You Stay”? Anyway, he dedicated it to “my friend Mark from the USA,” and I was promptly mobbed by a ton of people who thought I was Mark Kozalek from Red House Painters! I remember that I kept saying, “I’m not him,” but they kept winking and buying me drinks. All in all, it turned out okay.

On another AllMusic.com note, for some reason, they have the members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers listed as co-writers on “Nevermind.” Another case of mistaken song identity, I presume.

“Nevermind” is all mine. Unlike Eitzel, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are not among my heroes. I have never even owned one of their records…though I admire their lead singer for becoming famous without being able to sing in tune to save his life.

Is there any track that you look back on and think, “Y’know, I really could’ve done that better”? And if so, are you prone to correcting it when you perform it live?

Probably “What Holds the World Together,” actually. In the studio in Denmark, I think we got a little bored and thought, “Hey, let’s pretend this one’s a lost bonus track from Magical Mystery Tour, thus the mellotron and piccolo trumpet. (Oh, my!) My absolute favorite version of the tune was recorded live by some Japanese fans in NYC at Arlene’s Grocery at a Not Lame showcase. It’s just me on acoustic guitar and my friend, Amy Cavanaugh, on cello. And, yeah, whenever I play the song, I omit the last line. It may seem like a small thing, but omitting 4 little words makes the song a lot stronger.

I think you and I have discussed this a little bit off the record, but are you agreeable to speaking to why we haven’t really seen much from you since Everything’s OK?

I did time in a Central American prison for running guns and drugs with Warren Zevon. Warren never got caught. (He sold me out, actually, the bastard!)

And then there was this: I had two beautiful kids with a wonderful woman and then she divorced me…not that I didn’t deserve it or anything. Still, it was a very painful divorce and I kinda lost myself. To be honest, I had a total meltdown / breakdown. I stopped caring about myself and folded like a lawnchair. Dark times. For a few years, I didn’t do anything but hide out in a shitty one-room garage apartment in Bend, Oregon and watch “Law and Order” on cable. For awhile I worked the cash register in a boutique record store. All in all, it was a miserable little stretch and I suffered a lot emotionally…as did everyone around me, to be sure. By the time I got my shit together, I was afraid to focus on anything but repairing relationships and being a good father.

Eventually, we moved to Nashville and everything changed. Within a couple of months, I landed a part-time gig teaching English at an amazing little college. Then, a couple years ago, I was hired full-time. Today, I’m probably the happiest and most well-adjusted I’ve ever been in my life. I have my kids several days/nights a week, I see friends (former NL label-mate Doug Powell has been an especially positive, healing presence in my life), and I get to teach the most amazing stuff to some of the most gifted students I’ve ever known. The big flood in Nashville set me back financially in a major way, but not spiritually. I even have plans to get back into the studio and begin recording again. So we’ll see…

How badly were you affected by the flood?

I took an enormous, wholly unexpected hit. I don’t know if folks realize just how bad it was, because it didn’t get a ton of attention from the media, but it was a full-on deluge. I lost my car (under 5 feet of water), the house I was renting was totaled, and we lost pretty much everything. Furniture, my guitars, amps and effects, all ruined. My bed, my clothes, the kids’ Wii and all their games, both my computers…the list goes on and on. And there was no insurance because we didn’t live in a high-risk area for flooding. We got a few bucks from FEMA – two months’ rental assistance – but that’s it.

I never imagined that one day I’d be standing in front of our house, chest deep in water, loading the kids into a National Guard rescue boat, but that’s exactly what happened. We were rescued, thank God, at dusk. We weren’t allowed back to inspect the damage until 3-4 days later. The mold and standing water was already so bad that I contracted a nasty case of pneumonia and was briefly hospitalized and put out of commission for several weeks in June.

The kids, thankfully, were great about it: the flood was quite the adventure for them, and they have never complained about their stuff that was lost, God bless ‘em. But I was a bit less resilient, watching the water covering the hood of my car, thinking about the insurance I didn’t have as we motored toward safety across the murky water. A lot of friends and family have helped us out and we’re getting back on our feet. I was able to find a small, one-bedroom apt. close to my ex’s house, I got a sofa bed cheap so the kids can sleep over on weekends, and…here’s the best thing…we’re way up on the second floor!

If anyone has the money and the inclination to make a donation to help Mark and his family with the still-ongoing regrouping and rebuilding process, you can use PayPal (MHelm) or, for physical donations, send to Mark Helm, 1011 Murfreesboro Rd., Unit L-8, Franklin, TN 37064.

Given that the cover art for Pop Job features Bacino unabashedly blowing a bubble, it’s hardly surprised to find some seriously catchy bubblegum pop tunes on that record, and although Million Dollar Milkshake shows artistic growth and more variety of instrumentation, the 25-second-long opening track offers a link to its predecessor (it’s called “Bubblegum Factory”), and it’s still full of just as many hooks. When an artist manages to release two consecutive records of such great pop music, they’re instantly on my must-get list…but, unfortunately, there was a long, long wait in store for myself and all of the others who were anxiously awaiting Bacino’s third album.

Finally, however, Mark Bacino has returned to us, bearing new music. His latest album is entitled Queens English, released through DreamCrush, and like the records which preceded it, it finds him upping the ante while still delivering the hooks in a big, big way. My sincerest apologies to Mr. Bacino for taking so long to get on the phone with him to talk about his career, but I hope you find our conversation about his career illuminating and, more importantly, that you find yourself inspired to pick up any…oh, heck, let’s just say all of his albums.

Heck, the man’s three for three. He deserves your money.

Let’s go ahead and start with the inevitable secret-origin question: how did you first find your way into music? Was it something that was all around you when you were growing up…like, within your family… or was it something that you just found on your own?

My folks were not super-musical. My dad kind of listened to records and played a little bit of harmonica and a little bit of ukulele, guitar, that kind of thing. But they really weren’t super-musical folks. There was usually some music playing in the house, but…it was just sort of something that I guess I kind of hit on myself. I took some guitar lessons when I was a kid that my parents kind of put in front of me, and that didn’t really do anything for me until I was a teenager. At that point, I just kind of picked it up for myself. I think the guitar teachers I had just told my parents that it wasn’t worth it after a certain amount of time. (Laughs) They were wasting their money. Maybe they still did, I don’t know. But in any event, I just kind of picked it up as an early teen, and then I just kind of went from there.

I saw on your Wikipedia page…which, by the way, is very in-depth… (Laughs) …that you played in various bands when you started out. Were any of them of particular note?

No, y’know, just the usual high-school and college band thing. I guess there was, like, one main band that I played in that kind of stretched from the end of high school into the beginning of college, with me and the lead singer being the constant and various other people coming in and out. That band was actually…we had recorded and done shows, and we were an original band. We did some covers, but we were an original band with a very unoriginal name: The Edge. (Laughs) But it was actually a pretty good band, I have to admit. Now, sometimes when I listen to it, I’m, like, “Wow!” The guy was actually a pretty good singer/songwriter, and I just kind of played bass and sang backing vocals in that band, but it was pretty good, I have to admit. He was almost sort of the tortured genius. ..and, unfortunately, he now goes between institutions, I think! It’s a shame. But, no, to answer your question, there was nothing really of note beyond that.

So what was the impetus to go solo?

I guess that band, which I’d sunk a lot of my time into, was one of those things where, with the tortured genius singer guy, I ended up being one of the more organized folks in the band, and it was kind of tough for me to deal with the flaky artist/singer who didn’t really care too much about anything and just wanted to play but didn’t get into anything beyond that. So I guess I just kind of got frustrated with that. And I had been doing solo recording myself at home on a little 4-track, and then later on, in college, a guitar-player friend of mine and I kind of had this nice reel-to-reel studio set up in his folks’ place. All that put together kind of pushed me toward doing my own thing, so I just started doing that. But I’d always been doing it on the side, for myself. Just never super-seriously.

Given the cover art for Pop Job, you clearly weren’t afraid to embrace your inner bubblegum.

(Laughs) No, no, y’know, it’s funny, that whole thing. If you’d heard some of the things I was doing before…like, in the late ‘80s…it was very much of the time, and I guess it kind of sounded a little more electronic. I still feel like I was writing poppy songs, but just the instrumentation and arrangements were a little more electronic and…I guess it was of the time. But after awhile, I was shopping that stuff around, and I remember one person, who was an A&R person or manager type and who had championed my stuff, said, “You know, you’re really a hardcore pop person. You should just embrace that!” (Laughs) And it never really hit me until that person said that to me, but then I was, like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right!” I mean, I liked all that music. I guess it just wasn’t coming out in the production and the instrumentation. I’d done a couple of EPs that were self-released on a cassette and things like that, but after that conversation, I started thinking about that and tried to write in that vein. I was, like, “Okay, I’m going to try to write like that, because it’s so close to what I like, anyway, and I love that stuff. I should just embrace it and try it.” And that was the result. That’s what came out of that result: the Pop Job EP, which led to the deal with Parasol. The whole thing was, yes, embracing the inner bubblegum. (Laughs) That picture’s probably pretty clichéd. There must be 1600 bands with an image like that on their record.

Maybe. But it’s certainly no false advertising.

That’s for sure!

How did Willie Wisely and Michael Shelley end up on the album?

I was just a fan of their music. Michael Shelley and I had a mutual friend in the guy who produced the Pop Job EP, as well as some of the tracks on the actual album, and I was familiar with Michael’s music. I think his first record had come out on Big Deal at about that time, and our mutual friend had introduced us, so we kind of went from there. I just asked him, “Hey, man, I love your stuff, I just got this deal with this indie label, I’m expanding this record from an EP into a full-blown LP. Do you want to do a song?” And Michael’s always pretty cool about doing those things. Willie was kind of similar. We didn’t really have any mutual friends, but we just kind of struck up a friendship. He had come through New York on a tour, and I was probably, like, one of the few people that was there, unfortunately, on a Wednesday night in the middle of the summer or whatever. (Laughs) But they were missing this incredible show that Willie was doing, with a whole band. It was great. I think he might’ve been touring behind Turbosherbet or something. But I just introduced myself at the venue, we hit it off, and we’ve been friends since. It was just, like, “Hey, man, next time you’re in town, I’m gonna have you come sing on a tune.” So it was the same thing. He said, “Yeah, okay!” (Laughs) And with both of those guys, to this day, I’m still really good friends with them.

How did you find your way onto Parasol in the first place? Were you shopping your wares, or did they happen upon the original EPs and seek you out?

It was just…well, again, I put that Pop Job EP out, which is really just four songs that ended up on the album, and I did it just to try out that whole vibe I was talking about earlier, just to embrace that full-blown pop vibe and try it. I kind of self-released that one, and people were interested, and I think it was at that time, too, where that pop resurgence, that underground thing, started happening again. It was probably good timing for me. Yeah, I was getting it out there, that’s for sure. I was trying to send it out to indie labels in the hope that I could get some financing and turn it into a full blown album, ‘cause I certainly had enough songs at that point. I kind of just hit it with that vibe and just kept going, in terms of writing. So, yeah, it was out there, and it was out there to a bunch of different labels, and Parasol was the one that was willing to go for it, so that’s how it happened. I was definitely looking for someone to take the music out to another level, that’s for sure.

With Million Dollar Milkshake, you were obviously still embracing the bubblegum aspect, given the title of the opening track, but at the same time, you were expanding your sound. I presume that was a conscious intent rather than simply an incidental one.

Yeah, definitely so. I felt like the first record was the first record, and…that’s actually come up now with this record. I’ve had this discussion before… (Laughs) …because this new record is slightly different from those records. Yeah, I felt like Pop Job was Pop Job. It was a straight-up power pop record. Guitar, vocals, some little embellishments in terms of keyboards and things, but not much beyond that. When you go in to make another record, and the first one had done pretty well and gotten a good response, the temptation, I guess, is to just move on to the same thing. But I made the conscious decision, as you said, to say, “Okay, let’s see if I can take this a little further.” I love the studio. It’s like my second home, so for me, to go in there and just try and expand on the first record with a bunch of new songs was a lot of fun. I mean, it was work, but it was easy to do that. So, yeah, it was definitely a conscious attempt to take that form from Pop Job and expand it a little bit, adding all kinds of things. Some strings, some horns, and things like that. But, still, it’s considered a power-poppy record, that’s for sure.

Whose idea was it to parody the Slim Whitman TV commercial for the Million Dollar Milkshake ad?

(Laughs) Oh, that, unfortunately, was mine.

Okay, well, I thought it was awesome. I grew up watching the original, so it hit me where I lived.

Yeah, that whole thing, man…listen, I had a lot of fun doing it, and it was cool, but it was kind of a weird experience, in terms of the way that played out. It was really funny, because as a commercial…because that actually aired, you know, in New York and New Jersey…I got a lot of great feedback. I was at a show, possibly a Fountains of Wayne duo show, and I know Adam (Schlesinger) a little. Our paths have corssed, and he’s always been cool to me. I saw him at the show, and he said, “Hey, man, I saw your commercial the other night while I was watching Comedy Central, and it was hilarious! It was great!” So I was getting feedback from that, from people like yourself who knew the ad. But beyond that, I’d play shows and people would come up, and they’d say, “Hey, man, I saw you on TV, and I didn’t know if that was real! I thought it was a joke!” And I was, like, “Well, it sort of was, but it wasn’t!” And they were, like, “We didn’t think the album was real until we looked it up!” So long story short with that, it didn’t really do anything for me… (Laughs) …in terms of, like, moving things forward. It was just, like, a funny thing that people saw and just…they thought it wasn’t real. I came to the conclusion that it didn’t really do much in terms of sales. It was just the kind of thing that I think kind of backfired on me in terms of that. But I don’t regret it. It was a lot of fun, and I still get comments on it from people. I just like making a fool out of myself. (Laughs)

So, now, that album…I’m not sure if Pop Job was, but I know that Million Dollar Milkshake definitely saw release in Japan.

Yeah, actually, Pop Job was put out officially on vinyl in Japan by a company called SYFT, which was just fine for me, so I could actually have my own copy. I thought that was, like, the greatest thing. (Laughs) I was done. I was, like, “Okay, I can die now.”

I know they’re in no way ashamed of embracing power pop in Japan. Have you ever toured over there?

No, I’ve never been over there. I’d love to, and maybe I will at some point. Yeah, I guess it had done well, and it was weird, because Parasol had gotten a call from this distributor or record label in Japan, SYFT, and they were, like, “Hey, can we license the record for vinyl?” It was totally left field. They were totally shocked. So they set up that whole deal, and nobody really knew where that came from. I mean, for all I know , somebody could just be using them as placemats. (Laughs) I don’t know what they did, but they did some deal, and I ended up getting copies, so I was happy about that. And, then, Million Dollar Milkshake, yeah, that was actually licensed to a label in Japan called Nippon Crown, and that had a proper release. They’re a pretty big indie over there.

Queens English took awhile to come out, at least compared to the length of time between the first two albums.

Yeah, I mean, I always take a long time on records, and I’m definitely slow, but, yeah, this one was beyond that. I mean, there’s a lot of things… (Laughs) I was sort of burnt out by the time I was done with Million Dollar Milkshake. When I’m done with a record, I don’t usually want to record any of my music for another couple of months. I just want to stay away from things. For other people’s music, it’s fine. I don’t know, it took a long time because a lot of stuff happened between. I was living in Manhattan, and I left Manhattan, my wife and I bought a house, and I started building a studio in a portion of the house, and I had a kid…all this stuff. Building the nest and all that good stuff. It just went that way, and that took up a lot of time, obviously. And, then, I was doing work for other people here and there, producing and writing, doing television work, and stuff like that. So, finally, around 2006, which was actually really only, like, three years since Milkshake had come out, I started work on Queens English, and it took about two years to do, on and off. So it was finished in 2008, and it took about another two years… (Laughs) …before I could get it out. It went through various industry things that looked to be promising at one point…very promising, actually…and then they didn’t. In class music business fashion, they held me up, then they crashed and burned. So here we are in 2010, close to two years after the record’s completion, and it sees the light of day. Hopefully it won’t take me another seven years to make another record.

Fingers crossed. So when you approached this record…well, obviously, we discussed the fact that you’d been moving away from the bubblegum, but that move is even more obvious here than it was with Milkshake. Was that intentional or just a natural evolution?

I guess it was sort of semi-intentional, but to what extent…? I won’t say I planned it. It was semi-intentional, and then it sort of evolved. Again, it was, like, the same thing I talked about before. After Pop Job, it was, “Well, what do I want to do now? I could make another Milkshake record. That’s easy. I could make another Pop Job. But what do I do from here? I’d like to do something slightly different.” What that was, I wasn’t sure until I just started getting into it. And, then, the subject matter was certainly a result of all the changes in my life that had happened since Milkshake: becoming a father, becoming a homeowner, becoming a grown-up. (Laughs) You know how that is. It was sort of that, plus it was the whole post-911 thing here in New York. It seemed like it was a chapter that was closing, and another one was opening. New York was changing, I was changing, and all these things. It just became this coming-of-age sort of record…or, at least, a becoming-an-adult sort of record, in terms of the subject matter…and somehow the New York thing snuck in there, too. It’s hard to explain this record. (Laughs) I’ve noticed that while doing interviews for it. I don’t know if it makes sense sometimes. It makes sense to me, though. I feel like, ultimately, that…well, it’s a very New York-y record, and it’s sort of like the changes in New York are a metaphor for the changes in my life. Ultimately, that’s what it was all about. That wasn’t super-conscious. It was just that, as I was writing, it was something I started to see, and once I realized it was going on…it was almost like self-therapy in a way. But I’m sure you’ve heard that from songwriters before. (Laughs)

Indeed. So what are your expectations for Queens English, given that it’s on an indie label and, y’know, the kids aren’t listening to the pop quite as much as they used to.

Yeah, I don’t know, man. The expectations these days… (Sighs) It’s really hard to say. I was on the radio with Michael Shelley last weekend, we were on WFMU doing a live interview, and he was saying, “So the music business is really miserable, isn’t it?” (Laughs) And I’m, like, “Yeah, I guess it is.” So in terms of expectations, I don’t know, man. I would just hope that the record can get out there. The more people, the better. Hopefully, people will like it and enjoy it and get something positive. That’s sort of my hope for it. That, and that I can move on and do another record! (Laughs) My expectations are low. I’d like to say that I’d like to go somewhere beyond this plane of existence, this level I’m on right now. I just don’t know. Given the way the music business is and my experiences in the past couple of years and all of that together…you used to say when you were on a indie label that, “My hope is that this record will get picked up by a major label,” but that’s all gone now. That’s been sort of decimated. Even if somebody wanted me to do that, would I really want to do that? So the expectation, then, just comes down to trying to stay positive and just trying to keep to the art of it and remember that that’s why you do it. My hope is that people will listen to this record and that I get to do another one. That’s all.

Lastly, what song would you recommend as the gateway drug to Queens English?

(Laughs) The gateway drug…

Well, which song is the most accessible?

Oh, the most accessible? I think it depends. I think the audience who has embraced my other records would probably look at something like the song “Muffin in the Oven.” That would probably be the song that they would maybe identify with. It depends on who your audience is. I mean, for me, a song like “Happy” might be a good way into the record. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Maybe a song like “Bridge and Tunnel” might be a good way to sum up the thoughts of the record. But I think it’s the kind of record where different people will get different things from it.

Mark Bacino’s website: http://www.markbacino.com

I feel his pain. Whenever I receive praise for my writing I always say “thanks,” of course, but I usually shrug at the same time, as if to say, “If you say so.” Sure, sometimes I feel that something I’ve written has turned out well, but as often as not, I can’t really tell. I usually just write stuff because it’s stuff that I want to write about, and it’s just an added bonus if other people like it, too. Based on this, you will be unsurprised to learn that I’m generally pretty bad about promoting my work too, but I’m making an exception in this case because — wait for it — I’ve written a book.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. More accurately, I’ve compiled a book, one filled with the interviews that I’ve conducted for this column over the course of the past few years. It’s entitled All You Need Is a Hook… The Best of Hooks ‘N’ You, and you can order it through Lulu.com.

The content stretches all the way back to the first interview I did for the column, which consisted of a mere three questions that I asked of Moe Berg about The Wonderful World of the Pursuit of Happiness, and goes all the way up to my oral history of Vermillion by the Three O’Clock. In between, you can see the evolution of Hooks ‘N’ You as I figured out exactly what I wanted to do with the column, and you can enjoy interviews with, among others, Phil Keaggy, the Trashcan Sinatras, Don Dixon, Richard Barone, Kyle Vincent, Nick Heyward, Blue Mercedes and Splitsville.

The price is, to my way of thinking, pretty reasonable: $14.99 for 180 pages of what I am assured are insightful conversations about some of my favorite unheralded and underrated albums by the artists responsible for bringing them to life. For those wondering, yes, it is available for download at a lesser price (a mere $6.49), but I really hesitated offering it in that format because, hell, it’s not like the columns aren’t online! But as someone who regularly buys books released by the folks over at the Onion A.V. Club, I’m the first to admit that it’s always nicer to hold an actual book in your hand.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding when I made that comment about how I’m assured that the conversations are insightful. I figured that if I was going to go the distance and put out a book, the least I could do was go the whole nine yards and get myself some blurbs to put on the back. Little did I know I’d receive comments that would make my ego swell to such a degree that I can barely get my head out the door …

“Insightful and compelling, All You Need Is a Hook… is a delight, filled with impassioned and inspired writing. Highly recommended.” –Ken Sharp, co-author of KISS: Behind the Mask –
The Official Authorized Biography

“If I was to compile a list of my favorite writers who cover this beast we call ‘pop music,’ Will Harris would certainly be near the top. His interviews are always engrossing, insightful and fun to read, and I usually walk away learning something that I didn’t know before.  Plus, any writer who covers relatively obscure yet great artists such as Robbie Rist, Richard Barone, Splitsville and the Three O’Clock is aces in my book. All You Need Is a Hook… is a smashing compendium of Will’s literary exploits that is sure to charm the pants off of any self-respecting pop nut.  Buy this book, and then spring for a new pair of pants while you’re at it.” –John M. Borack, author of Shake Some Action: The Ultimate Power Pop Guide

“Sometimes, being a part of the so-called ‘power pop underground’ can feel, for good or ill, like being in a secret society. Those among us who love the good hook share a passion for catchy melodies, sweet harmonies, crunchy guitars and four-on-the-floor midwestern backbeats. At times this passion verges on the religious. Who am I kidding? Pop is my religion. Ever since the Beatles and up through XTC, Todd Rundgren and beyond, the pursuit of the ultimate pop hook has been the closest I’ve come to going to church. I write songs. I write about songs. I can’t shut up about this stuff, and some of my best friends are records. Which brings me to young Will here. I get the sense, having read Mr. Harris for some time, that he is (like Ken Sharp or Cameron Crowe before him) on the same page. Reading his prose on the subject of pop is like finding that cool record store, usually on a back street, where they not only have all the great records you’ve been looking for, there are posters on the wall for upcoming gigs by those bands, and the guy at the front desk relishes in turning you onto some new release by playing it loud for the whole store. It’s a place where every day is Record Store Day, a place where pop matters. Does that place still exist? I sure hope so, but just in case it doesn’t, you’d do well to enter the pages of Will Harris and turn it up. All good secret societies need sacred texts. Start here.” –Paul Myers, musician, songwriter, and author of A Wizard, a True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio

I have to pretend that I wasn’t just likened in some small capacity to Cameron Crowe, as it’s not healthy for my ego, but I’m no less grateful for any of these blurbs. Here’s hoping they inspire you to take the plunge and pick up a copy of the book, which, just in case you’ve forgotten, you can do by clicking right here. Also, keep in mind that the self-publishing route may well be considered by other Popdose writers if this proves to be a success. I, for one, would love to own a copy of Basement Songs: The Best of the Basement by Scott Malchus.

In closing, just so you don’t think I’m resting on my laurels now that I’ve put this thing together, I’m working on several other columns at the moment, including records by Imperial Drag, the Candyskins, Farrah, Mark Bacino, Mark Helm, and a couple of others as well that I’d hate to talk about, mostly because they may not actually come to pass. Still, that should be enough to confirm that there are indeed more “Hooks” on the horizon.

Owsley, who died on Friday, April 30th, the victim of an apparent suicide, only released two full-length records under his own name: a self-titled album on Giant Records in 1999, and The Hard Way, a self-released effort which emerged four years later. While I briefly considered writing this as a standalone obituary, the more I thought about it, the more I felt confident in placing it under the “Hooks ‘N’ You” banner: the whole purpose of the column is to shine the spotlight on my favorite underrated and unheralded albums, and Owsley’s oeuvre certainly qualifies. I only wish that I’d gotten around to writing about them earlier, so that I could’ve gotten his comments on them. It would’ve been nice to talk to him…again.

Yep, I interviewed Will once. It was back in 2005, when he released what was at the time anticipated to be the first of many 2-track digital singles. You can still find the songs in question, “Psycho” and “Upside Down,” on iTunes. What you can’t find anywhere, however, is our conversation. We chatted for at least half an hour, possibly longer, about his albums, his work as a sideman, and music in general, and as my daughter was still a newborn at the time, Will – himself a father to two boys – was very understanding about my sluggishness as a result of limited sleep. Unfortunately, that lethargy resulted in a horrifying moment when I got off the phone: I’d set the recorder wrong, and when I went to play back our conversation, all that could be heard was my questions. It would’ve still been painful to think about it on April 29th, so you can imagine how it feels now.

Fortunately, I have another memory which helps serve as salve on that wound: getting to see Will perform at the Jewish Mother, in Virginia Beach, VA, when he was touring behind his debut album. I was already a huge fan of the record, but I also managed to corral my roommates at the time – Donnie Sadler and Joe Laughlin – into coming along with me. They walked away as fans…but, really, you’d have been hard pressed to do otherwise: the songs were great, the performance was solid, and the crowd was small enough for Will to easily interact with the fans. Seth Gordon, frontman for The Mockers, was also at the show, and upon learning of Will’s death, he posted the video for “Life Goes On,” a song by The Semantics (Will’s former band), and said…

I yelled out for it, and he was amazed that anyone knew it! He said he hadn’t played it in a long time, but lucky for us, he did a solo version of it. A great great show, and he was really cool guy, too.

(At the time, I didn’t know anything about the Semantics. It would be several years later before I discovered their lone album, Powerbill, but when I finally did, at least I could fall back on the excuse that it had only been issued in Japan.)

If you’ve never heard Owsley, Will’s self-titled album, you’re missing out on hearing one of the best albums of the late ’90s, even if it wasn’t heard by nearly enough ears. As my buddy John M. Borack wrote in Shake Some Action: The Ultimate Power Pop Guide, “Every now and again, a major label decides to take a chance on a power pop artist, signs ‘em, releases one record which they fail to adequately promote, then drops ‘em like a hot pop potato. Such was the saga of Owsley.” You can’t say Will wasn’t doing his part to get the word out, though, as you can see from this clip from HBO’s late, great series, “Reverb”:

Given that you can (sadly enough) pick up a copy Owsley for only a few bucks over at Amazon, I’m not going to offer up a plethora of MP3 from the record, but I will give you a trio of them. The first two are my favorite tracks from the record, while the final song provides ample proof as to how easy it would’ve been for Ben Folds Five fans to jump on the Owsley bandwagon if they’d only given him a chance.

* Coming Up Roses
* Sentimental Favorite
* Sonny Boy

It was way too long a wait between albums from Will, but given the guy was no longer on Giant Records and was having to fend for himself, we can excuse him a bit of that time. Unfortunately, when The Hard Way finally turned up…well, there’s no other way to say this, really: it wasn’t a bad album, but it also wasn’t the record we’d been waiting four years to hear, either. A lot of folks were disappointed at the time. To listen to it in retrospect, though, is to hear an album that is, in and of itself, a fine effort, as you can hear from this small sampling.

* She’s The One
* Matriarch
* The Hard Way

Unfortunately, The Hard Way has turned into both a sophomore effort and a swan song for Will. He turned up on a few tribute albums, but after the aforementioned digital single in 2004, one presumes that the limited economic opportunities of releasing his own music proved no match for the easy money of serving as guitarist for artists like Amy Grant (with whom he toured for 16 years) and Shania Twain (he played with her on various TV and concert appearances), as well as working behind the scenes on albums by teen popsters like the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato.

I don’t mean that as a bash in any way, shape, or form: I’m a husband and a father, and I don’t begrudge any man for supporting his family. But I do still wish that somewhere along the way Will would’ve found the time to sit down and pull together another album, because there were people out there who were still waiting for one…and not just me.

Owsley – “Last Goodbye” (LIVE)

I’d love to tell you that the Three O’Clock’s final album, Vermillion, is one of those albums for me, but while there’s no question that I love it, I can’t do a whole lot to defend it. Mind you, I say that mostly because the sort of people with whom I’d be likely to enter into a debate on the album’s quality are well familiar with the band’s complete oeuvre, and, personally, I can’t imagine any Three O’Clock fan who’d be willing to go out on the limb labeled “Vermillion is the Best Thing Those Guys Ever Did.” With that said, however, I still love the record and spin it all the time…which, of course, is why it’s earning a spot in the “Hooks ‘N’ You” spotlight.

I first fell into the music of The Three O’Clock by reading a review of their 1985 I.R.S. Records debut, Arrive Without Traveling, in a back issue of Rolling Stone. I promptly bought a copy on cassette (this would’ve been 1987, I believe, so I didn’t have a CD player and rarely used my turntable), only to have it stolen out of my car just as I’d started to fall in love with it, and when I went to replace it, the store didn’t have any other copies. D’oh! I never got around to replacing it – I’d dived headlong into alternate music, and there were just too many bands out there that I hadn’t yet explored – but I wouldn’t forget about The Three O’Clock. When I took a job at Record Bar, one of the first CDs I special-ordered was the band’s 1986 album, Ever After (now, ironically, available on a 2-fer CD with Arrive Without Traveling), and a bit after that, I finally found myself a copy of Sixteen Tambourines and truly had my mind blown.

Unfortunately, Vermillion was released when I was a poor college student, and by the time I got around to picking it up, the album was already sitting in the cutout bin and The Three O’Clock had broken up. I blamed myself, of course, but I rose above the guilt and managed to enjoy the album nonetheless. When I popped open the CD booklet, I was surprised to see a newly-familiar name amongst the members of the band: Jason Falkner, who recently come on my radar because he’d since gone on to join the ranks of Jellyfish. I also did a double-take when I hit “play” and, after the brief instrumental title track, found myself listening to a song that I already knew: “Love Explosion,” which had been written by Ian Broudie – who produced Ever After, by the way – and recorded for the first Lightning Seeds album, Cloudcuckooland. (If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Jon Cummings’ piece about that record.)

It probably won’t surprise those who only know The Three O’Clock because of the label on which Vermillion was released – Paisley Park – that my instant favorite on the album was “Neon Telephone,” written by Joey Coco…or, as he’s more commonly known, Prince…but I quickly found myself falling in love with other songs, including “When She Becomes My Girl,” “Time’s Going Slower (which comes closer to the band’s old-school sound than any other track), and “On Paper.”

That admission, of course, reveals that, yes, Vermillion is a different-sounding Three O’Clock album. It sparkles in a way that only a record made in 1988 can, with a slickness that reveals just how far the band’s sound had come since the Baroque Hoedown EP…something which many, including the newest member of the band, weren’t entirely thrilled about.

First off, how did Jason Falkner come to join the ranks of the band?

Mike Mariano (keyboards): After our original guitarist, Louis, left in 1985 we went through several guitarists. A friend said we had a “revolving door for guitar players.” We were basically a 3-piece before recording Vermillion, and one day Danny decided he would find the right person. So he placed an ad and interviewed a lot of people. Jason responded to the ad thinking it was a band influenced by the Three O’Clock. He didn’t realize it actually was the Three O’Clock.

Danny Benair (drums): I held one-on-one auditions. We hit it off right away. We auditioned two people. For one moment we considered becoming a five piece, but Jason got the gig.

Michael Quercio (bass, lead vocals): He wowed us right away.

Jason Falkner (guitar): Let me start by exclaiming that I was a huge fan of the Three O’Clock in high school. I saw them two or three times before I was 18, and my teenage band even covered “With Cantaloupe Girlfriend” and “I Go Wild.” So, anyway, I ended up in The Three O’Clock at the ripe age of 19! I had just returned home from Alaska, where I worked in a cannery for a few months (Arrgh! That was insane!), and when I got back I placed an ad in an LA classifieds magazine called The Recycler looking for like minded people to start the best band in the world with me! I bought the issue with my ad in it just to make sure they printed my info correctly, and when I browsed down the page a bit, I saw an ad saying “Three O’Clock looking for guitarist. No metal, no country, no flakes.” I was baffled that this band that I loved and covered in high school was advertising in the same rag as I was, so I immediately called the number…which ended up being Danny Benair’s home! We talked for hours that very first call and, after they auditioned a huge number of people, I was hired.

Where was The Three O’Clock’s mindset was when the band embarked upon Vermillion? The band had worked their way up through the indie label ranks and made it to a Warner subsidiary. Were they actively looking for a hit, or were they just continuing to do what they’d always been doing and just hoping that more ears would now be able to hear and appreciate it?

DB: I think the record we wanted to make was far from Vermillion. We compromised a lot. We always wanted to have a hit.

MM: Even back in our early days, we were always trying to record hits! The bands that influenced us (Beatles, Byrds, Zombies, etc.) had hits…and we wanted ‘em, too!

MQ: I feel on my part that I was trying to write a batch of songs to make a huge record company happy rather than myself.

JF: I was thrilled when I joined – this was going to be the beginning of everything! – but it was really hard for me making Vermillion because I felt that the group had lost or abandoned their original spirit. I mean, the Salvation Army (Michael Querico’s prior band) sounded to me like early Black Flag filtered through The Zombies. Great stuff! All the Three O’Clock records prior to Vermillion were beautiful and slightly experimental yet still ballsy, so when we started working on Vermillion, I was pretty disappointed to find all those elements traded in for really crap (1988) “modern” production. I remember complaining to the guys that the record sounded like The Escape Club. (Look ‘em up, kids…or not.) Where was the Syd Barrett / Beatles / Monkees thing? I was the new kid, so my opinion didn’t really matter to them. Of course, I understand that reality in a band, but I wished at the time someone would listen to me.

How did the band find its way onto Paisley Park?

DB: Prince was aware of us from Arrive without Traveling and the “Her Head’s Revolving” video. The Bangles told us he was a fan, and when we were off IRS, he sent a label person to see us live.

MM: We contacted him and his management, asking if he was interested in having us on his label, and he said, “Yes.”

JF: I think Susanna Hoffs had told the Purple One to sign them when he asked her what else was happening in LA, but they had already signed with Paisley Park before I joined The Three O’Clock. We were an odd choice for Paisley Park, as evidenced on our Prince-funded flight to Minneapolis to see the Love Sexy show. Every act signed to PP was on this flight, including George Clinton, Chaka Kahn, Wendy and Lisa, etcetera. We were slightly out of place! (Laughs)

How did Ian Ritchie land in the production chair?

DB: His name appeared on our A&R man’s list.

MM: We met with a few different producers, and Michael was impressed with things Ian had done, like Pete Wylie’s Sinful.

Ian Ritchie (producer): The common thread (with the artists I produced in the ‘80s) is that they all wanted production and arrangement input from someone comfortable with the what-was-then-very-new computer sampling and programming techniques. There weren’t many of us in the mid- to late ‘80s. You will definitely hear a sonic and stylistic link running through all the recordings, which is to do with how I liked to make records at the time. The band was great to work with. The recording experience was about creativity and having fun. We all liked the way the songs were developing in the studio and of course hoped that this might translate into a big selling record. We were focused on making a good album rather than being obsessed with making “hits.”

MQ: We met with him and he was a nice guy and had done some great stuff. We were just not the band to do a super-produced 80′s album like the ones he did before. I don’t think he was into working with a not-so-super-slick rock band.

MM: Ian moved us into using a lot more sequencing than we had in the past, tipping the balance fairly heavily in that direction. If we had done a follow-up record, I think we would have moved the balance back to a more even blend of sequencing and 4 guys pounding away on their instruments.

JF: I always give people chances, and I liked Ian at first but grew to really dislike the way he worked. Bear in mind that this was my first recording experience in a REAL studio (I had been rocking the 4-track for years, but this was very different), so I didn’t really understand that you could argue your point! I think Ian choked the life out of this great band. Danny didn’t even play drums, and he was a great drummer! Shame…

DB: We settled for him, and we hated working with him. He ruined the record.

What was it like having a Prince song to record?

JF: To be honest, I wasn’t really into Prince at the time. I love him now, but when I was 19, I was into Roxy Music and David Bowie, so the whole experience was a bit square-peg / round-hole for me.

MM: Prince just wanted us to go in and make a record. One of his managers sent us a demo of three songs Prince had written, and we thought we’d take a crack at one of them.

DB: Prince first sent some funk tracks and then five others. We almost recorded a song called “Teacher Teacher” but changed our minds.

Was he ever in the studio at any point?

MM: No, he didn’t make it into the studio with us.

DB: He sent notes on demos and recording, but he had no recording involvement.

JF: We kept getting calls when we were in the studio saying, “Prince is in a limo on his way to you guys. Please clear the studio of anyone not in the band!” He never made it down. Classic.

How were Wendy and Lisa to work with?

IR: We had Wendy and Lisa down to do backing vocals on (“Neon Telephone”), which was fun, although I seem to remember that we almost had a few Bangles instead!

MM: I was working on some other things when they were recording their vocals, but Danny spent time with them and had fun hanging out with them, shootin’ the breeze, etcetera.

DB: Wendy and Lisa were great. They knew how to get their sound in 10 seconds.

MQ: Great singers, and very together. They did their vocal parts in two takes.

JF: Wendy and Lisa were bad-ass! The funniest thing with that was at the end of “Neon Telephone.” You can barely make out a mock telephone conversation between Wendy and myself. She was totally pro and sexy, saying, “Hey, baby, how you been?” and all that kind of stuff. I, on the other hand, was shitting myself, so when you hear me, I’m, like, “Uh, I’m fine, how are you?” (Laughs) Super awkward!

Lisa Coleman (the one in Wendy & Lisa who isn’t Wendy): First, what i remember about the song itself was that Prince had a hard time finding just the right home for it, (going) from artist to artist in his own ”camp” – always female – to other bands, so I thought it was funny that then it ended up being done by The Three O’ Clock, who were all boys! Wendy and I were a little leery of doing the session because we didn’t want to be thought of as a purple sound machine, if you know what i mean, but they were persistent, and we really didn’t want anybody else singing a part that would only end up being an imitation of what we had been doing for years, so we said “yes” and went to the session. I remember the guys all being so nice and talented and cute. Doing the vocals only took a few minutes. We almost felt guilty that it was so easy! Wendy and I had been singing together and doing background vocals in that style so much that we had it down to a science. We only sang those words a few times, and we knew the harmonies already. It was easy…but they were so excited about it! I think it was like hearing something out of context, like something you’re only used to coming out of your radio, and then you hear it right in front of you! They were so funny and playful. I remember fooling around with some sexy talking at the end of the song. To us it was tongue in cheek, but to the guys it was probably like “Weird Science,” when Kelly LeBrock comes to life and it’s a little more than they bargained for. (Laughs) They were really so sweet. I was sorry to lose contact with them.

The vocals on the record were spread around, with Mike Mariano taking lead on “When She Becomes My Girl” and Jason Falkner fronting for “Love Has No Heart.” Any recollections about those spotlights? Was it something those guys had to fight for, or was it planned out well before hitting the studio?

IR: There was more than one really good lead vocalist in the band, so naturally I tried to make use of that. I seem to remember trying vocals from Michael, Mike, and Jason on a few tracks and choosing the best ones to go on the record. There may also have been a link with the writer of those particular songs, as in John singing John songs and Paul singing Paul songs on Beatles albums.

MM: I had sung on a rehearsal demo we had done of “When She Becomes My Girl,” and Jason gave “Love Has No Heart” a try while we were in the studio. They seemed good, so we kept them that way. Michael shouldered a lot – lead vocals, bass, all the lyrics, the majority of the music – so I think he welcomed a little break now and then, as long as the results felt good to him.

JF: I had written a song that I sheepishly played for the guys in rehearsal. Michael seemed to like it, so we learned it and he was going to sing it. Well, the song never got recorded on Vermillion, but instead he and Ian decided I should sing “Love Has No Heart,” which was written by Michael. They told me I was doing this, and by the end of that day I had sung it. Not my song and definitely not one of my fave moments, but nonetheless my first vocals on a record.

MQ: I was burnt out on being the lead singer. I wrote those songs for those guys to sing. It was a weird time in my young life. Inside I knew that this would be our final record together.

What are your thoughts on the record when you look back on Vermillion? Do you have a favorite song, or, on the flip side, a track that you still hate to listen to because you know it could’ve been so much better?

MQ: The whole thing is a big drag to me. It was not The Three O’clock in my opinion. But I do like “When She Becomes My Girl”

MM: I like “When She Becomes My Girl,” “To Be Where You Are,” “Love Has No Heart,” “Through the Sleepy Town.” I don’t hate any tracks, but I think every record you make contains a track or two you felt could’ve been better…but hopefully not too many!

JF: When I think about Vermillion, I think, “I’m really proud I was in this band, but, dammit, I wish I had been on something earlier with that wonderful spark they had!”

IR: In 1988, I was very happy with the album. Listening to it now, I hear a record that was very much of its time and has a freshness and directness I still like.

DB: I loved our engineer, Chris Sheldon, but the record was not fun to make, other than a few moments. “To Be Where You Are” was fun – we all got to beat percussion – but Ian was out to make his own record, so it’s a sad record for me.

Chris Sheldon (engineer): I was asked by Ian Ritchie to come to California to engineer his production, and my remembrance of the making of Vermillion was essentially a good one and I had a lot of fun, but in hindsight – which is always 20:20, of course – I think Ian was the wrong producer for the band. That’s not to say that Ian’s production wasn’t great as far as the emerging electronic production techniques of the 1980′s are concerned, but I don’t think it should have dominated the production and sound of what was essentially, as I recall, a relatively psychedelic alternative band to the extent that it did. I think that the two techniques should have worked side by side, i.e. the real played drums, bass and guitars of the band, who were all great players, along side the sequenced keyboards and various bits of sampling that Ian introduced, amongst other things. Of course, I wasn’t privy to any meetings that Ian may have had with the group prior to the making of the album and so don’t know what their expectations were, but it seems to me that Ian’s concept of how the record should be made and the band’s idea, was not fully discussed, leading to later frustrations that should have been dealt with at a much earlier stage. But, on the plus side, thanks to Ian, who gave me a lot of work during the 1980′s, I got to meet Danny, Jason, Mike and Michael, and I had a great time working with them.

If Vermillion had been more of a success, do you think the band would have kept going, or had The Three O’Clock simply run its course by then?

JF: That’s really hard to say.

MQ: I would hope that the follow up record would have been us going back to our roots. Danny, Mickey, and Jason were super musicians, and it would have been great to do another record with them.

MM: I would have continued, sure, and I think the other guys would have been up for it. We enjoyed recording and playing shows, and if the record had given us more inertia to keep it going, we probably would have continued.

DB: The failure made it easy to split up.

JF: In a way, I think Vermillion itself is what cracked the band. I do have fond memories of Michael, Danny and Micky, but when you listen to the difference between that record and all of their output before that, one can’t help but wonder what happened. To me, Vermillion sounds like they were trying to cash in and have hits, which hardly ever works, especially if you had been a good “real” band before. It just sounds fishy.

When we last left our hero, Gary Clark, he was discussing his career as a recording artist…and if you missed it, then you must immediately haul yourself over to Part One, which can be found right here. Now, can we presume everyone’s on the same page? Excellent. Then we can get to the matter at hand, which involves Mr. Clark chatting about some of the work he’s been doing in recent years as a songwriter and producer for hire…

Popdose: Obviously, you’ve been doing a lot more songwriting and producing for other people than recording yourself for the last several years, but what I’ve been wondering is whether or not you do the demos yourself, and if you do, then will we ever get to hear them?

Gary Clark: I do record demos, but I don’t always sing them. Usually, I try and choose a session singer who suits whoever I’m pitching for, but sometimes, either for lack of somebody who suits or whatever, I do sing them. I haven’t really even thought about whether I’d release them! (Laughs) Very often, what happens is, if you get a cut on a record…if it’s a song that’s been pitched, one that you’re not writing with the artist, then they very often want the production as well. They then pay for the master, therefore you don’t own the master anymore. The label owns the master. But in the case of those that don’t get cut…the bad ones… (Laughs) …you never know. One of these days, maybe I will.

I just wanted to run through some of the songs you’ve written. I just recently heard Mark Owen’s “Kill With Your Smile” (In Your Own Time) and the songs that you wrote for Emma Bunton for her Life in Mono album (“Perfect Strangers” and “Take Me To Another Town“). When it comes to writing someone who’s a former member of Take That or the Spice Girls or whoever, how does that happen? Do their “handlers” approach you, or are you pitching the songs?

No, in those cases, the artist came in, and we wrote songs together. The labels kind of get to know you after awhile, which…I kind of knew a lot of them in the UK, but I’ve recently moved here to L.A., so I’m beginning again here. But they get to know you, and they sort of think, “That might work if you put them in a room together,” so they call you up, and…basically, it starts off as something you do on spec, unless you’re Timbaland or someone, in which case people charge to get in a room with you. But for me, you just get together, write a song, record the vocal, they’ll leave, I’ll finish the track, give it to the label, and if they like it, they pay for it to go on the record. And if they don’t…? Well, in fact, at that point, if they really like it, sometimes you get the budget extended to the point where you can maybe add some real drums or strings or whatever. So that’s kind of the way that a lot of records are made nowadays, because the budgets are such rubbish.

When you contributed to Liz Phair’s self-titled album, she was a pretty big name in alternative music moreso than pop music.

Yeah, I was a fan, actually.

Oh, okay. So what the process of writing “Red Light Fever” for her like?

Well, that was one I wrote with Liz. We wrote about ten songs, and…she basically made that album twice. She made a whole album with Michael Penn, on which there were lot of my songs – like, eight songs or something – and I have never heard it to this day. I was never given a copy. But, basically, when she took it to the record label, the record label said, “It’s too alternative, we need you to go more mainstream.” And that’s when she worked with The Matrix, and The Matrix wrote the singles that were on that album…and there’s Lauren Christy again. So that was kind of Liz’s foray into the mainstream…and she kind of got beat up for it, too. (Laughs) But the only surviving song from those Michael Penn songs of mine…and as I say, I’ve never heard the others…was “Red Light Fever.”

I’d love to hear those songs. I’m a big Michael Penn fan.

Yeah, I’d love to hear it as well. (Laughs) Honestly, Liz is super lo-fi, and she would only record demos on my little Walkman in the middle of the table. She and I would play live. And at one point, they contacted us…her label…to ask us if they could use one of these demos as an iTunes free download or something, and we agreed. So I guess it’s out there somewhere! But, yeah, it’s literally just a cassette recorder in the middle of the table, and Liz and I doing it live. I don’t even remember which song it was!

You co-wrote “That Boy” with Lloyd Cole. So had you guys fallen into the same circles in the late ’80s?

Yeah, I met Lloyd a few times in the process of gigging and doing promotion and stuff. We were both published by the same publisher, and he suggested that we would be good to write together, so I went to New York and wrote two or three songs with him, of which “That Boy” was one. The interesting thing about Lloyd is that…he’s brilliant, but he doesn’t want to do lyrics with anybody else. He wants to do the lyrics himself. I was used to being very involved in the lyrics, so it was kind of a weird dynamic trying to work with him, because I’d suggest things, and I could feel him pulling away, and I’d suggest more, and he’d just kind of close the song down, as if to say, “Ah, let’s more on to something else.” So I left New York thinking that we had a bunch of unfinished things, and then he finished the lyrics once I’d gone.

Well, it’s one of my favorite songs of his.

Oh, thank you. You know, it’s weird, that song, because it’s actually been released on three different records of his. He had it on the Negatives’ record, then he had it on the greatest-hits disc, and then there’s one more, though I can’t remember what it’s on! (Laughs) But, anyway, it’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Getting a song (“Got Dynamite“) on Demi Lovato’s new album, Here We Go Again, must’ve been a major coup for you. I mean, in the States, she’s huge in the ‘tweener market.

Well, it really made us feel that the move here was worthwhile. It was a huge thing for us, because…I mean, I’d done stuff with the Matrix, but when I stepped outside of the Matrix, that was the first production I got on my own. It was done unbelievably quickly. I had the track done with a demo singer, but once they wanted to do it, the turnaround was…I have never seen anything like it. It was like lightning. They had it turned around within the week. Everything: recording, editing, mastering, mixing. When they move, that machine…it’s amazing.

So how did you come to meet Ferras?

That’s kind of…the album is produced by me and The Matrix, and one member of The Matrix is Lauren Christy, who I worked with a long time ago. Basically, she came out to London to do some meetings or something, and we had dinner, and she told me that they were supposed to start Ferras’s record in January or something, and they were worried because they were going over schedule with another album that they were working on. I think it was the Korn album. And, basically, they needed another pair of hands, and would I come out first? Initially, it was going to be three weeks or something, just to kind of help them out, and I really clicked with Ferras. It was just working. And so they then asked me to stay on and contribute from the writing point of view, since initially I was just producing. And I just ended up staying on for the entire album. And the time I was staying here, I just loved it, and it made for the final decision to renew my visa and stay out here for a bit.

I know you need to get back to the studio, but I did have one more co-write I wanted to ask about: “Katydids,” the song you did with Swan Dive for their June album. Whose concept was the song’s subject matter, and is it safe to presume that Danny Wilson and the Katydids were gigging through the UK at approximately the same time?

Ah, Bill. Always love writing with Bill DeMain. Such a lovely and talented man. Boo Hewerdine suggested we write together, and Katydids was the song that came out of the first session – we recently wrote three in a day here in L.A. – and I remember it was a beautiful day in London. I lived on a garden square, and it was so nice that we took an acoustic guitar over to the garden and sat under the shade of a tree. Bill tends to have lyrics pre-written before a session, and it’s not the way I tend to work, but in his case, the lyrics are so good and musical and inspiring that I love doing it. So although I was aware of and was into the band, “Katydids” was entirely Bill’s concept and the music was written pretty quickly on that afternoon. But although I never encountered the Katydids around the Danny Wilson period, I remember my friends from Del Amitri did some gigs with them in the States, and more recently, through the Swandive song, I chatted with Suzy Hug on MySpace.

Lastly, do you have a favorite song that people might not have heard that you’ve written for someone else?

Well, you know, it would have to be one of the ones on the Ferras record, Aliens & Rainbows. That album is really dear to my heart, and it’s just a shame that he basically got lost in the EMI takeover of Capitol, and the album didn’t get the weight behind it that I wish it had’ve gotten. But I’d say there are two or three on there. “Liberation Day,” for one. And I love “Soul Rock,” which is kind of a throwback to my youth. To my Hall and Oates records. (Laughs) And I like the title track, “Aliens & Rainbows.” Working with Ferras was the closest thing I think I’ve done in a long time to the kind of record that I’d make…on the rare occasions that I do.

So do you forsee a time when you yourself will return to recording?

I never say never. There are things I miss about it and things I don’t miss about it. I don’t miss the process of being an artist, where most of your time – and I’m sure you believe it, because you’re on the other end of the phone! – is spent doing interviews and traveling and appearing on television and being made up. All the stuff that has nothing to do with music. So all of that, I don’t really miss. But the hour that you’re on stage, I miss. And I miss the joy that you get from making something that you love when it’s your own record, when you’ve written it and sung it and seen it through to the end. But at least I still get to make records. It’s a tough music business out there, so I’m just happy to be still making records.

Well, I’m officially pitching the idea that you should do some sort of live residency, where you just pop out and play for an hour a week.

I’ve actually thought about it, and I’ve ever talked about doing stuff with some other people, but my problem is just the scheduling. It’s really, really hard, because I just never know when I’m going to have somebody in to sing a vocal or to have a mix done. All the time, I’m chasing deadlines. But I think if I just forced myself to do it, if it was just once a fortnight or something, I could probably do it. So it’s a possibility.

As your Facebook friend, I’m sure I’ll be one of the first to hear about it if it happens.

Absolutely. Just don’t hold your breath. (Laughs)

A Six Pack of Other Gary Clark Co-Writes For Ya’ll:

* Ashley Parker Angel, “Perfect Now” (Soundtrack To Your Life)
* Nick Carter, “Is It Saturday Yet?” (Now or Never)
* Natalie Imbruglia, “Wrong Impression” (White Lilies Island)
* Jack Savoretti, “Dr. Frankenstein” (Between The Minds)
* Skin, “Purple” (Fake Chemical State)
* McFly, “The End” (Radio: ACTIVE)

Popdose: So how did you and your brother Kit first get started playing music? Did you grow up in a musical family?

Gary Clark: Not really. My grandfather played accordion…well, not really played, but he played at parties and stuff. Everybody was kind of a good singer. Like, my mum and dad would sing, again, at parties. It’s kind of a Scottish thing: we’d only sing at New Year’s Eve parties and stuff. But my mum and my dad were quite good singers, and…actually, I guess Ged (Grimes) and I started working together first, ’cause Kit’s younger than me by about five years, and Ged and I are about the same age. So we had a school band and stuff, and it kind of developed from there. He and I stayed together through a few different things until we worked in Danny Wilson with Kit.

You guys were originally called Spencer Tracy. Did you just get, like, a cease-and-desist order from his estate?

Yeah, we did. (Laughs) The album was done, the artwork was done…it was a real last-minute crazy, fearful moment. Basically, the US label checked it out here, and I believe that because Spencer Tracy had lived and died in California…in this state, you can copyright a person’s name. So we were just told, “If you try and use this, you will be sued.” And so the label just went, “Nope. Change it. Now.”

So how quickly did you come up with the new name, Danny Wilson?

Unbelievably quick. I mean, we’d sort of gotten used to the idea that the band had a person’s name, and so I guess that was the next train of thought. Kit came up with it, as it was a movie that my dad used to always talk about as being one of his favorite Sinatra movies…usually when he was complaining that they didn’t show it on TV anymore. (Laughs) So Kip had that idea, and it just really fit with the album being called Meet Danny Wilson, which was the name of the Sinatra film.

Only recently did I finally get a chance to see that film, when it came out on DVD not too long ago.

Me, too! (Laughs) All through that period, I never saw the movie. Not until much later.

So how surprised were you when, after a couple of tries, “Mary’s Prayer” finally became a hit for the band?

Well, it kind of happened in the States before it happened in the UK, and because of that, it triggered the UK label to re-release it. By this time, I was going, “No, please, no…” I thought it was flogging a dead horse. But the third time we released it, it was…it was Radio One, which was the biggest station there and still is, but at the time, when it got to the end of the year, Christmas or whatever, they had a phone-in vote for people’s favorite songs that missed the chart or whatever, and “Mary’s Prayer” won by quite a big margin. And that, combined with the fact that it was doing really well over here in the States, convinced Virgin to release it for the third time. They did a remix on it, but it was essentially the same record. And this time, it just went all the way pretty quickly. By the second week, it was #2 or #3 or something like that. So that was exciting.

It’s one of those songs that, even now, remains one of the great ’80s songs that everyone remembers but no one remembers who did it.

(Laughs) True! Well, that’s okay. I get to keep my anonymity. (Laughs)

And, yet, all you have to do is sing the briefest bit of the chorus, and people immediately go, “Oh, of course, that song!”

But, you know, that’s kind of a testament to one thing that I love about the States: you have radio stations that are just dedicated to keeping songs alive. Which is not as much the case in the UK. I mean, people know the songs, but here you have the classic rock stations that just keep playing things. I love that.

By the way, I just had to mention that, when I came over to the UK in 1992 after graduating from college, I had a Britrail pass, and I made a point of stopping in Aberdeen – even though I had no real reason to do so – just because of the song “Aberdeen.”

I’m so sorry. (Laughs)

I hope you’re proud of yourself! (Laughs)

The funny thing is that I’ve had quite a few people say that they’re curious about Aberdeen or that they’ve been to Aberdeen because of the song, but, y’know, there was nothing particularly magical about the town of Aberdeen. My brother was at university there, and I used to go visit him on weekends, so I spent a little bit of time there. I basically was trying to write the Scottish version of “Do You Know The Way To San Jose?” or “Galveston” or something. It always seems to be these quite obscure American towns that make it into songs, so I thought I’d give it a go for Scotland. (Laughs)

I think my favorite song from Meet Danny Wilson that didn’t get released as a single was probably “Lorraine Parade.”

Oh, wow, thank you. Yeah, I like that song.

Do you have any other favorites that weren’t released as singles that you still remember with particular fondness?

On the second album, I always liked “The Ballad Of Me And Shirley Maclaine,” but the first album…? I don’t know. I’d probably need to see a track listing. (Laughs) And I don’t really think of them as favorites, you know?

Well, they say you have your entire life to write your first album, then only about six weeks to write the second. How many songs did you have stockpiled when it came to write Bebop Moptop?

Not that many. Really, for the first album, I had cherry-picked over quite a long period. I mean, some of the songs were older, “Mary’s Prayer” being one of them. So was “Davy,” and “Steamtrains to the Milky Way” was older. I felt like I’d used the best stuff, so that album was basically written from scratch. I’m trying to think of how long we had to do it, actually. It didn’t feel like a rush at the time. The only thing I remember was that, when I first started writing it, I got my first serious case of writer’s block.

Ugh.

I guess it was because I had so much to live up to with the first album, and I just wouldn’t finish anything, because I felt like it was all rubbish. But I somehow convinced myself, “Look, if you just finish stuff, just finish it, then at least you’ll be moving forward.” And when I decided that I was just going to finish it, that’s when it kind of started to work again, and it slowly came together…thank God! (Laughs)

I understand that “Second Summer Of Love” barely existed as a song and actually had to be extended to make it into a single.

Yeah. It was kind of a joke, really. I actually remember writing it. We were in my girlfriend at the time’s apartment, and we were waiting to do a bunch of phone interviews, I think it was, so we all had to be in one place. It was kind of a long, boring day, and I basically went out to the store around the corner to get some stuff, and it honestly just wrote itself in my head between the house and the store. I went back, grabbed a guitar, and scribbled it down. And it was honestly just a laugh, a bit of a joke. A few friends of ours were getting into that acid house scene at the time, and Kit was born in 1967, which was the first Summer of Love, and we’d just been joking about his birthday and…I don’t know, I just wrote it as a one-minute joke. But the label heard it, and they were, like, “This is your single!” And we’re going, “How in the hell are we going to double the length of this?” (Laughs) And, so, we added that harmonica solo!

It seemed as though Virgin tried everything in their power to make a hit out of that album. I mean, there were something like five singles released from that album between the UK and States.

(And if you’d like to hear them, here they are!)

* “I Can’t Wait“
* “If Everything You Said Was True“
* “Never Gonna Be The Same“
* “If You Really Love Me (Let Me Go)“

Yeah, absolutely. Virgin were really great at that time, and, y’know, we didn’t really fit what was on the radio at any time. We kind of got lucky with “Mary’s Prayer,” in the sense that it just happened to fit, whereas the records were pretty eclectic. And Virgin, even though they loved the band and loved the stuff, they obviously had trouble at radio. It didn’t fit with what was going on.

When I was over in the UK, I actually managed to find a copy of the multi-disc Sweet Danny Wilson compilation, so I came to love the band’s versions of “Kooks” and ABBA’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” In fact, I actually heard your version of “Kooks” years before I ever heard Bowie’s.

Oh, did you really? I loved the Bowie version since I was a kid. Hunky Dory was one of my super-landmark albums, and I still kind of use that as a kind of reference point. I used it for Ferras. He’d never heard it before we were working on his album. That one goes way back for me. (Laughs) And that version was done at a small studio in Dundee. We just did it as a fun B-side kind of a thing, but it was really good fun that day.

So who did Danny Wilson view as their peers, as far as the music you were putting out, who did you feel was putting out the same kind of music?

You mean contemporaries?

Yeah.

(Sighs) There wasn’t really anyone. We always felt like we were slightly out of time, because the people that we loved kind of came from another era. They were either the Bacharach & David ’60s kind of stuff, or the obvious Steely Dan reference, or…I was a huge Stevie Wonder and David Bowie fan. But at the time…? I don’t know. There weren’t that many. We didn’t fit in with anyone, really. Even the sort of Scottish scene of bands, like Deacon Blue, Hue & Cry, and Love & Money, I don’t think we really sounded like any of them.

When I listen to Danny Wilson, I often think of Prefab Sprout.

Oh, that’s a great example, actually. Prefab Sprout were probably the only group at the time where I actually thought, “Well, that’s not so dissimilar from the ground we’re trying to cover.” I was a huge fan, and Steve McQueen is still one of my favorite records. And I also felt a kinship with the Blue Nile, who also seemed to exist in their own timezone, regardless of what was playing on the radio at the time. I adore their records as well.

So when you went to do your solo album, Ten Short Songs About Love, in 1993, you were still pretty much working with Ged and Kit, at least to a certain extent.

Yeah. But Kit’s my brother, and Ged and I are, like, best friends from way back. I think Ten Short Songs is the Danny Wilson album that I wanted to make, and the guys…well, part of the reason that the band split up was that they had started writing, and so when we got to the point where we were trying to choose songs for what would have been the third Danny Wilson album, instead of being able to write the album as I had done before, I was now kind of inundated with tons of songs, and it turned into a difficult situation, because it was, like, “We don’t like all of them, we don’t want to sing them,” and so on. And so Kit’s suggestion to that was that he wanted to make a solo record. In fact, he went to see the A&R people at Virgin, who basically said, “No, you’re contracted to do another Danny Wilson album.” That kind of didn’t sit well with him. He wanted to leave. And, basically, I thought that the band would be just so different without him, so much weaker…not necessarily musicianship-wise, but he was kind of a really good force just in terms of ideas and the flavor of things. And I just felt that, with just me and Ged, it would be a completely different thing. So I decided that was the time to call it a day. We were still friends, but the songs that I had started to prepare for the third Danny Wilson album basically became Ten Short Songs.

Well, I will tell you that it was a tremendous struggle to hunt down a copy of the CD back in the days before internet shopping was a regular thing.

Yeah, it was never released here. I remember at the time doing meetings here with record labels, and the reaction was quite simply that there were no singles on it that fit in with any radio format that existed. (Laughs) It fell between the cracks.

* “We Sail On The Stormy Waters” (Ten Short Songs About Love)
* “Freefloating” (Ten Short Songs About Love)
* “Make A Family” (Ten Short Songs About Love)

And a few years ago, when I was on my honeymoon in the UK, I managed to hunt down a copy of Great Day for Gravity, the album by King L, which was you, Eric Pressly, Neill MacColl, and Matt Laug. I really enjoyed it. How was the experience for you?

Well, it was kind of…I was still under the same deal that I had with Virgin after Ten Short Songs, and looking back on it, I think I was so disappointed in the sales of Ten Short Songs that I just needed to rip it up and start again. (Laughs) And the thing that I hadn’t been doing…’cause all of those records were really made with a small group of people in studios with overdubs and blah, blah, blah. I just missed that thing of standing with a live band in a room, and that was kind of the trigger for what became King L, you know? It started as sessions where I’d bring in musicians to try and cut tracks live, which we did, and when I found my kind of favorite players, it developed into a band thing. It seemed obvious to get the sound, and the band was great live as well, though… (Laughs) …hardly anyone ever saw us! But it was a good band. It was a reaction, I guess, to what was going on at the time.

* “Life After You” Great Day for Gravity
* “First Man On The Sun” Great Day for Gravity

And then King L more or less evolved into Transister?

Yeah, that was interesting. What happened, really, was that the label dropped King L. King L sold even less…by quite a long shot…than Ten Short Songs, and the label dropped me and, therefore, dropped the band as well. And Eric, who was in King L, is from L.A., had four weeks left on his work visa, and in the process of working a lot in the UK with King L, he had met and fallen in love with Keely (Hawkes). And he basically said, “With these four weeks that I have left, how do you feel about writing some songs and producing some tracks so that I can try and get Keely a record deal?” And I said, “Sure.” It sounded like fun, and I needed the distraction from the misery of being dropped. So we just went into my studio and did the first four or five tracks in that four weeks, and Eric went back to the States. And a friend of a friend played it to Chris Douridas, who’s a radio DJ in California and, at the time, had the morning show on KCRW. It was a pretty free show called “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” so he could play demos and stuff, and that’s where he started to play the Transister demos…before we were even Transister! (Laughs) And it kind of got the record companies interested again…including Virgin, who had just dropped us, which was funny. And at the time, it was kind of a, “Whoa, this thing’s kind of taking off,” and my initial job was producer / songwriter, and in some ways, I wish I had kept it at that! But at the time, I was persuaded to sort of jump on board and join the band…and that was a whole lot of jumping! But that album (Transister) and the Lauren Christy album…and I don’t know if you’ve heard that, but I did this album with Lauren Christy…was kind of the beginning of me starting to do what I do now, which is write and produce for other people.

* “Look Who’s Perfect Now” Transister
* “Dizzy Moon” Transister
* “Head” Transister
* “Flow” Transister

Stay tuned for the second part of my conversation with Mr. Clark, in which we discuss his work with artists like Ferras, Demi Lovato, Liz Phair, Swan Dive, and members of the Spice Girls and Take That.

Now, where were we?

Oh, that’s right: we were chatting with the one and only Francis Reader, frontman for the Trashcan Sinatras. If you tuned in last week (and you really should have, you know), then you’re already aware that the conversation between Frank and myself was one that was a little freewheeling in its form, but the end result seems to be well appreciated by fans of the band…and, indeed, by members of the band. Our own David Medsker spoke with Paul Livingston a few days later – look for that interview on Bullz-Eye.com in the very near future – and remarked that I really seemed to have caught Mr. Reader in a talkative mood. Well, all I can tell you is that the decision to make it less of an interview and more of a conversation seems to have worked in my favor, and I’m glad that it seems to be going over well. Now, mind you, I did hear from one friend of mine who, after praising the piece, noted that it perhaps wasn’t the kind of interview that the band’s manager would want, given that there was zero mention of the band’s latest album, In the Music.

What luck, then, that there’s quite a bit of chat about the record in the second and final part of our conversation.

Popdose: So what’s Davy Hughes’ status with the band? Did he drop out? Did he just not want to participate anymore?

Frank Reader: Well, Davy’s still involved, but he’s…you know, he’s got a family, and it’s just not the kind of thing, really, where you can give your all your time to it when you’ve got a family and kids to support. Neither me or Paul or Steven or John have got kids, and although three of us are married, John’s married to another musician, and me and Paul are married to very understanding, beautiful women. (Laughs) For Davy, it was just a case where we had to work out a different way of having him involved, and that was…what we kind of do now is that we keep in touch, obviously, and every now and again, he’ll say, “You know, I managed to get ten minutes’ peace from the kids…” (Laughs) “…and I sat down and did a bit of writing, and here it is. If there’s anything you can do with it, do something with it.” So he contributed to In the Music in that way. And it’s great, because it feels good to have him involved, because he’s a touchstone in my life. He was there in the very beginning, although he didn’t play on Cake. He was actually playing with us once or twice before we made an album – when we were just doing covers, he was around then – so it’s good to have involved. It’s kind of “once a Trashcan, always a Trashcan” with him, you know? (Laughs) And the keyboard player we have, Stevie, has been with us off and on since ’95, so he’s more permanent now, too.

With In the Music, I have to ask: how did Carly Simon come to appear on “Should I Pray?“

Well, we recorded part of it in Martha’s Vineyard at Andy Chase’s, and he was virtually a next-door neighbor of hers, so he knows her and her friends. I think that’s right. I’m trying to remember the relationships and the way the jigsaw goes together. He invited a couple of her friends over, and she wasn’t around, but we’d obviously said, “Can Carly come to the house?” And he said that she was out of town but that he was going to invite a couple of her friends. And we said, “Well, that’s close enough. We can talk to them about Carly Simon!” (Laughs) But we got on well with her friends, and they promised to give her a CD, so we gave her a couple of songs and a couple of ideas, and we wrote her a note with it, just basically saying how much we admired her, especially the No Secrets album. That was one of John’s favorites. And I think “You’re So Vain” was the first song I ever remember hearing, actually, so I waxed a little bit about that. It was all stuff that I’m sure she’s heard before, but much to our surprise, she got in touch with Andy after we left and she said that she loved one of the songs and asked if she could try doing a backing vocal on it. She was very gracious about it and very not at all pushy. She was very…I got the feeling that wasn’t completely sure of herself, which is a trait I always like in people. So she did some tracks, some recording with Andy over one of the songs. We never actually met, though. We were obviously just totally thrilled to have her involved. It’s a great, great honor to have her do something like that.

I understand that “Oranges and Apples” was inspired by Syd Barrett. Even without listening to the song, that certainly makes sense to me, given that I’m familiar with his early Pink Floyd single, “Apples and Oranges.”

Oh, you know “Apples and Oranges”?

Absolutely. I’m a big Barrett fan.

Oh, cool! Well, what had happened is that…well, he had died, obviously… (Laughs) …and we had been reading all about it, and there were all of the articles and the tributes, but a lot of them had been focusing on how he was an acid casualty, and…you probably know Boo Hewerdine, right?

Sure, from The Bible.

Yeah, and he plays a lot with my sister and John as well. Well, Boo’s a Cambridge man, and he was telling John that he often saw Syd around, and he always thought that Syd looked really happy. In fact, Boo actually helped him when he fell off his bike in front of him. Syd fell off his bike, and Boo helped him back on. And John started thinking about it in terms of how people like to focus on the idea of Syd Barrett and that he was a casualty because of that period of his life in the late ’60s, but you can have another perspective on his life if you read the stories from people who knew him. His sister, particularly. He was quite at peace and he was enjoying himself, and he was very, very creative still, just in a different, non-pop way. John, who’s the main writer of that song, his idea was to try and kind of write something focusing on that side of him, you know? Focusing on the positive side of actually being Syd Barrett and living your life day to day. And I think sometimes that, when people die like that, the whole story sort of falls into place in your mind. It’s no longer an open-ended story, so you can reflect on it then. It’s a lot like what people are doing right now with Michael Jackson.

We’ve always been fans of Syd, and I think that came out in the end. We knew exactly what John was talking about when he brought it in, and we had great fun getting that kind of soundscape together. We just played for hours and hours and hours, going around all of those chords, stoned out of our heads, but putting it all together…it all came together rather magically. And then the City Wakes people in Cambridge were organizing a two-week festival in tribute to Syd, with art, photography, films, and, of course, music, and we asked them if we could donate the song to the Mental Health Trust as a single, because we’d already mixed it by that point. And the proceeds, as much or as meager as they may have been, it still felt good to be involved with it. And Storm Thorgerson, he did the sleeve for it, too. So it was just a great…well, it was like the Carly Simon thing: it was great for us. We were so pleased. You open one door, and you don’t really know where it’s going to lead you, and the next thing you know, you’ve got the guy who did the Dark Side of the Moon sleeve doing your sleeve. (Laughs) And we’ll always have that! It’s the little things in life that keep you going.

Absolutely.

So it’s just been great, you know? The whole album’s been a great experience, as far as all that’s gone. It was lovely to be able to pay tribute to someone like Syd like that. We’ve always been more Syd than Roger, ourselves, and understood about the fragility of people like that. We kind of feel an empathy to him more than we do… (Starts singing) “Money!” (Laughs) All that stuff with public schoolboys whining about money. But we love Floyd.

My introduction to Syd Barrett was all hosed up. I discovered Robyn Hitchcock first, then through him I found Syd Barrett…and, then, my first Barrett album wasn’t even a proper album. It was Opel.

Oh, right, which was…was that the last one he made?

It was kind of an odds-and-sods collection.

Right. Yeah, right around 1991, we had Pete Jenner as a manager for about a year, and, of course, he was Syd’s manager while he was the Floyd’s manager. And when the band split and Syd was forced out, he obviously thought, “Well, Syd’s the guy to go with!” And he managed him all through The Madcap Laughs and right up to the point where he left and gave up making music. He was an interesting person to talk to about that, because he was so old-school business. He was still very much in the Allen Klein kind of vibe…but without the violence, probably. He was very much, like, “Just get it done! Get in the studio, and a few years later, you should have a hit single.” And we were, like, “Yeah, but it takes us six months to write one song, and even then we’ll want to start again!” So it was a bit of a mismatch, but it was interesting to get close to someone like that, who managed in that way and who knew someone so luminous in our lives. He was Billy Bragg’s manager at the time, and I think he managed Eddi, too. But after us, actually, I think. We had a bit of a connection there, too. I haven’t heard much Robyn Hitchcock, actually. I always think I’ll get round to kind of listening to some Robyn Hitchcock, but other than what I’ve heard in passing, I don’t know his stuff at all.

I should make you a Best of Robyn Hitchcock disc.

Yeah! I’d really like to hear some of that stuff.

Really? Hey, if you want one, I’ll make you one. I mean, I literally have all of his albums, so it wouldn’t be hard to put one together.

Yeah, whatever you think is the best. That’d be cool!

Okay, you asked for it!

Well, I like all of those gentle Englishmen. (Laughs)

I’ve done a couple of interviews with him, and he’s a really nice guy, always very interesting to talk with.

Yeah, he’s one of those guys who I’ve heard talk more than I’ve actually heard his music, but he’s always more than just a talking head. His perspective always seems to be a bit above the cliche and the rabble. I think we had some friends in common at one point. Tim Keegan was playing with him for awhile, wasn’t he?

He was.

We’ve had a lot of friends like that. The Blue Aeroplanes, he played with them.

Oh, sure, I remember them. Particularly “Jacket Hangs.”

Yeah, “Jacket Hangs,” and “…And Stones” was a cracker of a song. We would meet a lot of these bands on tour, you know. I remember Gerard from the Blue Aeroplanes being a sweet, sweet guy, taking us for a walk around historic Bristol after the gig. You don’t always want to just sit down and have a few beers after a show, and he said, “Come on, I’ll show you some architecture.” (Laughs) Okay, fair enough! So, yeah, lovely people.

Well, I’ve only got a couple more for you, because I’ve already talked your ear off…and vice versa! (Laughs) But I was wondering how you came to hook up with Andy Chase in the first place. I know he helped to mix Weightlifting, but how did that come about?

He came through our Japanese publisher. He’d worked with, I think, Tahiti 80, it was. You know that mob? They’re French. And we had heard his production…not his music, but his production. I think he was just getting started in production roundabout when we first heard his name, in ’98 or something. So our publishers in Japan had wanted us to consult with the guy from Tahiti 80, because they’re always trying to push you into doing, like, songwriting. We have enough trouble getting ourselves together! But the name “Andy” stuck around, and when Weightlifting was being made, which was our first album in eight years, we sat down in front of the mixing desk, and we were, like, “We don’t actually know what the hell we’re doing here! We haven’t the faintest idea how to mix a record!” I mean, it takes practice. You have to keep your hand in, and we hadn’t done it. So we sent him a tape of a couple of songs, ’cause we knew that he was interested and really wanted to do it, and that that he liked the band a lot. So we asked him to mix a track for free. And he’s a canny soul, so it took a bit of persuading, but he did it, and he sent us a copy of a song, “All the Dark Horses.” No, he did two. He also did “Leave Me Alone.” So he sent them to us, and we just thought they sounded terrible. We were actually kind of smug about it, how we were right not to have that guy. “We’ve made the right decision!” (Laughs) We were kind of happy about it! And then we went back to try and mix it, and we had gotten an engineer friend, but we ended up somewhat mixing it ourselves…just kind of pushing faders up randomly, basically. And then we thought we had a great, great mix of “All the Dark Horses.” But just on a whim, Paul and I, after listening to our mix and seeing how great it was, we put on Andy’s…and it just blew ours out of the water. It was, like, “Fuck, we’d better phone that guy back!” So we phoned him back, and we were saying, “Look, we’re really sorry about that. I don’t know what we were thinking, but we really love the mixes now, actually.” It just sort of came to us what was there and what he was doing. It’s very strange and hard to explain how you can hear the same thing in one environment and it doesn’t sound the same as in another, or at another time of the day or in another headspace. But he was very gracious about that, and he kind of said, “Ah, I thought you’d be back with your tail between your legs!” (Laughs) So we got involved, and he was always a saint when we went over to do the mixing in New York, John, Paul, and I. He’d often say, “I wish I could’ve had this record from the start. I really want to try and make a record with you guys.” And when we got In the Music together, we had a short list of producers…and my choice was Barry Gibb. And I wasn’t even high! I really wanted Barry Gibb to do it! (Laughs) I don’t know why I came up with that idea. Maybe it’s one for the next album.

Hey, I’m behind you. I’m a big Bee Gees fan.

Yeah, so you know what I mean, then! I just love the man. He’s one of my all-time heroes, and he’s very underrated as an arranger and producer, I think, though not by me, and I’m sure not by you, either. But Andy Chase was really glad to be involved, and he has a studio in New York, of course, so we were all up for the adventure of trying it. So we had some songs, and we did a little back-and-forth with E-mail and MP3s and demos, and he helped us along, and after about six months of that, we thought we were ready to all go over. And that was a big leap for us to do that, to gather all the money we’d got and take six people over to New York. That’s not an easy or cheap thing to do. But, thankfully, we got there and the set-up was fantastic. Andy and his really amazing engineer, Rudyard, had a great sound going from the start. Andy was a little cautious. I think he’s a bit…well, it’s like I was saying about building records up a bit studio-precise, and the records that you make from scratch are like that. He uses quite a bit of machinery. It’s well-managed and I think for the most part that he keeps it in mind that if he wants to retain the soul of something, but he still uses a lot more machinery than, for instance, a band like us would use.

But he was a bit wary of our ideas because, by this point, we had been rehearsing a lot in Glasgow, and I had kind of conceptualized the album as being one that we would do completely live, maybe apart from the singing. Again, I think he kind of nodded his head and said, “Yeah, right, we’ll see.” But we went in and we did the music, and we took an extra guitarist with us, a friend of ours from Kilmarnock, so we could try and do it all live. And the very first night, we did In the Music, and it just sounded like a record. It was, like, “Wow, this is fantastic!” And we did that for about one and a half weeks, got all the tracks down, and for the rest of the time, we played internet poker, did a few overdubs, and watched him on the computer, chopping up files. I don’t know what he was doing, but, basically, it was done in a week and a half.

Wow.

It was great! It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. It was the way we had to make this record, and he was surprised that the sound was so good straight away. That won him over to the idea of us doing it live. We’d been able to capture it. We’ve got those twenty years of experience, you know, so it’s something that we should use to our advantage! It was something we had to do, though, because there was the element of sense in the band that we couldn’t really make an album like Weightlifting again. We couldn’t, like, “Right, that’s the drums down, let’s get the bass down, and, Paul, let’s get a guitar sound together.” It wasn’t really interesting to us anymore to do it like that. The excitement of sitting in the chair next to the producer had kind of worn off. Now, the excitement was sitting in the room and making the big, soupy noise and just getting lost in it. That was the excitement for us. There are plenty of 16-year-old guys in bands who start off making music like that, but our time and our experience was different. Our time and experience was a more separate recording fashion, and it took us a long time to come around to the best way of doing stuff. (Pauses) Excuse me, Will, it’s my wife. She’s just come in. (Leans away from the phone for a moment to address his wife and make sure she’s well, then explains to her that he’s just doing an interview and will be finished momentarily) So, yeah, Andy was a great facilitator for that, and very organized as well.

Well, I’ll officially start the wrapping-up process, but…are there any songs that fans should not expect to hear during the upcoming tour?

That depends on the fan, I think. (Laughs) You know, when we were making this record, I was thinking, “You know, I could see a lot of Trashcan fans not really being into this kind of thing,” and it’s been borne out, but there’s not really anything we can do about that. The Cake stuff really isn’t…we have to feel it. Sometime maybe some of those songs will talk to us again, but at the moment, a lot of them don’t, and we’re really only interested in playing songs that excite us and interest us, so I would say that if you went along thinking that you were going to hear “Who’s He,” you would probably be disappointed. And that would go all of the first album, probably. I don’t know, it’s just that…I’m over 40 now. I’m 43, and some of that stuff was done when I was 22. And it’s not just me. There are five people in the band, and I think Paul would’ve gladly stopped doing Cake stuff in, like, 1992 or something. (Laughs) He’s been a trouper, I’ll have to say that for him. He’s been a real trouper about that. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people who haven’t really responded to this record very well have been the kind of people that like the kind of Trashcan music that *I* don’t like anymore or that I’ve never really felt comfortable with. When you’ve got three or four songwriters in the band and you’re working in a collective way, that’s always going to be that way. There’s always going to be a little bit of where you’re doing things for your friends sometimes. Like, “Okay, John really believes in this, and I love John, so I’m going to give it my all,” you know? And vice versa them for us. But that doesn’t mean that, on a Wednesday night in Manchester, you feel like getting out there and doing it. And with one or two of our songs, it’s been like that, and those have been the ones that have kind of died away, but we’ve got a catalog of about a hundred songs that were recorded, and we’re really, really proud of all of them for what they are, but most of them we’re still keen on, which is nice. And, again, our collective songwriting team is what’s really helped us stay interested. I think very few bands with single songwriters last more than a couple of albums and do anything of any real interest. If you think about it, all of the big bands who’ve managed to sustain themselves for more than ten years and are still making great records…you throw in your U2, R.E.M., the Beatles, even…have at least two songwriters, sometimes three. The only bands that have sustained on the basis of one songwriter that I can think of are the Kinks and the Who. Maybe you can think of more. But I think it’s helped, because…oh, Radiohead, there’s another example. There’s too much for one person to take on. It’ll burn you out! (Laughs) That’s why bands like Coldplay make one great, great record, and the rest of them are, like, “Well, so what?”

Well, that’ll do it for me, then, Frank.

That’s actually good, because I have to go! (Laughs) We’re just dashing off. But it was nice speaking to you, and let us know if you’re at one of the shows!

There are no two ways about it: were it not for the Trashcan Sinatras, I would not be where I am today.

This is in no way an overstatement. The facts are these: many moons ago, I joined the E-mail list in support of a highly underrated band from Irvine, Scotland, where I proceeded to become friends with many of the other individuals on the list. One of those friends was Popdose’s own David Medsker, who pitched me to the CEO of Bullz-Eye.com as someone who was worth bringing on as a contributor. The end result was that, after almost two decades of looking, I was finally in possession of one of the rarest positions in all of journalism: a full-time, work-at-home writing gig. And if I hadn’t been writing for Bullz-Eye, then I wouldn’t have been able to tell David about this awesome column called “Captain Video in the 1980th Dimension,” which made us both laugh so hard that he was inspired to ask its author – one J. Giles – if he’d be interested in becoming a Bullz-Eye contributor as well, a decision which ultimately led both us to become members of this wonderful world that we all know as Popdose.

You can imagine, then, just how important the Trashcan Sinatras are to me.

One could easily argue that any of the band’s albums would be worth of a spotlight within “Hooks ‘N’ You,” since none of them have ever really achieved what you’d call tremendous success. Their debut, 1990’s Cake, certainly came the closest, with “Obscurity Knocks” and “Only Tongue Can Tell” earning enough airplay on college radio and MTV’s late, great “120 Minutes” to leave the band’s name cemented even now in the memories of those who heard them at the time. Sadly, the follow-up, 1993’s I’ve Seen Everything, came out in the wake of grunge’s arrival and didn’t get the kind of notice it deserved, but at least the video for “Hayfever” managed to earn momentary fame when it turned up in an episode of “Beavis & Butthead.” By the time the Trashcan Sinatras released their third album in 1996, however, their stock in the States had dropped to a point that A Happy Pocket didn’t even manage a release on these shores. This has always seemed more than a little ironic to me, as it was this album which really made me love the band unconditionally, with songs like “The Main Attraction,” “Twisted & Bent,” and “How Can I Apply?” seeming easily as iconic to me as any of the singles which preceded them. Of course, I realize that the biggest reason for this is that the album was released when I first joined the aforementioned Trashcan Sinatras E-mail list, but I think you’ll find that almost everyone who’s ever heard A Happy Pocket will gladly tell you that it really is one of the best albums you’ve never heard…and, yes, that includes the cover of Lulu’s “To Sir, With Love.” (Hey, my 3-year-old daughter swears by it!)

Unfortunately, the fact that no one heard A Happy Pocket meant that it would be eight long years until the band finally put out a follow-up, but when Weightlifting finally emerged in 2004, at least it showed up in the U.S. as well. It wasn’t really what you’d call a hit (though lord knows that, with songs like “All the Dark Horses,” “Freetime,” and the title track, it certainly deserved to be one), but it still managed to raise their profile far higher than it had been in more than a decade. Bad luck, though: the label – spinART Records – filed for bankruptcy a few years later, leaving the band once again without a home.

Fortunately, the band has never been described as a bunch of quitters, so they’re still plugging away, and the release of their latest endeavor, in the music, is decidedly imminent…so much so, in fact, that the Trashcans are embarking upon a US tour. As a result, one of their greatest supporters – Joe DiMaria, who’s been a mate of mine ever since I joined the list – asked me if I might able to find it in my heart to chat with someone from the band in order to help spread the word about these upcoming events.

Yeah, like I really needed to think long and hard about an offer like that.

Here’s one bit of fair warning, however: this is a fairly free-flowing interview. It has on at least one occasion been suggested that, as a journalist, I have a tendency toward becoming inappropriately comfortable with my interview subject, thereby finding myself prone to making decisions within the conversation as if I was talking to a friend rather than a professional musician. I can’t really argue with that, but with one notable recent exception, this tendency has rarely steered me wrong, and when talking to Frank Reader, the lead singer of the Trashcan Sinatras, it must be said that I do feel like he is a friend of sorts…albeit one I’ve never actually met in person. It’s also worth noting that I quickly learned that Frank is a man who, all things considered, would be quite happy talking about almost anything but his own music. Not that we didn’t do a fair amount of that, but as you’ll see, there were many tangents throughout the course of our conversation. In fact, we spent the first five minutes barely talking about music at all, chatting about what I do for a living, how I’m going to try to make it the show at the Troubadour on July 29th, where I’m staying when I’m visiting California (the Langham), and how he and his wife stayed at the same hotel for their anniversary. Eventually, though, we got down to brass tacks.

Popdose: Well, I guess we should actually talk about the band for a bit.

Frank Reader: Ah, if we must, we must. We’ve actually just been practicing. I don’t like talking about them, you know? I find it hard in interviews. I find it’s easier if we just start chatting away, and things will just eventually come out of it, anyway.

(Laughs) I’m fine with that, too.

You’ll probably be more enlightened about the record just from talking to me about my family than you would talking about my music. It’s all just a mystery to us. Yesterday was our first rehearsal in years. Two of us are in L.A. now, and the two that are out here hired…well, found a bass player, I should say…and asked him to join the band. We needed someone for the tour, but we actually found someone that we liked so much that we asked him to join, so the three other guys have come over from Scotland just to meet him. It was a bit like we were presenting them with our choice, so it was kind of nerve-wracking, you know? But he’s very musical and a fantastically positive guy, and everybody was very impressed with him. We were actually playing and remarking to each other how it was the first time we’d actually played together since we recorded the new album in December ’07.

Wow.

Yeah, because it took, like, seven or eight months to get it mixed and into that stage, because we do it all ourselves and it’s in piecemeal fashion, so it drags out a wee bit more than you’re financing it yourself. Which is okay. As long as you can keep the focus. And we were lucky with the producer, as he was very focused on it. But as I say, we were talking about how strange that was. That’s probably the longest gap we’ve ever had! And most of the songs on the album were recorded a little bit…we had a few weeks rehearsal in Glasgow beforehand, but a lot of it we were getting the feel of it, which was a new thing for it. So it wasn’t like these were songs that we’d rehearsed the hell out of before we recorded them, you know? It was strange, because we were, like, “Do we actually know what we’re doing here?” It just sounded horrendous! But it comes out. I was moping later, saying, “This is terrible! We sound terrible! Are we going to sound all right?” And were looking for reassurance, but everyone else was, like, “What are you talking about? It’s fine!” We were all just listening to our own individual selves, and no one was listening to everything as a whole. But as a singer, I was sitting back and listening, waiting to be blown away. John says he spent half the time just reacquainting himself with his pedal and making buzzy sounds. He’s been touring a lot, and everybody’s been playing a lot of music. Frank, our new bass player, he’s busy all the time, but John plays with my sister, who’s a singer…

I’m familiar. (Laughs)

…and she’s his partner. They two have been de facto married, anyway, for ten years or so, but John plays in her band, so he’s been very, very busy…though mostly on ukulele. (Laughs) So he’s been reacquainting himself with a Les Paul. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard my sister’s music, but it’s kind of folky jazz. Her new album’s a bit more jazzy, and he’s been playing with her on that and touring all over the place.

Oh, I’ve definitely heard your sister’s music. I’ve been a fan of Eddi’s since the Fairground Attraction days.

Oh, wow! Well, yes, she’s absolutely phenomenal, and she’s a real hero of mine, a great guiding light for me throughout. But, then, she’s my big sister. She’s fantastic, and she’s always been a positive person…and growing up in working-class Glasgow, that’s not really that commonplace! It’s not a bastion of positivity. I think she took a lot of blows from people who thought she was crazy and flaky and all that, but she just kept up her determination. She wanted to be a positive person and find a way of breaking the cycle you have in life. Like, sometimes when you grow up in a big family…or any family, I suppose…you just follow in your parents’ footsteps, but to try something new…? Growing up in the ’70s, when she was a young teenager, she wanted to be a singer, and with my father a welder and my mum was a school dinner lady, you can imagine the look on their face! (Laughs) They were very supportive, and she was a wonderful singer and still is, but it was kind of understood that she would sing at parties and that’s it, you know?

I would expect the reaction would basically be, “Good luck with that.”

Yeah! “Make sure you stay in school!” But she didn’t want to go to school or anything! She was a real bonafide hippie, she had the long dress, long hair, and long everything, with the glasses and the chains, and she wanted to go and live in France when she was 16 and pick berries. She lived with a guy who made teeth! (Laughs) He did! He made his living making people’s teeth! But she did it, and I’ve always had so much admiration as well as love for her because she did all that stuff. She’s the real deal. She was a real busker, and even now, when she plays, she hates any kind of restriction on her playing. She’s been working with John for many years, of course, and everyone knows that she says at the drop of a hat, “I want to do this now!” But she’s great. She’s an inspiration.

So where were you with your music when “Perfect” topped the charts? Had you just gotten started?

We’d just gotten started. I think we’d been together for a year, maybe, at that point. It was 1988, I think, and I was actually with her the day she found out it had gone to #1. We were in an old part of Glasgow where we’d all grown up, and me and her stopped to buy a bag of chips, and the radio was on in the chip shop, and…I’m sure you know that she kind of knew it was going to be #1, because you kind of hear things. The RCA man had tipped her a wink and said, “Everything’s fine, don’t worry, we’ve paid the right people,” or whatever, so she had kind of known it was going to be #1, but she found out when we were in the chip shop, and it was kind of nice to be a part of her life when that happened. As far as the band, we were really excited for her, and it really helped my relationship with my mum and dad, trying to be a young guy who’s not working a proper job but trying to be in the band and work in music. They had seen that it was possible, so it really helped in that way. But in another way, I think my mum and dad kind of expected me to have a gold record the first time as well. (Laughs) But what the large print giveth, the small print taketh away, as Tom Waits says. But we’ve always been really supportive of each other, me and Edna, so it was a great thing to see her have that success. But I knew she was uncomfortable with it, you know? She’s pretty self-conscious and quiet…well, she was then, anyway. She’s much more confident now. But she was thrust into it really quickly, and she suffered some pretty cruel journalism from the NME and Melody Maker, people calling her ugly and things like that, because she was kind of unusual looking. But she’s absolutely beautiful, you know? It was kind of a weird, bumpy ride for her, too, and that band broke up really quickly. To watch that happen was kind of painful.

But she did, at least, step forward on her own and, at least from my perspective, seemed to do pretty good for herself. I don’t know how well it did in the charts, but her solo material was certainly acclaimed, anyway.

Yeah, but I think that, having had a #1, she was feted a little bit by her record company, and, you know, those people, they’re vampires. I mean, they really want the same thing all the time as soon as they get a formula. They just don’t want any changes. She had so many ideas, and they would come out in flashes, but you could definitely tell that she was getting more and more frustrated, and it wasn’t really until she went to Rough Trade and Geoff Travis took her under his wing that I think she felt the freedom to make the kind of records that she really wanted to make. So, yeah, it was kind of weird on the face of things. She was lucky to have that success because it gave her that. We were the same with our first album.

Actually, I was going to ask how much freedom you guys had on Go! Discs when you first signed to them.

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing about a major label is that they can do that for you. They can get your name out there and, for good or for bad, a lot of people will be able to make up their minds about you. That’s the hardest part nowadays, I suppose, making a record for a new band. The attraction is there to make it yourself, but getting heard is so hard. Now, do you make music yourself?

I do not. I’d love to tell you that I do, but I’m one of those horrible critics who can only write about other people’s.

(Laughs) Oh, that’s all right. You’re a master of your own trade! You know, it’s just so difficult for new bands to get heard, and she was lucky that we caught the tail end of that, the last of the major labels’ dying breath. They were throwing money at indie music, and they weren’t necessarily sure it wouldn’t succeed. Nowadays I think major labels are a bit more coy about that. But we can still feed on what we gained back then, you know? Like you say, there’s you guys on the list and the website. I think Go! Discs were quite quick on the wave as well. I remember in ’95 or so we got our first list-serv up, which was really early. I don’t think I’ve met another band who was doing it in those first months that we were doing it, so we were lucky in that respect as well.

You definitely have a rabid fanbase, to say the least.

Yes! (Laughs) And it’s funny, though, because when last we played gigs in L.A. or in Glasgow, there’d maybe be 800 or 1,000 people there, but only maybe 2% are aware of our website or have been to it. That was the last time we toured, so maybe it’s changed now, but it’s funny how you think that that’s your fanbase, but your fanbase is actually spread wider than that. In my experience, at least.

With Cake, it felt like you guys burst onto the scene out of nowhere and, at least for a few minutes, you were the heroes of MTV’s “120 Minutes.”

Ah, yes, on “120 Minutes” for a few minutes. (Laughs) We got a couple, anyway.

Did you feel like you were making headway with that first album when you first came over to the States?

You know, we felt a little bit like…well, Paul was 17 when that happened, I think. George is a bit older than me, but Paul was definitely 17 or 18. We were rubbish back then. We could barely make a noise back then, as far as musical sounds. We were definitely ropey. There was something we were talking about recently, me and Paul, that we never really see crap bands anymore. Not just in L.A., but it’s happened in Glasgow, too. You go to, like, King Tut’s or wherever to see a mid-sized band, and they’d have a local support, and the local support is bang on the button! And we were, like, whatever happened to really crap bands that couldn’t actually play? I used to go see bands where the bass player would be reading his music out of a book, and he’d have to stop to turn the page! (Laughs) We were just a small notch about that. We didn’t have a clue about amplification, we didn’t have a clue about anything. It was all manic energy. I just threw myself into it like a maniac, drinking like crazy and throwing myself about, just to distract from this crazy noise that we all thought was unlistenable. ‘Cause Cake was made quite carefully in the studio, and it’s a studio record. Unfortunately, I think we might’ve learned a few bad habits from it, and I’d have to take the blame, because I’d done engineering before that. It was all very ’80s and built up from scratch. I mean, it has its merits, but when we took it on the road, it was very much like a deer in the headlights. It was chaotic, that’s how I remember it, and I can barely believe that it happened. We were coming over here for the first time, and people were screaming at us during gigs. It was very silly.

Some friends of mine have very fond memories of seeing you at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.

Ah, yes. A couple of the gigs I remember, and the 9:30 Club I remember, because I remember how weird it was. I think it’s very different now…

Actually, it’s a completely different building now.

Yeah, because we played there when we toured for Weightlighting, and I was, like, “What is this?” The last time, I remembered, was low ceilings, and possibly pillows in front of you. Something to lean on. I think we played it twice, though I may be mixing a couple of gigs up. But we were doing weird cover versions at the time, I remember, trying to flesh out our set…because we only had, like, ten songs! We weren’t like the Beatles in Hamburg. We had nothing, really, except just the bare bones, and we were trying to flesh it out by doing covers like “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” by ABBA. We were doing Charlie Rich! I don’t know where we got them from. Maybe my mum’s record collection. I think that’s where we got these ideas. But we were always big country fans. It’s always been big in Scotland, particularly in the west of Scotland. We’ve got a Grand Old Opry in Glasgow.

Really? I didn’t know that!

Yeah, I think it’s the only official one outside of Nashville. And people go dressed up as cowboys and have fake shootouts, and there’s line dancing, though I think that’s a relatively new thing. But growing up, all of my uncles loved all that stuff. My dad was a huge country and western fan.

Hey, I grew up listening to Johnny Cash’s “Live at Folsom Prison.”

Well, we were a bit cheesier than that. We were more Crystal Gayle. (Laughs) It took awhile before we got into George Jones and Gram Parsons and that kind of stuff.

I’ve been through Crystal Gayle, Dolly Parton, Ronnie Milsap, all of them.

A-ha! And it never changes, really. There’s a certain period in your life, I think, where if music is something that you’re passionate about and it’s something that gives you a thrill…what you feel about the music in a critical way doesn’t come into it. If I hear anything from, like, the year 1979 or 1980, when I was first just getting knocked over by music, reading the charts every week and taking the radio to school, it doesn’t matter what the record is or if it’s the craziest comedy record or whatever. It just gives me such a thrill of nostalgia that I can’t not like it and can’t not enjoy that moment. It’s not about the record.

I know what you mean, though it took me years to appreciate that. I went through the same stage that everyone goes through, where I was, like, “I’m too cool to like this.” But then, at a certain point, I realized, “Who am I kidding? I grew up listening to Barry Manilow, and I can still appreciate this!”

Absolutely. “Weekend in New England” is a great song! (Laughs) I love a bit of Mr. Manilow. You’re right, though. It was hard on our psyches to grow up and make these musical strides in a harsh critical glare, for the most part, because we were pretty confused and never really confident, you know? We only really got confident, like, maybe about a year or two ago! Something like that. Honestly! And yesterday all the confidence was away again. But it’ll come back. It just felt like, “Is this the right time? Is the music we should be making?” And, also, the record company had a pretty strong influence on us. We weren’t headstrong people, you know, and we never have been, really. We are a bit more now, I’d say, but we were very kind of…we would make the music that we felt came from our heart, and then the record company would say, “Hey, that’s great, but can you change it a wee bit?” (Laughs) And we’d be, like, “Okay, if you like,” and we’d lock ourselves back in the studio and have a go. But what we didn’t know was that it was eating away at our confidence a tiny bit at a time…and then you wake up and it’s 1996 and you’re going, “Is this good?” So we had that period as well. It’s strange that what it takes to get you off it can sometimes seem on the surface to be really awful…like, in our case, the bankruptcy. Or losing a record company deal and being dropped. Whatever. All of these things that seem really calamitous are actually blessings at the end of the day.

And, obviously, I don’t want to dwell on that stuff, but I was curious: do you often wonder how many black cats have crossed your path over the years?

No, you cannae give that any momentum. You can’t afford it. You’ve got to remain positive. We’ve so much to be thankful for. There are four of us that have played together for almost twenty years now, and we’ve gotten so much out of just playing together. John and Paul, when they play guitar together, they’re just amazing. They just read each other very well. It’s kind of frowned upon to stay together in rock and roll, you know? But when John and my sister got married, that was in the middle of a time when we didn’t really know what we’d be doing next, and there was an element where we were, like, “We really have to accept each other or leave each other.” And we accepted each other, of course, and, y’know, we’ve grown to love each other and have learned how to treat each other properly. I think that, when we grew up together, we were very Pink Floyd-y about it. Nobody was saying anything, nobody was actually helping each other out of their problems, and we were feeling a little isolated. We had the camaraderie, but that’ll only take you so far. And now we have, I think, because we’ve been together so long and feel a bit of an element of “fuck it” and, you know, this is what we’re doing. It’s a vocation for us, and we actually enjoy each other’s company. Like I said, John and his brother are kind of my family, too. We’re much more comfortable with our music now.

Join us next week…no, seriously…when we return with more from Mr. Reader.

Okay, wait, she says, “No, you’re not.” So let’s just say I’m a dedicated journalist.

Anyway, I hope everyone who enjoyed the first half of my conversation with Robbie returns to check out this second half, as we discuss various artists he’s worked with during his career in music, and we also finally get around to asking him about his acting…and, yes, that includes Cousin Oliver. So let’s get back to where we left off, having just chatted about Napoleon Blown Apart and starting to ask about some of his other work…

I wanted to run through a couple of other albums that you played on. I hope to do a column about the Barry Holdship Four’s The Jesse Garon Project, because I love that record.

Oh, right on! Yeah, I did some playing on that. He’s an awesome guy. Barry’s an awesome guy. I just wish he didn’t put drum machines on his records. (Laughs) But we’ll talk about that. That’s a whole other thing. I’ve told him many other times, “Let me produce your stuff!” And he does it at home, and he does an awesome job, but…well, look, I listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and I go, “I would’ve fixed that.” Because, you know, I’ve made so much money on my art that I can afford to sit around and make these kind of judgement calls on other people’s art. (Laughs)

I think my favorite song on Jesse Garon is “Twist of Faith.” I first heard that on…I think it was a Poptopia! compilation.

Yeah, it’s a really good song. He’s written a lot of really good songs. “Hang Me Out to Dry” is a really fucking awesome barn-burning song that the BoDeans should’ve bought. The BoDeans should’ve bought that song from him and just had a whole second career.

You’ve worked with Cockeyed Ghost quite a bit.

I played with Cockeyed Ghost for awhile, sure. Actually, it’s a crazy thing: Adam (Marsland) is one of those who I kind of sometimes want to punch in the head. (Laughs) We’ve known each other for that long. But I’ll also say that he’s written five or six of my favorite songs ever. It’s pretty amazing. He has a song called “Ginna Ling” that’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. But going back to that, when I was playing with them, there’s a song on…I think it’s on Ludlow 6:18, and it’s called “Imagine You’re Dead.” (Writer’s note: actually, it’s on The Scapegoat Factory.) It’s a really cool, crazy pop song. “Asian Hero Worship” is another really great song. I mean, we toured for awhile, but it was sort of, like, once we got off the road… (Hesitates) I think it’s because I can’t be in a band and not go, “Oh, but I want to do it this way!” Adam has his ideas about how it’s supposed to be, and we were diametrically opposed on occasion, so once we got off the road, he said, “Yeah, I think I’m gonna go with Robert Ramos (on bass). And I just went, “Yeah, okay.” (Laughs) But we had an awesome time touring. All of the stuff you can imagine. We almost died! We were in a snowstorm outside of Flagstaff, and the car spins off the road, and the drummer’s asleep in the front seat. Adam goes, “Uh-oh, here we go,” and I’m thinking, “Well, this will be interesting. This’ll make for an interesting end of the story, won’t it?” But we were fine. And it was amazing. I think we played some amazing shows as a trio. Do you know James Hazley?

I know the name.

He was the drummer for Cockeyed Ghost for a very long time. He’s one of the best guys that’s ever played the game. I can’t believe that there are people out there that don’t know his name and who aren’t throwing lots of cash at him to play with them, because there’s nothing the dude can’t do. He’s a great singer, he’s a great songwriter, he plays multiple instruments, and he’s one of the best drummers that I’ve ever crossed paths with. Some of the shows that we played, Adam would go off the stage going, “Um, can you guys tone it down a little bit? I’m having a hard time keeping up with you.” And we’re, like, “That’s right, fucker, you are!” (Laughs)

You played on and…I think you produced the Receiver album, too, didn’t you?

I did produce Inspiration Overload, yeah. I had just…wait, when did the Receiver album come out? 2001?

That’s the date on it.

Yeah, so in 1999, there was a voiceover strike, and I was looking around for work to do. And I used to have an 8-track studio in my garage when I was a kid, and I’ve sort of always been around studios, but I never got any good at it. So I got all this gear, I got a couple of ADATs at the time, which was the big technology, and I had lined myself into a job working for a website as a recording engineer. Now, basically, the guy said, “Do you know how to do this, this, and this?” And I said, “No, but I learn fast.” And I saw the look on his face as he told me I could have this job, and it really was, like, “Oh, really. You learn fast. All right, well, you’ve got the job, and let’s see what happens next!” And, basically, I was strapped to a very fast-moving vehicle that I was completely out of control of. But because of him, I’d gotten some gear and was trying to become a recording engineer at home, so I told Ken (West), “If you want to do some songs…” I was going out with Lisa (Mychols) from the Masticators at the time, we were living together, and we started recording stuff just in the house, and then I moved my studio out to with Mike Simmons from Sparkle*Jets (UK), and we finished it up there. Receiver kind of helped me become a recording engineer. You can see all of us sort of going “What the hell are we doing?” during the course of it. But, you know, I just listened to it again about a week ago, and there were things that used to disappoint me about how some of the mixes came out, but as I listen to it now, I go, “You know, how else would it have been done? That’s sort of what the band sounded like!” I mean, Kerry Chicoine…there’s some amazing bass playing on that thing. And Bill from the Andersons played some awesome guitar on it. He was, like, their secret weapon.

Do you have a favorite song from the album?

Well, “Inspiration Overload.” I love that song. And “Erika Kane” is really great. Oh, and “Accidents.” That’s a crazy piece of material! But, yeah, that’s totally…they weren’t together long enough to be a completely crushing live act, but the thing is, I think that record kind of sounds like what they were. It’s a little rough around the edges, and there’s some pitches that go a little north and south, but overall the energy of the thing is really good. It sounds like five people or however many having the time of their lives.

You mentioned Lisa a few minutes ago. When it comes to the Masticators album (Masticate!), are you able to listen to it and separate the music from your relationship?

Yeah, I mean, our sort of thing ended badly, and that was kind of a drag because…well, it split up the group, and… (Laughs) …in classic poetic fashion and classic me fashion, the night the band actually split up, we were playing an IPO show at the Galaxy in Anaheim, and somebody from Atlantic or somewhere was there to see us, and they were interested. But it just so happened that the minute we said, “Thank you, good night,” I walked over and said, “Well, nice working with you.” And later on, we found out that there was a possible deal on the table. I mean, nothing may have happened, anyway, but I kind of went, “Oh, that just figures, doesn’t it?” And for a while after that, I was kind of bummed about it, because it was at that time when it felt like anything was possible, and I really felt that, of all of the groups that were around at the time, the Masticators really had a chance to possibly poke their head up a little higher. And we never got that opportunity. Sometimes, I still go, “Goddammit!” But other times, it’s like the end of “The Commitments.” “It was poetry, Brother Rabbitte.” (Laughs)

How did you find your way into the line-up of the Mockers?

I met Tony (Leventhal) and Seth (Gordon) at the Philadelphia Music Conference in maybe 1996, and, boy, were they a promoting machine! (Laughs) I mean, they’re both really driven dudes with huge vocabularies, so I’m watching them at this thing…I’d gone there with Kristi (Wachter), the head of Racer Records…and we’d never done anything like that, and we were, like, “I dunno, where should we go?” And they kind of took us under their wing, basically, and said, “All right, you people, over here!” Shelly Yakus, the engineer, was there, and I played him some Wonderboy stuff, because you get five minutes with an industry professional, and he liked it, so I was, like, “Well, my work here is done!” Meanwhile, I think they’d already worked out a couple of soundtracks deals! They were pretty amazing. And then they came out to L.A. for an IPO, and I played with them. We played one very disastrous show with Walter Clevenger playing lead guitar and me on drums, and we didn’t know the material as well as we would’ve liked to, and yet they still wanted me to play with them!

Was that IPO ’99?

It might’ve been. Yeah, actually, it had to have been, if Walter was in the band.

(Laughs) Actually, I was at that show!

Oh, it was disastrous. Boy, did we suck! But, somehow, they still wanted me to play with them. And eventually Nelson (Bragg), who’s now with Brian Wilson, joined up, and now we’ve been to Spain something like six or seven times. It’s pretty crazy. It’s weird about American pop stuff. Spain loves it! I did a fill-in thing for this Spanish band a couple of months ago, where we opened for the Rubinoos, and people were fucking screaming, “RUBINOOS!” And I’m going, “Really? Oh, that’s interesting. Why?” I mean, I like them, too, don’t get me wrong. I like them a whole lot. But…really? I mean, here, even if they were assassinated in the street, people would shrug and go, “Who?” It blows my mind. But, yeah, we’ve been to Spain a bunch of times, and I guess they’re working on…let’s see, I think the first tour I did with them was in 2002, and Tony brought a film crew to film the whole thing, so it looks like they’re working on a documentary that’s almost done. The working title was “15 Minutes of Spain,” but you may want to talk to them to check on that.

Well, Seth only lives a few minutes away from me, so it’s easy enough to hunt him down…if he’s in the country!

(Per Mr. Gordon, “They’re editing it right now. The director/editor’s last project was a Jay-Z doc, and he’s been working on it for the last 6 months or so. He came down here to do some more footage and interviews, and we all met up in NYC a few months back to do more interviews and wrap up some stuff. I think the ETA is sometime later this year. Then he’s gonna send it out to the film festival circuit. We’re thinking of doing a premiere at the Naro, actually, and maybe tie that in with a Mockers show here in town. I’ll let you know, of course. I think the new title is ‘Mockstar.’”)

One more I wanted to ask you about was John Hoskinson’s album, Pancho Fantastico. That’s another one of those albums that, like Barry Holdship’s, will probably earn its own “Hooks ‘N’ You” column at some point.

Yeah, John is amazingly talented. Actually, it’s funny, ‘cause he and I did time together in Eugene Edwards’ band. That’s where I met him. Although we also kind of knew each other in a roundabout way, because he’s best friends with my old roommate’s lead singer.

Um…

Yeah. (Laughs) For years, he’s been friends with this guy Sean Anders, who did that movie “Sex Drive” that was just out. He also had a movie called “Never Been Thawed,” a weird indie movie that he made. So it really is a small world, because John knew Sean, Sean knew Travis, and then John and I were in the same band with Eugene, and then I find out that John is making his own record…and his material is really, really good!

In some ways, he kind of reminds me of Dave Gregory. No, wait, not Dave Gregory. Brian Stevens. Of the Cavedogs. He put out a solo album, and Dave Gregory worked with him on it. That’s how John strikes me. He has that kind of knowledge. Eugene is a really talented guy, but I kept finding myself listening to Hoskinson’s stuff, going, “Dude, you should just have your own band! You just play shows on your own, because you’re an awesome writer who shouldn’t be standing among the chattle!” He just had me play guitar on one or two things, but anytime somebody who’s that good says, “Hey, come play on my thing,” I go, “All right! That’s what I’m talking about! This is what I want to be involved in!” Now if only the Knack would call me about that drum gig…

For real?

I wish they would! I mean, I play drums the way I do in no small part because of Bruce Gary. I saw him when I was 14. The Knack hadn’t been signed yet, and there wasn’t a person on the stage that I wasn’t completely blown away by. Their first record…to this day, I can play the first Knack record from end to end on every instrument.

Wow.

Yeah. And not that it ever happens, but if I was at a party and someone shouted, “Someone play ‘Lucinda,’” I could play it.

If only it would happen. Okay, since I’ve got you on the line, I might as well go ahead and quiz you about a couple of your acting gigs.

Sure.

And first up…no, I’m not going with the obvious. I’m starting with…“Kidd Video.”

Yes!

I have to admit, I watched it all the time when it first came on.

Well, it was weird! First off, it was Haim Saban’s first American television show. Haim Saban was the guy who was responsible for bringing the Power Rangers to America. So he comes over from Israel, he’s got this idea for “Kidd Video,” and…he made all of his mistakes on “Kidd Video” about how you spend money. From us, he learned, “Wait a minute, I don’t have to pay anybody anything if I don’t want to!” (Laughs) It was hilarious in the early stages of it to hear him on the phone with NBC, just reaming them! I mean, here’s a guy who’s got a little tiny independent company, and he’s taking on NBC, chest out, just, like, “Come on, fuckers, I dare you!” And I think the show ended up…I think the reason the show went off the air, really, is because it was just too expensive to produce for a Saturday morning show. But the second year…I don’t know what they put in the water cooler in the animation department, but it became this crazy thing that…it was like “Lidsville.” It was this acid-influenced, crazy animation. It became something like “Alice in Wonderland,” and I was in my twenties and watching these second-season episodes, going, “Is this for kids?” It was just a little bit too weird. And I guess that “Kidd Video” was also responsible for what I believe is the worst cover of “Where Did Our Love Go?” that has ever been committed to media. It’s just…oh, God, it’s awful.

You don’t have an MP3 of that, do you? (Laughs)

Actually, the video is over at KVFlipside.org.

Well, I’ll be including that in the piece…

Well, the videos are all up on YouTube, along with a couple of episodes, but it’s weird because…I’ve been lucky in that certain jobs I’ve been involved in, for some reason, still have some kind of life however many years later. So there’s a cult of “Kidd Video” out there, people who really like the show and are still paying attention to it. Yeah, there’s a “Kidd Video” website, and there are two “Kidd Video” MySpace pages, I think. It’s pretty weird about that show that people are still talking about it. And then there’s the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” thing, the “Brady Bunch” thing, even “Iron Eagle.” I did all of these jobs and, years later, people are still talking to me about them.

I’ll have you know that I watched “Big John, Little John” religiously when it was on.

Now, see, that’s another one. There’s a weird little television show, kind of adult for what it was. I mean, it was “Brady Bunch” people who made it. I’ve gotten mail on it, with people saying, “You know, somebody should make a movie out of that.” I mean, it is a Jim Carrey movie just waiting to be made!

I can still remember that, when “The Golden Girls” came on and Herb Edelman showed up as Bea Arthur’s husband, the first thing I thought was, “Hey, it’s the guy from ‘Big John, Little John’!”

(Laughs) Will, I think you were the only person who said that.

I’m pretty sure you’re right. Okay, so, Cousin Oliver: albatross around the neck or not?

It used to be. At one time, I can say that it was. My big concern was, “Is that it?” I mean, the one chance I got for a ride on the cultural icon-hood train, and I was nine years old for it. I had no idea what I was doing the one time that this happened, and I wondered, “Is this going to be it?” And, of course, as it turned out, I did more things as I got older. But the weird thing about entertainment is that all of it is lightning in a bottle. Nobody gave a shit about Hasil Adkins when he came out, but some years later, there’s a cult of Hasil Adkins. And, by the way, you can say that, yes, I did lump myself in the same category of Hasil Adkins. (Laughs) Sinatra, no. Adkins, yes. If you don’t know who I was talking about, he was kind of the proto Mojo Nixon.

You know, when I’m trying to tell someone about Wonderboy or whatever, I always feel guilty when I try to explain why they should know you but eventually just have to sigh and ask, “You remember Cousin Oliver?”

Oh, yeah, but…well, on the resume, that’s the most well-known one. What else are you going to do? To an extent, it kind of overshadows everything else, but how many people get the opportunity for that in their lives, anyway? At least I have something that overshadows everything else, and I’m pretty proud of that. It was a lucky job. I wish it was my role on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” that got all the juice. I’m not unhappy with how “The Brady Bunch” turned out, but “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” is what I call real television. For me, I was lucky enough to be on a show that was as good as “All in the Family” or as good as “Cheers” or “Taxi.” You know what I mean? But that isn’t the one that gets remembered. “The Brady Bunch” was just syndicated and was on 30 times a day.

When “Battlestar Galactica” got remade and the original series was reissued, did you start getting more people remembering you for playing Doctor Zee?

Yeah, there’s a little of that that’s come around again. For the occasional money gig, I’m starting to do these autograph conventions, and people are showing up and asking about that show. Actually, weirder than that, the last time I did one, Bobby Sherman was there, and…in the early ‘70s, I did a low-budget movie with Bobby Sherman and Keenan Wynn (“He Is My Brother”). If you look back at my resume, sometimes I go, “I worked with him? No shit!” Keenan Wynn’s a legend, you know? So Bobby Sherman and I are at this thing together, and he’s at this autograph convention – he works for the LAPD now in sort of a P.R. position – and all of the Bobby Girls from back in the day, who are now in their 50s, were all there, too. So all during the day, every once in awhile, some woman would walk up to me and ask, “Would you autograph my copy of ‘He Is My Brother’?” And I think this movie was released in, like, one market. But here it is over thirty years later, and somebody’s coming up and talking to me about it. And I haven’t heard anything about it since I did it! God bless the internet…I guess. The internet sort of allows for the survival of things that natural selection would’ve taken care of at a certain point.

Is there anything beyond “He Is My Brother” that you get people bringing up that just freaks you out when you do?

Well, so far, nobody’s brought up “Dirty Laundry,” so I’m pretty happy about that. It’s a movie I did with Greg Louganis. And Sonny Bono. And Frankie Valli. That’s a pretty weird one. No one’s brought that one up yet, so I guess it hasn’t come around again yet.

I did an interview in Spain the last time I was there, and apparently in the ‘80s…you know, Spain used to only have three channels or something, and then all of a sudden there were 20 channels, and they had to fill it with content, so they were taking American television shows that maybe didn’t fly over here. And there was a show I did with Dennis Dugan. He ended up being the director of the “Problem Child” movies, “Happy Gilmore,” and other films, but he’s actually one of my favorite comic actors ever, and I got to do this show with him called “Shadow Chasers,” a paranormal comedy show. And this guy brings it up! He says, “Oh, and then you were in this show called ‘Shadow Chasers,’ and…” And I just went, “Hey! No! Whoa! Jesus, what are you doing? How dare you blindside me like that?” (Laughs) “Kidd Video” ran for a really long time in Spain, from what he said. Really? I don’t remember getting any money from that! You know, the first time Haim sent us on a tour of Israel, when we got there, they had “Kidd Video” bedsheets, candy bars, radios, all of this crazy merchandise stuff which, because it was Israel, he didn’t have to pay us for. It was hilarious. He’s one of the great white-collar criminals of our century. (Laughs) But, yeah, sometimes people will bring up these odd things that I did a one-off from. Like, I did a “Knight Rider,” and I’ll get an E-mail from a “Knight Rider” fan who says, “Look what I did to my car!” And I don’t know if you know about this, but there is a sub-cult of “Knight Rider” fan who trick out their cars to look like KITT. I’m, like, “Really? Isn’t there anything else you can do? Do you make that much money? Because I have projects I’d like to get off the ground, so how about you don’t make KITT and you give it to me?”

You’d like to think they can afford it because they won the lottery, but that’s probably not the case.

No, no, no. What, are you kidding me? My guess is that they live in a very small apartment that’s probably a complete disaster…but the car looks great!

And, lastly, let’s bring this back to music: what’s your favorite album that you’ve worked on? Even if it’s a small, unheralded one.

So, what, all of them? (Laughs) They’ve all been pretty small and pretty unheralded! I don’t know, let me think. I’ve worked on a lot, and I’ve worked on a lot of stuff that never came out. I was in The Last for a lot of years, and we never released anything with me on it, but what we did record I’m pretty proud of. I’m proud of all of the Andersons stuff we did. Of all of the little community of power pop guys, the Andersons did a handful of cover tunes for various tribute albums, and I think every tribute that we did was pretty solid. We did one for the McCartney tribute, “Temporary Secretary,” and it sounds completely unlike the original, and yet it’s still the same song. It’s funny, because I love Wonderboy and the Masticators and all of the groups that I’ve played with, but I’d travel across continents to be in The Andersons again.

Well, you know, any band who can write a song called Hey Coelacanth” deserves your respect.

Totally! We wrote a song about science. And they say music isn’t educational! If I can help one kid when he asks “what’s that,” and then he likes dinosaurs, then I’m okay with that. More than our recorded stuff, though, what I really loved about The Andersons was that it was really familial. I mean, I still play in the Steve Barton Band with Derek. Have you heard any of Steve’s stuff yet, by the way?

I just downloaded one of his albums, actually.

Go to his MySpace page. If you can somehow sneak “Cartoon Safe,” the single off the new record (Gallery), into the piece, that would be awesome. It’s on YouTube.

I love Steve, and…well, of course, like all of the projects I involve myself in, it’s complete suicide. (Laughs) But here’s a 50-year-old power pop / punk legend from the ‘80s, and I’m going, “Come on, we can get this guy on the road!” Because he’s better now than he was when he was in his 20s! It’s really crazy. His level of songwriting…I mean, I met him at IPO, and it was just him and an electric guitar, and he’s going through his songs. I walked up to him afterwards, and I’m, like, “First off, nice to meet you, you’re a big hero, but why don’t you have a band?” And he’s , like, “I don’t know. I just don’t have a band.” “Do you want one?” “Yeah, I think I’d like a band. Sure!” So I basically put a band together for him. When I was in my early 20s, I was listening to those Translator records, and I remember listening to Steve’s songs, going, “I’ll never be in a band with anybody this good!” And now I get to be in a band not only with somebody that good but actually with the guy who made me think that!

Yeah, when I first heard “Everywhere That I’m Not,” I listened to it over and over again.

Oh, yeah, it’s an amazing piece of material. There’s “Necessary Spinning,” “Fall Forever,” so much really amazing stuff that those guys did. And, now, our labelmates are Tommy Tutone, so we’re hoping that maybe we can get something together there. I mean, you can get the record at Best Buy – I just found out about that recently – and I’m really happy about that. You talk about being proud? I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done with Steve. We’re on album three now. I work with people because I like them, not because they can make me any money. I mean, I hope that they do! (Laughs) I go into everything thinking, “This is legendary!” That’s why I involve myself with it. Do you know about Suzy and Los Quatro?

Only that it’s one of your credits.

Yeah, I produced their record, and I’m really proud of that one. And I play with Nice Guy Eddie. And I play with these groups not because I necessarily think they’ll make money, though I’d like for that to happen, but just because I think they’re really, really good. Everyone I work with is someone where, if I didn’t know them and heard what they did, I’d say, “That’s pretty great!” So all of these people I play with, that’s the reason I do it. You walk away from the experience saying, “Hey, I helped make something that’s pretty cool!” And on that note, if you can put in a shout-out for Slapdash, that’d be cool, too. That’s another band I’m working with. Right now, I’m producing a lot of bands, and I’d love to be able to plug those. What I’d like to do is be able to get more music-producing work.

It’s funny that you should make the comment about how you don’t necessarily do it to make money, since I’m writing this for Popdose, a site where we write for the love of what we’re writing about. (Writer’s note: Suddenly, it may make a lot more sense to you about why I had to keep putting off this piece in favor of meeting deadlines for my full-time…and paid…gig at Bullz-Eye.com.) I don’t know if you’ve checked it out or not, but it’s music, TV, movies, politics, and we all do it because we love it.

You know, the times we’re in really beg that sort of thing. Everything’s about niches now. There was a moment when popular music and the people’s definition of pop were neck and neck, running together. But somewhere in the mid-1980s, it just splintered, and now everybody’s just kind of finding their own little thing. Ultimately, something will poke its head up again, but in the meantime, all of us…and I include myself in what you’re talking about…are basically just showing our friends something and saying, “Dude, check this out!” It’s like we’re all in high school again. Eventually, something will rise up again and become a movement, but it’s really hard for movements to happen anymore because everyone’s so shuttered up in their own little area. Hopefully, it’ll be the beginning of new regionalism, which I miss. If you think about what rock music sounded like in California in the ‘60s and what it sounded like in New York, they were different. They were totally different, because they were kind of cut off from each other. With amplifiers, it was like you could only get Fender on the east coast, and you could only get Ampeg on the west coast. It created all of this regionalism that has really gone away, because the internet and television have homogenized our culture. Hopefully, us being shuttered up in our little areas will sort of create a new regionalism of some kind, because it all sounds the same now.

All right, Robbie, I appreciate you putting up with all of the questions. Thanks again, man!

Hey, thank you!