Historia de la Musica Rock- The Nineties

Lord, we were green. When Atlantic asked us to send the artwork for the dust cover, Catherine Irwin sent in her wonderful beet drawing and handwritten song list on the back, and was so thorough that she also drew the spine for the record. The art department in New York thought it was some kind of a joke. We needed a lawyer to work up the contract. When we were mixing in Boston, we had dinner with writer Byron Coley and met this fellow, Michael who had managed Mission of Burma in the early eighties. And he was a lawyer-what luck! That’s the only resume we needed; he was hired. I loved Burma! Where do we sign? According to Bettina years later, the contract we signed for the whopping figure of $25,000 was apparently more than our lawyer asked for. They had to convince him to take more. See, if you took less money, you could recoup faster on your royalties. He was a genius! After paying our lawyer and $10,000 to Amoeba to alleviate our guilt for jumping to a major; do the math, we were flush! That went down so well, we hired our lawyer to be our manager too. You know, to make it easier.

Note to any band thinking of signing to a major label- First of all don’t. If you must though, get the biggest damn advance you can possibly get. Ask for a gazillion dollars. Buy a house. Buy a round for all your friends. Buy another house. No matter if you get $25,000 dollars or $250,000 dollars, you ain’t recouping. No way. No how. You’ll get your mechanical royalties, you’ll get your publishing money, but you’ll never recoup on your advance- ask for the world. Of course, we felt like dweebs. Who were we to ask for the sky? Lesson one: Get a lawyer who at least owns a good suit.

That first tour was amazing. We went on the road with the Meat Puppets. They were as wacky as the kooky cartoony figures gracing their record covers. Very sweet guys though. They were driven around by Chris’s girlfriend in a big rv. The funniest thing I’ve ever seen was sitting inside the restaurant at Maxwell’s in Hoboken watching her try to parallel park that thing. We got great press on that tour; we were selling records and getting tons of college airplay. At one point we were number two on the CMJ charts. Curse you They Might Be Giants! If we were that high on the CMJ charts nowadays it would mean we were selling boatloads of records. Back then, it meant college radio was playing you. That’s all. Since we were top ten on the Gavin Report it meant that MTV would play us on 120 minutes. We got Testify played six weeks in a row and did an interview on the show. All told, we did our job for Beet. We got our name out there, we rocked on our first European tour, and sold somewhere around 25,000 to 30,000 records. It was an absolute blast. I loved touring. I would get to a gig, sound check, then walk miles around exploring whatever town we were in. Promotion was a bit of a drag, but we played the game. We used to have to eat dinner with local retailers and marketing people- meet and greets. Doug pulled my favorite rock star move ever. He asked the waitress for the most expensive beer on the menu. She brought him a ten dollar bottle of cherry lambic which he promptly put his cigarette in, using it as an ash tray.

Touring wasn’t a blast for all of us. Baird, who was newly married was somewhat tortured by having to leave his wife. He asked if we could take her with us on our first trip to Europe after the 5 week Meat Puppet jaunt. After one week it was almost unbearable. Our roadie Michael hated her with a passion. She was bored silly. She had no idea just what touring entailed- it’s not exactly sightseeing, it’s mostly waiting for hours inside of grotesque, smelly dressing rooms getting drunk and waiting for your one hour to play. She refused at first to help by selling t-shirts. She spent a lot of time whispering her discontent to Baird. We plotted ways to lose her. On the next record, it was no surprise that Baird would bail mid-tour to go back home. Poor guy. She was the kind of woman that makes a man want to hit the road.

After the moderate success of Beet, Atlantic was geared up for our second record. This one could break us out big time. When I say Atlantic was happy, I mean our little corner of the building. The Atlantic of Phil Collins didn’t know who the hell we were. I remember them flying us out to L.A. to do some press. Great hotel. We went down to the offices to meet the head honchos. We went in to say hi to the vice prez. He was on the phone screaming at someone to get that effin Debbie Gibson tape on his desk pronto. “Hi guys,” he turned. “Great stuff. Sorry, I got to take this call. Nice to meet you.”


We got to choose a producer and a place to make the record. Cub Run, Kentucky. We brought Timothy Powell’s mobile truck down to KY. and plopped it down next to a barn on an idyllic farm in the middle of silent nowhere. They were running Civil War reenactments close by, that was about it for excitement. That was a fun record to make- whiffle ball and loud guitars. We made the record we wanted to make- it was mastered like crap, but we were happy. Then Bettina left Atlantic. Peter Koepke, one of the good ones and Bettina’s boss, jumped ship to London Records, and although she felt bad, Atlantic had no desire for this “post-modern rock”. When we asked about a video, they told us that MTV wasn’t going to play videos anymore. We made one on our own anyway. The new A and R guy was no Bettina. It was hopeless. We were totally hung out to dry. We did another 15 weeks of promotion and touring. We were at our peak sonically, our tour in Europe with Yo La Tengo was wildly fun and successful. In the end, we moved up modestly to about 35,000 records. A smashing disappointment.

That summer, I noticed a loophole in our contract. If the label didn’t send a letter by such and such date, the contract and eight record deal was null and void. We were free and started to contact other labels. Why Atlantic called and asked us to stay I’ll never know. The new Prez himself, the man with the dead fish handshake, scheduled a lunch and flew to Chicago.

By the time we resigned with Atlantic we had seen both Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins open for us at Metro and begin meteoric rises. Why did we resign? For one, the Prez agreed to forgive our mountain of debt. We would get a clean slate. In retrospect, this was meaningless. Remember, under no circumstance would we ever recoup royalties anyway. It was a moot point. The sweet talk that got me though was the schtick about Sonic Youth. Like Geffen working Goo for months until it finally broke, Atlantic was going to stick with us for the long haul. My logic worked like this- if the label was willing to bring us back they must have believed they could do something with us; otherwise, why bother? The cool thing is, we booked one month at Sorcerer Studios in New York City to work with the engineer who we believed was responsible for the Matthew Sweet Girlfriend sound. We had an amazing apartment rented at Mott and Prince in Little Italy next door to a Ray’s Pizza joint. We also had a baby in tow, Matthew Beveridge Rizzo. When we walked in to the studio on the first day, we passed a row of vintage amps. The name written on masking tape- Television. The next day we started tracking the record. Our producer told Doug and I that, don’t look now, but Tom Verlaine is upstairs in the lounge. Needless to say, we went up to play some pool. The session seemed blessed. As much as I enjoyed living in New York, I was not used to having so much time to make a record. I got fidgety. New guitarist Wink asked to have a whole day for himself just to play on top of everything; the producer could splice and dice what we didn’t want later. I quickly saw that most of the extra time would be used by the producer to do his magic. Unfortunately most of his magic was spent on the phone. Future deals were rolling in, they couldn’t wait. One afternoon, when I was ready to overdub a solo on the song Rubberband I became so flummoxed by an interrupting call that I threw my Les Paul against the control room glass window. The guitar bounced off onto the floor. Strong stuff,that studio glass. I went back to the apartment for the day. I have to give the producer credit; I think it’s a great sounding record. I truly thought we had a hit record. El Moodio in my mind had the goods. In less than three months we were through. After our final Dutch show Wink and our roadie, Jimmy rode in the back of the van drunk and naked. I’m sorry Matt if that traumatized you as a one year old. I still don’t know why it didn’t work out. There was good press, good touring. Blame the manager? Didn’t throw enough payola at the radio stations? Most likely, it was that we were irrelevant. In the nineties there was music before Nirvana and music after Nirvana. The Catch-22 for Eleventh Dream Day-“ B.N.”, the industry had bands like us on the pay no mind list. “A.N.” the listeners’ taste had us on the pay no mind list. I didn’t stick around to blame anybody. I knew by the end of the last tour that music would not be the way I would support my family. Atlantic felt the same way. The nineties continued without me. Grunge and the internet got kind of big.

Next: The Naughts- state of the nation