Our Noise

A really, really good book on a do-it-yourself record company that didn't know how to do stuff, found it out themselves and are still alive and kicking, despite all kinds of problems, including being in a quite major band - Superchunk - themselves and at the same time giving artists on their label a perspectively big piece of the cake.

People ask the question a lot: Why did you decide to put out your own records? But it’s not like there was anyone else asking to put them out. —Mac McCaughan

And they learned and learned:

Steve Albini: They were pretty lighthearted. There wasn’t a lot of farting around. Coming from an independent background, Mac understood the economics of making a record independently. You have to try to save as much money as possible. And it’s much more efficient and it costs less money to have your shit together and be well rehearsed. Less money than it does to sort of hope that things come together in the studio.

It's a lot like the English label, Factory, in some ways:

Laura: We weren’t thinking of it as a business, we were thinking about it as this fun, cool thing. Contracts seemed like a gesture of mistrust. We were putting out records by people we knew and were friends with, and that could trust us and that we could trust. We’d talk about the basic premise, and that was that. In hindsight, I think that was really naïve. But at first, there really wasn’t that much money involved, so it didn’t really seem to matter.

Brian McPherson: (Attorney for Merge and Superchunk) I always thought it was a bad idea. I wrote a book called Get It In Writing. But that’s obviously their way.

Then, the money came in.

Matt Suggs: I got talked to by a lot of completely cheesy-ass industry people, which always freaked me out. I wanted to say, “Have you listened to the record? This is not going to get played on the radio.” In 1996, Butterglory was offered a $50,000 publishing-contract advance – wherein a publishing company buys a songwriter’s catalog copyrights, in hopes that the songs blow up one day. Matt Suggs They were offering a ridiculous amount of money. It started out at 30 grand, and then it was 40 grand. And we kept saying no. It was ridiculous, because I’m like a twenty-three-year-old working a deep-fryer, making $6 an hour, and I’m saying, “No, thirty grand is too low.” So when it got to $50,000, I said to Debby, “Look man, we should take this fucking money, because there’s no way we’re ever going to sell enough records for them to recoup even half that. So let’s just take their fucking money.” The publishing company sent a $10,000 check as first payment, and Debby and Matt went to Santa Monica to sign the papers.

Not much debauchery, though:

Despite the newfound popularity, there was little debauchery on the road with Superchunk.

Jon Wurster: I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like on my first tour, so I brought a box of twelve condoms along. Having no idea what was going to happen. But I might want to have twelve of them, you know? I didn’t use any of them. Never opened it. Still have them.

About the classic Steve Albini article:

In 1993, Steve Albini wrote an article for Chicago journal The Baffler called “The Problem With Music.” It was an astringent and clear-eyed case study of the process by which a band is signed to a major, beginning with the seemingly hip A&R rep who first makes contact: “After meeting ‘their’ A&R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, ‘He’s not like a record company guy at all! He’s like one of us.’ And they will be right. That’s one of the reasons he was hired.” It ends with a detailed accounting of how, after lawyers, managers, producers, promotional budgets, and all the other fees necessitated by the major-label system are taken into account, a band can sign a $1-million contract, sell 250,000 copies of their first record, and end up $14,000 in debt to the record company. Its final line is, “Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.”

On the advent of The Magnetic Fields:

In late 1991, Mac picked up a new 7-inch that had just come into Schoolkids. It was a release from Harriet Records, a Boston label founded by Harvard University history professor Timothy Alborn two years earlier. The A-side was called “100,000 Fireflies,” and it was a haunting, spare, and strange amalgam: An artificial tick-tock drum-machine beat beneath what sounded like a toy piano playing sugary melodies and a gorgeous, classic woman’s voice singing desperately sad lyrics with a delivery reminiscent of Petula Clark. It reminded Mac of a lo-fi, Motown-inflected Yaz, featured one of the most memorable opening lines ever laid to tape – “I have a mandolin / I play it all night long / It makes me want to kill myself” – and sounded like pop music from the distant future as it might have been imagined in 1965. The band was called the Magnetic Fields. Mac had never heard of them, but he loved “100,000 Fireflies” and played it so frequently in the van on the road that Wurster suggested that they cover it. Mac had been thinking the same thing, and they came up with a version that swapped out the original’s delicate reserve for furious guitars and Mac’s urgent, strained vocal delivery. It quickly became a crowd favorite at shows; Superchunk recorded its version during the On the Mouth sessions in Hollywood and eventually released it as a B-side on a single. Word eventually got back to the Magnetic Fields, then located in Boston, that some punk-rock band was playing their song. On October 22, 1992, Stephin Merritt, who wrote “100,000 Fireflies,” and his bandmate Claudia Gonson went to a Superchunk show at nearby Brandeis University.

Stephin Merritt: I was horrified. It’s probably best if I don’t go into the details of why I was horrified. But we thought of punk rock as reactionary. We thought of punk rock as… Stalin.

Not that Mac himself is very Stalinesque.

Stephin Merritt: No. More like Emma Goldman, maybe.

On "69 Love Songs":

The next Magnetic Fields record, 69 Love Songs, would deliver Merritt from the indie-rock ghetto. There’s a story that Gonson tells to help explain how 69 Love Songs came into being: In 1994, Merge asked the Magnetic Fields to play at their fifth anniversary celebration at the Cat’s Cradle. On the drive down from Boston, they stayed overnight in Washington, D.C. In the middle of the night, with the band members sprawled out across someone’s living room, Merritt sat up in the dark and shouted, “Indie Rocks!” The rest of the band wearily humored him as he explained: In the late seventies, pet rocks were a fad. So why not Indie Rocks? Or Soft Rocks? Or Punk Rocks? He went back to sleep.

The next day, when they got to Chapel Hill, Gonson collected rocks from the parking lot behind the Cat’s Cradle, went to an art supply store, and painted up about twenty Merge Indie Rocks. She sold them for $1 apiece that night at the show. Claudia Gonson So that’s exactly Stephin Merritt in a nutshell. He has these ideas, and he never thinks about executing them. For every idea he executes, he has three thousand that he doesn’t. 69 Love Songs was the rare one that he did execute. It’s the kind of record that has an origin myth: In January 1998, Merritt was drinking alone at a piano bar on the Upper East Side, writing songs. He was listening to Stephen Sondheim, and thinking not about love but about the American composer Charles Ives and his book 114 Songs, and – “Indie Rocks!” – decided that he would write a musical revue called 100 Love Songs.

It would feature various performers singing a vast and comprehensive survey of every kind of song there is to be written about love, from country to punk to krautrock to Irish folk ballad, all to be penned by him. The idea was quintessential Merritt: A taxonomic and clinical take on the most intimate and emotional of subjects. It quickly dawned on him that such a musical would be a challenge to finance, so he downgraded the idea to an album of 100 love songs. When that proved excessively long, he trimmed it down to 69: A suggestive number that had the virtue of being visually appealing on an album cover.

Arcade Fire signed with Merge, based on them being nice people. They left their previous label for Merge and wrote this to Merge:

Hey Mac. We just talked to Alien 8 and told them we were going with you guys. It went pretty well. They knew all along what the situation was, so it wasn’t too much of a shock. You can make an announcement. (I am sitting in the studio and we are mixing neighborhood RIGHT NOW!) :) —Régine

On how major labels basically wasted money:

Glenn Boothe: When I worked at Sony, I used to have an $18,000 expense account. And I was expected to spend it. And a lot of times that meant me and my friends went out and ate sushi. Because it’s got to be spent. I used to date this girl who worked for a label, and one day she told me, “Yeah, I needed a Snapple. So I had a friend messenger me one from her office.” So instead of going downstairs and buying a Snapple, she spent $20 or whatever to have it messengered.

All in all: a very inspirational, tough and loving story about a little record label that spawned a lot of brilliant artists and releases, and still continues to run to this day, having now been up for 25 years. That's really something.