ML HISTORY VOLUME #1

As is the case with most quixotic enterprises, it seems odd in retrospect the certitude with which we approached starting a band. To be sure, Peter and I were enormous music fans of the sort preoccupied with the obscure seven inches and tiny imprints and crate digging ephemera and the sort of things characteristic of the benignly obsessive-compulsive. There was indeed considerable excitement after we finally obtained the Young Fresh Fellows’ “My Boyfriend’s In Killdozer” seven inch b/w Scruffy The Cat’s “Love Song #9” through considerable write-away wheedling. 

We had informally commenced the process of writing songs together in high school and haltingly continued by telephone and summer breaks while he was an undergrad at Ohio Wesleyan and I was doing whatever the hell it was I was doing in Georgia. I sort of went to classes- mostly as a pretext to continue to have access to WUOG - and I wrote for the free weekly Flagpole. But if I'm being perfectly honest, mostly what I was doing was waiting for Pete to graduate so we could start a band in earnest. Provided that we had no relevant experience performing and only the slightest notion of what we should sound like, retrospectively this seems nothing less than utterly delusional. But there you have it.

I can't overstate the good fortune with respect to our landing in Athens, though of course it was no coincidence. By this juncture Athens was already a legendary wellspring of  bands ranging from the B52’s to Pylon to Dreams So Real and the Bar-B-Que Killers, and of course REM, who were by that juncture quite possibly the biggest band in the world. That had been the music of our youth in so many ways, but the regional mystery of the place remained intact and when we arrived it was no guarantee that the same magic was in the water. 

But it was, and then some. I showed up my first night in this strange place in 1992 and I went out to a club to see what the vaunted live music was all about. I went into a 200 capacity club which I think was then called the Atomic Lounge but which maybe was called the Shoebox and at any rate it would ultimately be called both so what does it matter? I had no idea what I was going to see but the billed band was Harvey Milk and that sounded good to me. Jesus. Really, there aren’t words. It was so loud and so heavy, but still tuneful. It was powerful, funny and scary. There were maybe ten people in attendance. That was Athens on any given weekday night in any given venue. We were 18 years old and nothing seemed impossible.

It took us a few years to get started in earnest. We made our first actual studio recordings and played our first shows as the Incompetones in 1995. We opened for The Possibilities at the same venue where I’d seen Harvey Milk. The Possibilities were not only incredible, but inexplicable. They were young kids- younger than us- from some impossibly rural town who played and sang like the Beatles and knew every song. Like every song by Eddie Cochran, NRBQ, Dwight Twilley, Graham Parker, Yo La Tengo and Sun Ra. This was before the internet, and I couldn’t understand how anybody could have such a huge swath of musical knowledge. Their originals were great too. The MInus 5 covered one of their songs later- “You Don’t Mean It” and even performed it on the Conan O'Brien show (clip here). They were nice too- very nice- if a little perplexed by our lack of proficiency relative to their own remarkable skill set. Like a lot of our Athens friends I’m not totally sure what happened to the Possibilities, but if you’d seen them at the time you’d have sworn they would be huge.

Our first recordings of the non four track variety took place at Andy Baker’s home studio. It was a ramshackle but very cool one floor home in some leafy part of Athens. Andy’s roommate was Brian Poole from Elf Power, a very nice guy. He had an eight track set up with a real console and speakers and a big live room. He charged $10 an hour, or maybe it was $5. We really didn’t have the faintest clue what we were doing, but Andy coaxed us along. He was (and is) a wonderful guy- calm, funny and encouraging. We were aware that what we were doing was faintly ridiculous, but it was incredibly fun being in the studio and at those rates you could experiment for hours. Eventually we had enough good material in our view to release a 7”:: the Husker Du homage “Seventh Round” on one side and the countryish “I Behaved That Way” on the back. We pressed a small number of these up and sent them out to college radio stations, where to our astonishment they received quite a bit of play. We had changed our name to the Mendoza Line then, feeling more serious about our aims but drawn forever to the self-effacing impulses of the Replacements and Big Star. The idea then, I guess, was that you underpromise and overperformed expectations. 

Pete and I were the mainstays but the rest of the band was important too: Margaret Maurice, Lori Carrier and Matt Lusk played with us early on- visual artists all three, studying in the art school at UGA. They were good musicians but more so they had a sense of art in a larger sense that helped inform our ambitions beyond bashing away insensibly on our guitars. Andy would play with us too sometimes- an outstanding musician with more technique then either Pete and I possessed. Friends we had known growing up- Andres Galdames, Paul Deppler and Mike Linde- were also superb players who helped make the most of our steadily more ambitious material. Paul would end up the Mendoza Line’s bass player for the entire ride, his signature mustache providing endless inspiration through countless grueling tours. And you couldn’t throw a rock in Athens and fail to hit some musical polymath: Zach Gresham from Summer Hymns was a big help as well as the guys from Masters Of The Hemisphere. We were lucky to be there.

Patterson Hood was just starting out the Drive By Truckers. He was our buddy and worked sound at the Hi Hat club directly beneath the downtown loft a number of us shared in various formulations. He had already had regional success with his pre-DBT group Adam’s House Cat and seemed to know a great many things about the music business. He produced some early material for us and it was obvious he would go on to great things, though just how great was impossible to predict. Even when you hear someone with a singing voice and songs as powerful as the ones Patterson would play us, you don’t think they are just about to form the modern day Stones. But lo and behold, that’s what he was up to when he kept speaking about his mysterious friend “Cooley” he hoped to lure to Athens to do some recording. 

By 1997 we felt we had enough good recordings to comprise an LP. We’d recorded at Andy’s freshly minted new studio Chase Park Transduction which he shared with two partners, one of which was Dave Barbe, who had played bass in Sugar and would go on to be DBT’s go-to producer. I never got to know Dave well but he and Pete bonded over their shared passion for borderline psychotic levels of baseball minutiae, a long running discussion that continues to this day. We also recorded some tracks at Duck Kee studios in Mebane, North Carolina with Jerry Kee. Jerry was a kindly, chivalrous West Virginian who took to recording bands in a trailer out in the country. We looked him up because we liked the Portastatic records he’d made and were intrigued by his grand piano, not that any of us really knew how to play. There was also an acoustic ballad recorded in a house some of us lived in. It was recorded on a blocky mobile unit by Greg Harmelink, the talented and kindly frontman of the band Kincaid. The album was called Poems To A Pawnshop. It was a mix up of punk, country, folk and power pop, much indebted to Uncle Tupelo and the Minutemen. There were only a few hundred copies and soon all were gone. I’ve not seen one in years. 

Poems To A Pawnshop was released by the local imprint Kindercore, though without a lot of enthusiasm. We really didn’t know too much about record labels and they were the only one in town that I was aware of, and so we sort of prevailed upon Ryan Lewis and Dan Gellar who ran the label to agree to release it. They were nice guys but I don’t think they ever really understood the band, and honestly we didn’t quite get the label. Ryan and Dan were, I think, working a sort of K Records-meets-kitsch angle which favored a lot of nostalgic, deliberately amateurish soft rock: basically what you’d call twee. We might not have known exactly what we were but we knew we weren’t that. Still- the album did well by our expectations. It got played on college radio a ton across the country, fared well on the CMJ charts and garnered some coverage in zines and places like Magnet and other tastemaking underground publications. It really was a good record.

One night shortly after Poems To A Pawnshop was released, we were drinking beers in the noir-ish Manhattan club downtown, when Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel approached and said he had heard the album and that he thought it was very cool. We only knew Jeff well enough to wave on the streets, and he was in the process of becoming justifiably famous for the landmark records On Avery Island and In The Aeroplane, Over The Sea. I was so shocked I literally became speechless. I don’t even know if I said thank you, but I hope I did. It was gracious and encouraging and totally beyond the call of duty. I haven’t seen him in twenty years, but I still remember and appreciate that. 

We made an EP and another LP for Kindercore which were released in 1998 and 1999. We played on bills in Athens with lots of extraordinary acts. Kindercore was able to license our records in Japan and some songs on television- all astonishing. The Athens music scene was reaching national prominence again led by Neutral Milk Hotel and the Olivia Tremor Control and though we didn’t really know those guys some of the exposure filtered down to us. Some of the art school contingent- Margaret and Lori- finished their undergraduate work and fixed eyes on Manhattan. Not the bar- the city. We’d been in Athens for five years- an invaluable education. But we knew we couldn’t stay forever. Plus a label had their eye on us: Bar-None Records in Hoboken. They’d discovered They Might Be Giants and Freedy Johnston, released records by Yo La Tengo and Arto Lindsay, and signed a couple of our most talented Athens cohorts in The Glands and Of Montreal. Now they were interested in us. Like a very special episode of The Simpsons: the Mendoza Line was going to New York. 

End Part One

Before we made the move, while we were recording the 1999 cluster-fuck of an LP I Like You When You’re Not Around, another pivotal moment occurred when we encountered Shannon McArdle, fittingly enough at the Manhattan, where major action in Athens seemed to play out. It was like Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca. You could never say what kind of intrigue was afoot. Shannon was barely 20 if that, but it was immediately obvious that her taste in music was astonishingly sophisticated. She knew everything about glam rock, esoteric English folk, early country and bluegrass and Exile On Mainstreet. She enthused endlessly about the Undertones and the McGarrigle Sisters and the Magnetic Fields. I thought I had cultivated the rarified tastes of a self-styled snob, but she seemed to know more and with less pretense. It was confusing, but in a good way. We invited her to a recording session at Chase Park and she suggested some harmonies on a song called “The Big Letdown”. Why not, we thought, not having any idea if she could sing. She could sing. She was from Albany, Georgia someplace in the state's mysterious southwestern realm near Alabama. She sounded like Tammy Wynette. I can’t exaggerate the shock of hearing her confidently belt out the song in one take, on what I’m pretty sure was her first experience in a professional recording studio. This was different. - Timothy Bracy 6/19/20

……MORE TO COME