Dead Rocker Returns to Underground Roots

Actually, Alex Chilton never really made it above the underground. He was the co-leader of Big Star, the Velvet Underground of the 1970s, after all. So I guess it’s fitting his corpse becomes a permanent fixture of the underground (or maybe Al was cremated — which means this stupid little thing I’m writing might be a tad inaccurate). Since I’m a little late to the funeral on this one (Alex's heart quit beating on March 17; he was 59), I won’t belabor the greatness of the Alex Chilton, solo artist and singer, songwriter and guitarist of Big Star, a band that stands as the second or third most overrated underrated band in history (after the Velvet Underground, of course).

I wrote the following Big Star puff piece for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer almost 10 years ago. Alex said it was one of the best stories he ever read about his band. No joke. OK, you got me; Alex never read it.

Big Star a little band that shined brightly, briefly
Friday, December 22, 2000

By Joe Ehrbar
Special to the P-I

VH1 couldn’t have scripted a better story.

In the era of the sensational “Behind the Music” rockudrama, the legend of Big Star would make great TV. The Memphis band of four gifted, visionary musicians—guitarist/vocalist Alex Chilton (more famously of the Box Tops—“The Letter”), guitarist/vocalist Chris Bell, drummer Jody Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel—conspired to make a trio of brilliant albums in the early ’70s, but were derailed by bad luck, bad habits and bad timing.

Yet the chances of VH1 telling Big Star’s tragic tale are slim, since no film or video footage of the band exists. Just a handful of photos and the band's recordings are all the artifacts remaining of its brief career (1971–75). Not to mention the group had no radio hits, sold hardly any records and was largely unknown outside Memphis.

It’s been said of the Velvet Underground that the few people who bought its records during the band's lifetime either formed a band of their own or became a rock critic. The same thing can be said about Big Star. Its influence, although insubstantial in the annals of pop music, has revealed itself in the music of others. Artists such as the Posies, Jeff Buckley, R.E.M., the Bangles, the dBs, the Replacements and Elliott Smith have all seen Big Star's light and been forever changed.

“Hearing that music the first time, it really felt like a better executed version of what [the Posies] were trying to do, with possibilities explored that we hadn’t even come close to imagining,” said Posies guitarist/vocalist Ken Stringfellow in a recent e-mail conversation from Australia, where he and Posies co-founder Jon Auer were touring. “Big Star definitely opened up some doors in our heads.”

Later, it also opened the door for Stringfellow and Auer to join Chilton and Stephens in a reincarnated version of Big Star for a reunion appearance at the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1993 (released on CD as Columbia: Live at Missouri University). The two have since remained onboard for subsequent reunions, including this year’s Bumbershoot concert and tomorrow’s much-anticipated Big Star appearance at The Showbox (9 p.m.; $20 at Ticketmaster).

Big Star recorded just three albums during its principal run: the ironically titled #1 Record, Radio City and Sister Lovers (alternately known as Third). In that tiny window the band conceived a glorious sound, music that was as fragile as it was formidable, as forlorn as it was joyous, as raucous as it was melodic. It was power pop the likes of which no one had ever heard.

Like the Beatles, this fab four dared to take rock 'n' roll down new artistic avenues. But in a region that was all Skynyrd and Allman Brothers, Big Star fell on deaf ears. It didn’t help that the band was signed to Stax Records, an imprint famous for its output of soul music (Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T. & the MGs, etc.), not rock ’n’ roll.

Making matters worse for the band was the strain of inter-band turmoil and personal demons. Bell and Chilton had engaged in a battle of the egos during and after the recording of #1 Record. Bell, struggling with drugs and depression, quit the band and died a few years later in a car crash. Chilton, meanwhile, forged his own path of self-destruction and debauchery, which he parlayed into a wrenching, if superb, record titled Sister Lovers, an album every bit as poignant as Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

Despite going boldly where few bands had gone before, Big Star collapsed (though the end was more like a prolonged dimming than a supernova). Hummel quit after Radio City and dropped out of musical together. Stephens remained until the bitter end, before pursuing work as a studio engineer. And Chilton went his own erratic way with a prolific, if elusive, solo career.

In the 1980s, the band’s music was unearthed by musicians and rock journalists. The Bangles recorded “September Gurls.” R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Chris Mills were singing the Big Stars praises in the press, as were the dBs’ Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple. The Replacements put a song called “Alex Chilton” on 1987’s Please to Meet Me. And then the Posies happened across Big Star’s albums.

“In 1989 Jon was working in a record store in Seattle [and] discovered a vinyl copy of Radio City ... so he checked it out. At the same time, Rick Roberts and Mike Musburger, our bass player and drummer at the time, were turned on to #1 Record by their co-workers at another record store,” Stringfellow explained. “If only I had worked at a record store then, I could have been turned on to Sister Lovers.”

Not surprisingly, the sublime cascading Chilton/Bell harmonies were assimilated into the Posies’ punchy power-pop, becoming one of its vital signatures.

Big Star may never gain wider recognition, but its extraordinary work continues to influence modern music. “Big Star aren’t important to everyone, and never will be,” Stringfellow said by way of summary. “But anyone who hears them really holds them close to their hearts. What I love about the records is the heartbreaking aspect ... the emotions expressed are really affecting. Listen to almost any multiplatinum record of today, and try to tell me what the performer is feeling—or if they are feeling.”

Journey Through the Past

The following interview originally appeared in The Rocket 11 years ago. Lately, I've been rummaging through my archives in an effort to rehabilitate old stories in need of a good edit. It's been an interesting, if sometimes painful exercise: revisiting the past, seeing the flaws you were once blind to, and then attempting to correct them. The writings that can be salvaged will be salvaged. The ones that can't will be chucked. In the end, I hope to self-publish a collection of my music writing—it would just be a small run, maybe 20 copies. I'm not sure the piece you're about to read makes the grade; it's at least in better shape than the original. The other reason you're reading it: relevance. Soundgarden has reconvened after a 13-year hiatus, and The Rocket page on Facebook has attracted a decent following.


Conspiracy Revealed!
Inside the Mysterious World of the Wellwater Conspiracy

Music journalists love to shine some light on new or previously obscure bands. Their paltry paychecks depend on it. After all, it’s a trend-driven business and if music writers are to stay ahead of the curve, they must constantly seek out ripening talent.

But what if the band isn’t so eager for the exposure?

Such could be said for Seattle’s modern psych-healers Wellwater Conspiracy, who have long been among the Northwest’s most promising bands, but have also been one of its most invisible. Since forming in 1992, the troupe's movements have been more covert than that of an intelligence spook. Very little evidence of their existence can be traced: Wellwater Conspiracy’s public performances can be literally counted on one hand; their early 7-inches are out of print (though they sometimes surface on eBay), and their 1997 debut album, Declaration of Conformity (Third Gear/Super Electro), is nearly impossible to find. And until just recently, with release of their latest album, Brotherhood of Electric: Operational Directives (released two months ago), the band's members had concealed their identities.

Well Water Conspiracy had just cause for staying underground. Co-conspirators Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd constituted the rhythm section of Soundgarden and guitarist John McBain was an alumnus of Monster Magnet. Lest they be marginalized as a side-project curiosity or over-hyped as a “super group,” WWC wanted people to focus on the music—not the personnel. There was also a legal reason to stay low-key: until 1997 Cameron and Shepherd were under contract with Soundgarden’s label A&M. The fact that none of the band's initial recordings appeared on A&M could have caused legal complications.

But now, in 1999, having struck a deal with the major label-distributed Time Bomb Records, Wellwater Conspiracy, presently a duo of Cameron (vocals, guitars, drums) and McBain (guitars), appear more willing to reveal themselves to a wider audience. And so should they. Their sophomore album, Brotherhood of Electric, is an involving, at times magnificent, work.

By comparison, Wellwater Conspiracy share little with Soundgarden or Monster Magnet, or even Pearl Jam, for whom Cameron now plays drums, beyond a taste for guitar-based songs and classic rock. Wellwater sources its inspiration from low-fidelity basement musings, 4-track experiments and obscure psychedelic voyagers of the 1960s. If all this sounds like a fruitless exercise in self-indulgence it’s not. The proof is in the new record.

Like the great psych records of the cosmic past, Brotherhood of Electric is an absorbing experience, a fantastic voyage of sound and song that navigates the scorched earth of terra firma and the hazy, dusk-shaded heavens above. And it’s Cameron and McBain’s brotherhood, their sonic union, that makes the record such fun. Cameron, who sings most of the albums songs, alternates his vocals between the evocative and dreamy, his drumming both grounding and propulsive, while McBain rewrites the laws of physics with his guitar work—he floats atmospheric melodies that drift like lost cosmonauts in space, or strike the surface with meteoric force. Together, and with the help of some friends like Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and Cameron’s wife, April on violin, they offer a sprawling, somewhat disjointed, but ultimately satisfying collection of songs (highlights being “Compellor,” “Born with a Tail,” and “Red Light Green Light”) augmented by all kinds of hallucinatory surprises, synthetic weirdness, disorienting sojourns and curious discoveries.

Brotherhood of Electric is an album worth celebrating, and on the eve of its release, The Rocket managed to talk Cameron and McBain out of hiding and sit down for an interview, and some drinks, at a now-defunct Belltown café and night spot.

How did Wellwater Conspiracy start?
John McBain: I met Matt on the road when [Monster Magnet] toured with Soundgarden in 1992.
Matt Cameron: We started 4-tracking together at my house in ’92. We’d write things, record them, just mess around. Lo and behold, we amassed a collection of songs that sounded like something that resembled a record.
McBain: It was after I had moved from New Jersey. It actually started with a single. I gave a tape to Steve Turner [of Mudhoney and Super Electro Records] and I must have pressured him in some way to put it out because he was kind of wary about it. But it did well.

The resulting Declaration of Conformity just kind of turned up with no fanfare. Did anyone even know about it, much less buy it?
Cameron: Yeah, it did all right. It sold between 4,000 and 5,000 copies.

Was releasing your first album independently a much more inviting proposition than shopping it to big labels?
Cameron: It’s not a shop-able record at all. It’s got tons of 4-track cassette noise. It sounds really bad.
McBain: The fact that it came out sounding so bad made it authentic in a way.

It sounds like a lo-fi garage/psychedelic record. It sounds the way it ought to.
McBain: We did it in what, a half-hour in your [Cameron’s] basement?
Cameron: Pretty much. I didn’t know how to work my soundboard [at the time], so the mixes ended up being in mono.

Who was involved in the making of Declaration?
Cameron: John pretty much recorded everything. I sang on some of the stuff. And then we gave Ben some cassettes so that he could do it on his 4-track. That was pretty much it. It was just the three of us.

Matt, could you always sing?
Cameron: Yeah, I guess so. I never sang lead in a band other than like cover bands when I lived in San Diego. I guess I’ve always sang, just for the hell of it. I sang “The Sound of Silence” in high school. It was a duet with this girl I had a crush on. And then she saw me at a party later on and I was really stoned, and she had nothing to do with me after that. Yeah, I guess I’ve always kind of crooned.
McBain: Someone’s got to. Lord knows I won’t.

When you started this band, was it your M.O. to have this loose, pseudo-experimental nature about the band?
McBain: Yeah, totally.
Cameron: We got wider tape now to use—we just got a 24-track machine. We try to record fast to get the essence of the songs on tape. A lot of times, when you make records … like, over there [Cameron points across the street to the vacant building that once housed Bad Animals studio, where Soundgarden recorded their breakout 1994 album Superunknown], you gotta have a producer, you have to do demos, you have to work the songs to where there’s no life left in the recordings.

So is Well Water Conspiracy your reaction to that process?
Cameron: No, it’s not a reaction, it’s just a different way of approaching it.
McBain: It’s not wanting to do it the usual way. I think the secret goal is to avoid getting caught in that hamster wheel and going through that process.
Cameron: When we did Superunknown over there, it was that whole process of like a big-time producer. We did rehearsals. We did demos. We went through all this rigmarole. For some bands, you gotta do that. For me and John, we know how to play our instruments, we know how to write and arrange. We can forgo that whole process.
McBain: I remember when I used to visit you guys [at Bad Animals]—it seemed like there was nothing being done. Everybody was sitting around playing video games.
Cameron: And our engineer would be sitting on the couch, belching. And I was like, “So this is how a record’s done.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars later…

In contrast, how much did the first Wellwater Conspiracy album cost?
Cameron: My 4-track cost about $1,000.
McBain: It cost us about the price of half-inch tape and a DAT—a couple hundred dollars.

With Wellwater Conspiracy, are you able to express yourselves in ways you couldn’t in other/previous music endeavors? And who’s the garage rock fan?
McBain: I’m the garage geek. So I kind of brought that to the band. All my songs have that kind of feel to it.
Cameron: And I’ve just always 4-tracked, since 1984. I do it because it’s fun. I like to write songs. I’m able to play guitar. It seemed like a good pairing of songwriting and recording styles. That’s a big part of it. We like to record it ourselves.
McBain: There’s no egos. There’s no frontman. It’s the way to go.

But you are the lead singer, Matt.
Cameron: Sort of. I don’t really look at it that way.
McBain: If you listen to the way we mix the vocals, they’re [mixed into the music so that they’re] just another part of the song. I like that approach.
Cameron: Most of the time they’re in the music—as opposed to being all you hear and then there’s this background music. But on Brotherhood of Electric, we also have Josh [Homme] singing and my friend, Luke [St. Kimble], sang on one song. It’s kind of the same approach as the last one—we had two singers. But Josh’s vocals and my vocals are a little more similar than Ben and myself. Ben just has this unique, singular style that I haven’t heard in a long time.

Why wasn’t Ben part of Brotherhood?
Cameron: I don’t think it was the kind of project that he was really into. He likes to have control of the whole environment. He’s got a lot of his own songs and a lot of talent. We just kind of started out on our own and we had no problems doing it ourselves.

Will Wellwater Conspiracy ever play live?
Cameron: We’re working on that right now. We’ve had some offers for summer and fall to play Europe, so we’re trying to get a band together.
McBain: We just want to be careful about not getting into that overkill situation. It seems like bands who come out of Seattle or the area plaster themselves everywhere. We don’t want that.

So you prefer to remain anonymous?
McBain: Exactly. That’s what we want.

Even if no one pays attention? The first album wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
Cameron: We had a lot of interest in Detroit, Chicago, New York and the U.K. But here, if you don’t play live, people don’t really connect with you.
McBain: Not that it’s bad, but it;s the baggage that we brought with the band. We don;t want people to look at it and go, “Oh, those guys and that guy—whatever.” I’m sure that’s why people brushed aside that first record, because they had other ideas of what it would be like. That’s why leaving it anonymous has really helped.

Your record company prefers that you not be anonymous. The bio explicitly says “Matt Cameron formerly of Soundgarden” and “John McBain formerly of Monster Magnet.” The label makes it a selling point.
McBain: Well, it’s not a sticker on the CD.
Cameron: We definitely want this one to get noticed a little bit more, and that’s a way to get people to take notice.

How did you link up with Time Bomb?
Cameron: It was through knowing Jim Guerinot, who is head of Time Bomb. He was with A&M and worked with Soundgarden. We sort of shopped [Brotherhood] to a couple different labels and no one was really interested. We had a few people telling us, “You should try shopping it at a major, man.” And I’m glad we didn’t, because it would have been lost. A&M passed on it anyway.
McBain: At one point, before we signed to Time Bomb, we realized that no one wanted this record.... When [Guerinot] first got it, he didn’t really know what to do with it. I don’t think he really understood. But I think as it started to get around, they got a little more excited about it.
Cameron: We like that fact that there’s a good Internet buzz about it.
McBain: We get a lot of messages.

So Wellwater Conspiracy has some fanatics?
Cameron: All 19 of them, to be exact.

Originally published in The Rocket, May 12, 1999.