Wheel Holders Anonymous

By Ryan Schreiber

Interview conducted January, 1996
Originally appeared in Pitchfork February, 1996.

Chicago has become practically the only city in the world with consistently good music coming out of it. Hell, indie rock was practically born there with its slew of underground record labels. Think of all those really great Chicago bands. You've got your Smashing Pumpkins, your Liz Phair, and your everyone else. Fig Dish comes as no surprise.

They just put out their debut album, That's What Love Songs Often Do. Blake Smith and I chat it up:

Pitchfork: How long did it take you to record the new album?

Blake: About three and a half weeks.

Pitchfork: And to write it?

Blake: I think when you're an unsigned band and you're not really sure what you're doing with yourself, it's kind of hard to pin down the writing process. We were together for about a year and a half and had just been constantly writing songs and we threw some out and wrote new ones. So some of the songs on the record are almost a year and a half old, and a couple of the songs we wrote about a week before we went into the studio.

Pitchfork: If there's one song on the record that will break you into the mainstream, which one do you think it is?

Blake: I thought the whole record was pretty accessible, but now we're getting all this mail from people that listened to it and they're saying that it takes a few listens.They think it's really great, but it took several listens to sink in. I thought it was a pretty poppy record.

Pitchfork: I think it's that way with almost any record.

Blake: Yeah, we put "Seeds" out as the first single. We thought that was a pretty catchy song.

Pitchfork: How did the band form?

Blake: We all played in rival high school bands. It was one of those great suburban high schools where they have the big Battle of the Bands at the end of the year. We were each in different bands, but we all kinda knew each other and then we all went off to different schools for college and just started knockin' around over the summers. First, just playing covers at parties and then starting to write our own stuff, and then we all got out of college for real and nobody could get a job. Rick [Ness] - the other principal songwriter - and myself, started writing songs together and just sorta got the other two guys. Just said, "You guys are just like waiters and doing nothing, so if you wanna be in our rock band..." and they just said, "Fine." But that, also, was a really long process.

Pitchfork: Where was your first live show?

Blake: [laughs] Our first live show was at a place in Chicago called The Metro. It's this really big place. It's actually the premiere rock club in the city, in most people's opinion. It takes most bands forever to get in there, and we made this demo tape in six hours one day and just sent it in and they just gave us a show about a month later. We were terrified, because you know, we would go there and watch Husker Du and The Replacements and Soul Asylum, and all of a sudden, we were gonna be on the stage. The club holds about a thousand people and they just threw us up there and...we played. We pretty much were shitting in our pants the entire time, and we played such a miserable show that we didn't get back in there for a really long time. All these other bands were like, "Who the fuck are these guys?" But we really bombed and ended up having to start back at the bottom. We went from there to like a Polish bar on the west side playing quarter beer night.

Pitchfork: How did you end up getting discovered by A&M?

Blake: When we started out, we didn't really know what we were doing. We were under the impression that if we just kept playing around Chicago, building a following, that the labels would come out and see us, and that really wasn't happening. Although, some label interest was starting to happen around Chicago. Some friends of ours, Veruca Salt, got signed, and some other bands. We weren't getting any attention at all and so what we did was we made our little demo tape and went to the hot producer in town at the time, who was Brad Wood, who worked with Liz Phair and eventually went on to work with Veruca Salt, because we told them to. But we made a demo with Brad, and we sent it out and everybody threw it in the garbage can without listening to it. So then we kinda played a trick on everybody. We sent them out again and we put the A&R guy's name on the envelope and there'd be a note saying like, "Dear Tom, I was driving through Chicago, and check these guys out, they're amazing! You gotta give them a listen," you know, "Keep in touch, buddy," and sign it, uh, Steve. You know, a real common name. And so these people would just pop it in because they got this personal note from a third party. Then, all of a sudden, the calls started coming in. We were getting several calls a week from record labels. And they would call, "Wow, we got this tape. This is really amazing. By the way, who's Dave?"

Pitchfork: You sound like you have a big Dinosaur Jr. influence? Are you big fans of theirs?

Blake: Yeah, I actually have tinnitous because "You're Living All Over Me" came out when I was a freshman in college. I used to come home, and I just be, you know, really full of teen angst and alienation and I'd sit down and put my head down between my speakers and just crank it all the way up. I actually damaged my hearing more listening to "You're Living All Over Me" than I have playing live. So that was a really big influence.

Pitchfork: Where do your songs generally come from?

Blake: I don't know. We've got a little break between tours and we're trying to get some songs together for the next record and I've sort of forgotten how I went about writing songs. A lot of times, I just get drunk and I'll come up with an idea and I'll write it on the back of my hand. The next morning I'll try to figure out what I meant and pick up the guitar and try to put it together. But there's really no set way. I mean, it's not like we all gather around the motel swimming pool and you know...

Pitchfork: What was your favorite Saturday morning cartoon?

Blake: I was always more into the live action ones than the cartoons. Things like H.R. Pufnstuf was on. So you had Sigmund and the Seamonsters, Captain Cool, things like that. I could always just identify more with that. Plus, I was living in California at the time and all of those were filmed in California. Everybody had really cool, you know, 70s bellbottoms and Frampton concert shirts with the three quarter-length sleeves and I could just identify with that. Everybody always looked high on those shows, too, which appealed to me.

Pitchfork: What was your best show ever?

Blake: We've had a lot of fun shows for various reasons, but it usually is venue exclusive. It has nothing to do with where we're playing, it's just whatever mood we're in. We like playing the midwest and the east coast a lot. We don't really like the southwest and the west coast very much. It's a broad generalization but I find when you go down to places like Arizona, you end up with all these kids showing up and you know, they're acid-washed and screaming for Primus and Rage Against The Machine. It's just a scene that we're not really into. The further north you go and the further east you go, the more musically sophisticated your audiences are. It's a cruel generalization because of course, there's excellent music fans everywhere, but as far as just judging masses of people, and geography...

Pitchfork: What band would you like to see make it big?

Blake: I'm listening to this band right now called Superdrag, who I think are amazing. Although, they're younger than we are and if they made it big and we didn't, then I'd feel really jealous and I'd hate them.

Pitchfork: Of course! So, what was the first record you bought?

Blake: It was either "Breakfast in America" by Supertramp or "Get The Knack." Oh, no! It was probably Cheap Trick, "Live at Budokan."

Pitchfork: Where did you hear it that made you wanna go out and buy it?

Blake: Probably just hanging out at the 7-11. You know, like I said, I was living in California and I'd go and get a Slurpee and just sorta sit there when I was six or seven. The Camaros would come up and they'd all be jammin' cool stuff on the 8-tracks and I think Cheap Trick's "In Color" was out then and I was really jammin' to that in the parking lot, watching the kids get baked.

Pitchfork: What was the worst thing you ever saw on television?

Blake: "Circus of the Stars" gives me the creeps.

Pitchfork: [in hysterics]

Blake: I think I saw a "Circus of the Stars" with Morgan Fairchild getting in the ring with Gunther Gable-Williams, who is totally creepy all on his own, and they were just making tigers dance. There was just something really eerie about that. Any professional magician on television gives me the willies, too. I always think it's a member of Styx.

Pitchfork: It's like they get Dennis DeYoung up there.

Blake: Exactly. If you open up the "Paradise Theater" record, every member in Styx looks like he could have been a professional magician. They've all got that look.

Pitchfork: What do you think about Kurt Cobain now that he's dead?

Blake: I think we won't be getting very many more records from him.

Pitchfork: That's a wonderful insight. How about Shannon Hoon?

Blake: Ooh. That's a tough one. We were on tour and we played a show in Chicago the day after Jerry Garcia died and I walked up on stage and I sang "Box of Rain" a cappela and the crowd was really into it. I don't know if they were into because they thought it was a pro-Jerry thing or an anti-Jerry thing, but they were cheering. The day Shannon Hoon died, we were playing in Denver. I walked up on stage and I just played the lick from "No Rain." The beer-neer-neer [twanging opening riff to "No Rain"]. I just played it twice and it lasted about ten seconds and I had 1,200 people booing and throwing things at me. You know, I didn't do it with any expression on my face at all. Just went up there and played six notes on my guitar and the place just reacted really violently. I wasn't sure at the time if they were booing because they didn't like Blind Melon, or because he O.D.'ed himself when he had kids or what. And then I got off stage and I had about 100 people threaten to rip me apart with their hands, and then I realized that it was me that they didn't like. I guess Shannon Hoon touched people a lot more than I thought he did.

Pitchfork: Yeah. I would never have imagined.

Blake: I wasn't passing judgement on him, I was just delivering the facts.

Pitchfork: Where do you think the Internet is going to take music?

Blake: God, I don't know. I just asked my parents for a modem for Christmas so I can start checking the Internet out. I have a little laptop and I've never really gone on the net with it. We have an e-mail account through our record label and whenever we're in New York or L.A. we get on it and answer all the e-mail we get from people. That's pretty amazing. I just think that brings musicians and their fans a lot closer together. There are people I've traded e-mail with three or four times now and I kinda know a lot about them and I tell them some of my personal stuff sometimes. And it's just a relationship I don't think you'd ever be able to have before the Internet. It's almost bad because I remember when I was in high school, I would go see The Replacements play and Paul Westerberg would be walking down the street afterwards and I'd be hiding behind a garbage can, trembling. Like, "Holy Shit, it's Paul Westerberg." And now kids walk up to me after a show and say, "Hey, man. Gimme a beer. I e-mailed you." So it's a little different.

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to name the album "That's What Love Songs Often Do?"

Blake: There's a couple of reasons. One is that we've been living in an age where language has been systematically reduced and destroyed by popular culture. You know, you turn on the radio and it's like, "That was Poe with 'Psycho' and Bush with 'Glycerine.' All the band names are one syllable and all the song titles are one syllable and that was just getting to be a real big bummer for us. So we wanted to have sort of a lengthy album title that would just be sort of unwieldy for people and clumsy. We came up with that because the other guitar player, Rick, was working at a paint store at the time and they constantly played lite rock and there's a Billy Ocean song that he heard about five times a day. That was one of the lines in it. We just thought it was funny because everybody's records are so full of rage and minimalist expressions and we wanted something clumsy and sort of sweet. And then we put our first single and it's called, "Seeds." So, I guess we're as guilty of it as anybody else.

Pitchfork: What was the worst place you ever lived?

Blake: I lived in a place called Santa Clara, California for about six months. I was in first grade and the kids were so stupid there that they couldn't even count their own lunch money. I was the only kid in the entire first grade that could count money and so I had to sit there and count everybody's lunch money to make sure they paid the right amount for lunch and had this much money left over for milk and dessert.

Pitchfork: Didn't like the lunchladies do that and stuff?

Blake: Well, they couldn't count either. And all the kids were making bongs out of their whiffle ball bats. I was only six, so my parents took me out of there.

Pitchfork: Why did you choose to contribute a cover of "Don't Come Around Here No More" to "You Got Lucky: A Tribute To Tom Petty?"

Blake: We were asked to do it by a really good friend of ours. The guy that put it together was this guy Joel Mark who plays in a band called Nectarine who are on Grass [Records]. That was one contributing factor, and the other was that I grew up listening to Tom Petty and when you asked me what one of the first records I ever bought was, earlier, one of the first ten records I bought was "Damn The Torpedos" when it came out. But you can't grow up in the midwest without having Tom Petty just bashed into your skull, so he's an influence whether we'd like to acknowledge it or not. It was fun, too.

Pitchfork: I'd like to see you guys redo the video for that song.

Blake: That was a pretty psychedelic video. Oh, the other good thing about that is we got paid $500 to do that track, so what we did was we went in and recorded a demo with that money and then just recorded that song at about four o'clock in the morning after we did the rest of the demo. So that money actually paid for the demo that got us signed. I'd forgotten about that. Nobody's asked us that question.

Pitchfork: What kind of music do you really, really hate?

Blake: It's funny because we come from what's called "Alternative," well, we come from classic rock, but we really like things like Dinosaur Jr and The Replacements and Husker Du and all the great guitar bands that we grew up with, but now I would say, the music that all of those bands have spawned is the music that I hate the most. You turn on the local commercial alternative radio station and you just wanna puke, but at the same time, we'd like to be added to that station so we're a little hypocritical.

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INTERVIEW: Fig Dish

"Things do get a little strange here and there, don't they," chuckles guitarist/vocalist Blake Smith when a few of the more creative lyrical moments on Figdish's second Polydor Records release, When Shove Goes Back To Push, are mentioned.

"We had most of the lyrics written down before we showed up at the studio," he continues. "As soon as we got there, however, we started drinking - basically, all day long. We wound up in the vocal booth at some point but nobody could remember any of the words! So, we just kinda made shit up as we went along," he laughs. "You know, 'Hey! Now that sounds pretty cool!' That's why things on the record may seem a little, uhm, obtuse at times."

One of the brightest-sounding records of 1997, the latest offering from the Chicago-based four-piece picks up the crunchy, Raspberries-flavored, guitar-pop torch their critically-acclaimed 1995 debut, That's What Love Songs Often Do, carried while it adds even more hooks, harmonies, glockenspiel, pseudo-metal riffs, techno-churn chaos, smart-ass lyrics, jangling power chords and revved- up guitar madness to the group's arsenal.

"We're all huge fans of good pop music," Smith says of his bandmates. "The great thing about being in Fig Dish is that the four of us all share a common pop vocabulary. We've all known each other since high school and we all come from the same place musically, so we don't have to consciously try to effect any particular pose. We just play what comes naturally to us."

"One of my favorite comments that I hear about the band when people see us live is that our gigs are more like watching a gang than a band," he adds. "We get out there and we're all, like, totally tuned in to each other and completely into putting on a great show."

"It's all, you know, about delivering 'the rock' to the people," Smith laughs. "And, while that might sound kinda corny and may even border on Spinal Tap, the thing is, we all love music so much that our pure love for playing and making music sometimes makes us come off as a little bit weird on stage."

"We almost seem like a put-on or like we're goofing on the audience when we're really goin' at it up there," he chuckles. "We jump around all over the place and like to strike these really dramatic, Ted Nugent-as-guitar-God poses. The thing is, though, as much as we love having fun, we're more than half-serious about what we're doing."

"You know, we've tossed a few television sets out of a few windows and gotten ourselves into a bit of trouble every now and then," Smith laughs when asked just how far he and his band were willing to take their quest for rock 'n' roll fun."

"Which makes a lot of the people we know ask us stuff like, 'What the hell are you guys doin'? Don't you want this?' [a career as a musician] And I'm, like, 'Well, yeah! This is what this is to me.' Partying. Getting loose. Having fun, man, when I was a kid growing up in the '80s, that was what rock was all about, you know? People really enjoying what they were doing."

"Rock has just gotten so damn tight-assed over the last few years," he says with a mixture of frustration and genuine disgust. "You turn on the radio anymore and everyone you hear is so damn serious and so damn straight-faced -- it's fuckin' rock, man! Lighten up, have some fun! Throw a party!"
-- Al Muzer, Consumable Online

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