Buffalo Stance

"THERE'S somewhat of a misconception that Buffalo Tom are obviously normal, nice guys. I don't think we're necessarily normal." The way bassist Chris Colbourn toys with his lovely green deerstalker hat while stressing the word 'normal' is very persuasive.

Today he is sitting in the bar of a London hotel, drinking mineral water, on the last leg of a lengthy press tour to promote their fourth and finest album, Big Red Letter Day. Buffalo Tom go back to Boston in two days time. Two days later, Chris will be back working in the jazz and blues music agency he's been with since leaving college.

"Everybody's kind of weird," he continues. "It just never occurred to us to act like rock stars, who drink whisky during interviews in the middle of the day. On this press tour, people kept going 'If Bill could just be brooding or just live that rock star part, that might be our angle'. But Bill is the opposite, he's really outgoing and friendly."

"Perhaps he's still able to function in society because he has this outlet to get rid of all the other stuff," muses drummer Tom Maginnis.

Bill Janovitz' and Chris Colbourn's lyrics weave effortlessly between the ordinary and extraordinary. The songs mention porchlights, treehouses, trucks, old newspapers, messed up relationships, and old friends. They also mention sunflower suits, falling eyeballs and people made of wood.

"The more I listen to our songs," says Chris, "it seems as if they sound very normal on the outside and then you start picking up on things. Even looking at the lyrics that we chose to print on the sleeve of this album . . . a lot of people listening probably don't notice the words we use. Recently I started listening really closely to The Kinks, and getting the albums that were darker, and realised, these guys are not normal happy English guys.

"It's the difference between them and The Smiths; I still love The Smiths, but as you get older, you realise they beat their subjects with a stick. It's like, fine, we get the message, you're not a happy fella."

"The media in the US doesn't really have time to go below the surface. Though we like that too," laughs Tom. "We're real fans of surface."

Tom is softly spoken and placid, content to be drowned out by Chris, who can talk expansively and with conviction on any subject you like to throw at him. Bill can talk longer and harder still, even after a soundcheck that ended in disaster when the vocal monitors packed up. He fears that tonight's low-key London date may have to be scrapped, despite the fact that it sold out weeks ago and fans have been queuing out in the pissing rain since tea time.

The show does eventually go ahead, and not even Bill's microphone packing in during the final encore of 'Crutch' can spoil it. It may not be the most technically perfect performance, but it is intimate and unforgettable. At one stage a very embarrassed Chris stands by awkwardly as the others lead the audience in a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday, and Bill's wife Laura jumps onstage to give him a birthday hug. Ten minutes after the band have left the stage, the music on the PA system has to be turned up to drown out the sound of cheering.

The complete adoration that they are capable of extracting from their fans does make it easy to understand why, when Buffalo Tom's third album, Let Me Come Over, was released in 1992, every review and interview predicted that they were going to be right up there with the big league by year's end. They were going to be bigger than Nirvana, huger than Guns 'N' Roses, heftier than U2, and all that shit.

"Well that's what it was - shit," says Bill quickly. "First of all, I don't like this whole mentality in rock that it's a competition; not even a competition between bands, but just to be big. Chris mentioned that he read a P.J. Harvey interview in the New York Times that said that some records don't have to be huge - in fact it's better if they're not - because it kind of would take away from the appeal to a smaller amount of real listeners.

"If something's huge, to me that indicates, and I think Nirvana felt the same way, that it's bad. I think Nirvana sort of freaked out because it's like, why are they so huge? Why are they bigger than Guns 'N' Roses? That would worry me.

"Certain bands have done it. I'm not really a big REM listener anymore, but I used to listen to them when I was younger and they were just starting out and real underground. They've become tremendously huge but have still maintained psychologically, mentally, a healthy attitude, and artistically they certainly seem to have maintained integrity. If we were, god forbid, to be that big, hopefully we would be one of those bands who can keep their heads about it.

"I think people listen to me saying that and go 'yeah yeah, sure', but really, that's an honest opinion. Hopefully we can save up and buy a house and basically just make another record next year and continue to do what we're doing. The kind of success I envy is sort of a Tom Waits, Nick Cave, The Fall success . . . people who sell consistently every year and play big theatres but don't necessarily have hit records. A hit record kind of scares me because there's so much baggage attached to it."

"I think that speculation about getting huge came about because we were on SST originally, Nirvana were on Sub Pop, and some people thought we wrote more poppy, radio-friendly songs than they did so this obviously meant we were going to be a big band," says Chris. "We had been in the business long enough to know that it wasn't that easy, you know. And also, when it's yourself you don't take it that seriously, you never picture winning the lottery."

Tom maintains that the music press has difficulty coming up with a newsworthy angle on Buffalo Tom. Even if, as Chris says, they're not entirely normal, neither do they provide fodder for attention-grabbing confessional cover stories. The Kurt Cobain "I was shooting up before breakfast" headlines do make Buffalo Tom look a little tame.

"I don't think we're necessarily faceless," argues Chris, "but even though Bill is more the figure-head of the band he's such a regular kind of kid, like the kind that you grew up with.

"One of the reasons I think we're still together is we generally have the same sensibilities. What drew us together to even form a band are the same things that keep us this close from killing each other, and help us settle things easy. That's why we can write music together and not get all worked up about egos."

"Some bands even thrive on arguing with each other, and that's so bad because years down the road it's just not going to work out," says Tom.

"And the business almost wants you to be that way," continues Chris. "From management down to record company they want to set up this thing where it's like, they want you to believe you're a rock star 'cause then you will be. We seem to want to fight against that. They're convinced that if you believe that you're a star, you act like you are, then you will be."

"Well, some of that's true," shrugs Tom.

"I agree, and maybe that's one of our problems," Chris reflects. "But once you buy into that you can never come back, and with us, we ate lunch in university together for years. If one of us was suddenly a rock star that would be weird."

Buffalo Tom met in Amherst, at the University of Massachusetts, where all three were pursuing a Liberal Arts degree. There they met Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis, who would subsequently help produce their first two albums. Chris: "There's not really a place to play in Amherst, so you go to New York or you go to Boston." They chose Boston.

"I think people go to visit Boston, musicians who are about nineteen years old and think, I like this," he says. "I know it was the same for Juliana Hatfield, Even Dando and us. It's a huge university city so there's lots of young people and because of that there's loads of movie places and record stores and coffee places and bookstores.

"A lot of those people are very ambitious too. We didn't just feel satisfied with playing in a little club, we wanted to tour, we wanted to get an album out. Same with Evan, Throwing Muses, The Blake Babies. I do think that's maybe an East Coast thing, where people are very ambitious. It's not the traditional slacker, Generation X crowd that a lot of people talk about. Maybe that's why we went to Boston in the first place, why we were in college.

"We weren't necessarily trying to be rock stars but we weren't going to sit back and just see what happened. And I think J is a good example. He's very had working, always doing soundtracks, always touring Europe, getting records out. It was never like that overused image of him sitting back and watching TV all day. You can never even get him at home, he's always touring or playing with someone else or producing."

There traditionally comes a point where interviewers observe that Buffalo Tom must feel guilty for being white, middle-class, educated and from fairly affluent backgrounds. Chris is already moving into "we have some guilt about how easy it's all been," mode, so let's hold it right there. Why should Buffalo Tom feel guilty for not having obstacles strewn in their path? Why not just feel lucky, or relieved? Why 'guilty'?

"I know," he laughs, "I think at the end of the day we don't actually have too much guilt about sitting down and having a soda in the London Embassy Hotel, or being able to tour. Our parents, and it's the same in almost every case of those bands we were talking about, are professionals, and were a very ambitious group of people. Many of them were the offspring of depression-era parents who made a living for themselves and got very ambitious, and taught their children, even if you're in a rock band, be very serious about it. There's a certain work ethic involved there.

"Sitting around with your friends in the afternoon jamming doesn't make you a rock band, you have to actually make a tape and send it out to people, and there's a lot of talented musicians, in Boston too and Amherst, who just sit back with their talent and don't do anything."

"But some people are so unsure at that point," interjects the diplomatic Tom, "because they haven't gotten that feedback that they're good, that they get really hesitant about taking that next leap into sending their tape into a radio station. It might be played, and what if people hate it? Do it, get it out there. If you don't, for sure nothing is going to happen."

The predictions of impending mega-stardom have re-surfaced with early reviews of Big Red Letter Day. Adjectives like accessible, assured, and immediate are cropping up all over the place. Bill doesn't mind telling it like it is - Big Red Letter Day is the sound of Buffalo Tom getting noticeably mellow.

"I don't think it has to do with our age, because we still like a lot of rocking, loud music, and we still play it, and I think the songs we play on record will come out much more raw live. It's a matter of getting more used to the studio and wanting to do certain things differently."

Big Red Letter Day enlists the production expertise of the Robb Brothers, a trio who've worked with everyone from David Bowie to the fabulous Bay City Rollers over the course of thirty years. Last year they emerged from virtual retirement to produce The Lemonheads' masterpiece, It's A Shame About Ray, and while the albums are by no means similar, the Robbs seem, in both cases, to have adopted the 'less is more' philosophy.

"I think it's certainly a more stark record, and there's more space. There's as much guitar as there was in the past but it's not one guitar turned up really loud, it's a lot of little things going on, which we find a lot more interesting. I think we would have gone in that direction no matter who we used, we just knew that certain other producers might not necessarily understand it as much.

"Steve Albini, for instance, wouldn't go make a real acoustic album with vocal layers," laughs Bill. "I think a lot of people will assume a lot of things. They'll hear the back-up singing by the Waters sisters on 'Treehouse' and think it was the Robb Brothers who pushed us into that, when nothing could be further from the truth."

"When The Lemonheads' album came out I listened to it a lot and thought it was great," says Chris. "Evan seemed really comfortable. The Robb Brothers have just got an old style of recording and like to get a good vibe in the studio and just get a nice performance out of you, you know. They're not going to put some studio effect on it later and patch it up.

"We did choose them probably for the same reasons The Lemonheads did - a lush acoustic guitar sound and the fact that Evan told us he felt really comfortable working with them. And when you're comfortable you do things that come naturally, like trying to sing better backing vocals and all that kind of stuff. We're not real natural at our instruments."

Songwriting seems to come more naturally. There were more than fifty songs, or scraps of songs, to weed through for this album.

"If somebody locked us in a studio for three days right now we could probably do another record. We work in such a traditional form," says Chris. "The structures are there, and sometimes the songs almost write themselves. The lyrics are where we write very separately. It's weird because these are very personal things, but we've known each other so long that we just mash it together and don't worry about it.

"You have antennas and all your influences are out there. We even nick things off ourselves; the beginning of 'I'm Allowed' is very much like 'Taillights Fade', although I didn't recognise that at first. It's hard for me even to feel as if we wrote a particular song. We're just tuning in to the frequency. My favourite bands were always like that. We enjoy music so much that we have no problem with the idea that at this time and space on earth we're just absorbing things."

See, he was right. They're not your everyday, run-of-the-mill nascent popstars at all. Hell, they don't even write songs, they absorb them. And still nobody knows quite what to expect from Buffalo Tom, except to hope that they might, one day, win the lottery and earn a little more of that commercial success that they've so frequently been told is just around the corner.

"I'm glad that to a certain extent we've got an open canvas still," says Chris. "We're just painting little pieces of it. It's really turning out to be a very bizarre picture with all these normal colours."