Dream team

Much has been written about Mercury Rev’s troubled past, a fascinating casualty strewn history that is 13 years old and – just barely – still counting. It’s well covered ground the band express little interest in revisiting at any point during this, their first promotional interview for their latest opus: Questions they don’t feel inclined to answer are either evaded or ignored. Suffice to say that in 1996, having released three critically acclaimed but commercially unviable albums – Yerself Is Steam (1991), Boces (1993) and See You On The Other Side (1995) – this unquestionably gifted alt-rock collective from America’s Catskills found themselves teetering on the brink of musical extinction.

Facing financial ruin and complete mental, physical and professional disintegration as a result of the sustained substance abuse and violent in-house and on-stage fighting that eventually saw them jettison vocalist David Baker in the interests of self-preservation, the band somehow managed to claw their way out of the gutter and swap notoriety for renown with the release of the revelatory Deserters’ Songs – a timeless, lovingly crafted slow-burner which saw Mercury Rev stand disheveled but triumphant on an artistic and commercial peak they’d been threatening to ascend for some time.

With All Is Dream, they have delivered yet another thrilling sonic soundscape, once again confounding the verse-chorus-verse listenership with a vision of structure, melody and orchestration that is uniquely the hallmark of a band who have always sat a little skew-ways at the rock ‘n’ roll table. Jonathan Donahue’s plaintive vocals, Grasshopper’s capricious guitar backgrounds, Jeff Mercel’s tender tub-thumping, a sweeping string arrangement or jumble of horns here, a wailing saw there… if there is a grumble – a very minor one – it is that the increasingly creeping familiarity of a band renowned for the unpredicatbility of their output could yet become the stick with which Mercury Rev’s musical hides are eventually flayed.

Sitting in a London hotel suite, Donahue is stick thin, gaunt, pale and well spoken. He fields most of the questions, even those directed specifically at his friends and colleagues Mercel and Grasshopper, who are also present. They don’t seem at all bothered, content to kick back, sip a few beers and interrupt with the odd chuckle, factual correction or wry observation. If there is any tension between the three of them they hide it exceptionally well. Their producer and former bassist Dave Fridmann is at home, having ditched the grind of life on the road in favour of spending more time with his family and studio toys.

hotpress: An awful lot of people are looking forward to hearing All Is Dream. Does that scare you or excite you?

Jonathan: Well, of course it excites us. When we began Deserter’s Songs there wasn’t much anticipation for a new Mercury Rev record because most people probably thought we’d broken up or disappeared. We began it thinking it could be our last record, that nobody would hear it or be interested in hearing it. When we began All Is Dream it was different because we knew we had a much larger fan base. It doesn’t change the way we go about making the music but it does encourage you in those dark moments in the studio when things are quite dire on a particular song or a particular part of the music. It does inspire you to know that people are waiting on this.

Grasshopper: It can be scary to yourself on a personal level, y’know… trying to live up to your own… to top yourself… to grow. That’s the scary thing.

Were you surprised by the success of Deserters Songs?

Jonathan: Well, coming from where we were on See You On The Other Side, I don’t think we were surprised by people’s reaction to the music, more the fact that people got to hear it. It was mainly down to word of mouth and that was very encouraging. It’s usually a better indicator than a label throwing a million dollars at a record and stapling it to people’s foreheads. It was much more rewarding to hear that people had listened to it, liked it and passed it along to each other like a razor in prison, as opposed to just being blanketed by leaflets dropped from a helicopter.

Where did the name All Is Dream come from?

Jonathan: Well, it’s the last line on the album, but there’s many layers and levels of metaphor throughout the entire record. There’s many levels of metaphor and symbolism encoded into the lyrics and even the music that go together, that strike us in many different ways on many different days. That’s the kind of music we enjoy listening to from other bands as well as ourselves and it follows that that’s the kind of music we enjoy making. It’s the kind of record you can go back to time and again and pick up something new on each occasion.

Before he died, producer Jack Nietzsche was going to work on All Is Dream with you. Did he approach you or you him?

Jonathan: We had spoken to him pretty early on after Deserter’s Songs came out and he had loved that record. From then until the beginning of All Is Dream we had spoken about working together. It was gonna be something. Unfortunately he passed away.

Grasshopper: Just sitting in the same room as him left a lasting impression.

Jonathan: Yeah, he was one of those magical beings that you can’t describe to anyone else. And obviously there’s lots of people, very talented, successful and famous people who have worked with him in the past and who would know him much better than we did, but certainly our impression of Jack was other-worldly. He was one of those people who you carry with you for a very long time after meeting him. He was very much a ghost of music past.

On paper you and he would be a dream team, but his reputation for self destruction and volatile behaviour is surpassed only by Mercury Rev’s. Would it have worked?

Jonathan: Well, the label gave us odds of 1000/1 against it working. They said right away that we’d both crash and burn in a very horrible, tragic way. We were well prepared for that because we’ve crashed and burned many times before and so has Jack. But yes, the label was very fearful.

Did they say that with their tongue-in-cheek or were they emphatically against it?

Jonathan: No, they were very serious about not wanting us to work with Jack. They thought it had a high potential for a great Greek tragedy.

But you thought it was worth the risk?

Jonathan: Well, we were prepared to risk it, but that’s easy for us because we don’t wear neck-ties and carry budgets around in our back pockets like record company executives do. They simply took our past and multiplied it by Jack’s past and came up with a very large imaginary number.

Although well received by the critics, your second album Boces has been described as the sound of a band disintegrating. What is All Is Dream the sound of?

Jonathan: It’s the sound of a band changing, of a band being. We enjoy change in everything we do, in all parts of our lives. This record, more so than any of the others, represents that transformation that we all enjoy.

In his most recent interview with hotpress, Nick Cave disagreed with the notion that you have to destroy yourself to create. Having been to the abyss, would you agree that it is over-rated?

Jonathan: Yeah, I would have to agree with that because many people seem to be under the misconception that you have to go to the bottom in order to create music. For us, the idea is that you have to change. You have to go to the bottom and come up and go back to the bottom and come up again. It’s not some magic formula, it’s just life. And when you’re at the bottom emotionally like we were in Deserter’s Songs it’s very difficult to create music when you’re so disenchanted with life itself.

It’s probably the last thing you want to do.

Jonathan: Well, you’re quite right. If you’re in a very bad place, the very last thing you want to do is pick up a guitar or a pen. Much more is going on in your head that you can’t figure out and it’s hard to find a reason just to get up in the morning, let alone go into a studio and create music. I would certainly agree with what Nick Cave says there, but then he’s a very smart guy. Sometimes at the bottom there are very dark special places that we’ve been to that can inspire a very special form of music. But to remain at the bottom or to have that as your goal, that’s very one-way. That’s not change, it’s a very static state that goes against the nature of man, which is to change.

Grasshopper: Also, I think there’s a lot of personal darkness on Deserter’s Songs. There’s also just ‘darkness’ that’s out there, y’know, something like the Presidential election, or the Buffalo Bills not doing so well, Jack Nietzsche passing away… y’know, it’s a different kind of darkness but it still pervades what you’re doing.”

Jonathan: “I mean, perhaps punk rock is a good example. Some of the very early and better punk rock was dealing with the darkness of whatever they saw at that time. It was about what they saw at that time society wise, culturally… not having jobs, really dead-end lifestyles. That was a darkness beyond their control and they wrote about that it in a very descriptive way. And as Grasshopper says, the personal one is much more crippling. It’s easy to describe the outside world as going downhill, but the darkness that is within you is far more crippling in terms of being able to describe, and yet it is far more universal.

My darkness, his darkness, your darkness – they all have a great universal-ness when described well and properly. There might be different reasons for the effects of it but everyone can understand because we go through it all the time. But it’s very hard to get that darkness that’s inside of you out in a way that doesn’t seem morose for the sake of being sad. A lot of Deserter’s Songs was trying to describe that darkness in a way that had hope and showed the light was in there.

This might seem like a daft question to ask you, but as a band who thrives on change, have you ever been tempted to let loose with some banging techno or jungle with drum loops and all the trimmings on any of your albums, or even while just dicking around in the studio?

Jonathan: Sure, we do that quite often. Despite what many people think, we don’t just walk around with string sections in our heads, y’know. Quite often we will just bang around the studio making the most god-awful racket until Dave [Fridmann] stops the tape and screams that he’s deaf, he’s had enough and that we all suck. Then we’ll wheel back.

Do you consider yourselves musical outlaws, holed up as you are in The Catskills doing your own thing?

Jonathan: I don’t think consciously we do, although the music industry does tend to put that moniker on us, as exiles. They find it very difficult to deal with a group of individuals like us who simply don’t conform to their idea of stamping a producer’s name on the album and having complete control of the songs and styles of music. I think the industry finds us quite difficult to work with and therefore labels us as outlaws. But to our label’s credit, they’ve gotten better at understanding that we’re happiest and we do our greatest work when we’re left alone. The fact that we live in the mountains doesn’t make that much difference to us – it’s just where we live.

But there seems to be a very definite vibe of “old America” on your albums. Would it still be there if you lived somewhere like LA?

Jeff: I think we would be so out of our element if we lived in LA that we just couldn’t survive. It makes a huge difference being surrounded by things you’re familiar with and people you love. To separate yourself from that and go to Los Angeles, for example, where you are completely out of your element is hard. You don’t know where you are geographically, you don’t know the people around you, you can’t help but come out with something different. We don’t want some hotshot big name producer because we know Dave, we like Dave, we’re comfortable with Dave and can maybe explore different things with him at the helm.

It’s very comforting for us to know that we’re working with someone we know won’t nail us to the wall when we fail the first 11 takes. Dave knows it might take us 12 takes to get something that’s coherent and makes sense, whereas if we were working with some big name producer that the label has appointed to us it’s gonna be different and difficult.

Jonathan: So much of what we do it mental, and to have that communication between the four of us requires a personal space and silence in order to get the thing flowing. And when there’s outside distractions it tends to interrupt what we do. For us, the album is entirely mental. The actual recording process doesn’t hold much interest for us. It’s the mental processes that go into creating the music, that’s where all of our energy is directed. We don’t really care what microphone is on the drums, we don’t really care about the technology involved. It’s the mental creative process on which we thrive and we struggle. We live and die by the mind and that’s why our albums do take a while… perhaps longer than most people’s.

Are you on good terms with David Baker?

Jonathan: Well, you know, we actually get along quite well now, probably because we don’t have the music and the business between us like we did for those years. We see him once in a while and we laugh like we did before we ever made Yerself Is Steam. Friendships have a way of working themselves out and surviving those difficult times we didn’t really have control of. They simply surrounded us and we were ill prepared for the effects they would have on us as old friends. The three of us go back a long way. We’ve been friends for nearly 15 years.

It must have been incredibly difficult to go your separate ways if you’d known each other so long. How wrong does something have to go before you break a bond like that?

Jonathan: You’re absolutely right, it was hard. It wasn’t hard musically, but friendship-wise it was incredibly difficult. Essentially we were saying goodbye for a period of time to someone we hold very dear to us. I’m sure David has his own feelings about that but it’s essentially saying goodbye to your best friend for a while, without having a definitive answer as to why. Even perhaps more so than separating from a lover, because we didn’t have reasons like: ‘I don’t like your cooking’ or ‘I don’t like the way you come home stinking of beer’. Our reasons for parting with David were much more intangible, so that’s where the pain came in. As we grew, we began to realise and say ‘I realise that you weren’t hurting me for the sake of it’. It was just the impressions we were receiving from outside of our friendship that tended to maneuver us in very awkward ways.

Most of what happened has been written about in the press already. We’re not interested in reliving that or going back to the specifics but it was a strange time. And at a certain point, especially during Boces, that train derailed in a very destructive way.

Jonathan, I understand the first gig you ever attended was by The Clancy Brothers. How did that happen?

Jonathan: Well, my dad is an Irish Catholic and my mother is a Transylvanian Jew, but they both love music. My parents would take us to see The Clancy Brothers every time they came around New York – this time it might have been Carnegie Hall. I’d grown up listening to the Clancys and other Irish music so I knew all the songs. But it was quite awe-inspiring just to be a very small child in the middle of all these Irish people screaming their heads of in Carnegie Hall, and anytime they would do rebel songs these people would just go crazy. That excitement they were able to create was more of a thrill for me than their actual set. For me, their records were just strange Irish folk songs, but seeing them in concert with all the people around them had a very profound effect. I grew up thinking The Clancy Brothers were rock ‘n’ roll.

Not many rock musicians would be prepared to admit that.

Jonathan: Well, that’s just the way our house was. My mother would never say ‘here’s classical music’ or my father would never say ‘here’s Irish music’. It was just music. The Clancy Brothers would bleed into Johnny Cash and I thought it was all rock ‘n’ roll. Seeing them live with all those people screaming, they didn’t seem that much different to Elvis. I never had delineation in my mind as to what you could and couldn’t do in rock ‘n’ roll – I thought you could do anything you wanted.

Is that why Mercury Rev’s output is unique?

Jonathan: Of course, it certainly led to the music we make. Obviously Grasshopper and Jeff might have other experiences that will define what you can and cannot do. That’s why I get irked when people say our music isn’t rock because we’ve got an orchestra or a flute or a saw in our band… well hey, I’m sorry, but yes it is.

What are your impressions of American popsters like Ricky Martin and Britney?

Jeff: Obviously that music resonates with a lot of people and makes them very happy.

Does that puzzle you?

Jeff: No, it doesn’t puzzle me. I think there’s a certain cross section of the population that they’re aiming their music at. That fills the need for that. There may be a 14 year old girl who loves N’Sync and there may be another 14 year old girl who’s in the vinyl shop rummaging around looking for Velvet Underground records. I think the two can still exist.

Jonathan: I’m sure our parents perhaps perceived early Beatles records in the same light: ‘Well, this is teenager music, I don’t see what they see in four mop-tops singing that they wanna hold your hand’. This is not new to music. I mean, in America we had ‘Yummy, yummy, yummy I’ve got love in my tummy’.

Are there any places in particular that you particularly like to visit while on tour?

Grasshopper: Ireland… definitely.

Aw shucks, you’re just saying that…

Jonathan: No we’re not and we have the proof to back that up because if you check you’ll find we generally begin all our tours in Ireland.

Any particular reason for that?

Jonathan: We just genuinely really love it there. We’ve been playing there a long time from when we were quite young in the very early days. We’ve had the mad gigs in Cork and our very first gold disc for Deserter’s Songs was in Ireland. We just enjoy it because it’s one of those special places that we all love to play. I’m not just saying it because we’re being interviewed by hotpress because I don’t really give a shit about that. We love the country. We love being there with the people, we have lots of friends… it’s just one of those special places like Spain or Scandinavia that we really look forward to going to. We’ve always had the greatest respect for the people in Ireland because they’ve always shown us the greatest respect. As an artist playing all around the world, that’s something you value. It’s not the club size or the crowd size – it’s the vibe you get from people. That’s what makes or breaks a tour, so we look forward to meeting people.

Grasshopper: The crowds in Ireland are wild and crazy and that makes you play that much better. They’re very loyal to what we do and talking to the kids after shows is just a dream.

Jonathan: That happens us in a lot of countries in the world and it’s good for getting you out of bed in the morning. The record label can’t buy you those kind of things.

Jeff: Ireland is one of those places where you can feel a genuine love for music. I don’t understand why exactly – maybe music is embedded in the culture in a different way to some countries. When you play there you can see it; you can see the smile on someone’s face and you know you’ve connected. On a night when that happens, you walk off stage and you feel amazing.

Finally, if your tour bus was to drive over a cliff would you be happy with all that you’ve left behind?

Jonathan: Well I don’t think we care much about what we leave behind. This is all about how we’ve grown as people. The friendships that we have and we cherish, the way in which we’ve treated our loved ones – that’s what we would take over the cliff with us. How this music will be treated in 20 or 50 years – that’s in the lap of the Gods.

All Is Dream is out now on V2 Records