How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (34 page)

Blast First released Big Black’s debut, the pummelling and concise
Atomizer
, along with a semi-official live vinyl album,
The Sound of Impact
, in 1986. When Big Black staged a return visit the following year the band played to rapt audiences.

‘If Big Black had stayed together, they would have been the biggest band on Blast First,’ says Smith. ‘Absolutely no doubt: they had the stadium, anthemic, simple-minded power and performance to be huge. I’m not saying Steve wouldn’t have been a very, very unhappy human being as a consequence but they really would have been massive.’

For
Atomizer
’s follow-up,
Songs about Fucking
, released just six months later in spring 1987, Pat Naylor, who had agreed to work with the band but on her own terms, issued a highly individual press release. ‘It was on one A4 sheet, of which
three-quarters
of the page was saying what a shit weekend she had, ’cause Derby had lost – she was a big Derby County fan – and the last thing was, “Oh, by the way, there’s another great record out on Blast First by Big Black.” That was it, and that got reproduced in the
NME
verbatim.’

Blast First had turned into a record-company version of its bands: alive with heated internal debates resulting in a playful and antagonising set of gestures, which the acts on the label largely appreciated. Working with bands with a road-hardened punk-rock work ethic, the label had a lean and focused release schedule that gave it a clear definition. In 1987 Smith released
Locust Abortion Technician
by the Butthole Surfers. The
Buttholes had dirt-bagged across America, operating out of a decrepit station wagon and putting on shows that were a form of performance anti-art wherever they could find a booking. A panhandling, Reaganomics version of the Merry Pranksters, the Buttholes honed their act to include gruesome back
projections
of circumcisions and chemical testing, overlaid with a strobe-heavy lightshow that made for a disorientating sensory experience. In front of this retina-burning overload the band’s two drummers would pound out a merciless beat over which guitarist Paul Leary would dispatch bludgeoning riffs. Onstage the band were a partially clothed set of hallucinating dervishes. The result was dark, psychedelic chaos: a bad acid test.

Smith had first seen the band in their natural onstage habitat at a festival in the Netherlands where Sonic Youth were also on the bill. Standing at the side of the stage Smith was confronted by the looming, shaking, six-foot frame of the Buttholes’ vocalist Gibby Haynes. ‘The first thing Gibby ever said to me was, “What time is it, man?”’ says Smith. ‘“What time is it?” Five minutes later he came up to me again, “What time is it now?” They needed to know when to drop the acid, so that it came on to the maximum when they went onstage. They were like, “Who’s got the paint, who’s got the bandages …” Gibby was putting pegs in his hair and then binding his head up minutes before they went on stage and then blundering on in this nonchalant kind of fashion and this … this enormous metal riff, you saw that and thought, holy fuck, here’s another one of those bands …’

*

The European festival circuit in the mid- to late Eighties was in its infancy, consisting of little more than two weekends bookending the summer. The first was in June, around the longest day, when Glastonbury and its Danish equivalent, Roskilde, ran simultaneously and the second was at the end of August when
Reading, Pukkelpop in Belgium and the Pink Pop Festival in Holland all took place. The proximity of the festivals allowed an American band to fly in for a whistle-stop whirl around northern Europe and return home having been handsomely rewarded. For Smith’s Blast First roster, after years of playing to empty clubs, there was now an audience hungry for a loud and raucous festival experience.

‘The Buttholes started climbing up the bills,’ says Smith. ‘At Reading in ’89 you could see the same people who were jumping around to the Wonder Stuff or whatever the fuck it was were struck with terror going, “What the fuck is this?” They weren’t really even getting Sonic Youth, but the Butthole Surfers they would vaguely get on a kind of spectacle basis.’

Smith’s timing was propitious. The generation of bands he had signed had started their careers with a sporadic and
hand-to
-mouth sequence of scattershot EPs, live tracks and mini-LP releases, allowing a slow progress across the USA via the network of fanzines and punk club drop-in houses that made up the American underground infrastructure. By the time Smith got to work with the bands, they had reached the peak of their powers. Butthole Surfers finally found a way to replicate the onslaught of their live show in a studio and released the startlingly heavy
Hairway to Steven
in 1988. Both Sonic Youth and Big Black were also turning in an album a year. The music weeklies became smitten, having found a garrulous set of characters with complex and contradictory personalities and stories from hard yards on the road. Distinctly not intimidated by the British press, they were excellent copy.

‘It wasn’t that considered,’ says Smith, ‘but we certainly sank a generation of English squat bands. Bogshed and all those guys sank pretty swiftly. I still run into those people and they still do bear a bit of a grudge, which I can understand; they were on the
dole and they could get by and there was three newspapers a fucking week that had to get filled, so they got written about. But if you deal with the vast expanses of America, and the vast gap between any kind of media, then that wrought certain kinds of characters, Sonic Youth in particular. Thurston was always very outgoing and interested in [them] and wanted to see that kind of music come through. It was a disparate bunch that vaguely crossed paths and they’d done all their playing to literally two people and a dog and then driven 600 miles to do it again. Here you’d have been to Scotland and back. It produced a level of performance that, to be honest, sad Britons at that time could not pull off.’

A group with which Smith was initially hesitant to work proved to give Blast First their most radio-friendly material and an indie disco anthem. ‘Kim [Gordon] was the mover and shaker behind
Bug
,’ says Smith. ‘I went, “That’s fucking horrible.” It was almost as bad as Die Kreuzen, which was their mate’s band who were
really
bad, but they couldn’t see it, ’cause they thought whatever his name was, Butch Vig, was really cool. I played
Bug
and I went, “No, I didn’t get that,” then I was humming a couple of the melodies to myself and thought, oh, that was that fucking record I heard earlier. So I phoned Kim up in the evening and went, “Have you still got the tape? Can I hear it again, ’cause …’ and she went, “It’s under your pillow,” and I always thought that was very clever of her. She’d left the cassette under my pillow and then after that I was like, bang, very much into the record.’

Dinosaur Jr released the hyper-melodic
Bug
in 1988, the same year as Butthole Surfers’
Hairway to Steven
and Sonic Youth’s masterpiece
Daydream Nation
; with most of their British independent contemporaries still taking tentative steps into the studio, it was as breathtaking a trio of albums as any British label released at the time. All three records were distorted and
submerged in a mess of chaotic electricity; above all they marked a moment when records that actually
rocked
took up residence at the top of the independent charts.
†

Alongside Big Black’s weapons-grade riffs, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and Dinosaur Jr marked a wholesale return to the guitar, an instrument that in the last five years had been primarily used to jangle, if it had been used at all.

Keeping up with bands with no management who spent much of their time out on the road proved complicated for Smith. The force of the personalities at work within Blast First and its acts made the situation even more wearisome. With a staff of three, Blast First was riding the crest of a wave that threatened to crash at any time.

‘Paul was very sort of passionate and brilliant,’ says Liz Naylor, ‘but also I remember him ringing me from Japan, and I’d got Sonic Youth “single of the week” in
NME
and
Melody Maker
but not
Sounds
, and he really bollocked me for that. He was completely unpredictable and people were acting out on you all the time. Lydia Lunch came into the office saying, “Now, I don’t want to speak to the monkey asshole.” All these slightly deranged people were always ready to kick off.’

Smith was starting to get a reputation for being slightly erratic. The time difference between the UK and USA meant a
never-ending
series of late-night calls and negotiations. Added to this, the personalities of Haynes and Albini, for whom getting up in someone’s grille was often the equivalent of exchanging pleasantries, made communication tricky. J Mascis had the opposite problem, a mixture of shyness and awkwardness. He left
people confused as to whether or not they had just had a conversation. ‘It was a nightmare trying to talk to J,’ says Smith. ‘Impossible to get anything out of him.’ By the end of 1988 the bands and staff of Blast First felt as shredded and explosive as their music.

‘We were all fucked,’ says Naylor, ‘apart from Sonic Youth. For them it was like an art project and I didn’t realise it was an art project. I thought it was a rock ’n’ roll band.’

Smith’s relationship with Sonic Youth had intensified with every release. He was now their manager, sound man, label head and all-purpose fixer, calling as many shots on their behalf outside the UK and Europe as he was at home; it was also a relationship in which Smith and the band’s love of music was a unifying bond. ‘We would be driving over the Pennines and out of nowhere Thurston would be going, “So, Joy Division, did you ever see Joy Division?” When they actually hit the realities of Manchester, they were quite spooked. Tony Wilson came down to see them and Hannett turned up and he was always pretty weird. I was going to Thurston, “Look, Hannett’s there, come over and meet him and say hello.” By the time I’d got the pints and come back, Hannett had got this gun which he put on the table and Thurston had turned white and was shaking. I was like, “Hannett, put your gun away, we don’t want that today,” and he was like, “Oh, sorry mate.” If you knew him even vaguely, you knew that he’s not going to fucking shoot anybody – he was far more likely to shoot himself in the foot, literally and metaphorically.’

However, a slight fissure was starting to open up between Smith and Sonic Youth. Having relocated to New York, Smith and the band were seeing an awful lot more of each other. While Smith was acting, he thought, as a de facto manager, the band were becoming increasingly weary of some of his behaviour. ‘I was always surprised, when I went to New York, that they didn’t go out. They didn’t have the money to go out, they didn’t drink
and they didn’t take drugs,’ says Smith. ‘They’d go and see films, and they’d go and see bands but they didn’t go “out” out, and one of the key cultural rifts that developed was that I’d be going, “All right, well, so we’ve done everything and it’s only ten o’clock and I’m in New York … so I’m going out now.” This was when the Lower East Side was still a little bit dangerous and had prostitutes and I’d be like, “But there’s a great bar at the end,” and I’d come from a culture where you went out and enjoyed yourself and they never could get that. Kim particularly was uncomfortable with that kind of lifestyle.’

His allies and colleagues were also noticing a slight
possessiveness
in Smith over the band. When Sonic Youth played live, Smith was either behind the mixing desk or could be glimpsed stage right, cross-legged behind a monitor. Smith, with some justification, would explain that such closeness was a product of his intensity and commitment. Others detected a hint of claustrophobia.

‘Sonic Youth didn’t have a manager. They didn’t have a record label. They didn’t have an agent,’ says Richard Thomas. ‘What they had was Paul, who should’ve let go a little bit sooner.’ Thomas also saw that Sonic Youth were having an influence on their generation in the manner of a modern-day Velvet Underground, particularly in London, where Thomas was noticing several of the
C86
-era bands were growing out their hair and buying larger amps. ‘The impact of Sonic Youth and the Blast First bands was pretty instant,’ he says. ‘Overnight, bands I’d put on before all had twice as many effects pedals.’

American music was now a currency that other labels were exploring. Smith, having failed to interest anyone three years earlier, was now seen as a totemic presence around London, somewhere between a seer and a hustler who had revitalised the sector.

‘Ivo called me up,’ says Smith, ‘and said, “I’ve just signed a band that sounds like one of yours. I’ve looked at all the records and it doesn’t say who produces them. I assume it’s you. Would you like to produce this record?” Stupidly I said, “No, no, I don’t produce the records, they all produce themselves.” Really stupid, because if I had produced the Pixies I could’ve shut their fucking career down. Much as I have to say I love Kim Deal, and had some nice times with Kim … but if only I could’ve kept my mouth shut.’

The idea of putting bands with producers was not something that had ever occurred to Smith, who, for all the accusations that he was a control freak, acted as an enabler rather than a
hands-on
A&R. ‘You don’t need to be the man rushing up to Sonic Youth saying, “I’m just thinking a bit of a remix here, lads,”’ he says. ‘When those tapes arrived, you put it on, you sat there and kind of went, “Holy fuck.” You didn’t sit there going, “Hmm, I’m thinking if only we’d put you with the right producer,” or something.’

For Smith, in the eye of a hurricane it was full steam ahead in the small unit he had built in Harrow Road. But the idea of marrying the masthead group of the American underground – something that was now starting to be called ‘indie-rock,’ or ‘alternative’ – with the working dynamics of an industry-grade studio budget was on the rise in America. A handful of executives were starting to wonder what might happen if you dropped the ‘indie’ in ‘indie rock’ and see what occurred in the mainstream, never mind the alternative.