The Breeders - The Secret History Of The Breeders (Both Verbal And Musical) (Promotional CD 1994)
The Breeders - The Secret History Of The Breeders (Both Verbal And Musical) (Promotional CD 1994)
EAC | FLAC Image with CUE & LOG | 53:28 mins | Scans | RAR 3% Recovery | 311 MB
Alternative Rock / Interview | 1994 Elektra Records #PRCD 8934-2
EAC | FLAC Image with CUE & LOG | 53:28 mins | Scans | RAR 3% Recovery | 311 MB
Alternative Rock / Interview | 1994 Elektra Records #PRCD 8934-2
A one hour special with The Breeders in conversation about the making of Last Splash. Interview segments contain some full length tracks and some excerpts of tracks. Released in a stickered card sleeve.The Secret History Of The Breeders (Both Verbal And Musical) @ Discogs
Tracklist:
1. Segment 1 (16:07)
2. Segment 2 (20:12)
3. Segment 3 (17:09)
Segment 1
Kim: They're so rock. Yes, we do that sometimes
Josephine: Cigarette butts yes, gum no
Meet the Breeders
Kim: I have got to get some sleep
Josephine: I've got to get some food
Jim: It really sucks being a drummer cous' you sweat so badly it's not like you can wear those clothes again
Kim: It's a derogatory term homosexuals use towards hetero-sexuals: "Ooooh they're a breeder", which I think is funny
I'm Kurt St. Thomas, and welcome to an exclusive interview with the Breeders. For the next sixty minues, we'll go back into their history, and talk with members Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim MacPherson. The Breeders wre born in 1989, with the recording of Pod. The bands formation was a bit complicated, because its members were still involved in other projects. Kim was in the Pixies Tanya Donelly was in Throwing Muses And Josephine was playing bass for Perfect Disaster But Kim describes one night in 1989 when, at a Boston club called Access, she and Tanya decided to get together for an impromptu jam session.
Kim: Me and Tanya went to Access, and we thought we had a really good idea we could do a dance song. We were really gonna try it. So we got David Lovering and David Narcizo, went to the music shop, and got a drum machine. We went to a rehearsal space and David Lovering played the drum machine. Narcizo played the drum kit. I played bass, and Tanya played guitar. And it lasted for about two hours. It kind of broke the ice with me and Tanya and we were friends and when she would come over and said that she was just coming over she would bring her guitar with her. So, and then we started writing songs, and when 4AD heard about it they said: "well send us a demo". It's like: whoaw! So we went to Fort Apache and they said: "OK, record it" And then I said: well, I know this girl who could play bass her name is Josephine I don't know her last name and she lives some place over in Europe.
< Metal Man bit >
Kim explains how she met Perfect Disaster bassist Josephine Wiggs
Kim: Pixies were doing a show over in London at the Mean Fiddler, and we had an opening band that evening, and the opening band was Perfect Disaster. And that was when I just first saw Josephine. We just said: "Hello"
Josephine: Hello
Kim: Then about six months later the Pixies were in Frankfurt playing at the Batch Camp. And after the show I was playing pinball, doing really well probably [The rest of the band giggles] But Josephine came up and interrupted me and said:
Josephine: Hello, do you remember me?
Kim: And I did. And she was with her friend Anna So we stayed in front of the Batch Camp near the railway station till like four in the morning. And then Jospehine asked me:
Josephine: Eeeh, Kim, how are you getting back to your hotel?
Kim: And I said: you guys are gonna give me a lift. Because in the mean time, the bus had already left, it's four in the morning, nobody's around.
Josephine: And of course we didn't have a car, we had to try and find a taxi cab at four o'clock in the morning, in this suburb of Frankfurt, which was not an easy thing to do, I can tell you. I said: where is your hotel? And she said: "Oh, I had the adress written on a piece of paper, but I gave it away to someone". So she disappears back into this club and comes back about ten minutes later with these fragments of paper, which we pieced together sufficiently so that we could actually read the adress. We drive into Frankfurt city center and we're looking around it's like: Is this gonna be the hotel? Is this going to be it? We drive out of Frankfurt city center towards the airport. The meter has got up to about sixty marks, okay? Kim didn't have any money, I didn't have any money, my poor friend had to pay for this enourmously long taxi drive in order to take her to her hotel, which was at Frankfurt airport. It was perhaps not an auspicious start
Kim: Cause you were taking a flight that morning
Josephine: I was, that was what was so ironic. It was already like, five in the morning, and I was meant to be at the airport at seven for the flight I had to catch. But all my stuff was back at Frankfurt city center. [Kim laughs]
Josephine: But it's been pretty much like that ever since, actually. [The rest of the band laughs]
Josephine: That's the way we operate.
< Hellbound >
Even though Kim was in the Pixies, Tanya in Throwing Muses, and Jospehine in Perfect Disaster, the trio never thought the Breeders were anything but a bonified band. As Kim explains, the term side-project never came up in conversation.
Kim: But at no time did I ever think: Tanya, Josphine, do you want to play on my side-project? No, cause we were a band like a guitar based band. We had to be in the room all together and play at the same time to make the music that we play. We had a name. And we put an album out. And that album had a name. Do you know what I mean? It never felt like a side-project. It seems like a lot of electric dance music is side-project-y. You know what I mean? But with a guitar based, okay, it takes four people to play and we're all in the room together, let's go! Play! That's what Pod is, basically, recording the song playing. It just never felt like a side-project.
< Happiness is a Warm Gun >
That's Happiness is a Warm Gun. A Beatles cover that appears on the Breeders debut album Pod. At this time, the line-up for the band consisted of Kim Deal, Josephine Wiggs, Tanya Donelly, and a curiously named drummer Mike Hunt. < Safari beginning> But just as the Breeders called Kim away from the Pixies, so too did Belly call Tanya away from the Breeders. Kim explains.
Kim: So we were doing Safari, and Tanya was playing. She didn't think she was gonna be able to make it to do the recordings in New York city. Cause she was busy with the Gorman brothers and Fred Abong, getting Belly together. But she can't stay away from us so she flew in anyway. We met the Gorman brothers in New York city. We were even talking to her over with names of her new band, you know, that she was gonna have. But that was the last time we knew that Tanya was gonna be able to play with us.
< Safari end>
With the departure of Tanya Donelly, Kim recruted her twin sister Kelley Deal.
Kim: Kelley could play drums, cause she played drums in highschool. Josephine would be the bass player
Josephine: Although I felt she couldn't actually play snare drum and kick drum at the same time.
Kelley: No way.
Kim: thank God we didn't do that.
Kelley: Well, I was able to do that then, but I can't now.
Kim: And I would play the rhythm guitar. But, eh, she didn't want to play drums, she wanted to play the guitar. And I said: Well, you can't play guitar. And she said:
Kelley: I don't care, I want to play the guitar.
Kim: Anyway, so she learned the parts on Pod and then she played all the parts on Last Splash. It's not like Smashing Pumpkins. She's not the representative of a lead guitarist in the band. She actually plays on the album.
Kelley: Do you feel comfortable saying that?
Kim: Yeah, I feel pretty comfortable.
Josephine: Well they've said it themselves, haven't they?
Kim: Yeah, Kelley's not really in the band.
< Flipside part>
Enter drummer Jim MacPherson.
Kelley: Kim and I went to Canal Street Tavern, it's a local place in Dayton, we saw Jim there and Kim thought: "Oh he's really cute. I really like the way he beats the drums." So we were doing some demo's and stuff and we just envited him to do demo's with us and he did, and so then we just stole him from his band. But it wasn't that bad, because like his band, one of them was a substitute teacher and they couldn't like play on school nights and stuff.
Kim: So we don't feel that bad really.
Jim: They asked me if, you know, I either wanted to play Canal Street Tavern the rest of my life, or open up for Nirvana in Ireland. I told them I'd have to get back on them. [The rest of the band laughs] And I also have a pickup truck. Can you do that, huh? You guys add it up. < Flipside end>
Kim: Okay, now Jim's gonna play the songs with us and, okay, Josephine's flying in soon, ehm, why don't you learn all the songs on Pod and ehm, and all the songs on Safari too.
Jim: For which I had two and a half days to do that.
Kim: And he learned it.
Jim: I stayed up till wee hours in the morning. I was no fool. I knew it was happening.
Kim: One of the first things that we did on our list of things to do now as a band was to fly over to Europe and open for Nirvana, and then do like the Glastonbury festival. Let me tell you, we were petrified.
Kelley: Yeah
Jim: I went from a two hundred and fifty seater Canal Street Tavern to an eight thousand seater in Dublin. Then we played the Parkpop festival in Holland for a hundred and fifty thousand people. And I can't even remember it. [Everyone laughs]
< Invisible Man>
You're listening to an exclusive interview with The Breeders. When we come back, we'll find out about the making of the Breeders LP Last Splash.
Segment 2
< Flipside end>
We're back, with The Breeders. In her career, Kim Deal has worked with a number of producers, including Steve Albini and Gill Norton. For Last Splash, Kim hooked up with Mark Freegard, and the results were quite different from Pod.
Kim: Pod was litterally just recorded. We all four stayed in this room. It was me and Tanya just ???. We didn't even wear headphones. We push record, and then we played the song, and then you press stop and we were done with that song. And that is the music on the album.
Josephine: There was nothing of 'well, I think we can do that better.' you know, 'well let's try it' you know.
Kim: Yeah, there was no deep bass punchins or anything like that. Whereas LAst Splash, if we didn't like a guitar sound and we would try it again.
Josephine: We would record a song and then maybe four days later after listening to the tape decide: "well, maybe we should've done that faster" or "we should've done it slower" and we go in and do another version.
Kelley: Yeah. For the demo's for Pod how long were they sitting around before they actually got recorded? You know, like a year. And when they went with Last Splash, you know, lots of these songs had only been in existance for, like two months. And it takes a while to listen to a song. To figure out what you want to do with it. You know. Where it's home is.
< Cannonball>
That's Cannonball. The first single from the Breeders LP Last Splash. To make the video for Cannonball, the band recruited Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, who by the way had never directed a music video before.
Kim: See, we recorded in San Francisco, but then after about five weeks after the recording we went over the Golden Gate bridge and lived in Saucolito (??) while we mixed at the notorious Plant studios there. And we lived on house boats. So on one of these house boats in april, I looked at Josephine and said: Do you know who I think would be a good video director? Kim Gordon.
Josephine: And I said: Has she ever directed a video before?
Kim: And I said: No, I don't think so.
Kelley: And she codirected it with Spike Jones, and, like, 100%, the Sonic Youth video, all those skate boarding shots, Spike Jones did. So Spike did a lot of what they call B-rolls.
Kim: Kim was like more of the big picture person. We just got done doing the second video, Divine Hammer, with her. She went to Dayton, Ohio.
Kelley: Yeah, they got a lot of Deliverance-looking shots.
Kim: So then me and Kelley went to L.A. to do another section of the video, because the name of the video again is Divine Hammer, so, this song was supposed to be, you know, when people, christian bands like Peter Paul and Mary, they always give you symbols to sing. You know, If I Had a Hammer, I'd be a Carpenter, Miles from the Meltons. And so I'm kind of making fun of it saying: Oh yeah, I'm looking for a Divine Hammer. Then it's got divinity in it so I wore a nun-outfit. Kelley was in a choir-outfit. They put a harness on us, underneath the cloathing, and then there's two little attachments on the back, near the spine. And then they had a big crane with two little aircraft cables, hooked it on the back of the harness, and cranked us up in the air, and then drove this thing down the road. [Kelley giggles] It was humiliating. [giggles all over] We're hanging.
Kelley: We're pretending like we're flying or something.
Kim: Flying nuns, yeah we're flying nuns, that's what we are. It was Thurston's idea.
< Divine Hammer>
That's Divine Hammer. The second single from the Last Splash. Another song that appears on the LP is Do You Love Me Now?, a song previously released on the Safari EP. It's a little different from the Safari version. In fact, it's slower in tempo.
Josephine: It's even more different than you thought, then, apparantly. [Kelley laughs] Because it's very very different. It's like half the speed. < Do You Love Me Now start> We were playing the song live, and every time it came to do this song, you know, Kim would start it up and I would say: No, I think it's slower than that. < Do You Love Me Now start, slower>
Kim: Eehm, I don't think so. < faster again>
Josephine: No, I think it's slower than that. No, it's slower. < and slower…>
Kim: It's seems a little slow. [laughs]
Jim: Kim would be looking back at me saying, you know, 'speed it up', and then just give me these cold eyes, 'Don't you dare'
Kim: I was dying.
Jim: Yeah, real dark and menacing, and keep-rock-evil-feel.
Kelley: Keep-rock-evil-feel, that's great.
< Do You Love Me Now (slow version)>
That's Do You Love Me Now. Kim Deal is credited as vocalist on the LP. But there is one song where her sister Kelley sings lead. It's called: I Just Wanna Get Along. And it too has a complicated origin. Kelley explains.
Kelley: That was actually from the Pod recordings, that song was. And it didn't cut the mustard at that time. But I remember hearing that on a tape, and I just never forgot. I thought it was such a rock song. I just loved it. And so we were…
Josephine: That's why we didn't put it on the album. You know that, didn't you. [Kelley and Jos laugh]
Kelley: I guess. So when we were trying to figure out songs. How many songs do we have, okay. We gotta make this longer than Pod. I thought: What about I Just Wanna Get Along? So, we went out and did it.
Kim: Yeah, and it turned out to be one of my favourite songs.
Josephine: That's essentially got one of my favourite lyrics in it. I really like: 'If you're so special why aren't you dead?' [everyone laughs]
Kelley: That is great, isn't it?
< I Just Wanna Get Along>
That's I Just Wanna Get Along, from the Breeders LP Last Splash. Josephine has loaned her vocal stylings to a number of Breeder songs. But she takes the lead on the B-side of the Cannonball single. It's a cover of Aerosmith's Lord of the Thighs. And as the band explains, it's more tongue and cheak than tribute.
Kim: So this is an old song from the seventies, and Josephine sings it.
Kelley and Jo: She does the 'vocal stylings'.
Kelley: Josephine has a good point about this though. In America that is really hilarious. Her English voice doing this. But she lives in England, so for her…
Josephine: It's like, I can just imagine everybody thinking: Oh, why isn't Kim singing this? Because her voise is so cool, it's, you know, got this cool American… thing.
Kim: And also the lines, some of the lines in that song. He's just such a leering sexist pig. And some of them were, you know, 'I was with my girls when you caught my eye', 'your fashion across the floor' [Josephine giggles]
Josephine: So, the point is that it's a kind of a joke, because it is so sexist to think of a guy, you know, leering in that kind of a way. So I think, you know, Kim thought it would be fun to have a girl singing.
Kelley: A girl leering as well.
< Lord of Your Thighs>
There's more conversation and music with The Breeders, after this…
Segment 3
< bass part of Cannonball>
We're back, with The Breeders.
< Saints>
That's Saints from the Breeders Elektra LP Last Splash. Putting together the music of the Breeders is often a group effort. But writing it sometimes falls into different hands. Josephine's 900, which appears on the Cannonball CD single, is the sad but true story of a failed expedition to the arctic.
Josephine: In the mid nineteenth century, when they were first crossing the arctic, this was one of the first sea-expeditions to be supplied with tinned food. And they hadn't quite got the whole technique down. So all the food was contaminated, and all the people on the ship got lead poisoning and they went crazy. And the ship got locked in ice.
Kim: Which happened a lot.
Josephine: Yeah, it was a regular thing for this north-west passage. The thing is, that you just have to wait for four months until the ice melted and then you could carry on. But of course, all these people had just lost their minds by this point, and they decided they were gonna set off over the ice, on foot, you know. And they had these sledges in order to take stuff with them, but they took the dummest things. They took all the tables and the chairs! And the cutlery. And it just struck me as: what a dumb thing, you know, but it's like, it's tragic. It's just so tragic to think of these people in the middle of nowhere, thinking that they're getting themselves together, you know, "We're gonna do it. This is it. We're doing it.", and yet it's so… absurd. It was a thousand miles until they reached the sea, to cross the ice. And they got about a hundred miles, and by that time they were all dead.
< 900>
That's the Breeders' 900. Featuring on cello: Josephine Wiggs. Another song on the Cannonball CD single is Cro Aloha. A tune that, as the band tries to explain, gave birth to the song No Aloha, which appears on Last Splash.
Jim: Well, I'll just say one thing about it, ehm. This was the first song that I actually played with Kim and Kelley and Josephine for a demo. This is the first demo version that they asked me to play on. And Kim was just like, just please go nuts on the drums, and like: Yeah! This is gonna be fun!
Josephine: And it's like, you know, the early version of No Aloha. And it was recorded in a studio in Dayton called Cro Magnon, okay. So, this is another example of a story being made up after the event. [giggles of the band] Cause I said it was like Cro Aloha because it was lower down on the evolutionary scale than No Aloha, you see. Like Cro Magnon man.
< Cro Aloha>
Jim: Kim and Kelly did the lyrics in the bathroom. They sang it and I guess she got some ideas from the bathroom.
Kim: Yeah. Saw it on the wall. Motherhood means mental freeze. It was sitting there in graffiti on the wall.
First you heard Cro Aloha, and now here's No Aloha from Last Splash.
< No Aloha>
The making of Last Splash required the band to be at several places at several times. Since Josephine lives in England, the band has to coordinate her trips to the states with the recording time and tours. Josephine and Kim explain the rigours of being in the Breeders.
< Roi on the background>
Josephine: It bears a lot, I mean before doing the album we all transplanted to San Francisco, so we rehearsed for the album in San Francisco, before going into recording. And then again when we did some shows in London everyone came over to London and we rehearsed in London. But last year for example I spent quite a lot of time in Dayton because we were doing rehearsals for the US tour.
Kim: But we really… were together, it seems like a lot, but hardly ever in one place. We were just travelling around so much.
Kim, Kelley, Jim and Josephine will all be together again, when they head to the studio to record their next album. But for now, the Breeders will rely on cigarettes, beef burritos and insects for inspiration.
Jim: It's a song about beatles running towards the light for a big nuclear bomb.
Kim: That's right.
Josephine: Was it cockroaches?
Kim: We worked out this whole story for it.
Josephine: You mean you worked out the story after you'd written the song.
Kim: But I don't think about that, yeah.
Josephine: That's what I thought.
Jim: Me and Kim were in Cro Magnon and we were listening back to it. Cockroaches are the only thing that could survive and…
Kim: And that's a new year. That's right. Now we do the New Year, right?
Jim: Yeah. And the light would be the after-light.
Kelley: You guys are geeks.
Jim: You're just saying that because you weren't there.
Here's the song New Year. I'm Kurt St. Thomas, thanks for listening.
Kim: They're so rock. Yes, we do that sometimes
Josephine: Cigarette butts yes, gum no
Meet the Breeders
Kim: I have got to get some sleep
Josephine: I've got to get some food
Jim: It really sucks being a drummer cous' you sweat so badly it's not like you can wear those clothes again
Kim: It's a derogatory term homosexuals use towards hetero-sexuals: "Ooooh they're a breeder", which I think is funny
I'm Kurt St. Thomas, and welcome to an exclusive interview with the Breeders. For the next sixty minues, we'll go back into their history, and talk with members Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim MacPherson. The Breeders wre born in 1989, with the recording of Pod. The bands formation was a bit complicated, because its members were still involved in other projects. Kim was in the Pixies Tanya Donelly was in Throwing Muses And Josephine was playing bass for Perfect Disaster But Kim describes one night in 1989 when, at a Boston club called Access, she and Tanya decided to get together for an impromptu jam session.
Kim: Me and Tanya went to Access, and we thought we had a really good idea we could do a dance song. We were really gonna try it. So we got David Lovering and David Narcizo, went to the music shop, and got a drum machine. We went to a rehearsal space and David Lovering played the drum machine. Narcizo played the drum kit. I played bass, and Tanya played guitar. And it lasted for about two hours. It kind of broke the ice with me and Tanya and we were friends and when she would come over and said that she was just coming over she would bring her guitar with her. So, and then we started writing songs, and when 4AD heard about it they said: "well send us a demo". It's like: whoaw! So we went to Fort Apache and they said: "OK, record it" And then I said: well, I know this girl who could play bass her name is Josephine I don't know her last name and she lives some place over in Europe.
< Metal Man bit >
Kim explains how she met Perfect Disaster bassist Josephine Wiggs
Kim: Pixies were doing a show over in London at the Mean Fiddler, and we had an opening band that evening, and the opening band was Perfect Disaster. And that was when I just first saw Josephine. We just said: "Hello"
Josephine: Hello
Kim: Then about six months later the Pixies were in Frankfurt playing at the Batch Camp. And after the show I was playing pinball, doing really well probably [The rest of the band giggles] But Josephine came up and interrupted me and said:
Josephine: Hello, do you remember me?
Kim: And I did. And she was with her friend Anna So we stayed in front of the Batch Camp near the railway station till like four in the morning. And then Jospehine asked me:
Josephine: Eeeh, Kim, how are you getting back to your hotel?
Kim: And I said: you guys are gonna give me a lift. Because in the mean time, the bus had already left, it's four in the morning, nobody's around.
Josephine: And of course we didn't have a car, we had to try and find a taxi cab at four o'clock in the morning, in this suburb of Frankfurt, which was not an easy thing to do, I can tell you. I said: where is your hotel? And she said: "Oh, I had the adress written on a piece of paper, but I gave it away to someone". So she disappears back into this club and comes back about ten minutes later with these fragments of paper, which we pieced together sufficiently so that we could actually read the adress. We drive into Frankfurt city center and we're looking around it's like: Is this gonna be the hotel? Is this going to be it? We drive out of Frankfurt city center towards the airport. The meter has got up to about sixty marks, okay? Kim didn't have any money, I didn't have any money, my poor friend had to pay for this enourmously long taxi drive in order to take her to her hotel, which was at Frankfurt airport. It was perhaps not an auspicious start
Kim: Cause you were taking a flight that morning
Josephine: I was, that was what was so ironic. It was already like, five in the morning, and I was meant to be at the airport at seven for the flight I had to catch. But all my stuff was back at Frankfurt city center. [Kim laughs]
Josephine: But it's been pretty much like that ever since, actually. [The rest of the band laughs]
Josephine: That's the way we operate.
< Hellbound >
Even though Kim was in the Pixies, Tanya in Throwing Muses, and Jospehine in Perfect Disaster, the trio never thought the Breeders were anything but a bonified band. As Kim explains, the term side-project never came up in conversation.
Kim: But at no time did I ever think: Tanya, Josphine, do you want to play on my side-project? No, cause we were a band like a guitar based band. We had to be in the room all together and play at the same time to make the music that we play. We had a name. And we put an album out. And that album had a name. Do you know what I mean? It never felt like a side-project. It seems like a lot of electric dance music is side-project-y. You know what I mean? But with a guitar based, okay, it takes four people to play and we're all in the room together, let's go! Play! That's what Pod is, basically, recording the song playing. It just never felt like a side-project.
< Happiness is a Warm Gun >
That's Happiness is a Warm Gun. A Beatles cover that appears on the Breeders debut album Pod. At this time, the line-up for the band consisted of Kim Deal, Josephine Wiggs, Tanya Donelly, and a curiously named drummer Mike Hunt. < Safari beginning> But just as the Breeders called Kim away from the Pixies, so too did Belly call Tanya away from the Breeders. Kim explains.
Kim: So we were doing Safari, and Tanya was playing. She didn't think she was gonna be able to make it to do the recordings in New York city. Cause she was busy with the Gorman brothers and Fred Abong, getting Belly together. But she can't stay away from us so she flew in anyway. We met the Gorman brothers in New York city. We were even talking to her over with names of her new band, you know, that she was gonna have. But that was the last time we knew that Tanya was gonna be able to play with us.
< Safari end>
With the departure of Tanya Donelly, Kim recruted her twin sister Kelley Deal.
Kim: Kelley could play drums, cause she played drums in highschool. Josephine would be the bass player
Josephine: Although I felt she couldn't actually play snare drum and kick drum at the same time.
Kelley: No way.
Kim: thank God we didn't do that.
Kelley: Well, I was able to do that then, but I can't now.
Kim: And I would play the rhythm guitar. But, eh, she didn't want to play drums, she wanted to play the guitar. And I said: Well, you can't play guitar. And she said:
Kelley: I don't care, I want to play the guitar.
Kim: Anyway, so she learned the parts on Pod and then she played all the parts on Last Splash. It's not like Smashing Pumpkins. She's not the representative of a lead guitarist in the band. She actually plays on the album.
Kelley: Do you feel comfortable saying that?
Kim: Yeah, I feel pretty comfortable.
Josephine: Well they've said it themselves, haven't they?
Kim: Yeah, Kelley's not really in the band.
< Flipside part>
Enter drummer Jim MacPherson.
Kelley: Kim and I went to Canal Street Tavern, it's a local place in Dayton, we saw Jim there and Kim thought: "Oh he's really cute. I really like the way he beats the drums." So we were doing some demo's and stuff and we just envited him to do demo's with us and he did, and so then we just stole him from his band. But it wasn't that bad, because like his band, one of them was a substitute teacher and they couldn't like play on school nights and stuff.
Kim: So we don't feel that bad really.
Jim: They asked me if, you know, I either wanted to play Canal Street Tavern the rest of my life, or open up for Nirvana in Ireland. I told them I'd have to get back on them. [The rest of the band laughs] And I also have a pickup truck. Can you do that, huh? You guys add it up. < Flipside end>
Kim: Okay, now Jim's gonna play the songs with us and, okay, Josephine's flying in soon, ehm, why don't you learn all the songs on Pod and ehm, and all the songs on Safari too.
Jim: For which I had two and a half days to do that.
Kim: And he learned it.
Jim: I stayed up till wee hours in the morning. I was no fool. I knew it was happening.
Kim: One of the first things that we did on our list of things to do now as a band was to fly over to Europe and open for Nirvana, and then do like the Glastonbury festival. Let me tell you, we were petrified.
Kelley: Yeah
Jim: I went from a two hundred and fifty seater Canal Street Tavern to an eight thousand seater in Dublin. Then we played the Parkpop festival in Holland for a hundred and fifty thousand people. And I can't even remember it. [Everyone laughs]
< Invisible Man>
You're listening to an exclusive interview with The Breeders. When we come back, we'll find out about the making of the Breeders LP Last Splash.
Segment 2
< Flipside end>
We're back, with The Breeders. In her career, Kim Deal has worked with a number of producers, including Steve Albini and Gill Norton. For Last Splash, Kim hooked up with Mark Freegard, and the results were quite different from Pod.
Kim: Pod was litterally just recorded. We all four stayed in this room. It was me and Tanya just ???. We didn't even wear headphones. We push record, and then we played the song, and then you press stop and we were done with that song. And that is the music on the album.
Josephine: There was nothing of 'well, I think we can do that better.' you know, 'well let's try it' you know.
Kim: Yeah, there was no deep bass punchins or anything like that. Whereas LAst Splash, if we didn't like a guitar sound and we would try it again.
Josephine: We would record a song and then maybe four days later after listening to the tape decide: "well, maybe we should've done that faster" or "we should've done it slower" and we go in and do another version.
Kelley: Yeah. For the demo's for Pod how long were they sitting around before they actually got recorded? You know, like a year. And when they went with Last Splash, you know, lots of these songs had only been in existance for, like two months. And it takes a while to listen to a song. To figure out what you want to do with it. You know. Where it's home is.
< Cannonball>
That's Cannonball. The first single from the Breeders LP Last Splash. To make the video for Cannonball, the band recruited Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, who by the way had never directed a music video before.
Kim: See, we recorded in San Francisco, but then after about five weeks after the recording we went over the Golden Gate bridge and lived in Saucolito (??) while we mixed at the notorious Plant studios there. And we lived on house boats. So on one of these house boats in april, I looked at Josephine and said: Do you know who I think would be a good video director? Kim Gordon.
Josephine: And I said: Has she ever directed a video before?
Kim: And I said: No, I don't think so.
Kelley: And she codirected it with Spike Jones, and, like, 100%, the Sonic Youth video, all those skate boarding shots, Spike Jones did. So Spike did a lot of what they call B-rolls.
Kim: Kim was like more of the big picture person. We just got done doing the second video, Divine Hammer, with her. She went to Dayton, Ohio.
Kelley: Yeah, they got a lot of Deliverance-looking shots.
Kim: So then me and Kelley went to L.A. to do another section of the video, because the name of the video again is Divine Hammer, so, this song was supposed to be, you know, when people, christian bands like Peter Paul and Mary, they always give you symbols to sing. You know, If I Had a Hammer, I'd be a Carpenter, Miles from the Meltons. And so I'm kind of making fun of it saying: Oh yeah, I'm looking for a Divine Hammer. Then it's got divinity in it so I wore a nun-outfit. Kelley was in a choir-outfit. They put a harness on us, underneath the cloathing, and then there's two little attachments on the back, near the spine. And then they had a big crane with two little aircraft cables, hooked it on the back of the harness, and cranked us up in the air, and then drove this thing down the road. [Kelley giggles] It was humiliating. [giggles all over] We're hanging.
Kelley: We're pretending like we're flying or something.
Kim: Flying nuns, yeah we're flying nuns, that's what we are. It was Thurston's idea.
< Divine Hammer>
That's Divine Hammer. The second single from the Last Splash. Another song that appears on the LP is Do You Love Me Now?, a song previously released on the Safari EP. It's a little different from the Safari version. In fact, it's slower in tempo.
Josephine: It's even more different than you thought, then, apparantly. [Kelley laughs] Because it's very very different. It's like half the speed. < Do You Love Me Now start> We were playing the song live, and every time it came to do this song, you know, Kim would start it up and I would say: No, I think it's slower than that. < Do You Love Me Now start, slower>
Kim: Eehm, I don't think so. < faster again>
Josephine: No, I think it's slower than that. No, it's slower. < and slower…>
Kim: It's seems a little slow. [laughs]
Jim: Kim would be looking back at me saying, you know, 'speed it up', and then just give me these cold eyes, 'Don't you dare'
Kim: I was dying.
Jim: Yeah, real dark and menacing, and keep-rock-evil-feel.
Kelley: Keep-rock-evil-feel, that's great.
< Do You Love Me Now (slow version)>
That's Do You Love Me Now. Kim Deal is credited as vocalist on the LP. But there is one song where her sister Kelley sings lead. It's called: I Just Wanna Get Along. And it too has a complicated origin. Kelley explains.
Kelley: That was actually from the Pod recordings, that song was. And it didn't cut the mustard at that time. But I remember hearing that on a tape, and I just never forgot. I thought it was such a rock song. I just loved it. And so we were…
Josephine: That's why we didn't put it on the album. You know that, didn't you. [Kelley and Jos laugh]
Kelley: I guess. So when we were trying to figure out songs. How many songs do we have, okay. We gotta make this longer than Pod. I thought: What about I Just Wanna Get Along? So, we went out and did it.
Kim: Yeah, and it turned out to be one of my favourite songs.
Josephine: That's essentially got one of my favourite lyrics in it. I really like: 'If you're so special why aren't you dead?' [everyone laughs]
Kelley: That is great, isn't it?
< I Just Wanna Get Along>
That's I Just Wanna Get Along, from the Breeders LP Last Splash. Josephine has loaned her vocal stylings to a number of Breeder songs. But she takes the lead on the B-side of the Cannonball single. It's a cover of Aerosmith's Lord of the Thighs. And as the band explains, it's more tongue and cheak than tribute.
Kim: So this is an old song from the seventies, and Josephine sings it.
Kelley and Jo: She does the 'vocal stylings'.
Kelley: Josephine has a good point about this though. In America that is really hilarious. Her English voice doing this. But she lives in England, so for her…
Josephine: It's like, I can just imagine everybody thinking: Oh, why isn't Kim singing this? Because her voise is so cool, it's, you know, got this cool American… thing.
Kim: And also the lines, some of the lines in that song. He's just such a leering sexist pig. And some of them were, you know, 'I was with my girls when you caught my eye', 'your fashion across the floor' [Josephine giggles]
Josephine: So, the point is that it's a kind of a joke, because it is so sexist to think of a guy, you know, leering in that kind of a way. So I think, you know, Kim thought it would be fun to have a girl singing.
Kelley: A girl leering as well.
< Lord of Your Thighs>
There's more conversation and music with The Breeders, after this…
Segment 3
< bass part of Cannonball>
We're back, with The Breeders.
< Saints>
That's Saints from the Breeders Elektra LP Last Splash. Putting together the music of the Breeders is often a group effort. But writing it sometimes falls into different hands. Josephine's 900, which appears on the Cannonball CD single, is the sad but true story of a failed expedition to the arctic.
Josephine: In the mid nineteenth century, when they were first crossing the arctic, this was one of the first sea-expeditions to be supplied with tinned food. And they hadn't quite got the whole technique down. So all the food was contaminated, and all the people on the ship got lead poisoning and they went crazy. And the ship got locked in ice.
Kim: Which happened a lot.
Josephine: Yeah, it was a regular thing for this north-west passage. The thing is, that you just have to wait for four months until the ice melted and then you could carry on. But of course, all these people had just lost their minds by this point, and they decided they were gonna set off over the ice, on foot, you know. And they had these sledges in order to take stuff with them, but they took the dummest things. They took all the tables and the chairs! And the cutlery. And it just struck me as: what a dumb thing, you know, but it's like, it's tragic. It's just so tragic to think of these people in the middle of nowhere, thinking that they're getting themselves together, you know, "We're gonna do it. This is it. We're doing it.", and yet it's so… absurd. It was a thousand miles until they reached the sea, to cross the ice. And they got about a hundred miles, and by that time they were all dead.
< 900>
That's the Breeders' 900. Featuring on cello: Josephine Wiggs. Another song on the Cannonball CD single is Cro Aloha. A tune that, as the band tries to explain, gave birth to the song No Aloha, which appears on Last Splash.
Jim: Well, I'll just say one thing about it, ehm. This was the first song that I actually played with Kim and Kelley and Josephine for a demo. This is the first demo version that they asked me to play on. And Kim was just like, just please go nuts on the drums, and like: Yeah! This is gonna be fun!
Josephine: And it's like, you know, the early version of No Aloha. And it was recorded in a studio in Dayton called Cro Magnon, okay. So, this is another example of a story being made up after the event. [giggles of the band] Cause I said it was like Cro Aloha because it was lower down on the evolutionary scale than No Aloha, you see. Like Cro Magnon man.
< Cro Aloha>
Jim: Kim and Kelly did the lyrics in the bathroom. They sang it and I guess she got some ideas from the bathroom.
Kim: Yeah. Saw it on the wall. Motherhood means mental freeze. It was sitting there in graffiti on the wall.
First you heard Cro Aloha, and now here's No Aloha from Last Splash.
< No Aloha>
The making of Last Splash required the band to be at several places at several times. Since Josephine lives in England, the band has to coordinate her trips to the states with the recording time and tours. Josephine and Kim explain the rigours of being in the Breeders.
< Roi on the background>
Josephine: It bears a lot, I mean before doing the album we all transplanted to San Francisco, so we rehearsed for the album in San Francisco, before going into recording. And then again when we did some shows in London everyone came over to London and we rehearsed in London. But last year for example I spent quite a lot of time in Dayton because we were doing rehearsals for the US tour.
Kim: But we really… were together, it seems like a lot, but hardly ever in one place. We were just travelling around so much.
Kim, Kelley, Jim and Josephine will all be together again, when they head to the studio to record their next album. But for now, the Breeders will rely on cigarettes, beef burritos and insects for inspiration.
Jim: It's a song about beatles running towards the light for a big nuclear bomb.
Kim: That's right.
Josephine: Was it cockroaches?
Kim: We worked out this whole story for it.
Josephine: You mean you worked out the story after you'd written the song.
Kim: But I don't think about that, yeah.
Josephine: That's what I thought.
Jim: Me and Kim were in Cro Magnon and we were listening back to it. Cockroaches are the only thing that could survive and…
Kim: And that's a new year. That's right. Now we do the New Year, right?
Jim: Yeah. And the light would be the after-light.
Kelley: You guys are geeks.
Jim: You're just saying that because you weren't there.
Here's the song New Year. I'm Kurt St. Thomas, thanks for listening.
Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 2 from 29. April 2011
EAC extraction logfile from 1. September 2011, 9:41
The Breeders / The Secret History Of The Breeders (Both Verbal And Musical)
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==== Log checksum 519ACFA10BBE51106A4C8DB7D0E6863A78A7EE55B251D6CDBC30A0E23BD6FED4 ====
EAC extraction logfile from 1. September 2011, 9:41
The Breeders / The Secret History Of The Breeders (Both Verbal And Musical)
Used drive : TDK CDRW4800B Adapter: 2 ID: 1
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Used output format : Internal WAV Routines
Sample format : 44.100 Hz; 16 Bit; Stereo
TOC of the extracted CD
Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
1 | 0:00.32 | 16:07.15 | 32 | 72571
2 | 16:07.47 | 20:11.38 | 72572 | 163434
3 | 36:19.10 | 17:09.37 | 163435 | 240646
Range status and errors
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Filename E:\[# AvaxHome #]\The Breeders - The Secret History Of The Breeders (Both Verbal And Musical).wav
Peak level 97.7 %
Extraction speed 9.5 X
Range quality 100.0 %
Test CRC 10995C4C
Copy CRC 10995C4C
Copy OK
No errors occurred
AccurateRip summary
Track 1 not present in database
Track 2 not present in database
Track 3 not present in database
None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database
End of status report
==== Log checksum 519ACFA10BBE51106A4C8DB7D0E6863A78A7EE55B251D6CDBC30A0E23BD6FED4 ====