Chain Reaction
David Sprague / Music Express
1989
1989
Edition #142
Charles Grodin, an actor and a cynic, recently finished his memoirs, entitled It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here. Chuck and I have never been , you know, like this, so I'm not entirely sure what the heck the title's supposed to mean either. But I do know that it's a shame he picked such precise wording - wording that's tailor-made for the someday-to-be-published Jesus and Mary Chain story.
It's all too easy to peg an off-kilter artist as "living in his own world" - which is, usually, codified music-biz slang for "his elevator doesn't go all the way to the top." But Jim and William Reid, the perfectly sane brothers who (for all intents and purposes) are The Jesus and Mary Chain, dream of doing just that. Trouble is, their East Kilbride bedroom fantasies - the one about being in a pop band, that is - came to fruition all too quickly. It's one thing, as the odd Twilight Zone/Night Gallery episode'll illustrate, to dream of ruling the world. To actually ascend the throne, however, is another thing altogether.
"To be totally honest, I don't think we have all that much fun anymore," sighs Jim Reid, on a break from the filming of the Mary Chain's Blues From A Gun video. "I don't think anything can live up to the image of what you think it's going to be like. Or even to the first few months of playing. That was just the best time for us."
of course, those first few months (now over five years gone) saw The Jesus and Mary Chain revered/reviled like no band since Malcolm McLaren's clerks got together in that combo called... what was it again? But where that other band gained notoriety with a spray of unfocused attitude, a few well-torn bits of haute-couture and a Ramones songbook, The Jesus and Mary Chain were doing something really threatening. They were messing with the music (man).
"At the beginning, people were always talkin' about the 15-minute sets we did," says Jim, who is surprisingly soft-spoken. "But sometimes we didn't make it to seven minutes. It was all down to the type of sound we had. Plus we'd only written about five songs. We were just doing what came naturally."
But the seismograph-sensitive British press thought they'd seen either the future - a future in which rock'n'roll would be obsolete (which Jim once claimed the Chain was intended to do) - or else, well... Mick Farren, who no longer writes frequently enough about rock music, insisted, "There's been considerable confusion on the part of the audience as to whether the band was tuning, playing or experiencing technical difficulties."
By creating some of the most pristine, crystalline-pure Beach Boys/Velvets (circa third LP)/Phil Spector pop songs, then forcing their heads into vats of poisoned feedback, the Mary Chain created something - a pastiche, sure, but one that touched a nerve in anyone who cared anything about pop music as more than just a temporary diversion. Psychocandy, the 1985 debut LP, distilled this mixture perfectly. But after the raves had abated, most everyone was left wondering what The Jesus and Mary Chain would do for an encore. And this number doubtlessly included the Reids themselves. After all, the brothers (along with sole other constant Douglas Hart) talked ceaselessly of Psychocandy's place as the greatest record of all time - or, when feeling modest, of the past 20 years. How to top it?
"Well, at the time we made it, Psychocandy was the best possible record anyone could've made," Jim confirms. "And we had to top that. At the same time, when we made Darklands, we knew it had to be different. We felt suffocated by the kind of press we were getting. It seemed that the guitar sound and the goings on onstage were getting more attention than the songs. So we deliberately set out to make a record that no one could talk about without talking about the songs first. But this time, we just set out to make a great album."
This time, they have. Automatic, the new Jesus and Mary Chain album, captures a band two years further down the road, but the Reids haven't lost one iota of the emotional starkness that marked their previous releases. Alternating between the hopeless, spider-webbed love songs they've all but perfected (Halfway To Crazy, Head On) and the menacing, space-age Spector threats they've churned out frighteningly easily (the Sidewwalking-like Gimme Hell, Her Way Of Praying), Automatic sounds as if they've spent the whole 24 months toiling over it. Jim Reid wouldn't argue with that.
"People expect a lot from the Mary Chain," he confirms. "That's why we take so long making a record. We're not lazy. But I think if you're making music and you find the process easy, you're doing something wrong. It's the kind of thing where you have to keep tryin' and tryin' until you get as close as you can to what you consider perfection."
The past couple of years, Jim reckons, have been the toughest in the band's history. Having fired Alan McGee, the man many called the JAMC's Svengali, Jim and William spent a good bit of time trying to act as managers themselves. McGee's departure, perhaps coincidentally, saw a switch in the band's public face - a desire for more acceptance, maybe?
"Not really," Jim muses. "We managed ourselves for a year-and-a-half, which was probably the most depressing time we've been through. You can't get away from it, really, 'cause every minute of every day, someone from the record company is phoning you up and asking you about things you'd rather not think about.
"These days, though, we try to have as little to do with the business end as possible. We may sound different now, or play longer or more professionally. But it's merely because we want to. We have definite ideas as to what the Mary Chain should be doing right now, and we're acting on them."
Does the record company have the same ideas?
"Not usually."
How do you differ?
"We got quite a lot of resistance from the record company [when it came to] releasing Blues From A Gun as the single," Jim replies evenly. "More or less, they thought we were insane. I can see their point, but we think our reasoning is quite good. We've been away for a year-and-a-half with no records out [Barbed Wire Kisses, a collection of B-sides, was released early last year], and we felt that to come back with something really poppy, like Halfway Crazy, would be a bit too... obvious."
Both Jim and William Reid have spoken in hushed tones about what they'd do if The Jesus and Mary Chain became superstars. In a sense, the master plan seems incongruous when one considers their oft-professed disdain for the music business in general. Were there unlimited capital in the JAMC coffers, the Reids would start a record label of their own. Something, Jim says, to enable him to release his own records only when he felt like it.
"We do set extremely high standards for ourselves," he explains, continuing a theme that's apparently very important to him. "I don't understand why groups feel they have to put out a record every year, when doing that means you have albums that are mostly filler."
It's odd, in a way, that a band so self-contained - so introverted (Jim grunts affirmatively at the adjective) - should have such devoted fans. Does the adulation please the Reids?
"I don't like it when people get too fanatical about it," he whispers. "When someone can't see the flaws in someone else - that kind of attitude is totally wrong. You get somebody followin' you around who thinks you're God Almighty and you've just got to feel sorry for them."
In a sense, this shows rather readily when The Jesus and Mary Chain are onstage. From their well-documented early gigs, which were basically, formless, 15-minute feedback fests, through their first North American gigs (which weren't much longer), Messrs. Reid, Reid and Hart kept their backs turned to the audience until their set inevitably collapsed into Jesus Suck, and equipment went flying. Even on recent tours, with the band fleshed out with a second guitarist, Bobby Gillespie's old galley-slave kettle-drum set-up replaced by a professional looking skinsman and sets constructed with consideration of not only the music, but of the ebb and flow needed to keep an hour-long show afloat, Jim (and especially William) seemed as though they'd much rather be somewhere else.
"I think the way we are live confuses a lot of people," agrees Jim. "See, none of us are really show people. We consider ourselves musicians, not entertainers, and I guess we sometimes come across as cold because we don't have any conversations with the audience. But really, the only way I can describe it is to say that I don't have anything to say to them. Anything I did say would be totally false and we'll never do anything false.
After all this time, Jim Reid still insists that The Jesus and Mary Chain are, in a sense, an Immaculate Conception. In other words, no forethought has apparently gone into their seemingly well-sculpted image of leather and shades, smoke and slhouette, rock myth and anti-rock myth-busting all in one neat package. And he genuinely seems to believe it when he insists their only contrivance was to "become the greatest band in the world." To be fair, he does give credit to the band's obvious antecedents - to cult legends the Fire Engines for braving 15-minute sets in 1980, and to Lee Hazelwood, whose eerie mid-'60s compositions (like Some Velvet Morning) the Mary Chain have electrified. But he's often been just as quick to lambaste folks as diverse as Lou Reed, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, without whom, it might be argued, the Mary Chain might be just another British pop band. It could be suggested that some of the bombast is for effect - to simply piss people off.
"It depends," Jim chuckles. "I suppose we do that. But a lot of people have pissed me off, so why shouldn't I do the same?
Well, sometimes the Mary Chain seem to have picked the wrong targets...
"I quite often do stupid things when I'm drunk," mutters the singer. "Probably all the stupid things I've done in my life have happened when I've been drinking too much. Sometimes I can't control my drinking habits, and though I'm not a drunk, I do tend to get a bit mouthy."
So that's what was behind the incident in Toronto during the last tour (Jim, apparently well-oiled, responded to a group of hecklers shouting "Boring!" by attacking them; first with a mike stand, later with a bottle. He ended up spending the night in a jail and eventually received an unconditional discharge). He responds to the very mention of the city with a groan.
"Yes, I remember. I feel totally responsible," he sighs, a note of genuine sincerity in his voice. "I've got to take all the blame for that. It was just one of those nights when I played too drunk and behaved really stupidly. That's one of the nights I regret the most in the band's history."
While quite willing to talk openly about drink (giving him the advantage over, say, Shane MacGowan), Jim Reid is mum when talk turns to... harder substances. There've always been rumors of abundant drug use in the Reid camp (which the brothers have always denied). And JAMC songs, from day one, have had not-so-sly drug references you don't have to be a rock critic to notice. Automatic, f'instance, leads off with Here Comes Alice, a jaunty tune that wraps love addiction in Waiting For The Man lingo, while Coast To Coast whispers of "junk gun fever," "senses strung out" and the like. There's more, but Jim doesn't want to discuss it.
Matter of fact, he doesn't like discussing lyrics at all, insisting that it's William who writes all of them anyway (a mild exaggeration, from what I've been led to believe). he then adds that their highly obsessive themes, like the oral sex overkill of early songs The Living End, Just Like Honey and Taste Of Cindy (and, for the extremely literal, who might be ready to accuse them of prurience, Head and Suck) and more recently, the insanity and/or suicide that dominated Darklands and Automatic, aren't particularly meaningful.
"To be quite honest with you," he laughs, "and I know this doesn't sound terribly convincing, it's just coincidence. Pure coincidence.
"I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with that, anyway. It would only become repetitive if we continued on album after album the same way. Sometimes you just want to write words that sound good. It's as simple as that - a selection of words that you think belong together. I've said it before, but that's what I love about Syd Barrett's lyrics. They don't mean [anything], but they don't have to. They sound good."
Is writing a pop song easy, then?
"The hardest thing in the world."
Does it help you deal with your emotions?
"That," he laughs softly, "is the second hardest thing in the world."
Charles Grodin, an actor and a cynic, recently finished his memoirs, entitled It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here. Chuck and I have never been , you know, like this, so I'm not entirely sure what the heck the title's supposed to mean either. But I do know that it's a shame he picked such precise wording - wording that's tailor-made for the someday-to-be-published Jesus and Mary Chain story.
It's all too easy to peg an off-kilter artist as "living in his own world" - which is, usually, codified music-biz slang for "his elevator doesn't go all the way to the top." But Jim and William Reid, the perfectly sane brothers who (for all intents and purposes) are The Jesus and Mary Chain, dream of doing just that. Trouble is, their East Kilbride bedroom fantasies - the one about being in a pop band, that is - came to fruition all too quickly. It's one thing, as the odd Twilight Zone/Night Gallery episode'll illustrate, to dream of ruling the world. To actually ascend the throne, however, is another thing altogether.
"To be totally honest, I don't think we have all that much fun anymore," sighs Jim Reid, on a break from the filming of the Mary Chain's Blues From A Gun video. "I don't think anything can live up to the image of what you think it's going to be like. Or even to the first few months of playing. That was just the best time for us."
of course, those first few months (now over five years gone) saw The Jesus and Mary Chain revered/reviled like no band since Malcolm McLaren's clerks got together in that combo called... what was it again? But where that other band gained notoriety with a spray of unfocused attitude, a few well-torn bits of haute-couture and a Ramones songbook, The Jesus and Mary Chain were doing something really threatening. They were messing with the music (man).
"At the beginning, people were always talkin' about the 15-minute sets we did," says Jim, who is surprisingly soft-spoken. "But sometimes we didn't make it to seven minutes. It was all down to the type of sound we had. Plus we'd only written about five songs. We were just doing what came naturally."
But the seismograph-sensitive British press thought they'd seen either the future - a future in which rock'n'roll would be obsolete (which Jim once claimed the Chain was intended to do) - or else, well... Mick Farren, who no longer writes frequently enough about rock music, insisted, "There's been considerable confusion on the part of the audience as to whether the band was tuning, playing or experiencing technical difficulties."
By creating some of the most pristine, crystalline-pure Beach Boys/Velvets (circa third LP)/Phil Spector pop songs, then forcing their heads into vats of poisoned feedback, the Mary Chain created something - a pastiche, sure, but one that touched a nerve in anyone who cared anything about pop music as more than just a temporary diversion. Psychocandy, the 1985 debut LP, distilled this mixture perfectly. But after the raves had abated, most everyone was left wondering what The Jesus and Mary Chain would do for an encore. And this number doubtlessly included the Reids themselves. After all, the brothers (along with sole other constant Douglas Hart) talked ceaselessly of Psychocandy's place as the greatest record of all time - or, when feeling modest, of the past 20 years. How to top it?
"Well, at the time we made it, Psychocandy was the best possible record anyone could've made," Jim confirms. "And we had to top that. At the same time, when we made Darklands, we knew it had to be different. We felt suffocated by the kind of press we were getting. It seemed that the guitar sound and the goings on onstage were getting more attention than the songs. So we deliberately set out to make a record that no one could talk about without talking about the songs first. But this time, we just set out to make a great album."
This time, they have. Automatic, the new Jesus and Mary Chain album, captures a band two years further down the road, but the Reids haven't lost one iota of the emotional starkness that marked their previous releases. Alternating between the hopeless, spider-webbed love songs they've all but perfected (Halfway To Crazy, Head On) and the menacing, space-age Spector threats they've churned out frighteningly easily (the Sidewwalking-like Gimme Hell, Her Way Of Praying), Automatic sounds as if they've spent the whole 24 months toiling over it. Jim Reid wouldn't argue with that.
"People expect a lot from the Mary Chain," he confirms. "That's why we take so long making a record. We're not lazy. But I think if you're making music and you find the process easy, you're doing something wrong. It's the kind of thing where you have to keep tryin' and tryin' until you get as close as you can to what you consider perfection."
The past couple of years, Jim reckons, have been the toughest in the band's history. Having fired Alan McGee, the man many called the JAMC's Svengali, Jim and William spent a good bit of time trying to act as managers themselves. McGee's departure, perhaps coincidentally, saw a switch in the band's public face - a desire for more acceptance, maybe?
"Not really," Jim muses. "We managed ourselves for a year-and-a-half, which was probably the most depressing time we've been through. You can't get away from it, really, 'cause every minute of every day, someone from the record company is phoning you up and asking you about things you'd rather not think about.
"These days, though, we try to have as little to do with the business end as possible. We may sound different now, or play longer or more professionally. But it's merely because we want to. We have definite ideas as to what the Mary Chain should be doing right now, and we're acting on them."
Does the record company have the same ideas?
"Not usually."
How do you differ?
"We got quite a lot of resistance from the record company [when it came to] releasing Blues From A Gun as the single," Jim replies evenly. "More or less, they thought we were insane. I can see their point, but we think our reasoning is quite good. We've been away for a year-and-a-half with no records out [Barbed Wire Kisses, a collection of B-sides, was released early last year], and we felt that to come back with something really poppy, like Halfway Crazy, would be a bit too... obvious."
Both Jim and William Reid have spoken in hushed tones about what they'd do if The Jesus and Mary Chain became superstars. In a sense, the master plan seems incongruous when one considers their oft-professed disdain for the music business in general. Were there unlimited capital in the JAMC coffers, the Reids would start a record label of their own. Something, Jim says, to enable him to release his own records only when he felt like it.
"We do set extremely high standards for ourselves," he explains, continuing a theme that's apparently very important to him. "I don't understand why groups feel they have to put out a record every year, when doing that means you have albums that are mostly filler."
It's odd, in a way, that a band so self-contained - so introverted (Jim grunts affirmatively at the adjective) - should have such devoted fans. Does the adulation please the Reids?
"I don't like it when people get too fanatical about it," he whispers. "When someone can't see the flaws in someone else - that kind of attitude is totally wrong. You get somebody followin' you around who thinks you're God Almighty and you've just got to feel sorry for them."
In a sense, this shows rather readily when The Jesus and Mary Chain are onstage. From their well-documented early gigs, which were basically, formless, 15-minute feedback fests, through their first North American gigs (which weren't much longer), Messrs. Reid, Reid and Hart kept their backs turned to the audience until their set inevitably collapsed into Jesus Suck, and equipment went flying. Even on recent tours, with the band fleshed out with a second guitarist, Bobby Gillespie's old galley-slave kettle-drum set-up replaced by a professional looking skinsman and sets constructed with consideration of not only the music, but of the ebb and flow needed to keep an hour-long show afloat, Jim (and especially William) seemed as though they'd much rather be somewhere else.
"I think the way we are live confuses a lot of people," agrees Jim. "See, none of us are really show people. We consider ourselves musicians, not entertainers, and I guess we sometimes come across as cold because we don't have any conversations with the audience. But really, the only way I can describe it is to say that I don't have anything to say to them. Anything I did say would be totally false and we'll never do anything false.
After all this time, Jim Reid still insists that The Jesus and Mary Chain are, in a sense, an Immaculate Conception. In other words, no forethought has apparently gone into their seemingly well-sculpted image of leather and shades, smoke and slhouette, rock myth and anti-rock myth-busting all in one neat package. And he genuinely seems to believe it when he insists their only contrivance was to "become the greatest band in the world." To be fair, he does give credit to the band's obvious antecedents - to cult legends the Fire Engines for braving 15-minute sets in 1980, and to Lee Hazelwood, whose eerie mid-'60s compositions (like Some Velvet Morning) the Mary Chain have electrified. But he's often been just as quick to lambaste folks as diverse as Lou Reed, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, without whom, it might be argued, the Mary Chain might be just another British pop band. It could be suggested that some of the bombast is for effect - to simply piss people off.
"It depends," Jim chuckles. "I suppose we do that. But a lot of people have pissed me off, so why shouldn't I do the same?
Well, sometimes the Mary Chain seem to have picked the wrong targets...
"I quite often do stupid things when I'm drunk," mutters the singer. "Probably all the stupid things I've done in my life have happened when I've been drinking too much. Sometimes I can't control my drinking habits, and though I'm not a drunk, I do tend to get a bit mouthy."
So that's what was behind the incident in Toronto during the last tour (Jim, apparently well-oiled, responded to a group of hecklers shouting "Boring!" by attacking them; first with a mike stand, later with a bottle. He ended up spending the night in a jail and eventually received an unconditional discharge). He responds to the very mention of the city with a groan.
"Yes, I remember. I feel totally responsible," he sighs, a note of genuine sincerity in his voice. "I've got to take all the blame for that. It was just one of those nights when I played too drunk and behaved really stupidly. That's one of the nights I regret the most in the band's history."
While quite willing to talk openly about drink (giving him the advantage over, say, Shane MacGowan), Jim Reid is mum when talk turns to... harder substances. There've always been rumors of abundant drug use in the Reid camp (which the brothers have always denied). And JAMC songs, from day one, have had not-so-sly drug references you don't have to be a rock critic to notice. Automatic, f'instance, leads off with Here Comes Alice, a jaunty tune that wraps love addiction in Waiting For The Man lingo, while Coast To Coast whispers of "junk gun fever," "senses strung out" and the like. There's more, but Jim doesn't want to discuss it.
Matter of fact, he doesn't like discussing lyrics at all, insisting that it's William who writes all of them anyway (a mild exaggeration, from what I've been led to believe). he then adds that their highly obsessive themes, like the oral sex overkill of early songs The Living End, Just Like Honey and Taste Of Cindy (and, for the extremely literal, who might be ready to accuse them of prurience, Head and Suck) and more recently, the insanity and/or suicide that dominated Darklands and Automatic, aren't particularly meaningful.
"To be quite honest with you," he laughs, "and I know this doesn't sound terribly convincing, it's just coincidence. Pure coincidence.
"I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with that, anyway. It would only become repetitive if we continued on album after album the same way. Sometimes you just want to write words that sound good. It's as simple as that - a selection of words that you think belong together. I've said it before, but that's what I love about Syd Barrett's lyrics. They don't mean [anything], but they don't have to. They sound good."
Is writing a pop song easy, then?
"The hardest thing in the world."
Does it help you deal with your emotions?
"That," he laughs softly, "is the second hardest thing in the world."
