The Jesus and Mary Chain
Tom Lanham / CMJ
01.1995
01.1995
It's cool and cavelike inside the windowless conference room at American Recordings' Burbank offices. And that's how the pale, quiet Reid brothers, Jim and William, seem to like it. Faced with a sweltering California sun, the pair scuttle like lizards for the spooky chamber and, once inside, immediately appear relaxed in padded, posturepedic office chairs. They're eager to discuss their decade in showbiz as The Jesus and Mary Chain, as well as their stark, mostly-acoustic new disc, Stoned and Dethroned. And it's more than just a catchy title, the singing/guitar-slinging siblings say in near-unison - "It's how the band's been feeling lately."
When the duo blasted out of East Kilbride, Scotland, ten years ago with a controversial name and a droning slice of white-noise feedback dubbed Psychocandy, critics were stunned. Many were quick to praise the debut for its shock value alone. The Jesus and Mary Chain's live sets only increased the mystique. At an early show in San Francisco, ice-blue crooner Jim Reid performed for a scant 20 minutes, his back to the packed house, while William throttled scuzzy, ear-ringing dissonance from his axe. A New York appearance didn't even last that long. Some folks went home thinking they'd seen the Next Big Thing. Some left wishing they could get their money back.
Then, in 1987, the group did the unthinkable. It released Darklands, a gorgeous, acoustic-edged collection of precious pop melodies sans violent feedback. Only the lyrics remained dark. It seemed the Reids didn't want to bash fans over the head with discord at all - they wanted to woo them with hummable hooks and chewable Top-40 arrangements, like their longtime idols, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Through four more albums the Reids did just that, becoming something like the Righteous Brothers of Doom. But it wasn't until "Sometimes Always," Jim Reid's chiming duet with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval (who's been dating William for several months), that the band had anything resembling a hit single.
Jim Reid frowns, and daubs at his expense-accounted nachos, one of the few perks the JAMC has received of late. "Sometimes it's kind of discouraging," he sighs, "because we had grand ideas when we started. We thought that if the band was still around ten years later, we'd be like
R.E.M. are now - they're huge, everybody loves them. But we've been through all kinds of different phases where we've analyzed ourselves to death. and that's a horrible thing to do.
"We've ended up thinking, 'Who the hell cares?' The most important thing is to keep making music that we're quite proud of, music we believe in. And it doesn't matter if we're playing football stadiums yet."
The Reids speak slowly, deliberately, in pudding-thick Scottish burrs; they take their time considering each thought. Neither possesses any noticeable sense of style. Each is wearing beat-up oxfords, a nondescript shirt and ratty jeans, and Jim, 32, still sports Beatles bangs while William, 35, retains his fluffy, eyelid-scraping poodle cut. "We try to avoid fashion, anything that's representative of a scene," explains Jim.
"Fashion comes and goes so quickly, to associate yourself with one means you might go with it."
A spin through the decidedly un-fashionable Stoned and Dethroned leaves one wondering along with the Reids why the Jesus and Mary Chain isn't a household word. Like Darklands, it's built upon William's acoustic strumming and toe-tapping tambourine rhythms. "Sometimes Always" is a perfect example of the team's deft craftsmanship. It starts slowly, with a chirpy 6-string and Sandoval's offhanded vocal: "I gave you all I had/I gave you good and bad/I gave but you just threw it back." The track steamrollers to a steeple-clanging crescendo, like some vampire take on Sonny and Cher. There's a taste of mortality to it, toned down from the brothers' typically insistent musings on sin, death, and life's attendant temptations of the flesh.
>But even though Stoned contains lyrics about feeling "sick and unholy," its predominant theme is love. On the cut "Till it Shines," the siblings refer to love as a "secret from above...the drug that keeps us true." William closes the disc crooning his ballads "These Days" ("These days I feel immune/To all the sadness and the gloom") and "Feeling Lucky" ("I've got someone who knows me/And still wants to hold me"). It's a marked change from the way the JAMC was feeling a couple of years ago.
In 1992, the Reids agreed to take their touring combo (which includes Ben Lurie and drummer Steve Monti) on the road with Lollapalooza. Big mistake. Accustomed to nighttime gigs, they appeared mid-afternoon on the stadium tour, looking ghostly white under that old nemesis sun and, in William's words, felt "naked in front of 20,000 people. Usually when we play live, there's darkness, films, smoke - we build a mystique. When I came out of Lollapalooza, I felt changed, I felt humiliated, and making another record proved quite exhausting in a lot of ways."
Stoned and Dethroned took a tedious year to complete, with the Reids questioning its worth every step of the way. "You do doubt yourself," says William. "I look back on the records we've made, and I know most of them are good, and some of them are great. But that's from a safe distance. In the process of making a record, it's not always clear how good it is."
Psychocandy, he adds, was easiest because "there was nothing to live up to. It was a reaction against the total mediocrity of the music scene ten years ago. And I think if somebody else had made Psychocandy, maybe we wouldn't have made it, because we were so fucking lazy. We sat around for years saying we were gonna make a record, we were gonna have a band, because we were so enthusiastic about music and upset about the way things were back then.
"But Darklands was a reaction to Psychocandy. And at that time, a lot of people thought that it was a piece of shit. They said that we'd sold out, because we'd gone for a soft, mellow production. But when people interviewed us around Psychocandy and asked us what bands we liked, nobody listened to what we said. When we said we liked Dionne Warwick, they should've believed us."
Now, says, William, it's an age thing. "I don't feel 35. But I get fucked up about my age sometimes. The music business makes me feel like I should be 22, and fresh out of the gate. And we don't sell a lot of records, but the people who buy our records probably aren't that casual
about buying albums. "Frankly," he adds, gulping down the last of his burrito, "if we sold a million records, I don't know what we'd do next."
Brother Jim has a sure-fire solution, and he's shocked it hasn't occurred to William. "We'd spend loads of money!" he cheers, spinning around in his chair. William brings him down to earth.
"I think success isn't necessarily a good thing," he counters. "Look at U2. What will they ever do to top Zoo TV? And look what happened to Kurt Cobain. That guy should've been a bus driver. He would've been alive until he was 87."
"We're in the music business - we're not running Sunday schools," sneers Jim. "We're around people that drink too much, take drugs - people that do what we do. A lot of people in our circle have gotten fucked up on alcohol and drugs."
So why haven't the Reids made the English scandal sheets? Jim cackles mischievously. "That's not news. Guys in bands getting drunk and falling over and puking. That's not even remotely scandalous. But in the music business, you can hang out with people who drink too much, and you can indulge yourself a bit because it's not a normal everyday life."
William phrases it more bluntly: "We're still a bunch of dirty bastards, and we still crave sex and lustfulness. But we're, uh, older now."
When the duo blasted out of East Kilbride, Scotland, ten years ago with a controversial name and a droning slice of white-noise feedback dubbed Psychocandy, critics were stunned. Many were quick to praise the debut for its shock value alone. The Jesus and Mary Chain's live sets only increased the mystique. At an early show in San Francisco, ice-blue crooner Jim Reid performed for a scant 20 minutes, his back to the packed house, while William throttled scuzzy, ear-ringing dissonance from his axe. A New York appearance didn't even last that long. Some folks went home thinking they'd seen the Next Big Thing. Some left wishing they could get their money back.
Then, in 1987, the group did the unthinkable. It released Darklands, a gorgeous, acoustic-edged collection of precious pop melodies sans violent feedback. Only the lyrics remained dark. It seemed the Reids didn't want to bash fans over the head with discord at all - they wanted to woo them with hummable hooks and chewable Top-40 arrangements, like their longtime idols, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Through four more albums the Reids did just that, becoming something like the Righteous Brothers of Doom. But it wasn't until "Sometimes Always," Jim Reid's chiming duet with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval (who's been dating William for several months), that the band had anything resembling a hit single.
Jim Reid frowns, and daubs at his expense-accounted nachos, one of the few perks the JAMC has received of late. "Sometimes it's kind of discouraging," he sighs, "because we had grand ideas when we started. We thought that if the band was still around ten years later, we'd be like
R.E.M. are now - they're huge, everybody loves them. But we've been through all kinds of different phases where we've analyzed ourselves to death. and that's a horrible thing to do.
"We've ended up thinking, 'Who the hell cares?' The most important thing is to keep making music that we're quite proud of, music we believe in. And it doesn't matter if we're playing football stadiums yet."
The Reids speak slowly, deliberately, in pudding-thick Scottish burrs; they take their time considering each thought. Neither possesses any noticeable sense of style. Each is wearing beat-up oxfords, a nondescript shirt and ratty jeans, and Jim, 32, still sports Beatles bangs while William, 35, retains his fluffy, eyelid-scraping poodle cut. "We try to avoid fashion, anything that's representative of a scene," explains Jim.
"Fashion comes and goes so quickly, to associate yourself with one means you might go with it."
A spin through the decidedly un-fashionable Stoned and Dethroned leaves one wondering along with the Reids why the Jesus and Mary Chain isn't a household word. Like Darklands, it's built upon William's acoustic strumming and toe-tapping tambourine rhythms. "Sometimes Always" is a perfect example of the team's deft craftsmanship. It starts slowly, with a chirpy 6-string and Sandoval's offhanded vocal: "I gave you all I had/I gave you good and bad/I gave but you just threw it back." The track steamrollers to a steeple-clanging crescendo, like some vampire take on Sonny and Cher. There's a taste of mortality to it, toned down from the brothers' typically insistent musings on sin, death, and life's attendant temptations of the flesh.
>But even though Stoned contains lyrics about feeling "sick and unholy," its predominant theme is love. On the cut "Till it Shines," the siblings refer to love as a "secret from above...the drug that keeps us true." William closes the disc crooning his ballads "These Days" ("These days I feel immune/To all the sadness and the gloom") and "Feeling Lucky" ("I've got someone who knows me/And still wants to hold me"). It's a marked change from the way the JAMC was feeling a couple of years ago.
In 1992, the Reids agreed to take their touring combo (which includes Ben Lurie and drummer Steve Monti) on the road with Lollapalooza. Big mistake. Accustomed to nighttime gigs, they appeared mid-afternoon on the stadium tour, looking ghostly white under that old nemesis sun and, in William's words, felt "naked in front of 20,000 people. Usually when we play live, there's darkness, films, smoke - we build a mystique. When I came out of Lollapalooza, I felt changed, I felt humiliated, and making another record proved quite exhausting in a lot of ways."
Stoned and Dethroned took a tedious year to complete, with the Reids questioning its worth every step of the way. "You do doubt yourself," says William. "I look back on the records we've made, and I know most of them are good, and some of them are great. But that's from a safe distance. In the process of making a record, it's not always clear how good it is."
Psychocandy, he adds, was easiest because "there was nothing to live up to. It was a reaction against the total mediocrity of the music scene ten years ago. And I think if somebody else had made Psychocandy, maybe we wouldn't have made it, because we were so fucking lazy. We sat around for years saying we were gonna make a record, we were gonna have a band, because we were so enthusiastic about music and upset about the way things were back then.
"But Darklands was a reaction to Psychocandy. And at that time, a lot of people thought that it was a piece of shit. They said that we'd sold out, because we'd gone for a soft, mellow production. But when people interviewed us around Psychocandy and asked us what bands we liked, nobody listened to what we said. When we said we liked Dionne Warwick, they should've believed us."
Now, says, William, it's an age thing. "I don't feel 35. But I get fucked up about my age sometimes. The music business makes me feel like I should be 22, and fresh out of the gate. And we don't sell a lot of records, but the people who buy our records probably aren't that casual
about buying albums. "Frankly," he adds, gulping down the last of his burrito, "if we sold a million records, I don't know what we'd do next."
Brother Jim has a sure-fire solution, and he's shocked it hasn't occurred to William. "We'd spend loads of money!" he cheers, spinning around in his chair. William brings him down to earth.
"I think success isn't necessarily a good thing," he counters. "Look at U2. What will they ever do to top Zoo TV? And look what happened to Kurt Cobain. That guy should've been a bus driver. He would've been alive until he was 87."
"We're in the music business - we're not running Sunday schools," sneers Jim. "We're around people that drink too much, take drugs - people that do what we do. A lot of people in our circle have gotten fucked up on alcohol and drugs."
So why haven't the Reids made the English scandal sheets? Jim cackles mischievously. "That's not news. Guys in bands getting drunk and falling over and puking. That's not even remotely scandalous. But in the music business, you can hang out with people who drink too much, and you can indulge yourself a bit because it's not a normal everyday life."
William phrases it more bluntly: "We're still a bunch of dirty bastards, and we still crave sex and lustfulness. But we're, uh, older now."
