20 years ago tonight I was on tour for the first time. I didn’t have a cell phone. We paid in cash and kept an eye out for Internet Cafes. We all carted around binders filled with compact discs. My day job was at CDNow. I had yet to start drinking coffee. (That love affair would begin a week later in New Orleans—thank you Jimmy Ford).
Things were different then.
The Bigger Lovers were in Richmond, Va. 20 years ago tonight, five dates into our first tour behind our first album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, which had been released to absolutely no fanfare that very day. About a year after it was supposed to come out. But that’s another story. (Bret gives the Cliffs Notes version in the liner notes to the 10th anniversary vinyl reissue if you’re so inclined).
We did an in-store that afternoon at Plan 9 Music in front of four interested people (three of whom were dudes who worked at the store—dudes who worked in record stores were kind of “our demo”) and a gig that night with a friend’s band to about eight interested people, five of whom were our friend’s band. We sold two CDs, one of which was purchased by a girl who said she knew GWAR. A few people might’ve signed up for the email list. We considered the night a scorching-hot success.
Worrying was released by a tiny little label called Black Dog, based in the one stoplight town of Monticello, Miss. Black Dog did release Marah’s first record, so they had some cred in Philly at least. Plus the Black Dog dudes were nice dudes. Chris & Jeff. They “mastered” the record for free (a sonic wrong we righted on the reissue). Jeff even hooked us up with Big Star’s Jody Stephens for a tour of the legendary Ardent Studios when we hit Memphis. But barely two months after Worrying’s release, Black Dog had a falling out with the distributor (a New Orleans-based concern that specialized in Cajun and Zydeco, naturally) and our record was effectively out of print shortly after it had (finally) been released. Being glass-half-full types, we chose to look at Worrying not as prematurely out of print, but as an instant collector’s item.
I didn’t care about such setbacks. Just like I didn’t care when the indie radio promotion guy Black Dog hired bailed before we played in Athens, Ga. (Paraphrasing: “I gotta scoot, boys, because I’m gonna be up real early working the phones getting your record on all the right college stations… just wait until you see that next CMJ report!’), or when the van broke down in Missouri and we had to stay in some bumfuck town overnight because the local mechanic had already gone home for the night. I was just so proud of what we accomplished with Worrying. Still am. I was also shocked at how good the record sounded. A producer who seemed kind of ambivalent toward us, Daniel Presley, and a wunderkind engineer/whizbang multi-instrumentalist named Bradley Newsom made us sound 1,000 times better than we had any business sounding. If you witnessed some of our early shows, you know what I’m talking about.
Daniel and Bradley coaxed an amazing drum sound out of the hybrid 80s-era Tama/60s-era Ludwig kit I’d cobbled together, which was rounded out by a Pearl mini piccolo snare (that I know for a fact was used on one, possibly two songs), a mish-mash of cymbals and one or two other drums of indeterminate origin. I wasn’t terribly picky about gear in those days. But they had those drums BOOMING, like Dave Fridmann had gone back and remixed All Things Must Pass.
The songs were the thing though. Our collective influences resonated in just the right amounts throughout the 11 songs that made up Worrying: the Beach Boys (“I’m Here,” with Scott singing like Evil Mike Love), Big Star (“Casual Friday”), the Replacements (“Threadbare”), the dBs (“Catch and Release”) with touches of the British Invasion, psychedelia, garage rock, and country all in the mix.
We were all very pleased with what we’d accomplished. Other people seemed to like the record too. But as was the case with our subsequent two albums, most of the people who were fans of ours were the kind of folks who got records for free: writers, record store types, promoters, radio people. There was already no money in music prior to the streaming era. Trust me on this.
Still, we held out hope. A lot of the power pop ‘zines liked us. WXPN and Y100 in Philly were supporting us. There was gonna be a European release (with, um “different” cover art). We felt like we were one five star MOJO review, or one effusive testimonial from Ray Davies or Bob Pollard away from reaching “the next level” (i.e., the level where four dudes don’t have to share one motel room).
But we never got there. Bands like ours just weren’t meant to succeed in our own time. Or 20 years later, apparently.
We’d hoped to be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Worrying with a show in Philadelphia tonight. That’ll have to wait until (hopefully) next year. When our debut album will be old enough to legally drink. That seems like a more appropriate cause for celebration, come to think of it.
Book the babysitter now.
P.B., 3/13/21