Grandaddy - The Paradise, Boston, Massachusetts, August 9, 2003
Twenty years ago, my girlfriend Dulcie and I climbed aboard the Grandaddy tour bus, which was parked in front of the Paradise on Commonwealth Ave. I was just a kid, trying to get some music journalist cred; this may not have been going backstage to interview Mick at a Rolling Stones concert, but it felt like a big deal at the time!
I chatted for a while with drummer Aaron Burtch, who was a super nice dude. Dulcie (who I would soon marry!) snapped some pics afterwards (Jason Lytle was a no show, sadly). Later, we caught the show in the very very very hot Paradise. Grandaddy was a (surprisingly?) terrific live band both times I saw them — something that's on display on this excellent recording. It's available on the massive Grandaddy Live Archive, which is a wonderful resource. All bands should have a page like this!
And hey, here's the article I wrote for the long-defunct Junkmedia.org:
The execs at V2 Records were shocked earlier this year when they received the tapes for Grandaddy's new record, mysteriously titled Arm of Roger: The Ham and Its Lily. The label was expecting big things from the band, especially following the critical and commercial success of 2000's masterful The Sophtware Slump. But after almost a year of recording in frontman Jason Lytle's home studio, the Modesto, CA-based group had turned in a follow-up that was disappointing, to say the least.
In fact, the new record was terrible.
Kicking off with the sonic mayhem of "Robot Escort" and closing with an offensive, if nonsensical ditty called "The Pussy Song", Arm of Roger was nothing short of career suicide — 35 minutes of un-listenable garbage. V2 staff members spent about a week in a state of panic, thinking that one of their flagship bands had gone completely off the deep end.
Grandaddy drummer Aaron Burtch chuckles, recalling the label's reaction. "The people who didn't know us that well there, they were saying, 'We've gotta get these guys into rehab, this is a bad situation, there's absolutely no way we can put this record out.'" But finally, the band's A&R; person, Kate Hyman, left a message on Lytle's answering machine.
"OK, motherfuckers," she said. "Where's the real album?"
"There had just been one too many record label calls to Jason's house, wondering where the record was," Burtch laughingly explains, relaxing in the "smoking lounge" of Grandaddy's tour bus a few hours before the band's show at the Paradise in Boston. As "a kind of tension-breaker" at the tail-end of a long and difficult year of recording sessions, Lytle, guitarist Jim Fairchild, and keyboardist Tim Dryden concocted the Arm of Roger album in three alcohol-fueled nights. "They just got super-hammered and banged this really stupid record out really fast," Burtch says. "And then we Fed-Ex'd it right over to them. It's good to keep people on their toes. Especially record labels."
V2 must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when Grandaddy duly delivered Sumday a week later. Picking up where The Sophtware Slump left off, the "real album" is easily one of the year's best. While not as career-defining as its predecessor, Sumday refines the band's futuristic pop sound and features some of Lytle's most accomplished songwriting to date. Like all Grandaddy releases, the new album is a self-produced affair. "One hundred percent of the album was recorded at Jason's house," states Burtch proudly. "We've always, always done that. I don't think we could do it any other way."
Despite the comfortable confines of Lytle's home studio, Sumday's birthing process wasn't an easy one. "It took a long time," Burtch says. "There were five or six months of set-up time, starting with us getting a bunch of new gear in. Then we had to make sure everything worked. And then we had to make sure Jason knew how to work it all." Finally, the band commenced recording, only to hit a wall about halfway through. "We had about six songs finished, but we had to take a break so Jason could get his head back on straight. He had just been down in the dungeon for months by that point."
Another disturbing development was Modesto's burgeoning reputation in the media as a hotbed for shady activities. "It's become the capital of young missing women, which is kind of scary," Burtch says of the central California tract-housing sprawl Grandaddy calls home. "There were the Yosemite Murders four years ago, and then the whole Laci Peterson thing happened. It's terrible, but if you live there, you just think, 'That fuckin' figures'." Still, he has no plans to relocate. "It's a weird place, for sure," he admits. "But I'm not gonna move, as far as I know. That's because we've all kind of built our own little oasis there that's separate from everything else."
Not that the band will be spending much time stoking the homefires in the coming months. With a tour itinerary that began in April and stretches well into December, they'll be lucky to spend more than a weekend off of the road. "This," says Burtch, pausing to gesture towards the cramped confines of the band's tour bus, "is not what we do. We make music, and we'd like to play shows, but we don't want to play a show a night for a year and a half. Radiohead has it down. They put out their record, play forty shows and then they go home. It'd be neat to be afforded a luxury like that. That would be the ideal. Big records, not so big tours."
Grandaddy isn't at this level yet — not by a long shot. Still, the band is selling out most of their club dates, and is greeted rapturously by fans. Upcoming shows in the UK and the US with Super Furry Animals will see the band reaching an even larger audience. "That'll be really cool," says Burtch. "Super Furry Animals had us come out and open for them in the UK in 1998, before anyone knew who we were out there. We've been friends with them since then. And that was the first time we'd played big places, with proper sound equipment and all that. So we owe them a huge debt."
Of course, the current tour was almost over before it began. During the band's spring stint as the opening act for Pete Yorn, guitarist Fairchild was literally run over by a tour bus carrying production equipment. After a few too many post-concert libations, he stumbled down some stairs and found himself beneath the wheels of the 18-wheeler. Miraculously, Fairchild only broke some small bones under his shoulder, and was onstage performing (with his arm in a sling) a few days later. "Hey, shit happens," says Burtch of the incident. "Sometimes you almost die, sometimes you don't. You put a bunch of skateboarders in a bus and tell 'em 'You can't do this and you can't do that, and you have to be back here at one o'clock' — you're fuckin' asking for it. Shit happens..."
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Desktop Disko's B-Rotation Top 50 (2024 #03)
Youtube Musicvideo Playlist: DD's B-Rotation Playlist 2024 #03
01 Goat Girl: ride around
02 Social Dance: Sometimes
03 Angus & Julia Stone: Cape Forestier (NEW)
04 Juliet Ivy: We're All Eating Each Other
05 Maya Hawke: Missing Out
06 Lauren Eve Scheff: Nothing to Prove
07 DIIV: Brown Paper Bag
08 Warpaint: Common Blue
09 Sevana: Lowe Mi - 2K24 Re-Release
10 Ibibio Sound Machine: Pull the Rope (NEW)
11 Janelane: Love Letters (NEW)
12 Khruangbin: May Ninth
13 Hurray for the Riff Raff: Hawkmoon
14 Aili: Fashion
15 Grandaddy: Long as I'm Not the One
16 Holly Macve: 1995
17 Saya Gray: AA Bouquet for Your 180 Face
18 Kevin Holliday: I Want You (NEW)
19 Freeze the Fall: Glitch
20 Jade Bird feat. Mura Masa: Burn the Hard Drive
21 Elbow: Lovers' Leap
22 Dahlias: Ella
23 Suki Waterhouse: OMG
24 Jordan Rakei: Freedom (NEW)
25 Kirsten Ludwig: Sunbeam (NEW)
26 Waxahatchee: Bored
27 Norah Jones: Paradise (NEW)
28 Richard Hawley: Two for His Heels
29 The Smile: Friend of a Friend
30 OMD: Kleptocracy
31 Skunk: 2 Wicky
32 lotusbliss: Tear Me Apart
33 The Church: A Strange Past
34 Alycia Lang: Bad Luck
35 Ariana Grande: we can't be friends - wait for your love (NEW)
36 Pearl Jam: Dark Matter
37 The Indien: How Many Nights (NEW)
38 Royel Otis: Foam
39 Keaper: Alone
40 Mooneye: Too Fast
41 Jane Weaver: Romantic Worlds
42 Madison Galloway: Love Like Yours
43 Faye Webster feat. Lil Yachty: Lego Ring
44 Rosegarden Funeral Party: Doorway Ghost
45 The Black Keys: I Forgot to Be Your Lover
46 Samantha Savage Smith: Wholesomely Made
47 The Marías: Run Your Mouth (NEW)
48 iomfro: Sammenbidte Tænder (NEW)
49 Miakie & Ethan Jupe: Want the Goosebumps (NEW)
50 Fan Club: Westbound (NEW)
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12/14/23.
One of the bonuses of buying so much music is that it makes blogging so much easier, especially during a time of year when new releases slow to a trickle. Some days all I need to do is sift through the emails from all the labels I've bought music from in the past.
Today, Meritorio Records (Madrid, Spain) announced that they are releasing the 2nd LP from Austin, Texas band The Infinites. The band specialize in the kind of indie rock that alternates between languid and driving. The guitar sound/reverb can recall Franky Flowers, The Chills, Mazarin or even Felt. The vocals have an earnest higher register that might be what Tim Smith (Midlake, Harp) might sound like without overdubbed harmonies. I can't help but also think of Grandaddy.
I'm posting their first LP because you have more songs to listen to. It is available on LP directly from the label First Human Records.
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