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Feature: Jack Foley
ON THE day Garbage gathered in Wisconsin to start work on their
fourth record, they came up with the glittering and steely Right
Between the Eyes in all of 30 minutes. Things would not go
quite so well with Bleed Like Me again.
The band battled illness, surgery, creative disagreements, major
life changes and - depending who you ask - either a break-up or
a much-needed sabbatical.
"To me, personally, the very fact that it got finished is
a miracle," says singer, Shirley Manson, upon reflection.
But then, so is the very fact that Garbage has been at it for
ten years.
When Manson first hooked up with Butch Vig, Steve Marker and
Duke Erikson, the band was pegged as 'three producers and a girl'.
Vig and Erikson had been, respectively, the drummer and the
frontman for Midwestern guitar-pop favorites, Spooner, as well
as mid-‘80s college radio successes, Fire Town.
Vig’s old college buddy, Marker, engineered Spooner’s
very first recordings on a four-track in his basement; the two
men went on to found Smart Studios, producing and engineering
such seminal post-hardcore bands as Killdozer and Die Kreuzen.
Then Vig manned the console for such landmark records as the
Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish and, of course, Nirvana’s
Nevermind, as well as discs by Sonic Youth, L7, House
of Pain and Freedy Johnston.
Garbage was meant to be a lark, a way for three old friends to
take advantage of success and have fun on the other side of the
control room.
But someone had to sing. "It was just going to be a blip
in our personal history," says Manson, who began her career
playing keyboards in the Scottish combo, Goodbye Mr MacKenzie,
then fronted her own band, Angelfish.
Three records later - 1995’s Garbage, 1998’s
Version 2.0 and 2001’s Beautiful Garbage
- Garbage has seen their albums top the charts around the world,
had countless hit singles, earned several Grammy nominations (including
Best New Artist in 1997 and Album of the Year for Version 2.0
in 2001) and cut a James Bond movie theme (The World Is Not
Enough).
Manson, Vig, Erikson and Marker are true musical soulmates, equally
in love with experiments and bubblegum, with noise and beauty,
always welding bright sounds, big hooks and bigger melodies to
Manson’s goth-glam sensibility and innate Scottish pessimism.
They were, in fact, a family - and in a family, there’s
always gonna be some conflict and dysfunction.
It was already brewing at the time of Beautiful Garbage,
which came out on September 4, 2001. Then came 9/11.
Suddenly, doing interviews and promo tours felt inappropriate,
and certainly not fun.
Even an American support slot with U2, at a time when Bono truly
tapped into the nation’s grief, turned into a trial - midway
through, Vig was diagnosed with a serious case of Type A hepatitis.
The band continued on with replacement drummers, Matt Chamberlain
and Matt Walker, something Vig encouraged, but it surely added
to the weirdness.
And on top of all of that, Vig wed his longtime girlfriend,
Marker and his wife had their first child, Erikson married off
a daughter and Manson lost her voice - a terrifying ordeal that
ultimately resulted in successful surgery to remove a cyst on
her vocal chord.
When the time came to think about another record, Garbage dutifully
returned to Madison.
But things just weren’t happening - particularly for Vig.
After a frustrating few weeks, he retreated to LA.
"On a psychological level, my heart just wasn’t in
it," he says. "It was like, ‘I gotta go.’
If we’re gonna finish this record we gotta take a break
and re-build the creative juices."
Then there’s Marker’s take: "We broke up,"
he says, which is also Manson’s point of view.
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"It got pretty dark there, that’s
for sure," says Erikson, ever the voice of reason. "All
four of us might have been willing to just let it go."
It wasn’t so much the drama as 'no one was agreeing on
the direction of the music', he continues.
"At different times, different band members would come up
with stuff, but the other three wouldn’t be on board.
"When you lose that common bond of the music, you’ve
got nothing."
Good thing this story has a happy ending.
"What we realized, after we did take five months off to
sort of reassess," says Marker, "was, we’ve been
through all this other bullshit..."
"And we still want to do it," finishes Manson. "All
the bands that came out back when we did are gone, but we’re
still standing, wanting to make records, regardless of success
or expectations or other outside forces.
"That’s a really empowering feeling, and I think it
helped us make the record that we wanted in the end."
What also helped was one last failed experiment: They went into
the studio with Dust Brother, John King, a session that produced
Bad Boyfriend but no more.
"“No disrespect to him," says Erikson. "It
was an interesting experience, learning someone else’s way
of doing things, but we’re pretty set in our ways.
"And what we figured out is, our ways are pretty damn good."
"It just kind of made us realize, we’re the only ones
who can make a Garbage record," says Vig.
So after a flurry of Fed Exed discs and e-mailed sound files
from everyone’s respective home studios, they reconvened
at Smart for what most bands would call 'mixing' - a process of
selection and collage and re-recording that is key to the way
Garbage puts their songs together.
But this time out, they did so without bombast: fewer tracks,
fewer loops, fewer samples, fewer keyboards.
"The operating word was ‘simple,’" Erikson
says. "I think it’s the strongest body of work we’ve
put together as far as just the songs. We depended on the songs,
rather than production."
They also depended on guitars, guitars and more guitars.
"That’s what I’m most proud of on this record,"
Marker says. "I think we really nailed the fact that we’re
a loud rock band more than anything else - a guitar band behind
Shirley’s voice. When we made the first record, we hadn’t
played live at all."
"When people come to see us, nobody expects us to be that
loud," says Manson. "It’s like, ‘oh my god,
a rock band!’ I don’t think we’ve ever captured
that on a record, but this one is the closest we have gotten."
Bleed Like Me includes contributions from Matt Walker
(Filter, The Smashing Pumpkins), bassist Justin Meldel Johnson
(ImaRobot, Beck) and most notably, a certain part-time drummer
Vig has worked with in the past.
"It was great," he says of former Nirvana drummer turned
Foo Fighters frontman, Dave Grohl’s visit to the studio
to guest star on Bad Boyfriend.
"He played it down a couple of times, and then came back
into the control room to listen to playback.
"In the middle of the break, he looked at Duke, and he asked,
what should I do here, should I go wild? We told him, go wild.
And the next take, he went crazy!
"That’s the drum fill over the guitar break, it’s
a pretty chaotic moment. He had a shit-eating grin on his face,
it was just awesome to see him play again, to come full circle."
And just as that moment prompted Vig to reflect on where he’s
been and what he’s done as a producer, Bleed Like Me has
him marvelling at Garbage.
"We have accomplished a lot more as a band than I ever thought
we would," he says.
Adds Manson: "To even get to make a fourth record is incredibly
lucky; we have this incredibly long history.
"I think we’re amazed by that, and proud of it. It
really is hard to stay together as a group, it'd be so easy to
just pursue our own individual desires," she continues.
"But I still believe in the notion of a band - that people
can come together and find a way to work on something together.
I’m still in love with the romance of rock’n’roll."
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