“There was a hurricane last week, and a tropical storm this week,” Grasshopper notes, rain falling in sheets outside the window. “Jonathan’s house got flooded-out – he lost a lot of books and CDs. It’s been crazy up here – a lot of roads washed out, beautiful big trees down, power lines.” In fact their singer and guitarist, Jonathan Donahue, “still doesn’t have electricity. It’s been like, 10-days.”
Weather reports aside, many fans sat open-mouthed when they read Mercury Rev would return to Australia for the inaugural Harvest festival. The band had been absent from our shores for a number of years, and after waging a battle to regain the rights to their songs things had seemingly been rather quiet in the camp. It’s heartening to learn from that perceived solitude was in fact a hive of activity. it just didn’t translate that well across the Pacific.
“We’ve been doing stuff since last January – the Deserter’s Songs re-issue, and that came out on CD but it’s also going to be coming out on vinyl, and David Fridmann also remixed an instrumental version and we put that out ourselves through our own label.” Aside from the re-issues, Mercury Rev were finally lured to the All Tomorrow’s Parties three-day event to play their astonishing 1998 release Deserter’s Songs in its entirety.
“That was kinda spurred on by ATP, their Don’t Look Back [series]. Barry [Hogan, founder] from ATP kept asking us for years to do Deserter’s Songs and at the time we didn’t feel it was right, but now – it’s been 13 years, so we thought ‘lucky 13!'”
Having recently attended the BigSound music conference where Alan McGee (who no longer listens to music, apparently) bemoaned the need for band’s to revisit past albums, I posit Grasshopper with the idea that such a revisionist exercise might be, well, passé.
“We were really sceptical about it,” he admits. “I did go to ATP’s couple other shows, when I saw Suicide do their whole record and The Feelies do their first record and The Dirty Three did Horse Stories, and it was really powerful and really cool. And also Iggy had done Raw Power and it was cool to see it like that and re-live it. Those records were really an influence on me and to hear them like that; you have that expectation, with the vinyl and it almost becomes like classical music with the movements, where you expect the next thing, and it’s just kind of great.
“That also helped for us to do it, and I think Jonathan has also seen The Psychedelic Furs do their first album, he’s a big fan of that. So we thought ‘Barry’s been asking us so long, let’s do it’. We got some of the rights back for the publishing, so we thought it’d be cool.”
After so much thought, how did the result feel?
“It was weird to go back to reconstruct ’cause a lot of those songs we never played live – ever – especially the instrumentals, [they were] just experimental things in the studio, so to learn them in sequence and play ’em live was, really a mind-expanding thing to do it like that.” Indeed with the benefit of new technologies these songs, mere experiments in the studio, were aptly re-created even if it was at times challenging.
“Some of the songs – especially the instrumental ones – [we] added elements of playing some of the newer, weirder instruments, like Kaoss pads or something, [it] just helped bring through that ambience in the studio that we got. And at the time we had a Tettix Wave Accumulator, that we invented, but it’s kinda broken now and are arcane in use.”
Painstakingly recreating older works, while seemingly not focusing on the new, I can’t help but wonder whether the aforementioned rights’ battle somewhat stymied the band’s new works.
“There was some of that going on. It’s a long story but in America we were signed to V2, which then was bought by five other record companies through the years, so it was in limbo. It’s been a saga story to finally get back some of those rights. So yeah, that could be a book on its own, but Jonathan and I have been writing new stuff, but we’ll re-release All Is Dream as well. Some of these records aren’t available anymore and we just wanted to do ’em justice and put ’em out. There’s a lot of demos and stuff that we have from those records that we also put in the package.”
Much like their friends, Pavement and Mogwai, finally giving these releases the treatment they deserve is somewhat cathartic. Mercury Rev toured with Pavement in ’95-’96, and only last night Grasshopper caught up with his friend, Mark Ibold, in the rain. “Those packages were great, so we wanted to do something like that, and find all those early demos and tracks we didn’t put on the record at the time.”
Having filled the blanks on the not-so silent years, what can we expect from Mercury Rev’s return to Australia for Harvest, and just what was it that enticed them to return?
Well, there will be: “A lot of Deserter’s [in the set] … we’re rehearsing a lot of songs from Deserter’s but we’re also rehearsing a couple of songs from each album, and it’ll be different probably in each city; maybe half Deserter’s and half other songs. That festival sounds great – just the description of the festival sounds cool, and The Flaming Lips and Mogwai and Portishead, and all the bands really, it just seems like a really cool line-up. And plus, for us it’s like November here so it’s really crappy weather so we can go jump in on your spring time!”
Here’s hoping the tropical thunderstorms don’t follow them Down Under.
