1996 to 1999
For its first six or so years of existence, Superchunk galloped at a furious pace. By the time Strings came out, they’d released seven full-length records, including two collections of singles, and seventeen 7-inches. In 1996, after pushing Strings harder than any previous record, they eased off the accelerator. They would wait an unheard-of-in-Superchunkland two years to put out their next full-length, Indoor Living. They played shows, including a year-end trip to Australia, but for the first time since 1991, the band’s calendar featured months-long swaths of blank space. They spent just two days out of the entire year in the studio, recording four songs for the Laughter Guns EP, which they released in a limited edition of 5,000 in October to hold fans over.
Superchunk was in a strange place. There were established vectors that bands were obliged to follow. A 1991 story in the Chapel Hill–area Independent Weekly championing Superchunk and bemoaning the local hype surrounding Lollapalooza, which had started that year, summed up the expectations: “The local scene deserves as much attention, anticipation, and adulation as [Lollapalooza]. When Superchunk draws 20,000 or 30,000 people around here that’ll be more like it.” The trajectory was supposed to go from passionate obscurity to jaded celebrity. Bands either break through, or they break up. Superchunk had steadily sold more records with each release, and after Strings were at the peak of their career. Their name had become synonymous with indie credibility. But their efforts to translate that into broader commercial success – the Belly tour, the “Hyper Enough” radio push – had failed. They were no longer perceived as having insurgent momentum, and they never did draw 20,000 people. So they got coverage like this, from a 1996 Rip magazine profile: “Truth be known, I’m pretty much up on most indie rock, but Superchunk just never made it to my CD player. I’d heard them at friends’ houses and thought they were cool, but I owned none of their records.” The writer made much of that fact that the friend she brought with her to see a Superchunk show before the interview was surprised to find out that they weren’t Supergrass.
And indie credibility wasn’t quite as profitable as some had hoped. In January 1996, Atlantic dissolved its relationship with Matador; Billboard speculated that Superchunk’s decision not to stay with the label was a factor. Nor was Superchunk so young anymore. “We’re all almost thirty years old, and our audience is still twenty,” Wilbur told an Australian newspaper in 1996. “You see yourself getting older, and you wonder what you could possibly be doing that is still relevant to these people. It’s scary to think about it. It’s not youthful rebellion any more. It’s an idiom I can exploit for artistic means.”
Matt Gentling There was a sense even back then that people would remember Merge, and that it would leave its mark on music. But they were kind of financially strapped a lot of the time. They were operating just right around the line, and even just under the line, quite a bit.
Claire Ashby Superchunk supported that label for the first ten years or so. I’m sure they were outselling everybody else on the label. Merge was paying something to Mac and Laura, but I don’t think they were making a ton of money off it.
Laura Superchunk loaned Merge money a couple of times, to help keep things rolling. But I always paid Superchunk back. It was a little matter of cashflow.
Liz Sloan (Former Merge finance director) At one point we explored taking on some bank debt just to have more comfort from a cash perspective. And they were not interested in leverage. They didn’t want to go that route. And that’s why I think they’ll be celebrating their twentieth anniversary.
Laura It’s not in my nature. I don’t gamble. I don’t like giving money away. I don’t like paying interest. But I actually do love paying the bands. There’s nothing better than finishing a profit-sharing statement and realizing that we owe a band a big chunk of money.
Jim Wilbur Superchunk was so much more of a thing than Merge for a while. And then the balance shifted.
Jason Ward They were aware that they were not going to blow up. They sort of locked in their core audience. When I’d tell people that I toured with Superchunk, they’d say, “Oh, I loved them when I was in college. They’re still around?”
Tom Scharpling It seemed like they hit a ceiling with things. Is that wrong to say? Am I being insulting by saying that? It kind of leveled off. And it’s a frustrating thing, I’m sure.
Jim Romeo In the last ten years, Super-chunk has probably played fewer shows than they did in all of 1994.
Jim Wilbur Jon would have expectations. He would get upset if no one came to the show. I’d get upset, but I wouldn’t cry about it. You know, there were times when we’d play in Athens, a place where we used to always sell out, and there’d be 150 people. And he would take that personally. And I’d be like, “Well, R.E.M. are playing tonight.”
Phil Morrison There was a period of time where every Superchunk show I saw, I thought it could be the last one. Not because there would be some kind of tumult, but that maybe they would just stop. And end.
Bob Lawton They kind of flattened out, or waned, whatever you want to call it. They started touring less, and recording less.
Phil Morrison It went from being the thing that everyone was expected to put first, and drop anything else for, to becoming a thing where, if everybody agreed, Oh sure, I’m free for that, that they could do it. But anyone was allowed to veto for some other priority.
Jim Wilbur When we’d do interviews – I remember at one point, Jon and I said, “If they ask anything about Merge, we’re going to walk away.” Because we didn’t have anything to do with Merge. And Mac had to tell a guy, “Could we just stop the interview? Can we just talk about Superchunk?” Which was a bit churlish in retrospect. But it came up in every interview.
Mac I thought they were such babies about that. What’s the big deal? It helps the Super-chunk story, but you don’t feel like sitting there for two minutes while I talk about it?
Bob Lawton I used to say, “Can’t you do something? Maybe get arrested?” They were so unassuming. They didn’t want to bring extra attention to themselves. Wilbur might take one hit of pot after a show – maybe. They had a couple beers. They barely touched hard liquor.
Jim Wilbur No drug abuse, no fashion. There was nothing really to hang a tag on this band except that we looked like your neighbors. Most indie kids had the skinny, glasses, unshaven look. They’re from central casting, a lot of times. We’re the most unrock rock band. We didn’t wear scarves. We don’t have funny hair. I guess Laura and Mac did kind of have funny hair in the beginning. I didn’t have funny hair.
Laura Jim was losing his hair. The break-up was over, so the press didn’t even have that to latch onto. After we played with the Super-suckers a couple times, I started joking that we needed a gimmick like their cowboy hats to keep people interested. Man or Astroman? was doing real well with their space suits at the time.
Lou Barlow When I first met Mac and Laura, I felt like a completely sarcastic asshole. They were just incredibly friendly. My experience of being in hardcore bands was that things were always just sort of edgy. If you met another band, you never knew if they were going to be really nice, or just so cool that they were completely pricks. The question was always really up in the air. Back then, you were kind of supposed to be angry. But with Superchunk, they were from the South and a lot nicer, and they weren’t pretentious.
Amy Ruth Buchanan I think Laura had a retirement account before I knew what one was.
Lou Barlow I was doing reviews with a friend of mine for this fanzine called Pop-watch, and I was pretty opinionated about what I liked and what I didn’t like. I was a little bit divisive, I would say, in my opinions about things. And I wrote something about Superchunk – like, “Oh, they’re okay, they’re too poppy, or they aren’t heavy enough for me.” Something like that. And Mac sent me a letter saying, “Wait a minute! I thought we were kind of friends.” I just had to say something dismissive about him, and he totally busted me on it. I mean, he got me. He totally got me. And I remember thinking it was pretty sweet, because it obviously meant he cared. I thought that was great, and that I should probably watch what I type.
In the winter of 1996, Superchunk went on a lengthy tour of Europe with the coheadliners Seam that was attended by a rare showing of outright rancor, and ranks as legendary among Superchunk’s many ill-fated tours of the continent.
Jon Wurster That was probably the worst tour I’ve ever been on. It was so bad that Jim still carries the itinerary in his wallet, so whenever things go badly in his own life, he’ll take it out and he’ll know that it can get worse.
Mac There was definitely some friction. I got along with everybody, including the Seam guys. But I think any time you’re put in a bus for six weeks, there’s going to be some personality traits that conflict. And the stronger personalities, like DeWitt, and some of the guys in Seam, kind of clashed.
DeWitt Burton was Superchunk’s roadie for the tour.
Jon Wurster For some reason, the drummer for Seam, Chris Manfrin, didn’t really bring anything. He didn’t bring cymbals or anything. So he was using all my stuff.
DeWitt Burton That guy was as prepared to play a rock show as Custer was to fight Indians at the Little Big Horn. I think he showed up with like a pair of sticks. The whole thing was, I felt like I was getting taken advantage of, because I was the only roadie there. And the Superchunk guys are just so great about helping you pack up and stuff at the end of the night. They would never let me pack the van by myself. And I told the Seam and the Superchunk guys that I would work for everybody, but, come on – you guys have to pitch in. So on nights when Seam headlined, I’d always have to say to Chris, “You’ve got to help bust down these drums and put them away.” One night in Sweden, after the show, everybody was having a good time with all the beautiful people. Chris had just started taking down the drums and left the cymbals on the ground – it was people just spilling beer on them and stepping on them. And this is my friend Jon’s drum kit, so I’m extremely protective of it. So I’d seen this going on, and it just kind of came to a head.
DeWitt Burton.
Jon Wurster After the show, I went to bed on the bus. I slept the entire drive overnight. And the next morning I wake up to find that the drummer for Seam is in the hospital. I was like, “What happened?”
DeWitt Burton I said to Chris, “Get your fucking ass out there and pack those drums.” And he got mad at me and suggested that he was going to beat my ass or something. He’s got this Midwestern, Chicago tough-guy thing – but he’s not. And I’m not a little fella. I’m a lot bigger than Jon, Mac, Laura, or Jim. I was like, Yeah right, on your best day, you redneck. He flew off into this volatile, explosive rage, screamed, jumped up and down like a small child, and then proceeded to turn around and smash his hand into a brick wall. Which reduced several of the bones in his hands to a powdery form. He sure showed me. And the rest of the tour, Mac was once again playing the drums for Seam.
Jon Wurster Mac was the original drummer in Seam. So we figured out this way where, for Seam’s set, Mac would play some songs, and I’ll play some songs, and the sound guy will play some songs. Show goes on.
DeWitt Burton I guess it was a good thing he was in Sweden where they have fine hospitals and everything, because they put his hand back together, put him in a cast and then he flew home. But as you might guess, that did cause a little dissent and a little aggravation among people cramped in a living space together.
Joe Hickey was Superchunk’s soundman on the tour.
Mac My wife Andrea came to visit for a few days on that tour. On her last night we were in Munich, and we skipped the bus and got a hotel room. I dropped her off at the subway to the airport in the morning, and walked back to the venue where the bus was parked. And I get back there, and everyone’s freaking out, because DeWitt and Joe had – basically, DeWitt had punched Joe, and Joe’s face was a big shiner. And one of them was going home, but no one knew which one. And I was like, “What!? I only left for like six hours.”
Jim Wilbur On the same tour, Jon dove off the stage during a song in Copenhagen when a guy reached up and touched Laura’s bass. You’re playing, you’re in the moment, and all of a sudden the drums stop. And I look and see Jon flying through the air, grabbing this guy going, “What are you doing? You don’t touch people!”
Laura It was in Christiania, a weird, druggie enclave in Copenhagen. The place we were playing was a combination rock club, restaurant, and hostel. This guy started messing with me, and I started to see drum sticks flying through the air at him, and I realized Jon was trying to defend me! So sweet. He tried more subtle methods before tackling the guy, he really did.
Jon Wurster He got thrown out. But at the end of the night – which is ruined at this point – we’re loading up stuff, and I look over and he’s there again. I’m like, “What’s going on? Why is this guy here?” And the club owner says, “Uh, we could not really throw him out, because he lives here.” He lived in the building!
Mac I understand why Jim hated that tour. It was very grueling. Bus tours are hard, because you’re trapped wherever the bus is. It’s pretty much like the bus is leaving at this time, you go to sleep, and you wake up in a parking lot somewhere. And if you want to go somewhere, you have to walk or take a cab. And we’re just so used to having control over our own movement. It’s especially bad in Europe because the clubs are all outside the town in some industrial park in Germany. You can’t really get around. And Jim couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t relax, so he would spend long hours sitting in the jump seat next to the driver. One thing about the bus is that you can’t take a shit on the bus. That’s the rule. So the driver would literally pull over for Jim in the middle of the night. I remember Jim one time saying he had to take a shit on a frozen river, under a bridge, in like Sweden somewhere, because that was the only place to pull over. And Jim’s like, “No, don’t worry, you don’t need to pull into a truck stop. Just like pull over to the side of the road.”
Jim Wilbur I had health issues. I was a vegetarian, and unknowingly lactose intolerant. So I just felt bad all the time because I was eating cheese, and just having horrible gastrointestinal problems. But I cared about the band. I hated touring. I hated it. But I did it, because I’m a New England masochist. You know, Protestant work ethic and all that.
Laura We had a code name for diarrhea in the band – Perlman. As in Rhea Perlman. It comes in very handy when you have Jim Wilbur in the van.
Tour antics aside, responsible young adults make responsible young adult music. Superchunk’s next two records, 1997’s Indoor Living and 1999’s Come Pick Me Up, were calculated departures from the brash and salty-sweet guitar heroics that the band was known for.
For Indoor Living, the band tapped their friend John Plymale, who had produced the Laughter Guns EP. They headed out to Echo Park in Bloomington, Ind., a studio owned by Mike Wanchic, the guitar player for John Mellencamp.
Mac Plymale is great in the studio. He never gave us an ounce of weariness, or the “Are you sure you want to do that?” look. He also introduced us to the greatest game you can play after spending twelve hours in an airless and artificial studio environment: A basketball variant called Tip It In, which we played on the court behind Echo Park. I think it’s the only time the whole band participated in a sport of any kind.
Jason Ward Indoor Living was the beginning of them changing a lot. They started to stretch out more musically. There were fewer chords and more of back and forth – almost like a Television kind of thing – these little interplays of guitar melodies instead of unison power chords. And the tempos came down and the songs were a little longer. I really liked it a lot. And Mac also started developing more of an interest with keyboard parts and other textures that weren’t just two distorted guitars and distorted bass.
Writing Indoor Living in Wurster’s basement, 1997.
Writing Here’s Where the Strings Come In, 1995.
Laura When we were writing songs for Indoor Living, I started playing the bass parts in a higher range, because all of the boom-boom was getting a little dull for me. At some point, I wondered if Mac was thinking, “Oh shit, now she’s playing like the bass players we used to have in the Slushpuppies!” Of course, I couldn’t play a bass solo if you paid me to. In fact, we started covering Elvis Costello’s “Lipstick Vogue,” which has a break with this crazy bass part, and every time we played it, I thought, “I am a failure as a bass player.” I can’t solo my way out of a wet paper bag.
John Plymale I think one of the reasons they picked Echo Park was that Mac looked at their list of equipment and they had a whole bunch of cool synthesizers. I definitely remember him wanting to experiment a lot with the synthesizers, playing around and trying to come up with ideas.
Ron Liberti Mac was kind of feeling differently about how he was being represented. And I was coming to the point then, too, where I was kind of sick of screaming my head off. Not that I was ever really angry, but when I was younger, it came out in a certain way. And when I got to thirty years old or so, I didn’t really want to scream anymore. I didn’t really have anything to scream about.
John Plymale Mac was making the vocals a little bit more part of the plan. He’s an interesting guy, because the things he really likes musically are very different from the type of music that he makes. He’s a really big jazz fan, and he’s also a really big Bruce Springsteen fan. And I don’t personally hear much of either of those really in his music. But obviously they’re influences on him, in a big way. So you’ve got Bruce Springsteen, who’s all about having a big, loud lead vocal in the mix. And then you’ve got jazz and bebop, where it’s all about being obscure and really to the left of everything. And Mac is somewhere in the middle of that.
Jason Ward He started singing more sing-songy stuff, and singing falsetto, and backing harmonies. It was like watching him learn that he was actually a singer, and that he can hit notes.
Mac I used to never want the rest of the band in the studio when I was recording vocals, because it’s humiliating. But this time we came up with a nice little system with me in a glass booth facing Jim and John in the control room. Jim would weigh in after each take, which was a huge help, because he knows me and knows the songs better than anyone. A lot of the time in Superchunk, there’s a sort of “every man for himself” vibe, with everyone just focused on taking care of their own stuff. So in the studio, everyone sort of has their heads down to a certain extent, concentrating on their own little world and their own parts. Having Jim out there made me feel like there was someone on my team.
Jon Wurster I was kind of hoping that we’d branch out a little earlier than we did. Because I remember – and this is a completely polarizing band – but the Afghan Whigs, they had put out Gentlemen around the time of On the Mouth. And to me, that was a really advanced kind of record for a band that was coming from where they had come from. They were obviously thinking about it. And they were throwing in things that I kind of was hoping we would throw in. But we just weren’t there yet. So the ones that came later are the ones where we were experimenting a little bit.
Indoor Living had its traditional Superchunk barnburners, like “Nu Bruises” and “European Medicine.” But many of the songs were awash in organ and burbling keyboard noises, and peppered with carefully orchestrated oohs and ahs. Mac’s deliberate falsetto was striking. “Like a Fool,” the opener to Foolish three years earlier, had also featured Mac straining the upper ranges, but it was rough-hewn and raw. On Indoor Living, it was crafted.
Mac Christof Ellinghaus, who ran our European label, City Slang, asked me who the girl was singing backup vocals. There was no girl.
The record also found Mac taking a more concrete direction lyrically. “Song for Marion Brown” was an ode to the jazz composer and a meditation on art and commerce: “While the Capricorn Moon gathers dust / Now the box sets are moving in the malls… / They’re charging admission now… / For your baby teeth and a lock of hair.” Before Mac completed the lyrics, it was given the temporary title of “Baba O’Really?” by Wurster, because its chorus blatantly echoes the iconic guitar riff from the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
DeWitt Burton When they were writing that song, Laura said, “We should do this right here,” and she played the chorus part on her bass. Jon and Mac and Jim look at each other and go, “Hey Laura, have you ever listened to the Who? Have you ever heard ‘Baba O’Riley?’” And she says, “No.” And they all looked at each other: “Then it stays.” When they play it live, at the end, Jim screams into the microphone, “We’re all wasted!”
Laura I don’t recall that, and I’m a huge fan of the Who. Somehow, when I did it, it just didn’t occur to me that it sounded like the Who. But hey.
The 1996 Seam tour also served as inspiration for Indoor Living, turning up in “European Medicine”:
Old faxes, torn in two
One drummer turning blue
He’s alright, you know
Drinking kills both parasite and host
Continental clowns
Buying francs with pounds
Passed out on the ground…
Smashed and shattered now
One more hand, they’ll have to put me down
DeWitt Burton William Shin, who was in Seam and now is a businessman in the Washington, D.C. area, called me on the phone one day and said, “Man I was just sitting in my cubicle at work, and I heard this Superchunk song that is obviously about that tour.” If I’m fodder for a song from the Superchunk band, whether it makes me look like a fool or a great guy, I’m honored nonetheless.
Indoor Living’s final track, “Martinis on the Roof,” was another rare lyrically direct Superchunk song; it was a musical eulogy of sorts for Gibson Smith, a friend of the band who had been killed in a car accident near Chapel Hill a few months before they went into the studio. Smith’s apartment, above Cliff’s Meat Market on Main St. in Carrboro, N.C., had access to the roof, where he used to throw parties: “Cheetos and 100 proof / Martinis on the roof / And you were leaving too soon.” While the lyrics were mournful, the song itself was upbeat, with an almost Caribbean feel.
Laura I came up with the bassline that was the seed of that song, because I decided I at least had to write one song for Indoor Living. I thought it sounded like the Supremes combined with Soft Cell, and I assumed the guys would reject it. But they didn’t. The words to that song have made me cry many times on stage.
Mac The last thing we did at Echo Park was the marimba part on that song. I kept hearing a marimba in unison with the guitars on the chorus, and the studio found one somewhere in Bloomington. On our last day there, we went and grabbed it, brought it to the studio, recorded that part, and split town.
Indoor Living sold 23,000 copies. It was generally well received, but most of the reviews cast a nostalgic eye back on the days of “Slack Motherfucker” as Superchunk’s heyday. The Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot, one of their earliest champions, wrote: “As the decade starts to wind down, they have become indie-rock elders, an established band with a long string of albums, singles and side projects, as well as a successful record label, the Chapel Hill–based Merge. At Lounge Ax on Sunday, the band and a club full of fans celebrated bassist Laura Ballance’s 30th birthday.… It was a reminder that tunes such as ‘Sick to Move’ now qualify as nostalgia.”
Superchunk toured heavily behind Indoor Living: The states in October 1997, Europe in December, the South and Midwest in February 1998, and Brazil in September.
Jason Ward It was definitely kind of static in terms of their audience. People that were there were generally pretty into it. Of course, people would always get real psyched when they would play some raucous old song.
Jim Wilbur We felt that people were going to come see us even if we put out a shitty record. Because we have a back catalog that they do like. So we can try to do things differently.
In 1999 – after taking another leisurely two-year break between recording projects – Superchunk went back into the studio to make their strangest record yet. They reserved a full two weeks, the longest they had ever spent in a studio, at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago. Albini had come a long way since the band mixed Foolish in his cramped attic: He had built Electrical to his exacting specifications, including dorms upstairs for the bands, a pool table, an espresso machine, a live room lined with imported clay bricks, and studio techs who wore green-gray jumpsuits that made them look like mechanics from the 1950s.
They band asked Jim O’Rourke, who was known both for his work with experimental noise bands like Nurse with Wound and for his facility for writing horn and string arrangements for Stereolab and others, to produce. The result was Come Pick Me Up, a record of some of Superchunk’s most classically pop-oriented songs cut with odd song structures, weird time-signature changes, dance beats filtered through noiseboxes, “doobie doobie bop bop” backing vocals, lilting string melodies, and a brass section featuring Jeb Bishop, who had become a major figure in Chicago’s improvisational jazz scene; saxophonist Ken Vandermark; and former Volcano Suns bass player Bob Weston.
Mac I wanted an artier Superchunk record. A record with some surprising stuff going on.
Jeb Bishop Jim was really good at arranging and was good at thinking up expanded orchestration and instrumentation for things, and taking it out of just being a rock band into something more. And Mac was interested in trying to get some of that on a Superchunk record.
Wilbur, Jim O’Rourke, and Wurster during the recording of Come Pick Me Up.
Horn charts written by Jim O’Rourke for Come Pick Me Up.
Mac There was a snowstorm that hit right when we arrived in Chicago, and I literally didn’t leave the studio for the first seven days we were there. Jim and I slept on the floor of the control room for a couple nights. You just go to bed and wake up in the same windowless room with little blinking gear lights, and keep working.
Jim Wilbur We just went over the top with strings and handclaps and whatever. But it was fun. It didn’t change the way we wrote it. It was just when we recorded it, we asked O’Rourke to make up parts: “What would fit?” It was very off-the-cuff. He’d come in and be like, “I wrote this.” And we’d get the string players, they’d look at it, they’d record it. Boom – it was done. There were no long, drawn-out discussions. Mac would say, “Well, I want to do this. Anybody object?” No. What’s to object to?
Mac Jeb did a solo on the end of “Pink Clouds” during what O’Rourke told him was just a mic check to get levels. It was probably the first time he’d ever heard the song after maybe a playback in the control room or something, and it was amazing, and we kept it. We also kept Ken Vandermark’s solo on the same spot, so there was like horn mania for the first time on a Superchunk record, and Laura said something like, “It sounds like Bruce Springsteen!” Jim and I were like “Yes!”
Laura Jim O’Rourke brought in a modular synthesizer when it came time to mix the record. It was a big silver box with a bunch of holes in it, like a telephone switchboard. He would put on this big fuzzy plush-suit and plug away. He looked like a demented stuffed-animal telephone operator patching through calls. He got some crazy sounds out of that thing.
Jim Wilbur I kind of think that it was necessary to do what we did. But I think some of the ideas were – not necessarily ill conceived, but ill realized. Or maybe they shouldn’t have been realized. If you could go back, would you do it differently? Yeah. But you can’t go back, and you’ve got to stand by it. There were issues of Mac singing falsetto. But he was doing that because he was ruining his throat and he was trying to figure out a way to sing in a different way, that wouldn’t tear it to pieces.
Mac A lot of critics hated the falsetto. But I was writing melodies that I thought were really cool, and that was the only way I could sing them. And frankly, I was sick of belting out the tunes.
Come Pick Me Up was a divisive record. The Washington Post called it “the most engaging album of the band’s decade-long career.” London’s Guardian accused Superchunk of “stretching and striving to become a pop-folk band, but hesitating to leave their feedback-saturated roots behind, [leaving] their punk songs spindly and their low-key laments half-formed and immature.”
Mac Sales kind of dropped off for us with Come Pick Me Up and plateaued around 20,000. But our live shows were still as big as ever, if not bigger. We definitely had people who were not as into the records, but were still coming to the shows and loved them. We’d hear a lot of, “Even the new songs rocked live” from fans. Well, yeah. We’re not in a studio laying down cello parts, we’re playing live rock’n’roll at the Cat’s Cradle!
Laura The funny thing about the waning of Superchunk is that it seemed like once we started to branch out into things that weren’t just fast and loud, some people lost interest because they wanted to hear “Precision Auto” again. But I’d also hear people say, “Oh yeah, they just do the same thing all the time, so I lost interest.” It was confusing. Such a disconnect.
Ron Liberti I respected that they could go out on top. Not that they were going out, but they could do other things. They had the freedom to do other things because of Merge. And it wasn’t like, Superchunk’s done, now we’re all going to go get a job at the Kwik-E-Mart.
O’Rourke at the controls.
