Lambchop
If there is a quintessential Merge band aside from Superchunk, it is Lambchop. Based more on friendship than ambition, and more on music than careers, Lambchop has been plugging away for two decades, making records that defy categorization.
When Mac went to college, he left behind a rich and supportive underground music community for a big city that wasn’t conducive to playing in bands. He missed Chapel Hill and the music scene badly enough to delay his studies and stay home for a year, and when he came back to stay, he and Laura set about building a burgeoning indie network. His Columbia classmate Jonathan Marx had the opposite experience.
Marx was raised in Nashville, where the major-label music machinery is as thoroughly entrenched, and as banal a part of the local economy, as steel in Pittsburgh. In the 1980s, it drew thousands of talented musicians, but for someone who wasn’t interested in pumping out prefabricated radio-ready country, or writing patriotic songs on a production line, it was a backwater. Nashville’s Jason and the Scorchers shook things up in the early 1980s, undermining country clichés and filtering them through a punk aesthetic a full decade before alt country became a genre. But locally, the Scorchers were more bad-boy outlier than leaders of a movement. There was nowhere to buy the records that Marx wanted to buy, and aside from the occasional band coming through town, there were no shows that he wanted to go to. Marx grew up with a sense that good music, and like-minded fans, were elsewhere.
Jonathan Marx I had this sense of the music world being incredibly big, remote, and “cooler” than I could possibly hope to be.
But New York was an awakening. He became friends with Mac, and through him, Laura, and met a host of people from Boston, D.C., Seattle, and other cities that were full of kids making noise. The record stores were overflowing with obscure 7-inches, and he could see any band he wanted. He went to see Antietam and Big Dipper at CBGB’s one night, and came home blown away by the former’s Crazy Horse–inspired rock. Two days later, he walked into the elevator of the Columbia library on his way to French class, and found himself standing next to two of them. They worked in the library.
Jonathan Marx Seeing Antietam in the elevator was a perfect emblem of my experience. My friends were in bands and putting out records, and I was suddenly in close proximity to all these things I had wanted to be a part of. I was really awed by it all.
Marx didn’t play an instrument, or write songs; he was content to sit back and be a fan of what his friends were doing. When he moved back to Nashville after school, he found himself back in nowhere land. All his friends were in D.C. or North Carolina or New York making music and putting out records that he couldn’t even find in Nashville record stores. He would send letters with cash to Mac, who would buy whatever sounded cool at Schoolkids and send them back. He’d visit Chapel Hill whenever he could, and contemplated moving there.
Jonathan Marx It just seemed so fun. I remember mentioning to Laura that I was thinking about it, and she was like, “Why would you want to do that?”
So he stayed in Nashville and landed an internship at Nashville Scene, the local alternative newspaper, waited for records to arrive in the mail from Mac, and searched for ways to find some sort of local connection to music that was worth caring about. One August night in 1990, his friend Jeremy Tepper was in town for a conference, and Marx was showing him around. They stopped in at a bar called Springwater in the West End district, and a band was playing that sounded different. Nashville is lousy with songwriters, and on any given night you can walk into a bar and hear familiar voices singing formulaic songs – “people trying to shop around their cut that they hope to sell to John Michael Montgomery, or whoever the fuck it is, and make $50 to pay the rent,” as Marx puts it. But this band had nothing to do with that. They seemed to be there because they were enjoying themselves. They were tuneful and unconventional, and reminded Marx of the New Zealand pop that was coming out on Flying Nun at the time. It was the first time he’d seen a local band that was doing something that sounded exciting to him. He fell in love with them. They were called Posterchild.
Posterchild was led by Kurt Wagner, a gentle, quiet, and sincere art school graduate ten years Marx’s senior who had moved to Nashville from Chicago in 1986. Wagner’s attitude toward making music was as casual and informal as Mac’s was focused; he’s likely to answer any question about his musical endeavors with some variant of, “it seemed like it would be fun.” For Wagner, Posterchild was as much a social exercise as a musical one. He just liked to get together with friends and do stuff, and music seemed like a better time than poker.
Kurt Wagner We definitely didn’t have any aspirations other than getting together every week and having a good time and playing these songs we made up.
Those songs were a sort of genre-free distillation of the AM radio hits that Wagner grew up on in the 1970s, a fusion of folk, soul, and classic rock into a sort of elemental pop music overlaid with Wagner’s curious singing voice, which sounded like a tired but dedicated father reading a bedtime story at the end of a long workday.
As per Wagner’s freeform vision of what a band should be, Posterchild’s lineup was in constant flux. Anyone could come to the party, but the original core was formed out of the flooring company Wagner worked for: His boss, Bill Killebrew, played guitar, and coworker Marc Trovillion played bass. They occasionally made four-track recordings, more as a lark or a pantomime of being in a band than as an avenue to get their music out.
Kurt Wagner Anybody could be in the band so long as they behaved themselves. That was really my only criteria. And believe it or not, it was enough. People would come and hang out and either say, “These guys are nuts,” and leave, or they’d find some like-mindedness and stick around. It was sort of like a fantasy idea of having a band, without all the officialness of actually doing it.
Early self-released Posterchild cassette.
Posterchild, 1992.
Posterchild played every third Saturday at Springwater in what the club called the Working Stiffs Jamboree, a recurring evening of music by and for the few people who weren’t trying to network their way into the industry. Marx started going compulsively, and introduced himself to the band. He begged them for tapes, so they started recording practices on a boom box just to have something to give him.
Jonathan Marx There was no scene. There was just nothing to connect to in Nashville, and then suddenly I found this band. And they were all ten years older than me. It was like being introduced to this other world. It felt very much like they were artists – bordering on folk artists.
Marx and Wagner became friends, and started going to shows and “whatever kind of vaguely halfway worthwhile shit was going on in Nashville.” Marx had stumbled into the community he’d been looking for, but he was still just an observer until one night in 1992, when he and Wagner were talking about their childhood musical experiences. Wagner mentioned that he’d played cello as a kid, and Marx replied that he’d played the saxophone in his high school marching band, and his sister had played clarinet. “I always thought a clarinet would sound kind of cool in Posterchild,” Wagner told him. Marx went to his parents’ house, rooted around in their basement, dug up his sister’s old clarinet, and started playing in his favorite band.
Jonathan Marx It was completely loose and unstructured at that point. I just basically started hanging out with them every week. They were these crazy, free-form sessions where we’d get completely baked and, for lack of a better word, jam. It was unhinged.
But Marx was hell-bent on recreating in Nashville the kind of creative, and productive, indie culture he’d seen in New York and Chapel Hill, and he set about harnessing Posterchild’s freeform, lackadaisical fantasy-band energy into an actual band with actual records. He convinced them to go into a studio, and in the fall of 1992 they recorded “An Open Fresca” and “A Moist Towelette” in a makeshift studio run by a friend of theirs that was housed in a U-Store-It rental space. They were rough-hewn, and sounded like two guitar players, a bass player, a drummer, and a clarinetist who were not trying to sound like anything else. Marx hoped Merge would put it out and sent a tape to Mac, but didn’t hear anything back. He didn’t want to press the issue and make his friend say something he didn’t want to say, so they decided to put it out themselves as a split 7-inch with a local band called Crop Circle Hoax.
Mac Jonathan would write letters talking about this band he was in, Posterchild. Not that I didn’t trust Jonathan’s judgment, but this friend, who I’ve never known to play music outside of a Government Issue cover band he sang in at Columbia, is all of a sudden telling me about this weird country band he’s in, and he plays clarinet – I was worried about what that was going to sound like! And it was strange, but in the best way. The early Lambchop stuff had this spazzy, almost aggressive nervous energy. Even the quiet songs sounded off the rails and beautiful.
Kurt Wagner Jonathan was a big revelation. He brought a lot of interesting ideas to us, like the idea that you can actually make a record yourself. And he proudly sent that 7-inch to Mac and said, “Look, I’ve got a band, and I made a record.”
Jonathan Marx At the time, it hadn’t really occurred to Kurt that we could make this a thing. That we could be a band that puts out records. But I was just so obsessively interested in doing just that, because all my friends were doing it, that Kurt was like, “Hell yeah. Let’s run with it.”
They sent “An Open Fresca” to Ajax, which picked it up, and this made enough money for them to buy more studio time. They recorded another batch of songs in 1993, which Marx again sent to Mac. By this time, Wagner had begun to work his powers of persuasion: When Superchunk played Nashville the previous October, he brought them a fruit basket. But rather than hand it to them in the dressing room at the Pantheon, he simply placed it onstage as they were playing.
Kurt Wagner It just got torn to pieces by the audience, and Mac slipped on a banana peel and fell on his ass. That was sort of my way of trying to get on Merge. I still recommend a fruit basket; I’m sure it will do the trick.
Merge did agree to put out the single, “Nine” b/w “Moody Fucker,” as the label’s forty-fifth release. But it wasn’t by Posterchild. Their first single got enough attention and positive reviews in zines to cross the radar of lawyers at Warner Brothers, which had recently signed the Champaign, III., power-pop band the Poster Children. The label sent Wagner a cease-and-desist letter claiming ownership over the singular variant of the name as well. Figuring he was in no position to face down a threat, Wagner considered changing the name to REN – the typographical difference between the two names – but decided that would just inflame the label, since R.E.M. was also on Warner Brothers.
Kurt Wagner We were thinking about Turd Goes Back. Laura really didn’t like that one.
One day, while reading a newspaper item about Shari Lewis, Trovillion started talking about her puppet sidekick, Lamb Chop. “Hmmm, that’s stupid enough,” Wagner said. “Nobody would call their band that, so nobody will threaten to sue us again.”
Mac I was sure the puppet’s people were going to come after us.
Merge released the single in 1993 and followed it up with I Hope You’re Sitting Down, Lambchop’s first full-length, in September 1994. The sleeve for “Nine” was printed by Hatch Show Prints, a Nashville print shop whose block-letter, two- and three-color show posters for everyone from Hank Williams to Bill Monroe to Roy Acuff virtually invented the visual language of country music. It bore the message “written, recorded, printed, pressed, assembled in Nashville” and began Lambchop’s two-decade attempt to reclaim its hometown and musical heritage. Wagner gleefully and publicly described Lambchop as a “country” band, a moniker that stuck despite the fact that the description is, in some ways, patently false. While they employed the tools of country music – pedal-steel guitar, acoustic guitars, mandolin, banjo – they don’t sound anything like country music in its contemporary or classical definitions. The songs are infused with elements of soul, jazz, and Burt Bacharach radio pop, but devoid of any twangy tropes. Wagner’s lyrics are often inscrutable – “The Man Who Loved Beer,” from their second record, How I Quit Smoking, is based on a 4,000-year-old Egyptian poem – or detailed sketches of quotidian domestic scenes. There are no witty or corny epigrams about heartache.
Kurt Wagner We were taking some of the notions about that Nashville sound, using the instruments of Nashville, and the recording facilities of Nashville, and just looking at what is country, conceptually. Everything but the actual sound. I mean, I grew up here. Jonathan grew up here. We had as much right as anybody to say, “This is what Nashville music sounds like.” We called ourselves country partly to be funny, but it ended up getting taken seriously, which blew my mind. I didn’t realize people took what you said seriously. I thought that everyone made up their own mind about stuff and didn’t rely on you to tell them what you are.
Deanna Varagona and Kurt Wagner, making the setlist.
Mac I’m still absorbing I Hope You’re Sitting Down – or Jack’s Tulips, depending on which spine you’re looking at – to this day. It’s layered, and some of the layers are so quiet or obscured that you don’t hear them the first fifty times you listen to the record. The lyrics are almost spoken at times, but then Deanna Varagona will come in, doubling Kurt’s vocals in a higher octave, or the horns and lap steel will swell under a surprise chorus, and the miniature sounds suddenly add up to something really affecting and heavy. The music is hard to place in time; it’s really unto its own little world. It didn’t fit into any kind of “indie rock” category – it was literary, it strolled rather than charged, it was delicate. It certainly didn’t sound like anything else we had released on Merge.
Wagner’s loose definition of what constituted membership in the band meant that it was constantly metastasizing, picking up stray musicians and continuing to expand the musical kinship Marx was looking for. I Hope You’re Sitting Down lists no fewer than eleven musicians playing fourteen instruments, from ukulele to pedal steel to “open-ended wrenches.” Shows in Nashville quickly became legendary for the crowd onstage rivaling the audience in number. Wagner viewed proficiency almost as a liability.
Kurt Wagner I was a little self-conscious about our lack of true musical abilities. So if any actual musicians wanted to play, I’d say, “Come by. But can you bring something else?” Paul Niehaus is a great example of this. He’s a great guitar player. And I said, “I’ve got this old lap steel. Can you play that?” It just so happened he was wanting to try the lap steel out anyway. So he was handicapped because he actually knew how to play music. It was more about the things that people could bring to the music other than their musical adeptness. Their ideas. Their sensitivity. Their inability.
Jonathan Marx Kurt thought like an artist. He made Lambchop an art project without being pretentious. And as it became more of an endeavor, and he had less time to paint, it became, “I don’t paint anymore. This is what I do for art.”
They stumbled into some early breaks: In 1993, Lollapalooza was inviting select local bands to the play the side stage on each stop, and one of the promoters happened to have heard one of the 7-inches. He gave them a slot after Tool. The crowd loved it, and Lambchop was asked to do a whole leg of Lollapalooza the next year. It was their first tour.
Kurt Wagner It was insane. We didn’t have any concept of touring. We brought a Hammond organ that died during the first show, and we dragged it around for two weeks. We’d be playing and George Clinton would be on the main stage, and you wouldn’t be able to hear us at all.
Mac I went to see them when Lollapalooza came through Raleigh. They were on the side stage with Stereolab, playing at noon. It was a great bill, but even with thirteen people on stage they were so quiet that it felt like they were getting swallowed up by the wind and the dust and the sound from the main stage. But they built their set up to a rocker like “Nine” at the end, and their size and the stubborn novelty of the music they were playing really won people over.
But serious touring was a tough proposition for a thirteen-or-so member band, most of whom had day jobs that they weren’t prepared to give up. (Marx eventually became the Nashville Scene’s managing editor and went on to cover arts for The Tennessean, Nashville’s daily newspaper.) Aside from the obvious scheduling difficulties, the expense of moving and housing a baker’s dozen of musicians around the country made it virtually impossible to book a profitable tour. Bob Lawton, their booking agent, tried to get Wagner to pare the touring band down to a more manageable size.
Bob Lawton It was always, “Kurt, can we get this down to a smaller thing, so you can do it more?” And he’d say, “OK – six people.” And in New York, there would be nine onstage! They’d just show up!
And bands with clarinets and horns and strings tended not to go over too well in rock clubs; Lambchop usually played quietly, with Wagner sitting down. They were the sort of band you’d expect to see at a place with seats. Lambchop’s failure to hit the road was frustrating to Mac and Laura, and it placed a ceiling on their record sales. Merge didn’t have the resources to offer enough tour support to make it worthwhile for the band, but they loved the music, so they kept putting out their records.
Europe was a different story. Christof Ellinghaus’s City Slang put out I Hope You’re Sitting Down there, and for reasons that even Wagner can’t quite articulate – perhaps a misguided sense that Lambchop was a part of the “Americana” movement that was taking off in the mid-nineties – it sold well.
Mac We sent Christof I Hope You’re Sitting Down before it came out, and he initially passed on it. But like Lambchop records do, it grew on him. Even though he knew it was a strange record and an unwieldy band, he really felt strongly that he needed to follow his love of the record and put it out. He called us after it was already out over here and was like, “I need to do this record, I can’t stop listening to it!”
When Ellinghaus asked Lambchop to tour Europe as a full band, and offered to underwrite the travel, the band looked at it as more of a vacation than a tour. It didn’t go great.
Kurt Wagner On the last night of the tour, I walked off stage, and the rest of the band was still playing, and Christof and I were both sitting there watching. And he told me that he lost $40,000 on the tour. And I said, “Well, I guess we’re done then.” He goes, “No. Maybe next time we lose $20,000.”
Indeed, after How I Quit Smoking, Ellinghaus brought them over again, and lost less money. The investments paid off, and Lambchop’s European audience grew to the point where the band could take off for a couple weeks every year or so to profitably tour European concert halls with Austin’s Tosca String Quartet and elaborate stage decorations, playing to thousands of people. And then they’d come back home and go back to work in relative anonymity.
Kurt Wagner We’d get offered a show at Royal Albert Hall, and then I’d come home and sand floors. And I thought that was beautiful. I was convinced that you could make records and balance it with a normal life.
That dream evaporated in 2000, when he had to quit the flooring business because his knees and lungs were giving out from all the kneeling and sawdust, and the band took up too much of his time to find another job.
Lambchop is an almost maddeningly prolific band, with a total of sixteen releases over their fifteen-year relationship with Merge. Their 1997 release Thriller was named the tenth best record of the year by the London Independent, and 2000’s Nixon was described as a “near-masterpiece” by both Spin and The Onion. But none of them ever broke through in the states, and sales peaked at 20,000. The action was in Europe.
Jonathan Marx Merge certainly doesn’t reap any kind of great financial gain from being involved with us. But that’s not what Mac and Laura set out to do in the first place.
Kurt Wagner Mac and Laura were just so sweet. Laura would say, “We’re happy to put out anything, anytime you want.” And for someone to say that was all we needed. We didn’t need a contract. Just the understanding that they believed in the art we were making, and were happy enough if that’s all we could do for them. They just wanted to hear another record.
Mac Kurt is making art. Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes it’s crowd-pleasing, and sometimes it’s just incredibly quiet, but it’s his art and he’s constantly refining it and expanding it at the same time. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, and I feel lucky to be a part of it. It’s true that we work hard at Merge, and are sometimes frustrated by our inability to grow Lambchop in the U.S. in the way that they have exploded overseas, but it’s also true that we just want to hear a new record.
Ed Roche Nobody would admit it, but I think there are some labels that probably would have given up on Lambchop because they weren’t able to tour the states. But Merge has stuck with them the whole time. It’s not just business with the band, because they are friends, and Mac and Laura have a very strong relationship with Lambchop.
Of course, by the same token, if Lambchop hadn’t stuck with Merge, and migrated to a label that could underwrite U.S. tours the way City Slang could in Europe, their story might have been different.
Bob Lawton It was so frustrating for us all, because we all just felt that they were so great. And they can’t get arrested here. Was it Merge? If they were on Lost Highway, would they have more profile here? Are they actually impeded by being on Merge who can’t spend oodles of money? It’s a fair question, and I’m not going to answer it. Because they’re the same records, right? It’s not a different record that goes to Europe. It’s the same people, it’s the same songs.
Jonathan Marx Our relationship with Merge is part of who we are. Maybe someone would have thrown more money at us at the front end, but they also might have just given up at some point because we didn’t sell enough records. And then where would we be?
In 2006, with the release of Lambchop’s eleventh full-length, Damaged, Lambchop and Merge finally decided to try to mount a U.S. tour done right. Part of the frustration with their failure to catch fire in the states the way they did in Europe was that American audiences rarely got a chance to see Lambchop the way they were meant to be seen: In a quiet concert hall, with the full band and the help of the Tosca String Quartet.
Mac For the Lambchop show at the Merge 15th anniversary festival, we had put them in the Carolina Theatre instead of the rock club. We got a string quartet to play with them. People were in tears by the end of their set. It was just incredibly moving, and after the show Kurt said, “Well, that’s basically what it’s like every night in Europe.” So we wanted to try that here on a larger scale.
Kurt Wagner Mac and I, after years of trying to do things budget-y here, we decided to invest in that notion. A U.S. tour with the full band, and the strings, in nice venues. Nobody came. The shows were great, but it was mildly attended. It was proof, I guess, that both of us were wrong. Overall, it was astonishing just how little interest there seemed to be in us at that point.
The only people who need to be interested, of course, are Mac and Laura. The answer to Lawton’s question – did Merge help or hinder Lambchop? – is unknowable. But what is certain is that without Merge, Lambchop wouldn’t have become what it is.
Jonathan Marx I’m glad to still be part of Lambchop, and part of Merge. There’s part of me that feels like we must be hoary, or outdated, especially when you look at Spoon or Arcade Fire and go, “Wow, those guys are actually popular.” Us? Well, we do what we do, and maybe there’s a certain amount of pride in just being ourselves.
