| '90s
survivors |
|
It’s becoming an archetypal indie-rock story line: A young band gets signed to a major label during the mid-’90s alternative rock boom, they record a ridiculously expensive album in the studio where “Pet Sounds” was made, and just then just weeks before their triple-platinum projected masterpiece hits the shelves their major label gets bought by a major conglomerate and the album gets locked in a “let’s cut our losses” vault at conglomerate headquarters. Two weeks later the band gets dropped from the label. Three years later, they’re all broke, dead, or working at Kinko’s. Unless they are the rare and special exception. Enter Pinback. Pinback’s members came out of the major mess stronger, wiser, and more focused. It wasn’t even Pinback that got signed in those heady days of limo rides and huge advances–it was singer and bassist Amistead (“Zach”) Burwell Smith IV’s band 3 Mile Pilot. Pinback started as a reaction to the major label hangover. Smith didn’t want to spend $100,000 recording an album–he wanted to make music and regain the reins. He called his friend Rob Crow. “I just wanted to have fun doing music again – and that was the whole concept,” Smith says. “We weren’t trying to make a band; we weren’t trying to put out a record. It was just like, ‘Hey, come over. We’ll make music.’” Zach Smith’s world seems to operate entirely within two opposing modes: the laid back Southern California mode where he says stuff like, ‘Hey, come over, let’s make some music’ and that becomes a popular, sustainable band with seemingly little planning or effort; and the other mode where he works his ass off. He says of Pinback’s middle era, “I was doing everything. That was our thing – DIY kind of thing.” He was going to the paper store to buy paper to print CD covers himself; he was making band t-shirts in his backyard at 4 in the morning in the nights leading up to tours; he was sewing special tour-only CD cases. It’s an odd combination. Sometimes Zach talks like a stoned surfer who just flows along and if something happens, it happens, he didn’t do anything to make it so. Then other times, he talks about all the work he has done just to get by as a small band on a small label and you wonder when he has time to buy groceries, let alone write songs. Eventually, he started to wonder about that too. “We actually kind of started going ‘Wow, we’re kind of overwhelmed with just two people,’ “Smith says. “So there’s other people now who help out… We’re letting in a little help, simply at this point because I don’t want the music to suffer.” Suffer it has not. Pinback’s newest release, Summer In Abaddon, has the band roaming all over texture and atmosphere. This is not a tight, hurried record. It’s mostly relaxed and cinematic–a spacey Shins. Like Smith’s bipolar approach toward his career, Pinback’s music sometimes leaps from the valium haze into screams and shouts. The Pinback dichotomy even crops up on their tours: Smith and Crow frequently travel in separate vans. “We like to try to give each other space on the road,” says Smith. “We are two guys who like to do things our own way, you know? It’s natural.” In his sleepy San Diego way, Zach Smith somehow makes this seem normal. Of course a two-man indie rock band would have each member traveling in his own van; of course a guy whose casual demeanor seems one notch above a perpetual afternoon nap actually works harder than most bands ever will; of course the songs range from quiet acoustic cooing to serrated shouts – in the rest of the world, it’s pretty rare, for Pinback, it’s natural. A2P Pinback
will be at the Blind Pig on Wednesday, November 3. The Blind Pig
is located at 208 S. First St. in downtown Ann Arbor.
|
 |
 |
COLUMNS |
| MUSIC MOVIES BOOKS |
| PLUS: |