Please — No Chops.
How a Boston advertisement and a Seattle train yard killed hair metal
In the last post we saw MTV at its peak… pyro, $500K music videos, and Weird Al poking at the soft parts of the armor.
Meanwhile, Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap drops in 1984. That was probably hair metal’s commercial peak, and Spinal Tap had something to do with the demise. Excess for excess’ sake was cool for teenage boys (trust me, my first concert was Mötley Crüe) until it got cringe. And hair metal was the natural conclusion of the over-the-top energy bands like Led Zeppelin popularized. It was an arms race.
The film worked as a comedy because the audience was already exhausted. How could you not be with the amps at eleven?
The Literal Underground
Let’s go into the basement.
One was a tiled bathroom in Somerville, Massachusetts. The other was a converted candy store in Ballard, Seattle, sitting next to an active rail line. The train was so loud that the band that jammed in that candy store had to stop playing as the locomotive overpowered them. (Maybe they needed to turn up to 11?)
Let’s tell the story of how these two rooms killed hair metal. And how the song that changed rock was, by the songwriter’s own admission, a rip-off that even erudite music fandoms would be unlikely to connect to Grunge.
Pay close attention to the guitar solo (especially at 2:53). Notice the contrast from the hair metal showmanship to the idgaf energy? How the solo itself almost feels like a parody?
Counter Culture
The pendulum always swings.
MTV made the monoculture visible. Weird Al and Spinal Tap poked fun at the dominant style. And underneath (in literal basements and homespun printing presses) the ground was shifting. College radio. Fanzines like Maximumrocknroll, Flipside were photocopied at Kinko’s and stapled in someone’s living room.
Indie labels formed in bedrooms by people who didn’t particularly care for or connect with the plastic factory Hollywood had become. And they emerged from a we-have-all-we-need ethos and bootstrapped music scenes that inherently rejected making yacht money their main priority. They wanted to make what they wanted to make.
Two labels to call out in particular:
4AD in London, run by Ivo Watts-Russell, who had art-school taste and the good sense to hire a designer named Vaughan Oliver, whose album covers looked like ghosts you wanted to stare at.
Sub Pop in Seattle, run by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman. Sarcastic and broke, with an official motto of “Going Out of Business Since 1988.” April Fools’ Day is the label’s anniversary. They stored their vinyl in the bathroom.
Boston, 1986: the ad that built the Pixies
Charles Thompson, better known as Black Francis, placed an ad in the Boston Phoenix:
Band seeks bassist into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary. Please — no chops.
“Please — no chops.”
Here’s the anti-Eddie-Van-Halen moment, the anti-Yngwie Malmsteen. There goes the arms race.
We don’t want a virtuoso.
Kim Deal answered. She was the only one. She didn’t even own a bass. Kim borrowed her twin sister Kelley’s. And she got the gig.
Meet the Pixies:
Black Francis (vocals, guitar), Joey Santiago (lead guitar, with an odd love of surf rock), David Lovering (drums, criminally underrated), Kim Deal (bass, the secret weapon).
The Pixies cut their first 17-song demo, The Purple Tape, at Fort Apache Studios in six days for about $1,000. Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD heard it and signed them on the spot. Said he felt like he’d just heard The Fall again for the first time. The Purple Tape was the next phase of the underground.
Into… the Bathroom?
It’s December 1987 in Q Division Studios, Somerville, Massachusetts. The producer is a 25-year-old named Steve Albini. Unlike pretty much everyone working in the industry, Albini thought royalties were an insult to the band. He wanted to be paid a flat rate. But his punk philosophy was paired with an intensity. A technical obsession.
He’d spend hours on mic placement, with the ultimate goal to capture a sound that felt like the room. Not his hand. He was going for transparency, which is harder than it seems. On his projects, the visceral edge and the craft paired.
The Pixies hired him, and Albini is struggling with the guitars. He wants them bigger. But not in a hair metal way. He throws the amps in the hallway. Nope. Control room? Nah. After exhausting the “normal” options… he moves the amplifiers into the tiled bathroom down the hall.
A PZM Microphone
We’ve covered how technological change has shaped rock as a genre, from massive loudspeaker arrays to the clarity of FM radio. But here’s a weird one… a PZM (Pressure Zone Microphone) is a flat, plate-like mic that you stick onto a surface to capture sound right where it hits that boundary.
Imagine a microphone that doesn’t just sit on a stand, but actually “teams up” with a flat surface like a wall, floor, or table to hear better. Normally, sound waves bouncing off a table can interfere with the sound going straight into a regular mic, making it sound fuzzy or hollow (this is called “comb filtering”). Because the PZM is flush against the surface, it catches the direct sound and the reflection at the exact same time. This results in a super clear, natural recording that picks up everyone in a room or the full “vibe” of a drum kit without any weird echoes or muddled audio.
Albini taped a cheap PZM mic on the bathroom wall. Rolled tape.
The sound on Surfer Rosa, one of my favorite records, is the sound of bathroom tile. The room! Not the stadium.
Contrast..!!..!!
Somewhere in those ten days spent recording Surfer Rosa, the formula gets named: loud-quiet-loud.
Verse whispers. Chorus detonates. Verse whispers. Chorus detonates harder.
That’s not new, technically. It’s kinda just call-and-response. That goes back to the “invention” of rock music. Of course, the Pixies didn’t invent dynamics. They just went hard.
Surfer Rosa drops in 1988. Wins Album of the Year in Sounds. Wins Album of the Year in Melody Maker. In America: crickets. Almost nobody buys it!
But Kurt Cobain (allegedly) shoplifted Surfer Rosa.
Loud Quiet Loud
I can’t move on without mentioning my favorite Pixies album, Doolittle (1989).
Surfer Rosa found the sound. Doolittle evolved it, and took the songwriting even futher. “Tame” is basically two minutes of Black Francis chaos energy at its finest.
Meanwhile, next to a train yard
Same year as Surfer Rosa, 1988. About 3,000 miles west.
Reciprocal Recording, in Ballard, Seattle, is a converted candy store, run by a guy named Jack Endino. The control room was so small a band can’t fit inside it at once. You gotta take turns.
And the trains. Reciprocal sat next to an active switching yard. The freights would roll by, and the room filled with low-end rumble. Every meter on the board slammed red at once.
The session would just stop.
The band would sit there, smoke a cigarette, wait for the train to pass, then keep recording rock and roll.
They called it a “train break.” It had a name because it happened that often. (I hear that train a-comin’ / it’s comin’ round the bend.)
January 23, 1988. Jack Endino picks up the phone and hears:
“I got a call from a guy who said his name was Kurt, and that he was a friend of the Melvins.”
Endino’s response, paraphrased: friend of the Melvins, friend of mine.
Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic drive up from Olympia. They don’t have a drummer, so the Melvins’ Dale Crover sits in. They cut 10 songs in one afternoon. Total bill: $152.44.
Listen to the demo on the Internet Archive. Hear the influences from hardcore music?
That demo circulates and an indie label called Sub Pop bites. December 1988, Nirvana goes back to Reciprocal with new drummer Chad Channing and cuts most of Bleach with Endino producing. $606.17.
Look at the symmetry: same year, opposite coasts, DIY, low budget, small studio. Boston bathroom tile. Seattle train horns.
The literal opposite of an MTV soundstage with smoke machines and a green screen.
Nevermind
Nirvana grew in stature with Bleach, but their lineup wasn’t locked. Drummer Chad Channing was out by 1990. And a 21-year-old from Virginia named Dave Grohl replaced him. Grohl’s heavy hand (and paradoxical love of disco dance beats) was the missing variable.
Producer Butch Vig brought Nirvana down to LA for the sessions at the legendary Sound City in 1991. As he put it: "90 percent of Nevermind's sound is just how Dave plays."
In September ‘91, Nevermind is released. January 1992, it knocks Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off #1 on the Billboard Top 200.
Last post, we ended on the King of Pop. Four years later, MJ gets dethroned by a band that doesn’t shower enough (grunge!)… whose producer recorded their first demo in a room next to a train yard… for $152.44.
And then in 1994, Kurt tells Rolling Stone:
“I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band or at least a Pixies cover band.”
Black Francis, when asked about it years later: “I’ll admit it… you ripped us off.”
No lawsuit. Just the relay race that is rock music history.
The loop closes when Albini produces In Utero in 1993. Boston comes to Seattle. And the circle completes itself.
Neverending
The Pixies and Nirvana refounded the DIY energy that’s always been the core of rock. From early Elvis and Muddy Waters demos to emo to bedroom pop. It’s Paul McCartney’s Ram. It’s The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird. It’s the music I make. And the music my friends make.
Cash constrained with something to say. Underground. Often literally.
Thanks for reading internet friend,
Scoob.pizza
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P.S. If you’re so inclined, keep up with all the things Love Music More by subscribing to this Substack’s companion podcast. There’s an audio version of this post going up alongside it. And be sure to read the other posts about the History of Rock! Also if you want to check out my music on vinyl 🎨 you can make that spin happen. Good luck out there ꐕ