Automatic for the People (Warner Bros., 1992 )
GW: Automatic was an incredible refinement of the semi-acoustic approach you
took on "Losing My Religion." You added touches with the electric that made
the songs much more emotionally and musically complex.
BUCK: It's our most successful record, in terms of really maintaining a mood
all the way through. I did begin using things like feedback, slide and noise
to add more dimensions to certain songs. Noise is a signifier, it has its own
tonal quality
GW: Did Bill Berry really create the verse to "Man on the Moon" by falling out
of his chair?
BUCK: That's literally true. He was strumming this C chord and, as he leaned
over to get his beer on the amp, he moved his hand, sliding the C up to the
third fret. We played that verse forever and, while Michael created this
surreal idea of heaven, eventually cobbled together the chorus and bridge. I
overdubbed the slide part in a couple of passes. I grew up in Georgia, so even
touching a slide after Duane Allman is almost sacrilegious. I compose almost
all my solos-I'd be lost jamming on a I-IV-V. Let's just say I utilized a piece
of glass to get some sounds out of the guitar.
Monster (Warner Bros., 1994)
GW: Even though they were meant to be straight-ahead rockers, there was
something musically skewed about songs like "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"
and "Bang and Blame," like old blues songs that skipped beats. Was that
intentional?
BUCK: Mike came up with the chords to "Kenneth," and I helped him rearrange
them. It was weird, because I really couldn't get a handle on it at first. It's
so circular, I couldn't tell the A from the B section, and Michael was asking, "Where do I sing on this one?" Then we simplified it, chopped out a couple of parts, including a bridge, and as we accented the chords the pieces began to fall into place. It slows down at the end. The truth is, Mike [Mills, bassist] slowed down the pace and we all
followed, and then I noticed he looked strange. It turned out he had
appendicitis and we had to rush him to the hospital. So we never wound up
redoing it. What a year!
New Adventures In Hi-Fi (Warner Bros., 1996)
GW: It's very unusual that you recorded virtually all of your new album on
tour, during soundchecks. How difficult was this, compared to working in the
studio- and why did you attempt it at all?
BUCK: It was easier than you might guess, because we didn't have to think about
it. Every day, we'd play this set of songs at soundcheck and then we were done.
And naturally, the songs would go through incremental changes day by day. As
for why-Bill and I, in particular, feel that as a band we tend to work in the
studio to the point where some of us often think a song is finished, and the
others don't. Sometimes we wind up smoothing things out too much. I wanted to
be involved in a recording process where there wasn't any chance of doing that.
We didn't want to make your typical live album with audience applause, either.
I also wanted to keep myself busy on tour, and this way I had an hour and a
half to look forward to at soundcheck where we'd be doing something creative
and refreshing-making our next album.
GW: I get the sense you were after that edgy sense of disorientation, chaos and
boredom that one feels on the road…
BUCK: Right, because that's what the essence of a tour really is. It's not
sightseeing and eating nice food and all that. It's this chaotic whirlwind you
happen to be at the center of-like taking a portable hurricane with you
wherever you go. There's all this stuff going on around you that doesn't make
sense. You don't really know where you are. You're always kind of tired, always
hungry, and you always have two more things to do than you have time for.
GW: Bill's collapse from a brain aneurysm midway through the tour must have
been terrifying. Did you realize how seriously ill he was at first?
BUCK: We'd all had the flu in Switzerland. In the middle of the set, Bill got
up from the drums and said, "Man, I think I'm going to pass out. My head is
really killing me." The local doctor thought it was a migraine. But I had a
bad feeling it was more than that. At 5 a.m. we checked him into the hospital a
nd found out it was a brain aneurysm. God, we were all wandering around shell-
shocked. There was this period before the operation where anything might've
happened, and we couldn't even go in to see him. Luckily we were in
Switzerland, where they invented this particular operation. It went well, but
afterwards there was another two week period of uncertainty where again,
anything might have happened. I assumed the tour was over-if not the band.
Then Bill started to recover, and he wanted to play a week later! The doctor
said he could play in four weeks, but we waited six, just in case.
GW: You recorded this album with two extra guitarists, Nathan December and
Scott McCaughey, who were part of your road band. Did that complicate or
simplify things?
BUCK: It was great. If I wanted a heavier sound on a chorus, instead of waiting
to overdub we could just say, "Okay, Nathan, you play this here; Scott, you
handle that." So it sounded more like a real record almost immediately. Plus
those guys would phrase or accent things a little differently from me. The
interplay of all six of us playing provided the dynamics, rather than another
overdub. A lot of the tracks retain the song's initial ideas. I didn't spend a
lot of time going back to the studio and worrying if we needed something extra
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