Facebook: Spoon Day 1: Telephono (1996)
Welcome to Spoon! This is my favorite working band, and the only one that can still prod me into hauling my ass to a festival (specifically, Panorama this July on Randalls Island here in NYC). I’m happy you get to hear them.
The words “minimalist” and “meticulous” readily attach themselves to Spoon’s music, but that wasn’t always the case. 22-year-old guitarist Britt Daniel and 27-year-old drummer Jim Eno met in 1992 in Austin, Texas, in a country/rockabilly band called the Alien Beats. Daniel’s previous band, Skellington (named for the Julian Cope album), had put out a couple of releases on tiny local indie labels, and he was finishing an RTF degree (Radio-Television-Film) at the University of Texas. Eno, an electrical engineer, had just moved to Austin to design microchips for Motorola.
After one EP, Alien Beats broke up, but Daniel and Eno stayed together to form Spoon (named after the Can track). Taking their original cues from bands like Wire and Pixies, they put out the NEFARIOUS EP on Fluffer Records in 1994. When they eventually signed to Matador, Daniel quit his job creating sound effects for a video games. Their spiky full-length debut, TELEPHONO, came out in 1996 and immediately attracted a small but fanatical fanbase, some of whom still think it’s their best album. It was produced by John Croslin in his garage studio for about $3,000.
By the way, to make the Pixies connection even more explicit, Spoon’s bass player on this album is a woman named Andy Maguire, who also crops up with harmony vocals a time or two.
EXTRA: B-SIDES & MISC TRACKS (1993-1996)
Spoon wasn’t Britt Daniel’s only focus during these early years. He also put out a couple of very lo-fi solo recordings under the nom de plume Drake Tungsten. I’ve included a handful of tracks from his self-released cassette CLOCKING OUT IS FOR SUCKERS in this playlist so you can get more sense of his sound and his influences. The earliest Spoon track I can find is here, as well as the latest Drake Tungsten (both from indie compilations), and B-sides from Spoon’s first two Matador singles. You’ll also hear Britt do his best approximation of Nirvana, with a couple of lines that could almost serve as an artistic mission statement: “I can’t believe that Kurt Cobain is dead. I wish that it was Axl Rose instead.”
EXTRA EXTRA: NEFARIOUS (EP, 1994)
For the rest of the week I plan to include EPs in the main playlist, but NEFARIOUS consists mainly of songs that would later be re-recorded for TELEPHONO. (There’s also a Godfathers cover that I included in the previous playlist.) If you’re curious to hear these early versions, here they are.
NEWS ALERT!
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1996-06-07/entertainment/9606051384_1_telephono-spoon-daniel
Orlando Sentinel, 7 June 1996
“The word has gotten around about Spoon”
An interesting little time capsule with Britt speaking rapturously of Matador, a label on which Spoon will not remain much longer.
SPOONTV
“Not Turning Off” (official video)
In 2006, Merge Records licensed and reissued TELEPHONO and SOFT EFFECTS. That’s when this video for “Not Turning Off” actually came out, not in 1996.
SPOONTV2
“All the Negatives Have Been Destroyed” (official video)
Here’s another video that I didn’t run across until today. Interestingly, this sounds like the original version from TELEPHONO, but Andy Maguire is mostly definitely not the bass player in this video so it has to have been filmed after she split from the band. Britt has never looked more like Richie Cunningham than he does here.
DAILY COVER TRACK ROUND-UP
Drake Tungsten: “Let Me Roll It!” (Paul McCartney)
Drake Tungsten: “Secrets” (The Cure)
“This Damn Nation” (The Godfathers)
“Towner” (aMiniature, as “Towner on the B-side”)
“Irrigation Man” (Balloonatic)
“Partyup” (Prince)
Six cover tracks to note amongst our offerings today, if you’re keeping score at home. (I’m unreasonably fond of the Prince cover myself.) If you didn’t listen to the first bonus playlist, you can still check out the tracks individually above.
One of the odd songs out on this list, which neither you nor I have ever heard, is “Irrigation Man,” a track written by John Clayton and originally recorded by his band Balloonatic. At least, I’ll trust the internet on that, because I haven’t yet managed to track down a copy for myself. Clayton is an Austinite and a friend of Spoon. This won’t be the last time we hear Spoon covering their friends, let alone the last time they do a John Clayton song.
Britt Daniel once said that Spoon only covers its friends, but you can see here that this isn’t true and never has been.