Mammoth Records
Encyclopedia
Founded by Jay Faires
in 1989 in Carrboro, North Carolina
, Mammoth Records was one of the premiere independent record labels of the 1990s. Its roster featured such diverse talent as Antenna
, Blake Babies
, Chainsaw Kittens
, Dash Rip Rock
, Dillon Fence
, Far Too Jones, Frente!
, Fun-Da-Mental
, Fu Manchu
, Jason & the Scorchers
, Joe Henry
, Juliana Hatfield
, Kill Creek, Machines of Loving Grace
, The Melvins
, My Friend Steve
, Squirrel Nut Zippers
, The Sidewinders
, Vanilla Trainwreck
, Velo-Deluxe, and Victoria Williams
.
The label went from a stand-alone company to being a part of a joint venture with Atlantic Records
in 1993. The label hit the open market again in 1997.
Faires sold Mammoth Records to The Walt Disney Company
in 1998.
Mammoth Records was dissolved into Hollywood Records
in 2003.
(1989–90, two albums) – Faires was blown away by this Tucson, Arizona
, band—which soon thereafter became Mammoth’s first signing—while checking them out at Liberty Lunch during the second SXSW fest in 1988. He liked them so much that “I helped load out the equipment the next day, after they played an in-store, as I met the guys for the first time. They then routed a tour through Chapel Hill to meet my small staff.” Guitarist Rich Hopkins fondly remembers staying with his bandmates at Faires’ house and being introduced to the local sights and sounds. “Jay took us to a Durham Bulls
baseball game, which is where we made a handshake deal,” Hopkins recalls. “After we delivered the record [Witchdoctor, 1989], we got a call from Jay telling us he’d met with Bob Feiden at RCA and played him one minute of ‘Witch Doctor’ before Feiden told him he loved the song and wanted to sign us. It was staggering—we were barely even on Mammoth and suddenly we were on RCA.” Faires remembers the coup just as fondly. “We made the first album for $3,000 and sold it to RCA
for $100,000 when Mammoth was three weeks old,” he says. “It went Top 5 alternative on Gavin’s chart, and we sold 40,000 copies. I was like, ‘OK, this is easy. That’s a good return on investment.’” When the follow-up LP, 1990’s Auntie Ramos’ Pool Hall, went Top 5 and sold 40,000 as well, Faires had no reason to modify his initial viewpoint on what a snap it was to move units and make money; he would later learn that it was much harder than he’d first believed. Sounding like John Mellencamp’s kid brother, frontman David Slutes shines on “Witch Doctor,” which drove sales on the first album. Hopkins also had his own label, signing Tempe
’s Gin Blossoms
to their initial deal and producing their first album, which contained the original versions of their subsequent hits. Business often led to friendship during those days of rampant optimism and DIY camaraderie; Faires served as best man at Hopkins’ wedding.
Dash Rip Rock
(1989–91, three albums) – This veteran bar band from Baton Rouge, Louisiana
was legendary in the South, thanks to the prodigious energy and infectious enthusiasm of the players. As Faires recalls, “Steve Balcom [who rose from intern to general manager of the label] and I found that getting wasted with everyone and watching the moshpits was a great way to vent from the pressures of building the label.” The legendary Jim Dickinson
(Big Star
, The Replacements) produced the band’s second LP for Mammoth, 1990’s Not of This World, which sold 10,000. Bass player Ned "Hoaky" Hickel' is now a charter-dive instructor in Florida, and lead guitarist/vocalist Bill Davis is a schoolteacher outside of Nashville. “If his students only knew,” says Faires with a laugh.
Blake Babies
(1989–91, two albums) – Formed by Berklee School of Music students John Strohm (guitar) and Juliana Hatfield
(vocals, bass), along with Strohm’s drummer girlfriend, Freda Love (born Freda Boner), the Boston, Massachusetts-based Blake Babies were DIY personified. Although Hatfield had been writing songs since high school, she’d never performed them because she’d never found anyone to play with—this youngster didn’t see herself on a stool strumming an acoustic. “I wanted to be a rocker,” she says. “I didn’t realize at the time that I had this thin, childish voice. But John and Freda accepted me as I was.” Hatfield and Love learned to play their instruments on the fly, and early on the bandmembers’ loftiest ambition was simply to become a big enough draw to snag a Saturday night club gig. Early on, the Blakes worked as a four-piece, joined by Evan Dando
, who invited Strohm to play drums (John’s original instrument) for his band The Lemonheads
. Yup, it was an incestuous little scene, but brimming with raw talent. The fledgling band recorded a set of demos, self-releasing them as Nicely, Nicely
, but after striking out in their initial attempts to score a record deal, they hooked up with Gary Smith
(the Pixies, Throwing Muses
) and engineer Paul Kolderie at Fort Apache, the producer’s Boston studio and Petri dish. Strohm picks up the narrative in an illuminating and highly entertaining blog recounting his adventures in the music biz: “Early in the fall of 1988, Steve Balcom, the Chapel Hill
DJ who had interviewed the Lemonheads, contacted the band. He worked for a new label, Mammoth Records, and wanted us to meet the Mammoth partners to discuss a contract. We'd really hoped to be on one of the established, cool indie labels such as Homestead
or Twin/Tone, but we were interested in the Mammoth prospect. At least they would give us some money to pay Gary and Paul, who had been working entirely on spec. It’s hard to get into the mindset, but the initial advance of $6,000 just seemed like an enormous amount of money.” With the 6 grand, the Blake Babies finished their first proper LP. “The final recordings for the Mammoth debut, arbitrarily titled Earwig
, ‘Dead and Gone,’ ‘Cesspool’ and ‘You Don’t Give Up,’ were all recorded as a trio,” Strohm writes. “They are easily the strongest productions on the record. The album came out in the spring of 1989 with a great deal of momentum following a great setup and a healthy promotional push. In the weeks following the release, I called Steve Balcom daily from a Harvard Square pay phone to hear the good news about the album’s chart positions and press commitments. Primarily because of Mammoth’s efforts, things were finally happening for the band on a national level.” So it was that the Blakes became the upstart label’s flagship band. “With the relative success of Earwig and the growing major label interest in the band, Mammoth and Gary encouraged us to think in terms of bona fide mainstream success with the songs we were writing for the new album,” Strohm continues. “Sunburn
came out in the early fall of 1990 to immediate and widespread acclaim. Our years of constant work paid off; we weren’t big [Sunburn sold only 20,000 at the time—not many units for what’s now considered an indie-rock classic], but we could depend on audiences in every town, and we started to see the same faces in town after town. Shortly thereafter, Juliana announced that she planned to record a solo album and didn’t plan to continue with the band. Mammoth resisted the band breaking up and asked that we continue to tour through the first half of the year. We relented and agreed to support the forthcoming release of the Rosy Jack World EP. In a way it felt great to be playing to our own packed headlining shows every night, but in another way we just wanted to get on with our lives. The Blake Babies felt like what it had become: a lame duck band. Breaking Juliana’s career in Europe remained Mammoth’s priority, and in late summer we learned that Nirvana
had invited us to open the European leg of their tour to promote their new album scheduled to be released in the fall. I’d heard rumors about the album, and I’d convinced a DJ in Missouri to play me the advance of the new single, ‘Smells like Teen Spirit.’ I just had a feeling we should do the tour. Freda, however, refused to go. She felt loyal to Jake and to the new band. She simply refused to do any more Blake Babies shows under any circumstances. With little time to find a replacement drummer, we had to pass on the Nirvana tour. I couldn’t take a hard-line stance, because Freda had the moral high ground. I felt a crushing disappointment that has only sharpened and increased in the intervening years.”
The Bats
(1989-95, four albums) – Faires and Balcom worshipped New Zealand
’s Chills and Gary Smith’s crisp, clean production. While Faires was unable to nail down a U.S. distribution deal with Flying Nun Records
, he did get the Bats, who were one of the Kiwi label’s two best acts, the Chills being the other. “Maybe it’s because they’re from New Zealand, but it feels like the songs and their shimmery guitar sound could work in some alternate Lord of the Rings,” says Faires. “They toured with Belly behind the record, and the tour went great, but it was always a critics’ darling and college fave we couldn’t break.”
Blackgirls (1989-91, two albums) – The second album recorded on Mammoth’s tab was Procedure, the debut of a Chapel Hill-based female trio (none of them African-American) that sounded like a British folk group from the ’70s—which is why Faires contacted Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Nick Drake
) to produce it. “I had gotten way into Joe Boyd and all the genius records he had produced, some of them on Joe’s own legendary Hannibal label,” Faires recalled. “And somehow I pulled off getting Joe to do both their albums. We made the first one for $6,000; on the second we went crazy and spent $10,000.” The gossamer, cello-accented “Charleston” is one of Faires’ favorite Blackgirls tracks. “The vocal take Joe got from Dana [Kletter] is just beautiful,” he marvels.
Antenna
(1991–93, two albums) – In early 1991, after the success of Sunburn, and just before Juliana Hatfield announced she was quitting the Blake Babies
Faires invited John Strohm to record a solo album based on four-track demos of his songs. He and Love then returned to their native Indiana and put together a band to play the new material. After starting as Sway, they were threatened with litigation by another band with the same moniker, so they decided to call themselves Antenna and title the album Sway. Fatefully, the record came out the same day as Nirvana’s Nevermind. “We played dates throughout the fall,” Strohm remembers, “but it became clear that Antenna would not benefit much from the Blake Babies’ momentum. Sway is very, very different from Sunburn; not necessarily a far worse record, but not really comparable in any way. Many Blake Babies fans felt alienated by the radically different sound. We essentially had to start our new career from scratch.” After Love and second guitarist Vess Ruhtenberg quit, Strohm and bassist Jacob Smith soldiered on with a shifting lineup of players, recording the longplayer Hideout and the swan song EP For Now in’93 before calling it a day, leading Strohm to form the short-lived Velo-Deluxe before embarking on a solo career. He’s now a prominent music attorney based in Birmingham
, with an indie-centric clientele that includes Of Montréal
, Bon Iver
and, yes, Juliana Hatfield
.
Dillon Fence
(1991-95, three albums) – The first Chapel Hill band signed to Mammoth came up through the college circuit on the heels of the Connells, doing their share of frat parties at UNC (where singer/guitarist Greg Humphreys and lead guitarist Kent Alphin were going to college) and around the region. Before long they were selling out 1,000-capacity clubs up and down the East Coast, but the major labels showed no interest in signing them or their fellow southern bands. “The perception was that bands on the circuit that we were on, including Dave Matthews
and Hootie
, were never gonna be a big deal,” Humphreys recalls. But Dillon Fence had more than enough going for them to get Mammoth’s full attention. “Jay was a smart guy who had a vision,” Humphreys acknowledges. “He was right in the middle of the Triangle and could see what was going on in the Chapel Hill scene. Jay was into it, and so was Steve Balcom, who had also gone to UNC. They recognized what we were doing and gave us a chance.” Further tightening the Tar Heel connection, Humphreys had been a college intern at Mammoth soon after the label first formed. The band’s early songs (“about life in college, which is where they all were then,” says Faires) were heavily influenced by British pop in general and the Smiths
and Housemartins in particular. “Those bands were into classic American pop,” Humphreys points out, “so it was one of those back-and-forth-across-the-pond things. I loved the songwriting of Morrissey and Johnny Marr, but I was also really into soul music and funk, which I’d grown up listening to. That was part of the Dillon Fence thing that didn’t really fit the template of most bands at that time.” You can hear the Britpop
influence interweaving around Humphreys’ soul roots on “Francis” from the band’s self-titled 1993 EP—the guitars shimmer, his voice seeming to float above them. While their first full-length Rosemary (1992) was rough around the edges, the band took a significant step forward a year later with the Outside In, which overflowed with crisp, hooky, Beatles-inspired guitar pop. But Dillon Fence could handle balladry as well, as the intimate, silky “Any Other Way” so captivatingly indicates, with Humphreys’ soulful vocal foreshadowing the direction he’d take later in the decade with Hobex. Living Room Scene (1994) boasts a beefed-up sound, akin to Matthew Sweet
circa Girlfriend, a touchstone for the group, underscored by the solid production of Mark Freegard (the Breeders
, Del Amitri). They were a great live band, with Humphreys’ rich vocals and Alphin’s smoking guitar solos, which took staples like “She’s the Queen of the In-Between” into the stratosphere. “We put their first album out at the same time as Nevermind
,” says Faires, “and it was caught in the tidal wave of crunch—clean alt-pop songs released at the completely wrong historic moment, just as folks were getting fed up with Bush the Elder.” From there, grunge
steamrollered everything in sight well into the ’90s. So Dillon Fence never broke, despite their superior songs and sound, a criminally underrated band. These days, Humphreys continues to do occasional shows with both Dillon Fence and Hobex, but he performs primarily in what he calls “my acoustic troubadour mode.”
Chainsaw Kittens
(1990–94, four albums) – Allmusic.com calls these Oklahoma
-based neo-glam rebels fronted by Tyson Mead and featuring lead guitarist Trent Bell, “Arguably the best American band who never made it when alternative music suddenly became a huge proposition in the early ’90s,” and they will get no argument from Faires on that score. “I have a special place in my heart for Tyson,” he says. “Being gay in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1990 was likely not the easiest thing to do. He was always turning me on to great authors early—Michael Chabon’s first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh comes to mind. We got Butch Vig
to produce Flipped Out in Singapore as he was coming off Nirvana’s Nevermind. Butch did the whole album in 10 days, and it still sounds awesome—big and beefy. Best guitar sound Trent ever got, and Tyson’s screams brought into the right range. Tyson’s lyrics obliquely dealt with where he was coming from on ‘Connie, I’ve found the Door’—his screams would probably be labeled as emocore today—combined with these powerful riffs coming from Trent Bell. Those riffs are just monstrous at the start of ‘She Gets,’ and so are his leads. In fact, his playing may be what first hooked me on the band—that and the way it’s juxtaposed with Tyson’s vocals. We thought ‘High in High School’ was going to be this teen anthem like the Ramones
’ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll High School.’ The title was genius, but maybe it was too much. We knew we were on to something when we found out that the Smashing Pumpkins [another Vig client] were some of their biggest fans.”
Machines of Loving Grace
(1991–95, three albums) – Mammoth’s second Tucson-based band was stylistically a world away from the Sidewinders, whose Rich Hopkins played middleman, sending MLG’s demos to the label, which picked up the group and promptly put out their self-titled debut, surprising those observers who’d assumed Mammoth was a dedicated guitar-pop haven. “When I worked at Poindexter’s,” says Faires, “I’d buy records by the Jesus & Mary Chain, Fishbone
, Guadalcanal Diary
, etc. I didn’t listen to just one kind of music, and I wanted the label to reflect that eclecticism.” Influenced by industrial-rock trailblazers like Nine Inch Nails
(whose Trent Reznor
remixed a track on their 1992 EP Burn Like Brilliant Trash), Machines of Loving Grace
fashioned precise, aggressive and muscular music mating played and programmed parts, with Scott Benzel singing, Mike Fisher handling the keyboard parts and guitarist/bassist Stuart Kupers coming up with the hooks. “Butterfly Wings,” from the subsequent Concentration (1993), produced by Roli Mosimann, got a lot of 120 Minutes play on MTV
, while the song went Top 5 at KROQ
L.A. and hit the Top 5 in total airplay at alternative
radio, but by the time the other stations came on, KROQ had faded. Nonetheless, the LP sold north of 70,000 copies. “Suicide King” and the rest of 1995’s Gilt continued the band’s evolution sonically, with in-your-face production from Sylvia Massy (Tool
), but by then Kupers had split, leaving a big hole. The band broke up in ’97.
Juliana Hatfield
(1992-95, three albums) – After Sunburn, Hatfield began to get restless. “I’m a person who acts on instinct, and some part of me felt I needed to break up the band to move forward,” she says now. “I also felt the need for autonomy; democracy was becoming draining, and I wanted to play guitar.” Barely pausing to take a breath, she started banging out the songs that would appear on her first solo album, Hey Babe (1992), maintaining her relationship with producer Gary Smith
, while Evan Dando
contributed guitar and Mike Watt
from the Minutemen
and Blakes touring mates Firehose played bass. “I was just a songwriting machine at the time,” she recalls with a soft laugh. “I never worried about running out of ideas.” Continuing in the style she’d developed with her former band—personal songs presented in melodic and hooky but aggressive settings—Hatfield came up with some gems, including “I See You” and “Everybody Loves Me but You.” That little-girl voice of hers proved irresistible to males, while females found her lyrics intensely relatable to the point of identification. This combination of qualities brought Mammoth its biggest hit to date, hitting the 50,000 plateau. To Hatfield, that stood as a triumph, but in fact she was just getting started. The performance of Hey Babe got the attention of Atlantic Records
’ Danny Goldberg, who went into partnership with Mammoth in large part to get Hatfield. When she was asked whom she’d like to produce the follow-up, she readily named Scott Litt because of his work with R.E.M.
, and 1993’s fittingly titled Become What You Are, which marked the debut of the Juliana Hatfield Three, her first for Mammoth Atlantic, sold a whopping 250,000 units, powered by her zeitgeist-capturing hit “My Sister.” “When they picked ‘My Sister’ as the single, I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I mean, it doesn’t even have a chorus. And it became my biggest hit.” When the follow-up LP, 1995’s Only Everything, failed to outsell Become What You Are, Faires was disappointed, but Hatfield was fine with it. “I knew I was a ‘developing artist,’ and not at the top of my game as a singer,” she says with typical candor. “I wasn’t aiming for anything other than my own creative satisfaction.” By the time she delivered her fourth album under the working title God’s Foot, Faires had left the building, and the record was never released. The resilient Hatfield returned to the indie sector from which she’d sprung, continuing a career that’s now more than two decades long. “I still feel like the luckiest girl in the world,” she says. “Mammoth was the only label that wrote back when we sent out the Blake Babies demos, and I’m just so glad that someone wanted to take a chance on us. They introduced us to a bigger audience and started my so-called ‘career.’ I think it’s pretty amazing that I’ve been able to make a living this long.” That remark—at once self-deprecating and defiant—is quintessential Juliana Hatfield. “I reconnected with Jules through John Strohm in the last year or so,” says Faires. “We started emailing, and she sent me a copy of When I Grow Up, this book she’d written about that time period. A couple days later, she emails me, ‘Holy shit, I forgot I totally trashed you in the book.’ I died laughing. Said I was pretty sure I had said things that put her off in the day, to say the least. I found it hilarious. Time and distance help, I guess.”
Joe Henry
(1992–2001, five albums) – The following recollection was written by the iconoclastic artist in a Paris
hotel room in February 2010. “Just before my discovery of Mammoth Records and what I believe they were uniquely trying to foster down in North Carolina
, I had been signed to A&M
and had made two records for them. This did not prove to be a fruitful relationship, and though I did some good work there—helped identify something for myself about what I did and didn’t want to do—suffice to say that, once free of them, I began to look for different ways to work. I threw in with the Jayhawks for a tour together (the band opening the shows as themselves, then acting as my backing band for the second half). I marveled at the raw energy and spirit that conjured together, but my songs (mostly from Shuffletown, my last for A&M) didn't fall very comfortably into their bag. We had some good nights, but I thought my segment of the show claustrophobic and brooding, compared to the spirit of theirs...felt like swimming not surfing, as I had invariably just seen them do. In response, I went home from that tour and very quickly wrote songs for them specifically—like a screenwriter/director writing for a particular ensemble of actors. I wanted to speak their language so we could sing—literally and metaphorically—together. I returned to Minneapolis one bitterly cold winter weekend, and we recorded Short Man’s Room [1992] live to 8-track tape over two days. I had arrived thinking we'd be making demos, but once in the can, the performances and the recording just seemed very much to the point of something: it was immediate and wiry and terse and reflected something about our brotherhood, which I was enjoying tremendously. The result was that instead of shopping it as an idea, I shopped it as a finished piece: take it or leave it. I didn't realize then how significant that attitude would later prove, but it sort of became my ethos. I met Steve Balcom and Jay Faires after hearing about what they were doing in N.C. with their label—hearing from them what their greater ambitions were—and we decided to work together very quickly. That said, I never intended for that particular musical stance—that sonic dress code—to permanently define me. I was interested in all kinds of music and method, and curious what different musicians and different approaches might do to my writing and my songs. I followed Short Man’s Room with Kindness of the World [1993] and must honestly say I was tired of it before it came out. I don't mean to suggest I am not proud of it; I just mean by that point I could really see that I was working in the studio like a primitive—or worse, like someone who didn’t love what the studio offers—and was embarrassed that I’d limited myself. I came away from touring Kindness of the World believing that if I didn't find a different way to work as a recording artist, then I would stop being one. Some on that was road fatigue talking, but certainly not all of it. I noticed that the music I kept going back to was so deep, dark and rhythm-oriented—not self-conscious lyrics propped up by only a folk-country conceit. I was digging into Stevie Wonder
, Marvin Gaye
(Here, My Dear specifically) and most notably Sly and the Family Stone. My friend from Ireland
, the great recording engineer (now also producer) Pat McCarthy, turned me on to Dr. Dre
's The Chronic, and I flipped. I didn't know how to approach this working sensibility, but I knew I was determined to find my own way to respond to the impulse to do so. As my luck would have it, Mammoth Records in total, but Steve Balcom in particular, not only did not scoff at my attempts to rethink my tableau, but were in fact wildly encouraging of it. Trampoline [1996] is the sound of a blind man trying to put an alarm together for the first time. Fuse [1999] sounds to me now like someone doing deliberately what he had been doing only instinctively before. Using loops and samples (some of which I’d replace later or augment with live musicians), I began creating whole tracks save lyric and melody—completely backwards from the previous album, where the songs had all began with lyrics. It was terribly liberating and exciting, to work alone in my garage, and for the first time allow the recording process to be a part of the writing process. I swore I’d never go back to recording with a band circled together in a room. But never say never. I believed that what would follow Fuse would be something even more fractured and dark...something like I heard the Roots
doing on Things Fall Apart. But the songs that arrived next were wholly different than I’d expected, and influenced, I now see, by my obsession with jazz of a certain variety but also in particular the ’67 duet record between Frank Sinatra
and Antonio Carlos Jobim. I knew the jig was up at Mammoth. They’d sold to Disney and Jay and Steve had departed. but given how far I was into my deal at this point, Disney owed me a pretty decent chunk of money to make a record; so I decided if I wanted to do something with a more sprawling band—and a bunch of heavyweights to boot—and I wanted to incorporate an orchestral element, I believed it was time to do it. Thus, for Scar [2001], I pulled together some of the musicians I most admired in the world at that moment: Marc Ribot, Brian Blade, Meshell Ndegeocello, Brad Mehldau, David Piltch, Abe Laboriel Jr., arranger Stephen Barber and, of course, Ornette Coleman. I also brought in friend/producer Craig Street to help me manage the new circus. It was the most fun I’d ever had working, and it was the most ambitious thing I’d done. But what it really was the end of me thinking in any kind of genre terms. My records had been so varied to that point, I stopped identifying myself as belonging to any camp. I was just going to write the best songs I could and then follow wherever they took me.” In the nine years since Scar, Henry has released three more critically acclaimed albums, while also establishing himself as a remarkably sensitive producer, helming modern-day classics from the likes of Solomon Burke
, Bettye LaVette
, Ani DiFranco
, Allen Toussaint
and Mose Allison
.
Frente!
(1994–96, two albums) – Buoyed by Hatfield’s success, Mammoth reached all the way to Australia
for its next hit band. Like the Blake Babies, Melbourne
’s Frente (sometimes spelled with and exclamation point at the end) was powered by a male-female tandem—the potent pairing of singer Angie Hart
and guitarist Simon Austin. “In Australia, Frente signified a changing of the guard as the first ‘alternative’ local act to enjoy significant mainstream success,” says current manager Will Larnach-Jones. “It came down to Angie and Simon's musicianship and the songs. Their musical chemistry just worked so well—it was at once naive and knowing, spontaneous and studied. Angie was one of the first Australian vocalists to sing in an Aussie accent, and this changed the musical landscape for many of the Australian female singers who followed. I think Frente and Marvin represented a time of optimism and possibility in Australian music. It sounds sappy, but in many ways they represent more innocent days—the songs remained pretty undressed and largely spoke for themselves.” Frente’s version of New Order
’s classic “Bizarre Love Triangle,” a B-side in Australia, exploded after it was played on San Francisco’s Live 105 and the phones lit up. “I talked the band into stripping it onto the Marvin album. It was Doug Morris 101—when a record reacts, chase it,” Faires says, referring to one of his mentors, legendary record man Doug Morris
, who was then Atlantic’s chairman. Powered by the radio and MTV
hit, Marvin sold a half-million copies in the U.S. and generated big numbers worldwide—including Australia, where it kept Madonna from hitting #1. That was gratifying to the Mammoth gang, considering the band had been offered a far bigger deal by Madge’s Maverick label. “We met with Jay and the Mammoth staff in Chapel Hill right after meeting with Maverick,” Hart recalls. “I was 21, and it was my first trip to the U.S. Although the jet-lag had well kicked in by this point, their hospitality was more than enough to lift my spirits and keep me awake. They worked out of a funky old building, open-plan style, and told me that we would have to work hard touring and writing new material, as they wanted to build us slowly to ensure a solid standing for our future. This appealed to me greatly. They seemed more like a family than a corporate label. My mind was made up without question. After a dinner of BBQ and grits, we played an impromptu performance for everyone in Jay's living room. It felt as if something very special was being forged.”
They kept things going via a six-month tour of the States, which helped get follow-up single “Labour of Love” into the top 10 at alternative radio. “Mammoth were true to their word, and we toured like a band possessed,” says Hart. “Those were some of the best and the worst times of our lives. We had amazing opportunities supporting some of the great bands of that era, like Everything but the Girl, Alanis Morissette and Counting Crows. We were featured on all of the college radio festivals with the likes of Pavement
, Dinosaur Junior and Beck
and performed live at radio stations in every town we went to. It was exhausting and eventually led to the demise of the band, but we forged the path they had talked about. To this day, we still play in major cities in the U.S. to good recognition, due to that 'crusade' that we launched when we signed to Mammoth.” After living in the U.S. for more than a decade, Hart and Austin recently returned to Australia. Hart has released two well-received solo albums, makes regular appearances on radio and TV and tours a lot. Austin has started a family and does audio technology and production. Frente still plays occasional shows.
Jabberjaw Compilation – Good to the Last Drop (feat. Girls Against Boys
, Beck
, Hole
and Teenage Fanclub
; 1994) – The underground Hollywood club Jabberjaw was a go-to place for the bands that went on to happen, including Nirvana
, whose first L.A. show went down in the funky venue. A&R
man Jim Barber signed Girls vs. Boys to Geffen
after hearing their live take of “Magattraction” off of Jabberjaw Compilation. Barber was also “the reason Jason and the Scorchers had a second life with us,” Faires acknowledges, “as well as the reason we did that second great Kevin Kinney acoustic solo record.” He’s referring to 1994’s Down Out Law; Barber managed Drivin n Cryin
, the band Kinney fronted.
Victoria Williams
(1994–95, two albums) – Atlantic’s Danny Goldberg, who was a fan introduced Faires to the music of this Louisiana
-born iconoclast, and once he got his head around Williams’ idiosyncratic vocal delivery and unique cosmology, she became the lone artist jointly signed by both labels. “I liked Jay, Steve and everybody at Mammoth,” she says of her experience. “I thought they were a really cool label because they did things together all the time, like going on retreats in the mountains. I thought, this is the kind of label I like.” Just beforehand, Williams had been diagnosed with MS after coming down with it while on the road opening for Neil Young
. She had no health insurance, and her fellow artists rallied around her, leading to the Sweet Relief benefit album, in which an all-star cast tackled her songbook, with memorable results, notably including Pearl Jam
’s stirring cover of “Crazy Mary.” Loose, Williams’ Mammoth/Atlantic debut, featured her own version of “Crazy Mary,” marvelously showcasing her one-of-a-kind warble, awash in Paul Fox’s burnished string arrangements. “Vic’s tonality and phrasings around her lyrics make the song,” Faires offers. “I also adore the lines in ‘You R Loved’ where she sings, ‘Jesus walked on the water, he went down to the drunkards and told them everything is fine/you r loved, you r really, really loved’—and those horns at the end are sublime. I don’t know how many times I went up to her beautiful, ramshackle house in Laurel Canyon
listening through demos with her as she was making this record.” Next came the live This Moment: In Toronto With the Loose Band. When Mammoth moved to Disney, Williams remained with Atlantic, recording another pair of critically acclaimed LPs in Musings of a Creek Dipper (1998) and Water to Drink (2000). A few years back, on a trip to the desert, Faires happened upon the Joshua Tree village of Pioneertown and local watering hole Pappy and Harriet’s, which Williams had told him about. “What a trip—one third hippies, one third bikers, one third families and everyone’s chilling,” he remembers. “I order a beer and look up, and there’s Vic setting up on stage at 5 in the afternoon on a Sunday to jam with some friends. I hadn’t seen her in seven or eight years, and she was her same beautiful self.” With 14 albums under her belt, seven under her name and another seven under the Creek Dippers nameplate, Williams continues to perform regularly, including those Sunday afternoon jams at Pappy and Harriet’s whenever she’s not on the road.
KCRW Rare on Air (1994–98, four albums); KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic
Vol. 1 (1999) – Soon after the Atlantic joint-venture deal went down, Mammoth hooked up with Chris Douridas, host of the hugely influential L.A. NPR
station KCRW
, opening a treasure trove of performances by the most prestigious left-of-center artists, all recorded live in the station’s tiny Santa Monica
studio. “Danny Goldberg had moved me to L.A. to be by him after I did Atlantic deal,” Faires remembers, “and as I commuted between my place in Silver Lake and the Atlantic offices, I’d listen to Chris Douridas’ show every morning, and I was hooked. Those four CDs Chris curated are full of amazing stuff. Air’s ‘Come Away’ is ethereal, timeless and so freakin’ French—like waves crashing. Jeff Buckley
’s ‘So Real’ is one of my favorite tracks Douridas ever culled from his extensive sessions; it may even surpass the album version. The first time Radiohead
played “Subterranean Homesick Alien” live was on Chris’ show, and as might be expected, it’s beautiful. Evan Dando’s harmonizing with Juliana on the live version of his Lemonheads song ‘My Drug Buddy’ reminds me of how great they were. Jules played bass on It’s a Shame About Ray, and her voice is all over the track. Their harmonizing on the chorus is so innocent and so dark at the same time, which neatly sums up the two of them in their twisted friendship/love connection.”
Seven Mary Three
(1995-1998, three albums) – Orlando native Jason Ross formed 7M3 with Virginians Jason Pollock (guitar) and Giti Khalsa (drums) while all three were sophomores at William and Mary
. As things got serious, Ross persuaded his high school buddy Casey Daniel (bass) to move from Orlando
to Williamsburg
in order to complete the lineup. Ross’ taste, shaped by ’80s radio, was heavily impacted by the first blast of grunge coming out of Seattle, which gave him an outlet for his own pent-up anger. “Cumbersome,” the most articulate initial expression of his aggression, got picked up by an Orlando station and spread around the South, getting the attention of all sorts of labels. A showcase was arranged in an Orlando club, and all the majors sent reps—but Mammoth (invited by the band because Dillon Fence was so big in Virginia) took it a step further, as the entire staff of the tiny company showed up at the gig. “I’m still friends with every one of those people,” says Ross, who now lives in the Chapel Hill area because of the relationships he formed during those days. After signing with Mammoth, Seven Mary Three became the subject of what Ross describes as the label’s grand experiment: taking the commercial inroads made by Frente and Hatfield via the Atlantic partnership and knocking one out of the park, which they proceeded to do, selling 1.3 million copies of the band’s debut album, American Standard, fueled by the exploding “Cumbersome,” which went Top 10 alternative and kept AC/DC
and the Red Hot Chili Peppers
out of the #1 slot on the rock charts. Not only that, but the video went to #3 at MTV
. While touring behind the record, Ross somehow managed to maintain a full load at William & Mary while also working part-time. The band followed this breakthrough with the sprawling, ambitious Rock Crown, which stands as case study in how not to follow up a hit; Atlantic had been hoping for “Cumbersome 2” and more tonsil-shredders like “My My,” but the band delivered a 15-song album that aimed higher than the southern grunge they’d become known for, confusing the fan base. By then, Faires had sold the company to Disney, and the exit agreement from Atlantic stipulated that he leave 7M3 behind. The split between the band and its support system coincided with further songwriting growth on the part of Ross, resulting in complete departures like “Over Your Shoulder,” which locates the common ground between R.E.M. and the original Allman Brothers Band, and “Each Little Mystery,” an eloquent, cello-accented ballad that describes in poetic detail the tender moments of a relationship. (Certainly, there was no precedent in 7M3’s body of work for lines like, “She rests her hands on the space between my neckline and my back/I can feel her fingers running through the feeling I didn’t think I had.”) In this case, unfortunately, artistic gains equated to commercial setbacks, because the band’s mainstream following wanted more of the same, and Orange Ave., which contained these and other gems, stiffed, effectively ending the Atlantic relationship. 7M3 recorded a 2001 album released by Hollywood Records
after Faires’ departure, and they continue to record and perform on occasion to this day. Ross now works for concert promoter the Bowery Presents, while Khalsa is a financial advisor for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.
Jason & the Scorchers
(1995–98, three albums) – This trailblazing, Nashville-based four-piece led by singer Jason Ringenberg
and guitarist Warner Hodges was on the forefront of what would later be labeled alt-country, and they blazed through the Southeast during the ’80s like General Sherman’s army. According to Faires, they were the reason he started Mammoth. “I loved their debut record Reckless Country Soul,” he says, “and then, when I saw them live, it took it to another level for me about the transformative power of music. I’ll never forget the intensity of those shows at the 40 Watt in Athens, with Jason playing his harmonica as he ran down the top of the bar and Warner doing 360s with his guitar,” he says. “I even named my first Lab Ringenberg. For me, being from the hills of East Tennessee
, Jason’s music always resonated.” The birth of Mammoth coincided with the breakup of the Scorchers, but a half decade later, the lineup reconvened for a one-off show, and they enjoyed it so much that Ringenberg was inspired to write a new batch of tunes, including the rousing “Cry by Night Operator” and the introspective acoustic ballad “Somewhere Within,” and after the band cut A Blazing Grace in a Nashville studio, they sent a cassette of the new work to Mammoth. So began a fruitful relationship and a viable second chapter in the Scorchers’ career. On the subsequent Clear Impetuous Morning, which ranks with their ground-breaking EMI records from the prior decade, the band hotwired the connection between first-generation country rock by twanging out a faithful take of the Gram Parsons
-penned Byrds classic “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man.” Following in the footstep of Gram Parsons
and Emmylou Harris
, Jason & the Scorchers
won the Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance in 2008, becoming the first band to be so honored. These days, Ringenberg has a second career making music for kids as Farmer Jason, while he and Hodges recently dusted off the Scorchers nameplate to cut their first studio LP of new material since 1996.
Squirrel Nut Zippers
(1994-2000, six albums) – This decidedly unconventional band, composed of rock veterans from the Triangle area, signed with Mammoth a week after playing its second show ever at a Chapel Hill restaurant. Debut album Inevitable, produced by Brian Paulson (Uncle Tupelo
, Wilco
) on a $6,000 budget and released on the first day of spring in 1995, sold modestly, as some skeptics carped that the Zippers were jumping on the lounge bandwagon. “We had no idea of what anyone else was doing,” singer/multi-instrumentalist Tom Maxwell
says of the Zippers’ early days. “Combustible Edison or the Royal Crown Review would come into town and people would say, ‘They’re a lounge band.’ After we released our first record, then we too were a ‘lounge band,’ and after we released our second, we were a ‘swing band.’ But what actually informed what we were doing were Fats Waller
reissues and bourbon.” Second album Hot, released in January 1997, became a leftfield smash behind Maxwell’s dark but infectious uptempo tune “Hell.” “That song was cool because it was impossible to sing along with, the lyrics are almost impossible to understand, and it’s got a good head riff,” Maxwell says with a laugh. “I was listening to calypso reissues from the ’30s, like Growler, King Radio and Lord Executioner, and I flipped out over the stuff, which was much darker and more aggressive than what Harry Belafonte
was doing in the ’50s. And it was a typical Zippers thing—‘OK, I can do that.’” When influential L.A. alternative station KROQ gave the track a shot as a midday change of pace, the phones lit up, leading to more than 100,000 sales of Hot in L.A. alone, and the single spread across the country from there. “MTV
saw what was happening at KROQ
, and they slammed the ‘Hell’ video into heavy rotation the week after I signed my exit papers with Atlantic,” Faires recalls. At its hottest (pun unavoidable), the album was selling 30,000 a week—pretty mind-blowing for a group inspired by Cab Calloway
rather than Kurt Cobain
. Says Maxwell, “It was a shocking combination of timing and good fortune. That and an abundance of enthusiasm—we had that in spades.” It certainly wasn’t a result of lavish production—like most Mammoth acts, SNZ recorded on the cheap—“so it had to be about the songs,” Faires points out. Indeed, both “Put a Lid on It” (from Hot) and “Suits Are Picking Up the Bill” (from 1998’s Perennial Favorites) seem utterly timeless now, just as they did on the day they were released. Maxwell couldn’t believe his ears when contestant (and eventual champ) Donnie Osmond cut a rug to “Lid” during the 2009 season of Dancing With the Stars
. “I didn’t know whether it was cool or not,” says Maxwell, “and then a friend said, ‘Well, obviously, your song has made it into the canon.’ And that completely blows my mind. You write a song, you think it’s good, you’ve got a little band, you drive around in a van, and if you can keep body and soul together, you’re doing fine. Anything that happens beyond that is extraordinary.” A lot happened beyond that; in all, the Zippers sold north of 3 million albums.
Pure
(1996-98, two albums) – Faires credits Balcom for finding this under-appreciated band from Vancouver
after they’d made one LP for Warner Bros., and subsequently A&Ring Generation Six Pack, a strong album that was little heard on this side of the Canadian border. “Sonically, the production is so stellar on the whole album,” says Faires, “We went with ‘Denial’ as the single but didn’t really get far. The lack of traction on Pure was actually one of the triggers for me asking to get out of my executive contract at Atlantic and buying my company back, just as the Zippers were starting to break.” After the band broke up in 2000, frontman Jordy Birch embarked on a solo career, forming Guilty About Girls in 2008, while guitarist Todd Simko is now an in-demand Vancouver-based producer.
Fu Manchu
(1996-2001, four albums) – The label’s lone purveyors of stoner rock, from SoCal’s Orange County
, were tight with Kyuss (whose drummer, Brant Bjork, would join Fu Manchu
in 1997) and boasted a shredding sound that both anticipated and influenced Queens of the Stone Age
. Faires, a die-hard surfer himself, loved the fact that guitarist Scott Hill surfed every morning, worked as a repo man by day and played in the band at night. While Mammoth couldn’t take them beyond being critics’ darlings, Fu Manchu is still going strong, releasing three albums for as many indie labels since their fourth and last for Mammoth, 2001’s California Crossing.
The Backsliders
(1997–99, two albums) – Faires knew he was onto something special when he heard this gifted stone-country band out of Raleigh
led by frontman Chip Robinson
and guitarist Steve “Howie” Howell. The first album from L.A.-based Dwight Yoakam
had brilliantly revisited the classic Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens
and Merle Haggard
, inspiring Mammoth to tap Yoakam producer Pete Anderson to helm the Backsliders’ debut, Throwing Rocks at the Moon, and it was a marriage made in hillbilly heaven. “Song for song, the writing is phenomenal, on a par with the Zac Brown Band
,” says Faires. “It had such classic songs, like ‘If I Was King’ and ‘Broken Wings,’ and “Cowboy Boots” says it all. Pete did an incredible job, but it always came back to Chip’s voice and Howie’s leads. We got it to #1 on Gavin’s alt country chart, ahead of some genius artists. I’m really proud of that record; I’d put it right up there with Uncle Tupelo
and the Jayhawks. God, if we’d been more dialed into Nashville, we could’ve—and should’ve—broken this band.” For the last several years, Robinson has been playing guitar with Keith Urban
.
Marcy Playground
(1997, one track): The New York band’s modern rock smash “Sex and Candy” initially appeared on Mammoth’s soundtrack to the 1997 Sundance Film Festival
hit Hurricane Streets
and started breaking at radio before Capitol
put out their self-titled album, which then went platinum. “Sex and Candy” spent 15 weeks at #1 on Billboard
’s Modern Rock chart.
Mark Lizotte (1999, one album) – It was near the end for Faires and Mammoth when he inked this gifted singer/songwriter, who was big in his native Australia
. “Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads
produced, and you could just feel it coming together in the studio in Sausalito,” says Faires. “Mark never got his due in the States, but the album is great, and ‘Dig’ is such a freakin’ smash.”
The Wiseguys
(1998, one album): Mammoth’s final hit act was an electronica
group picked up from a U.K. label. “Disney didn’t want me to head to heavy rap, and most U.S. alternative acts had gotten so formulaic and stale by then,” Faires recalls. “So I was digging into U.K. big beat stuff, the Wiseguys were my favorite artist on Mark Jones’ great Wall of Sound
label, and we were lucky enough to release their second album, The Antidote, stateside. I still listen to the album, which is chock full of hits. We did the project in partnership with the Dust Brothers
’ label, Nickel Bag—the name went over really well with the Disney brass, but I was too obtuse to realize that at the time. ‘Ooh La La’ had been a #2 hit in the U.K., and we made a great video that’s now a genius YouTube
mash-up with ‘Grease’”—a hit in its own right. And ‘Start the Commotion’ has it all: great samples, cool horns and sick phat beats. A year after The Antidote came out, Mitsubishi
put ‘Start the Commotion’ in a commercial, and the song went to #12 on the U.S. pop charts. They sold about 300,000 copies in the U.S., but by the time that happened, the Mammoth core team was long gone.”
Freestylers
(1999-2001) – The brainchild of DJ/producers Aston Harvey and Matt Cantor, this English unit employed a kitchen-sink approach that took it past conventional electronica
into the stratosphere. At its peak, the Freestylers’ lineup was 11 strong, including guitar/drums/bass, a turntablist, two MCs and three breakdancers—“and they killed live,” says Faires. “I loved the big beat stuff, and these guys were the best. I go back and listen to We Rock Hard [1999] and get blown away. We let MTV
pick the single instead of listening to our gut. They went with ‘Here We Go,’ a cool track that worked for them, but we knew that ‘We Rock Hard,’ which they cut with Soul Sonic Force, was the hit. I didn’t fully appreciate who Soul Sonic Force was at the time—I was so busy building the company and the vision for the label that at times I forgot to step back. We sold 110,000 albums, and it’s weird, I thought it was a failure back then—nowadays it would be considered a success.”
A Picture Made – Past EP
Downsiders – All My Friends Are Fish
1990
Frequency
– North Carolina Compilation
1991
Vanilla Trainwreck
– Sofa Livin' Dreamazine
1992
Big Wheel – Holiday Manor
Vanilla Trainwreck
- Sounding To Try Like You
1993
Big Wheel – Slowtown
Transmissions From The Planet Dog - Volume 1 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
1994
Eat Static
– Implant
Kinney
- Down Out Law
Kill Creek – St. Valentine’s Garage
Laundry
– Blacktongue (Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Porch
(Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Vanilla Trainwreck
- Mordecai
Velo-Deluxe- Superelastic
1995
Alphabet Soup – Layin Low in the Cut (Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Banco de Gaia
– Last Train to Lhasa (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Banco de Gaia
– Maya (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Bandit Queen
– Hormone Hotel
Children of the Bong
– Sirius Sounds (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Eat Static
– Abduction (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Eat Static
– Epsylon (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Eskimo
– The Further Adventures of Der Shrimpkin (Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Feed Your Head – Volume 1 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Feed Your Head – Volume 2 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Fun^Da^Mental – Seize the Time (Mammoth/Beggars Banquet)
Quadruped
– Vol 1 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Various Artists - Up and Down Club Sessions Vol. 1 (MR0103-2)
Various Artists - Up and Down Club Sessions Vol. 2 (MR0104-2)
Vowel Movement- Vowel Movement (Mammoth/Atlantic)
1996
Clarissa
– Silver
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
- Ears To The Wall
Future Loop Foundation – Time and Bass (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Jabberjaw Compilation – Pure Sweet Hell (feat. Everclear, Mary Lou Lord and Jawbreaker)
Jack Drag - Jack Drag (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
Kill Creek – Proving Winter Cruel
Melvins - Stag (Mammoth/Atlantic)
MTV
Buzz Bin - Volume One: The Zen Of Buzz Clips (Mammoth/MTV) (feat. the Dave Matthews Band, Radiohead and the Stone Temple Pilots)
Planet Dub – Planet Dub (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
The Raymond Brake
- Never Work Ever (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
1997
Clarissa
– Blood and Commons
Elevate – Interior (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
Fabric
– Woolly Mammoth (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
Feed Your Head – Volume 3 : Accelerating The Alpha Rhythms (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Jack Drag –Unisex Headwave (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
KCRW
Rare on Air - Rare On Air Vol. 3 (feat. Fiona Apple, Patti Smith and Ben Folds Five)
MTV Buzz Bin - Volume One: The Future Of Buzz Clips (Mammoth/MTV) (feat. D’Angelo, The Flaming Lips and The Chemical Brothers)
Strangefolk
– Weightless in Water
Two Dollar Pistols - On Down the Track (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
1998
April March
– Lessons of April March (Mammoth/Ideal)
Creeper Lagoon
– I Become Small and Go (Mammoth/Ideal)
Far Too Jones – Picture Postcard Walls
Jocelyn Montgomery & David Lynch
- Lux Vivens: The Music of Holdegard von Bingen
My Friend Steve
– Hope and Wait
Natural Calamity – Peach Head (Mammoth/Ideal)
The Hope Blister
– Smile’s OK (Mammoth/4AD)
1999
10 Cents - Buggin' Out (Mammoth/Ideal)
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
– Buck Jump
James Mathus & His Knockdown Society – Play Songs for Rosetta
Whalen
– Jazz Squad
Splendid - Have You Got A Name For It (Unreleased)
Strangefolk
– A Great Long While
Styles of Beyond
– 2000 Fold (Mammoth/Ideal)
2000
Frankie Machine - One
Soundtracks
Hurricane Streets
– feat. Marcy Playground, “Sex and Candy”, Xzibit and De La Soul
Jesus' Son
– feat. Wilco and Joe Henry
Orgazmo
- (Mammoth/ideal) feat. Wu-Tang Clan, Dust Brothers, Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Smashmouth
Reality Bites
- feat. Juliana Hatfield, U2 and Dinosaur Jr.
The Crow
- feat. Machines of Loving Grace, RATM and The Cure
The Crow: City of Angels
- feat. Seven Mary Three, Iggy Pop and Deftones
Mammoth 20th Birthday
Schatzi
Seven Mary Three
Juliana Hatfield
Squirrel Nut Zippers
Joe Henry
Dillon Fence
Dash Rip Rock
Fu Manchu
Blake Babies
Chainsaw Kittens
Freestylers
Frente
Victoria Williams
Wiseguys
KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic
John Strohm's Music Blog
http://www.variety.com/article/VR101450.html?categoryid=18&cs=1&query=mammoth+record
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117775630.html?categoryid=16&cs=1&query=jay+faires
Jay Faires
Jay Faires Faires founded JFE in 2011, a TV oriented production company with a slant toward music and bold faced names. It is building commerce opportunities by mobilizing communities around engaging content. He currently sits on the board of the LA Chapter of the Recording Academy and the...
in 1989 in Carrboro, North Carolina
Carrboro, North Carolina
Carrboro is a town in Orange County in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The population was 19,582 at the 2010 census. The town, which is part of the Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan statistical area, was named after North Carolina industrialist Julian Shakespeare Carr.Located near Chapel Hill and...
, Mammoth Records was one of the premiere independent record labels of the 1990s. Its roster featured such diverse talent as Antenna
Antenna (band)
Antenna was an American indie rock band active from 1991 to 1994.The group was put together in Bloomington, Indiana by John Strohm and Freda Love, who had previously played together in the group Blake Babies. After adding local musicians Jacob Smith and Vess Ruhtenberg to the lineup, they began...
, Blake Babies
Blake Babies
Blake Babies was an alternative rock band formed in 1986 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The three primary members were John Strohm, Freda Love , and Juliana Hatfield, with Evan Dando, Andrew Mayer, Seth White, Anthony DeLuca , and Mike Leahy each also performing as members of the band at...
, Chainsaw Kittens
Chainsaw Kittens
The Chainsaw Kittens were a part of the American alternative rock scene, drawing from pop, glam rock, punk, new wave and British Invasion music. Their lyrics tackled such varied topics as religion, the Stonewall Riots, Federico Fellini, Oklahoma, Erik Menendez, and Oscar Wilde.Based in Norman,...
, Dash Rip Rock
Dash Rip Rock
Dash Rip Rock is a New Orleans based rock band built around the songs of singer-guitarist Bill Davis.The band is a legendary live powerhouse, often being credited with founding the musical genre known as "Country Punk." The New York Times said Dash Rip Rock is "the kind of band that provides a...
, Dillon Fence
Dillon Fence
Dillon Fence was an American rock band in the mid 1980s to 1995. They have been described as "a key band in the tres chic Chapel Hill, North Carolina, scene"....
, Far Too Jones, Frente!
Frente!
Frente! are an Australian alternative rock group, formed in 1991. The original lineup featured singer Angie Hart, founder and guitarist Simon Austin, bassist Tim O'Connor , and drummer Mark Picton...
, Fun-Da-Mental
Fun-Da-Mental
Fun-Da-Mental is a British-based multi-ethnic hip-hop–ethno-techno–world fusion music group formed in 1991. The group is notable for its energetic fusion of Eastern and Western musical forms, for its outspoken political stance, and for its strong Islamic affiliation and advocacy. Fun-Da-Mental's...
, Fu Manchu
Fu Manchu
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character introduced in a series of novels by British author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century...
, Jason & the Scorchers
Jason & the Scorchers
Jason & the Scorchers, originally Jason & the Nashville Scorchers, are a Cowpunk / Country rock band formed in 1981 and led by singer/songwriter Jason Ringenberg....
, Joe Henry
Joe Henry
Joseph Lee "Joe" Henry is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. Henry's musical style spans several genres, including alt. country, rock, jazz and folk.- Early years :...
, Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield , is an American guitarist/singer-songwriter and author from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies and Some Girls. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts....
, Kill Creek, Machines of Loving Grace
Machines of Loving Grace
Machines of Loving Grace was an industrial rock band from Tucson, Arizona.Named for a Richard Brautigan poem, they formed in 1989. The original lineup consisted of Scott Benzel , Stuart Kupers , and Mike Fisher , with Brad Kemp added shortly thereafter...
, The Melvins
The Melvins
The Melvins are an American band that formed in 1983. They usually perform as a trio, but in recent years have performed as a four piece with two drummers. Since 1984, singer and guitarist Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover have been the band's constant members...
, My Friend Steve
My Friend Steve
My Friend Steve, with frontman Steven Burry, was a band hailing from Orlando, Florida. "Charmed", released on their 1998 album Hope & Wait , was their only single which charted. The single appeared on Billboard's 1999 Modern Rock Chart, peaking at number 38. The song also reached the Adult Top 40...
, Squirrel Nut Zippers
Squirrel Nut Zippers
The Squirrel Nut Zippers are a band formed in 1993 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by James "Jimbo" Mathus , Katharine Whalen , Chris Phillips on drums, Don Raleigh on bass and sideman Ken Mosher....
, The Sidewinders
The Sidewinders
The Sidewinders were a rock band from Tucson, Arizona, who released two major-label albums and scored two radio hits in the US before a lawsuit forced a change of name. Another album was released on a major label but by that time the band had nearly broken up...
, Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck is an indie rock group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina that was active in the 1990s. They released three albums on Mammoth Records...
, Velo-Deluxe, and Victoria Williams
Victoria Williams
Victoria Williams is an American singer-songwriter and musician, originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, although she has resided in Southern California throughout her musical career. She is noted for her descriptive songwriting talent, which she has used to immerse the listener of her songs into a...
.
The label went from a stand-alone company to being a part of a joint venture with Atlantic Records
Atlantic Records
Atlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz...
in 1993. The label hit the open market again in 1997.
Faires sold Mammoth Records to The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Walt Disney Productions established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into...
in 1998.
Mammoth Records was dissolved into Hollywood Records
Hollywood Records
Hollywood Records is an American record label owned by Disney Music Group, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company.-History:Hollywood Records was founded in 1989 by then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner with the idea of expanding the music operations of the company and to develop and promote...
in 2003.
Historical Discography
The SidewindersThe Sidewinders
The Sidewinders were a rock band from Tucson, Arizona, who released two major-label albums and scored two radio hits in the US before a lawsuit forced a change of name. Another album was released on a major label but by that time the band had nearly broken up...
(1989–90, two albums) – Faires was blown away by this Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...
, band—which soon thereafter became Mammoth’s first signing—while checking them out at Liberty Lunch during the second SXSW fest in 1988. He liked them so much that “I helped load out the equipment the next day, after they played an in-store, as I met the guys for the first time. They then routed a tour through Chapel Hill to meet my small staff.” Guitarist Rich Hopkins fondly remembers staying with his bandmates at Faires’ house and being introduced to the local sights and sounds. “Jay took us to a Durham Bulls
Durham Bulls
The Durham Bulls are a minor league baseball team that currently plays in the International League. The Bulls play their home games at Durham Bulls Athletic Park located in the downtown area of Durham, North Carolina. Durham Bulls Athletic Park is often called the "DBAP" or "D-Bap". The Bulls are...
baseball game, which is where we made a handshake deal,” Hopkins recalls. “After we delivered the record [Witchdoctor, 1989], we got a call from Jay telling us he’d met with Bob Feiden at RCA and played him one minute of ‘Witch Doctor’ before Feiden told him he loved the song and wanted to sign us. It was staggering—we were barely even on Mammoth and suddenly we were on RCA.” Faires remembers the coup just as fondly. “We made the first album for $3,000 and sold it to RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
for $100,000 when Mammoth was three weeks old,” he says. “It went Top 5 alternative on Gavin’s chart, and we sold 40,000 copies. I was like, ‘OK, this is easy. That’s a good return on investment.’” When the follow-up LP, 1990’s Auntie Ramos’ Pool Hall, went Top 5 and sold 40,000 as well, Faires had no reason to modify his initial viewpoint on what a snap it was to move units and make money; he would later learn that it was much harder than he’d first believed. Sounding like John Mellencamp’s kid brother, frontman David Slutes shines on “Witch Doctor,” which drove sales on the first album. Hopkins also had his own label, signing Tempe
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe is a city in Maricopa County, Arizona, USA, with the Census Bureau reporting a 2010 population of 161,719. The city is named after the Vale of Tempe in Greece. Tempe is located in the East Valley section of metropolitan Phoenix; it is bordered by Phoenix and Guadalupe on the west, Scottsdale...
’s Gin Blossoms
Gin Blossoms
Gin Blossoms is an American pop rock band formed in 1987, in Tempe, Arizona. They took their name from a photo of W.C. Fields which bore the caption "W.C. Fields with gin blossoms", referring to what appeared to be the actor's gin-ravaged nose, but was actually a skin condition known as rosacea...
to their initial deal and producing their first album, which contained the original versions of their subsequent hits. Business often led to friendship during those days of rampant optimism and DIY camaraderie; Faires served as best man at Hopkins’ wedding.
Dash Rip Rock
Dash Rip Rock
Dash Rip Rock is a New Orleans based rock band built around the songs of singer-guitarist Bill Davis.The band is a legendary live powerhouse, often being credited with founding the musical genre known as "Country Punk." The New York Times said Dash Rip Rock is "the kind of band that provides a...
(1989–91, three albums) – This veteran bar band from Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Baton Rouge is the capital of the U.S. state of Louisiana. It is located in East Baton Rouge Parish and is the second-largest city in the state.Baton Rouge is a major industrial, petrochemical, medical, and research center of the American South...
was legendary in the South, thanks to the prodigious energy and infectious enthusiasm of the players. As Faires recalls, “Steve Balcom [who rose from intern to general manager of the label] and I found that getting wasted with everyone and watching the moshpits was a great way to vent from the pressures of building the label.” The legendary Jim Dickinson
Jim Dickinson
James Luther "Jim" Dickinson was an American record producer, pianist, and singer who fronted, among others, the Memphis based band, Mudboy & The Neutrons.- Biography :...
(Big Star
Big Star
Big Star was an American rock band formed in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1971 by Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Jody Stephens and Andy Hummel. The group broke up in 1974, but reorganized with a new line-up nearly 20 years later...
, The Replacements) produced the band’s second LP for Mammoth, 1990’s Not of This World, which sold 10,000. Bass player Ned "Hoaky" Hickel' is now a charter-dive instructor in Florida, and lead guitarist/vocalist Bill Davis is a schoolteacher outside of Nashville. “If his students only knew,” says Faires with a laugh.
Blake Babies
Blake Babies
Blake Babies was an alternative rock band formed in 1986 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The three primary members were John Strohm, Freda Love , and Juliana Hatfield, with Evan Dando, Andrew Mayer, Seth White, Anthony DeLuca , and Mike Leahy each also performing as members of the band at...
(1989–91, two albums) – Formed by Berklee School of Music students John Strohm (guitar) and Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield , is an American guitarist/singer-songwriter and author from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies and Some Girls. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts....
(vocals, bass), along with Strohm’s drummer girlfriend, Freda Love (born Freda Boner), the Boston, Massachusetts-based Blake Babies were DIY personified. Although Hatfield had been writing songs since high school, she’d never performed them because she’d never found anyone to play with—this youngster didn’t see herself on a stool strumming an acoustic. “I wanted to be a rocker,” she says. “I didn’t realize at the time that I had this thin, childish voice. But John and Freda accepted me as I was.” Hatfield and Love learned to play their instruments on the fly, and early on the bandmembers’ loftiest ambition was simply to become a big enough draw to snag a Saturday night club gig. Early on, the Blakes worked as a four-piece, joined by Evan Dando
Evan Dando
Evan Griffith Dando is an American musician, most famous for fronting the alternative rock band The Lemonheads. He is the only original member left in the current Lemonheads line-up, having served as lead singer since the band's original formation in 1986...
, who invited Strohm to play drums (John’s original instrument) for his band The Lemonheads
The Lemonheads
The Lemonheads are an American alternative rock band first formed in 1986 by Evan Dando, Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz. Dando has remained the band's only constant member....
. Yup, it was an incestuous little scene, but brimming with raw talent. The fledgling band recorded a set of demos, self-releasing them as Nicely, Nicely
Nicely, Nicely
Nicely, Nicely is the debut album by the Blake Babies, released in 1987 .-Track listing:all songs written by the Blake Babies#"Wipe It Up" – 2:57#"Her" – 2:16#"Tom and Bob" – 1:55#"A Sweet Burger LP" – 2:16...
, but after striking out in their initial attempts to score a record deal, they hooked up with Gary Smith
Gary Smith (record producer)
Gary Smith is an entrepreneur, record producer, and artist's manager known for his work recording albums by alternative rock musicians since the mid-1980s at Fort Apache Studios...
(the Pixies, Throwing Muses
Throwing Muses
Throwing Muses is an alternative rock band formed in 1981 in Newport, Rhode Island, that toured and recorded extensively until 1997, when its members began concentrating more on other projects. The group was originally fronted by two lead singers, Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, who both wrote the...
) and engineer Paul Kolderie at Fort Apache, the producer’s Boston studio and Petri dish. Strohm picks up the narrative in an illuminating and highly entertaining blog recounting his adventures in the music biz: “Early in the fall of 1988, Steve Balcom, the Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...
DJ who had interviewed the Lemonheads, contacted the band. He worked for a new label, Mammoth Records, and wanted us to meet the Mammoth partners to discuss a contract. We'd really hoped to be on one of the established, cool indie labels such as Homestead
Homestead Records
Homestead Records was a Long Island, NY based sublabel of music distributor Dutch East India Trading. It was founded in 1984 by Sam Berger, who was the American Independent buyer for Dutch East India Trading. Berger was finding that many bands who had perhaps released their own first 45 were...
or Twin/Tone, but we were interested in the Mammoth prospect. At least they would give us some money to pay Gary and Paul, who had been working entirely on spec. It’s hard to get into the mindset, but the initial advance of $6,000 just seemed like an enormous amount of money.” With the 6 grand, the Blake Babies finished their first proper LP. “The final recordings for the Mammoth debut, arbitrarily titled Earwig
Earwig
Earwigs make up the insect order Dermaptera, found throughout the Americas, Africa, Eurasia, Australia and New Zealand. With 1,800 species in 12 families, they are one of the smaller insect orders...
, ‘Dead and Gone,’ ‘Cesspool’ and ‘You Don’t Give Up,’ were all recorded as a trio,” Strohm writes. “They are easily the strongest productions on the record. The album came out in the spring of 1989 with a great deal of momentum following a great setup and a healthy promotional push. In the weeks following the release, I called Steve Balcom daily from a Harvard Square pay phone to hear the good news about the album’s chart positions and press commitments. Primarily because of Mammoth’s efforts, things were finally happening for the band on a national level.” So it was that the Blakes became the upstart label’s flagship band. “With the relative success of Earwig and the growing major label interest in the band, Mammoth and Gary encouraged us to think in terms of bona fide mainstream success with the songs we were writing for the new album,” Strohm continues. “Sunburn
Sunburn
A sunburn is a burn to living tissue, such as skin, which is produced by overexposure to ultraviolet radiation, commonly from the sun's rays. Usual mild symptoms in humans and other animals include red or reddish skin that is hot to the touch, general fatigue, and mild dizziness. An excess of UV...
came out in the early fall of 1990 to immediate and widespread acclaim. Our years of constant work paid off; we weren’t big [Sunburn sold only 20,000 at the time—not many units for what’s now considered an indie-rock classic], but we could depend on audiences in every town, and we started to see the same faces in town after town. Shortly thereafter, Juliana announced that she planned to record a solo album and didn’t plan to continue with the band. Mammoth resisted the band breaking up and asked that we continue to tour through the first half of the year. We relented and agreed to support the forthcoming release of the Rosy Jack World EP. In a way it felt great to be playing to our own packed headlining shows every night, but in another way we just wanted to get on with our lives. The Blake Babies felt like what it had become: a lame duck band. Breaking Juliana’s career in Europe remained Mammoth’s priority, and in late summer we learned that Nirvana
Nirvana
Nirvāṇa ; ) is a central concept in Indian religions. In sramanic thought, it is the state of being free from suffering. In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the Supreme being through moksha...
had invited us to open the European leg of their tour to promote their new album scheduled to be released in the fall. I’d heard rumors about the album, and I’d convinced a DJ in Missouri to play me the advance of the new single, ‘Smells like Teen Spirit.’ I just had a feeling we should do the tour. Freda, however, refused to go. She felt loyal to Jake and to the new band. She simply refused to do any more Blake Babies shows under any circumstances. With little time to find a replacement drummer, we had to pass on the Nirvana tour. I couldn’t take a hard-line stance, because Freda had the moral high ground. I felt a crushing disappointment that has only sharpened and increased in the intervening years.”
The Bats
The Bats
The Bats are an influential New Zealand rock band formed in 1982 in Christchurch by Paul Kean , Malcolm Grant , Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward...
(1989-95, four albums) – Faires and Balcom worshipped New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
’s Chills and Gary Smith’s crisp, clean production. While Faires was unable to nail down a U.S. distribution deal with Flying Nun Records
Flying Nun Records
Flying Nun Records is an independent record label formed in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1981 by music-store proprietor Roger Shepherd.-History:The label was formed in the flurry of new punk rock-inspired labels forming in the early 1980s...
, he did get the Bats, who were one of the Kiwi label’s two best acts, the Chills being the other. “Maybe it’s because they’re from New Zealand, but it feels like the songs and their shimmery guitar sound could work in some alternate Lord of the Rings,” says Faires. “They toured with Belly behind the record, and the tour went great, but it was always a critics’ darling and college fave we couldn’t break.”
Blackgirls (1989-91, two albums) – The second album recorded on Mammoth’s tab was Procedure, the debut of a Chapel Hill-based female trio (none of them African-American) that sounded like a British folk group from the ’70s—which is why Faires contacted Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Nick Drake
Nick Drake
Nicholas Rodney "Nick" Drake was an English singer-songwriter and musician. Though he is best known for his sombre guitar based songs, Drake was also proficient at piano, clarinet and saxophone...
) to produce it. “I had gotten way into Joe Boyd and all the genius records he had produced, some of them on Joe’s own legendary Hannibal label,” Faires recalled. “And somehow I pulled off getting Joe to do both their albums. We made the first one for $6,000; on the second we went crazy and spent $10,000.” The gossamer, cello-accented “Charleston” is one of Faires’ favorite Blackgirls tracks. “The vocal take Joe got from Dana [Kletter] is just beautiful,” he marvels.
Antenna
Antenna (band)
Antenna was an American indie rock band active from 1991 to 1994.The group was put together in Bloomington, Indiana by John Strohm and Freda Love, who had previously played together in the group Blake Babies. After adding local musicians Jacob Smith and Vess Ruhtenberg to the lineup, they began...
(1991–93, two albums) – In early 1991, after the success of Sunburn, and just before Juliana Hatfield announced she was quitting the Blake Babies
Blake Babies
Blake Babies was an alternative rock band formed in 1986 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The three primary members were John Strohm, Freda Love , and Juliana Hatfield, with Evan Dando, Andrew Mayer, Seth White, Anthony DeLuca , and Mike Leahy each also performing as members of the band at...
Faires invited John Strohm to record a solo album based on four-track demos of his songs. He and Love then returned to their native Indiana and put together a band to play the new material. After starting as Sway, they were threatened with litigation by another band with the same moniker, so they decided to call themselves Antenna and title the album Sway. Fatefully, the record came out the same day as Nirvana’s Nevermind. “We played dates throughout the fall,” Strohm remembers, “but it became clear that Antenna would not benefit much from the Blake Babies’ momentum. Sway is very, very different from Sunburn; not necessarily a far worse record, but not really comparable in any way. Many Blake Babies fans felt alienated by the radically different sound. We essentially had to start our new career from scratch.” After Love and second guitarist Vess Ruhtenberg quit, Strohm and bassist Jacob Smith soldiered on with a shifting lineup of players, recording the longplayer Hideout and the swan song EP For Now in’93 before calling it a day, leading Strohm to form the short-lived Velo-Deluxe before embarking on a solo career. He’s now a prominent music attorney based in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, with an indie-centric clientele that includes Of Montréal
Of Montreal
Of Montreal is an American rock band from Athens, Georgia. It was founded by frontman Kevin Barnes in 1996, named after a failed romance with a woman "of Montreal." The band is one of the bands of the Elephant 6 collective...
, Bon Iver
Bon Iver
Bon Iver is a Grammy nominated folk band founded in 2007 by American indie folk singer-songwriter Justin Vernon. It includes Michael Noyce, Sean Carey, and Matthew McCaughan. Vernon released Bon Iver's debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago independently in July 2007. The majority of that album was...
and, yes, Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield , is an American guitarist/singer-songwriter and author from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies and Some Girls. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts....
.
Dillon Fence
Dillon Fence
Dillon Fence was an American rock band in the mid 1980s to 1995. They have been described as "a key band in the tres chic Chapel Hill, North Carolina, scene"....
(1991-95, three albums) – The first Chapel Hill band signed to Mammoth came up through the college circuit on the heels of the Connells, doing their share of frat parties at UNC (where singer/guitarist Greg Humphreys and lead guitarist Kent Alphin were going to college) and around the region. Before long they were selling out 1,000-capacity clubs up and down the East Coast, but the major labels showed no interest in signing them or their fellow southern bands. “The perception was that bands on the circuit that we were on, including Dave Matthews
Dave Matthews
David John "Dave" Matthews is a South African–born American musician and occasional actor, best known as the lead vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist for the Dave Matthews Band...
and Hootie
Hootie & the Blowfish
Hootie & the Blowfish is an American rock band that enjoyed popularity in the second half of the 1990s. They were originally formed in 1986 at the University of South Carolina by Darius Rucker, Dean Felber, Jim Sonefeld, and Mark Bryan. The band has recorded five studio albums to date, and has...
, were never gonna be a big deal,” Humphreys recalls. But Dillon Fence had more than enough going for them to get Mammoth’s full attention. “Jay was a smart guy who had a vision,” Humphreys acknowledges. “He was right in the middle of the Triangle and could see what was going on in the Chapel Hill scene. Jay was into it, and so was Steve Balcom, who had also gone to UNC. They recognized what we were doing and gave us a chance.” Further tightening the Tar Heel connection, Humphreys had been a college intern at Mammoth soon after the label first formed. The band’s early songs (“about life in college, which is where they all were then,” says Faires) were heavily influenced by British pop in general and the Smiths
The Smiths
The Smiths were an English alternative rock band, formed in Manchester in 1982. Based on the song writing partnership of Morrissey and Johnny Marr , the band also included Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce...
and Housemartins in particular. “Those bands were into classic American pop,” Humphreys points out, “so it was one of those back-and-forth-across-the-pond things. I loved the songwriting of Morrissey and Johnny Marr, but I was also really into soul music and funk, which I’d grown up listening to. That was part of the Dillon Fence thing that didn’t really fit the template of most bands at that time.” You can hear the Britpop
Britpop
Britpop is a subgenre of alternative rock that originated in the United Kingdom. Britpop emerged from the British independent music scene of the early 1990s and was characterised by bands influenced by British guitar pop music of the 1960s and 1970s...
influence interweaving around Humphreys’ soul roots on “Francis” from the band’s self-titled 1993 EP—the guitars shimmer, his voice seeming to float above them. While their first full-length Rosemary (1992) was rough around the edges, the band took a significant step forward a year later with the Outside In, which overflowed with crisp, hooky, Beatles-inspired guitar pop. But Dillon Fence could handle balladry as well, as the intimate, silky “Any Other Way” so captivatingly indicates, with Humphreys’ soulful vocal foreshadowing the direction he’d take later in the decade with Hobex. Living Room Scene (1994) boasts a beefed-up sound, akin to Matthew Sweet
Matthew Sweet
Sidney Matthew Sweet is an American alternative rock/power pop musician. He was part of the burgeoning Athens, Georgia music scene in the early and mid-1980s before gaining commercial success during the early 1990s...
circa Girlfriend, a touchstone for the group, underscored by the solid production of Mark Freegard (the Breeders
The Breeders
The Breeders are an American alternative rock band formed in 1988 by Kim Deal of the Pixies and Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses. The band has experienced a number of line-up changes; the current line-up consists of Kim Deal , her twin sister Kelley Deal , Jose Medeles , Mando Lopez Todd the Fox...
, Del Amitri). They were a great live band, with Humphreys’ rich vocals and Alphin’s smoking guitar solos, which took staples like “She’s the Queen of the In-Between” into the stratosphere. “We put their first album out at the same time as Nevermind
Nevermind
Nevermind is the second studio album by the American rock band Nirvana, released on September 24, 1991. Produced by Butch Vig, Nevermind was the group's first release on DGC Records...
,” says Faires, “and it was caught in the tidal wave of crunch—clean alt-pop songs released at the completely wrong historic moment, just as folks were getting fed up with Bush the Elder.” From there, grunge
Grunge
Grunge is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged during the mid-1980s in the American state of Washington, particularly in the Seattle area. Inspired by hardcore punk, heavy metal, and indie rock, grunge is generally characterized by heavily distorted electric guitars, contrasting song...
steamrollered everything in sight well into the ’90s. So Dillon Fence never broke, despite their superior songs and sound, a criminally underrated band. These days, Humphreys continues to do occasional shows with both Dillon Fence and Hobex, but he performs primarily in what he calls “my acoustic troubadour mode.”
Chainsaw Kittens
Chainsaw Kittens
The Chainsaw Kittens were a part of the American alternative rock scene, drawing from pop, glam rock, punk, new wave and British Invasion music. Their lyrics tackled such varied topics as religion, the Stonewall Riots, Federico Fellini, Oklahoma, Erik Menendez, and Oscar Wilde.Based in Norman,...
(1990–94, four albums) – Allmusic.com calls these Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
-based neo-glam rebels fronted by Tyson Mead and featuring lead guitarist Trent Bell, “Arguably the best American band who never made it when alternative music suddenly became a huge proposition in the early ’90s,” and they will get no argument from Faires on that score. “I have a special place in my heart for Tyson,” he says. “Being gay in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1990 was likely not the easiest thing to do. He was always turning me on to great authors early—Michael Chabon’s first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh comes to mind. We got Butch Vig
Butch Vig
Butch Vig is an American musician and record producer, best known internationally as the drummer of the Madison, Wisconsin-based alternative rock band Garbage and the producer of multi-platinum selling album Nevermind by Nirvana....
to produce Flipped Out in Singapore as he was coming off Nirvana’s Nevermind. Butch did the whole album in 10 days, and it still sounds awesome—big and beefy. Best guitar sound Trent ever got, and Tyson’s screams brought into the right range. Tyson’s lyrics obliquely dealt with where he was coming from on ‘Connie, I’ve found the Door’—his screams would probably be labeled as emocore today—combined with these powerful riffs coming from Trent Bell. Those riffs are just monstrous at the start of ‘She Gets,’ and so are his leads. In fact, his playing may be what first hooked me on the band—that and the way it’s juxtaposed with Tyson’s vocals. We thought ‘High in High School’ was going to be this teen anthem like the Ramones
Ramones
The Ramones were an American rock band that formed in the New York City neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens, in 1974. They are often cited as the first punk rock group...
’ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll High School.’ The title was genius, but maybe it was too much. We knew we were on to something when we found out that the Smashing Pumpkins [another Vig client] were some of their biggest fans.”
Machines of Loving Grace
Machines of Loving Grace
Machines of Loving Grace was an industrial rock band from Tucson, Arizona.Named for a Richard Brautigan poem, they formed in 1989. The original lineup consisted of Scott Benzel , Stuart Kupers , and Mike Fisher , with Brad Kemp added shortly thereafter...
(1991–95, three albums) – Mammoth’s second Tucson-based band was stylistically a world away from the Sidewinders, whose Rich Hopkins played middleman, sending MLG’s demos to the label, which picked up the group and promptly put out their self-titled debut, surprising those observers who’d assumed Mammoth was a dedicated guitar-pop haven. “When I worked at Poindexter’s,” says Faires, “I’d buy records by the Jesus & Mary Chain, Fishbone
Fishbone
Fishbone is a U.S. alternative rock band formed in 1979 in Los Angeles, California, which plays a fusion of ska, punk rock, funk, hard rock and soul. Critics have noted of the band: "Fishbone was one of the most distinctive and eclectic alternative rock bands of the late '80s...
, Guadalcanal Diary
Guadalcanal Diary (band)
Guadalcanal Diary is an alternative jangle pop group. They originated in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, but they were often billed as being "from Athens, Georgia" in the early 1980s. The band formed in 1981 and disbanded in 1989. They reformed in 1997, but never recorded any new material...
, etc. I didn’t listen to just one kind of music, and I wanted the label to reflect that eclecticism.” Influenced by industrial-rock trailblazers like Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails is an American industrial rock project, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction...
(whose Trent Reznor
Trent Reznor
Michael Trent Reznor is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, record producer, and leader of industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Reznor is also a member of How to Destroy Angels alongside his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, and Atticus Ross. He was previously associated with bands Option 30,...
remixed a track on their 1992 EP Burn Like Brilliant Trash), Machines of Loving Grace
Machines of Loving Grace
Machines of Loving Grace was an industrial rock band from Tucson, Arizona.Named for a Richard Brautigan poem, they formed in 1989. The original lineup consisted of Scott Benzel , Stuart Kupers , and Mike Fisher , with Brad Kemp added shortly thereafter...
fashioned precise, aggressive and muscular music mating played and programmed parts, with Scott Benzel singing, Mike Fisher handling the keyboard parts and guitarist/bassist Stuart Kupers coming up with the hooks. “Butterfly Wings,” from the subsequent Concentration (1993), produced by Roli Mosimann, got a lot of 120 Minutes play on MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
, while the song went Top 5 at KROQ
KROQ-FM
KROQ-FM — branded 106.7 KROQ — is a commercial modern rock radio station licensed to Pasadena, California serving the Greater Los Angeles. The call sign is pronounced "kay rock." It is the flagship station of Loveline hosted by Dr...
L.A. and hit the Top 5 in total airplay at alternative
Alternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
radio, but by the time the other stations came on, KROQ had faded. Nonetheless, the LP sold north of 70,000 copies. “Suicide King” and the rest of 1995’s Gilt continued the band’s evolution sonically, with in-your-face production from Sylvia Massy (Tool
Tool
A tool is a device that can be used to produce an item or achieve a task, but that is not consumed in the process. Informally the word is also used to describe a procedure or process with a specific purpose. Tools that are used in particular fields or activities may have different designations such...
), but by then Kupers had split, leaving a big hole. The band broke up in ’97.
Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield
Juliana Hatfield , is an American guitarist/singer-songwriter and author from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies and Some Girls. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts....
(1992-95, three albums) – After Sunburn, Hatfield began to get restless. “I’m a person who acts on instinct, and some part of me felt I needed to break up the band to move forward,” she says now. “I also felt the need for autonomy; democracy was becoming draining, and I wanted to play guitar.” Barely pausing to take a breath, she started banging out the songs that would appear on her first solo album, Hey Babe (1992), maintaining her relationship with producer Gary Smith
Gary Smith (record producer)
Gary Smith is an entrepreneur, record producer, and artist's manager known for his work recording albums by alternative rock musicians since the mid-1980s at Fort Apache Studios...
, while Evan Dando
Evan Dando
Evan Griffith Dando is an American musician, most famous for fronting the alternative rock band The Lemonheads. He is the only original member left in the current Lemonheads line-up, having served as lead singer since the band's original formation in 1986...
contributed guitar and Mike Watt
Mike Watt
Michael David Watt is an American bassist, singer and songwriter.He is best known for co-founding the rock bands Minutemen, dos, and Firehose; , he is also the bassist for the reunited Stooges and a member of the art rock/jazz/punk/improv group Banyan as well as many other post-Minutemen...
from the Minutemen
Minutemen (band)
Minutemen were an American hardcore punk band formed in San Pedro, California in 1980. Composed of guitarist D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley, Minutemen recorded four albums and eight EPs before Boon's death in an automobile accident in December 1985...
and Blakes touring mates Firehose played bass. “I was just a songwriting machine at the time,” she recalls with a soft laugh. “I never worried about running out of ideas.” Continuing in the style she’d developed with her former band—personal songs presented in melodic and hooky but aggressive settings—Hatfield came up with some gems, including “I See You” and “Everybody Loves Me but You.” That little-girl voice of hers proved irresistible to males, while females found her lyrics intensely relatable to the point of identification. This combination of qualities brought Mammoth its biggest hit to date, hitting the 50,000 plateau. To Hatfield, that stood as a triumph, but in fact she was just getting started. The performance of Hey Babe got the attention of Atlantic Records
Atlantic Records
Atlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz...
’ Danny Goldberg, who went into partnership with Mammoth in large part to get Hatfield. When she was asked whom she’d like to produce the follow-up, she readily named Scott Litt because of his work with R.E.M.
R.E.M.
R.E.M. was an American rock band formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1980 by singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. One of the first popular alternative rock bands, R.E.M. gained early attention due to Buck's ringing, arpeggiated guitar style and Stipe's...
, and 1993’s fittingly titled Become What You Are, which marked the debut of the Juliana Hatfield Three, her first for Mammoth Atlantic, sold a whopping 250,000 units, powered by her zeitgeist-capturing hit “My Sister.” “When they picked ‘My Sister’ as the single, I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I mean, it doesn’t even have a chorus. And it became my biggest hit.” When the follow-up LP, 1995’s Only Everything, failed to outsell Become What You Are, Faires was disappointed, but Hatfield was fine with it. “I knew I was a ‘developing artist,’ and not at the top of my game as a singer,” she says with typical candor. “I wasn’t aiming for anything other than my own creative satisfaction.” By the time she delivered her fourth album under the working title God’s Foot, Faires had left the building, and the record was never released. The resilient Hatfield returned to the indie sector from which she’d sprung, continuing a career that’s now more than two decades long. “I still feel like the luckiest girl in the world,” she says. “Mammoth was the only label that wrote back when we sent out the Blake Babies demos, and I’m just so glad that someone wanted to take a chance on us. They introduced us to a bigger audience and started my so-called ‘career.’ I think it’s pretty amazing that I’ve been able to make a living this long.” That remark—at once self-deprecating and defiant—is quintessential Juliana Hatfield. “I reconnected with Jules through John Strohm in the last year or so,” says Faires. “We started emailing, and she sent me a copy of When I Grow Up, this book she’d written about that time period. A couple days later, she emails me, ‘Holy shit, I forgot I totally trashed you in the book.’ I died laughing. Said I was pretty sure I had said things that put her off in the day, to say the least. I found it hilarious. Time and distance help, I guess.”
Joe Henry
Joe Henry
Joseph Lee "Joe" Henry is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. Henry's musical style spans several genres, including alt. country, rock, jazz and folk.- Early years :...
(1992–2001, five albums) – The following recollection was written by the iconoclastic artist in a Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
hotel room in February 2010. “Just before my discovery of Mammoth Records and what I believe they were uniquely trying to foster down in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
, I had been signed to A&M
A&M Records
A&M Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group that operates under the mantle of its Interscope-Geffen-A&M division.-Beginnings:...
and had made two records for them. This did not prove to be a fruitful relationship, and though I did some good work there—helped identify something for myself about what I did and didn’t want to do—suffice to say that, once free of them, I began to look for different ways to work. I threw in with the Jayhawks for a tour together (the band opening the shows as themselves, then acting as my backing band for the second half). I marveled at the raw energy and spirit that conjured together, but my songs (mostly from Shuffletown, my last for A&M) didn't fall very comfortably into their bag. We had some good nights, but I thought my segment of the show claustrophobic and brooding, compared to the spirit of theirs...felt like swimming not surfing, as I had invariably just seen them do. In response, I went home from that tour and very quickly wrote songs for them specifically—like a screenwriter/director writing for a particular ensemble of actors. I wanted to speak their language so we could sing—literally and metaphorically—together. I returned to Minneapolis one bitterly cold winter weekend, and we recorded Short Man’s Room [1992] live to 8-track tape over two days. I had arrived thinking we'd be making demos, but once in the can, the performances and the recording just seemed very much to the point of something: it was immediate and wiry and terse and reflected something about our brotherhood, which I was enjoying tremendously. The result was that instead of shopping it as an idea, I shopped it as a finished piece: take it or leave it. I didn't realize then how significant that attitude would later prove, but it sort of became my ethos. I met Steve Balcom and Jay Faires after hearing about what they were doing in N.C. with their label—hearing from them what their greater ambitions were—and we decided to work together very quickly. That said, I never intended for that particular musical stance—that sonic dress code—to permanently define me. I was interested in all kinds of music and method, and curious what different musicians and different approaches might do to my writing and my songs. I followed Short Man’s Room with Kindness of the World [1993] and must honestly say I was tired of it before it came out. I don't mean to suggest I am not proud of it; I just mean by that point I could really see that I was working in the studio like a primitive—or worse, like someone who didn’t love what the studio offers—and was embarrassed that I’d limited myself. I came away from touring Kindness of the World believing that if I didn't find a different way to work as a recording artist, then I would stop being one. Some on that was road fatigue talking, but certainly not all of it. I noticed that the music I kept going back to was so deep, dark and rhythm-oriented—not self-conscious lyrics propped up by only a folk-country conceit. I was digging into Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder
Stevland Hardaway Morris , better known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and activist...
, Marvin Gaye
Marvin Gaye
Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. , better known by his stage name Marvin Gaye, was an American singer-songwriter and musician with a three-octave vocal range....
(Here, My Dear specifically) and most notably Sly and the Family Stone. My friend from Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, the great recording engineer (now also producer) Pat McCarthy, turned me on to Dr. Dre
Dr. Dre
Andre Romelle Young , primarily known by his stage name Dr. Dre, is an American record producer, rapper, record executive, entrepreneur, and occasional actor. He is the founder and current CEO of Aftermath Entertainment and a former co-owner and artist of Death Row Records...
's The Chronic, and I flipped. I didn't know how to approach this working sensibility, but I knew I was determined to find my own way to respond to the impulse to do so. As my luck would have it, Mammoth Records in total, but Steve Balcom in particular, not only did not scoff at my attempts to rethink my tableau, but were in fact wildly encouraging of it. Trampoline [1996] is the sound of a blind man trying to put an alarm together for the first time. Fuse [1999] sounds to me now like someone doing deliberately what he had been doing only instinctively before. Using loops and samples (some of which I’d replace later or augment with live musicians), I began creating whole tracks save lyric and melody—completely backwards from the previous album, where the songs had all began with lyrics. It was terribly liberating and exciting, to work alone in my garage, and for the first time allow the recording process to be a part of the writing process. I swore I’d never go back to recording with a band circled together in a room. But never say never. I believed that what would follow Fuse would be something even more fractured and dark...something like I heard the Roots
The Roots
The Roots is an American hip hop/neo soul band formed in 1987 by Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter and Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They are famed for beginning with a jazzy, eclectic approach to hip hop which still includes live instrumentals...
doing on Things Fall Apart. But the songs that arrived next were wholly different than I’d expected, and influenced, I now see, by my obsession with jazz of a certain variety but also in particular the ’67 duet record between Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...
and Antonio Carlos Jobim. I knew the jig was up at Mammoth. They’d sold to Disney and Jay and Steve had departed. but given how far I was into my deal at this point, Disney owed me a pretty decent chunk of money to make a record; so I decided if I wanted to do something with a more sprawling band—and a bunch of heavyweights to boot—and I wanted to incorporate an orchestral element, I believed it was time to do it. Thus, for Scar [2001], I pulled together some of the musicians I most admired in the world at that moment: Marc Ribot, Brian Blade, Meshell Ndegeocello, Brad Mehldau, David Piltch, Abe Laboriel Jr., arranger Stephen Barber and, of course, Ornette Coleman. I also brought in friend/producer Craig Street to help me manage the new circus. It was the most fun I’d ever had working, and it was the most ambitious thing I’d done. But what it really was the end of me thinking in any kind of genre terms. My records had been so varied to that point, I stopped identifying myself as belonging to any camp. I was just going to write the best songs I could and then follow wherever they took me.” In the nine years since Scar, Henry has released three more critically acclaimed albums, while also establishing himself as a remarkably sensitive producer, helming modern-day classics from the likes of Solomon Burke
Solomon Burke
Solomon Burke was an American singer-songwriter, entrepreneur, mortician, and an archbishop of the United House of Prayer For All People. Burke was known as "King Solomon", the "King of Rock 'n' Soul", and as the "Bishop of Soul", and described as "the Muhammad Ali of soul", and as "the most...
, Bettye LaVette
Bettye LaVette
Bettye LaVette is an American soul singer-songwriter who made her first record at sixteen, but achieved only intermittent fame until 2005, with her album, I've Got My Own Hell to Raise...
, Ani DiFranco
Ani DiFranco
Ani DiFranco is an American Grammy Award-winning singer, guitarist, poet, and songwriter. She has released more than 20 albums, and is widely considered a feminist icon.-Biography:...
, Allen Toussaint
Allen Toussaint
Allen Toussaint is an American musician, composer, record producer, and influential figure in New Orleans R&B.Many of Toussaint's songs have become familiar through numerous cover versions, including "Working in the Coalmine", "Ride Your Pony", "Fortune Teller", "Play Something Sweet ", "Southern...
and Mose Allison
Mose Allison
Mose John Allison, Jr. is an American jazz blues pianist and singer.-Biography:...
.
Frente!
Frente!
Frente! are an Australian alternative rock group, formed in 1991. The original lineup featured singer Angie Hart, founder and guitarist Simon Austin, bassist Tim O'Connor , and drummer Mark Picton...
(1994–96, two albums) – Buoyed by Hatfield’s success, Mammoth reached all the way to Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
for its next hit band. Like the Blake Babies, Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
’s Frente (sometimes spelled with and exclamation point at the end) was powered by a male-female tandem—the potent pairing of singer Angie Hart
Angie Hart
Angie Hart is an Australian pop singer best known for her role as lead vocalist in the band Frente!.Hart was a founding member of Frente! in 1989. She is renowned for her delicate songcraft, lyrics, and her breathy vocals....
and guitarist Simon Austin. “In Australia, Frente signified a changing of the guard as the first ‘alternative’ local act to enjoy significant mainstream success,” says current manager Will Larnach-Jones. “It came down to Angie and Simon's musicianship and the songs. Their musical chemistry just worked so well—it was at once naive and knowing, spontaneous and studied. Angie was one of the first Australian vocalists to sing in an Aussie accent, and this changed the musical landscape for many of the Australian female singers who followed. I think Frente and Marvin represented a time of optimism and possibility in Australian music. It sounds sappy, but in many ways they represent more innocent days—the songs remained pretty undressed and largely spoke for themselves.” Frente’s version of New Order
New Order
New Order are an English rock band formed in 1980 by Bernard Sumner , Peter Hook and Stephen Morris...
’s classic “Bizarre Love Triangle,” a B-side in Australia, exploded after it was played on San Francisco’s Live 105 and the phones lit up. “I talked the band into stripping it onto the Marvin album. It was Doug Morris 101—when a record reacts, chase it,” Faires says, referring to one of his mentors, legendary record man Doug Morris
Doug Morris
Doug Morris is an American music executive. He is the current Chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment. He previously served as Chairman and CEO of the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011.-Life and career:...
, who was then Atlantic’s chairman. Powered by the radio and MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
hit, Marvin sold a half-million copies in the U.S. and generated big numbers worldwide—including Australia, where it kept Madonna from hitting #1. That was gratifying to the Mammoth gang, considering the band had been offered a far bigger deal by Madge’s Maverick label. “We met with Jay and the Mammoth staff in Chapel Hill right after meeting with Maverick,” Hart recalls. “I was 21, and it was my first trip to the U.S. Although the jet-lag had well kicked in by this point, their hospitality was more than enough to lift my spirits and keep me awake. They worked out of a funky old building, open-plan style, and told me that we would have to work hard touring and writing new material, as they wanted to build us slowly to ensure a solid standing for our future. This appealed to me greatly. They seemed more like a family than a corporate label. My mind was made up without question. After a dinner of BBQ and grits, we played an impromptu performance for everyone in Jay's living room. It felt as if something very special was being forged.”
They kept things going via a six-month tour of the States, which helped get follow-up single “Labour of Love” into the top 10 at alternative radio. “Mammoth were true to their word, and we toured like a band possessed,” says Hart. “Those were some of the best and the worst times of our lives. We had amazing opportunities supporting some of the great bands of that era, like Everything but the Girl, Alanis Morissette and Counting Crows. We were featured on all of the college radio festivals with the likes of Pavement
Pavement
Pavement may refer to:* Road surface, the durable surfacing of roads and walkways* Sidewalk, a walkway along the side of a road, in British English or Philadelphia/Baltimore dialect* Pavement , a floor-like stone or tile structure...
, Dinosaur Junior and Beck
Beck
Beck Hansen is an American musician, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, known by the stage name Beck...
and performed live at radio stations in every town we went to. It was exhausting and eventually led to the demise of the band, but we forged the path they had talked about. To this day, we still play in major cities in the U.S. to good recognition, due to that 'crusade' that we launched when we signed to Mammoth.” After living in the U.S. for more than a decade, Hart and Austin recently returned to Australia. Hart has released two well-received solo albums, makes regular appearances on radio and TV and tours a lot. Austin has started a family and does audio technology and production. Frente still plays occasional shows.
Jabberjaw Compilation – Good to the Last Drop (feat. Girls Against Boys
Girls Against Boys
Girls Against Boys are an indie rock/post-hardcore band, originally forming in Washington, D.C. in 1988 and currently based in New York City.-Career:...
, Beck
Beck
Beck Hansen is an American musician, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, known by the stage name Beck...
, Hole
Hole (band)
Hole is an American alternative rock band that originally formed in Los Angeles in 1989. The band is fronted by vocalist/songwriter and rhythm guitarist Courtney Love, who co-founded Hole with former songwriter/lead guitarist Eric Erlandson...
and Teenage Fanclub
Teenage Fanclub
Teenage Fanclub are an alternative rock band from Bellshill, Scotland. The band is composed of Norman Blake , Raymond McGinley , Gerard Love and Francis MacDonald , with songwriting duties shared equally among Blake, McGinley and Love...
; 1994) – The underground Hollywood club Jabberjaw was a go-to place for the bands that went on to happen, including Nirvana
Nirvana
Nirvāṇa ; ) is a central concept in Indian religions. In sramanic thought, it is the state of being free from suffering. In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the Supreme being through moksha...
, whose first L.A. show went down in the funky venue. A&R
A&R
Artists and repertoire is the division of a record label that is responsible for talent scouting and overseeing the artistic development of recording artists. It also acts as a liaison between artists and the record label.- Finding talent :...
man Jim Barber signed Girls vs. Boys to Geffen
Geffen Records
Geffen Records is an American record label, owned by Universal Music Group, and operated as one third of UMG's Interscope-Geffen-A&M label group.-Beginnings:...
after hearing their live take of “Magattraction” off of Jabberjaw Compilation. Barber was also “the reason Jason and the Scorchers had a second life with us,” Faires acknowledges, “as well as the reason we did that second great Kevin Kinney acoustic solo record.” He’s referring to 1994’s Down Out Law; Barber managed Drivin n Cryin
Drivin N Cryin
Drivin' 'N' Cryin is an American Hard rock/Southern rock band from Atlanta, GA.-History:The band was formed in 1985 in Atlanta. Kevn Kinney hooked up with Tim Nielsen, who was in a popular band called the Nightporters with drummer Paul Lenz at the time...
, the band Kinney fronted.
Victoria Williams
Victoria Williams
Victoria Williams is an American singer-songwriter and musician, originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, although she has resided in Southern California throughout her musical career. She is noted for her descriptive songwriting talent, which she has used to immerse the listener of her songs into a...
(1994–95, two albums) – Atlantic’s Danny Goldberg, who was a fan introduced Faires to the music of this Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
-born iconoclast, and once he got his head around Williams’ idiosyncratic vocal delivery and unique cosmology, she became the lone artist jointly signed by both labels. “I liked Jay, Steve and everybody at Mammoth,” she says of her experience. “I thought they were a really cool label because they did things together all the time, like going on retreats in the mountains. I thought, this is the kind of label I like.” Just beforehand, Williams had been diagnosed with MS after coming down with it while on the road opening for Neil Young
Neil Young
Neil Percival Young, OC, OM is a Canadian singer-songwriter who is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation...
. She had no health insurance, and her fellow artists rallied around her, leading to the Sweet Relief benefit album, in which an all-star cast tackled her songbook, with memorable results, notably including Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam is an American rock band that formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1990. Since its inception, the band's line-up has included Eddie Vedder , Jeff Ament , Stone Gossard , and Mike McCready...
’s stirring cover of “Crazy Mary.” Loose, Williams’ Mammoth/Atlantic debut, featured her own version of “Crazy Mary,” marvelously showcasing her one-of-a-kind warble, awash in Paul Fox’s burnished string arrangements. “Vic’s tonality and phrasings around her lyrics make the song,” Faires offers. “I also adore the lines in ‘You R Loved’ where she sings, ‘Jesus walked on the water, he went down to the drunkards and told them everything is fine/you r loved, you r really, really loved’—and those horns at the end are sublime. I don’t know how many times I went up to her beautiful, ramshackle house in Laurel Canyon
Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, California
Laurel Canyon is a canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It was first developed in the 1910s, and became a part of the city of Los Angeles in 1923 ....
listening through demos with her as she was making this record.” Next came the live This Moment: In Toronto With the Loose Band. When Mammoth moved to Disney, Williams remained with Atlantic, recording another pair of critically acclaimed LPs in Musings of a Creek Dipper (1998) and Water to Drink (2000). A few years back, on a trip to the desert, Faires happened upon the Joshua Tree village of Pioneertown and local watering hole Pappy and Harriet’s, which Williams had told him about. “What a trip—one third hippies, one third bikers, one third families and everyone’s chilling,” he remembers. “I order a beer and look up, and there’s Vic setting up on stage at 5 in the afternoon on a Sunday to jam with some friends. I hadn’t seen her in seven or eight years, and she was her same beautiful self.” With 14 albums under her belt, seven under her name and another seven under the Creek Dippers nameplate, Williams continues to perform regularly, including those Sunday afternoon jams at Pappy and Harriet’s whenever she’s not on the road.
KCRW Rare on Air (1994–98, four albums); KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic
Morning Becomes Eclectic
Morning Becomes Eclectic is a three-hour adult album alternative radio program first aired in 1977 and broadcast live every weekday from KCRW in Santa Monica, California. The show's name is a play on the Eugene O'Neill trilogy of plays, Mourning Becomes Electra.The show is hosted by Jason Bentley,...
Vol. 1 (1999) – Soon after the Atlantic joint-venture deal went down, Mammoth hooked up with Chris Douridas, host of the hugely influential L.A. NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
station KCRW
KCRW
KCRW is a public radio station broadcasting from the campus of Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, California, carrying a mix of National Public Radio news, talk radio and freeform music format. The general manager of KCRW is Jennifer Ferro...
, opening a treasure trove of performances by the most prestigious left-of-center artists, all recorded live in the station’s tiny Santa Monica
Santa Mônica
Santa Mônica is a town and municipality in the state of Paraná in the Southern Region of Brazil.-References:...
studio. “Danny Goldberg had moved me to L.A. to be by him after I did Atlantic deal,” Faires remembers, “and as I commuted between my place in Silver Lake and the Atlantic offices, I’d listen to Chris Douridas’ show every morning, and I was hooked. Those four CDs Chris curated are full of amazing stuff. Air’s ‘Come Away’ is ethereal, timeless and so freakin’ French—like waves crashing. Jeff Buckley
Jeff Buckley
Jeffrey Scott "Jeff" Buckley , raised as Scotty Moorhead, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He was the son of Tim Buckley, also a musician...
’s ‘So Real’ is one of my favorite tracks Douridas ever culled from his extensive sessions; it may even surpass the album version. The first time Radiohead
Radiohead
Radiohead are an English rock band from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, formed in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke , Jonny Greenwood , Ed O'Brien , Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway .Radiohead released their debut single "Creep" in 1992...
played “Subterranean Homesick Alien” live was on Chris’ show, and as might be expected, it’s beautiful. Evan Dando’s harmonizing with Juliana on the live version of his Lemonheads song ‘My Drug Buddy’ reminds me of how great they were. Jules played bass on It’s a Shame About Ray, and her voice is all over the track. Their harmonizing on the chorus is so innocent and so dark at the same time, which neatly sums up the two of them in their twisted friendship/love connection.”
Seven Mary Three
Seven Mary Three
Seven Mary Three, occasionally abbreviated to 7 Mary 3 or 7M3, is an American hard rock band. They have released seven studio albums and one live album, and are best known for their hit singles "Cumbersome", "Water's Edge", "Lucky", and "Wait"....
(1995-1998, three albums) – Orlando native Jason Ross formed 7M3 with Virginians Jason Pollock (guitar) and Giti Khalsa (drums) while all three were sophomores at William and Mary
William and Mary
The phrase William and Mary usually refers to the coregency over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, of King William III & II and Queen Mary II...
. As things got serious, Ross persuaded his high school buddy Casey Daniel (bass) to move from Orlando
Orlando
Orlando is a major city in the U.S. state of Florida.Orlando may also refer to-Places:* in Florida** Orlando, a major city** Greater Orlando, the 27th-largest metropolitan area in the United States...
to Williamsburg
Williamsburg, Virginia
Williamsburg is an independent city located on the Virginia Peninsula in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area of Virginia, USA. As of the 2010 Census, the city had an estimated population of 14,068. It is bordered by James City County and York County, and is an independent city...
in order to complete the lineup. Ross’ taste, shaped by ’80s radio, was heavily impacted by the first blast of grunge coming out of Seattle, which gave him an outlet for his own pent-up anger. “Cumbersome,” the most articulate initial expression of his aggression, got picked up by an Orlando station and spread around the South, getting the attention of all sorts of labels. A showcase was arranged in an Orlando club, and all the majors sent reps—but Mammoth (invited by the band because Dillon Fence was so big in Virginia) took it a step further, as the entire staff of the tiny company showed up at the gig. “I’m still friends with every one of those people,” says Ross, who now lives in the Chapel Hill area because of the relationships he formed during those days. After signing with Mammoth, Seven Mary Three became the subject of what Ross describes as the label’s grand experiment: taking the commercial inroads made by Frente and Hatfield via the Atlantic partnership and knocking one out of the park, which they proceeded to do, selling 1.3 million copies of the band’s debut album, American Standard, fueled by the exploding “Cumbersome,” which went Top 10 alternative and kept AC/DC
AC/DC
AC/DC are an Australian rock band, formed in 1973 by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young. Commonly classified as hard rock, they are considered pioneers of heavy metal, though they themselves have always classified their music as simply "rock and roll"...
and the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Red Hot Chili Peppers is an American rock band, formed in Los Angeles in 1983. The group's musical style primarily consists of rock with an emphasis on funk, as well as elements from other genres such as punk, hip hop and psychedelic rock...
out of the #1 slot on the rock charts. Not only that, but the video went to #3 at MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
. While touring behind the record, Ross somehow managed to maintain a full load at William & Mary while also working part-time. The band followed this breakthrough with the sprawling, ambitious Rock Crown, which stands as case study in how not to follow up a hit; Atlantic had been hoping for “Cumbersome 2” and more tonsil-shredders like “My My,” but the band delivered a 15-song album that aimed higher than the southern grunge they’d become known for, confusing the fan base. By then, Faires had sold the company to Disney, and the exit agreement from Atlantic stipulated that he leave 7M3 behind. The split between the band and its support system coincided with further songwriting growth on the part of Ross, resulting in complete departures like “Over Your Shoulder,” which locates the common ground between R.E.M. and the original Allman Brothers Band, and “Each Little Mystery,” an eloquent, cello-accented ballad that describes in poetic detail the tender moments of a relationship. (Certainly, there was no precedent in 7M3’s body of work for lines like, “She rests her hands on the space between my neckline and my back/I can feel her fingers running through the feeling I didn’t think I had.”) In this case, unfortunately, artistic gains equated to commercial setbacks, because the band’s mainstream following wanted more of the same, and Orange Ave., which contained these and other gems, stiffed, effectively ending the Atlantic relationship. 7M3 recorded a 2001 album released by Hollywood Records
Hollywood Records
Hollywood Records is an American record label owned by Disney Music Group, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company.-History:Hollywood Records was founded in 1989 by then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner with the idea of expanding the music operations of the company and to develop and promote...
after Faires’ departure, and they continue to record and perform on occasion to this day. Ross now works for concert promoter the Bowery Presents, while Khalsa is a financial advisor for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.
Jason & the Scorchers
Jason & the Scorchers
Jason & the Scorchers, originally Jason & the Nashville Scorchers, are a Cowpunk / Country rock band formed in 1981 and led by singer/songwriter Jason Ringenberg....
(1995–98, three albums) – This trailblazing, Nashville-based four-piece led by singer Jason Ringenberg
Jason Ringenberg
Jason Ringenberg is an American musician, and lead singer of Jason & the Scorchers. He is also a songwriter and guitarist....
and guitarist Warner Hodges was on the forefront of what would later be labeled alt-country, and they blazed through the Southeast during the ’80s like General Sherman’s army. According to Faires, they were the reason he started Mammoth. “I loved their debut record Reckless Country Soul,” he says, “and then, when I saw them live, it took it to another level for me about the transformative power of music. I’ll never forget the intensity of those shows at the 40 Watt in Athens, with Jason playing his harmonica as he ran down the top of the bar and Warner doing 360s with his guitar,” he says. “I even named my first Lab Ringenberg. For me, being from the hills of East Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
, Jason’s music always resonated.” The birth of Mammoth coincided with the breakup of the Scorchers, but a half decade later, the lineup reconvened for a one-off show, and they enjoyed it so much that Ringenberg was inspired to write a new batch of tunes, including the rousing “Cry by Night Operator” and the introspective acoustic ballad “Somewhere Within,” and after the band cut A Blazing Grace in a Nashville studio, they sent a cassette of the new work to Mammoth. So began a fruitful relationship and a viable second chapter in the Scorchers’ career. On the subsequent Clear Impetuous Morning, which ranks with their ground-breaking EMI records from the prior decade, the band hotwired the connection between first-generation country rock by twanging out a faithful take of the Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. Parsons is best known for his work within the country genre; he also mixed blues, folk, and rock to create what he called "Cosmic American Music"...
-penned Byrds classic “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man.” Following in the footstep of Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. Parsons is best known for his work within the country genre; he also mixed blues, folk, and rock to create what he called "Cosmic American Music"...
and Emmylou Harris
Emmylou Harris
Emmylou Harris is an American singer-songwriter and musician. In addition to her work as a solo artist and bandleader, both as an interpreter of other composers' works and as a singer-songwriter, she is a sought-after backing vocalist and duet partner, working with numerous other artists including...
, Jason & the Scorchers
Jason & the Scorchers
Jason & the Scorchers, originally Jason & the Nashville Scorchers, are a Cowpunk / Country rock band formed in 1981 and led by singer/songwriter Jason Ringenberg....
won the Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance in 2008, becoming the first band to be so honored. These days, Ringenberg has a second career making music for kids as Farmer Jason, while he and Hodges recently dusted off the Scorchers nameplate to cut their first studio LP of new material since 1996.
Squirrel Nut Zippers
Squirrel Nut Zippers
The Squirrel Nut Zippers are a band formed in 1993 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by James "Jimbo" Mathus , Katharine Whalen , Chris Phillips on drums, Don Raleigh on bass and sideman Ken Mosher....
(1994-2000, six albums) – This decidedly unconventional band, composed of rock veterans from the Triangle area, signed with Mammoth a week after playing its second show ever at a Chapel Hill restaurant. Debut album Inevitable, produced by Brian Paulson (Uncle Tupelo
Uncle Tupelo
Uncle Tupelo was an alternative country music group from Belleville, Illinois, active between 1987 and 1994. Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and Mike Heidorn formed the band after the lead singer of their previous band, The Primitives, left to attend college. The trio recorded three albums for Rockville...
, Wilco
Wilco
Wilco is an American alternative rock band based in Chicago, Illinois. The band was formed in 1994 by the remaining members of alternative country group Uncle Tupelo following singer Jay Farrar's departure. Wilco's lineup has changed frequently, with only singer Jeff Tweedy and bassist John...
) on a $6,000 budget and released on the first day of spring in 1995, sold modestly, as some skeptics carped that the Zippers were jumping on the lounge bandwagon. “We had no idea of what anyone else was doing,” singer/multi-instrumentalist Tom Maxwell
Tom Maxwell
Tom Maxwell is a modern metal/rock guitarist in the bands Knives Out! and Hellyeah. Previous bands include Nothingface in which he was a founding member and main song-writer with Bill Gaal. After Nothingface he was involved in a band with Skrape vocalist Billy Keeton. In the 1980s he was in thrash...
says of the Zippers’ early days. “Combustible Edison or the Royal Crown Review would come into town and people would say, ‘They’re a lounge band.’ After we released our first record, then we too were a ‘lounge band,’ and after we released our second, we were a ‘swing band.’ But what actually informed what we were doing were Fats Waller
Fats Waller
Fats Waller , born Thomas Wright Waller, was a jazz pianist, organist, composer, singer, and comedic entertainer...
reissues and bourbon.” Second album Hot, released in January 1997, became a leftfield smash behind Maxwell’s dark but infectious uptempo tune “Hell.” “That song was cool because it was impossible to sing along with, the lyrics are almost impossible to understand, and it’s got a good head riff,” Maxwell says with a laugh. “I was listening to calypso reissues from the ’30s, like Growler, King Radio and Lord Executioner, and I flipped out over the stuff, which was much darker and more aggressive than what Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte
Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. He was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s...
was doing in the ’50s. And it was a typical Zippers thing—‘OK, I can do that.’” When influential L.A. alternative station KROQ gave the track a shot as a midday change of pace, the phones lit up, leading to more than 100,000 sales of Hot in L.A. alone, and the single spread across the country from there. “MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
saw what was happening at KROQ
KROQ-FM
KROQ-FM — branded 106.7 KROQ — is a commercial modern rock radio station licensed to Pasadena, California serving the Greater Los Angeles. The call sign is pronounced "kay rock." It is the flagship station of Loveline hosted by Dr...
, and they slammed the ‘Hell’ video into heavy rotation the week after I signed my exit papers with Atlantic,” Faires recalls. At its hottest (pun unavoidable), the album was selling 30,000 a week—pretty mind-blowing for a group inspired by Cab Calloway
Cab Calloway
Cabell "Cab" Calloway III was an American jazz singer and bandleader. He was strongly associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City where he was a regular performer....
rather than Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...
. Says Maxwell, “It was a shocking combination of timing and good fortune. That and an abundance of enthusiasm—we had that in spades.” It certainly wasn’t a result of lavish production—like most Mammoth acts, SNZ recorded on the cheap—“so it had to be about the songs,” Faires points out. Indeed, both “Put a Lid on It” (from Hot) and “Suits Are Picking Up the Bill” (from 1998’s Perennial Favorites) seem utterly timeless now, just as they did on the day they were released. Maxwell couldn’t believe his ears when contestant (and eventual champ) Donnie Osmond cut a rug to “Lid” during the 2009 season of Dancing With the Stars
Dancing with the Stars
Dancing with the Stars is the name of several international television series based on the format of the British TV series Strictly Come Dancing, which is distributed by BBC Worldwide – the commercial arm of the BBC. Currently the format has been licensed to over 35 countries...
. “I didn’t know whether it was cool or not,” says Maxwell, “and then a friend said, ‘Well, obviously, your song has made it into the canon.’ And that completely blows my mind. You write a song, you think it’s good, you’ve got a little band, you drive around in a van, and if you can keep body and soul together, you’re doing fine. Anything that happens beyond that is extraordinary.” A lot happened beyond that; in all, the Zippers sold north of 3 million albums.
Pure
Pure (band)
Pure was a Canadian rock band, formed in Vancouver in 1991. Previously, the band was known as After All and Grin Factory. Signed to the Reprise label, the band reached a greater audience once their song "Greedy" was featured on the soundtrack album Songs from the Cool World, and the single "Blast"...
(1996-98, two albums) – Faires credits Balcom for finding this under-appreciated band from Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
after they’d made one LP for Warner Bros., and subsequently A&Ring Generation Six Pack, a strong album that was little heard on this side of the Canadian border. “Sonically, the production is so stellar on the whole album,” says Faires, “We went with ‘Denial’ as the single but didn’t really get far. The lack of traction on Pure was actually one of the triggers for me asking to get out of my executive contract at Atlantic and buying my company back, just as the Zippers were starting to break.” After the band broke up in 2000, frontman Jordy Birch embarked on a solo career, forming Guilty About Girls in 2008, while guitarist Todd Simko is now an in-demand Vancouver-based producer.
Fu Manchu
Fu Manchu
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character introduced in a series of novels by British author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century...
(1996-2001, four albums) – The label’s lone purveyors of stoner rock, from SoCal’s Orange County
Orange County, California
Orange County is a county in the U.S. state of California. Its county seat is Santa Ana. As of the 2010 census, its population was 3,010,232, up from 2,846,293 at the 2000 census, making it the third most populous county in California, behind Los Angeles County and San Diego County...
, were tight with Kyuss (whose drummer, Brant Bjork, would join Fu Manchu
Fu Manchu
Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character introduced in a series of novels by British author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century...
in 1997) and boasted a shredding sound that both anticipated and influenced Queens of the Stone Age
Queens of the Stone Age
Queens of the Stone Age is an American rock band from Palm Desert, California, United States, formed in 1997. The band's line-up has always included founding member Josh Homme , with the current line-up including longtime members Troy Van Leeuwen and Joey Castillo , alongside Michael Shuman and...
. Faires, a die-hard surfer himself, loved the fact that guitarist Scott Hill surfed every morning, worked as a repo man by day and played in the band at night. While Mammoth couldn’t take them beyond being critics’ darlings, Fu Manchu is still going strong, releasing three albums for as many indie labels since their fourth and last for Mammoth, 2001’s California Crossing.
The Backsliders
The Backsliders
The Backsliders was an alternative-traditional country-rock band composed of Chip Robinson, Steve Howell, Danny Kurtz, Jeff Dennis, and Brad Rice. Chip Robinson teamed up with Steve Howell to form The Backsliders, which began as a duo in 1991 in Athens, GA...
(1997–99, two albums) – Faires knew he was onto something special when he heard this gifted stone-country band out of Raleigh
Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh is the capital and the second largest city in the state of North Carolina as well as the seat of Wake County. Raleigh is known as the "City of Oaks" for its many oak trees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city's 2010 population was 403,892, over an area of , making Raleigh...
led by frontman Chip Robinson
Chip Robinson
Chip Robinson is a retired race car driver. He drove in the IMSA Camel GT series and won the 1987 24 Hours of Daytona Chip Robinson (born March 29, 1954 in Philadelphia, PA) is a retired race car driver. He drove in the IMSA Camel GT series and won the 1987 24 Hours of Daytona Chip Robinson (born...
and guitarist Steve “Howie” Howell. The first album from L.A.-based Dwight Yoakam
Dwight Yoakam
Dwight David Yoakam is an American singer-songwriter, actor and film director, most famous for his pioneering country music...
had brilliantly revisited the classic Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens
Buck Owens
Alvis Edgar Owens, Jr. , better known as Buck Owens, was an American singer and guitarist who had 21 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country music charts with his band, the Buckaroos...
and Merle Haggard
Merle Haggard
Merle Ronald Haggard is an American country music singer, guitarist, fiddler, instrumentalist, and songwriter. Along with Buck Owens, Haggard and his band The Strangers helped create the Bakersfield sound, which is characterized by the unique twang of Fender Telecaster guitars, vocal harmonies,...
, inspiring Mammoth to tap Yoakam producer Pete Anderson to helm the Backsliders’ debut, Throwing Rocks at the Moon, and it was a marriage made in hillbilly heaven. “Song for song, the writing is phenomenal, on a par with the Zac Brown Band
Zac Brown Band
Zac Brown Band is an American country music, southern rock, and folk band based in Atlanta, Georgia. The lineup consists of Zac Brown , Jimmy De Martini , John Driskell Hopkins , Coy Bowles , Chris Fryar and Clay Cook...
,” says Faires. “It had such classic songs, like ‘If I Was King’ and ‘Broken Wings,’ and “Cowboy Boots” says it all. Pete did an incredible job, but it always came back to Chip’s voice and Howie’s leads. We got it to #1 on Gavin’s alt country chart, ahead of some genius artists. I’m really proud of that record; I’d put it right up there with Uncle Tupelo
Uncle Tupelo
Uncle Tupelo was an alternative country music group from Belleville, Illinois, active between 1987 and 1994. Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and Mike Heidorn formed the band after the lead singer of their previous band, The Primitives, left to attend college. The trio recorded three albums for Rockville...
and the Jayhawks. God, if we’d been more dialed into Nashville, we could’ve—and should’ve—broken this band.” For the last several years, Robinson has been playing guitar with Keith Urban
Keith Urban
Keith Lionel Urban is a New Zealand-born Australian, country music singer, songwriter and guitarist whose commercial success has been mainly in the United States and Australia. Urban was born in New Zealand and began his career in Australia at an early age...
.
Marcy Playground
Marcy Playground
Marcy Playground is an American alternative rock band consisting of three members: John Wozniak , Dylan Keefe , and Shlomi Lavie . The band is best known for their 1997 hit "Sex and Candy".-Early years:...
(1997, one track): The New York band’s modern rock smash “Sex and Candy” initially appeared on Mammoth’s soundtrack to the 1997 Sundance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...
hit Hurricane Streets
Hurricane Streets
Hurricane Streets is a 1997 American coming-of-age drama which was the debut feature film from writer-director Morgan J. Freeman . The film won the Audience, Best Director, and Best Cinematography Awards at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival—the first film ever to win three awards at the festival...
and started breaking at radio before Capitol
Capitol Records
Capitol Records is a major United States based record label, formerly located in Los Angeles, but operating in New York City as part of Capitol Music Group. Its former headquarters building, the Capitol Tower, is a major landmark near the corner of Hollywood and Vine...
put out their self-titled album, which then went platinum. “Sex and Candy” spent 15 weeks at #1 on Billboard
Billboard (magazine)
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...
’s Modern Rock chart.
Mark Lizotte (1999, one album) – It was near the end for Faires and Mammoth when he inked this gifted singer/songwriter, who was big in his native Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. “Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads
Talking Heads
Talking Heads were an American New Wave and avant-garde band formed in 1975 in New York City and active until 1991. The band comprised David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison...
produced, and you could just feel it coming together in the studio in Sausalito,” says Faires. “Mark never got his due in the States, but the album is great, and ‘Dig’ is such a freakin’ smash.”
The Wiseguys
The Wiseguys
The Wiseguys was a British electronica and hip hop band that was responsible for creating the song "Start the Commotion" that was in a Mitsubishi TV advertisement, as well as the films Lizzie McGuire, Zoolander and Kangaroo Jack; and "Ooh La La", which was used in Budweiser commercials...
(1998, one album): Mammoth’s final hit act was an electronica
Electronica
Electronica includes a wide range of contemporary electronic music designed for a wide range of uses, including foreground listening, some forms of dancing, and background music for other activities; however, unlike electronic dance music, it is not specifically made for dancing...
group picked up from a U.K. label. “Disney didn’t want me to head to heavy rap, and most U.S. alternative acts had gotten so formulaic and stale by then,” Faires recalls. “So I was digging into U.K. big beat stuff, the Wiseguys were my favorite artist on Mark Jones’ great Wall of Sound
Wall of Sound
The Wall of Sound is a music production technique for pop and rock music recordings developed by record producer Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, California, during the early 1960s...
label, and we were lucky enough to release their second album, The Antidote, stateside. I still listen to the album, which is chock full of hits. We did the project in partnership with the Dust Brothers
Dust Brothers
The Dust Brothers are the Los Angeles, California based, Grammy Award winning producers, E.Z. Mike and King Gizmo , famous for their sample-based music in the 1980s and 1990s, and specifically for their work on the albums Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys, Odelay by Beck, and the soundtrack to...
’ label, Nickel Bag—the name went over really well with the Disney brass, but I was too obtuse to realize that at the time. ‘Ooh La La’ had been a #2 hit in the U.K., and we made a great video that’s now a genius YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
mash-up with ‘Grease’”—a hit in its own right. And ‘Start the Commotion’ has it all: great samples, cool horns and sick phat beats. A year after The Antidote came out, Mitsubishi
Mitsubishi
The Mitsubishi Group , Mitsubishi Group of Companies, or Mitsubishi Companies is a Japanese multinational conglomerate company that consists of a range of autonomous businesses which share the Mitsubishi brand, trademark and legacy...
put ‘Start the Commotion’ in a commercial, and the song went to #12 on the U.S. pop charts. They sold about 300,000 copies in the U.S., but by the time that happened, the Mammoth core team was long gone.”
Freestylers
Freestylers
The Freestylers are a British electronic music group, generally fitting into the breakbeat genre. Recently their style has incorporated more of a drumstep sound, more in line with The Prodigy and other such artists.-Career:...
(1999-2001) – The brainchild of DJ/producers Aston Harvey and Matt Cantor, this English unit employed a kitchen-sink approach that took it past conventional electronica
Electronica
Electronica includes a wide range of contemporary electronic music designed for a wide range of uses, including foreground listening, some forms of dancing, and background music for other activities; however, unlike electronic dance music, it is not specifically made for dancing...
into the stratosphere. At its peak, the Freestylers’ lineup was 11 strong, including guitar/drums/bass, a turntablist, two MCs and three breakdancers—“and they killed live,” says Faires. “I loved the big beat stuff, and these guys were the best. I go back and listen to We Rock Hard [1999] and get blown away. We let MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
pick the single instead of listening to our gut. They went with ‘Here We Go,’ a cool track that worked for them, but we knew that ‘We Rock Hard,’ which they cut with Soul Sonic Force, was the hit. I didn’t fully appreciate who Soul Sonic Force was at the time—I was so busy building the company and the vision for the label that at times I forgot to step back. We sold 110,000 albums, and it’s weird, I thought it was a failure back then—nowadays it would be considered a success.”
Other Mammoth Artists:
1988A Picture Made – Past EP
Downsiders – All My Friends Are Fish
1990
Frequency
Frequency
Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency...
– North Carolina Compilation
1991
Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck is an indie rock group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina that was active in the 1990s. They released three albums on Mammoth Records...
– Sofa Livin' Dreamazine
1992
Big Wheel – Holiday Manor
Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck is an indie rock group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina that was active in the 1990s. They released three albums on Mammoth Records...
- Sounding To Try Like You
1993
Big Wheel – Slowtown
Transmissions From The Planet Dog - Volume 1 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
1994
Eat Static
Eat Static
Eat Static is an electronic music project from Frome, Somerset, England formed in 1989 by Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton. Hinton left the group in February 2008 after 18 years to spend more time with his family.-History:...
– Implant
Kinney
Kinney
-People:* Jeff Kinney, football athlete* Jeff Kinney * Kathy Kinney, actress-Places:United States* Kinney, Minnesota* Kinney County, Texas* Kenney, Texas, a community also called "Kinney"Canada* Kinney Lake, in British Columbia-Other uses:* G.R...
- Down Out Law
Kill Creek – St. Valentine’s Garage
Laundry
Laundry
Laundry is a noun that refers to the act of washing clothing and linens, the place where that washing is done, and/or that which needs to be, is being, or has been laundered...
– Blacktongue (Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Porch
Porch
A porch is external to the walls of the main building proper, but may be enclosed by screen, latticework, broad windows, or other light frame walls extending from the main structure.There are various styles of porches, all of which depend on the architectural tradition of its location...
(Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck
Vanilla Trainwreck is an indie rock group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina that was active in the 1990s. They released three albums on Mammoth Records...
- Mordecai
Velo-Deluxe- Superelastic
1995
Alphabet Soup – Layin Low in the Cut (Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Banco de Gaia
Banco de Gaia
Banco de Gaia is an electronic music band from England, formed in 1989 by Toby Marks .The music of Banco de Gaia is best categorized as ambient dub, but Marks works to cross genres, often using Arabic and Middle Eastern samples against a bass heavy reggae, rock, or trance rhythm to produce deeply...
– Last Train to Lhasa (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Banco de Gaia
Banco de Gaia
Banco de Gaia is an electronic music band from England, formed in 1989 by Toby Marks .The music of Banco de Gaia is best categorized as ambient dub, but Marks works to cross genres, often using Arabic and Middle Eastern samples against a bass heavy reggae, rock, or trance rhythm to produce deeply...
– Maya (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Bandit Queen
Bandit Queen
Bandit Queen is a 1994 Indian film based upon the life of Phoolan Devi. It was directed by Shekhar Kapur and starred Seema Biswas as the title character. It was produced by Bobby Bedi's Kaleidoscope Entertainment.The Music was Composed by Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.- Plot :The film opens in the...
– Hormone Hotel
Children of the Bong
Children of the Bong
Children of the Bong was an electronic band formed in the early 1990s by Rob Henry and Daniel Goganian. They signed to Planet Dog Records in 1994 and released one album, Sirius Sounds, as well as a couple of tracks on Planet Dog compilations. The band recorded a Peel Session for DJ John Peel on BBC...
– Sirius Sounds (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Eat Static
Eat Static
Eat Static is an electronic music project from Frome, Somerset, England formed in 1989 by Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton. Hinton left the group in February 2008 after 18 years to spend more time with his family.-History:...
– Abduction (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Eat Static
Eat Static
Eat Static is an electronic music project from Frome, Somerset, England formed in 1989 by Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton. Hinton left the group in February 2008 after 18 years to spend more time with his family.-History:...
– Epsylon (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Eskimo
Eskimo
Eskimos or Inuit–Yupik peoples are indigenous peoples who have traditionally inhabited the circumpolar region from eastern Siberia , across Alaska , Canada, and Greenland....
– The Further Adventures of Der Shrimpkin (Mammoth/Prawn Song)
Feed Your Head – Volume 1 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Feed Your Head – Volume 2 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Fun^Da^Mental – Seize the Time (Mammoth/Beggars Banquet)
Quadruped
Quadruped
Quadrupedalism is a form of land animal locomotion using four limbs or legs. An animal or machine that usually moves in a quadrupedal manner is known as a quadruped, meaning "four feet"...
– Vol 1 (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Various Artists - Up and Down Club Sessions Vol. 1 (MR0103-2)
Various Artists - Up and Down Club Sessions Vol. 2 (MR0104-2)
Vowel Movement- Vowel Movement (Mammoth/Atlantic)
1996
Clarissa
Clarissa
Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748. It tells the tragic story of a heroine whose quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her family, and is the longest real novelA completed work that has been released by a publisher in...
– Silver
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is a New Orleans, Louisiana, brass band. The ensemble was established in 1977 by Benny Jones together with members of the Tornado Brass Band...
- Ears To The Wall
Future Loop Foundation – Time and Bass (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Jabberjaw Compilation – Pure Sweet Hell (feat. Everclear, Mary Lou Lord and Jawbreaker)
Jack Drag - Jack Drag (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
Kill Creek – Proving Winter Cruel
Melvins - Stag (Mammoth/Atlantic)
MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
Buzz Bin - Volume One: The Zen Of Buzz Clips (Mammoth/MTV) (feat. the Dave Matthews Band, Radiohead and the Stone Temple Pilots)
Planet Dub – Planet Dub (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
The Raymond Brake
The Raymond Brake
The Raymond Brake was an indie rock band that formed in the mid-1990s in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA. Greensboro being only 45 minutes drive away from Chapel Hill, the city's music scene was an influence and a guiding light...
- Never Work Ever (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
1997
Clarissa
Clarissa
Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748. It tells the tragic story of a heroine whose quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her family, and is the longest real novelA completed work that has been released by a publisher in...
– Blood and Commons
Elevate – Interior (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
Fabric
Fabric
A fabric is a textile material, short for "textile fabric".Fabric may also refer to:*Fabric , the spatial and geometric configuration of elements within a rock*Fabric , a nightclub in London, England...
– Woolly Mammoth (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
Feed Your Head – Volume 3 : Accelerating The Alpha Rhythms (Mammoth/Planet Dog)
Jack Drag –Unisex Headwave (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
KCRW
KCRW
KCRW is a public radio station broadcasting from the campus of Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, California, carrying a mix of National Public Radio news, talk radio and freeform music format. The general manager of KCRW is Jennifer Ferro...
Rare on Air - Rare On Air Vol. 3 (feat. Fiona Apple, Patti Smith and Ben Folds Five)
MTV Buzz Bin - Volume One: The Future Of Buzz Clips (Mammoth/MTV) (feat. D’Angelo, The Flaming Lips and The Chemical Brothers)
Strangefolk
Strangefolk
Strangefolk is a rock-oriented jam band originally from Burlington, VT. Since forming in 1991, they have released five studio albums, two live albums and one live concert DVD...
– Weightless in Water
Two Dollar Pistols - On Down the Track (Mammoth/Hep-Cat)
1998
April March
April March
April March is an American indie pop singer/songwriter who sings in English and French...
– Lessons of April March (Mammoth/Ideal)
Creeper Lagoon
Creeper Lagoon
Creeper Lagoon is a San Francisco indie rock band originally started by Sharky Laguana as a solo project in 1991. They are currently on Sharky's digital record label, Neglektra.- History :...
– I Become Small and Go (Mammoth/Ideal)
Far Too Jones – Picture Postcard Walls
Jocelyn Montgomery & David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
- Lux Vivens: The Music of Holdegard von Bingen
My Friend Steve
My Friend Steve
My Friend Steve, with frontman Steven Burry, was a band hailing from Orlando, Florida. "Charmed", released on their 1998 album Hope & Wait , was their only single which charted. The single appeared on Billboard's 1999 Modern Rock Chart, peaking at number 38. The song also reached the Adult Top 40...
– Hope and Wait
Natural Calamity – Peach Head (Mammoth/Ideal)
The Hope Blister
The Hope Blister
The Hope Blister was an ambient band founded by Ivo Watts-Russell, head of the 4AD Records label. The band was something of a continuation of the This Mortal Coil project, but with a fixed line-up on ...smile's OK and focusing on cover versions...
– Smile’s OK (Mammoth/4AD)
1999
10 Cents - Buggin' Out (Mammoth/Ideal)
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is a New Orleans, Louisiana, brass band. The ensemble was established in 1977 by Benny Jones together with members of the Tornado Brass Band...
– Buck Jump
James Mathus & His Knockdown Society – Play Songs for Rosetta
Whalen
Whalen
-People:Whalen is a surname, and may refer to:*Bruce Whalen, American politician*Charles W. Whalen, Jr., American politician*R. Christopher Whalen, American writer and financial analyst*Diana Whalen, Canadian politician*Dianne Whalen, Canadian politician...
– Jazz Squad
Splendid - Have You Got A Name For It (Unreleased)
Strangefolk
Strangefolk
Strangefolk is a rock-oriented jam band originally from Burlington, VT. Since forming in 1991, they have released five studio albums, two live albums and one live concert DVD...
– A Great Long While
Styles of Beyond
Styles of Beyond
Styles of Beyond is an underground rap group from the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California. The group consists of MCs Ryan Patrick Maginn and Takbir Bashir , Colton Raisin Fisher , and producer Jason Rabinowitz . They have released two LPs, one mixtape and were heavily featured on Mike...
– 2000 Fold (Mammoth/Ideal)
2000
Frankie Machine - One
Soundtracks
Hurricane Streets
Hurricane Streets
Hurricane Streets is a 1997 American coming-of-age drama which was the debut feature film from writer-director Morgan J. Freeman . The film won the Audience, Best Director, and Best Cinematography Awards at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival—the first film ever to win three awards at the festival...
– feat. Marcy Playground, “Sex and Candy”, Xzibit and De La Soul
Jesus' Son
Jesus' Son
Jesus' Son is a 1999 film that was adapted from a collection of short stories of the same name by Denis Johnson. It stars Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Holly Hunter, Dennis Hopper, Denis Leary, Will Patton, John Ventimiglia, Michael Shannon and Jack Black...
– feat. Wilco and Joe Henry
Orgazmo
Orgazmo
Orgazmo is a 1997 comedy film written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the animated series South Park, and directed by Parker.-Plot:...
- (Mammoth/ideal) feat. Wu-Tang Clan, Dust Brothers, Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Smashmouth
Reality Bites
Reality Bites
Reality Bites is a 1994 American romantic comedy-drama film written by Helen Childress and featuring the directorial debut of Ben Stiller. It stars Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Stiller, with major supporting roles played by Janeane Garofalo and Steve Zahn. The film was shot on location in Austin...
- feat. Juliana Hatfield, U2 and Dinosaur Jr.
The Crow
The Crow
The Crow is a comic book series created by James O'Barr. The series was originally written by O'Barr as a means of dealing with the death of his girlfriend at the hands of a drunk driver. It was later published by Caliber Comics in 1989, becoming an underground success, and later adapted into a...
- feat. Machines of Loving Grace, RATM and The Cure
The Crow: City of Angels
The Crow: City of Angels
The Crow: City of Angels is a 1996 action film directed by Tim Pope. It is a sequel to the 1994 cult film The Crow.-Plot:The film is set in Los Angeles, where drug king Judah Earl controls it all...
- feat. Seven Mary Three, Iggy Pop and Deftones
Artist Links
Mammoth Classics on You TubeMammoth 20th Birthday
Schatzi
Seven Mary Three
Juliana Hatfield
Squirrel Nut Zippers
Joe Henry
Dillon Fence
Dash Rip Rock
Fu Manchu
Blake Babies
Chainsaw Kittens
Freestylers
Frente
Victoria Williams
Wiseguys
KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic
John Strohm's Music Blog
Works cited
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1116676444.html?categoryid=16&cs=1&query=mammoth+recordshttp://www.variety.com/article/VR101450.html?categoryid=18&cs=1&query=mammoth+record
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117775630.html?categoryid=16&cs=1&query=jay+faires