Squirrel Nut Zippers ride again

Friday's paper has a story checking in on Squirrel Nut Zippers, circa 2008, who are trying to make a go of it again after spending years in a wilderness of bad legal and interpersonal juju. But journey with me back to the halcyon days of 1997, when the Zippers and Ben Folds Five unexpectedly and belatedly fulfilled those gaudy "next Seattle" predications about Chapel Hill. For a vintage feature on that breakthrough as it was happening, see below.

Back in the present, the Zippers play Saturday at Cat's Cradle.

Stealing the Scene
Chapel Hill was once dubbed the next Seattle. Now comes a pair of bands far from Nirvana.
By David Menconi, News & Observer
April 27, 1997

Chapel Hill -- For the past month or so, it has been the local music community's equivalent of chitchat about the weather: "So ... how 'bout those Squirrel Nut Zippers?"

Finally, after years of being touted as "The Next Big Thing," the Chapel Hill music scene has a couple of legitimate breakthrough bands. Only thing is, the bands breaking through are the last ones anybody would have predicted: the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Ben Folds Five.

"Squirrel Nut Zippers are probably selling more records in a week than every other band from Chapel Hill combined, ever," says Ben Folds from a tour stop in San Antonio. "And we're doing a lot better than people back home know - maybe better than anyone from there has ever done before. But somehow it seems so ... anticlimactic. Maybe if it were Superchunk or Archers of Loaf, that would be another story. But instead, it's the Zippers and us. So it's pretty funny."

Funny, maybe, but the numbers don't lie. The Zippers' 1996 album, "Hot" (Mammoth Records), is entering rarified territory, recently cracking the top 50 of the Billboard album sales chart. "Hot" has sold more than 200,000 copies and shows no sign of slowing down. With a video for "Hell" in "buzz-clip" rotation on MTV, gold (500,000 in sales) shouldn't be too far off, and platinum (1 million) isn't out of the question. That would be remarkable, since the Zippers' updated speakeasy-era hot jazz isn't normally the stuff of hit records.

While Folds' '70s-centric piano pop is more overtly commercial-sounding, his band's quick success is hardly any less surprising. 1995's "Ben Folds Five" did well for a debut album, but it never cracked the charts. So no one expected the group's sophomore effort, "Whatever and Ever Amen" (550/Epic Records), to debut at No. 90 on the Billboard album chart this month.

To put this into context, no Triangle group has ever made the Billboard album chart's Top 100 before. And no Chapel Hill band has even made the Top 200 before this.

Now, there isn't just one - but two.

"At this point, it truly has become such a carnival ride that it's fairly easy to deal with," says Zippers guitarist Tom Maxwell from his home in Pittsboro. "We just don't take any of it seriously at all. How can we? As far as believing the hype, that's not been a problem. But the surreal quality to a lot of this has been deliriously fun. Not a week ago, I was backstage in Toronto trading off-color jokes with Robin Leach. It was ... weird."

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Chapel Hill's stardom:

To the extent they're aware of Chapel Hill at all, readers of magazines like Spin and Details probably think every band in town sounds like Superchunk. That's a byproduct of the Chapel Hill music scene's 1992-93 media scare, when the rock press anointed the town "The Next Seattle" (as part of the music industry's obsession with finding "The Next Nirvana").

This reached a crescendo in August 1992, when the ironically named "Big Record Stardom Convention" drew label representatives and magazine writers from across the country to see 49 local acts play at four clubs. A wave of anthropologically toned stories followed over the next six months, mostly focusing on bands like Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, Polvo, Picasso Trigger and Metal Flake Mother.

Except for being guitar-based, none of these bands sounded much like each other. None of them broke through commercially, either, which is not to say they've all been unsuccessful.

Neither Folds nor the Zippers play what you'd call "indie rock," though both have connections to Chapel Hill's indie rock scene. The problem with pigeonholes is that music scenes are never as monolithic as they're made out to be.

Five years ago, that didn't stop anyone from trying to define the elusive "Chapel Hill sound," usually in terms of slacker caricatures. Details called it "Seattle on Prozac." Spin had the most memorably absurd description, quoting an anonymous local: " 'You really want to know the Chapel Hill sound? It's this,' he says, and opens a beer can in my face."

Another misperception these stories created was the size of the scene. The "Chapel Hill scene" they talked about always had a higher national profile than a local one. Indeed, local acts like Johnny Quest and Dillon Fence consistently drew bigger crowds than the Archers or Superchunk, even though they were never part of the "in" crowd.

"What's considered 'mainstream' in Chapel Hill has nothing to do with the rest of the world, or even the rest of Chapel Hill," points out Folds. "But that's part of the reason the 'Chapel Hill scene' works as a music thing. The scene is 40 delusional people who don't even realize they're the scene-sters. There aren't many of them at all - most of the town is a bunch of frat people. But those 40 people set the tone, and that's part of what makes it work. There are a lot of very creative, cool bands there because of them."

Even with a band like the Zippers - whose music is about as idiosyncratic as anything out there - this process continues.

"Oh, it's still the same old crap, this pigeonhole thing," says Maxwell, who played in What Peggy Wants before joining the Zippers. "What Peggy Wants disintegrated, and it was too bad, but we never operated under any illusions about what we were doing or were part of. I'm sorry if some magazines from out of town didn't get it. But that clarified my thoughts on why I love Chapel Hill so much - the diversity of what's accepted here. That's why I felt like I could do anything I wanted in this band, if I did it with enough conviction.

"Now, I get questions like, 'Describe your music in one word.' Or, 'What is up with the scene, this "swing" thing? Did you start that?' I used to give rambling answers, try to make something up, but now I just refuse to answer. It was always complete guesswork on my part, anyway. I refuse to participate in my own pigeonholing."

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On the way up:

Such questions are part of the new reality for both the Zippers and Folds, who find themselves in the unexpected position of dealing with the downside of success. Even touring in a somewhat tonier style has some unforeseen psychological drawbacks.

"There's definitely a downside to it," Folds says. "That's the way the human mind works - it always recalibrates: 'That was "down" before, this is what it is now, and you'll hate it just as much.' Part of the downer is I feel less engaged sometimes. I almost feel like cargo getting dragged around: 'Here, talk to this person; do this; do that.' Before, we were moving the piano ourselves, sleeping on floors. And that was OK because we were calling more of our own shots. This way, you feel like a sack of potatoes thrown onstage, 'Now, play!' "

In the Zippers' case, Maxwell also cites a feeling of a loss of control as "Hot" has taken off. Additionally, there are demands to tour more than the band would like. But the biggest concern is that the belated success of "Hot" (which was originally released almost a year ago) has held up the release of the Zippers' next album.

Their third album is finished, but it won't be released until after "Hot" runs its course. That could take up to a year, if another single takes off. Maxwell says that's caused some internal consternation - especially since the group is already writing material for the fourth album.

"I don't want this record to become obsolete," Maxwell says. "It's not like I'm discontented with our first two records, or feel they've been invalidated. But bands and songs do evolve. We've been playing six or seven songs from this third record for a while and they're already starting to mutate. I don't want them to get too divorced from the couple of weeks we spent committing them to tape in late 1996."

Another byproduct of success is becoming a bigger target. Folds is still picking up the sort of overwhelmingly favorable press the Zippers were getting two years ago. "Whatever and Ever Amen" earned a 3 1/2-star rating in Rolling Stone and an incredible nine (out of 10) from Spin.

But if Folds really catches on, he may find himself catching arrows similar to what the Zippers have been getting lately. The same issue of Rolling Stone that had the Folds record review ran a lukewarm piece on a Zippers live show in Los Angeles. The New York Times gave a similar dressing-down to the Zippers' last New York show: "The band is as clumsy as they are eager to please. ... There are bands in New Orleans playing for tips that could blow the Squirrel Nut Zippers off any stage."

Then again, bad reviews are a minor inconvenience in the cosmic scheme of things. For now, the Zippers are still just trying to enjoy the ride.

"I don't understand this myself, but stuff like this is not bugging me like it used to," Maxwell says. "I have to say that the guy from The New York Times didn't say anything we haven't said ourselves - he was just so uncharitable about it. You'll never hear me compare myself to Django Reinhardt or Louis Armstrong or Fats Waller. Those people are the masters, and we don't claim to be that. We're just conduits for letting this exhilarating and beautiful thing come through.

"We wouldn't compare favorably to any of those bands, and we know that. But the thing is, nobody would know anything about those people or spend any time talking about them now if not for us."

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Sidebar: Five years past stardom

This summer will mark five years since the Big Record Stardom Convention and the attendant wave of magazine coverage of the "Chapel Hill Scene." Maybe you're wondering what happened to...

The bands:

- Superchunk, Polvo: Superchunk remains very successful within its self-imposed limits of putting out records on its own label, Merge. The new "Trouser Press Record Guide" says Superchunk "has done more to foment the indie-pop revolution than nearly any other band extant." In recent years, bandleader Mac McCaughan has split his time between Superchunk and his side band, Portastatic. Drummer Jon Wurster plays in a number of other bands, including the Pinetops and Grand National.

One of Merge's flagship bands was Polvo, until the group left for a larger independent label (Chicago-based Touch and Go Records) for last year's "Exploded Drawing" album. Still one of the most respected bands in the land of indie rock. Guitarist Ash Bowie also moonlights in the Boston band Helium.

- Archers of Loaf, Small, Picasso Trigger: All three of these bands wound up signed to the California-based independent label Alias Records shortly after the Big Record Stardom Convention. By now, only the Archers are still together. They've done respectably well, although their sales have yet to match their critical acclaim (they're a particular favorite of the notoriously cranky "Dean of American Rock Critics," Robert Christgau). The Archers jumped from Alias to Elektra Records for their 1996 major-label debut, "All the Nation's Airports." Ben Folds played drums on Archers leader Eric Bachmann's 1995 solo album, "Barry Black."

In 1992, Bachmann was splitting time between the Archers and Small. After he quit Small to devote all his time to the Archers, he was replaced by David Hollinghurst. Small made three full-length albums - all pretty good, but none of them did a thing commercially. The group called it quits in 1995. Hollinghurst subsequently wound up in Rubbermaid, while frontman Mike Kenlan recently surfaced in the group Aftertax (with ex-members of Soccer). Drummer Chuck Garrison's primary band is Pipe.

Picasso Trigger made two full-length albums before succumbing to internal pressures in 1995. Drummer Jon McClain now plays in Leadfoot (and also won a car on "The Price Is Right" last year).

- Metal Flake Mother, What Peggy Wants: Both bands recorded for now-defunct Moist/Baited Breath Records (also home to Southern Culture on the Skids at the time), and both expired in 1993. Later that year, Metal Flake Mother drummer/guitarist Jim Mathus and What Peggy Wants drummer Tom Maxwell came together as the nucleus for the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Hep-Cat Records just reissued Metal Flake's fine 1991 album, "Beyond the Java Sea." That album was engineered by Caleb Southern, who has since produced both Ben Folds Five records, among many other credits. What Peggy Wants (originally known as Teasing the Korean) left behind one full-length album, 1992's "Death of a Sailor."

- Sex Police: A Chapel Hill institution, growing out of the late great Pressure Boys. Disbanded after 1994's "Science" album. Frontman John Plymale is fast becoming an in-demand producer (including upcoming records by Superchunk and Two Dollar Pistols), and also plays drums in Kickball with Nikki Meets the Hibachi/Two Fish Blue's John Gillespie. Bassist Norwood Cheek is equally in-demand as a video director - he directed the Squirrel Nut Zippers' breakthrough video for "Hell." Horn player Stacy Guess played on the Zippers' first album, 1995's "The Inevitable Squirrel Nut Zippers."

- Dillon Fence: Pop band made three full-length albums for Mammoth Records before disbanding in 1995. Frontman Greg Humphreys now leads the soul/funk group Hobex (with Johnny Quest drummer Steve Hill) and moonlights in Dana Kletter's band, Dear Enemy. Guitarist Kent Alphin and drummer Scott Carle form the nucleus of the pop group Granger.

- Zen Frisbee: Made one of the great obscure albums of Chapel Hill indie rock, 1994's "I'm As Mad As Faust" (Flavor-Contra Records), before disbanding last year. The album cover painting is by guitarist Laird Dixon, whose artwork also adorns the walls at various Chapel Hill night spots; that's his unfinished portrait of blues guitarist Elizabeth Cotten on the back wall at the Cat's Cradle.

- Erectus Monotone: Broke up in 1993. Bassist Jennifer Walker now plays in Ashley Stove. Drummer Brian Walsby has been in numerous other bands since then, most recently the Shames.

- Flat Duo Jets: Guitarist Dexter Romweber and drummer Crow split up for a while, but the duo is together again and still putting out a steady stream of records. Romweber also made a solo album last year on the local label Permanent Records.

- Finger: Raleigh band broke up in 1993. Drummer John Howie has since played in many other bands, including June and Chris Stamey's Alaska. He currently leads the country band Two Dollar Pistols. Brad Rice now plays lead guitar in the Backsliders.

- Accelerators: Another Raleigh band, now semi-active and playing several shows a year. The last original member left is Gerald Duncan. Finger/Backsliders guitarist Brad Rice also did a stint in the Accelerators.

- Motorolla: This spinoff of Eight or Nine Feet formed in 1992, and Big Record Stardom Convention was one of its first public shows. The band became a hot property in 1993 (and had to rename itself Motocaster) and signed to Interscope Records, which released the Mitch Easter-produced "Stay Loaded" in 1994. The follow-up album has not seen the light of day, and the band is currently in limbo. Guitarist Bo Taylor played in Dish for a time and is now in Red Star Belgrade. He and drummer Jon Heames also make up the nucleus of Peterbilt.

- Vanilla Trainwreck: Raleigh band made three albums for Mammoth, splitting up after 1994's "Mordecai." Various combinations of members have since shown up in different bands including Refrigerator Heaven and Regraped. Bandleader Greg Elkins served as assistant engineer on country-rock band Whiskeytown's new four-song single, just out on Bloodshot/Outpost Records.

- Lubricators: Split up in 1993. Guitarist Kenny Roby now leads the country-rock band 6 String Drag; the band's Steve Earle-produced album is due out in September. Bassist Jack Cain was sound engineer at Raleigh's Brewery nightclub for a number of years. More recently, he's been out on the road as sound man for the Backsliders and Squirrel Nut Zippers.

The clubs:

- Cat's Cradle: The 206 W. Franklin St. location closed in May 1993 after a show by the Jayhawks to make way for FGI Telemarketing, which wound up not occupying the space after all. It now houses BW-3 restaurant. The Cradle opened in its current location at 300 E. Main Street in Carrboro in November 1993.

- La Terraza: The upstairs space at 504 1/2 W. Franklin St. has most recently been the Crescent City Music Hall.

- Hardback Cafe: Name-checked in the 1995 Ben Folds Five song "Where's Summer B.?" By then the space at 110 N. Columbia St. had already closed and reopened as the Lizard & Snake Cafe, a restaurant/nightclub run by Clarissa bassist Andy McMillan.

- Margaret's Rock & Roll Cafe: This club at 506 W. Franklin St. went through a number of names and guises before stabilizing as Local 506 (site of the annual Sleazefest music festival).

- The Cave: Still The Cave, still downstairs at 452 1/2 W. Franklin St.