Spoon at a Fork
The first time the members of the Austin band Spoon were saddled with the label of Next Big Thing, it almost destroyed them. This time they have a choice: get seduced by another big record company or reinvent what it means to be rock stars.
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"Everybody who uses four-track does this," he says. "It’s not my own thing. But it’s the only way I know to be good." And the proper place to experiment and figure out what he will want when he gets to the studio. "I was working on the vocals for ’Waiting for the Kid to Come Out’ [on 1997’s five-song EP Soft Effects], and when I listened back to it, I accidentally heard an earlier, completely different vocal track play with it. I thought, ’That sounds pretty cool. Let’s do that when we get to the studio.’" It worked. In the song’s bridge, two Daniel vocals split your attention, singing different lyrics over each other until joining together to scream the chorus. It’s disjointed, then dramatic, and all by design.
It’s the notes from those tapes that Daniel takes to the studio to work out with Zarbo and Eno. Zarbo is the band’s little brother, the butt of most of their jokes. But his steady bass lines and harmony vocals are a big part of how the band manages to replicate their studio success on stage. And Eno is Daniel’s musical better half. He’s been in Spoon since Daniel started the band, and his training as a jazz drummer taught him to roll smoothly through all manner of stops and starts and quirky tempos, a vital skill for playing behind Daniel. Eno’s day job designing microchips has helped too, allowing him to build the studio and help finance Spoon’s recordings. As he and Daniel have become increasingly adept at working the recording board, they have been able to take their time making albums. It helps that there haven’t been any label execs hounding them for a hit.
"Josh likes to make like he’s [Motown bass player] James Jamerson," says Daniel. "He’s more studied in theory than I am. Jim is pretty calculated when it comes to his parts. He likes to add something to it to surprise you rather than just lay down a backbeat." But it’s ultimately Daniel’s band. "Britt will have a very clear vision of what he wants," says Austin producer John Croslin, who sat at the board for Telephono and A Series of Sneaks. "He’ll try everybody’s ideas, but if it veers too far from what he wants, he’ll cut it off."
The formula worked on Spoon’s first four records, and it’s still in place for the fifth. Here in Eno’s garage, after recording a guitar part for another new song, "I’ve Been Good Too Long," Daniel turns his attention to vocals. He grabs a couple of beers before looking over his notes, dimming the lights, and slipping on a pair of headphones. Then he bellies up to the mike. "Good Too Long" begins for maybe the tenth time in the past hour but this time with words. Daniel slurs and gasps the lyrics: "You were a fly by night/No mind, no plans/I was a practiced mark/Listening to the weatherman." He moans, hiccups, jumps in and out of falsetto, races to squeeze words into the groove: "Said you got to fight when you know you’re right sometimes/We all act like we know what that means." Here’s where Daniel injects a sense of urgency, where he hints at letting go, where he reminds you that, no matter how concise the rest of the song may be, this is in fact rock and roll: dangerous, sexy, and above all else, cool.
THE MEMBERS OF SPOON ARE TIRED of talking about their short stint with a major label. That was back in 1998, when the band was officially the Next Big Thing and Elektra Records was offering them the traditional route to stardom. The relationship ended in disaster, and these days Daniel, open and animated when the conversation sticks to music, looks like he might run from the room when talk turns to the music business. "I don’t want to do a whole article on Elektra," he says.
Although some fans were disappointed when Spoon chose Elektra to release their second album, A Series of Sneaks, the decision to go with a major made sense at the time. They’d been signed by Ron Laffitte, the head of Elektra’s A&R division, the department that oversees the development of new talent. And they’d recorded Sneaks on their own before licensing it to the label, meaning not only that Spoon had had complete control when they’d recorded the album but that they would ultimately own the recording itself, a rare allowance from a major. Sneaks sounded leaner and brighter than Telephono; it was short and to the point, fourteen songs in 33 minutes, brimming with hooks, energy, and the unexpected. It should have been a hit.
But things soured quickly. According to Daniel, Laffitte stopped returning his calls and never attended a single show after signing the band. (Laffitte, now the president of A&R at Columbia, didn’t return calls for comment.) In a weird move, Elektra insisted on adding thirty seconds to the album’s first single to make it closer in length to everything else on the radio. None of it felt right to the band. When the album was released, in May 1998, Spoon received scarce advertising and a cut-rate tour budget. It had not even sold three thousand copies when, early that September, Laffitte left the label, meaning the band had no one at Elektra to lobby on their behalf. That same week they were dropped.
Daniel depicts the immediate aftermath as a "lost period." He moved to New York and put on a tie to take a day job as an administrative assistant at Citibank. On his lunch break one day, he went to pick up registration materials for a music conference and ran into the drummer for punk-rock group Sleater-Kinney. "I was dressed up in my Citibank outfit, and she said, ’What are you doing?’" Daniel says.
"I did think for a time that I’d have to stop making music," he adds later, "which I could have handled. But it was going to break my heart."
Music had been Daniel’s focus since growing up in Temple, a Central Texas hospital town, where he spent much of high school combing British music magazines and picking out melodies on a bass guitar while watching MTV. Friends remember him as a rock star even then, plenty intellectual and a little bit alienated. He was into Prince, the Cure, Spacemen 3, Julian Cope, music you’d never hear on pickup truck radios in the Temple High parking lot. "Yeah, I was the coolest kid in high school," he says. "It’s just that nobody else knew it."
He formed bands as soon as he got to the University of Texas, in 1989, meeting Eno in 1993 and starting Spoon a year later. The band’s blistering yet hypermelodic punk quickly earned the buzz they would ride through Sneaks, and they started recording almost immediately. A handful of labels offered to release Telephono, but Spoon went with Matador, in part because it was the home of their favorite acts, like Pavement, Liz Phair, and Yo La Tengo. But Telephono received mixed reviews, and Spoon learned quickly that being a big dog in Austin didn’t necessarily translate on the road. Still, they found pockets of support.
"We were in Fargo one night in October," says Eno. "It was about to start snowing, and you could see it in people’s eyes: They were getting ready for their long, alcoholic winter. There was one guy there in a trench coat who paced back and forth in front of the stage the whole show. Miserable. So the next night was in Omaha, and we figured it would be just as bad. We set up our equipment in the club that afternoon and left and didn’t get back for the show until about five minutes before it started. And there were twenty-five to thirty high school kids there who just worshiped the band. After the show, they invited us to go hang out at a bowling alley across the street, then to a karaoke bar, and then to somebody’s house to drink beer all night." Among the locals was Conor Oberst, who, at seventeen, had already started his own record label and his own band, Bright Eyes, but was still a good five years away from being called the next Bob Dylan in publications like the New York Times.
After the train wreck with Elektra and Daniel’s New York hiatus, the band regrouped in Austin in the fall of 2000 and then went on the road. In a sense, Spoon has always been two bands, controlled inventors in the studio lab but a furious live act. Now they had real frustrations to take out onstage. That summer they had released a scathing two-song kiss-off to Elektra, "The Agony of Laffitte" and "Laffitte Don’t Fail Me Now," on Oberst’s Saddle Creek Records. The single provided a convenient hook for stories in alternative weeklies in towns where Spoon went to play. Their shows started attracting an intensely loyal following of kids who were growing up like Daniel had, proud to feel as though they’d found something no one else knew about.
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