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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Then Spoon released a third album. Girls Can Tell was yet another departure, a more straightforward pop-rock record than its predecessors, a reflection, says Daniel, of the classic rock radio he had listened to in New York—lots of Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and the Kinks. The band shopped an early version of Girls for about a year before completing the record and accepting an offer from Merge, the label started in 1989 by members of edgy pop group Superchunk as a refuge for like-minded bands. After Merge released it, in early 2001, little signs indicated that Spoon’s fortunes were changing. Critical praise came from the anticipated alternative sources, like the Village Voice and L.A.Weekly, but also from the Washington Post and the Toronto Sun. The first week’s sales equaled the first ten months’ for Telephono, boosted by a glowing NPR segment on the band. The video for Girls’ opening track, the soulful, spooky "Everything Hits at Once," started showing on the Jumbotron over Times Square. And the little clubs they’d always played in places like Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A. could no longer hold enough people.
After The New Yorker and a dozen other publications put Girls on their year-end ten-best lists, Spoon took a full head of steam into the studio for 2002’s Kill the Moonlight. Here was Spoon at their finest: the risks and energy of Telephono and Sneaks combined with the maturity of Girls and delivered with a swagger emboldened by the critical acclaim and wide fan support they felt they’d always deserved. The Chicago Tribune said the record "confirm[ed] greatness for Spoon." At music festivals across the U.S., like the Austin City Limits fest and New York’s Downtown River to River festival at Battery Park, the largest crowds assembled for the Spoon set. The band appeared on Conan, Carson Daly, and Austin City Limits. Major labels started calling again with offers for the band. Last fall, an executive at Elektra even e-mailed to inquire whether Spoon had decided what label their next record might come out on. "I just told them to talk to our manager," says Daniel, "who asked if they were aware of our history in that building. It makes me feel like those people are a little out of it." Spoon, on the other hand, was finally in.
"I REMEMBER BEING IN A CLUB in Boston the first time somebody asked me if I liked indie rock," says Daniel. "I thought he meant bands making records on independent labels. Then I realized he was talking about indie rock as a genre, not a method. I thought he must have been an idiot." Credit the confusion, which comes up frequently when a hard-to-peg band like Spoon is written up in a daily paper, to lazy critics and A&R reps. In their rush to find the next Nirvana after the Seattle punk trio’s Austin City Limits remade popular music in 1991, music industry types who thought "grunge" too narrow a term to describe all the acts making the jump to major labels chose "indie rock" as a broader category. It gave no indication of what a band might actually sound like, but it worked its way into the lexicon anyway.
But what is a joke as a genre has never been more important as a way to make records. Despite an improved first quarter in 2004, major labels have been slumping for years, and indies have picked up the slack. "Majors are being much more selective now," says Bill Bentley, a vice president at Warner Bros. Records, "so signing bands who aren’t quite ready will often fall to the indies. Majors have to be able to do something with an act when they sign it." Bentley and other execs cite a handful of reasons for the change, from free downloading off the Internet to a poor economy to the lessons learned from all those next Nirvanas nobody can remember. Conor Oberst, who was fourteen when he started Saddle Creek with those same Omaha friends who went with him to see Spoon, calls it differently. "Majors make music for people who don’t like music," he says. "They cater to people who buy five CDs a year." And so, the logic goes, majors need only make CDs by five artists a year. And hopefully sell 15 million copies of each.
Their smaller scale isn’t the only thing that distinguishes indies. They tend to be run by fans for fans, and they pride themselves on forming real relationships with their bands. "When Spoon’s A&R guy left Elektra," says Merge’s publicity director Martin Hall, "nobody at the label knew who they were. Everybody at Merge knows Spoon."
The Merge-meets-Spoon story is a perfect example of what an indie can do for an act. Spoon licensed two completed records to Merge, meaning the band didn’t owe the label any money for production and could start receiving their indie-standard 50 percent split of profits almost immediately. At a major, Spoon would have received a royalty rate closer to 9 percent, and that money would not have come in until Spoon had paid back whatever advance they had received, plus any money that had been spent by the label on marketing and videos, which can run into the millions of dollars.
"There’s a misconception that independent record labels don’t want to sell records," says Merge president Mac McCaughan. "But the economics are that we don’t need to sell as many, and that allows us a certain flexibility to deal with each band and record differently." That way, the label doesn’t automatically throw a bunch of money at a release, instead targeting fans already in place. In Spoon’s case, that meant getting reviews in the magazines and Web sites Spoon fans read, like Spin and Pitchforkmedia.com, and shows in the places where the fans live. Then, when record and ticket sales indicated that momentum was starting to build, Merge got review copies of the records to general-interest publications like GQ and Vanity Fair and started to spend on videos. It’s a marketing scheme based on and conducive to a natural growth of the fan base. "It’s taken talent to get to that spot in people’s consciousness," says Spoon’s tour manager, Ben Dickey, who runs his own indie label, Post-Parlo Records, in Austin. "Spoon is getting bigger crowds now, and there are some casual fans there. But the great thing is, the people are staying for the whole show. There’s not been one big hit, so no one’s there for just one song."
That the hit song is no longer the brass ring is a plus in more ways than one. Spoon’s friends Fastball were Austin’s other Next Big Thing in the summer of 1998, and by that September, when Spoon was wondering if they should quit music and go to grad school, Fastball’s hit song, "The Way," was being played between innings in every ballpark in America. And Fastball’s album, All the Pain Money Can Buy, released just two months before Sneaks, had sold more than a million copies. But just as quickly, Fastball disappeared, and although they’ve recently resurfaced in Austin, the rest of the world won’t likely be aware of them again until Time-Life introduces its "Ultimate 90’s Collection" series. Although Spoon’s sales will probably never match Pain’s, it’s a safe bet that Spoon has more true fans among the 65,000 who bought Moonlight than Fastball ever had.
A better target for Spoon is the success of a band like Wilco. The Chicago pop outfit has never had a hit song or even much radio play. But they have been the critics’ pet for nearly ten years now, increasing their attendance figures and record sales the same way Spoon has, through steady touring and well-crafted records. Their last one, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, sold 434,000 copies, but not until after their own hard-fought split with a major landed them at Nonesuch Records, a small boutique subsidiary of that same major. The example is well-known to Spoon. Last year they turned their business over to Tony Margherita, a Chicago-based manager with one other client: Wilco. It was another indication of the direction Spoon was heading. And while Margherita will not talk specifically about his hopes for either band—no need to put pressure on the boys—he will say it’s not unrealistic to expect Spoon to double their current sales when their next album comes out in the fall. At 130,000 copies, they’d be well on their way to Wilco.
The members of Spoon, of course, don’t profess to aspire to be anybody but who they are, and they are happy that being the Next Big Thing is somebody else’s problem this time around. "All I really ever wanted," says Daniel, "was to put out records, ones I’d be proud of, and have that be the main thing I was doing with my life." That may not strike you as the musings of a rock star. But whose definition are you using?
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