EVERYBODY LOVES OUR TOWN

L7 with producer Butch Vig at Sound City, during the recording of Bricks Are Heavy, 1991. (Via the official L7 Facebook page) Here’s an outtake from my book, Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, in which Vig discuss the events surrounding the making of the album:

BUTCH VIG (producer) L7 were amazing. The sessions at Sound City were pretty straightforward, and then we went to Smart [Studios] back in Madison for like a month to finish overdubs and mix, and they took over the town. We rented a house a couple blocks in the studio, and it turned into the biggest fuckin’ party palace in Madison. They knew every druggie, junkie, bookie, psycho killer, man on the street. Every sort of scoundrel that Madison had, they knew. It was a parade of weirdos coming and going from the studio. It was pretty wild. To this day I still run into people going, “Man, those girls from L7, they fuckin’ knew how to party!”

After I posted that video of the reunited Last Splash–era Breeders last night, I was reminded of this great 2002 New York Times Magazine story documenting the making of their much-delayed third album, Title TK. The piece is kind of a ’90s alt-rock Hearts of Darkness. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

The session started at the Magic Shop, in SoHo; Kim couldn’t find a drum sound she liked there, so the band decamped to Midtown. They moved into a venerable studio, reputed to have the most extensive collection of vintage recording equipment on the East Coast. One night while Deal was holed up at the mixing board, her bandmates began making trouble in the waiting room. ”Everybody was smoking crack in the lobby,” Kim says. ”I will never be allowed there again.”

The operation moved to Avatar Studio, the former Power Station, where, in an episode now legendary among New York’s assistant engineers, Deal spent an entire day fussing over a “click track”—basically a recording of a metronome that plays in the musicians’ headphones but is removed from the final mix. ”All these technical hoodoo things,” says one engineer, still irked by the memory, ”that no one would ever hear or know—but that she heard in her head.”

Poster for Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr./Antietam/Salem 66 show at CBGB, New York, Sept. 25, 1985

(Source: suicidewatch)

papermag:

Courtney Love Pill Bottle Sculpture

Artists Katie Heffelfinger and Jed Miner created a found art sculpture out of 57 discarded pill bottles prescribed to Courtney Love. The pair of artists, who call themselves “occupytheartworld” found the bottles in a “common area” at a storage facility. Click HERE to see photos of the artwork. 

Blag Dahlia of the Dwarves, on tour in Europe.