Rock is back. Again. Although it may be on the way out. Again. The king is dead. Long live the king. Unless he’s not, in which case the king lives, lets get him. Fashion fortune tellers and style soothsayers clamber over column centimetres to be the first to declare it out, or hot, or now or like, so last week with the regularity of toilet functions. They keep one eye on the horizon to see what’s coming next, and the other on their colleagues to see what they’re up to in case they find whatever is it first. No one wants to miss out predicting the next new thing, or worse still, bagging it then find it’s becomes cool.
It takes patience and will, but uncovering music neglected by magazine covers that present The Bravery as the new Futureheads, who were the new Kaiser Chiefs after Bloc Party became the new Franz Ferdinand, is possible.
News stand success rarely translates into long term artistic wins or real sales victories, and most of the “so hot right now” bands will release follow up albums that will never recapture the initial flurry of excitement that accompanied them. They’ll fade away having spent their advance and met the contractual obligations of their three record deal with a best of and rarities double compilation.
There are bands, though, who will continue to write, record and perform after the corporate knives are drawn and the cold steel of economic rationalism drives home the difficult truth that they’re just not popular enough anymore. In the modern age, the alternative routes available to artists to communicate with their audience outside major labels and glossy magazines are plentiful and relatively easy to access.
In the past three years bands like Wilco, Teenage Fanclub, Gomez and You Am I have been reinvigorated by freedom and opportunities they have created themselves through partnerships with independent labels, promoters and media after the suits declined to renew their contracts. The audience may have shrunk, but there’re still enough people buying records and going to gigs that these artists can make more money than they ever did when they had a label sponsored stylist and penchant for French wine.
“I’m not a millionaire but I’m definitely successful in a music sense and I like being there.” This is Jon Auer from The Posies. Jon and his friend Ken Stringfellow formed the power pop band together in their home town of Seattle in the early ninteties. That’s right, Seattle in the early nineties.
Needless to say, Jon has seen plenty of music industry machinations from the inside, having come from the city that was strip mined of talent to appease the gods of hype all those years ago. “It’s good to be able to make a living out of it, which I do. I haven’t worked a job since I was seventeen. I produce stuff, I record records for other people, that’s a job, but what a job. That’s getting paid to do what you love to do. It’s debatable if that’s even a job. It’s a good place to be and as long as I can still keep making a living at it, I’m happy.”
The Posies lyrical, melodic jangle was beefed up for their breakthrough album Frosting on the Beater released in 1993. This would prove to be the bands commercial, and many believe artistic high water mark. However they soon retreated from the noise of that album and it’s follow up Amazing Disgrace in favour of the gentler sounds of Success released in 1993. Then that was pretty much it. Jon went on to join the Big Star reunion with his hero Alex Chilton while Ken scored a guitar spot on tour with some band called REM. Both men pursued their individual work and managed to release solo projects before reconveing as a duo for an acoustic world tour that led to the release of the live EP In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Plugging in 2001. Now they’re back. Again. A new Posies record, Every Kind of Light, written and recorded as a band under their arm and a world tour in support.
“It’s bizarre for me because the impression I get from people about the Posies is that we broke up a long time ago and we haven’t really been doing much but really the Posies, or Ken and I at least, have been doing stuff since 1999 when we started working together again and playing shows as an acoustic duo. We did a lot of work getting our deluxe box set together and our greatest hits package, all those things a band has when they’re over basically right? In the process of doing that it totally brought to light that we really still enjoyed hanging out with each other and low and behold by a set of very natural circumstances we started working together on a very small level together again and it morphed into what it is now. Very organically. Organically is a term is I like to use to describe it. I say this a lot but it seems like it could have been planned but it actually wasn’t, it just kind of happened and we molded what was happening to suit the Posies.”
Auer excuses himself if he sounds “spacey” during the interview but he’s driving home from his Seattle studio and he “doesn’t want to run over a cop or anything.” It would certainly make for a great interview he could manage it. “Actually you’re right. Hey look, there’s one now, hang on a second.”
The interview is interrupted by the operator asking “Mr Posie” if he would like to be reconnected from his mobile to his home. He says he will continue on the mobile. Fingers crossed.
“I love it she’s like hello, is Jon Posies there? I’m like yeah, I’m Jon Posies. You’ve got to love it. I was like that’s Mr Jon Posies to you.”
So why a Posies album when Jon and Ken are so prolific as solo artists and busy working with other bands?
“The difference now is we’ve decided to do it together. Even old Posies was very much apart. It was pretty much who ever sang it, wrote it. On this record I think it’s because we have so much going on outside of The Posies now that we decided the Posies needed to be what we made of it as a group not as individuals. Does that make sense? Because otherwise, what is the difference between The Posies and what we do? And you know what, there is enough similarity between what we do individually and The Posies already, it’s too much already so we really wanted to make a new set of criteria to experiment with and hopefully inspire us to try different things to what we had done before and just not fall back on things we had already done or already knew but actually try some things that might shake things up creatively and emotionally a bit.”
“I guess we could have come back and written Frosting on the Beater II, and maybe some people would really like that and want that, and maybe it would even be good, but it just seemed that every step of the way, as we get older and and changing we need to do things to keep it fucking interesting or we’re just going to be bored to tears doing the same shit. Literally, after we did that acoustic tour, we did three months of acoustic touring together, I don’t think we wanted to play Flavour of the Month or Solar Sister after that tour for quite some time. I mean we do, and we love those songs but it doesn’t mean we want to write them over and over again.”
Frosting on the Beater II the new album isn’t. The gutsy guitar that helped make that album popular has mostly stayed in mothballs, apart from a couple of tracks that are heavier and carry more weight. Jon and Ken handed over the writing of the music to the whole band, which was recorded in just twelve days. The two friends then retreated to write the lyrics, and found themselves writing some songs with political themes.
“I’m kind of a little over cautious about the political element. For some people because we have three or four songs on the album that could be taken as a political kind of thing they’ve suddenly decided we’ve become The Clash or something. Like a political band with some manifesto. Suddenly we were the Manic Street Preachers, and we were going to free Cuba, I don’t know. I didn’t get it because a lot of songs were hidden in metaphor and were really cleverly done and could be taken not just as political pieces but songs about relationships in general. That being said the time we made the record was a pivotal time for us because we were all just so desperately wanting to get George W. Bush out of office in America, or everyone I know at least. We did everything we could to try and make that happen and obviously we know now it didn’t work out, which is frustrating. It was just where our heads were at so it just came out in the old lyrical department. It was fun to get it to fit into the set of criteria we had for making the record which was to try things we hadn’t tried before. That’s why you get a blues song that’s political. That’s two firsts for the Posies.”
“For me the criteria is if it’s a good song or not. There’s people that don’t approve of the subject matter of gangsta rap, but I love some of it regardless of what it’s talking about just because it’s got a great groove and a great hook and a great melody and I’m not just going to reject it or like on the principal of what the subject matter is.”
If the name Jon Auer isn’t for his Posies or his solo work, check out the credits on Hi Fi Way by You Am I. There’s Auer, listed as mixer alongside producer Lee Ronaldo.
“Tim hired me because he loved Frosting on the Beater so much and they’d seen us play a couple of times. We hit it off right off the bat. We had a great time, we shared a place together while we were doing it. It’s weird because America doesn’t respond to a lot of great guitar pop bands the way that other places do it seems. I mean Sloan for instance, do you know Sloan? Well they’re huge in Canada but they just can’t make it in the States. We do great in Europe and other places and we have a good following in the States but we’re not huge.”
“Then you have a guy like Tim with You Am I with three number one records in Australia and he would come here and play to like sixty people, and still put on a show of course like he’s playing to a million. The coolest thing about playing Meredith (Music Festival, 2000) for me was not just playing it for the Posies, but watching Tim play all these songs and watching five thousand people sing along to every syllable. It gave me great hope and faith in music and people being able to appreciate stuff that has real depth and substance which I think his stuff does. There’s a lot of what I would consider autobiography in his work in the lyrics, and it made me very mad at America again at that point. It was almost too good for America to appreciate or something, that’s how I viewed it. It wasn’t dumbed down quite enough. It still had the pop hooks and the potential and wot not, but it was till just a little to personal for it to go totally over the top.”
Rumours are circulating about The Posies making it to Australia later this year, and that they may fall into a festival somewhere, but that’s just conjecture Jon isn’t prepared to jinx at this point.
Next time your flicking through the racks to find something new by the “so hot right nows,” stop, go to the Ps and get something that you’ll still be playing in a years time. It may not be cool tomorrow, or next week, or even next year, but the time will come when everyone will be listening to it.
