Not to sound like a dinosaur but the IG’s really did do everything by hand back in the late 80’s. I kept most of our notebooks and paperwork in file folders and boxes that I’ve been moving from one living space to the next ever since. We were so proud of every little goal we reached, so I hung onto the proof of our hard work and the system we had created as we moved through the early days of our career. Releasing a single and an EP had given us something to hang our work on, music to spread around and the vehicles to help us establish and achieve goals. When I go back through all these files and boxes of notebooks, I can see that, just as it is now, touring was the big priority. Touring helped our recordings mean more and the music we left in our wake helped the touring mean more. They were inextricably linked, so we collected club names and gig contacts from every source we could find. There were coveted lists of clubs and the name of the bookers floating around town, and we often got new resources from other musicians passing through or friends who had played in places we hadn’t gone yet. A lot depended on curiosity and the exchange of information and ideas, and on us going to other shows to meet new musicians and see how they did their thing. We just worked through our list and methodically mailed out our music and tried to conquer the world of gigging one club at a time.
As our touring base expanded, we were also writing more and focusing on original music. So in 1987, we recorded and released our first full-length album, called Strange Fire. When I look back at my little calendar book, I see that we met with the Athens producer and engineer John Keane in the spring, proceeded to record and then had the record out by the fall. We had no sense of the “correct” way to “set a record up” for release - a long lead-time for press, etc. We were flying by the seat of our pants and eager to get the music out there. So we turned it around as fast as possible and just started mailing it out to everyone we could –radio stations, clubs, promoters, music writers, musicians and friends. It was an exciting time for us and we celebrated the release of Strange Fire at Little Five Points Pub, the bar where we cut our teeth, and for me, the most significant gig of our career, because it ushered in most of our growth and kept us tightly bound to our community. The recording of Strange Fire established our relationship with John Keane, who became a fixture in our lives for quite some time and did many recordings for us, including our work with R.E.M. I’ll never forget the way it felt to work on Strange Fire, I finally had the sense that we were really doing this music thing and not just faking it. This record represented a real growth for us, and even though the songs on Strange Fire feel young to me now, at the time, it was a transition to a new level of maturity- moving from EP to LP.
When it came to album cover artwork and promo photos, I had a bit of a learning curve to get through. I had kind of botched the EP cover when I didn’t noticed the lines from the cut and paste job showing through until it was too late, they were already printed and we couldn’t rationalize printing a whole new run of record covers. So for Strange Fire, I really wanted to get it right and have a good LP cover and good press photos to send out. We had a photographer friend, Kris Anderson who did cool black and white work that was both mystical and documentarian in style. We enlisted her help for the record cover and publicity shots. There was an African Methodist Episcopal Church near my neighborhood where I grew up, I had always loved the building and the setting because it felt timeless, and this particular denomination reflected some of the struggles of spirituality versus the “institution” of religion. As a religion major in college, my songwriting took on certain metaphorical language that grew out of studying peoples and their faiths, I was obsessed with religion actually, so for me, it was an image that reflected this time. Now it feels pretty heavy handed, but those were the pitfalls of youth and ultimately I feel like our earnestness served us well, if not always artistically, it helped us have the energy and convictions to persevere. Even with its youthful drama, I still love this cover and the photos Kris took that year, I can look at the images and all the strong feelings of that period of time come to the surface.
For me, Strange Fire was the record and the experience that got us to where we are now. I think it really helped us create a model for how we work, what we think is important, and how to build a community and a fan base. It was the blueprint for us, and it led to good things. We sold over 10,000 albums through a combination of indie distribution, consignment, and show sales; we had a really successful radio campaign; and managed to extend our touring up to Maine, across to Texas and diagonally to the Midwest. These were the lines we followed and tried to build on.
We worked this record hard, figured out how to promote it ourselves, split up the duties and diligently took to the phones, fax machines and the U.S Mail. College Radio was huge at the time and a real maverick in the industry, totally challenging convention and opening the doors for indie musicians of all stripes. It was a unique and fertile time in college radio that fostered interest in all sorts of music that was off the beaten path, but it didn’t last long; in the ensuing years, college radio was over-exploited by the major labels and often became just another cog in the wheel of the corporate music machine. We got lucky though and hit it at a moment of true diversity and non-commercialism, and the radio play we received had a thorough impact on our early indie days.
We gathered lists of stations from various publications. We collected names from friends at other colleges, phone books, music magazines, whatever we could find. Our main workhorse was the College Music Journal or CMJ-it was like the bible for me. I read it religiously and used it for everything we did. We made our little lists and charts, and then called the stations and asked them to report if they had received the record, if they were playing it, and how many spins. The biggest deal was to get on the playlists that actually appeared in print in the CMJ, a total thrill for me whenever it happened, somehow it felt more legitimate to see the tracking lists in something besides our own handwriting…
We used this “tracking” information to convince record stores to carry the record and to prove to clubs we were worth the risk. And it worked the other way around too. So if we got a gig in a city, we always used the gig as something to build on. We’d go after press in the local arts paper, radio play on the indie station, and try to get stocked at the local record store. That was pretty much the formula. Whatever you got first, you built on it. So sometimes press or radio led to a gig or the gig led to press or radio. The “constant” in the formula was that you really needed all three ingredients to happen in order to be successful in that town, and so we took one town at a time and worked towards that equation. We started where we knew people, so North Carolina, where my sister lived, or New Orleans where Emily had gone to Tulane, everything was all about family and community and the contacts they shared with us, and that has never changed, even to this day!
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