My man Simon hipped me to a new book, Tom Maxwell’s A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene 1989-1999. This isn’t a review of that book, which I rushed out to get (rather, I stayed in and got the Kindle version—a physical copy would have taken forever to get where I’m at) and then devoured it in a day—more like half a day. Well, that’s my review, I guess! Couldn’t put it down.
Maxwell was in the Squirrel Nut Zippers (which you may know) and before that a band called What Peggy Wants (which you may not). He’s also in the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and that’s no slight hall of fame to be in. Suffice to say, it was a tight knit intimate scene and he was in the warp and woof of it.
As coincidence would have it, MergeFest35 just wrapped up last Sunday. MergeFest is when Chapel Hill’s Merge Records (well, they’re actually in Durham now) celebrates their roster with a bunch of live shows over a long weekend and it happens every five years. Simon and I and Leila Easa went to the first MergeFest together, MergeFest5 (because the label had been around for five years and that was a good reason to celebrate). Everybody rocking out at the Cat’s Cradle—a kind of epitome to me.
We weren’t really part of the Chapel Hill scene. We were all Chapel Hill scene adjacent. That wasn’t only because we lived in Durham. The “scene” encompassed rings ranging out (like when you throw the pebble in the pond) and a couple of other cities and smaller towns or areas around the Chapel Hill epicenter from which it rippled counted as a part of it. (It = The Scene.)
We weren’t a part of it but rather adjacent to it because we were Duke students who couldn’t be going out to every single show every night (though I dare say I saw as many as possible or even probable while also doing other things), and because we weren’t from around there originally (or we were there like students from somewhere else are there), and because the real scenesters and insiders and musicians were mainly 5 to 10 (or more) years older than us.
But being Chapel Hill scene adjacent is one of the best cool things I ever lucked into.
My experience of Chapel Hill music before getting to college was a tape of Superchunk’s No Pocky For Kitty. I wasn’t even going to apply to anywhere out of state. Nobody ever went out of state. My high school guidance counsellor (who was 100 years old if she was a day and had also been there when my parents were students) could think as far as the University of Alabama and no farther. I’d rather have gone to Auburn. (Even though I’m a Crimson Tide fan. Roll Tide!) A fellow named Scotty a couple of years older than me from my school went to Auburn and I visited him there my senior year. He was on the year book staff—I was our yearbook editor, as he had been before me—and he had a bunch of sample college year books. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill yearbook looked pretty cool.
But like I said, I wasn’t going to apply out of state. I was in a churlish mood. My mom reminded me that I had once wanted to apply to somewhere like the schools we had seen when we travelled through Boston on a family vacation and I was at least going to look at one out of state school. So I picked Chapel Hill. We signed up for a campus visit and drove to Chapel Hill, which was about a nine hour drive.
So we drove there and at the start of the campus visit in a boring auditorium the guy leading the thing basically said they weren’t looking for out of state students. (He wasn’t a college kid, he was an adult—a professor, maybe? I guess the public university systems hadn’t fallen on such hard times yet that they were desperate for out of state tuition, to say nothing of gouging international students at loan shark-worthy rates.) It was Very Lame and confirmed my own last-year-of-a-long-slog sense of the futility of giving a hoot and other Very Lame things I was feeling, which wasn’t particularly characteristic of my vibe, usually, but I guess I was being a teenager.
Anyway, my mom (thank you mom xoxo) said, “Well, Duke University is not far away. Why don’t we go there?” I’m sure I grumbled but off we went no more than 15 minutes down the highway and got to Durham and the college kid leading the campus tour as he walked us around (no stuffy auditorium) was an English major from Huntsville, Alabama (which is close to where I lived) and it was a gorgeous day and everybody was out on the lawn and reading and talking and playing frisbee and it’s a pretty impressive campus, so that was the one out of state school I decided to apply to, which I did, and lo and behold I got in.
That’s where I went. I was there from Fall 1992 to Summer 1996 and then after graduating I stayed on in Durham working at the graduate admissions office as a temp who then got his contract extended (I don’t think there was really a literal contract, but I got to keep working there basically for as long as I wanted). I opened envelopes and filed things. It was a good group of people in the office, who had all mostly worked there for a long time. They were middle-aged women or older and I was kind of a mascot/supplement son. I left Durham for good on June 3, 1997 to drive to grad school, with a filled-up truck borrowed from my uncle and pulling a U-Haul trailer. The reason I remember the date is because it was the day Wu-Tang Forever was released and I bought it on vinyl that morning before I left for the trip, and if you bought it the day it came out, you got a “gold” Wu-Tang coin.
Shows at the Cat’s Cradle, shows at The Coffeehouse, shows at other scattered places. Records at Poindexter’s practically just down the street and every so often at School Kids. Seeing the bands, reading about the bands in The Independent, writing about the bands in R & R and Stay Free!. A bunch of us were DJs at WXDU. There were some excellent college stations in the area. I had shows on the weekend from 12 midnight to 2 AM one semester and from 2 AM to 5 AM for a few semesters and once did a summer jazz show. One of my shows was called The Hamburger Pimp Show. Another one was Fear of a Squirrel Planet. I can’t remember what I stupidly named the rest of them. The station was in an old two story house not far from my apartment and it was totally chock full of records old and new.
It all just seemed so normal because it was all just so around, but in retrospect it was absolutely special but then again it even felt absolutely special at the time.
Throw me a cord and plug it in / Get the Cradle rocking . . .
The hair in the hole in my head / Too bad the scene is dead . . .
One time I was home for Christmas vacation and Geezer Lake was down playing in Huntsville. They were a bit more far out than the average Triangle band, tape effects and re-verbed horns and oddball sound stuff amidst the sludgy rock. I went with three of my high school friends. We were the only people there, not counting the people working the bar or sitting at the bar in spite of there being a band. Geezer Lake went ahead and rocked out while the four of us just stood in front of them thrashing and swaying and then they chit-chatted with us after the show.
The first Archers of Loaf single had unique-in-each-case hand crayoned sleeves. Inside was an issue of Stay Free!, the Chapel Hill music zine.
I wrote a few things for Stay Free! The Wikipedia entry for the zine says it was based in Brooklyn. Nope, not at first and not for a long time it wasn’t. It was Chapel Hill all the way. But the entry is at least right that it had a little Adbusters and Baffler about it. It was edited by Carrie McLaren, who worked in some capacity for Matador. They were all WXYC people there, I think. They were older and hipper than me. I wrote for three issues, short reviews of Spent and an Archers ep and the Gravediggaz and a couple of other short ones and a fairly long review of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and in the “Children’s Issue” (which I have but don’t have here so can’t show you—it had the kid from the cover of The Frogs’ It’s Only Right and Natural on the front) I had a long essay printed called “Blueberries, Mice, and Wet Dreams,” which was about Blueberries for Sal, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t.
Then there was R & R. I’m really quite proud of it in retrospect (a writer first, later a co-editor). The print run was 15,000 copies a week and they were distributed not just on campus but elsewhere as well. (More on this mag down the line.)
We even had a classmate, Jeremy Steckler, who started a record label, The Now Sound.
People’s hearts seemed in the right place, more or less. There used to be a lot of brouhaha about selling out and all that nonsense, but then again it wasn’t really nonsense, because it was also about ownership and freedom and fun and trying things out and it was usually sloppy and melodic, it wasn’t very mopey all things considered, and now that everyone is born already bought and sold and branded, it seems as innocent and pure as a clean little lamb, and you had a better chance of surviving and thriving if you stayed independent than you did if you got swallowed up. I still believe in most of that, practically all of it, accounting of course for the intervening three decades and all the arrows of time that pierce the soul, and having both stayed independent in my own furtive ways and also having been totally willingly swallowed up inside a big machine. (I’m fairly sick of the machine. The machine makes us sick.)
You can’t go home again but you could probably go back to Chapel Hill. But surely it couldn’t be the same. Why would it be? Why should it be? “What did you expect?”
You know what it mostly makes me think of, listening to this music, looking at these things, reading Maxwell’s book? It makes me think of the most vibrant sustained creative happy time of my life; of a bunch of people I haven’t seen in years; and of a small handful of people who I continue to see and who I happen to adore very much.
As Superchunk later put it, in a much different landscape, What A Time To Be Alive.
What a time indeed. I’m grateful to the people who made the scene and cherish my memories of my temporary adjacency.
—Andrew DuBois
