Bluedot Volume1

MERCURY REV
M
usic, rum, drugs, spirituality and isolation.
Sounds like quite a cocktail, doesn’t it?
MERCURY REV guitarist Sean Thomas
Mackowiak served himself a large one
every year from 2009 to 2014, by spending
months on end in Guatemala while his band were on
a self-imposed break. The 49-year-old, whose 100mph
personality led to him being nicknamed Grasshopper as
a child, sums it up with one word: “Craziness.”
“It’s kind of like the Wild West,” he continues down
the phone from his home in Kingston, upstate New York.
“There’s lots of drugs and weird stuff going on, Mayans
doing ayahuasca ceremonies, ecstasy in the cities. I
dabbled here and there.”
The rum and spirituality came as a package.
Grasshopper got involved with a Mayan ritual
celebrating the legendary Maximón, who, the story
goes, travelled to Guatemala and became a god prior
to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and Christianity in
1492. “Maximón watches over people with problems,”
Grasshopper explains. “The people celebrate with
effigies of him in a suit, hat and tie. You buy him cigars
and pour rum down his throat. I went to ceremonies with
shamans, too.”
Away from drugs and effigies, he found time to explore.
The volcanic Lake Atitlán – which he excitedly notes was
praised by Aldous Huxley in his 1934 travel book Beyond
The Mexique Bay – was a favourite spot. “It’s a really
simple life, a place you can be left alone. That tied in with
me recharging.”
The recharging was necessary. Grasshopper and
singer Jonathan Donahue began making music together
in Buffalo, New York in the late-80s, and their first proper
gigs as Mercury Rev included an appearance at the 1991
Reading Festival alongside the ascendant Nirvana, and
a support slot at Yale University with Bob Dylan, who
watched in a hoodie from the side of the stage.
Their odd trajectory continued as they quickly became
submerged in a toxic world of infighting, chaos and drugs.
“Our relationship gets
stronger the more we
go through: with all these
battle scars you feel you’re
gonna make it together”
Legend has it that either original vocalist Dave Baker or
Donahue once tried to gouge Grasshopper’s eye out with
a spoon. The UK press lapped them up just as much as
it did Nirvana, Mudhoney or Dinosaur Jr., and a 1991
interview in Melody Maker revealed how Grasshopper’s
mother had said one of their gigs was so good it “induced
orgasm”. Years later, Frances Bean Cobain would admit
she was “more into” Mercury Rev than her late father’s
band.
After 1993’s wild second album Boces – complete
with a children’s choir, trippy field recordings and jazz
– irreconcilable slanging matches forced Baker out and
prompted a shift towards a mellower, rootsier sound.
Even so, the mid-90s saw Grasshopper resort to visiting a
Spanish monastery in search of his sanity, while Donahue
suffered a heroin-induced breakdown.
Their fourth album, Deserter’s Songs, belatedly brought
mainstream success in 1998, resulting in 10 exhausting
years spent working constantly, making the most of
newfound stability. But, once they’d finished touring
2008’s Snowflake Midnight, they resolved to take time
off. “We needed a breather to reconnect and reignite the
engines,” says Grasshopper.
He and Donahue are best friends who – if you believe
a couple of 90s interviews with Melody Maker and
NME – met as kids at summer camp for delinquents
when Grasshopper was throwing dead squirrels and
rats into a lawnmower. They live 90 miles north of
New York in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains, in a
town where lost bears are often seen rifling through
rubbish bins. They hung out a lot while on their break,
playing the odd festival and tentatively working on new
music, but personal circumstances turned relaxation into
more turbulence.
“My mother had Alzheimer’s disease, so I was taking
care of her,” Grasshopper says in his slow drawl. “Then,
in 2011, Hurricane Irene wiped out Jonathan’s house and
washed everything away, so we lost a lot of music. It was
a big kick in the stomach.”
For a band that has always run on the telepathic energy
between its two main creative powers, this represented a
real stumbling block. Both were approaching 50, could
they still hack it?
“Our relationship gets stronger the more we go through;
with all these battle scars you feel you’re gonna make it
together. You have that bond,” Grasshopper answers.
Still, they took until 2013 to start work on The Light
In You in their basement studio. Released last September,
it’s their first album without long-time producer Dave
Fridmann and mashes together earthy soundscapes with
rock ‘n’ roll, boogie and soul. Grasshopper reckons this
shouldn’t surprise people, given they released a version
of Sly And The Family Stone’s If You Want Me To Stay as
far back as 1992.
Donahue and Grasshopper’s ingrained communication
methods don’t allow for giving each other advice (“we’ve
never done that”), so both men dumped their baggage
into the record. It charts the story of a character who’s
devastated at the outset, but who is saved by the
restorative power of music by the end.
The plaintive Amelie references Donahue’s addiction
(“I’ll break the habit… It’s my last score”), You’ve Gone
With So Little For So Long is dark and symphonic and the
giant brushstrokes of Central Park East paint a vivid picture
of isolation. You can almost feel the rain and wind gusting
through Autumn’s In The Air, which acts as a bridge to
the relatively bonkers grooviness of Are You Ready? and
Rainy Day Record. Both feel outlandishly upbeat and the
latter finds the usually maudlin Donahue rapping about
listening to his favourite albums on vinyl (“Talk Talk, Felt,
Romeo Void/Give me The Fall ‘I’m totally wired’”).
Grasshopper remembers the studio time as almost
wordless: “Neil Young used to say this a lot, but it felt
like the songs were being transmitted to us and we were
just playing them. We didn’t need discussion.” While
there wasn’t much conversation, there was rediscovery,
of both resilience and the transportive power of Mercury
Rev’s sound. Grasshopper compares it to a drug, and has
research to back him up: “I was reading about a study
of musicians’ brains that said, while they were playing,
scans of their brains looked very much like they were in a
dream state like drugs would induce.”
Mercury Rev have been chasing this feeling for 30
years; indeed, they believe it’s the reason they exist at
all. The toll of pursuing it ultimately led to a seven-year
break, but still they carry on. “Jonathan and I are both
on a search for meaning, asking, ‘What are we gonna
make of our time on earth?’,” Grasshopper continues.
Suddenly, birdsong is audible in the background, as if to
chime deliberately with his mysticism. “It’s about visceral
energy and electricity. We try to get people to that place
we go when we make music, to lose themselves.”
Before he hangs up, Grasshopper admits he’s unsure
how they’ve made it this far. “It’s weird, you blink your
eyes and you’re 18, you blink them again and you’re 49.
We’re stuck in a space-time continuum.”
Somehow, Mercury Rev continue
mercuryrev.com
WRITTEN BY BEN HOMEWOOD
ORBIT STAGE
SUNDAY
26 | OBSERVE