Flashback: Waxing Poetics - The Oral History (Part 2 of 2)
Flashback: Waxing Poetics - The Oral History (Part 2 of 2)
[This post originally appeared on News, Reviews & Interviews (R.I.P.) on December 27, 2012.]
I wouldn’t dare offend my numerous friends in the Hampton Roads musicians community by suggesting that any one band was or is more popular than another, but I at least feel comfortable saying that Waxing Poetics were the first local band that ever captured my attention. It helped immeasurably, of course, that they were also the first local band I ever heard played on the radio, which was a relatively unheard-of phenomenon back in the day, but it was mind-blowing to me that these were guys who lived in the area and, yes, actually had day jobs in the area once in awhile!
If you frequent this site with any regularity, then you probably know how this story goes: I pitched the idea of doing a piece on the Dec. 30th Poetics’ reunion show – with Left Wing Fascists opening up, no less! – to Pulse Magazine, and my editor gave me the go-ahead. It seemed like it might be fun to travel the oral-history route, so I contacted all of the former members of the band that I could find, not to mention one of the band’s former producers (thank you, Peter Holsapple, for helping me get on the phone with Mike Mills), and the results were outstanding. They were also downright epic, so there was never any way it was all going to fit in Pulse.
Here’s the piece as it appeared in Pulse. It’s pretty great, if I do say so myself. But if you loved the Poetics as much as I did, then I think you’ll find this extended version even better…and if you missed part one, no worries, just click here to read it, and then come back to read the rest!
Changing Things Up for Manakin Moon
David Middleton: If you listen to Hermitage, it’s very bright, clean, crisp, and upbeat. Paul describes it as “caffeinated,” which I think is a great way of describing it. We were drinking a lot of coffee, so it’s definitely caffeinated! But Manakin Moon is much heavier, much harder, much darker. I listened to it again recently to prepare for this reunion show, and I found myself at the end taking the headphones off and going, “Wow, that’s a really strong, solid, hard rock album.” I guess that makes sense. We kind of come from hard rock. I mean ,the first album I ever bought with my own money was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. The first 45 I ever bought was “Black Dog,” by Led Zeppelin. So hard rock is definitely in our DNA. And we definitely had a producer for that album (Steve Gronback) that really could get that sound. He could really get those muscular guitar sounds. So we really went for it. And, yes, it turned out to be a darker, sort of harder affair. But in a good way, I guess.
By the time we released Hermitage, I had already written songs like “Baby Jane” and “Where Your Name Is” and things like that. In fact, people were asking if “Baby Jane” was going to be on the Hermitage album. Before it was even released, our sound had kind of grown a little bit already. And then another thing that also happened was, you go into the studio with one sound in your head and you kind of come out with another sound in your head, because you come out as a better player, so you’re hearing things differently. So after we recorded Hermitage, our live shows became a little more muscular, with the grittier guitar sounds, and maybe the songs got a little bit heavier and darker. It was definitely gradual, but it had a lot to do with just the experiences that you go through as a band.
Sean Hennessy: I think there was a difference where we were songwriting-wise, but there’s a correlation, I think, with the sound that we wanted and who we were working with. I mean, we were working with jangly with Mitch and Mike, and Steve had a different sound. And that was a conscious decision. We wanted a little more raunch in there and a little less jangle.
Paul Johnson: I like the songs on Manakin Moon a lot. I like my guitar playing on Manakin Moon. That’s probably my favorite, the sounds I was getting at the time. It’s more like the stuff I’m doing now. On the first record, David wrote a lot of the parts, and they were very jangly and not in the vein of where my roots come from. There were creative things that David did on guitar that I wouldn’t have thought to do, and it made me look at things from sort of a different perspective. The second record is more in the vein of what comes natural to me. As is the third, but I like the songwriting on Manakin Moon. I like David’s lyrics, I like the overall sound of the second record probably the best. But David might tell you something different. I think he’s partial to the third. Some might like the first. Maybe it depends on what mood I’m in. I don’t know.
David Middleton: Originally Manakin Moon was going to be produced by Tim Butler, who is the bass player for the Psychedelic Furs. He had seen us at the Bottom Line in Manhattan, and…it was one of our worst gigs ever. But he loved us. And he invited us to the Ritz to see Husker Du with him the next night, and we hung out with him, and then we went over to his place and talked all night, and he wanted to helm the second album.
Paul Johnson: He trapped Dave and Billy at his house. His wife wouldn’t let ‘em leave! And he kept going on and on…I think they were doing blow or something, the Butlers, and they were just non-stop, on and on. And every time they’d take, like, two sips out of their beers, they’d give ‘em a fresh one. Basically, they told me they were pinned at their house. Y’know, I’m sure Tim’s a nice guy, and he was being sincere, but he was wasted. I don’t even know if he remembers that! And we’d played with the Furs, and we’d seen ‘em in concert, but I didn’t recognize him at first. They told me later who he was, but I was just, like, “Wow, who’s this guy? He’s wasted!”
David Middleton: Unfortunately, our paths weren’t able to cross again, and it wasn’t due to anything between us. It was just that, at the time we needed to record Manakin Moon, Tim was scheduled to tour Europe, and there was no way we could figure that out. So unfortunately that fell through.
Sean Hennessy: I didn’t even realize that Tim was considering producing that album, so this is news to me! I mean, hey, it certainly may have happened, but I don’t remember that being a conversation. But if he had, it would’ve certainly changed the sound. It sure would’ve changed the bass sound. He was most definitely an influence on my playing early on. In the beginning, in the days when we did three sets of material and there were cover songs in there, there were certainly a few Psychedelic Furs songs in the mix at my request. So I think it would’ve been awesome with Tim. Not that I didn’t enjoy working with Steve Gronback or that he didn’t do some great work.
David Middleton: Steve Gronback had recently produced an album by the Rain Parade called Crashing Dream, which you might remember, and we – Carol and I especially – were definitely fans of that band. They had fantastic guitarists and an amazing sound. So that was the connection that Carol developed. I’m not exactly sure how she developed it, but it was definitely a smart choice, because he really knew how to get those really big, crisp and clean yet dirty and gritty and muscular guitar sounds. So he was definitely a good choice. We recorded at his studio, which is in the basement of a big log cabin. A solar-powered log cabin out in the woods in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina. It was really lovely.
Bill Shearin: As always, recording is an ongoing experience, and even though I’ve got fond memories of just about every situation we were in, Manakin Moon was pretty fun. Yeah, we recorded it in a basement studio in the middle of Carolina in the winter, but it was amazing how that came together. The songs really showed our growth. I mean, I’d loved all our songs as a band up to that point, but you get more used to the recording process, and we’d been together longer and…well, we were just having a blast.
David Middleton: As far as the cover of “Needles in the Camel’s Eye,” Paul, Sean, and I were all big Eno fans. Especially Paul and Sean. They really knew more Eno stuff than I did. And one day, Paul lent me the album Here Come the Warm Jets, and I was just completely…I mean, that’s one of those albums that you just can’t help but be completely blown away when you first hear it. And, yeah, I was just very taken with that song. It just had such a great soaring melody. Originally, however, the idea was that we were going to cover the song “Here Come the Warm Jets,” which is a stranger and much weirder song. But that was originally the plan. But then I latched onto “Needles in the Camel’s Eye,” and I was just, like, “You know what? This song just really is aching to be covered.” And that was just how it came about.
Sean Hennessy: Yeah, I love all that stuff. Y’know, before Eno went to his total ambient stuff. I like some of the music he made and the songs that he wrote, so I’m glad we covered that.
David Middleton: I like it when people are freaked out by (hearing the original and realizing it’s a cover). I remember seeing bands do covers, and I didn’t know that they were covers, and then hearing the original version. It really blows your mind. Now, I didn’t want to do it like the original, because you can’t really touch that. I wanted to do it radically differently. I didn’t want to copy it note for note or anything like that, because it’s such a unique record. It’s almost basement-demo sounding, and I didn’t want to touch that at all. I know that many people have covered that song since and done it more faithfully, but I didn’t want to go in that direction at all.
When Manakin Moon came out, a lot of people thought it was a Roxy Music song. Because it’s credited to Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, I think a lot of people assumed that, because they were both in Roxy Music, it was a Roxy Music song, so many of the reviews said, “They do a great cover of Roxy Music’s ‘Needles in the Camel’s Eye’!”
Paul Johnson: Steve was a great producer, and he’s really good with tone as well. The tone on Manakin Moon is …well, it’s just a well-produced record. And I was pleased with the way he got the overall sound to be, as well as my guitar sound. I don’t apologize for any of that. I never go back to the records I’ve made and go, “Oh, I should’ve done this better,” or, “It would’ve been good if we’d done that.” It’s the record we made then, and it is what it is. It’s what we were doing then, and it captured what we were doing then. So, yeah, Steve did a good job.
We did a demo with him later, though, that I wasn’t that happy with, that I think was very overproduced. We did that for Warner Brothers, and…I don’t think anybody was happy with that. I think Steve saw big numbers, maybe, with Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers came to see us play in Baltimore and, like, partied with us afterwards. We were drinking Jack Daniels and having a good time. And then we went into the studio and cut this extremely slick demo, and I was, like, “This doesn’t even sound like us!” And they listened to it, the guys from Warner Brothers, and they were, like, “This isn’t really the band that we were expecting.” I think they wanted the more raw energy that we got at the show in Baltimore. I’m not blaming Steve or anything. He did great on the second record, that’s for sure. I think sometimes when people see “major label,” they think people want a big, polished sound, but I don’t think that’s what they were looking for.
David Middleton: This probably wouldn’t affect bands nowadays, because I hear groups like Bon Iver or whatever, and their records are very weird and they win Grammys and get played on the radio, but back then we were in this sort of netherworld where our music was a little too weird for commercial for rock and pop radio, and it was not really weird enough for college radio. At the time, college radio was mostly, like, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers…you know, much more out-there stuff. So in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when we were really trying to get our records heard, we ended up in this little netherworld. Fortunately for us, I guess we were able to make records that sounded good between the Doors and Journey or whatever. So a song like “Baby Jane,” I’ve heard it on FM-99, and I’ve heard them follow it up with “Love Me Two Times” by the Doors. And I was, like, “Okay, all right, that’s fine with me!” So, yeah, whether we were fortunate enough or smart enough or talented enough, I guess, we made records that you could put in there on commercial album-rock radio.
Bill Shearin: I did enjoy the first time I heard “Baby Jane.” It was an early summer afternoon in ’88, and I remember that I’d fallen asleep to the radio, and darned if I didn’t hear that song as I started to drift back awake. I was, like, “Now that is pretty darned cool…”
Sean Says Goodbye, Jeff Says Hello
Sean Hennessy: A combination of things led to my departure from the Poetics. I had tried to go to school earlier on, but I couldn’t. My student loans, I didn’t qualify as an independent student until I was 25. So it was that. And we’d come back from a tour that wasn’t a great tour. We opened for Killing Joke, and that, uh, kind of wasn’t a good combination.
Paul Johnson: I remember that the lead singer of Killing Joke stood behind the stage right before he was supposed to go on and down a whole bottle of some kind of liquor, a little pint of something, and that was how he got into the persona of what he did. I was, like, “Whoa, okay…” He stood there by himself, sort of hidden, and did this. But I saw him, because I was back there.
Sean Hennessy: So there was a little frustration. But it was just time. It was time to go. I saw what happened to a lot of musicians, where, y’know, you have a certain amount of success, and I think that’s great, but I didn’t really want to end up working in a music store or giving guitar lessons or something. And I had been working as a photographer as well, and that was starting to fill my creative needs. I worked for On Stage Magazine as their staff photographer, and I worked for a commercial photographer in town as his assistant, and I really wanted to go and study. So I took off and went to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Parsons School of Design in Paris and studied photography and film. And that’s what I’m doing these days.
Jeff Bailey: I’m the new guy. I joined the band in ’89, when they already had two of their albums out and had been together for five or six years. The first time I saw them was at the Kings Head Inn show to promote the release of the first album. I was in a band called the Boweevils, which I joined in ’86, and…I guess I was behind the time, because everyone in Tidewater knew about ‘em when Carol Taylor invited the Boweevils and a whole bunch of other musicians in the area to the Kings Head Inn for the album release party. They broadcast it on FM99. I still have a cassette tape of it somewhere. Then Carol actually got the Boweevils traveling around with the Poetics. We used to travel mostly in-state, but we did a couple of out-of-state gigs where we would open up for them. And then I guess it was the summer of ’88 when the Boweevils broke up, and I moved up to Richmond because I was working for B. Dalton Booksellers, and they said, “Hey, we’ll make you a manager and move you to a store in Regency Mall,” so I said, “Sure!”
And I moved up there, but about eight or nine months later, right about when I was getting tired of standing around in a bookstore pretending I was a manager, Dave Middleton called me one night and said they’d just gotten back from a Midwest tour and were thinking about making a change. This was the tour where they were supporting Manakin Moon. So he called me up in April of ’89 and said, “If we were to make a change, would you want to play bass?” And I said, “Well, heck, yeah!” I mean, I was already 29 years old, so I figured it’d probably be the last time I’d be willing to jump into a situation like that and travel around. Plus, y’know, they were already putting out CDs and traveling the country, and that’s what I wanted to do. So from June 1 of ’89… I have a good memory for this, because I happen to have a cassette tape that says “June 1, 1989” on it that was my first rehearsal with the Poetics So from June 1 of ’89 to December 2 of ’91, which was our last show at the Boathouse, I was with the band. We did an official last show in October, I think it was, but then there was some benefit thing that they wanted us to play at the Boathouse, which we did. So, yeah, for two and a half years, I was the bass player for the band, and then I’ve played for some reunion shows.
Sean Hennessy: I’ve never played a reunion show. Because when Jeff took over…I mean, he’s the bass player now.
Jeff Bailey: I saw Sean in September ’89, when I played my first Boathouse show. We did about eight of those while I was with the band, and they did a lot more before I was there, but my first-ever in-town show was at the Boathouse, and Sean was there. Afterwards, maybe it was the next day, I saw him out somewhere, and he told me I did a really good job and congratulated me. And that was the last time I laid eyes on him.
Sean Hennessy: I didn’t…and I think at the beginning I can say that we didn’t…expect anything from the Poetics. It all just kind of happened very organically. And I was amazed every time we played that people came out and were there and knew our songs. And it was fun. I’m certainly not bitter, and I didn’t expect to be a rock star. That wasn’t my goal. And I don’t think it was the goal of anybody in the band. We just liked playing music, and we were having fun doing it.
Jeff Bailey: When I took over for Sean, it was kind of a challenge to…not so much to learn the songs, but to get the feel of them, if you know what I mean. Like, I remember “Where Your Name Is” having a very distinct sound and me not knowing exactly how to reproduce it. For one thing, some of the mix on Manakin Moon, the bass is so mixed in there that I couldn’t really tell what Sean was doing, and I kind of came up with my own thing. And then I remember Paul stopping the song and saying, “Uh, I kind of like what Sean did during the song. He just did this.” And I went, “Oh, yeah, that sounds a lot better,” because I was trying to do something else.
That was just a matter of me not being able to hear exactly what the bass was doing on the record. On most of ‘em, like “Baby Jane,” you can hear it really well. But on that particular song, I couldn’t exactly tell what Sean was doing. I think more of it was just trying to get the right feel. Because, y’know, I came from more of a…I guess if you ever heard the Boweevils, we were sort of a cross between this Squeeze-type stuff, pop music, and then a lot of sort of Motown-ish stuff. A lot of my early bass playing was me trying to reproduce all of those Motown records, that bouncy bass, which is a little different. Plus, Sean played with a pick. Sometimes when you play with a pick your style is completely different. I think on one or two songs during the reunion show I’ll have a pick in my hand, and it’ll be very foreign to me, because I hardly ever play with a pick. But it just sounds like that’s the way it should be. Like, the song “Hermitage,” I wouldn’t play it with my fingers. I have to play it with a pick, because it sounds like that on the record, and it’s a great sound.
What’s funny, though, is that when I did start reproducing some of those same things in exactly the same way that Sean did them, the guys were going, “Wow!” It was like they were hearing them for the first time. Maybe it’s just because it was off someone else’s hand. Maybe it was because I was playing with my fingers. There are a few little accents you can do with your fingers that you can’t really do with a pick. A pick makes everything sound the same. And there are certain cases where I might pop a string here or there, or if I’m just doing a series of eighth notes, I might put a slightly different accent on certain ones. I don’t know, but they just jumped out of their skin one time when we were playing something simple. I think it was “Beauty and the Beatitudes.” I played it note for note the way Sean played it, but at the end, they were, like, “Oh, my God, that sounded great! That was so much better than the record!” And I was, like, “Really? I didn’t do anything!”
During the first few gigs, though, I did get…like, we were playing the Bayou in Washington for maybe the fourth or fifth gig I did with them, and people were yelling, “Where’s Sean? Where’s Sean?” And I was kind of looking at everybody and shrugging my shoulders, but I was trying not to get embarrassed, because I figured I’d get that. But they kept saying, “Where’s Sean? Why isn’t he up there?” Finally, Paul came up to the microphone and said, “You know, I don’t know where he is…but I invited him!” And it was at that time that I guess I knew I’d replaced him for good and that they were okay with it. And the whole time I was with the band was a lot of fun.
A Very Strange Bed Time Story
David Middleton: When we made Bed Time Story, a lot of records that were coming out that sounded very processed. Big, wet drums, lots of reverb, and lots of processed chorus-y things. It’s similar to nowadays, when everything kind of has auto-tune and that sort of stuff. There was a typical kind of late ‘80s/early ‘90s sound with lots of gated reverb and…just things that we didn’t like. And we were coming to the end of our contract. We’d signed a three-album deal with Roadrunner, and here we were at our third album, and we’d agreed to the most money for this record. Carol and I actually discussed this. I had been making a lot of four-tracks demos, and so had Paul, and we had been kind of creating a sound that was a little more…rootsy, I guess. Listening to stuff like ‘70s Stevie Wonder and things like that, we were creating this very analog sort of sound that was getting even more basic. And we thought, “Why not just go ahead and follow our muse and do exactly whatever we feel? This is the third album. Let’s make something that we could put on 10, 20, 30 years from now, and it won’t sound dated, and we’ll still be very, very proud of it.” So we just eschewed everything that we had done before and just completely cleared our minds and explored every little bit of creativity, everywhere that we wanted to go.
Paul Johnson: Yeah, I mean, that was David’s mission, and I was on board with it. That was a very loose record, and I’m all down for loose. A lot of it was done live. We were trying to just really get a rawer sound, less produced than the second or even the first record, and I think we did it.
Jeff Bailey: When Dave and Paul, who wrote most of the material, started taking their songwriting in a different direction, I think the bass playing was probably the first thing they wanted to see change. You know, a little bit different. Because it was no longer that R.E.M. / Cure kind of quirky pop stuff. It became a little more groove-oriented, and there was just some stuff about it that…I think they were looking for someone like me.
Dave Middleton did a project called The Dave Middleton Combo in the summer of ’88. This is while the original band was still together, but he asked Mark Lawrence from the Boweevils and me, and then him and Bill, we slicked our hair back, put on leather jackets, and played old rockabilly tunes. I think that was the seeds of Bed Time Story, because when we did that, he liked the way I played, I guess, and he thought, “Well, this is more the direction I want the Poetics to go into.” So, yeah, I think that’s probably where it all started from. So listening to and learning the new batch of songs was really easy for me, because they were kind of like…I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I feel like some of ‘em really were written for me or at least my style in mind, with some jamming groove things and stuff like that. It was really fun to put in my own bass lines for a change rather than have to learn stuff off a record.
David Middleton: Bruce Olson, the producer, was the lead singer and guitarist of a band called The Offenders that were kind of, y’know, semi-big around the Richmond, Norfolk, and DC areas in the early ‘80s. I remember seeing them open up for Squeeze once. I knew that his ideas…he definitely was one of those guys that was open to any idea. And he was also very open to doing whatever it took to create the sound that the song exemplified. For example, we had tried recording the song “Manakin Moon” with Steve Gronback – hence, of course, the title of the album Manakin Moon – but it didn’t really work, because Steve wanted to put a lot of instruments on it, and he really wanted to arrange it and put piano and backing vocals and things on it. And it just didn’t work. It didn’t have the sound that we really needed. So when we went to record Bed Time Story, we still wanted to record the song “Manakin Moon,” we thought it was good, but we also felt that it was a song about feeling alone and abandoned, so why not just do it completely solo? So that’s just me and the guitar in the studio with the lights out. So we explored every single idea to exemplify the sound and the tone and the feeling of each song.
Jeff Bailey: I remember that we couldn’t get “Shake” right. We couldn’t get the feel of the song right. We recorded it five or six times, and Bruce said, “All right, sit tight, I’ll be back in a minute.” And he went to the store, and he came back with a 24-pack of beer. So each one of us pumped two or more of ‘em into us, and then we got up and played one more take. And that’s the take you hear on the record. I guess we were just stiff. It was just one of those days where you’re self-conscious because, y’know, the mike’s rolling, so you feel like you’ve got to be perfect. And you can’t do that. If you want a really good take, you can’t be self-conscious about the microphone in front of you and the tape rolling. You’ve just got to go for broke.
We recorded that at the Flood Zone, in Richmond. I think anybody who records in the studio will tell you that a lot of involves sitting around. It was nice. For the most part, it was a perfect combination of really exciting and really boring, but it was fun sitting at the board and watching people do stuff. We did a lot of the backing tracks live. As a matter of fact, almost everything we played live, and most of it was the first or second take, and then we would overdub vocals and backing vocals and guitar solos and things like that, which of course took the longest amount of time. A lot of times we were sitting there with beers in our hands, waiting for the day to end so that we could go back to the place that we’d rented in Richmond so that we wouldn’t have to drive back to Virginia Beach after every day of recording.
David Middleton: I stayed late one night to do some extra vocal parts, and Bruce drove me back to the little house on Monument Street where we were staying, and on the way back he said, “Have you thought about the sequence of the songs on this album?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m sort of trying to figure it out in my notebook.” And he said, “Because you’ve got everything from art rock to country rock on this album. You really need to figure out how you’re going to order it.” So that’s the reason why you’ve got kind of a hard, dark Side A and sort of a lighter, gradually getting more acoustic Side B.
Oh, God, I just choke up thinking about Bryan Harvey when I hear “Jet Black Plastic Pistol” and when I think of him. That was one of the best afternoons of my life. I mean, they came in, and…they had auto parts. Johnny Hott had a bag of percussion stuff that included all kinds of trash and toys and auto parts and tools and pieces of metal and who knows what. It was kind of like band camp. We split into two sections: Paul and Jeff and Bil and Johnny, they were all doing the percussion stuff, and Bryan and I sat and worked on the vocals and the music and the arrangement. I remember at one point I was teaching him the backing vocal, and I was, like, “Okay, I want you to sing this part: ‘Jet black plastic pistol.’” And he stopped me and he looked at me and went, “‘Jet black plastic pistol’? That’s really amazing! Where did you come up with that?” And I said…I was, like, “Uh…honestly, I was trying to write something that sounded like you!” Of course, it didn’t sound anything like anything he would write. But literally what I was doing, I’d been listening to House of Freaks and I’d been trying to write something like that!
Bill Shearin: What I loved about Bed Time Story, but also about the other two albums as well, is that every producer that we had was completely different but was very good for our sound. They were able to pull out the songs that we had and put their ideas into them. The engineers were good for that, too. Engineers are sometimes co-producers, really. So I was really impressed with every single one of ‘em and what they did with the songs we were there to do. Sometimes it can be a thankless job behind the scenes, so you want to give ‘em their due. There’s a reason why producers and engineers are known as the Xth member of a band: because they actually transform themselves, or at least try to, to be a part of that band for at least the length of the sessions.
David Middleton:I think Bed Time Story holds up beautifully. Someone even once told me that some of it, when he listens to it now, it reminds him of Radiohead or Nirvana, things that came later. So, yeah, I think it definitely holds up. I think musically, in the context, it holds up the best of all three because it’s just so basic and barebones that it was kind of futuristic at the time.
Paul Johnson: You know, there were times when I’d go back and think, “Oh, Manakin Moon sounds too much like the ‘80s to me,” or whatever, but you know what? When I go back and listen to “Radio Free Europe,” it sounds like the ‘80s. And when I listen to the dB’s or the Del Fuegos, and I love those guys, they sound like the ‘80s. You can tell when those records were made. So it wasn’t like we were doing something that we were ashamed of. I will say, though, that Bed Time Story, you can’t really tell exactly when that one was made. I will agree with David on that. There isn’t any flashy ‘80s dated reverb on it. You can tell when you listen to the first two records when they were made, but Bed Time Story could’ve been made just a few years ago. It holds up. If you played that for a bunch of people who had never heard of us and knew nothing about it, I’d be curious as to what a panel of 10 people would say about when they thought it was recorded. That’d be a fun project.
Studio vs. Live
Bill Shearin: No, the albums didn’t represent our live sound. But we’re just one of hundreds of thousands of bands to say that.
Sean Hennessy: Although I will say that I think that to go into the studio with a group of guys like that, where we had been playing that much, makes a big difference, I think there was a different energy to the band live.
Paul Johnson: As far as our studio records go…if any of them captured our live sound, the third one did, but mostly I think the Poetics’ albums just sound like albums. But our live sound…to be honest, I think our little self-released live record does capture it. I’m happy with Never Were…Never There, which was just taken from cassette board mixes. You know, that’s what we sounded like live at that time. There’s mistakes on it, and some of the songs were out of tune, but there’s an energy there that captures where we were at at that time playing live. David was the only real singer in the band, and he does most of the vocals on the first and second record, but the rest of us…I mean, I’m a garage-rock croaker at best, but we’re all trying to do his backing vocals that he’s done on the record, so we had a rawer, less careful sound live. The guitar solos are a little screwed-up sounding, but I’m all for that. I’m for leaving mistakes just to show what it was really like.
Breaking Up the Band
Paul Johnson: I realized our contract was up, the Warner Brothers thing didn’t work out, and I had played with everybody in Tidewater that I pretty much wanted to play with at the time. I had so many side projects when I wasn’t touring with the Poetics. I recorded with a lot of people, I sat in on people’s gigs…I’d basically done the Tidewater music thing, and I wanted to go up to New York and see what was up there.
David Middleton: Paul had been thinking about leaving the band for a long time, he was kind of getting itchy feet, so we called a band meeting one day, and he expressed this, that he had wanted to leave, and I was kind of anticipating it, in a way. I didn’t even hesitate: at that moment, I said, “You know what? Let’s just dissolve the group, then.” Because I didn’t want to be burdened with trying to…you know, the chemistry of the band was Paul and I. We were in The Probe together, and the reason that we were able to do what we did and get as far as we could was because we had that kind of bond and that sort of chemistry. We were each other’s biggest fan, y’know? So I felt that trying to continue the band without him would just be weird. We had had a different drummer at one point, and we had had a different bassist at one point, and those things you tend to be able to accommodate, but having the creative energy, trying to create that creativity energy with another guitarist…? I would’ve felt uncomfortable. So I said, “Look, if you feel that way, let’s not dwell on it, let’s not make each other miserable, let’s just dissolve the group. And then we can kind of all move on, and if we ever feel like it, we can get back together and play again, but we don’t have to have it burden us.”
Jeff Bailey: Sure, it could’ve been that the big break was right around the corner, but I think we all kind of had a sense that there wasn’t much more we could do with the band, so instead of just rehashing the same thing…I mean, maybe I’m the only one that felt that way, but I think everybody did. I think it was sort of a mutual opinion that the band had kind of run its course.
David Middleton: After we had finished touring for Bed Time Story, we kind of ended up falling into this period of time where…well, I think a lot of it had to do with what I described earlier, about our music being too weird for commercial radio and not weird enough for college. I think it was just at a time when there was a lot of other competition coming up, and people really weren’t going to see bands as much. It was just kind of a nebulous time in music. And the face of music was changing. It was getting a little more towards grunge and things like Metallica and Nine Inch Nails. It was kind of going a way that really…even though our music was somewhat tough and hard and muscular in a way, it didn’t go in that direction. We weren’t a metal band or anything like that.
One of the things that made us decide to pack it in was the fact that we just weren’t drawing at the clubs, and doors were closing on us. I remember a great club down in South Carolina called Rockefeller’s that we used to play, and the owner was a guy named Art who loved us, but one night he just came up to us and said, “Look, I’m your biggest fan, I love you guys, but you don’t draw, and I just can’t book you anymore.” I saw a lot of bands make it by changing their sound. I mean, I remember the Black Crowes warming up for us once, and their name was Mr. Crowe’s Garden, and they wore button-down shirts and played Rickenbackers, and they had more of an R.E.M.-like sound.
Paul Johnson: There was nary a blues riff played when we played with Mr. Crow’s Garden, I can tell you that.
David Middleton: And then I remember seeing them a couple of years later, and suddenly they had tattoos and were sounding like the Faces. And I was, like, “Okay, y’know, I definitely the newer sound better, but…” I didn’t want to be one of these bands that changed their sound just to get somewhere. It was, like, is that what I want to do with my work?
Paul Johnson: I found a lot of musical soulmates when I went up to New York, and I still have that relationship with them. I just wanted to go up there and see what was available creatively. I did a lot of experimental things, I had a little studio and helped record a bunch of other artists, I worked with guys from the M-80s, Egypt, Rylo…you know, I just did the New York thing. And I don’t regret any of it. I wasn’t trying to get signed to a major label, I was just looking for creative projects to get my ya-yas out.
Jeff Bailey: We still got along great, all the way ‘til the end. Everybody likes to ask me who was fighting who and who got mad at who and why we broke up, because you hear that all the time from other bands. But, no, we just had that meeting one day, and Paul said, “I think I’d like to quit, I want to do this, and you can get another guitar player if you want, but I’ve got to go and do this project on my own, and I feel like I’ve done about as much as I can do with the Poetics.” And Dave said, “Hey, I feel the same way,” and I was already ready to go back to music school and learn how to be a teacher. I think it was harder on Bill, though. I think he was still all gung-ho about the band staying together.
Bill Shearin: Well, you never want anything like that to end, of course. But you want to be respectful of your band members. That was quite a long time ago, so how could I not be fine with it now? I always felt like we were a good band, so, sure, it’s a little tough when you decide that it’s time to move on or whatever. But that’s the way with anything, isn’t it?
Reuniting and Reflecting
David Middleton: We let the reunions happen kind of organically. We all kind of live far away from each other now. I live in New Jersey, Paul lives in northern Virginia, the other two guys live down in the Tidewater area. And then some of us have children. Paul has a son, and Jeff has, I believe, two daughters and a son. And they all play in groups and do things, and we’re all kind of busy. So what I do is…well, we always talk about it. Every year we sort of think about it and talk about it, and we always get in contact with each other and just say, “Figure out when you want to play again, I’m open to it.” And I sort of leave it up to Paul. When he kind of feels the vibe is right, he’ll call me, we’ll sort of start talking about it, and then we’ll feel it out. Of course, now that we’re much older, we’re getting to a point where we have to book it four months ahead of time! We used to be able to kind of get together on a whim, maybe three weeks out or a month out, but now we need close to a half a year. But that’s okay. That’s all right. Whatever it takes.
Bill Shearin: We’ve all stayed in close contact since the band broke up, but we still get together to play. When it’s something that you enjoy, you do it for more than just monetary reasons. You do it because you love it.
Paul Johnson: I’m still proud to hear myself on the radio. It always feels good. Plus, I get a little quarterly check, too, and that always helps out a little bit. I just got one that I’m going to use for Christmas money!
Jeff Bailey: You know, the second gig I ever did with the band…it was still the summer of ’89, and we played at King’s Dominion. That by itself isn’t necessarily the ultimate achievement. I mean, it’s not like Carnegie Hall or someplace like that. But we opened for the Bangles. And I thought, “This is my second gig with the band!” I was as nervous as I could be as I was standing on this stage that was taller than two Boathouse stages, looking down at 5,000 people and playing in front of people as a Poetic for the second time, the first time being at the Atlantis. That was a real “rock star” moment. But, you know, just being at the Boathouse and being able to stage-dive without people dropping you on the floor…just having something like that is probably the best part for me. I don’t remember being any more impressed with a lot of stuff we did than just coming home and playing at the Boathouse. That was always a lot of fun. That, to me, was “rock star” enough. And now the fans are crawling out of the woodwork again, which is exciting.
You know, I think I’ve actually had more of those kind of “rock star” moments since the band broke up, because people recognize me and will come up to me and say, “I remember you! You were in the Poetics!” And they come up to me and ask me a bunch of stuff about the band, and…it’s kind of fun reliving it. I work at Landstown Middle School, and three-quarters of the faculty is now saying, “Hey, I didn’t know you were in the Poetics! I’ve already got my tickets for the reunion show!” I’m, like, “Okay, good!” There’s more people than I would’ve thought who still remember the band and still want to go to this concert…including some of my students, which really makes me feel old!