The making of Superchunk’s No Pocky For Kitty
By Eric Waggoner
The sky above them was full black. Great quarter-ton animals lurked in the vegetation along the roadside, just out of view. And Jim Wilbur, of all the awful things, had begun to cough up blood.
Late night, early April 1991, somewhere on Highway 101 along the Pacific coast. Bassist Laura Ballance was at the wheel. Guitarists Mac McCaughan and Wilbur, who was developing an increasingly ugly case of bronchitis, were seated nearby. Drummer Chuck Garrison was tucked in the back, way up in the van’s small makeshift loft space, sound asleep. The night rolled and rolled and rolled past the windows as the band pushed ahead to the next show, at Portland’s Satyricon.
Superchunk, then only 18 months old, was in the middle of a good year. Its debut, released on Matador six months prior, was getting solid press and a strong response on tour. Anchored by single “Slack Motherfucker,” Superchunk was a half-hour of criminally catchy noise that would come to mark an artistic shift between ’80s hardcore and the ’90s indie-rock boom. Call it post-punk that, at the time, skewed way more punk than post.
The support tour to this point had been a series of manageably spaced hops—three weeks on the road, three weeks at home, two weeks on, a week off, and so on. But this leg was more ambitious. A western trajectory through the southern states hooked north in California, carrying the band up to Olympia, Wash., after which it was able to double back through the Midwest and stop for four days in Chicago, where the band was booked to record the second release in Superchunk’s three-record contract with Matador. The quartet had been writing and rehearsing new material for weeks, on and off the road, developing ideas in McCaughan’s kitchen, expanding them backstage before shows, running through new songs at the houses of the fans who hosted them along the way.
Ballance remembers that tour being exceptionally difficult. The band didn’t know quite what it was doing yet, and everything it was doing, the band was doing on a starvation budget. So, in the middle of the tour, for some reason—Ballance doesn’t remember why, except they had the day off and figured the trip would be pretty—they decided to push nonstop from San Francisco to Portland, not knowing they were committing to nearly 700 miles of driving. What began as a leisurely diversion stretched unexpectedly far into the night. And they were somewhere on the Redwood Highway, deep among some of the oldest living trees on earth, when the bull elk appeared.
The thing was huge, Ballance would later say, taller than the van. It stepped unhurriedly out into the road, directly into their path. And then it just stopped, completely blocking the northbound lane and fixing Ballance and Co. with a strangely baleful glare.
There was nothing else for it: Ballance stood on the brake pedal. The van’s nose dipped sharply, and everything and everyone inside was hurled forward. Poor sleeping Garrison was launched from the loft space and caught air all the way from the back, clean over the center benches, landing hard between the front seats. The vehicle quaked to a stop, van and beast somehow unharmed. Superchunk, now wide awake and with hearts hammering, took up the road once again.
Leave it to others to speculate on alternative histories and the arrow of time. But among the great untold stories of indie rock is the one about how a careless, scowling elk nearly scotched one of the era’s finest albums.
Sometimes, god knows how, a band manages not only to avoid the sophomore slump, but also find every bit of its needed traction on its second record. For Superchunk, 1991’s No Pocky For Kitty was that album, the one on which the group hit the ground running and tore hunks out of the pavement when it landed.
Barely 50 seconds longer in run time than its predecessor, No Pocky was a little more slowly paced than the band’s debut, if equally loud and jittery. Superchunk was primarily a collection of solid-yet-separable songs grown from the patchy soil of its shared musical obsessions. Recorded in all of two days at Jerry Kee’s Duck Kee Studios in Raleigh, N.C., Superchunk featured not only the wild, gleeful “Slack Motherfucker,” but the slow chug of “Binding,” the whipsaw stutter-stop of “Down The Hall,” the somber “Half A Life” and the anthemic “My Noise,” the latter a joyful celebration of the soon-to-break fuzzy punk/pop for which Superchunk was currently cutting the acetate.
Founding guitarist Jack McCook had played on that first record. But Connecticut-born Wilbur, a close friend of McCaughan since both were in college, recognized its merits immediately. When McCook declined to tour behind Superchunk, Wilbur replaced him even before the record’s official release date.
“I’d seen the band twice,” says Wilbur, “when they were still called Chunk—once at a party in Chapel Hill, and once at CBGB on New Year’s Eve, 1989. They didn’t play a lot, really. I think by the time I joined, they’d played maybe four or five shows, and I’d been at two of them. So, when they got that first album together, Mac gave me a tape of it. It was really good. My friendship with Mac was mostly about bantering, so I didn’t want to admit it; I didn’t want to tell him how great I thought it was. But the energy—that first record really holds up. It’s so of its time, so catchy. I loved the speed, the guitar sound. We used to buy records together and talk about them, what was good about this, what did we like about that. That first record was an encapsulation of everything we loved about music.”
Still, Superchunk was the product of a young band in the process of getting its act together. The pace at which the album was recorded, for good or ill, captured that developing state.
“I recently listened to it again,” says Ballance. “I was blown away at all the flubs that were left in. Apparently we didn’t have time to listen to any playback, much less do any retakes.” As good a reception as that debut received—and the critical and popular buzz around Superchunk was overwhelmingly positive from the start—the band was determined to approach its second album more deliberately.
Work on No Pocky began while the band was only starting to promote the first record. The addition of Wilbur, and a more tightly focused approach to composition, allowed the new songs to arrive in a quick, intense flood, often beginning in short ideas that McCaughan and Wilbur put onto four-track.
“I remember that time feeling very fertile,” says Wilbur. “We worked very, very hard at it. Rehearsals ran like, ‘OK, here’s a part—everybody try to play along.’ We’d come up with ideas and record them quickly, then play them over and over again to see if they’d turn into anything. We figured out what worked and didn’t work. And when we had something that sounded like an arrangement, that’s when Mac would begin writing words. The words always came last. For every idea that ended up becoming a song, there were five that didn’t.”
“The songs were all written very quickly,” says McCaughan, “but we also had more time to work on them. Not in the sense that we had months to do it, but we all lived in the same town in the time leading up to the album being made.” (Wilbur had moved from Connecticut to North Carolina when he’d joined the band, sleeping for two weeks on McCaughan’s floor.) “Before the first record, I was living in New York, and we were practicing and recording when I was home on vacation from school. So, by this point, we were more of a real band, and figuring out how to write songs that worked for us, especially the roles Jim and I were playing on guitar.”
“We were writing No Pocky while touring for the first record, playing the new songs live as we went along,” says Ballance. “More often than not, we stayed on the floors of the people who came to see us play. We got to know some really interesting characters, and got to know each other really, really well. Meaning we got on each other’s nerves sometimes. Hence songs like ‘Skip Steps 1 & 3.’”
You see what you wanna say
Get to the point, you’re gettin’ to me
Skip steps 1 & 3
Skip steps 1 & 3
You’ve been suckin’ wind so long
You’ve been suckin’ wind so long
You’ve been suckin’ wind so long
You’ve been suckin’ wind so long …
You couldn’t ask for a punchier opener than “Skip Steps 1 & 3,” which kicks No Pocky off with a drum tag like a rifle crack, then delivers one of the band’s hookiest guitar lines at breakneck speed. It’s a powerful cut, still featured in Superchunk’s live shows. The song first began to come together on the road, on March 30, 1991, to be specific, in the backstage area of Houston’s venerable Fitzgerald’s, while fIREHOSE was sound-checking. “We were all amped that it sort of sounded like Bullet LaVolta, like thrash metal,” says Wilbur.
“No one’s allowed to know the meaning of (Mac’s lyrics), officially,” says Laura. “But as I remember it, that’s what the song is about: just doing something, not talking about how you’re going to do it (step one), then talking about how you did it (step three).”
They continued to develop material throughout the tour, catching rehearsals every chance they could. McCaughan remembers first running through the finished “Skip Steps 1 & 3” at a friend’s house in Phoenix; three weeks later, they’d be recording it. But all through the drive up the coastline, Wilbur, as noted above, was in rough shape. He ended up having to miss the Portland show at Satyricon, which remains the only date on which Superchunk ever played as a trio. By the time the van reached Olympia, Wilbur was down for the count. Emergency care from Seaweed’s Aaron Stauffer and Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson, who was Stauffer’s next-door neighbor, began to turn the trick. “I was staying at Aaron’s apartment,” says Wilbur. “Calvin came over and brought me some sort of awful hippie garlic concoction, and fed it to me while I was lying in the bathtub.”
A course of antibiotics had begun bringing Wilbur back when they finally hit Chicago. He still had to lie on the floor during some of the overnight sessions. But the dates were firm. There was nothing to do now but skip step one, and get to work.
Superchunk played chicago’s now-defunct Czar Bar for the second time on Saturday, April 20. Peter Margasak, publisher of the Butt Rag zine (and today a two-decade veteran writer at the Chicago Reader), had booked both Czar dates. For three days thereafter, Sunday to Tuesday, Superchunk crashed on the floor of Margasak’s apartment during the day, and recorded with Steve Albini at night.
Superchunk had first met Albini in Chapel Hill in 1990, when Sonic Youth played the fabled Cat’s Cradle and Albini was running sound for opening act the Jesus Lizard. As plans for its second album gelled, the band saw the tour would route the group through Chicago, where Albini had an ongoing after-hours deal at Chicago Recording Company.
“It was a state-of-the-art studio at the time,” says Wilbur. “Twenty-four tracks. Cheap Trick had recorded there,” as had Styx, as well as Cameo and jazz pianist Earl Hines. The Chicago Cubs’ team anthem, “Go, Cubs, Go!” had been cut at CRC in 1984. But through his off-hours work with the studio, Albini had, over the past few years, expanded the CRC’s discography to include more current and experimental fare, including the Jesus Lizard’s Goat and Bitch Magnet’s Ben Hur (both 1990).
“We all liked Steve’s band (Big Black),” says McCaughan, “and the records he’d made with other bands. So, we asked (Matador co-founder) Gerard (Cosloy) to put us in touch. We were excited that Steve would do it, and that he had a plan we could afford. We were intimidated, but we were also used to recording quickly. And we knew he was about capturing a band realistically, which fit with our aesthetic at that point.”
“He had theories about recording that aligned with ours,” says Ballance. “We weren’t so much looking for a producer as someone who could record us in a way that sounded big and loud.”
The No Pocky sessions ran from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. each night. “I remember feeling really intimidated,” says Ballance. “I’ve never felt like I was the greatest bass player in the world, and at that point particularly, I wasn’t very confident. Playing in front of that guy was nerve-wracking. But Steve turned out to be a totally different person than I imagined he’d be from the records. I thought he’d be really tough and mean, but it turned out he was a music geek just like us.” (Ballance also recalls that Albini, architect of Big Black’s Songs About Fucking and the short-lived trio Rapeman, was a devoted fan of Pepperidge Farms’ Chessmen cookies. As Chuck Berry once sang, it goes to show you never can tell.)
The sessions moved quickly and efficiently, largely due to the fact that Superchunk’s working methods aligned more or less exactly with Albini’s. “Steve didn’t monkey around,” says Wilbur. “Everything had to be budgeted: OK, the amps are set up, let’s go. We didn’t have lots of time to fill. And he wasn’t into backing vocals or overdubbing guitar solos. There was a little bit of disagreement there, actually. There are some moments on the album where Mac and I are playing guitar lines, and there’s a little melodic line over the top of it. Mac would want to try a guitar line over some part of a song. And always, Albini would ask, ‘Why?’ To him, the sound of the band was the sound of four people. Why would you want to do anything else?”
The rapid-fire performing and recording strategy caught the sound of the band live in the room, and also gave No Pocky a consistent texture the first record had lacked. “We basically had to play the songs one right after another to get it done in the time we had allotted,” says Ballance. Albini, who’s often spoken about the Chicago music scene’s penchant for ball-breaking, couldn’t resist a jab or three: McCaughan’s guitar lines sounded like REO Speedwagon, like Freedom Rock. (McCaughan, a Speedwagon fan as a kid, didn’t mind the ribbing, though he didn’t say as much to Albini.) When Garrison would pound his drum heads loose, Albini would come into the recording space with a blowtorch and aim it over the snare heads to tighten everything up, since the band couldn’t afford replacement gear.
Then there was “Creek.” “We absolutely could not play ‘Creek’ live,” says Wilbur. “We could rehearse it, but for some reason—I don’t know, Mac couldn’t play and sing it at the same time, or something. It’s so fast, and it has such weird timing. We were anxious about recording it, because we thought it was a throwaway to begin with, but we needed it to fill out the record.”
So, nerves wired tight, the band went for it. And the planets, or something, aligned, and for the first (and last) time ever, Superchunk nailed “Creek” in a single pass, punctuated at the end with a sharp cymbal crash. And the cymbal was still ringing when Garrison, transported with relieved joy, yelled out, “That was easy!”
The band sucked a collective breath. Then came Albini’s voice, exaggeratedly cheerful and calm: “Great job, Chuck. Gonna have to spend a lot of time erasing that.”
“I thought, ‘Oh god, please don’t make us do that again. We’ll never get it,’” says Wilbur. (As it happened, that take of “Creek” was indeed the keeper. Listen at the end and you’ll hear the cymbal degrade rapidly, as Albini pulls a quick fadeout.)
All told, No Pocky For Kitty was accomplished, performances to final mix, in just more than 36 hours. At the time, Albini, suspicious of the hip cache associated with his name, often removed himself from album credits. No Pocky’s back cover finally read, “Produced with eyes closed by Laura, who sat in the right chair.” It was a good-hearted poke at Ballance, who couldn’t keep her eyes open through the all-night sessions and frequently fell asleep at the board as they reviewed mixes.
CRC’s final bill for the sessions came to $1,700. Matador’s first check bounced, and Albini hung onto the masters until the matter got straightened out. But in the end, Superchunk’s second album appeared on Oct. 30, 1991, right on schedule.
There are a few songs that aren’t the greatest on there,” says Ballance. “I think On The Mouth is actually a better collection of songs. There wasn’t a lot of time for changing instruments or amp settings to create a variety of sounds (on No Pocky), but I like that about it. To me, it’s a good embodiment of what Superchunk was at that time.”
“We almost always do some songs from that record live,” says McCaughan. “‘Throwing Things,’ ‘Cast Iron,’ ‘Seed Toss,’ ‘Skip Steps 1 & 3,’ ‘Tie A Rope To The Back Of The Bus,’ ‘Punch Me Harder,’ sometimes ‘Tower’—that’s a pretty high percentage.”
“It was a better-sounding record than the first,” says Wilbur, “and we had a much bigger audience. It was exactly what we sounded like live. Now everybody with a laptop is recording, but recording was a luxury for bands then. To get into a studio was expensive. You wanted to be well-prepared, and you didn’t want to fuck around, and you wanted it to be good. It wasn’t like there was a lot of pressure, but it wasn’t for hobbyists.I’ll tell you how silly it was. The bridge part on ‘Throwing Things’? We didn’t have anything to put there. So, I came up with that while Mac and Laura went out to see a movie. It’s the stupidest bridge. But we weren’t afraid of doing things that way. When we play that part now, even 20 years later, I think, ‘What went into it?’ Well, nothing went into it, really. It was just spontaneous. You’re young, and you’re spitting this stuff out. You’re not repeating yourself; you haven’t done enough yet to repeat yourself. We didn’t have anything else to do. We didn’t have families, houses. We were just sitting around with guitars.”
