Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
The thing with Mecca Normal at the beginning was that our sound and configuration created the perfect gatekeeping system to allow us to meet exceptional people that we didn’t have any idea were out there in the world at large. That wasn’t our plan. We just stuck to what felt right, and we met people who had similar philosophies.
Who knows how it all would have gone down if we’d played by the rules? Dave and I often talk about who we met and how great the conversations were, how amazing the flow of … everything was while we were most active, in those intense years from 1986 toward 2000 or so.
I wouldn’t trade all of that for some sort of music-industry success, and when Nick Cave laughed and said no one wants to be indie (in the new Kylie Minogue doc), he’s wrong, in essence. I mean, the term “indie” wasn’t around when we were most active, but there were reasons to work the way we did. Being on a major label didn’t look like much fun, with executives pushing for songs that would make money. Guess you had to be there, but being “indie” or DIY wasn’t a buncha bands who wanted to be on major labels, but weren’t good enough. The most interesting, inspiring and stimulating people knew this.
And now, it would appear that the non-major-label action of that era has a certain amount of cache associated with it. All due to the odd things that people did for the first time and then stuck with for reasons that are difficult to explain.
“Water In A Bucket” from Water Cuts My Hands (K, 1991) (download):
