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 Married to the Music
The creative union of lead 'dogs Jason Weinheimer and Indy Grotto Words: Colter McCorkindale
Pics: Matthew Martin
“Are you pulling rank on me?” demands Indy Grotto with a laugh, in her soft Australian accent, as she interrupts her husband Jason Weinheimer's attempt to speak definitively about The Boondogs rise to fame some years ago. Of course there's really no rank to pull, as the two share everything: songwriting, singing lead, playing guitar, raising a child…the two are accustomed to taking turns.
The topic is the much-ballyhooed publicity the band received when they won Garageband.com's first recording contract in 1999, beating out hundreds of other groups. The record label, Garageband Records, headed by former Talking Head Jerry Harrison, spent upwards of $250,000 on The Boondogs before combusting with the rest of the dot-com flameouts.
“That was just a big mess,” explains Weinheimer as Grotto yields him the floor. “We went into it very skeptical.” Their collective wariness soon gave way to starstruck awe, however, as they commenced recording at the famous Ardent Studios in Memphis, using the same instruments their heroes REM and Big Star had played. This was a particular thrill for Weinheimer, as he had learned to play guitar from listening to REM records, mastering each song from start to finish.
“It was freaky, playing on the mellotron that REM bought,” says Weinheimer. “We were living this dream and we knew it didn't mean anything. It was just fun. We made this big rock record, spent tens of thousands of dollars on two songs. We knew that it wasn't us, but we were trying to play ball.”
As so often happens, the label's vision of the band did not correspond with the band's own vision. The label wanted to turn Grotto into a navel-showing, sexed-up Sheryl Crow. Despite the group's status as a two-songwriter/two-lead-vocalist outfit, Garageband suggested that Grotto sing all the band's songs.
“They weren't my songs!” says Grotto defiantly. “I couldn't sing someone else's songs. It never ended.” Grotto says she didn't want to be the focal point by herself. “I can't play that game, and that's what I love about this band,” she says, referring to her freedom to alternate lead vocal duties with Weinheimer, as well as switch instruments when she wants. “And I don't have 36D breasts, and I'm not going to show my stomach.” She tempers her defiance with another laugh, “Although I do have a nice six pack.”
Weinheimer summarizes the tale thusly, “After making this record that we didn't like, they went out of business.”
“Thank god,” sighs Grotto.
(Garageband.com relaunched a few months after its demise with a change of format and is still operational, although it has yet to turn a profit).
And the record? “I have a thousand copies in my closet,” Weinheimer says secretively. “Indy doesn't want anyone to hear it. I gave one to my friend Jeff. He listened to it and said ‘Indy's right.'” Only a handful of people have actually heard the $250,000 record, and Grotto aims to keep it that way. “I personally guard them,” she says sharply.
It took the band two years to get out. By 2002 they were at a standstill. “We just waited it out. As soon as they called us and freed us I went out and bought a Pro Tools rig and a G4, and we made This Is the Way The World Ends here in the house,” Weinheimer says proudly, while freely admitting, “We had no idea what we were doing.”
The story is eerily reminiscent of Ho-Hum's imprisoned rise and free fall. “We knew exactly what [Ho-Hum principals] Rod and Lenny went through.” After leaving the “big time record deal,” the group embraced the DIY spirit and its myriad freedoms. Covering every aspect of the record's release, Weinheimer says was “a reactionary thing, we said ‘let's package them ourselves' and we did.”
Now, like Ho-Hum, the group feels most satisfied by their current direction and lineup of Chris Michaels on bass, Isaac Alexander on drums, Charles Wyrick on electric guitar. “I love this version of the band so much” Weinheimer says emphatically. “We have upright bass, Charles is making space noises, Indy is playing acoustic guitar and I can STOP. I love it.”
The band's refreshed enthusiasm is reflected in their latest release, Fever Dreams, distributed nationally by Little Rock's Max Recordings. The album is a focused, dreamy collection of melancholy pop songs.
“We've found a footing.” Weinheimer says. “This is the way; it was a step to finding our sound. With Fever Dreams we've achieved it. It was really easy. We recorded ten hours in one day in Mississippi at the Money Shot in Water Valley” with Fat Possum Records co-founder Bruce Watson at the helm. Weinheimer points out that Watson is a “pop guy” and knew just how to treat a group like The Boondogs, whose sound doesn't sit conveniently in one genre.
“I'm very attracted to that bubblegum sound but I think it will come out in a children's record. That's when we'll do happy record,” Weinheimer says, apparently not joking. Trying to come up with a phrase to describe the band's sound, he suggests “low-watt power pop, or dirge pop.”
People ask me, ‘What's your fixation with the apocalypse?' but it's not about the end of the world. It's a metaphor,” says Weinheimer. Grotto explains that she's compelled to write melancholy songs as an exorcism—“I don't think I could write a driving, happy rock song.”
Another comfort for the band, and something that allows them to maintain their autonomy is the internet. Citing their web following as the “one really good thing that came out of the whole Garageband experience,” Weinheimer says the label “exposed us to people all over the world, but mostly in the States. So we have pockets of people all over the place. Our webmaster is in Albuquerque. We have an email list of over 1,000 people. We do targeted touring,” which he says is a necessity because several of the band members have children. They're perfectly happy with their ability to play where they want, when they want, because they know they can draw solid crowds in Chicago, Nashville, Shreveport, Tulsa, and others.
Their goals are simple. They're not out to take over the world, just to play the music that they have to play. Grotto states that her only goal is to give people what she calls “the big hurt”: “We all went to see this band play, three of us, years ago, and at one point we were all crying. I would like for somebody to get that feeling from one of my songs. I love music when you can go and see a band and they play a song and you go ‘ahhhh— “the big hurt.”'”
Asked about his motivations for making music, Weinheimer, by stark contrast, modestly says, “I just like to write liner notes.” And with that, the couple's peculiar musical partnership has survived and evolved into a comfortable creative union marked more by self-fulfillment than money or fame. They have succeeded on their own terms, and their latest album marks the arrival of the band they've always wanted to become.
Colter McCorkindale owns a bunch of guitars and was once on the cover of the Arkansas Times for blogging. That's pretty much all he has going for him. Oh and he wrote the Ho-Hum piece last year. You can pester him at colter@gmail.com. |
