GRINDERMAN Nick Cave And The Goodbye Band

GRINDERMAN

Nick Cave And The Goodbye Band

Nick Cave’s ‘other’ outfit is back with a new album called Grinderman 2. BOB GORDON speaks with drummer, Jim Sclavunos.

Back in 2007 there was talk of Nick Cave’s Grinderman project doing the rounds of music magazines and blogs. It seemed hard to imagine Cave and several of his Bad Seeds members going about things in a different way, as the man had so consummately preserved his oeuvre over the years.

But the Grinderman album emerged like a rabid dog, lean bluster and tongue in ear. Cave was playing guitar. It worked. And now there’s a second serving, Grinderman 2. It seems it was always going to be.

“When we started doing Grinderman we knew that we simply wanted to try it,” drummer Jim Sclavunos recalls down the line from Brooklyn. “We had been playing in this so-called Nick Cave solo band for a couple of years, the members of Grinderman, and this unique sound was emerging, evolving slowly out of soundchecks and rehearsals and what have you. We had played together so frequently, whereas as The Bad Seeds we had seen each other quite infrequently – only when there was work to do. Whereas with the small band was easier to travel with and easier to assemble at the spur of the moment.

“So we ended up working together a lot and the sound was coming naturally out of working together a lot and we knew that we had something different on our hands. It wasn’t sounding like The Bad Seeds anymore, even though we were doing Bad Seeds material. So we thought, ‘what would it be like if we tried some original stuff?’. And it was almost unfeasible because we didn’t know how to go about doing it because we’d never done it before. I mean, I’d been in The Bad Seeds since ’94, so it’s a good stretch of time. It’s hard to just overnight do something else. So we went to the studio, tried it, loved it and by the time we finished the first album we immediately wanted to go back in and do another one.

“So after the initial uncertainty when we settled down and knew we had something we liked, we didn’t know what anybody else was going to think of it,” Sclavunos continues. “We still don’t know what anybody else thinks of it. But we liked it and we we’re happy to do it again and again. Maybe it’s a bit subtle, or maybe it’s not clear at all, but what we were thinking in calling it Grinderman 2 was knowing implicitly there would be a Grinderman 3 and a Grinderman 4. Kind of like Led Zeppelin or Chicago (laughs).”

People do indeed like it. To a point that is perhaps a little surprising considering how sacred many fans hold the canon of Nick Cave’s work (then again, it is a free-thinking kind of fandom). Similar to the first album, there was much in the way of raw improvisation to go through, some 30-40 hours it seems. The recording, however, was drawn out intermittently over a year, so a rare revisitation was there for the taking.

“We worked on it in fits and starts,” Sclavunos says. “We usually work really fast. Nick likes to keep things moving along rather briskly and that’s great because it keeps the energy levels high. You never get bogged down in nitpicking or details about production. The musical essence is a priority, you know? Things are always a bit clearer that way. So we usually hit the ground running.

“This time, because it was more spread out, we had a little more time for reflection. We were able to revisit some of the songs after several months, even, and rethink them. Which is kind of unheard of, for Grinderman or The Bad Seeds. At least since my tenure with either band.

“Some of that stuff, as on the first album, ended up, more or less, in the original form on the album itself. Like on the last album Electric Alice and When My Love Comes Down were pretty much the same as when we recorded them during the so-called jam session. Just a snip of the tape and a bit of over-dubbing and there you go. On this album there was even more material like that. Bellringer Blues, What I Know and several other songs... everything is twice as muddy this time around.”

The chance to revisit, however, saved one of Grinderman 2’s best songs from the slaughter-yard. Opening track, Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man, takes the listener from the first album to the new one in fine form.

“Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man is one we did early where we thought, ‘there’s something special there’,” Sclavunos explains. “Then it nearly got left off the record, because it seemed to have some problems and we weren’t sure how to solve them. Then in that extended break we had some time to think about it and we actually came up with a solution. We were able to do some stuff to it and all of a sudden it was one of our favourite tracks.

“So it went from almost being left off the album to being the very first track on it (laughs). It was a nice bridge to the last album. It has a directness which connects it to the first album. The rest of the material on the album is a little more densely layered and possibly a bit more inscrutable – not as easy to get on first listening. Or maybe I’m kidding myself... maybe it’s all simple as pie.”

Depends on the pie, really. But one must say that long-time fans of Nick Cave will not be disappointed by what’s on offer here. Nor by the evolution of Cave’s guitar playing.

“You mean can he play it?” Sclavunos laughs.

Er, okay, let’s go with that.

“Well he can’t tune it, but he can play it,” Sclavunos laughs. “That’s half the battle. More than half the battle. Tuning’s for roadies.”