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25 Years Of Local H
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| | PACK UP THE CATS. Our major label masterpiece. With a bigger recording budget, top tier talent behind the boards in the form of Nick DiDia and the great Roy Thomas Baker, and our strongest batch of songs yet - our resources were finally in line with our ambitions. Which is good. Because, this time, we had major ambitions. Bound For The Floor had put us on the radio next to a lot of bands that we didn't particularly care for. We wanted to make a record that would separate us from the pack. Working with somebody outside of the current pool of hot producers was a good way to do that. And that's where RTB came in. We happened to hear Killer Queen one day on the radio, and that was it. Roy was our man. We defy you to name a more exciting piece of production than Killer Queen. Nope. Not even Bohemian Rhapsody. If he could handle Queen, our little concept record about a shitty mid-level band should be a breeze for him. To hedge our bets, we enlisted the man behind current hot producer Brendan O'Brien to engineer: Nick DiDia. The pairing turned out to be inspirational and he and Roy continued to work together long after we wrapped the record. Roy had a studio in Lake Havasu that was literally at the base of a mountain. It was like going to work at the Bat Cave. After Scott got over his initial disappointment that Roy couldn't make them sound like Queen, the sessions charged ahead with little distractions or drama. Roy kicked Scott's ass on vocals. This is the man who's worked with Freddie Mercury and Steve Perry, for chrissakes! The sound of Joe's drums hit like a ton of bricks (the secret is toilet paper). And the tunes? We had 'em. All Right (Oh, Yeah) had been a song that we'd been playing on the Veruca Salt tour, and that started the record off on the usual note of ambivalence. But this time, everything was spiked with a supercharged dose of pop voltage. Hit The Skids, All The Kids Are Right, She Hates My Job (inspired by a couple of shows we played with Juliana Hatfield) - we were closer than ever to that soaring kind of sound that we heard in our head. What Can I Tell You featured a riff that was familiar to anyone listening to the guitar/bass portion of soundchecks during the STP tour. Speaking of STP, Dean DeLeo would be the first person outside of the band to play on one of our records when he guested on the solo for Cool Magnet, our Day Tripper/Hair Of The Dog rip. We finally got Joe to use a cowbell - something Bosso had been trying to get him to do since High Fiving MF. Fine And Good and Lucky Time were songs that had initially been written for the Slingblade soundtrack. The original music Scott had written for Fine And Good would later be used for There You Are off of the second record by Scott Lucas & The Married Men. 500,000 Scovilles and Deep Cut had the scorched earth approach to paranoia that we'd all grown to love. Stoney was named for Stone Gossard after he told Nick that he wanted us to name a song after him this time. The instrumentation, the harmonies, the perfect flow of the production - the way the record was experimental without ever being self indulgent - it was everything we wanted. Maybe the sound was a little too clean and shiny, like Steve Haigler had suggested, but we were fine with that and perfectly willing to own it. Everyone at the label was convinced that this was going to take us to the next level. Of course, as we know now, that didn't happen. The merger with Universal and Polygram was happening and, to put it simply, we got lost in the shuffle. Almost everyone we knew at the label either quit or got fired, including our biggest champion: Joe Bosso. No one could concentrate on making us rock stars when they were worried about their jobs 24/7. Our support system had all but vanished. But maybe the fault was all ours. Maybe putting out a Cheap Trick inspired concept record about cats wasn't the smartest move in 1998. In the age of post-Limp Bizkit moop rock, maybe a record like Pack Up The Cats didn't stand a chance. Who knows? But listening to it now - listening to that beautiful ascending slide solo in those final sparkling Layla-esque moments of Lucky Time - it feels like the perfect kiss off to our major label days, and the classiest fuck off we could've possibly mustered. Thanks for the fish, guys. |
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