Spoon: Revenge of the Underdog
When Spoon frontman Britt Daniel moved to a new house in Portland, Oregon, a couple of years ago, he spent a full six months trying to decide what kind of couch to buy. “I didn’t know what I liked, so I was kind of educating myself on it,” says Daniel, who studied design magazines on the tour bus before deciding he liked furniture with “short legs and square shoulders.”
Daniel, 38, makes his aesthetic decisions carefully, and then follows through with relentless determination. That trait led him to choose a really nice sofa, and also to push Spoon to become the most rhythmically inventive and consistently tuneful American rock band of the 2000s. Along the way, they helped establish a new middle-class definition of rock success; with the support of indie label Merge Records, Spoon experienced the kind of slow and steady growth in which hit-hungry majors lost interest long ago, while picking up movie and commercial placements (Stranger Than Fiction, Jaguar) instead of platinum albums.
Daniel quit his last day job, as an online copy editor, in 2000, and with 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon finally hit the Top 10, squeezing onto mainstream radio with the buoyant, horn-boosted “The Underdog.” But the band feels under no obligation to repeat that feat with its new album, the rawer but still seductively melodic Transference. “I would hate being in a situation where I felt like it was expected,”says Daniel, “or there was even some kind of subtle or unmentioned pressure.”
Still, he doesn’t need external expectations to push himself and the band hard. “I know how things should sound,” Daniel says in his perpetually amused drawl, steering his lime-green 1974 biodiesel-converted Mercedes through sleepy midmorning streets in Austin, the band’s hometown. “And if they don’t immediately sound that way, then I’m gonna keep working until they get there.” Daniel has a long, forceful nose, a slow, sardonic grin and reddish-blond hair that’s been bed-headed for roughly two decades. He warms up slowly, but eventually becomes friendly and unguarded — he seems like he’d be a lousy acquaintance but a good close friend.
Daniel is a big Stanley Kubrick fan, and Spoon’s songs sometimes seem to share the clinical precision of the director’s films. “Britt is crazy detail-oriented,” confirms keyboardist Eric Harvey, sipping a beer in a heat-lamp-warmed courtyard of an Austin hotel. “There’s a lot going on in duder’s head.”
Bassist Rob Pope smiles. “He’ll get as specific as ‘I want it to sound really tough-sounding, like the bass line of an early Cure record,’ something that detailed.”
The group’s founding members, Daniel and drummer Jim Eno, both started playing music relatively late. Eno, who admired the tasteful, play-for-the-song ethos and unconventional technique of U2’s Larry Mullen Jr., R.E.M.’s Bill Berry and the Smiths’ Mike Joyce, didn’t start drumming until his junior year of college in North Carolina. He majored in electrical engineering and landed a series of lucrative day jobs designing microchips while he honed his drum chops — even playing in Compaq’s official corporate big band in Houston.
Daniel had wanted to make records for a living since he was eight, when he discovered his first favorite band, the Bee Gees, via the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and its disco-fied follow-up, 1979’s Spirits Having Flown. “Still a great record,” he notes. “It’s no coincidence that those were my favorites — I think you have the same taste your whole life.”
Around that time, Daniel’s parents went through a traumatic divorce — his dad, owner of those Bee Gees records, went to Dallas, leaving Britt and his four siblings with their overburdened mom. Then, as an arty kid in the rural, jock-infested town of Temple, Texas, he faced what he remembers as a “dark and lonely” early adolescence — his 2002 song “Jonathon Fisk” is about a kid who used to beat him up. So Daniel didn’t get around to actually learning an instrument until he was a black-nail-polish-wearing, Cure-worshipping junior in high school — one day, he picked up a “Beatles for easy guitar” book and taught himself the chords.
Eno, who looks like a hip Michael Dukakis, first crossed paths with Daniel in an Austin studio in the early Nineties. They played together in a rootsy band called the Alien Beats (Daniel was the bassist), then broke off to form Spoon — which Daniel simply wanted to be a “loud rock & roll band.”
Spoon had a rough Nineties. Despite critical acclaim for their early music, the era’s alt-rock boom passed them by. In what’s become one of the all-time great major-label horror stories, they were dropped from Elektra within weeks of releasing their first album for the label, 1998’s Series of Sneaks. “We call them the locust years,” says Eno, wincing at the memory. “We pretty much toured from 1994 to 2001 in front of no one. We’d play in a town, have 20 people the first time, 40 people the second time and 15 people the third time! How depressing is that?”
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