Fellow traveler

The many faces of Scott McCaughey

by Brett Milano

Seattle musician Scott McCaughey has three main talents: he writes good songs, he plays a bunch of instruments, and he's a really nice guy. And he has no doubt which of those qualifications has helped his career the most. "The only reason I'm still playing music is because I get along with people," he notes from his home in Seattle. "That's absolutely true. I know for sure that I wouldn't be in R.E.M. except for the fact that I'm a fun person to hang out with and have a drink with. That's my biggest qualification over my musicianly skills."

For a guy who's never quite made it big, McCaughey is currently sitting pretty. He's got two bands going full-time: Young Fresh Fellows, whom he's fronted since the early '80s, and Minus Five, whom he conceived with some high-profile friends as an outlet for his sadder songs. Two new McCaughey albums -- one by each band, the Fellows' Because We Hate You and Minus Five's Let the War Against Music Begin -- were released late last month as a double CD by Mammoth. As is often the case with a McCaughey project, the album credits read like a registry of pop-cult heroes: Peter Buck, Robyn Hitchcock, John Wesley Harding, Posies' leaders Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer, Presidents of the United States of America frontman Chris Ballew, Los Lobos' Steve Berlin, Smithereen Dennis Diken, and Sean O'Hagan of High Llamas all turn up at various points on the double album. They're joined by Terry Adams (NRBQ), Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices), and Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), who've all been on Minus Five albums in the past. Meanwhile, McCaughey has spent the past four years as an auxiliary member of R.E.M., with whom he's also just wrapped up an album.

Young Fresh Fellows, who opened for the Soft Boys last week at the Paradise in Boston, are a Seattle classic. Along with the Posies and the Fastbacks (whose leader, Kurt Bloch, doubles as the Fellows' guitarist), the band helped lay the groundwork for the city's underground-rock scene. But as a pop band with heavy '60s influences and a sense of humor (their closest thing to a hit was the musical mash note "Amy Grant"), they had precious little to do with what Seattle became. "I'll tell you what amuses me. In '91 we did our album Electric Bird Digest, which was partly produced by Butch Vig. When he did that one, he had two weeks' vacation time between producing Gish and Nevermind. So both of those two records were obviously so huge and influential, and then there was our little record that he did at the same time. That to me is hilarious."

Not that McCaughey intended Electric Bird Digest (Frontier), which is generally considered the Fellows' best album, to be Vig's "little record" between better-known ones. "It's funny, my wife was telling me the other day that she thought I was pretty bummed out during that whole period. But I remember thinking, `Well, this is cool -- Mudhoney's got a contract and they're doing well, and the Fastbacks are getting recognized a bit.' I felt like we got some recognition as well, even though we were a completely different kind of band. We definitely came out of a '60s-pop mentality, whereas the grunge bands were all into the '70s and Black Sabbath, which I listened to as a teenager too. But I was already pretty Beatles-damaged by then. We were actually pretty popular during the early '90s. I felt like we got a lot of credit, even though we didn't get any money."

Perhaps it's fitting then that one track on Because We Hate You sounds like a tribute to grunge, down to the production and the massive guitar sound -- except that the song is "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight," a '60s bubblegum nugget originally done by Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart, the guys who wrote songs for the Monkees. And you have to love a band who, on their biggest-budget album to date, would find the space to do a hopelessly untrendy cover tune that they happen to love.

In the wake of the early-'90s grunge boom, Young Fresh Fellows became less and less of a priority for McCaughey. "We went from being a full-time band to a whenever-we-felt-like-it kind of band. Mostly, we kept playing in Seattle and recording in our basement, so we were still active in a low-key kind of way. We never broke up, though -- we're way too lazy to ever break up. That would take an actual decision."

With the Fellows on a part-time schedule, Minus Five have taken up much of McCaughey's non-R.E.M. time in recent years, and the agenda there is simple: he wants to make some of the most depressing pop records ever. He probably won't overtake Bright Eyes or Cat Power in that department, but the downbeat sentiments on the band's two previous albums (1997's The Lonesome Death of Buck McCoy and 2000's Old Liquidator) were nonetheless quite a surprise coming from the author of Young Fresh Fellows tunes like "Beer Money" and "My Boyfriend's in Killdozer."

On the new Minus Five album, the material is poppier and the depression sounds a little more tongue-in-cheek -- and since the Fellows' album has fewer outright jokes than before, the two bands are getting harder to tell apart. The Minus Five disc even ends with a Robyn Hitchcock spoken bit that sounds like a perfect send-up of his usual expounding. McCaughey's press-kit description of the new Minus Five album is worth repeating: "I thought it would be cool to do an album about death, loneliness, alcoholism and despair, but to have sleigh bells on every song."

"Lately I write more of those stranger, downer songs than I do the happy and poppy ones," he explains. "It's getting harder to write rock-and-roll songs, but it's easy to just pick up an acoustic guitar and moan. I wanted the new Minus Five album to be the weirdest, slowest, downest record ever. But at the last minute the head of the label said, `What about putting on these pop songs?' And I said, `Okay, but then I'd have to take off these five-and-a-half-minute dirges.' "

The Fellows' album likewise changed shape at the last minute. They originally planned to call it A Tribute to Music and give every song lyrics about the style of music being played. ("Good Times Rock & Roll," which namechecks their old tourmates the Presidents of the USA, survives from that incarnation.) "We recorded it over two years, so it changed a lot when we had to whittle it down to 14 songs. We wound up going with the ones we liked the best, even though that ruined the concept."

Back before R.E.M. came calling for McCaughey, there was a period of time when he was thinking of hanging up his guitar and getting a day job. Then R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck moved to Seattle, and before long McCaughey was pulled into the evolving R.E.M. line-up, along with the Posies' Ken Stringfellow and ex-Beck drummer Joey Waronker. Their role, McCaughey says, is somewhere between session men and full-fledged bandmembers. He and Stringfellow switch off on guitars, bass, percussion, and keyboards -- in other words, whatever instruments Buck and Mike Mills haven't already grabbed. "I feel like they don't tie down our creativity; they let us add within guidelines. If Peter or Mike has already done a demo of a song, it's very possible that Ken or I will just be learning a part. But we always get to add our own little bits, even when we're learning an old song, and it feels like a band when we're playing."

Basic tracks for the forthcoming R.E.M. album, Reveal, were done with everybody playing at once, but a few layers of overdubs were added later. "We demo'd 20 songs in Athens, basically playing live to eight-track. On a few of them Michael [Stipe] even had lyrics and melody already that he'd sing while we were tracking the song. At first I was thinking that it was going to be like Out of Time -- Peter was playing a lot of acoustic guitar, and there were drums all the way through. But now I'd say it's going to end up being a logical progression from Up -- it's pretty adventurous. Maybe a cross between that and the moody ambiance of Automatic for the People." (If that sounds scary, let me add that the new song I've heard on Napster, "She Just Wants To Be," is a gorgeous, mid-tempo pop song in the "Fall On Me" vein.)

After spending nearly two decades in his indie world, McCaughey now has a foot in both camps, touring on an indie-rock level with Young Fresh Fellows while preparing for R.E.M. to rev up later in the year. "It's a little overwhelming, but I love it. It's cool to balance the high life with R.E.M. and the `back in the van, tune your own guitars' kind of thing with the Fellows. I have to admit that I'm a little more accustomed to the R.E.M. treatment by now, but I really do like both. I like playing good music whenever I possibly can."