Pete and pals

Buck goes West with Mark Eitzel,
and a few other things

by Brett Milano

When Peter Buck hits the road with a roomful of musical pals next week, he won't be caught short for anything new to play. With R.E.M. taking a temporary break, no fewer than three albums featuring Buck have been released in the past month: the Minus Five's The Lonesome Death of Buck McCoy (Hollywood), Tuatara's Breaking the Ethers (Epic), and the gem of the batch, Mark Eitzel's West (Warner Bros.). All three acts will be part of a mix-and-match bill at the Middle East in Cambridge, with Buck on stage from start to finish.

On the surface Buck's ubiquity is nothing unusual. Before R.E.M. went platinum, he seemed to produce and/or play guitar on half the indie-rock discs made within a thousand-mile radius of Athens, Georgia. There are a few differences this time, however. He co-wrote the material on all three albums, something he's hardly done outside R.E.M. before. None of the featured players is from Athens, or even the South (Eitzel's a San Franciscan; the other two are from Buck's adopted home of Seattle). And in the past Buck has departed from the R.E.M. sound in his outside projects, choosing bands (the Replacements, Fleshtones, Drivin' & Cryin') who pushed in a rougher direction. Not the case this time, as both the Eitzel and Minus Five discs sport textured pop settings that one could imagine Michael Stipe singing over. Sometimes they even jangle.

The ringers are Tuatara, a sophisticated instrumental band with Buck as a full-fledged member alongside Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees), Justin Harwood (Luna), and saxophonist Skerik. How much you'll like it will depend on your tolerance for bachelor-pad exotica. By now there must be more bands emulating Martin Denny than R.E.M.; Tuatara's sound has a lot of the former -- plus, oddly enough, a good deal of fusion-period Gong -- and almost none of the latter. What saves them is their eclecticism -- putting sitars into a Hawaiian number and vibes into a Western one -- plus their sense of melody and groove. What's more, they respect these musical forms instead of treating them with an implied smirk à la Combustible Edison. Buck's profile here is the lowest of the three albums; he sticks mainly to bass and dulcimer, and at that he sits out a third of the tracks.

"Tuatara were already together before I joined, so they'd already delineated where it was going," he points out over the phone. "But honestly, if I were going to form a rock band, it would be a second-rate version of what my band [i.e., R.E.M.] already does. What I do with my band is on a high level and pretty pleasurable for me, so I can't imagine doing another rock record." Will getting back to clubs be a relief after the huge venues of the last R.E.M. tour? "Each situation has good things about it. It's hard to deny that it's a thrill when there's 20,000 people in the audience going insane -- it's more a celebration, everyone's there. And my band always tries to work in new material and rearrange things, so it's not a greatest-hits show.

"For this tour, the offers we've had have all been for 1000-seat-type places, and as long as we're going out at that level, let's play some clubs and let everyone see us sweat. We'll have the band on stage all night and let people take turns singing. We won't do any set changes; that would seem too arbitrary."

The Minus Five are a loose-knit outfit built around Buck and Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows Leader and R.E.M. sideman). On their first album, Old Liquidator (quietly released two years ago on ESD), the supporting cast included the two main Posies and half of NRBQ. On the new disc it's the Posies again plus Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices), and Chris Ballew (Presidents of the USA).

The debut's set-up allowed McCaughey to write songs that were less obviously pop and more overtly depressing than anything he did for the Fellows. With that band defunct and the Minus Five moving to a larger label, he's lightened the approach somewhat. He's still wrestling with depression and self-doubt, but now his lyrics are leavened by gallows humor ("I've been to purgatory, it was pretty nice/And I might try it again") and by a strong shot of pop melody -- the above-quoted "Wouldn't Want To Care" finds Buck stealing a Beatles lick in the chorus. That's not the only Fab Four echo on this album, whose production takes Magical Mystery Tour as an apparent model -- piling on layers of weird-but-warm sounds to frame McCaughey's appealingly self-conscious vocals. This happens even on the one cover, "My Mummy's Dead." It's the most miserable song in John Lennon's catalogue, but here it's wrapped in such a lovely psychedelic swirl that you might not notice.

Making depression sound seductive is also Mark Eitzel's specialty, and West may be his most seductive album yet -- unlike last year's too-loungy 40 Watt Silver Lining, it proves he can make superior pop without his former band, American Music Club. Less rootsy than an AMC album, West brings Eitzel close to the Burt Bacharach groove that he's always admired from afar. There's some R.E.M. in here too, but it's mostly left-field R.E.M. ("Old Photographs" has the droning intensity of "Country Feedback"). Perhaps because the songs were written in a hurry, Eitzel lets a non-tragic love song ("Free from Harm") slip through. And Buck makes the album sound as if it were coming from the dim-lit barrooms that Eitzel sings about: you can hear the brushes hit the drums, and he's left out the layers of echo that earlier producers put on Eitzel's voice. There are even some uplifting moments, provided that "I got a fresh screwdriver, just before closing time" is your idea of an epiphany. But when Eitzel succumbs to melancholia, as he does on the waltz-timed "Stunned & Frozen," he remains one of the finest whiners in rock.

The real fun begins when you ask Eitzel about his king-of-pain image. "I never created that image, other people did," he explains over the phone. "Maybe it's because I don't have a chin. But that idea is such a bore. And it's making me real depressed and gloomy. In fact, you know that comet that's going by? Well, there's a UFO behind it, and . . . " [Yes, the Heaven's Gate suicides had taken place just two days earlier.] I change the subject for propriety's sake, but Eitzel's on a roll. "You know what's depressing? Not my fucking record. What's depressing is all those poor fuckers who get on TV and say, `Do it, girl. If you really want something you'll get it.' That's pathetic, the fact that people who exercise and eat all the right foods are as fucked up as I am. That does it; from now on I have a new image as a curmudgeon."

As for the bar and alcohol references that pop up on West even more often than usual: "People through the ages have been writing about bars; if prostitution is the first big industry, then drinking is the second. They might be romantic or scary places for some people, but not for the rest of us who are just your commonplace drunks."

The West sessions happened pretty much by accident. Buck went to San Francisco to add bass overdubs to an album that Eitzel had nearly finished (that album, bearing the brilliant Elvis-derived title Caught in a Trap, I Can't Walk Out, Because I Love You Too Much Baby, will be out on Matador later this year). Instead, they wrote a dozen songs in three days; Buck then alerted Tuatara and booked studio time in Seattle. "Peter's from a whole different school of thought than I am," Eitzel says. "I'm always saying, `Let's make this as difficult and obscure as possible.' And Peter says, `Let's make a pop record.' "

Could the album be his long-hoped-for hit? "No, my career was over the minute I broke AMC up. Everybody still hates me for that." Buck, on the other hand, is more upbeat. "I wanted there to be two or three really poppy things to please the record company. But some of the weirder things on the album are really my favorites. There was no plan whatsoever when we started; we did the whole thing in seven days and finished at six in the morning. Then I made sure I sent copies to the high-up people at Warner Bros. They want the album to sell, and they're pretty happy for Mark's sake."

Meanwhile, what of R.E.M.? When we talked, Buck was about to meet with his bandmates, laying plans for the next album. "We've got tons of stuff on tape, so I think we're going to do something relatively quickly. We'll do some demos and talk about what we want to do in the immediate future. I personally am not all that interested in electric guitar at this moment; you go on tour and come back thinking, `Well, I've done that.' So I can't say what kind of album it's going to be, but I know what kind it won't be -- and it's obvious what every other band is going to do this year, it's going to be a Beck thing. I like the Beck record, but there aren't any bridges on it; it's all loops and samples -- you don't have to sample James Brown records, you can do it yourself. I know that the Rolling Stones are in the studio with [Beck producers] the Dust Brothers right now. That's real good reason for us not to do it." n

Peter Buck, Mark Eitzel, the Minus 5, and Tuatara play the Middle East this Tuesday, May 27. Call (617) 864-EAST.