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 BREEDERS’ drummer JOSE MENDELES has a pretty good ethos – “at this stage, if you didn’t embrace everything you wouldn’t be around”. EVELYN HENDRICKSEN takes his advice, and appeals to the youth to do the same.
You’d have to be a bit of an indie ignoramus (or as I discovered, just born after 1985) to not be aware of The Breeders … something I struck all too keenly when a recent visitor to the office looked at me blankly when asked, ‘But you know who The Pixies are … right?’.
Seemingly not.
And so it was with somewhat deflated spirits that I set about explaining the significance of Kim Deal to not only my musical development – but the world’s! Ok ‘world’ is perhaps a moot point, (besides who wants to be responsible for shaping a few billion people’s tastes?), but there is no denying the impact Kim, alongside sister Kelley, has had on this scribe’s musical meanderings, and no doubt many others. So when the opportunity to interview someone – anyone - from The Breeders came up I latched onto it. Hoping, wishing, praying I may indeed get a chance to hear that broad Ohioan inflection down the line.
Well, I did get some Midwestern inflection, but not from the source I was hoping – turns out Breeders drummer Jose Mendeles is from Illinois, and from the leafy surrounds of a truck stop in Ashville, North Carolina, he was more than happy to shoot the breeze with an aging indie fangirl in Brisbane, Australia – after all, I really should take the man’s advice and embrace everything!
Initially being recommended to Kim by a friend after the loss of ex-Guided By Voices sticksman Jim MacPherson, Jose boarded the good ship Breeders recording 2002’s ‘comeback’ LP Title TK.
“I joined like eight months before we recorded Title TK and I was referred through a friend of a friend,” Jose explains an oft heard tale of band meets boy. “To make a long story short, basically it was how anybody would join a garage band. Like ‘hey my friend plays drums you should get together with him he’s pretty cool’ like ‘no way? They play music too?!’ So we just got together and yeah, and I never left!”
Never leaving? Or more like hanging out in the elastic recording and touring entity? With the ‘reformation’ of The Pixies in 2004 many pundits believed the band was popped on the backburner as those indie-kings who never got their just deserts finally toured the globe (you know, cause Kim was/is in The Pixies…)
“It wasn’t like we completely stopped when she started up The Pixies,” Jose clarifies. Kim had moved back to Dayton, Ohio to care for her ailing parents – and so the band essentially moved with her whenever they needed to record. Recordings that soon became their brilliantly spacious and tingly new album Mountain Battles.
“Whenever she would be home from a break I would fly to Dayton and we would work on music. So it was this continuing working process. It wasn’t like ‘okay guys I’ll see you in three years or four years’. She was always working on music and Mando [Lopez, bass] and I would always fly out to, you know, work on stuff. It was great to still work on Breeder music between all the time that we had.”
But shifting the recording from Los Angeles to the comparatively smalltown Dayton. Could this seriously work?
“It was really a breath of fresh air to be honest with you. When we’d go there all we’d have to do would be work on music because there was no scheduling to work around … where in Los Angeles there was always a schedule to work around. But when we flew into Dayton to work on music for seven days, we would hang out and work on music for seven days with little distractions. So less distractions I think is a smart way to put it. The main difference? I personally thought it was much more relaxed, we weren’t in a rehearsal room in LA. We were in Kim’s basement. In the middle of a cool little neighbourhood, you know with trees and snow.”
"I personally thought it was much more relaxed, we weren’t in a rehearsal room in LA. We were in Kim’s basement. In the middle of a cool little neighbourhood, you know with trees and snow"
Trees and snow; pretty. And obviously conducive to creative tendencies. But how much input does Jose get when playing in Kim’s basement?
“The core of every song comes from Kim,” Jose offers. Shedding more light by explaining: “She’ll have these really cool parts guitar parts or vocal parts and then you know Kelley will contribute some really great ideas and then a lot of times Kim will have an idea for the drum part already or I’ll go in and put down a whole bunch of ideas and see if she likes one of them that suits the song.
“Then [we’ll] sing with Mando. He’ll throw in his bassline and his movements. So it’s definitely Kim’s baby and we just try to get it to where she likes it a lot. It’s pretty basic how we do it. We don’t go into a rehearsal room and just jam you know? Like how a band will just get together and jam? There’s no zen of us just performing and saying ‘wow that was fantastic’. There’s not a whole lot of that. It’s very planned out. It’s very ‘you know we have to work on that’ and we do until we get it.”
Currently showing Kim’s new baby off to the world, Australia gets its chance to go ga-ga next month, and turning our attention to their forthcoming (and sold out) appointment at The Zoo, it is with some relish that I remember Kim ambling around The Arena stage back in 2003, checking her gear, parachute pants ‘whoosh-whoosh-whooshing’ as she went.
We may not see the pants this time around, but a capacity venue ensures the The Zoo will still hear a raucous crowd trying to drown out the Deal sisters’ beautiful harmonics … they just may be of the more established generation. Though, I do hope I am wrong.
Clarification: I am sure there are young people who are aware of the existence of The Breeders and The Pixies (hell, why on earth are you even reading this if you’re not?). It’s just alarming when you meet a growing number that don’t.
THE BREEDERS play The Zoo Mon Aug 4 [sold out]. MOUNTAIN BATTLES is available on Remote Control/4AD. Be schooled in all things Kim and Kelley at www.breedersdigest.net or www.noaloha.com
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