American Stars & Bars

Joe Pernice comes down from Scud Mountain with a pure pop record that echoes the classics

by Peter Blackstock

It’s South by Southwest weekend in Austin, Texas, the year’s biggest gathering of up-and-coming musical acts, with more than 800 artists crammed into three dozen or so clubs, bars, coffeehouses and parking lots over a five-day stretch. Daytime parties and in-stores make it easy to do nothing but see live music from the moment you rise at the crack o’noon (this is the music industry, after all) to that final after-hours party at 4 a.m.

So how does Joe Pernice plan to bide his time on Saturday?

He’s going fishing.

"It’s great, it’s very relaxing," Pernice enthuses of his favorite pastime. "It’s completely solitary, which is really nice."

Indeed, solitude is a refuge we all must seek out at certain times. For Pernice, who spent the mid-’90s with the countrified pop band Scud Mountain Boys, the need to be out on his own has carried over into musical pursuits as well. After three albums with the Scuds that focused on a lo-fi, minimalist approach, Pernice found himself hankering to make a record that more fully explored the possibilities of the studio.

"To me, recording a record and playing live have always been two different things," Pernice begins, attempting to get to the heart of what led to the dissolution of his former band. "When we made the Scud Mountain Boys records, there were things I would’ve done differently – not a lot, but, I would have liked to experiment musically with some more instruments. And there was always the sentiment that we shouldn’t do it if we can’t play it live – which is limiting, in a way. So, I wanted to go into the studio and make the record I wanted to make."

He’s done just that with Overcome By Happiness, due out May 19 on Sub Pop under the name Pernice Brothers. (Lest fans suspect the new moniker is some sort of Palace-inspired in-joke, Pernice explained that his older brother Bob does indeed play guitar and sing on the record, though family and work commitments will prevent him from touring with the band.)

While there’s an instantly identifiable connection between the Pernice Brothers and Scud Mountain Boys records – Pernice, after all, wrote and sang lead on almost all the Scuds’ original material – Overcome By Happiness is clearly a different animal. Piano often replaces guitar as the primary instrument around which a song is based, and several tunes are strengthened by a soaring, swelling string section. Overall, it’s much more stridently and overtly pop than the Scud Mountain Boys were.

"I think I definitely like pop music – whatever ‘pop music’ is – more than the other guys," Pernice allows. "Like, Bruce [Tull, the Scuds’ steel guitarist] was a great player, but he wanted to play pedal steel on every song, and sometimes I’m thinking, ‘I wanna write a piano ballad.’ He had pretty well-set ideas of things, and I wanted to experiment more."

The greatest manifestation of that experimentation on Overcome By Happiness is undoubtedly the addition of strings, which burst forth in full orchestral swoon on an instrumental coda to the opening track, "Crestfallen", and continue to be a significant presence throughout the record. "We triple-tracked the quartet, that’s why it sounds gigantic," Pernice explains. "They were players from a symphony in Hartford. We went through the union and got some real pros. And the horn players as well."

Conducting and arranging the orchestral passages was Mike Deming, who co-produced the album with Pernice and bassist Thom Monahan. Both Deming and Monahan had made guest appearances on Massachusetts, the Scuds’ final album, which came out on Sub Pop in 1996. (In 1997, Sub Pop reissued Pine Box and Dance The Night Away, both of which originally came out on Chunk Records in 1995, as a two-disc set retitled The Early Year.)

The downside to recording with symphony players, as the Scuds’ credo pointed out, is that it’s difficult to re-create such grandeur in a live setting (unless you have the stature of, say, Ray Price, who brought nine violinists onstage with him at his South by Southwest showcase). "If the money was there, or in select towns or something, I’d love to have a quartet come in, or maybe even just one violin and a cello or something," Pernice says. "That could happen at some point. But I don’t think that I want to get into using a sampler or a synthesizer to do strings; I’d much rather leave ’em off than do that."

Indeed, Pernice stresses that the lush and fleshed-out sound of the new record was not a product of MIDIs and drum machines. "Outside from a few passages in one song, every instrument, every note, is created by the hands of people; it’s all human beings playing all the instruments," he says. "It’s still flawed at times, because I’ll never be able to play in time, and I’ll always sing a little flat."

Despite Pernice’s own-worst-critic appraisal, his singing is unquestionably one of the most compelling aspects of his music, a high tenor voice that realizes the richly melodic potential of his songwriting. At times, it brings to mind Art Garfunkel, and while Pernice is ultimately not quite in the same league as that legendary choirboy, there’s more than a little common ground between the two artists. For instance, the song on Overcome By Happiness in which Pernice’s voice most noticeably recalls Garfunkel’s is called "All I Know" – a Pernice original, but coincidentally, carrying the same title as Garfunkel’s first solo hit single back in 1973.

In fact, Pernice recalls, "I actually submitted a song to him a few years ago. One of the industry magazines said he was looking for songs, so I submitted a tape. But I don’t even know if he ever heard it; probably not."

The writer of Garfunkel’s 1973 "All I Know" hit is another of Pernice’s primary influences: Jimmy Webb, writer of "Wichita Lineman", "MacArthur Park", "Galveston" and several other classics. (The Scud Mountain Boys covered "Wichita Lineman" and Webb’s "Where’s The Playground Susie" on their first and second albums, respectively.)

"We were thinking Webb on a lot of the string arrangements for this record," Pernice acknowledges, and later he reveals that "I did just write a song I want to record for my next record that’s my tribute to Jimmy Webb."

Other moments on Overcome By Happiness reveal connections to other classic pop tunesmiths. A 1-1/2 minute snippet titled "Sick Of You" has a distinct "Close To You" vibe about it; Pernice readily admits having a soft spot for the Carpenters and Burt Bacharach. And then there’s "Wait To Stop", which sounds like one of Brian Wilson’s long-lost outtakes from the height of the Beach Boys’ purest pop phase.

Pernice says that song actually grew more out of a fascination with Alex Chilton – which brings up the flip side of Pernice’s palette. As much as he has been influenced by ’60s classicists such as Webb and Wilson, he also lives in the here and now, and the calling cards of more contemporary writers are apparent as well (though probably on a more subconscious level). The opening track – at least before its string-laden coda kicks in – is akin to the irrepressible pop smarts of Freedy Johnston, while the melancholy closer "Ferris Wheel" sounds like a page from the Mark Eitzel songbook.

Lyrically, Pernice definitely falls more in line with the modern crowd than with the old school; indeed, he suspects that one reason submitting a song to Garfunkel was such a longshot is that "sometimes I think my songs could get a little too grotesque for the mainstream." He’s probably right: The simple sentiments of "Close To You" are more likely to connect with the masses than, say, the Overcome By Happiness track "Chicken Wire", which deals with a friend who committed suicide by breathing car exhaust fumes.

And then there’s the matter of a new song he’s written about Bjorn Borg, the Swedish tennis star who won five straight Wimbledon titles in the late ’70s. Bjorn Borg?

"Oh, I think he’s a great character," Pernice says, brimming with an enthusiasm for the subject that reveals much about the off-kilter nature of his lyrical inspirations. "Here was a guy at the height of it all – and I’m not really sure of his mental wellness at the time, I think he had some issues – but he was at the height of his powers, and then the love of it, the passion of the thing that always meant a great deal to him, just sort of died away. And he dropped out. I mean, how many times in life do you reach that kind of pinnacle of whatever it is you’re doing? It’s an intriguing kind of American theme."

Even though Borg was…"Swedish? Yeah." Well, okay.

There is, to be sure, a certain fascination with his home country’s culture that drives Pernice’s expression. When discussing exactly what kind of music he has created on this new record, he suggests at one point that it’s "American. Just American."

It’s not, however, Americana – a big-top tent under which the Scud Mountain Boys’ music fell, and where Pernice will probably take up at least partial residence initially simply by previous association. But there’s really nothing countrified about Overcome By Happiness. Not that that matters one whit to him.

"I have a real hard time with figuring out what kind of music is what," Pernice says. Ultimately, I suggest, his new record is just pure and simple pop. "It all comes out of melody," he acknowledges. "I think strong melodies are common in all the music I like, no matter what it is, really."

That leaves him a potentially difficult path to follow in today’s musical environment, where classic pop doesn’t really have a home anymore. A style of music once literally defined by the word "popular," it’s now lost amidst an ever-fragmenting musical marketplace littered with genres and sub-genres as far as the ear can hear.

Then again, such matters are beyond the artist’s reach. "I don’t have much concern with that, because, if I were going to be on a giant major label that was gonna pump a ton of money into a giant radio campaign, then it would happen," he says with a laugh. "They would do that, and then that’s why it would get played, not because it fits into any type of format. If they choose to do it, they’ll break it.…So you’ve just got to follow your instincts and play the kind of music you want to play, and make the records with integrity. I really believe that.

"It would really depress me to be insincere about playing music. You know, it’s hard to go on tour, and if I was doing something I didn’t like, it would even make it worse. And for what – the chance to make a lot of money? If I wanted to be unhappy, I could go work at a bank, and make a lot more money, and have a lot more free time. So, if you think it through – if you really think it through – it doesn’t make sense to do it any other way."

Though a self-confessed Jimmy Webb nut with over 600 versions of Webb-penned songs in his record collection, ND co-editor Peter Blackstock has never been so obsessive as to actually write a song in tribute to the man. Yet.