INTERVIEW WITH JON WURSTER FROM SUPERCHUNK
MAY 1996
This originally appeared in the Superchunk email list I used to run for the band in the late 90s, a.k.a. the Superchunk Internationalé Email List. It still lives on Here With Superchunk, the now-defunct super-Superchunk fan site. The following is an edited version of the interview - the full version can be found at http://monkey.org/~chunk/superchunk/news/interview
DaveKrinsky: Where did everyone in the band come from?
JonWurster: Jim is from Mystic, Connecticut, where Mystic Pizza was filmed. Mac is from the Ft. Lauderdale [Florida] area, but moved up near
Raleigh-Durham around age 14. Laura is from the Atlanta area. I'm from near Philadelphia. Actually, Laura may have been born here [in Chapel
Hill], then moved to Atlanta, and then back. I'm not quite sure.DK: What are your personal, musical influences?
JW: Growing up, say ages 10-13, I listened to Aerosmith and stuff like that. Around age 14, I moved into bands like the Clash and the Ramones.
In high school and for a few years after, I listened to some hard core stuff like Minor Threat, MDC, Government Issue, etc., but also a lot of
pop like 3:00, Tommy Keene, and R.E.M. My favorites were Husker Du and the Replacements. I have to say they're probably still two of my favorite
bands. I also listen to the Rolling Stones, Dylan, and some other stuff. I don't like very much current music. I do like Guided by Voices and Son Volt a whole lot. I think that, out of all of the band members, my tastes are the most middle of the road.
DK: What made you want to start drumming?
JW: It was mainly just seeing bands on TV shows like American Bandstand. I took lessons from ages 10 to 12, but I dropped that soon after. That
wasn't the kind of drumming I wanted to learn. I wanted to play the stuff I heard on records, the music I liked.
DK: How did you wind up joining Superchunk?
JW: At first I moved to Winston-Salem, which is about a hour and a half away from here, but my brother was attending grad school at UNC so I moved to Chapel Hill. I met Mac and saw him a few parties, but I had never met Jim at all. I met Laura only once--at a Danzig concert, actually. One
day, my brother told me that Mac had called, that they were having problems with their drummer. Mac was wondering if I would be interested
in drumming with them. We tried it out by playing a little bit and it worked. We played our first show a two days later! It was the Madonna-thon, a benefit for WXYC, the local radio station. The rule was that the bands could do five songs, but then they would have to do a Madonna cover, too. Jack (the original guitarist) played with us that night, so we were billed as "SuperDuperchunk."
DK: So what Madonna song did you do?
JW: Mac came out by himself and did "Shining Star" acoustic and then we all came out. Jack played on the songs he knew, but we mostly played stuff
from the first album anyway. I think the only No Pocky song we played was "Throwing Things." A week or two later, we went on a 3-week tour of
the east coast and part of the midwest. After another short break, we did a full US tour.
DK: So you had toured with the band long before you recorded with them.
JW: I toured with them pretty much just after the No Pocky album. The first thing that I recorded with the band was the "Mower" single. We went into the studio and just recorded "Mower," "On The Mouth," "Invitation," "Girl U Want," and an alternate version of "For Tension."
DK: How do you decide what covers you're going to do?
JW: Usually, we're listening to something in the van and one of us says 'that's a good song, maybe we should do that...' and then we figure out how we're going to do it. We haven't done a cover in quite a while, at least not since the time near On The Mouth. There was going to be a cover on On The Mouth that never made it. We were doing a cover of Adam and the Ants' "Beat My Guest," but it was taking us so many takes to do it - 6 or so and we usually do a song in one or two. Mike Watt was there, in the studio, that day and we were thinking: `Oh no! Now he's going to think that we can't play!'
DK: Was it ever finished?
JW: Yeah, we finished it, but we still didn't use it. Another cover we did that never got used was "Blending In" by Government Issue, which is
Jim's real vocal debut. We probably couldn't agree on what covers to do now.
DK: Does the rest of the band like listening to the bands that Superchunk has covered?
JW: Not really. Jim now hates rock. He's listening to classical music now, especially avant-garde classical.
DK: Like Philip Glass?
JW: No, it's still traditional as far as having an orchestra, but different in arrangement. I know it isn't exactly avant-garde, but he listens to Gustav Mahler a lot. One of his other main favorite is Charles Ives, but also Robert Simpson. Well, he still likes rock a bit, but is loathe to admit it. Mac listens to the 3D's, the Bats, Stereolab, GbV, and Mark Eitzel. He also listens to some jazz artists, like Bill Evans, Coltrane, Miles Davis. Out of everyone in the band, I would have to say that Mac is the biggest music fan. Laura listens to different stuff...some Latin stuff, Tito Puente-ish....some Patsy Cline....she likes the Melvins, or at least she used to. She also likes Rocket From The Crypt, Scrawl, and Cornershop. She's been playing a lot of the
Tindersticks lately, some Lambchop, too. I really only get to hear their music when we're driving the van.
DK: Who drives the van?
JW: Jim mostly, but then Laura, then Mac, then me. I don't think they really like me driving the van - I proved that early on.
DK: You got into an accident?
JW: No, nothing like that. I don't really like driving and that makes Laura really nervous. Besides, Jim would rather drive. The rest of the band likes to drive as much as I like not to, which is fine with me. I still drive every so often, but not too much.
DK: How do you decide on how to do your videos?
JW: We leave that up mostly to the director, but most of our directors are our friends as well. They usually come up with the main idea and run
it past us...they ask us what we think, if we would be comfortable doing such-and-such. We all agree on it before we do it. That's the way we
did "Driveway to Driveway" and "First Part." Those were done with two directors, Peyton Reed and Phil Morrison. They worked on both videos,
but Phil worked on "First Part" more, and Peyton did more of" Driveway." Peyton had always kind of wanted to do a takeoff on The Philadelphia Story and this was his chance to do it. We did those two videos in a two-week span. My roommate, Joe Ventura, came up with the idea for the "Hyper Enough" video, with the psychiatrist and all. Then we went to a bar with the director, Norwood Cheek, and worked the whole thing out.
DK: Perhaps you could clear up some debate - what are "Sunshine State" and "Swallow That" about?
JW: "Sunshine State" - I'm not sure about. I'm not quite sure about all the stuff Mac writes about - he's not exactly tight-lipped about it, but he wants people to get out of it whatever they want to get out of it. Once you've come up with an idea of what a song is about, the truth is usually so much less interesting that it's a let-down. I don't know about "Swallow That" either, but I do know that the chorus line, "It's just a body!", is based on how, when Mac used to pick up Laura from her place for practice, there was a big roll of carpet out in front. Every time he saw it, Mac would wonder about how there could be a body in the middle of that thing, because that's kind of what it looked like. That's where that line came from, but I don't know about the rest of the song.
DK: Do you have any particularly interesting tour or studio stories?
JW: On the first day of the "Here's Where The Strings Come In Tour," I went outside of the club in Winston-Salem, N.C., after the show. I
walked about half a block away and I was mugged at gunpoint - which isn't funny - but it was in the town that I had lived in for six years. That's
probably the most exciting story that we ever had. I was fine, I came through it okay - no trauma, so...that's that. Also, Keanu Reeves came to
see us play in Minnesota. He seemed a bit disappointed. We asked him what the problem was and he said he wished we'd played "Cut Your Hair."
As far as stories from the studio, I don't think there are any, only because we record so fast that we're hardly in there. There is one story - Jim's amp sounded awful the first day of making Foolish. We opened it up to see what was wrong and we discovered a dead rat.
DK: I was reading a copy of Raygun from last year that has a Superchunk interview of it. In it, they say that you "upped the ante on Superchunk's sex appeal." Have you read this?
JW: (chuckling) Yes.
DK: They go on to say: "With his mushroom hair and wiry build, he looks like a bedhead Ian McCulloch. He's also the quiet one..." What do you
think about press comments like that?
JW: That's the first time I've ever heard anything like that. People will think what they want to think. I suppose it's rather flattering, actually.
DK: Who do you consider to be a good drummer and/or who is a personal
influence on your drumming?
JW: My favorite drummers aren't really involved with the same `scene` we play in. The main ones are: Charly Drayton, who mainly plays bass, but
has played drums with the Replacements, Keith Richards, and the DiVinyls; Steve Jordan, who has drummed with Neil Young and Keith Richards; Levon Helm, of the Band; and Pete Thomas, who has worked with Elvis Costello. Of the harder rocking bands, I like Phil Rudd of AC/DC and Alex Van Halen. Of the younger guys, I like Atom of Rocket From The Crypt and Steve Earle, who used to be in the Afghan Whigs.
DK: What are your favorite albums?
JW: - The Clash - London Calling, Rolling Stones - Exile On Main Street, The Replacements - Pleased To Meet Me, Husker Du - Flip Your Wig, Son Volt - Trace, and The Band - Music From Big Pink.
