Brightest Young Things

Twenty years after Slumberland Records unveiled its debut release upon an unsuspecting indie rock world (a humble, three-song 7” compilation called “What Kind of Heaven Do You Want?”, featuring cuts by Velocity Girl, Black Tambourine, and Powderburns), the label not only continues to thrive, but has hit a newfound peak in popularity, influence and critical recognition.

Bands such as The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Crystal Stilts, Sexy Kids, Sic Alps and Pants Yell! are just a handful of Slumberland acts that have set the indie blogosphere aflutter with excitement this year. The label’s commitment to quality, fuzzy guitar pop is so widely known by now, it’s almost a given that each new release will incite the requisite use of glowing superlatives from cooler-than-thou, mega-music tastemakers such as Pitchfork and Stereogum. In short, if you are looking to up the quality of your current music collection or really want to impress that ultra-hip guy or gal you’ve been ogling, look no further than procuring some titles from the Slumberland Records back catalog.

Even better, take that cute guy or gal to the Black Cat this Friday evening for what promises to be a very special 20th Anniversary Slumberland show featuring indie pop heroes from the label’s past and present. The full line-up is a once-in-a-blue-moon chance of seeing Slumberland artists both old and new: Label newbies such as Crystal Stilts, Brown Recluse, Pants Yell!, Frankie Rose & the Outs (that’s Frankie formerly of Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts btw) will be playing on the same bill as reunited veterans The Ropers, Nord Express, and Lorelei. With the label’s roots being firmly tied to the DC area (led by Mike Schulman, the label was founded by a close group of University of Maryland friends and has released a number of recordings featuring DC artists over the years), this show has particular resonance for local music fans.

To mark this most special of occasions for the label, BYT wanted to investigate Slumberland's history further.

IN SEQUELS NO LESS (who ever saw 20 years fit into one post, anyway?)

For part 1 of our special feature on Slumberland, we spoke with multi-instrumentalist Dan Searing, a man who has played in a number of Slumberland acts (including Big Jesus Trash Can/Whorl, The Glo-Worms, The Castaway Stones and The Saturday People) and played a key role in the label’s formation. Read on!

BYT: For a lot of people, myself included, the origins of Slumberland are a little hazy. What do you remember about meeting Mike Schulman and how the bands and label came about?

Dan: Well, I met Mike my freshman year of college at the University of Maryland. A friend of mine, who I knew from high school and traded tapes with, was living in a different section of the dorms, and said, ‘You’ve got to meet this guy! He’s so amazing. He’s into the best music.’ And so my friend introduced us.

I remember part of my initial conversation with Mike was about Scottish music. I told him I was listening to a lot of it and he said, ‘Great! Me too.’ And we were talking about––not completely different sections of Scottish music, but I was thinking of The Blue Nile and a couple other groups. Mike was talking about the indie pop that was coming out at the time and its immediate predecessors––bands like The Shop Assistants and Orange Juice. He was so deeply into music…just incredibly well versed and connected, particularly with both key aspects of the indie scene at the time: the jangly indie pop side and then the kind of noisy post-punk stuff. And I was excited by those sounds as well.

BYT: So at that point, were either one of you playing in bands yet?

Dan: No, neither of us had really started to play music. I’m not sure how much of what we eventually did was in Mike’s imagination at the time. I know Mike had a high school friend who played guitar and they might have jammed a little, I’m not sure. But I certainly had not done anything at all musically outside some piano lessons here and there as a kid.

Our friend Rob Goldrick, who is in Nord Express, had been at the University of Maryland a year before and he and Mike had become good friends. And around that time, they had started to record some demos––this was in fall of ‘86 or spring of ’87. They invited me to join them one evening to just kind of mess around with some instruments, seeing what kind of sounds we could make, and that was the beginning of what eventually became Big Jesus Trash Can, later to be renamed Whorl.

I invited my friend Brian Nelson to join us, who had been a close friend of mine in high school, and someone who I shared a lot of musical taste with. He was at Frostburg at the time. So he would drive down from there for practice and he eventually also became a member of Black Tambourine and Velocity Girl.

BYT: How did things develop from there?

Dan: It was an interesting progression. We started out as a very improvisational, noise-industrial kind of group, with very little musical skill but we had a lot of ideas and a passion for making music and just seeing what we could do. And gradually, as we became better at playing, we got more into doing song-oriented things. We were very excited by being able to play someone else’s song because that was part of our development. We did a couple covers, including “Rocket U.S.A. ” by Suicide, and eventually we did Galaxy 500’s version of “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste,” which is a Jonathan Richman song. We gradually started to incorporate some of the indie pop elements that we were originally inspired by into the kind of noisier mix of things.

By then, Black Tambourine existed, Velocity Girl existed, Mike Schulman had also started to play in a band called Powderburns, which was sort of a contemporary noisy-type group inspired by Big Black and Head of David, using a drum machine, lots of feedback and guitar, things like that. And we had all sort of made that transition from being intense music fans to being in bands and playing shows. The logical next step was to put out records. Of course, there was a fantastic scene at the time of indie 7 inches both from the U.K. and the U.S. so the logical next step was to do that. So the first release on the Slumberland was the “What Kind of Heaven Do You Want?” compilation 7 inch. The second release was the first Whorl single.

BYT: Apart from K Records, it doesn’t seem like there were many notable U.S. indie labels at that time putting out that kind of music. I would think Slumberland really stood out from the pack when it put out these releases…or am I wrong about that?

Dan: No, I don’t think you are at all. I think the timing was really good because there was definitely a burgeoning scene…the next wave of music after hardcore punk, which kind of paved the way for a lot of DIY in the U.S. There was a lot of interesting kind of post-punk type of music being released via indie labels; post-punk in the sense of a little bit more noisy, a little bit more aggressive, and coming from a different branch of the tree than the U.K. indie pop that we were so inspired by. And yeah, there was very little of that in the U.S. at the time. Slumberland was an interesting kind of fusion of those two things. Because we had noisy groups like Big Jesus Trash Can/Whorl and Powderburns but then we had a pop-oriented style of music too, albeit still pretty noisy at times, like Black Tambourine and Velocity Girl.

I can only think of a handful of groups with similar sounds that we would find through whatever sources we had. It wasn’t as easy to find music back then because we didn’t have the internet. We found the stuff by reading fanzines and writing letters and pouring over mail order catalogs and haunting the local record shops. Eventually Mike started working at Vinyl Inc. in Silver Spring, which was one of the best independent record stores in the area. And Archie Moore, who was in Velocity Girl and Black Tambourine, worked for some time at Yesterday and Today Records, probably one of the other significant stores in the Maryland side of the suburbs. That helped a lot too to have people who worked at these stores so they could see what was coming in and know what was out.

BYT: When I working at this year’s WFMU Record Fair, I met this one record dealer from North Virginia who was telling me about what Vinyl Inc. was like before and after Mike Schulman started to work there. He basically said that Mike “hip-ified” that store (laugh). Before he started working there, you were hard-pressed to find the cool indie singles that were storming the U.K. underground. But then Mike came in and suddenly the store was stocked with all these really amazing import independent releases. Apparently he made that place his own.

Dan: He made a fantastic contribution to the store. George, the owner, and his wife, who ran the store, were huge music fans. I’m not sure how much older George was, but he was about a generation older than us and he had a broader musical taste that came from kind of a different background. But Mike has always been so incredibly focused and voracious in his efforts to find the best and most interesting music of the type that interests him. I’ve never met anyone, well, very few people––Mark Williams is another (ed note: Mark Williams is the driving force behind three of DC's very best monthly dj nights: Taking the Piss, Soundclash and Procedure)––with that kind of focus, and that made Mike a really great asset to the record store. And it’s why he’s been so successful at Slumberland. He’s constantly out there, looking for the next great band or the next great record. And he was a great salesman at Vinyl Inc. too! I never failed to leave there with a completely empty wallet (laughs). Every time I went in, he’d just play stuff that would make my palms sweat, you know? I just had to have it! A lot of my record collection I owe to that period when he was working there.

BYT: Obviously, the Slumberland aesthetic is quite different from the kind of punk rock DC’s underground music scene has long been associated with. What do you remember about the kind of reception that the label and the bands got in DC in the early 90s?

Dan: Well, this brings me back to something I did want to touch on before. At the time that Slumberland started, there might not have been that much stuff going on in the U.S. and DC specifically that was like what we were doing, but I think as things progressed, we kind of grew to have a lot more in common with other local labels like Simple Machines and Teen Beat than some people may realize.

If you look at the back catalog of those labels, there’s a lot of different stuff and there’s certainly bands that had to be on Simple Machines, or they had to be on Teen Beat or Slumberland. But there’s a lot of overlap too, in terms of inspiration and aesthetic. Those labels were all kind of a similar generation of coming after Dischord, whose influence always looms large on any kind of discussion about independent music in DC. And certainly, we all really liked a lot of the Dischord music. Rites of Spring were a huge inspiration to me. Brian Nelson and I listened to that record together a lot. I know Mike had seen Minor Threat at the 9:30 Club. We definitely drew inspiration from that, but we were also pretty conscious of doing something pretty different as well. I think the DIY aesthetic was the most important connection for us but the motivation was also pretty similar. To do something new and interesting and inspired by the things that moved us.

We were also lucky to get support from some really key places too, such as DC Space. We got regular bookings there. Cynthia Connolly, who was doing the booking then, was really kind to us. I’d like to think she recognized there was something cool and different going on about the Slumberland bands. We were very appreciative of having that support. It eventually led to many of the groups being able to open for out-of-town groups at the 9:30 Club. Slumberland also collaborated with Simple Machines and Teen Beat on putting on the Lotsa Pop Losers festival at DC Space. That was a series of shows featuring indie bands from DC and all over the place.

BYT: You played in a few bands with Black Tambourine vocalist Pam Berry, who also co-founded the indie zine Chickfactor. What can you tell me about her contributions to the label and the 90s indie pop scene in general?

Dan: She was obviously such a huge factor in terms of the overall impact of Black Tambourine. Ironically enough, when Brian, Archie and Mike started playing together in Black Tambourine, Pam was living abroad in London. It was intended for her to be part of the group, to come back and become the singer, but part of the reason that song on the first single is an instrumental is because Pam was out of the country when they recorded it (ed: the title of the track in question, “Pam’s Tan,” may suggest what the singer was focused on while she was living in England). And then she came back and they started integrating her singing and lyrics into the songs they had been working on. As they say, the rest is history.

I was thrilled when she and Terry Banks invited me to play with them in Glo-Worm because I hadn’t been doing anything regular musically since Whorl had broken up. And I was Black Tambourine’s number 1 fan. I think I’m the only person that has seen all their live performances. I consider myself very lucky. And I was also excited to do something a bit different…some more pop-oriented indie stuff.

But Pam is just an incredible networker and she has a tremendous energy for the things that she’s into doing, which is similarly powerful to what Mike Schulman brings to his efforts. And so, she was a great partner for Gale O’Hara with Chickfactor because she was just great at networking with people. She was involved with so many bands because she got so many offers and she just didn’t want to say no. Not because she had trouble saying no, but she had so many opportunities to collaborate with so many interesting people. From The Shapiros to Cat’s Meow…I think she produced a pretty incredible body of work.

BYT: Your name is on a number of Slumberland releases as well. Is there one that you are especially proud of in hindsight?

Dan: Well, The Saturday People album is a huge accomplishment from my perspective. I felt so great to be a part of it because I was working with Pam Berry, Terry Banks, Greg Pavlovcak, and Archie Moore, who, at the time, was working at Omega Studios in Rockville, one of the biggest and most well-equipped studios in the area. And by virtue of his working there, we got to have access to the space quite frequently, during off hours and things, at a very reasonable cost. And then the album further benefitted from Archie putting in a tremendous amount of work with mixing and tweaking it, and doing overdubs.

So it was really fun to get to have a long time to work on a record when so many of the other recordings I had been a part of were either done on the cheap in somebody’s basement or at a regular studio where you had to be in and out in a short amount of time because the budget was tight. And that was really, really great.

That’s not to take anything away from any of the other stuff that I was involved in, but I think that album turned out really well. I think the songs are great. Terry and Greg were great collaborators, each contributing interesting things to the other songs. It’s fun to be in a band with multiple songwriting voices. We got a fantastic cover design as well and Mike put out a wonderful vinyl edition of the record which looks really good.

BYT: I also wanted to ask you about what’s happening in the current indie scene. There seems to be an emergence of young bands, particularly from Brooklyn, that seem to basically wear their affections for the Slumberland label on their sleeves. And in some cases, Mike himself has signed some of these bands and put out records by them. But what do you think about the fact that you’ve got a number of bands that are clearly looking back and drawing influence from Black Tambourine and other Slumberland bands from back in the day?

Dan: I think it’s mindboggling and very exciting. And it shows how cyclical music can be. Part of what I find hard to wrap my head around is when we were getting excited about listening to Biff Bang Pow! in the mid-80s, that band was drawing inspiration from 60s bands like The Byrds and Love. Now there are bands looking back at Black Tambourine nearly 20 years later. I can understand the math but it’s still sort of hard to wrap my head around it.

At the time, none of us could have predicted that, or even have hoped for, the influence that particularly Black Tambourine would have on some of these contemporary groups. It was lucky that the singles that were gobbled up by the eager fans at the time and put out in limited releases were successfully reissued. And then the music was out there for people to find. And of course it’s a lot easier to find music these days because of the incredible power of the internet. That’s the biggest sea change that’s happened in the years between since we first started making this music.

But the opportunity to do that in the 80s...it was a different scene then than it was in the 60s. Although in the 60s, there were tons and tons of small independent groups doing things as well...the Nuggets style thing. So hopefully that sort of thing will always be there. The music is out there for people to find and it’s just a click away. There’s more out there than ever before to be inspired by.

It’s poetic justice that Slumberland is getting the opportunity to release groups that were inspired by some of the music that the label put out in the first place. The fact that the label is still going strong is a testament to Mike really sticking with it, even through periods of inactivity. Now the label is stronger than ever and the catalog and the legacy is still growing.

BYT: And it also seems like the label is getting more critical recognition than it ever has.

Dan: I think there’s a lot to be said for sticking to your guns. And the longer you do something, the more likely you will have people recognize you for what you do.

Certainly, the audiences at the Black Tambourine shows I attended were a lot smaller than the audiences at the last Pains of Being Heart show or the most recent Crystal Stilts show I saw. I think it’s exciting that the music that’s being made now that’s inspired by the indie pop of the 80s at least in large part is finding a wider audience.

BYT: What are your thoughts on Friday’s big show?

Dan: I’m really excited about it. There’s so many interesting acts on the bill. It’s hard to say which bands I’m looking forward to seeing the most. Some of my favorite bands like Nord Express and The Ropers will be playing together again. And then there’s the chance to see new Slumberland acts that I haven’t seen yet...Brown Recluse is one that I’m really interested to see. And then of course I think we have to give credit to Lorelei. They’re really kind of bookending the whole thing by having reformed a few years back and being so active again. They’ve got a whole new set of material.

BYT: And judging by the quality of the new songs in their live show, their forthcoming new album is going to be something really special.

Dan: Yeah, I think it’s going to be great. They’re working really hard on it.

BYT: Any final thoughts?

Dan: Just one more thing about Friday’s show: I’m hoping that some of the people who are excited by the current crop of bands will come out to see some of where it came from and celebrate what’s still going on.

BYT: Amen brother. And thanks very much for taking the time to share your thoughts. I really appreciate it.

Dan: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. Cheers!

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 COMING SOON