This is a Craig Wedren interview that I conducted on December 7th, 2000 at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City.B: Ok… first and foremost. I hope you’re not tired of hearing this question, but how’s your health?
W: My health is great. I had Hodgkin’s Disease, which is a lymphatic cancer. For which I underwent about nine months of treatment. I’ve been in remission for 4 and a half years. Once I hit the five year mark, the doctors sort of deem it a cure. Although there’s always a sort of proclivity towards those types of illnesses once you’ve undergone that type of treatment, so… it kills it, but it also kills a lot of good stuff. But, you know, I feel great.
B: Good.
W: I certainly consider myself blessed.
B: Before I get into the new band – are you calling it “Baby”? I had seen you at Brownies a little while ago when you said you were considering calling the band “Baby.”
W: I think it’s just Craig Wedren. “Baby” had been a name that had been tumbling around in my head for a long time… it was something that sounded more infinitely universal than Shudder to Think. And more pronounceable than Craig Wedren. I wanted something that was a little more “boom.” But having said that, and having tried it out, I think I’m just going to call everything I do by my name. If people have a hard time pronouncing it, and remembering it, then I’m the worse for it.
B: So you’ve been recording stuff?
W: Oh yeah. I’ve been recording… well, I mean, I’m always writing. I’ve been PROPERLY recording from about February through August at my apartment. A year ago, I was hired to do music for a T.V.Show called “Wonderland.”
B: The Peter Berg show?
W: Yeah. A short-lived, but pretty intense outing.
B: How’d that happen?
W: A friend of mine was music supervising it, who supervised the movie “High Art.” And she said I have this great T.V. show that we should work on. It’ll be fun.
B: So this is that whole Dolly Hall crew (a prominent producer in the NYC independent film world) ?
W: Yeah. Well, this was a different segment of that, but still sort of “all in the family.” So she called me up, said “I have this great project, we should work on it together, it’ll be great… really cool people, really cool show, but… ABC… blah blah.” It was my first foray into mainstream T.V., to be sure. And one I will never forget. But one I hope to live down.
B: Really?
W: It wasn’t awful, it was certainly educational. I loved the show, and I really liked a lot of the people involved… but it was such culture shock for me. Because of the sheer speed and velocity with which they wanted things – but they weren’t sure quite what they wanted.
B: Of course.
W: Though I know I didn’t help matters much. ‘Cause I’m accustomed to much more collaborative – you know, when I’m working with a director, there’s got to be some interplay so that I can understand what the tone of the piece is going to be.
B: And it WAS like that with the “First Love, Last Rites” thing?
W: Oh, yeah… and with the movie I just finished that David Wain from “The State” just finished making, with a lot of other people from The State. It’s fucking hilarious. It’s so good. It’s called “Wet Hot American Summer.” And it’s about the last day of summer camp in 1981.
B: Wow. Sold. So you scored that?
W: Yeah. I co-scored it with a friend of mine who also did music for “The State,” named Teddy Shapiro. He just did the music for the movie “Girlfight.” So he and I did it together. But back to what I was saying about the culture shock with working for television, it could not have been more different. It was like trying to perform remote brain surgery or something. Like “what am I looking for and where is it?” It was difficult. And the show lasted two episodes on the air.
B: Which is criminal.
W: Which is criminal. I barely lasted THAT long on the show. But in celebration-slash-preparation of and for my first big T.V. gig, I bought myself a pro tools unit for my apartment, which I still owe my grandfather heavily for, seeing as how that venture didn’t work out. But… the T.V. show forced me to learn pro tools really fast. So on my last day at the “Wonderland Estate”… the “Wonderland Commons”… I started working immediately on my own music. In fact, a lot of the stuff I was doing for “Wonderland” ended up playing into the more experimental end of the new stuff that I’m doing. So in that respect, “Wonderland” was an amazing experience, cause it turned out that the stuff that I was doing was probably as much for me as it was for the T.V. show.
B: O.K., talking about side-projects outside of your specific music, what can you tell me about “Night Vision: A First World Vampire Opera?”
W: Oh, man, what do you know about “Night Vision?”
B: I don’t know much about it at all. I know that you played someone called “The Spin Doctor.”
W: How do you know that?
B: There was something on the internet…
W: Oh, dear god. So there’s this woman playwright, Ruth Margraff – who my old girlfriend Nina Helleman, late of the band Cake Like, used to work with. And I always really loved her writing, and I got a phone call that she was doing a reading of one of her new things, which are always completely a trip. She might be insulted by my saying this, but I mean it as the utmost compliment, this thing was totally hyper-imaginative, flight of fancy, stream of consciousness, very poetic kind of semi-encrypted. That’s her style of playwrighting. And she called me ‘cause they were doing this thing and needed a replacement. So I was in that world briefly, which was this sort of free-jazz, cyber, post-modern opera thing.
B: And whatever happened to the “Spanish Amnesian” solo album?
W: Well, I made that record when I was sick, and it was sort of an ambient, experimental excursion. It was an excursiomental record. Beautiful stuff, really textural, lovely… I think it fed directly into the movie “High Art.” It was sort of my own late night palette of sounds. It seemed like it was plagued every step of the way, though… I was sick, I didn’t have a ton of energy, I ended up not getting it out there. But I still have it, and it’s really pretty.
B: So it may someday see the light of day?
W: I hope so. Parts of it have found their way into new parts of my new stuff, which has a sort of combination of that aesthetic with a very classic pop thing, with some Shudder to Think-isms, too.
B: Right. So the real “bleeps and bloops” stuff started with “High Art”?
W: No, I’ve always been a home – for lack of a better word, ambient – writer/producer. In fact, it was almost sort of weirdly fluky that Shudder to Think became the focal thing. I mean, I was always the singer in a band, and the stuff I would work on at home would be much more sound scape-y. Then I started writing more and more and more for Shudder to Think, and the sound scape-y stuff was always totally separate, until “High Art,” which was kind of a combo of the two. And now that I have the chance to do the stuff myself, it’s taking on both aspects of my musical styles. In college and stuff, I used to do more performances that were kind of “sound acoustic theater” pieces.
B: Something along the lines of the “Interpreting Robert Johnson” track (from an old comp called “Teen Smash Hits for Students”)?
W: Yes, exactly. Wow, you have done your homework.
B: I’m a nerd, actually. I huge geek.
W: No, it’s cool.
B: So can you talk, if you want to, about the last days of Shudder to Think?
W: Sure.
B: Was it the Black Monday label merger thing?
W: No, we were on Epic, which wasn’t involved in that whole thing. I will say this, so many of those bands that were affected by the shakedown of Black Monday – horrible as it was – the silver lining is “free at last, free at last.” Because, man, it ain’t easy dealing with a corporation who knows how to do something in one of two ways, and at one speed – and that’s very slow. All due respect. Had some wonderful experiences at Epic. In fact, Michael Goldstone, who signed us, lives in that building right across there. I adore a lot of the people who did and do work there. But, man, get them all in a room together, and it is really hard. It’s like pushing a mastodon up a hill. So…. The last days of Shudder to Think. We were still at Epic records, and we had gotten into soundtracks, which initially we had been discouraged from doing.
B: Why?
W: Who the fuck knows? I think the general consensus at the record label was that “First Love Last Rites” was somehow distracting us from the focal thing, which was the band… when in reality, it was reinvigorating the band. After “Pony Express Record,” we started going through an identity crisis. I wanted to go further in the direction of “Pony Express Record.” More poetic, less traditional structures. It was around that point that Nathan’s and my lifelong friendship and erstwhile working relationship began to fissure. And sour. Which we knew was imminent from the day we started working in Shudder to Think together. In fact, the night that I extended the offer for Nathan to replace Chris, the old guitar player who had just quit, we sort of looked at each other with knowing glances – again, having been friends for ages and having done music on and off with each other since high school – and the look, if not the words, said “it will end in tears.” And it did.
B: Mm hmm.
W: In short, we’d had a bumpy experience with the mainstream “high money world of alternative rock.” Which we just sort of fell into. Our music sounded like us. It happened to be, in my opinion, fairly distantly related to the movement known as alternative. But like most of the people in alternative music, we had all come up in punk, and been turned on by similar things. Pretty white kids who like to fucking rock a lot. So it had been a strange trip from Dischord to Epic… putting out records, touring…
B: Did you guys take a lot of heat for jumping from Dischord to Epic?
W: You know, in my opinion, and I hope this is no offense, anybody who is going to think that we were sell outs from going from “Get Your Goat” on Dischord to “Pony Express Record” on Epic, is missing the point.
B: No, believe me, I steer clear of those polemics, but I was wondering if you felt any of that…I know Jawbox did.
W: I would look at people and sort of go, “what the fuck are you thinking? Have you LISTENED to the record we made for Epic?! It’s a coup!” We also… you know, we just happened to be on Dischord Records, because Ian and Jeff loved our music, and we loved Ian and Jeff. We were never the type of band to cop to anything but the truth, which was that we wanted to take over the world! The commercial world as well as the underground, with our brand of music, which was the ultimate in our eyes. So there was never any social-political stuff holding us back in that respect. But, you know, everything you hear about record labels is true, although I don’t believe that most of the people are evil at all.
B: There’s been a bit of a resurgence of the anti-major thing lately – like the infamous Steve Albini article about “The Problem with Music” – with all the internet related stuff.
W: Yeah, right. But it wasn’t the jump. Like I said, when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s, which coincided with the last “Pony Express Record” support tour, which coincided with the beginning of the writing of “50,000 B.C.,” was the beginning of the end. Nathan no longer had any interest in what I was bringing to the table. Which, aesthetically, was related on one hand to “Pony Express Record,” and on the other hand to all of the ambient stuff I was doing. He wanted to do soul music. You know, his own version of soul music. He writes beautiful songs. I then went to the task of re-writing everything I had written for “50,000 B.C.,” ‘cause I was getting blank stares in the rehearsal space, and went and re-wrote everything when I was sick to suit the band. I think the general consensus was that everyone was disappointed with the performance of “Pony Express Record.” Which in retrospect, is ridiculous, because people who love that record feel so passionate about it. I wouldn’t say “50,000 B.C.” was a sell-out, by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just—personally, for me – a little bit convoluted. It doesn’t have the singular identity of “Pony Express Record,” or “First Love, Last Rites,” or “High Art,” or “Get Your Goat,” or “Funeral At The Movies.” I think you can feel it pulling in many directions. It didn’t quite ever arrive. Even though I love the songs and have many fond memories.
B: Uh huh.
W: But throughout the process, frankly, Nathan was becoming more and more miserable. Our relationship, which was always fairly competitive, but based on pure brotherly love and, bottom line, respect for each other’s work and vision, was really getting strained. I had the dominant artistic say in the band. Nathan went and made “Mind Science of the Mind,” and I think he was disappointed that it wasn’t more successful than it was, which – it should have done much better, it’s a beautiful record. He was just feeling trapped in Shudder to think. He wanted to front his own thing.
B: What’s he doing now?
W: He’s doing mostly film soundtracks. He did finish a record of his. It should be coming out on Artemis records. I haven’t heard the whole thing, but I’ve heard a few songs from it. His film soundtrack career is exploding.
B: Oh, he had the song in “Boys Don’t Cry.” What about Stuart?
W: Stuart is doing computer network development at an on-line mediation site, where people with claims who don’t want to go into arbitration, they go on line and try to settle.
B: So no music?
W: I’ve called him a few times and asked if he wanted to play, he just – when the band broke up, which basically happened in the Chicago airport, when Nathan was finally like, “dude, I’m quitting,” and I was kind of relieved, because I was feeling trapped in a rock band… (pause) In retrospect, I was so foolish. Not to let the band break up, necessarily, but I thought everything that followed would be pie. I would do awesome soundtracks, I would make awesome records, everybody would want to put my shit out. I was so naïve.
B: You’ve had trouble finding people who want to put your stuff out?
W: Well, let me put it this way – I’m not viewed as a commodity at this point. My music remains uniquely my own. And I want it to be the right thing. I don’t just want to settle. If it’s going to be on an indie label, it has to be perfect. If it’s going to be on a major label, it has to be even MORE perfect. I guess, giving myself the benefit of the doubt, I’ve been very cautious and wary. But I just thought it would be so easy to find the perfect players – a whole new Shudder to Think.
B: Right.
W: Well, no… after Shudder to Think, I just wanted to work alone, actually. And I did, until I lost my mind. At first I was like, “fuck it, I just want to do my own thing for awhile.” By that point in Shudder to Think, I felt like I was having to shelve so much music that meant so much to me that had really been tapped into with “High Art.” With the combination of “High Art” and “Pony Express Record,” actually. Those were like the 2 records that most felt like truest to me; closest to home. I was tired of the struggle. Tired of the personality and ego struggle. Tired of going into band practice and getting….
B: Shot down?
W: Not even shot down. Cause most of the songs on “50,000 B.C.” were mine. Just feeling like I was having to compromise something that was important to me. And it was worth it for a while, ‘cause it was for the sake of the band. But after a certain point, it wasn’t worth it. And then I just wanted to do it myself. Which I did…. But I realized how difficult that is. Because working along just isn’t as much fun. Working alone is the most wonderful shangri-la, haven, oasis, in the desert thing when you’re working with other people. But when there isn’t anybody, or there isn’t the right group, it’s just a drag. So I did it – working alone – for like 2 years. I get really deep into the minutiae of things, so I was really starting to go “The Shining” on that motherfucker. I gave myself an August deadline, basically at my Dad’s insistence. He was like, “you have to stop recording in August. You’re going to go on until you’re like 70. So stop.” I thought that seemed reasonable. In order to finish something, you need to finish it. And August came, and it was time to put a group together, because that was the next phase. And figure out how to put it all together in a performance environment, which was something that I was missing so much. That and working with other people. And the show you saw at Brownies was the second of our performances together.
B: Was the last tour Shudder to Think did the “Movie Soundtracks” tour?
W: Mm hmm.
B: I caught that in
W: Really? That was a really fun show. Lots of friends were there. That was such a great tour, such a beautiful thing. All that soundtrack stuff we were doing around then was such a breath of fresh air for everybody. Everybody was happy for a brief stint. It was reinvigorating, but it was temporary.
B: And after that were you going in to record another album?
W: We started writing, and the stuff was beautiful. It sounded sort of “Get Your Goat.” Quintessential Shudder to Think-y, but somehow simpler.
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POSTSCRIPT: Wedren did release one excellent but hard to find album with Baby. In addition to a LOT more soundtrack work, he also put out a great solo album called "Lapland." "The Spanish Amnesian" solo album finally did come out, but not until this past year. Shudder to Think partially re-united for a series of shows last year (without Stuart Hill, who has never played music publicly again as far as I know, and with late-era drummer Kevin March) - these shows led to the amazing live album Live From Home on Team Love Records (living overseas, I didn't get to see any of the shows, and I have a bad feeling they won't do it again, which is a real drag). I read recently that Wedren and Nathan Larson recently collaborated on a score for a movie that just played at Sundance called "The Kids Are Alright." Each and every Shudder to Think album is essential as far as I'm concerned.
