Love Battery always sounded a little sideways to me.
I mean that as a compliment. They were definitely part of the Seattle thing, but there was something else floating around in there — psychedelia, garage rock, punk, big fuzzy guitars, pop songs buried under enough noise to make you work for them. Sometimes they sounded like somebody had left a stack of old records melting in the sun and decided to make a band out of whatever came out.
They started here in 1989. Ron Nine had been in Room Nine, Kevin Whitworth came out of Crisis Party, and the early rhythm section was Tommy Simpson on bass and Dan Peters from Mudhoney on drums. Peters didn't stay long, and Jason Finn came in after Skin Yard. Jim Tillman from the U-Men replaced Simpson on bass not too long after that. If you're already reaching for a piece of paper to keep track of everybody, congratulations, you understand Seattle.
The name came from the Buzzcocks song, which should probably tell you something too.
Their first single was "Between the Eyes", backed with "Easter", on Sub Pop in 1989. They recorded "Between the Eyes" at Reciprocal with Jack Endino, which might be the most Seattle sentence I've written anywhere on this website. Great song, too — psychedelic without turning soft, noisy without just sitting there making noise. Ron's voice already had that slightly detached thing he does, like he's standing inside the song and about three feet outside it at the same time.
Then "Between the Eyes" turned into one of those titles designed specifically to annoy record collectors.
There's the Sub Pop 7". There are early overseas versions on Tupelo and Waterfront. Then Sub Pop put out a longer Between the Eyes in the States with more material. Different formats, different track listings, different labels, songs recorded at different times. So when somebody tells you they own Between the Eyes, the sensible response is, "Which one?"
This is what record collecting does to a person.
I actually got into Love Battery through Dayglo, though. Somebody at the store back in Queens had a copy and put it on one afternoon. "Out of Focus" came first, then "Foot", and by the time the title track rolled around I was already looking at the sleeve trying to figure out who these guys were.
Seattle. Sub Pop.
Of course.
I bought a copy. Another one for the pile.
Dayglo is still probably my favorite Love Battery record. It came out on Sub Pop in '92, recorded at Egg with Conrad Uno and Jon Auer, with Ron and Kevin on guitars, Jim Tillman on bass and Jason Finn on drums. The funny collector detail is that if you wanted the LP over here, you were buying an import — Sub Pop had the U.S. release on CD and cassette while the vinyl was being made in Germany. I had the music either way, which was the important part, although try explaining that distinction to somebody after you've spent ten years digging through record bins and see how normal you sound.
There's a weird haze hanging over Dayglo. Ron and Kevin could pile guitars on top of each other without turning everything into mud, and Tillman's bass keeps moving around underneath them while Finn pushes the whole thing forward. It can be heavy, but it doesn't lumber. It can get dreamy without floating away. "Out of Focus" is right there in the title, really. The guitars sound like they're coming into view and disappearing again while the song underneath stays put.
That's what separated Love Battery from a lot of the bands they got lumped in with. The ingredients weren't completely different. Everybody around here owned fuzz pedals and somebody's old Stooges records. But Love Battery let more light into the noise. There was color in it. Sometimes ugly color, granted, but color.
I moved to Seattle in September '92, and Love Battery were one of those bands I was excited to finally catch. I saw them more than once around town, but I'm not going to give you dates because I don't trust my memory enough anymore and I'm not going to make up a Tuesday night at the Crocodile just so this page looks authoritative.
What I remember is the guitars.
On Dayglo they could sound hazy and almost dreamy. Live, they were a lot nastier. Same basic songs, but the fuzz was suddenly right in your face and the pretty edges got knocked off. That's the Love Battery I remember from rooms around here: louder and rougher than the records made them seem, with Ron and Kevin's guitars crashing into each other and somehow still leaving enough space for the songs to get through.
The lineup was already changing again. Tillman left, Tommy Simpson came back for a while, and then Bruce Fairweather took over on bass. That's another one of those Seattle family-tree moments: Fairweather had played guitar in Green River and Mother Love Bone, and now here he was playing bass in Love Battery. Jason Finn would eventually become a lot more famous drumming for the Presidents of the United States of America. Dan Peters had Mudhoney. Tillman had the U-Men. You start drawing this stuff out and eventually you need another wall.
Far Gone came out on Sub Pop in '93 with Fairweather on bass and Finn still on drums. They went all the way to Waterfront Studios in Hoboken to make it with Michael Beinhorn, which is about as far from the cheap Egg Studio feel of Dayglo as you could ask for without recording the thing on the moon.
It's a strange record.
I've heard people dismiss Far Gone for years, and I don't. But it doesn't hit me the way Dayglo does. The sound is cleaner and the psychedelic fog has been pushed back. Jason was already complaining around the time the record came out that there weren't enough guitars in the mix, and I can hear what he meant. With Love Battery, taking guitars away is a little like buying beer and removing the alcohol because you think people will appreciate the bottle more.
Still, "Searching for Rose" is good as hell. "Split in Two" too. There are moments where the record catches that crooked Love Battery thing perfectly, and even when it doesn't, it's more interesting than plenty of supposedly better records I've sold over the years.
By the end of '93 they were already talking about moving on to Atlas, which was tied to PolyGram. That's about as much of the label story as I'm willing to pretend I understand. I've heard several versions over the years about who wanted what record, who had what contract and why Far Gone ended up where it did. Unless somebody wants to hand me everybody's paperwork, I'm staying out of it.
What matters is that the next step was Atlas.
They put out the Nehru Jacket EP in '94, and then Straight Freak Ticket arrived in '95. By then the record business had spent a few years crawling all over Seattle looking for anything that might turn into the next giant band, and Love Battery finally had the kind of major-affiliated deal that was supposed to mean something.
Straight Freak Ticket is a good fucking record.
"Fuzz Factory" alone ought to have bought them more attention than they got. "Harold's Pink Room" is another one I always come back to, and "Straight Freak Show" has exactly the right title for this band. The production is bigger than the early records, obviously, but the personality survived. You still know who's playing within about thirty seconds.
And then... not much happened.
That's the part of the Seattle story people tend to clean up afterward. Everybody remembers the bands that went from little clubs to arenas because that's a hell of a story. Fewer people remember how many perfectly good bands got the big-label handshake, made the record they were supposed to make, toured, did interviews, watched the machinery turn for a while and then discovered that the machinery had found something else to look at.
I'm not saying that's the one simple reason Love Battery didn't get bigger. Nothing in the record business is ever that simple, and anybody who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you a book. But by the middle of the decade the attention had changed. The labels had changed. Radio had changed. Seattle wasn't the new toy anymore.
Love Battery were still Love Battery.
Finn was increasingly busy with the Presidents, and the drummer situation got less tidy after that. They kept going, though, and by the end of the decade they had landed on C/Z and made Confusion Au Go Go. That came out in '98, with Fairweather still on bass but different drummers turning up across the record — Dan Peters on most of it, Finn on "Colorblind" and Mike Musburger on a couple of tracks.
There's something wonderfully Seattle about Love Battery ending up with Dan Peters behind the drums again after all those years.
Not ending, exactly. You know what I mean.
By then almost nobody outside the people who had kept following them seemed to be paying much attention. Confusion Au Go Go didn't arrive with the circus that had surrounded Seattle records a few years earlier. It was just another record by a band that had been here all along.
Their loss.
That's one reason I'm putting bands like Love Battery on this site. If you remember Seattle only through MTV, you get maybe five bands and a couple of videos. That's not a scene. A scene is a band like Love Battery making a single at Reciprocal in 1989, then making a psychedelic Sub Pop record at Egg, then changing bass players and drummers while half the same names keep turning up in other bands all over town. It's Jim Tillman coming through from the U-Men. It's Dan Peters playing drums at the beginning and then showing up again years later. It's Jason Finn moving from Skin Yard through Love Battery and eventually into the Presidents. It's Bruce Fairweather going from Green River and Mother Love Bone to playing bass here. It's a record called Between the Eyes that turns into three different answers depending on which country and which year you're talking about.
That's a scene.
And it isn't neat.
As far as I know, Love Battery are still technically around. They don't seem to do much these days, but I'm not writing an obituary for a band that hasn't told me it's dead. There hasn't been another studio record since Confusion Au Go Go, and right now they seem more inactive than anything else.
Maybe they'll make another record.
Maybe they won't.
Either way, Dayglo isn't going anywhere. Ten years after I first heard "Out of Focus" in Queens, I can put that thing on and the guitars still sound slightly wrong in exactly the right way.
That's Love Battery.
Put it on loud.
