Garbage

Version 2.0 (Almo)
An interview with Butch Vig
by Michael McCarthy

Butch Vig Speaks: Talking With The World’s Most Famous Garbage Man

You’re going on tour with Girls Against Boys. How did this pairing come about?
I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while. We did some shows with them in ’96, played some festivals. Some of the radio shows like HFS and Q101, you know, where they have a dozen bands on the bill. We just had a good time hanging out with them beyond playing gigs. And their new record came out recently and we really like it a lot, so… We just called them up. When we put our wish list together of the bands we wanted to play with, they were kind of at the top and they were able to do it.

A lot of fans speculated that you’d tour with Massive Attack or Tricky, where they’d remixed some of your material previously and have new albums out as well. Were they on the wish list?
Kind of. I know that Massive Attack just did a few shows on their own. When we did the first couple shows here in the U.S., before we went to Europe, we used a DJ. And Crystal Method played some shows with us over in Europe. Some of the club shows. So, we’re definitely into using more groove-oriented synth bass bands versus traditional rock bands or whatever. We kind of felt like both Tricky and Massive Attack had a pretty high profile. And we know that Tricky’s pretty busy with his label right now. I didn’t realize he’s been touring that much. We felt like we wanted, at least for the start of the tour, to go with a guitar band.

Your brief club tour when Version 2.0 was released sold out very quickly. What size venues are you looking to play at this point?
I think it depends on where we’re going. In bigger markets, like New York or L.A., we’ll probably be playing maybe 3,000 seaters. But there’re a lot of other places that we’re going that we’ve never been. Like Iowa City and Fresno and places like that. So, it’ll either be a big club or a small theater, probably.

That’s just the U.S. leg, I assume.
That’s just the U.S. [laughs]. We have a few weeks off, then we’re going back to Europe for six weeks. Then we go to Southeast Asia for some places we haven’t been like Korea and Hong Kong. We’ve played Japan and Singapore before, but we want to go to some other places, like Thailand. Then we go to Australia and New Zealand, then I think we’re going to South America. By then, it’ll be summertime and we’re coming back to tour the U.S. again, late spring, next summer.

Is bassist Dan Shulman touring with you?
Yes.

Why did you decide to recruit an outside bass player? How did you find him?
His name was kind of thrown into the hat from some people through our management. They knew he was a good bass player. He’d done session work and also gigged with other bands. I’d met him in L.A. a couple of months before we even asked him to come out and play with us and thought he was a nice guy. I think we liked him because he’s played with a lot of hip hop artists, like Warren G. And his brother runs part of Def Jam, so he’s kind of hooked up in that whole scene. We thought it’d be cool to have someone coming from that area. I think we’d worked with four or five different bass players and we just liked his feel best. He ended up playing on the record, too.

Do you think he’ll end up becoming an official member at any point?
I don’t know. We thought about that on the last record, but we kind of felt like the balance between four people is already very delicate because all four of us produce and we all write together. There’re already four cooks in the kitchen, and I don’t know if we need a fifth cook in there. But he’s definitely a full-time member of the band, touring-wise.

Are you bringing out any other musicians for the tour?
I think at the start it’s going to be just the five of us. There’s a DJ from this band Citizen King in Milwaukee who did some work with us in the studio and we’ve talked about bringing him out. But he’s also right in the middle of trying to finish their record. I think we’re going to start out kind of small again. Keep it to the minimum. As the tour progresses, if we expand with any more production or musicians on stage, we’ll do that as it comes.

Last time around, I was surprised to see that you actually performed some of the remixes, “Queer” and, I think, “Dog New Tricks.” Will there be any remixes in the set this time?
Yeah, I think. A lot of the older material, we’re going to reinterpret further. There’s a remix of “Milk,” a version we played a lot last time, we might start doing that. We might change “Stupid Girl” around quite a bit and incorporate some of the elements from one of the remixes. And I think with some of the new songs, there’re a couple we’re going to pare down. We’re thinking of using “The Trick Is To Keep Breathing” with all synths, very dub sounding. And “Medication” we may do acoustically. We just did a B-side in the studio of “Medication.” It’s just acoustic guitar and piano and Shirley singing. It sounds really lovely, so we’re trying to put more dynamics in the show to keep us from getting bored as well as the audience.

There are many CD singles available from the various labels you’re on in various territories, but I’ve seen very few Garbage T-shirts or other merchandise. Are you picky about licensing?
Yeah. Also, we weren’t particularly happy with the stuff that we came up with on the first record. We’ve been working with the guy who does our artwork through Mushroom, who helps us design all our stuff. He’s been working on some new designs for T-shirts and other things. Stuff that’s more techie, too, like a mousepad and things like that. We’re happy with how the stuff looks design-wise now. So, hopefully we’ll have some of that, which we’ll be able to license and take with us on the road.

In what ways does being on various labels in various territories help and hinder you?
Well, a lot of times, I think we think it hinders us because everybody kind of has their own agenda, what they would like to do. With the last record, we would go into a territory on tour and we wouldn’t even know what they were working, what single was out currently or in what sequence they had put them out. It was very crazy. This time out, at least everybody started with “Push It” worldwide. There was much more of a concerted effort from the get-go. We’ve found as you go, different territories are going to respond to what they think is a better single than other places. So, we’re loosening that up a little bit. I think everybody was pretty much on “Paranoid” for the second single, but at this point, like in France, I think they want to go with “The Trick Is To Keep Breathing” next. Other parts of Europe, like the UK and Germany, they want to go with “Special.” That’s what we’re going with here. So, we’re just going to let them do their thing. It’s interesting though, to watch how the labels do that, how they deal with marketing in terms of what they think the audience and fans will respond to or what radio will respond to. It’s quite different everywhere.

What’s the status of the www.garbage.com website? When I checked it a few days ago, it said “coming soon,” or something to that effect.
It’s kind of up and running, but it hasn’t been a hundred percent. We’re supposed to be having an official launching, which actually we’re talking about tonight. It’s been hard to keep up on a lot of this, but, yeah, I think it’s coming up pretty soon. Electric Artist worked on the initial design of it and I think we’re pretty pleased with everything they’ve been talking about doing.

There was previously a website/fan club called The Garbage Zone, which claimed to be official. Was that run by the band?
Yeah. We found that it was very difficult to run a fan club where you mail stuff on a quarterly basis. It was easy for us to get things together for it, but in order to get it out and get it mailed, trying not to lose money in it… Everybody told us that fan clubs, if you break even, you’re lucky. It’s just basically to connect with your fan base and stuff. And we had so many people who were emailing us, we decided we were going to do it all through the website. Anybody who was in the Garbage Zone, we sent official letters to telling them they can get their money back and also offering that they could get tickets to any show we did anywhere and then registering them in the new fan club and giving away some merchandise. We’re trying to get everything focused through one, instead of having a website and a fan club or whatever. It’s easier to do it all through the website.

Are there any particular unofficial Garbage websites that you’re fond of?
Oh God, there’re so many, like The Shirley Manson Fetish Club or something. Somewhere they’re just totally obsessed with Shirley. That we find very interesting. The Cafe Montmartre was kind of interesting. Whoever picked up on that knows that Cafe Montmartre is like our hangout in Madison. I think they got that from a press thing somewhere. Every couple of months I’ll go online and there always seems to be a new site.

There’s one called Absolute Garbage.net that actually has reviews of the fifty-plus bootleg live shows that are out there.
Yeah. I’ve tried to collect bootlegs, and some of them I’ve found through the Internet. I mean, I guess we don’t necessarily officially encourage bootlegs, but we don’t discourage them either. My philosophy is that if someone buys a bootleg, they’re a hardcore fan and they’ve already bought our albums. The only thing that bums me out is some of them sound really bad.

But there are some that sound really good, which prompts me to wonder why the band hasn’t released any live B-sides yet.
Before we went to Tokyo, we sifted through a lot of the live tapes we did in Europe for these festivals. We had a couple shows that we’d taped on multi-track that I think we might remix. One of the highlights of the tour, we played a huge festival in Denmark – like a three day festival and we headlined one of the nights in front of like 70,000 people – it was just one of those shows where we played well and the crowd was amazing. I think we’re going to try and pull some things off that.

I can see why there would have been a lot of pressure for you personally, making the first album, after garnering so much applause as a producer. Yet I can also see why there would have been a lot of pressure with the second, with the first being so well-received and critics always eager to say that so-and-so has fallen victim to the sophomore slump. What were the different worries for you, making the two albums, and was there in fact more pressure making one or the other?
I think I felt more pressure on the first record, personally. Because, I think you’re right – if it had failed, nobody would have talked about Shirley or Duke or Steve. It would’ve been my ass. They would have said this record sucks or whatever. And I think a lot of people kind of almost expected that when it came out. I don’t know what people thought, but I don’t think they expected us to make this pop record that incorporates dance and hip hop and techno and buzzy guitars and things. I think they thought it was going to be a grunge record or Nine Inch Nails industrial something angst record. I even know people in the industry – I heard people behind my back saying that was the end of my career, that it was a really stupid for me to do because it would totally destroy any credibility I had. But I didn’t necessarily get involved with Garbage because I was trying to keep credibility or make more money. It came totally from a creative point of view. I never really expected to have the kind of success we did. When we made Version 2.0, I think there was a little bit of pressure. Everybody else felt more pressure, but personally, even though it was really hard work making the second album, I didn’t feel quite as stressed out. I think it was more balanced out between all four of us. Once we started working, we isolated ourselves in the studio, so we could kind of escape that a little bit. We put more pressure on ourselves because we wanted to take what we did on the first record and make it better. We didn’t really want to reinvent ourselves or do a “drum and bass” record or an electronica record. We just wanted to try and encapsulate our strengths better this time out. And we wanted more live play and more live interaction. And Version 2.0 is really Shirley’s record lyrically, whereas the first record was kind of written more by committee and kind of cut and pasted together more over a long period of time.