Rock luminaries (clockwise from upper left): Dave Grohl, Shirley Manson, Butch Vig and Billy Corgan all appear in Wendy Schneider’s new documentary.
The story of how Wendy Schneider ended up at Smart Studios is so ’90s.
The 23-year-old Schneider, newly arrived from New York City, simply knocked on the door of the nondescript building at 1254 E. Washington Ave. and asked if they were hiring interns.
“I talked to the studio manager at the time, and within an hour I was hired,” says Schneider, who moved to Madison in 1991. “They didn’t ask for a résumé.”
Schneider, who had some experience doing post-production sound in New York, was learning to engineer live sound with a ska band in Madison. But even though she had never made a record, she soon settled in among a cadre of recording engineers at Smart Studios and became a part of a scene that incubated the alternative rock and grunge movements and the careers of Garbage’s Butch Vig and Steve Marker.
Vig says people used to mistake the studio for a crack house. But from inside that building on the yet-to-be-redeveloped East Washington corridor, a collaborative ethos developed and a team of engineers and musicians created a sound that defined a generation.
Among the rock icons that recorded at Smart before it closed in 2010 were Killdozer, the Smashing Pumpkins, L7, Tad and Nirvana. Local rockers Die Kreuzen and the Tar Babies cut their teeth there, too.
Decades later, Schneider’s career has taken a new direction, and she’s fresh off a premiere of The Smart Studios Story at this year’s SXSW festival. The film is one of the most talked-about offerings at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival, and tickets for the two screenings (April 17 at the Barrymore and April 19 at Sundance) sold out in a mere five hours.
Schneider, who has spent years as a working musician, composer, engineer and filmmaker, didn’t set out to make the definitive rock doc, but after the studio closed in 2010, she says she began turning the camera to people who lamented the loss.
“I knew people there,” says Schneider. “I had run my own studio, I’d been in a band, so I understood the loss of Smart subjectively. And I just thought it was important enough to ring up people and say ‘Hey, I’m going to interview you about the closing.’”
Schneider did around 40 interviews in the winter of 2010 after the studio closed. Then she began sharing footage with Vig and Marker. “We were all really impressed with how good it felt and how meaningful it was to watch, and we wanted more.” With help from Vig and Marker, Schneider arranged a whirlwind trip to California, interviewing rock icons such as Shirley Manson (Garbage), Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters), Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) and Donita Sparks (L7).
And from there, the narrative turned to how the studio shaped the sound of a generation. “It started to become, wait a second, if there was no Killdozer, there would be no [Nirvana’s] Nevermind,” says Schneider. “I saw Smart and the Midwest as a link to what I considered a very big shift in the genre of music in the early ’90s, where the grunge era really roots back to Killdozer. And if you think about it like that, it sort of blows your mind a little bit.”
With more than 90 clips of music, The Smart Studios Story is a film for music lovers and for people who appreciate Madison’s contribution to rock history.
“What I love about the film and why it’s so important to me is that it aligns with that DIY independent ethos that drives what’s real in communities,” says Schneider. “People want to ground themselves in a sense of identity, and music is an expression of that.”
Vig and Marker will be in Madison for a screening, and their band the Know-It-All Boyfriends may make an appearance at the High Noon Saloon for a post-screening reunion of bands that recorded at Smart Studios.
Schneider says she never would have made the documentary without the cooperation of the larger music community, which her film honors. “Everyone who’s ever lifted a finger to make a record out of that building deserves the accolades and the appreciation for this history.”
