Jon Hain
Negative Example, from left, Tim Sullivan, Marcel Colbert, Bucky Pope, Saul Glazer and Stephanie Rearick.
In 2015 I saw our son’s pop-punk band Snack Champion perform in Asheville, North Carolina. The band’s drummer got pretty lathered up knowing I had come from Madison. “Do you know Bucky Pope?” the 20-something asked. This touched off his five-minute soliloquy on the lasting significance of Pope and his ’80s punk pioneers Tar Babies.
Tar Babies released two records on their own via sessions with Butch Vig and Bob Mould before launching several more albums with SST Records. It’s known as the greatest punk band that never got the international limelight it deserved. Yet, as the young Asheville drummer’s infatuation with the group’s music shows, the band has a second generation of players pulled by its draft.
These days Pope is as irascible, charming, unpredictable, complex and — at times — sullen as ever. But he stays original, a rebel who, inspired in his early days by D. Boon of Minutemen, even makes up his own chords. Negative Example, his current band, is working on new material scheduled for release in 2019 that will add to a catalogue that already includes a full-length, Negative Examples, and an EP, Double Negative. The band plays Jan. 12 at Communication with Drone Therapy.
In a 2016 review of Negative Examples, The New York Times called Pope one of the “great nonvirtuosic guitarists of that era.” But right now, in this era, he’s writing the best music of his career. He still eats dissonance for breakfast, but somehow there is a soothing nature to the music, too.
“It Ain’t Pretty” loops the listener up and down, like a child on a swing. The band’s material is even better live. That’s because his current lineup — bassist Saul Glazer, lead guitarist Tim Sullivan, keyboardist Stephanie Rearick, and drummer Marcel Colbert — have had time to master the odd-shaped compositions.
“Sweet, spontaneous and sweaty,” is how Glazer describes Pope on stage. The first two words seemed especially accurate last month when the band started a set at Art In with a deadpan cover of “Good Morning Starshine” from the 1967 musical Hair. Offbeat covers was one of the topics Pope discussed with Isthmus in a recent email conversation.
How do you decide to do a song like that?
When we choose covers it’s usually because the song itself is awesome but it’s also an opportunity to perform a song way out of its context. I like the audience to have to ask themselves, “Why is this happening? Why is Negative Example opening with ‘Good Morning Starshine?”
How would you describe your guitar playing?
If Keith Richards and Thelonious Monk had a baby who grew up playing guitar in punk bands, he and I would probably have a similar approach to playing guitar. I play guitar 10-12 hours a week, but I seem to just be honing my style rather than building skills. I can’t play highly technical stuff. I wouldn’t cut it as a session guitarist, but a lot of musicians much more talented than me are perplexed when they see me play.
What is your favorite cut from the Negative Example releases?
I think “Platitudes” is a solid piece of work. It took me months to finish. It became a lot more than it started out to be when we recorded it. I’ve read interviews with rock stars who say they never listen to their past music. I’ve made a few cringe-worthy recordings but I love to listen to my own music.
Is it true that you write music and then words?
I improvise onto a multitrack tape recorder then figure out how to reproduce the cool bits. Strangely, it’s sometimes a real chore to do, because I’m not keeping to a consistent meter when I’m improvising, and the riff has to be tweaked to conform to something you can explain to a drummer. That’s sometimes hard to do without losing what was cool about the riff to begin with. I usually add a couple other guitar parts, which become ideas for the other instruments. The vocal is just another element of the music. Who cares about the words? I think pop music is a legitimate art form but, in term of lyrics, a lot of what people write about are such hackneyed clichés. Some of the Negative Example songs are pretty narrative, but the seed that became the story was random. Some of the lyrics I’ve pinched out were meaningless until they were finished and I could contrive their meaning after the fact.
Did you want more attention for Tar Babies at the band’s “peak,” however you would define peak?
I never had the expectation that we were going to be more successful than we were. Punk rock just facilitated me going from dissecting Zeppelin tunes to writing original tunes. In the early ’80s the punk/hardcore music scene had no hope or aspiration to reach the mainstream rock industry. Eventually Hüsker Dü, the Pixies and Nirvana took down the hair metal bands, but the Tar Babies were never contending for alternative rock stardom. We may have been between niches. Not having an audience instills a purity to any artistic endeavor, maybe. The music I love informs the music I make up, but for whatever reason, the music I’ve made does really not rally the masses. Nobody tattooed Tar Babies logos on their arms. A Negative Example tattoo would be cool though. I’ll pay for a small Neg Ex tattoo, if anybody wants one.
