LONDON
So there we are, in London's sold-out Electric Ballroom, staring out at a crowd of 1,200 screaming, moshing fans. The side stage is crammed with three members of the Catheters, two White Stripes, one J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. (he was reviewing the show for Mojo), a handful of guys from the Greenhorns, and one chocolate-colored blowup doll. On stage, Mudhoney are tearing into their encore, a protracted version of "Suck."This crowd has come to see Mudhoney more than the Catheters, but the younger band played an opening set, during which a steady trickle of newly converted fans purchased their T-shirts, stickers, and CDs. U.K. fans are gold these days. A couple cycles in the U.K. music hype machine seems a prerequisite for an American band to make it big; the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Andrew W. K. all gained major momentum touring England. Mojo, The Face, and NME have given some of our nation's finest some of their earliest press, and all these publications--plus Rock Sound and The Independent--have been heaping praise on the Catheters.
As Mudhoney puts the finishing touches on "Suck," Catheters bassist Leo Gebhardt makes his move. He takes a running leap, crossing in front of Mudhoney bassist Guy Maddison, and dives into the crowd. Soon after, Catheters frontman Brian Standeford pats guitarist Derek Mason on the back, urging his bandmate to follow Leo's lead. Unfortunately, Derek's leap isn't quite as successful; he runs out and trips over a monitor, knocking it a good four feet, sending it off the stage and onto the ground. As a result, he hides backstage for the rest of the encore.
It's hard not to think of Derek's little pratfall as a metaphor for the Catheters' place on the international music map. As the most likely local successors to Mudhoney's coveted punk sludge spotlight--they have label support from Sub Pop, positive press, and a growing fan base--the Catheters still stumble occasionally, tripping over small stuff en route to center stage. But they'll have that spotlight soon enough.
SEATTLE
Rewind to Sunday, July 21.The Catheters are shooting their first video at their manager's house on Queen Anne. Exposed light bulbs hang from the ceiling, bathing a bunch of black-clad kids in bright white while the band mimes its way through take after take of "Nothing," a single off their sophomore Sub Pop album, Static Illusions and Stone Still Days. It is a hot, tiring afternoon, and the band gets through it by feeding off countless boxes of pizza. Drummer Davey Brozowski, the only one not pantomiming his moves, flattens himself on his kit during one of the final takes, shirtless (as usual) and exhausted.
But even with the repetition before the cameras, there have been hints of those special rock 'n' roll moments, an intangible mixture of aggression, energy, chemistry, and a singer who screams like Iggy Pop and shakes his head like Mic Jagger, all coming together to create something bigger. In that dank basement, anything seems possible. People watching the band can't shake the feeling that the Catheters are coming into their own, creating something new but still hewing to a Northwest rock tradition. They're the latest band to grind a punk sneer against heavy, bellowing rock and find a growing audience in the process. (Later that night, radio DJ John Richards is manning the controls at 107.7 for KNDD's local show. Coincidentally, he plays "Nothing," joking at the close of the song, "There's Sub Pop, going back to what they do best--Mudhoney." His statement is aimed at the similarities between the two bands' music, and the fact that the Catheters are the best new rock band on a label lately branching out into folk, comedy, and new wave.)
Almost two months after the video shoot, the Catheters are on their way to Nottingham, Glasgow, Manchester, and London: the stops on a tour that showcase Sub Pop doing what it does best--sending a group like the Catheters over to the U.K. for a critical stamp of approval.
NOTTINGHAM
"Touring England is nothing like touring the U.S. We're huge in the U.S. After shows it's usually all girls and drugs, and I haven't signed one boob here."--Brian, joking about his band's success
The Nottingham Boat Club is a small, dank hall that accommodates 300 people at its sardine best. There are rowing trophies perched above the merch tables, and showers and weight benches in the single makeshift dressing room. It's Monday, September 9, and the Catheters have started their U.K. leg of the Mudhoney tour here by cracking open the headliner's whiskey (Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters' whiskey, to be specific) a good couple hours before they get on stage. Brian walks around the steamy, sweat-smelling venue in a Cramps T-shirt. When a fan pulls him aside to congratulate him on the band's show preview in NME, he shrugs modestly. "They're just a tabloid," he says. "Mojo is a better magazine."
The press calls Brian the shy Catheter, but they make the mistake of asking him about his band. Brian, the group's blond-haired, blue-eyed lead singer, is a budding musicologist, and he would rather talk about other people's bands. He casually rattles off facts about artists as varied as Little Richard, the Specials, the Electric Eels, and Rocket from the Tombs like some sort of rock 'n' roll Rain Man. He'll explain how a cracked wah pedal changes the whole sound of a song, or the reasons someone's guitar solo is amazing. Yet he doesn't play an instrument in the band. While Leo reads The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Derek plunges into Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary to pass some of the countless hours of van time during the tour, Brian works through a Keith Richards biography.
"I know in talking to Brian they have a great love for this shit," says Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm, "and a good understanding of [music] history. It's all very important to them.... To see a band that's that young with that good of an understanding of music is amazing."
The Nottingham show is all fire and whiskey, a calculated attack with claws drawn. As a couple of kids beg requests for "Nothing," Brian jumps off stage and pushes into the sold-out house, his mic in his mouth as he lunges at the center of the pack. They close in on the untamed spectacle, the kids closest to Brian wearing huge grins. Leo climbs the speakers like a jungle gym, exchanging confident looks with his singer as he jumps back to the stage. The energy flows through these two and into Derek, who transforms into a mad extrovert, jerking around like playing music is an exercise in electrocution as Davey's strong-armed drum skills round out the chemistry. The only short circuit in this live current occurs when Leo's bass cuts out, which happens almost every night of their U.K. tour, beginning with this one.
During the show, the Mudhoney-Catheters age difference is a constant source of teasing between the acts, with the more mature Seattle statesmen gently swiping their younger brethren like a momma bear gently smacking her drunken little cub. Sitting backstage, one of Mark Arm's friends asks, "Twenty-one? Is that even an age?"--Derek and Brian are 21, Leo is 20, Davey is 19--while another chides, "Nineteen-eighty-one? Who was born in 1981?" The band shows its age--and inability to hold its liquor--by wrestling in the showers, picking up and dropping the heavy weights, and teaching the punishment for falling into a booze coma, which happens like this: At the close of the night, Ed, the Catheters' U.K. tour manager, drives us to Leo's friend's house in nearby Darby as Brian dozes off, grinning, with a pillow hugged to his chest. Derek and Nick--the band's merch/sound guy--draw a big dick and some crude commands all over Brian's pale face and arm. The temporary tattoos stay with the singer through breakfast the next morning, with our host's mom--who was working sewing clothing for priests (I kid you not)--in the next room.
Grinning, Derek sheepishly explains the line his band isn't allowed to cross: "Don't pass out with your shoes on," he shrugs.
GLASGOW/MANCHESTER
Out of all four Catheters, Derek's words and movements are the most measured off stage. Sitting in the classroom-cum-dressing room of the Glasgow University Student Union before his show, idle talk about why it doesn't snow in Seattle leads to him modestly giving a scientific breakdown about the greenhouse effect's place in Northwest weather patterns. Tell him you miss living in a crowded city and he'll recommend a book on the sociology of cramped spaces. Derek is a killer guitar player (as proven with his work on the next-wave-of-Nirvana single the Catheters showcased in Glasgow, tentatively titled "Pale Horse"), but he's also a sharp thinker when it comes to book smarts. He's not completely buttoned up, however, telling jokes to Ed in the dressing room about the difference between tour managers and guitarists (punch line: "And the manager says, 'Have them both back here in five minutes.'").Overall, though, Derek's a modest guy, blushing with compliments and keeping quiet about his band in the face of fans. Tomorrow night he will run into two chatty teens after the band's Manchester University show and won't even mention he'd played earlier. When the kids find out he's from Seattle, they'll get very excited, asking him, "Are the Murder City Devils drunk all the time?" and fawning over Zeke, while Derek keeps his band info at bay, a secret.
LONDON
Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner isn't part of Leo's family, but the Catheters bassist definitely wishes they were related. Leo admires his jokingly nicknamed "Uncle Steve," even if Turner attended his first punk show in 1980, a year before Leo was born. Leo and Steve don't look alike--despite the glasses and curly hair--but there are constant jokes on tour about their shared blood."I had one reporter convinced that Leo was my nephew," Turner says of a London critic who interviewed both bands. Other myths about the Leo/Steve relationship spread on this tour: Leo's mom and Steve had a relationship; Steve is Leo's real father. A fact you can take seriously: "Leo and I were cut from the same Mercer Island cloth," says Turner of their shared hometown roots.
In London the Catheters learn a valuable lesson from their elder non-relatives: When in doubt, talk back like Mudhoney. X-Ray, a new magazine looking for a "Sub Pop Then and Now" theme, takes up part of an afternoon, shooting both bands at London's Camden Locks, a junkie park with dead eels down the street from the Electric Ballroom. The shoot takes about two hours of awkward posing, but the attitude expressed in that time makes an impression on Leo.
"It was the coolest thing watching Mudhoney at the photo shoot," Leo says in his dressing room afterward. "When we'd do photo shoots, we'd give in very easily. We don't want to offend a photographer 'cause they're doing their job too. But when the photographer was like, 'All right, I'd like Mudhoney to jump in the air,' Mudhoney said, 'Nope. We don't jump.' So then the photographer's like, 'All right, then why don't the others'--that's what he fucking calls the Catheters--'why don't the other guys, why don't you all jump?' and we're like, 'No.' If it was just us and they'd said, 'Why don't you all jump in the air?' though, we would've."
After the photo shoot, the X-Ray journalist takes members of both bands to dinner for a musical trivia roundtable. Leo goes, but barely contributes. "Steve [Turner], Mark [Arm], and Brian are the three biggest music nerds I've ever met," he says. "I went to dinner with them, and I didn't say a fucking word, 'cause they're like, 'Oh yeah, this band and this band and this fucking obscure-ass band.'"
Brian cuts in: "You have to understand that everything I know about music is because of those guys and people like my girlfriend." (Brian's live-in girlfriend is fellow record collector Fen Hsiao.) "I just learn from all these other people who are crazy about music."
The dinner and conversation may have been inspiring, but technically the Catheters' London show that night isn't their best. A high-pitched ring hangs through the band's set, prompting Brian to yell from the stage, "Can you make it stop?" When the answer seems to be no, he fumes, "We're just gonna fuck around for a half hour and then the Buff Medways will come on and play some music." It's a tense moment when, after announcing they have a couple more songs to play, the Electric Ballroom soundman comes out on stage and makes a cut-off motion to the band. But after what looks like a pathetic end to a night plagued with mistakes, Brian throws all the band's cards on the table, launching into a double-time version of "What Have They Done to You?," screaming and sweating as the band sparks like live wires around him.
This moment epitomizes the Catheters at their best--adrenalized fighters flipping the finger at detractors and defiantly delivering holy hell to a crowd jacked on their energy.
An hour and a bottle of Maker's Mark later, Brian and Leo have forgotten the technical quirks of the evening, relaxing backstage and talking about the larger challenges in front of the band. When asked about his biggest frustration with the tour, Brian laughs and says, "Each other," a comment that most likely comes from the fact that drummer Davey has spent all his downtime on the tour in the small loft in the back of the van, coming out only for sound check or to play, and causing palpable tension picked up by outside observers.
Moments later, Brian changes course, surprisingly holding himself and his band up to impossible standards, saying, "I know one of these days, and it's already starting to happen, I'm gonna realize that what I want so much out of life right now I can never have. Because I listen to a lot of other records and I listen to our band and I know we're not doing that kind of stuff, you know? I know we're not gonna be that band. And it's cool 'cause I still love to play music and it's worth it just to do it on its own, but I know we're not gonna be that band that's gonna carry on."
He pauses, then continues: "That shit is innate. You've got it or you don't. There's no way in hell we're gonna be a Jimi Hendrix or someone like that, because those guys, when they were our age, they were already doing that shit. We came out of more of the punk rock side of things, where it's about amateurism. Look at someone like the Blood Brothers--they're the same age as us and they're so much more advanced. If we can eek out a living doing this, then that's enough for me. Being in a band is like living in a fucking fantasy world, and you're just playing make-believe from day one anyway."
After the London show, feedback from the press spans from writers from NME and the Guardian loving what they saw ("The Catheters are very Mudhoney," one writer told the band's U.K. press person), to not being metal enough for Metal Hammer while being too heavy for Smash Hits. But they still left a big impression on the people they played for every night, people who believe they will head into greater success in the future--including their Uncle Steve.
"They've really come into their own," says Steve Turner about the Catheters after his week with them on the road. "I think Derek's a great guitar player, Davey's a great drummer, Leo's a great bassist, and Brian's a great, charismatic frontman. For their age, they've gotten further than I ever got when I was that young."
The Catheters play Fri Oct 11 at the Vera Project with Fitz of Depression and Akimbo.
