Drag City

A Short History

Nearly twenty years after being founded by Chicago independent distributors Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn, Drag City is one of only a few labels dating from the great DIY boom of the late 80s and early 90s to have survived with its independence and credibility intact. Beginning in 1989 with a Royal Trux release, soon followed by Pavement’s Demolition Plot J-7 EP, the earliest Drag City releases were characterised by the messy but intelligent sound of those two bands. With Pavement’s departure to Matador and the Royal Trux’ eventual shift towards coherence, the label kept its ears open and ended up with a who’s who of everything interesting and non-grunge in early 1990s America. Bands such as Smog, Stereolab and the Silver Jews held the middle ground, while DC explored alt-folk with Will Oldham (Palace Brothers, Bonnie Prince Billy) and pretty much everywhere else with Jim O’Rourke (Gastr Del Sol, Sonic Youth, producer, mixer, avant-garde composer). Towards the present day, Drag City retained their ear for something new and different. They continue to release the multiple albums a year Jim O’Rourke thinks up on various subsidiaries, as well as picking up on the Bay Area’s only surviving fairy minstrel, Joanna Newsom, arranging her marriage with Beach Boys string-arranger Van Dyke Parks for her 2006 opus Ys. With their twentieth anniversary coming up in 2009, Analogue turns the spotlight onto Drag City.

So what does Drag City mean?

One of the reasons for their longevity and growth into something of genuine importance is the chameleon characteristic. Drag City started out with similar enough music to most of the DIY labels starting up in cities around the US at the time, but by ten years later the music was unrecognisably eclectic. They will literally put out anything so long as it sounds good to them. A recent example: in Drag City’s latest newsletter, they put some effort into promoting a re-release of an album by Suarasama, a pair of Sumatrans with ethnomusicology degrees. It seems far-fetched for an American indie label to be promoting that, but they are, because they want to. And though they are commonly thought of as economical (i.e. cheap) by many of their artists, as Joanna Newsom says, “they’ll spend money on things if they believe in it”. Recently, they made the news on the blog circuit by pulling their catalogue off emusic.com, an mp3 site, because it wasn’t worth their while to have them there. This created a new round of debate on the future of the indie labels, with the received wisdom that paying for cheap downloads (without manufacturing costs) is just as good as buying CDs coming into question. Really though, the way to enjoy Drag City releases is to sit back with a copy of a zine, drop the needle on a 12″ and remember that there would be no Label Love features if it wasn’t for the common identity forged by record labels like these.

The Savant:

Jim O’Rourke - Eureka (1999)/Insignificance (2001)

Chicago’s dizzyingly prolific O’Rourke has been one of Drag City’s most important artists of the past twenty years. 1999’s Eureka is his most perfectly conceived record from start to finish, channelling Bacharach in a stab at inventing experimental lounge pop. Certain moments, including the mantric ‘Prelude to 110 or 220/Women of the World’, are sweet enough to jerk tears. Others are simply mood-lifting pop, but Eureka remains one of O’Rourke’s finest moments.

Being the chameleon of the underground music world, it was only a matter of time until O’Rourke tried out the rock and roll robe. 2001’s Insignificance shows the results of hanging out a lot with Thurston Moore, packing messy riffs and blue-collar drums alongside the zephyr-like qualities he perfected on Eureka. Having left Chicago for New York, O’Rourke lyrically burns his bridges with his former scene-mates, especially on the opener ‘Downhill from Here’. However much less likeable this may make him seem, it helps to drag him out of his aggregated “experimental” mythos and into the real world. Add to this the fact that the album is of course sonically gorgeous and even occasionally quite catchy, and you have the perfect introduction to one of the most intimidating back catalogues in modern music.

The Story-Teller:

Silver Jews - American Water

Plagued by the shadow of his own rhythm guitarist for most of his career, David Berman waited until 1998 to make his confession, thereby delivering the greatest opening line in singer-songwriter history: “In 1984 I was hospitalised for approaching perfection”. Berman’s songs are rife with these types of lines, single sentences that stand out and make you go “hah”. He’d been doing this for a while by the time American Water came out, but nothing before or after is as consistent as this. With Malkmus in tow, Berman explores the gauntlet of styles between Pavement and honky-tonk without submitting to either, while his untrained (i.e. occasionally flat) voice sings with the uncanny ability to sound like it’s on auto-pilot until the sixth listen, when a line will come out of nowhere and grab you. His other trick is managing to sound completely sincere without ever actually giving anything away. Fill in the meanings yourself.

The Anarcho-Hipsters:

Royal Trux – Twin Infinitives (2000)

The third Drag City record ever released was Twin Infinitives. On it, Royal Trux come off as a sort of Times New Viking left in the womb, rearranging the component parts of rock music into arrhythmic noise, and only occasionally breaking into something approaching an actual song. It is difficult to listen to and vaguely disgusting. But somewhere in the muddle of noise and silence, there lays an absolutely captivating thing: the sound of being really fucked up. The Royal Trux climb into your head and play the sound of the head cold, the hangover or the heroin addiction back to you. They did eventually calm down and come out with something approaching coherent indie rock, but on this formless double-LP, that was nowhere to be seen. It has been argued that the album is merely a group of substance-abusing art-schoolers ripping the piss out of a scene that celebrates disaffection. This is entirely possible. Listen to Twin Infinitives more as a historical artefact than an actual album.

The Fairy Maiden

Joanna Newsom: – The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

The best thing about The Milk-Eyed Mender is that, with a little added vinyl hiss, it could’ve been recorded any time in the last fifty or even hundred years. And it would still sound different. Rehabilitating the harp as a serious instrument with a greater purpose than new age esotericism, Newsom’s unclassifiable folk-classical style is so enchanting that it makes it seem like being enchanted is a reasonable thing to happen. Songs like ‘The Book of Right On’ and ‘Sprout and the Bean’ are profound and playful, beautiful and basic at the same time. The lyrics are sharp, sometimes funny and always delivered in a little girl’s voice that divides everyone who hears it. Newsom was lumped in at the time with ‘freak folk’ artists like Devendra Banhart, but The Milk-Eyed Mender is more timeless than anything that scene produced. The follow-up, Ys, is conceived on a much greater scale, with orchestral arrangements and ten-minute-long songs. It is incredibly impressive in its own way. But not as enchanting.