By Vish KhannaJon Wurster is a comedic writer and performer on the Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling, and the amazing drummer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina's Superchunk. For the past 20 years, Superchunk have made a tremendous impact on underground culture with their own impassioned, pop punk output, and for their role in founding Merge Records, one of the most impressive record labels in history. After a prolific ten-year arc in the 1990s, Superchunk ― consisting of Mac McCaughan, Laura Ballance, Jim Wilbur, and Wurster ― have taken most of the 21st century off as a band, releasing their last album in 2001. All that changed in September with the release of an excellent, dynamic album entitled Majesty Shredding. For his part, Jon Wurster didn't really slow down, manning the drums for Rocket From the Crypt, Bob Mould, A.C. Newman, and the Mountain Goats among others. Exclaim! caught up with Wurster recently for a wide-ranging conversation about Superchunk and more. Good morning Jon, how's it going? Good, I've done my sit-ups and I'm ready.
Oh, is that your early morning ritual? Absolutely. A thousand sit-ups. Really, you do a thousand sit-ups every day? No. I do do yoga every day. Ah, what prompted you to do that? I can't remember why I started doing it but I just felt better after doing it. So now, I feel really bad if I don't do it for a couple of days. So I try and do it every day.
When I think of music and yoga, I always think of Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Chuck Klosterman wrote an article about Thom Yorke once and he talked about how Thom was late for the interview because he had to do some yoga. So when musicians tell me they do yoga, I often wonder if they've been inspired by Thom Yorke. I had no idea he did it. He and I are feuding.
Wow, just because of that? Weird. I know that Superchunk convened for some shows and the odd recording session in the last ten years but the band's schedule did slow down considerably; what prompted that exactly? Well, we'd been hitting it really hard there. I joined right before the second album came out ― I didn't play on it but I toured behind it ― and that was in October of '91. We pretty much did it full-time, non-stop for the next ten years or so. And it just got to be tiring and wasn't exciting anymore. I'm speaking for me personally. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the company of the people in the band; I'd just had enough at that point. And I think maybe another member or two felt the same way so we just agreed to not break up but to not do it full-time anymore. Like you said, we'd play at least one or two shows every year from 2002 on, and we recorded nine or ten songs over that period also and they came out on various comps and things. A lot of it came out a couple of years ago on an EP called Leaves in the Gutter. So, it was just time to not do it full-time for a while. Mac did Portastatic, he and Laura did the label with great success, and I ended up playing with a bunch of great artists and that's it. And now we're back doing it again.
It's interesting to me that you didn't slow down as a musician at all; you played with many different people. So, it wasn't music you were sick of, just playing that particular kind of music. Yeah, yeah; that's a fair assessment. Nothing against it, it's just that, if you do it all the time and that's all you do, you kinda get tired of it. I don't know a musician who hasn't experienced that. You wanna do something else and hear something else.
Do you suppose that time away from one another had any profound impact on the way you played together on Majesty Shredding? I'm sure it did in some way. Every other album we've ever done, we did it all in one shot. You'd get there and record every song straight and then you'd mix it right after, so there's no period of assessment or break from it at all. That can be really good but it can also lead to this tunnel vision, or not being able to take a good look at it as a whole. With this record, I think we started it last spring and it was done in little snatches whenever we were all able to meet up. I was on the road constantly for two years with Bob Mould, or Carl Newman, the Mountain Goats especially, and Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar or whomever. It was whenever I had a break in touring and Mac and Laura could take a breath from Merge and their families. So, we'd grab three or four songs at a time and did it that way. The interesting thing was, we didn't have a whole lotta time to work on them together, whereas in the past, we'd really rehearse the songs, almost to death in a way. I'd do four-track demos of the song myself, kinda obsessing over them and sinking it into the ground in a way. But this time, Mac pretty much wrote the songs on his own and would send us demos with guitar, vocals, and keyboards and we learned the songs. We'd rehearse them for two days and then go in the studio and record them, which really lent them a spontaneous vibe, which we really didn't have, personally for me, since maybe On the Mouth. We did the record with a guy named Scott Solter who I'd worked with on two Mountain Goats records. He lives near Charlotte, North Carolina and I thought it'd be cool to bring him into the mix because he has an interesting way of working and getting a great performance outta you. So, it was a great combination of things. We did way more takes than we've ever done before of songs but it still has a nice, fresh vibe to it.
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