About Mercury Rev
Mercury Rev is an American rock band formed in 1989 in Buffalo, New York, with singer/guitarist Jonathan Donahue and guitarist/clarinetist/sound generator operator Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak as the only constant members. The band's music has incorporated indie rock, psychedelic rock and American roots, amongst other forms. Mercury Rev have been closely associated with The Flaming Lips, and the two bands have shared historical ties.
Mercury Rev was formed in 1989 by students at the University at Buffalo, partially inspired by the drone music of composer/media studies professor Tony Conrad . The line-up gradually coalesced around Donahue, Grasshopper, vocalist/keyboard player David Baker and flute/French horn player Suzanne Thorpe; subsequent additions were bass guitarist/in-house producer Dave Fridmann , and a late addition in the form of drummer Jimy Chambers
The band was initially formed to score its members' student films, and had a loose playing and recording existence. The band's initial music was a blend of experimental, psychedelic rock, drone and noise rock. David Baker recalls "we were in Buffalo, sitting there thinking, there's no hope of us being a band, we’re not going to be Guns N’ Roses. What we did wasn't considered real, because it wasn't being covered by Spin or Rolling Stone, so we could just be whatever we wanted to be. We'd take the microphone and record pots and pans or guitar and make our own little world. I mean, we knew the context, we knew who Bowie was, we knew who all the bands were, but we didn't put them with us. We were just making music. It was, 'Us? Are we in a band?' Well, none of us live in the same town, we just meet in the studio and have a great time together doing stuff."
At this early stage, several members also had other musical interests which prevented consistent Mercury Rev activity. Donahue worked as a gig promoter for other bands' concerts in Buffalo, which brought him into contact with The Flaming Lips in 1989: he then toured with them as guitar technician before formally joining as lead guitarist in time to play on their 1990 album In a Priest Driven Ambulance. The latter album was co-produced by Dave Fridmann, who went on to co-produce every Flaming Lips studio album to date with the exception of 1993's Transmissions from the Satellite Heart.
Mercury Rev's debut album was 1991's Yerself is Steam. Once referred to as "soundtracks to actual movies, composed by a band that didn’t really exist," it originated as the collective's attempts to devise and perform musical scores for student films showing in local galleries, or for existing nature documentaries which they'd watch on television and jam to. It was followed by the "Car Wash Hair" single, a more straightforward song typifying the band's early merging of psychedelic rock and noise rock. During this year, the band had begun to solidify and concentrate on more sustained effort. Yerself is Steam had been completed during Donahue's breaks from Flaming Lips activity in tour and in Oklahoma: following creative disagreements with the band's frontman Wayne Coyne, Donahue left The Flaming Lips in mid-1991, shortly after recording the Hit to Death in the Future Head album. This enabled him to return to Buffalo and concentrate full-time on Mercury Rev. Fridmann, meanwhile, had produced the band's early recordings as part of his university course-work, meaning that Mercury Rev could access and use the SUNY Fredonia studios in off-hours and at cheap rates.
As they began to play live , the band began to make a name for themselves as creators of powerfully experimental, often chaotic psychedelic music, with Pitchfork later recalling "in their formative years, Mercury Rev really did sound like a careening bus headed towards a fiery crash — one where half the people on board were frantically fighting each other for control of the wheel, and the other half were in the back obliviously singing nursery rhymes as the whole bucket of bolts went up in flames... less a melding of disparate sounds than a battle royale of oppositional ideologies: order and anarchy, ecstasy and terror, purity and perversion."
Although Dave Fridmann remained the band's bass player, co-producer and co-composer in the studio, he often had to step back from his role as live bass player due to increasing demands on his time as a record producer. Bassist John DeVries substituted for Fridmann at an increasing number of live shows, including an Ireland-and-England tour in the autumn of 1992, with Gerald Menke taking over live bass duties by 1993.
Map & Directions To Venue
