Happy 30th Anniversary to The Vaselines’ compilation The Way of The Vaselines: A Complete History, originally released May 1, 1992. (Note: Audio streams of Sub Pop’s 2009 deluxe reissue of the compilation entitled ‘Enter The Vaselines’ are embedded throughout this article.)
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“I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new.” - Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape (2007)
Before the Internet and things going viral, there were certain mix tapes that would achieve not exactly virality, but a devoted following or even just a certain mystique. After I went off to college, my mother got really into antiquing and bought a crappy yet functional used minivan to transport her finds. The downside to the minivan was that one of us—my brother, me, or our newly acquired teenage stepsiblings—had to drive it, as it was one of the family cars in heavy rotation. So, we nicknamed it the Shaggin’ Wagon to give it an ironic air of crazysexycool. Whenever I was home in the summers, I was the one who always ended up driving it, for the sole reason that I was the oldest and just didn’t have much fight in me anymore. And it sucked… until I found the tape.
It had no case, and was simply titled “A Mix 4 U.” I found it while rooting around the van’s dusty console for some change or a roll of Lifesavers. I popped it into the tape deck, and immediately heard the Pixies, which was odd because approximately three people who lived on or near the American army base in Germany where my parents lived, and where I had grown up, liked the Pixies. After that song, it was one great selection after another—all relatively obscure indie rock. My childhood friend Kara came to visit later that summer, and we began referring to it formally as “The Tape.” Before Kara left, I made her a copy, and I would make many other people copies over the years. I never figured out where The Tape came from, but for a while it was one of my prized possessions.
Later, I would have a similar relationship with a cassette that came to be known as “Adam’s Tape,” which is where I discovered The Vaselines. Kara had a friend named Adam who she’d met at college, and Adam made her a mix tape. I can’t remember now if meeting Adam preceded my having a copy of the tape—because there were copies—or if I met him first. But Kara and I were crazy about that tape, because it had a strange, eclectic mix of stuff like Sam Cooke’s tender “Cupid” to Action Patrol’s furious-screamo “Tube,” to The Magnetic Fields’ transcendent “100,000 Fireflies,” to The Vaselines’ merry, waltzing ode to bike seats “Rory Rides Me Raw.”
I had already heard of The Vaselines because I had heard of Kurt Cobain. On Nirvana’s 1992 album Incesticide, the grunge band had covered two Vaselines songs, “Son of a Gun” and “Molly’s Lips,” but neither had made much of an impression on me. In fact, I thought both covers were unimaginative, repetitive pop punk sung with the requisite sneer. Honestly, I don’t know if I would have even liked the Vaselines had I stumbled upon them on their own, without the greater context of Adam’s Tape. I might have thought them a bit precious, and twee. But something about hearing them among traditional greats like Sam Cooke and Elvis and then also against hardcore bands, like Rye Coalition’s shrieking, raging “The Higher The Hair, The Closer To God,” allowed me an appreciation for the Vaselines, and made me pay more attention to their garage-y distortion, the brilliance in their limited-chord simplicity, and the folky ’60s-ness of their two voices in tandem. The Vaselines were punk rock, in a whole new way.
When I eventually met the famous Adam at Kara’s parents’ house in Virginia over Spring Break in or around 1998, we talked about his tape, and he suggested I get The Way of The Vaselines. I bought the compilation, and it struck me as crazy how much the Nirvana covers had smoothed out the Scottish band’s charming, rudimentary roughness. “Son of a Gun,” the first song on the album, begins with buzz-saw distortion that dissolves into a jangly tangle of guitars, and the Vaselines—Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly—singing, in stark contrast to the instrumentation, with sunny, crystalline candor.
In fact, they sang sunnily about everything—nothing seemed off-limits—from Catholic guilt (“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam”) to the aforementioned banana seat (“Rory”) to sexual revulsion (“Sex Sux”) to obese cats (“Monsterpussy”) to the imagined kissing of Scottish actress Molly Weir (“Molly’s Lips”). They even had a cover of drag queen Divine’s “You Think You’re a Man.” Every song on the compilation is simple in both lyrics and musicality, but deceptively so. The Vaselines’ music is greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s a YouTube video of a 2017 conversation at the University of Glasgow between the Vaselines and Professor John Butt (yes, really) in which Butt, a world-leading authority on Johann Sebastian Bach, attempts to deconstruct the beauty of the Vaselines. Butt’s thesis is that even people who admittedly only know a few chords, like McKee and Kelly, can possess a musical genius, and that the Vaselines indeed have that. “Part of my fascination is the fact that you manage to do things without [formal] knowledge,” the professor tells the Vaselines at one point, referring to their instinctively figuring out things like song structure and time signatures and key changes.
When asked about influences, Frances McKee is plain that there aren’t any: “We couldn’t be influenced by anyone, because we didn’t have—I still don’t have—the musical know-how to use an influence and then copy it,” she said. “So anything that comes from us, that’s it. That’s why it’s all the same [laughs] because there’s nothing—there’s things that we like, but there is no way we could emulate it.” (Later, however, she says that she and Kelly were fans of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, and that they had been inspired by “Some Velvet Morning” in the writing of “Son of a Gun”—and you can hear it.)
“We kept it basic,” Eugene Kelly said, “because we could only play certain chords. We couldn’t play minor chords, so we only wrote songs in major chords, and if there was a minor in there, it was just by accident.”
The two rarely rehearsed, because they lived in flats where the neighbors wouldn’t appreciate the noise, and they couldn’t afford rehearsal space as students. Live shows were always tense.
“So you’re playing on the edge all the time, on the edge of complete falling apart?” Butt said. “I think that happens in all forms of music. If you don’t play on the edge, it’s really boring.”
The conversation soon turns to the natural vs. the heavily practiced and gleamingly polished in music. “I think one thing you find in the whole history of all forms of music is a constant yearning, on the one hand, for naturalization,” Butt observes. “We want to make things more natural, so that music comes as close as you can to shitting, basically [everyone laughs]. You don’t put anything in the way. You don’t want to stop your natural urges because it gets very uncomfortable.”
“That’s the way our music is,” McKee says, laughing.
“And the other side of music is to make it as complicated as you can, in other words to craft it, and polish it, and push it further,” the professor says.
The idea that you didn’t have to be a polished, practiced musician to pick up an instrument and play your heart out with authority was a notion that was born with punk rock in the ’70s, but it was taken to the extreme—or at least applied to more traditional pop formats (catchy melodies, verse-chorus-verse, etc.)—with the birth of a scene in Olympia, Washington in the ’80s, helmed by a young man named Calvin Johnson of the band Beat Happening. Johnson also had a record label, K Records, which began very humbly with original band recordings—singles, which was the punk-rock currency at the time—on compilation cassette tapes; so mix tapes, really.
That was in America. On the other side of the pond, a similarly thriving DIY scene, subject of the 2017 retrospective documentary Teenage Superstars, was cropping up in Glasgow, Scotland, led by a young man named Stephen McRobbie, otherwise known as Stephen Pastel of the band The Pastels. Pastel had started his own record label, called 53rd and 3rd after the Ramones song about male prostitution.
The two scenes—Olympia and Glasgow—would collide in around 1987 or 1988 when Johnson, touring the UK with Beat Happening, sought out a label for a UK release of Beat Happening’s most recent record, and landed on Pastel’s 53rd and 3rd, according to Love Rock Revolution, a book about K Records by Mark Baumgarten. The Vaselines, who had also just put out a single on 53rd and 3rd, ended up playing some shows with Beat Happening. When the tour was over, Johnson brought the Vaselines’ music back to Olympia with him, which is no doubt how Kurt Cobain, who lived in Olympia in the late ‘80s, heard them. (In fact, Cobain was such a fan of Calvin Johnson’s record label that he even had a tattoo of the K Records logo on his forearm.) So, it’s quite likely that Kurt Cobain discovered the Vaselines, his “favorite songwriters,” in almost exactly the same way I did—via a mix tape.
In 1990, Nirvana contacted the duo to see if they would like to open for them in Edinburgh on the Bleach tour. By that point, the Vaselines had broken up—both as a couple and a musical act —not long after the release of their first full-length album Dum-Dum on 53rd and 3rd. “So Eugene phoned me up and was like, ‘Do you want to play this show?’” McKee recalls in Teenage Superstars. “There’s a band called Nirvana that seem to be playing one of our songs.”
The Vaselines borrowed guitars and amps, barely rehearsing beforehand until they were backstage. “I grabbed Eugene and was like, ‘You need to go over these songs with me because I haven’t a clue how to play them,’” McKee says. “And so we’re sittin’ there trying to play—I can’t remember what song—and Kurt came by and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s going to think we’re idiots because we can’t play our music.’”
“This is terrible and I was gettin’ really embarrassed about it all,” she continues. “Little known to me at the time that he [Cobain] was kind of in awe of us.” McKee shakes her head, clearly still in disbelief about it all.
The Vaselines reunited for just that one night. Because of the increase in their popularity, Sub Pop sought permission to release the totality of the duo’s output at the time, resulting in 1992’s The Way of The Vaselines. It was the first time most people had access to their music. In 2009, Sub Pop re-released The Way of The Vaselines under a different title, Enter The Vaselines. And then, to fans’ joy, the duo re-formed and released an album, Sex with an X, in 2010, followed by 2014’s V for Vaselines. Still, the Vaselines’ popularity remained largely underground, and still has to this day.
Not long after I met Adam over that spring break at Kara’s, he and I began a somewhat feverish back-and-forth email exchange. Eventually, we met up in Philly for a Superchunk show at the Trocadero, and then slept in the same bed in a room my friend Orlene was renting in a random house near UPenn. The whole thing was weird. We didn’t make out, though, because I think Kara had a crush on him, too, and I determined that my years-long friendship with her was more important. Still, I will always remember Adam with a little bit of romanticism, if only because he introduced me, properly, to the Vaselines.
“His [Kurt’s] enthusiasm for your music came just too late, didn’t it, in terms of what you were doing,” Keith Bruce, the moderator for the University of Glasgow discussion, asked the Vaselines.
McKee laughed and looked over at Kelly. “Yeah, that’s the story of our life, really, isn’t it?”
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