The Jesus and Mary Chain sound like a band playing delicately crafted melodies next to a table saw chewing away on a plate of candy glass – all soaked in reverb. The ever-present screeching of the table saw is a constant reminder that the lightly sung alt rock tunes were born from hate. The Reid brothers absolutely despised mid-'80s pop music, and set out to create a remedy for what they saw as a talentless, uninspired void. Together, their songwriting would create the bridge between the British punk movement of the '70s and '90s rock, Psychocandy.
Some compared the group — known for inciting riots and being the catalyst to various acts of violence in its early days — to The Sex Pistols, but a young Jim Reid, the group's lead vocalist, quickly dismissed that comparison in early interviews. One interviewer tried to pay Reid a compliment, saying the group was "streets ahead" of Joy Division.
"Joy Division was shit. Joy Division was fucking rubbish. I don't even like us being mentioned in the same sentence," a young, notoriously off-putting Reid replied before taking a sip of his drink.
Decades later Reid would explain to me over the phone, "I'm terribly, terribly shy, and a lot of that supposed arrogance in the very beginning ... I just didn't know how to behave so I'd just get drunk and act like an absolute tit." Offering an example, he continued, "We hired security guards who were really well paid, and they'd spend a few days on the road with us before they were the ones who were going to beat the living shit out of us! [Laugh:] They were! They would have to be persuaded not to by our management, we're like, 'Fucking hell, this is bad news. The guys we paid to protect us want to kill us,' you know? We had to take a good close look at ourselves, you know?"
The band re-formed in 2007 and is currently touring the U.S. and Canada to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Psychocandy, the dysfunctional group's most celebrated and influential album. The band performs material from Psychocandy on Saturday, May 16, and Sunday, May 17, at The Warfield. It's been 30 years since the band released the 14 songs contained on the U.K. version, but their importance (or ability to draw a crowd) remains. "The quality doesn't dip," Reid said of the album. "We were aware of it when we were recording it. Almost any track on it could have been a single. That doesn't very often happen."
A lot has changed in the 30 years since Psychocandy's release. When the band headlined Coachella in 2007, Reid had never played a show in the Mary Chain sober, and felt so nervous he could faint. And the always-tumultuous relationship between the brothers has found a new, low resting point. Through his dry wit and sense of humor (and thick Scottish accent), you can hear an inkling of defeat in Reid's voice when he speaks about his brother. The two got along well when the band was just an idea, and stayed close throughout the first few years of its existence, but the relationship gradually deteriorated.
"Towards the end of the first period of the band in 1997-98 it was just painful to be around each other," Reid said from his home in England, a world away from his brother who resides in L.A.. "We just seemed to annoy the shit out of each other without even trying to (or if I'm being honest, trying to as well). It wasn't arguing about the music anymore, it was arguing about anything at all, like, 'Who is going to make the next cup of the tea in the studio?' The band would almost break up over an argument about tea."
The end of the band would ultimately come when Jim and William came to blows only three days into a world tour in 1998.
"The band didn't need to break up, what should have happened is someone should have said 'You go that way, you go that way, take six months or a year off and don't talk to each other,'" Reid said. "But they didn't do that, what they did instead was book this big fucking world tour where we were both stuck on a tour bus together. The band broke up within three days of that tour. They stuck us on the bus and that was it."
Things weren't always so tense between the brothers. When Jim quit his job working at the Rolls-Royce factory ("I couldn't communicate with anyone who worked there. It was like we were just on completely different planets.") and his father kicked him out of the house, Jim and William moved to London to live on the dole. That feeling of isolation, not only from his co-workers, but from the music going on at the time, would be a driving factor in the birth of The Jesus and Mary Chain. When their father was laid off, he gave some of his severance money to his sons.
"He gave a few hundred quid to me and William — I dunno what he thought we were going to do with that, but when he got back from holiday we had bought this contraption, a four-track recording studio — one of the first portable recording studios that ever came out," Reid recalled with a chuckle. "It was fairly safe to say he was pretty disgusted when he got back and had seen what we had spent the money he gave us on. He was like, 'What the fuck is that?' We said, 'Well, this is going to make us our fortune,' and he was like, 'Oh, Christ.'"
Despite their father's doubts, the brothers would find great success together in their musical endeavors, but one question still loomed — who would be the singer? Neither wanted the role, so they flipped a coin.
"I lost, and became the singer," Reid laughed. "After a couple months he started to realize the singer got all the attention so he was like, 'I want to do it now!' and I was like, 'No, oh fuck no, it's settled now, William. We can't go back, everyone knows I'm the singer now, it'd be weird.'"
Music — especially good music like The Jesus and Mary Chain — often has the power to transport listeners to a different time or place: to the place they first heard a song, or a time when they listened to it on repeat after a breakup. And although Reid will be in the driver seat when he hits the stage at The Warfield, and in control of the table saw-powered Psychocandy, he'll also be taken for a nostalgic ride.
"Psychocandy is a reminder of those good times. It's still no walk in the park with me and William," Reid said. "We just know not to go too far now. We know what an argument can do. But we're never going to get back to the way we were in 1985. We're never going to be that Jim and William again, so we just have to make the best of what there is."
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