FEATURE:
Supervixen
The Mighty Garbage at Thirty
__________
1995 is a year when…
IN THIS PHOTO: Shirley Manson with her Garbage bandmates Duke Erikson, Steve Marker and Butch Vig in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images
some of the all-time best albums were released. A few classic debut were also released that year. An embarrassment of riches and bounty for music fans – including me – at the time, we look back at these albums thirty years later with a sense of nostalgia and retrospection. How well they have aged and what do they mean now. In terms of the very best of 1995, there is no doubt that Garbage was among them. The eponymous debut of the U.K.-U.S. band - released on 15th August, 1995 -, they are still going strong today. Many people rank Garbage as the all-time best album from the Shirley Manson-led group. Reaching number twenty on the US Billboard 200 and number six on the UK Albums Chart, it was lauded for its innovative production sound and its incredible consistency and confidence. Garbage spawned incredible singles like Queer, Only Happy When It Rains, Milk, and my personal favourite, Stupid Girl. I will end with a review of Garbage’s debut album. Before that, there are some anniversaries features that I want to include. We get a bit of backstory into the album. Before getting to some anniversary features, when going through Garbage’s discography for SPIN in 2012, this is what Shirley Manson noted about their 1995 debut: “I can remember Butch slicing and splicing like a crazy man with bits of tape hanging off every surface of the studio. We had no idea the record was going to become this cultural zeitgeist. We put “Vow” out on a little CD sampler magazine, and before we knew it, we were getting played on the radio from Sydney to Seattle and everywhere in between. It was a such a headfuck. In a good way”.
I will get to a twentieth anniversary feature soon. Before that, in 2020, Albumism marked twenty-five years of Garbage. Even though the debut album is seen as a classic, some do not rate it as highly as they should. To me, it is one of the most significant debut albums of the 1990s:
“This phenomenon in life is also often mirrored in artistic collaboration and the genesis of Garbage is evidence thereof. Holed up in his Madison, Wisconsin headquartered Smart Studios, a few years removed from his notable production triumphs with Nirvana’s generation-defining Nevermind (1991), Sonic Youth’s Dirty (1992), and the Smashing Pumpkins’ debut Gish (1991) and smash follow-up Siamese Dream (1993), Butch Vig embarked upon a new chapter of his career by forming Garbage with longtime cohorts and fellow sonic experimentalists Duke Erikson and Steve Marker.
Soon thereafter, the trio recognized that the missing piece to giving the group a formal go was the absence of a commanding lead presence—preferably a woman—with the confidence, charisma and vocal chops to distinguish the band from the rest of the alt-rock landscape.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the great city of Edinburgh, a Scottish songstress named Shirley Manson was also in the midst of a fresh career phase with her new band Angelfish, which morphed out of her previous outfit Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie. In early 1994, the buzz behind the group was beginning to build and the video for “Suffocate Me”—the lead single from their self-titled debut LP—was added to the rotation of MTV’s 120 Minutes. (Side note of unabashed nostalgia: Man, I miss that program. But I digress.)
Marker just happened to be viewing the program one evening when the video played, and his interest was piqued. Marker, Erikson and Vig spared precious little time in setting up an introduction with Manson and despite an infamously botched initial audition—at least according to Manson herself—the gentlemen had found their coveted lead.
When Garbage’s inaugural single “Vow” debuted at the modest #39 slot on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart in June 1995, roughly a year after the threesome fortuitously became a quartet, it did so within the predominantly male-dominated airplay paradigm of the mid-1990s. A cursory glance at the artists who secured the Modern Rock chart’s top spot in 1995 reveals just one woman among their ranks: Alanis Morissette, who peaked at #1 twice that year with “You Oughtta Know” and “Hand In My Pocket” from her breakthrough album Jagged Little Pill. Otherwise, alt-boy bands including Bush, Green Day, Live and Silverchair reigned supreme.
Although Garbage wouldn’t capture the #1 spot until the first week of 1997 with “#1 Crush” (remixed for the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, but originally released in 1995 as the B-side to “Vow”), from its inception, the Manson-fronted band was doing its part to provide a welcome, er, alternative to at least some of the testosterone overload that defined the alternative rock scene at the decade’s midway point.
But beyond their charismatic firebrand of a frontwoman, the quartet differentiated themselves in another key way: their sound. With arguably Nine Inch Nails as the other analogue at the time with respect to their genre-bending disposition and proclivity toward dense and dark textures, Garbage melded an abundance of riffs, synths, samples, and looped percussion for a brooding yet melodic mélange.
“I think because of my success with Nirvana and the Pumpkins, everyone expected a grunge album,” Vig confided during a 2005 Vanyaland interview. “And Garbage sounded different, just in the way we approached using different genres and blending them together—electronica, hip-hop beats, film atmospherics, pop melodies and fuzz guitars and whatever—and then a lot of other bands started to copy that approach. I’ve definitely heard bands Garbage influenced, and that’s totally cool with me. We take that as a compliment.”
Preceding the release of the band’s eponymous debut album by nearly five months when it emerged in March 1995, the aforementioned “Vow” served as the band’s official introduction and captured the group’s sonic muscle replete with multiple textures and shapeshifts that envisaged more of the same to come via the full-length. Poised and coolly defiant, a vengeful Manson declares war on her lover-turned-adversary, vowing, “I came to shut you up / I came to drag you down / I came around to tear your little world apart / And break your soul apart.” No empty threat, Manson makes sure that there’s no doubt in listeners’ minds that she means business.
Four additional singles subsequently saw the light of day, including the trip-hop-esque “Queer,” a universal anthem for embracing eccentricity in its various forms, which continued Garbage’s steady momentum at radio, building upon the solid airplay figures for “Vow.” It’s also notable for featuring the percussion prowess of the late Clyde Stubblefield, a fellow Madison, WI resident at the time and the “funky drummer” extraordinaire who played a vital role in James Brown’s musical legacy and, by extension, countless hip-hop samples.
The propulsive “Only Happy When It Rains” unfurls as a sardonic, self-deprecating nod to the angst-ridden, misery-loves-company credo—or at least the semblance thereof—that largely defined alternative rock during the 90s’ first half. The song took off at radio in the early weeks of 2016 and the accompanying video quickly became a fixture on MTV (remember when the network actually played videos?), cementing the single as the group’s breakthrough moment.
Nearly one year after Garbage’s arrival, “Stupid Girl”—a damn near perfect pop-rock confection—became the crowning success of their debut album, peaking at #24 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, garnering a pair of GRAMMY Award nominations, and a coveted MTV Video Music Award nod.
“I have always defined myself as a feminist,” Manson reflected in revisiting “Stupid Girl” during a 2015 Rolling Stone interview. “I have never rejected that label. I’ve always welcomed it and believed in it. But I also think you have to be careful that you don’t get entrenched in clichés. I don’t think that just because you’re a feminist, that gives women carte blanche to do whatever they want and behave which way they wish. I felt strongly that when someone acts like an asshole that you should challenge that. So I loved the idea of a woman calling out another woman. I felt like it was a fresh perspective.”
Since Garbage arrived a quarter-century ago, the group has cultivated a career worthy of reverence and wholly devoid of the superficial trappings of pop-rock stardom, owing to their unbridled discipline and dynamism, both in the studio and on stage. Three years later in the spring of 1998, they unleashed an even broader critical and commercial triumph with their sophomore, GRAMMY Album of the Year shortlisted set Version 2.0 and they’ve delivered four sterling albums in the two decades since. With rumors swirling that their seventh studio project—the successor to 2016’s Strange Little Birds—is on the near horizon, there’s no better time to relive where it all began by dropping the needle anew on their enduringly wonderful debut”.
Before I get to a review from Rolling Stone, I think I will actually come to an interview from The Independent from 2020. Celebrating twenty-five years of Garbage’s debut album, Shirley Manson and Butch Vig shared their recollections and insights:
“With Garbage, she was thrust into the limelight and not entirely comfortable with her newfound position as rock poster-woman. She didn’t feel she deserved the attention. “I’ve suffered imposter syndrome my whole life,” says Manson now. “I had been in Goodbye Mr Mackenzie for 10 years before I joined Garbage. I was quite happy in the background. People think of me now as some sort of ambitious go-getter. That’s not who I was.”
Suddenly she was halfway across the world, living out of a hotel in Vig’s hometown of Madison and trusting her artistic future to three men she barely knew and a good decade older. And Vig was risking a great deal, too. Vig’s Smart Studio in Wisconsin had become an epicentre of the American alternative scene since he opened it in 1983. It was at Smart that Nirvana recorded “Polly” – with Vig in the production booth – and where Smashing Pumpkins laid down their 1991 debut, Gish.
When Vig started Garbage, several music industry friends took him aside and told him he was crazy, that the band was doomed to fail and then his reputation as a super-producer would go down in flames. But Vig was convinced that his new path was the right one.
“After the success of Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins I had a lot of offers to move to Los Angeles or New York or London to set up a studio,” he shrugs. “All these high-powered managers were calling: ‘You’re going to work with the Rolling Stones, you’re going to work with Pearl Jam.’ I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t take on a manager. I stayed in Madison. I liked being off the beaten track. I felt it kept me grounded.”
Garbage hit stores in August 1995 and was a sensation. The commercial crescendo came with “Stupid Girl”, built on a sample of The Clash’s “Train In Vain”, which became a ubiquitous hit in the UK in the summer of 1996. And yet, even as the confetti rained down, Manson felt ever more adrift. “I didn’t let myself enjoy it for numerous reasons,” she says.
“I felt pretty worthless as a human being. I had a lot of guilt. I came from a music scene [in Edinburgh] that was rife with unbelievable talent. And here I was on Top of the Pops. Who was I to stand front of the stage on Top of the Pops, this iconic TV show? I didn’t have half the talent of so many of my peers at home. I was embarrassed.”
And then came the misogyny. “It’s funny,” she begins. “On the one hand, [Garbage] was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me. But also, it was the most lonely, most cruel. I endured so much criticism. When I look at the headlines from magazines, I am shocked at the venom and the disrespect that I was under and how much worshipping there was of my male colleagues.”
Rolling Stone described Manson as a “pop-star-as-one-night-stand”; Entertainment Weekly praised her “menacing sexuality”. This sort of language was rife in the music press of the time. “They asked if I was a prostitute,” remembers Manson. “They asked me all kinds of things about my body, my sexual preferences, my face, how my lips looked good. It was truly, truly unbelievable. Now I look back and think, ‘Wow… I must have really been threatening to these boys.’ And they were young boys, a lot of the journalists writing for these papers I loved.”
By that point, Manson and her bandmates were unstoppable. Garbage went on to shift a blockbusting 4 million copies worldwide and, in 1997, receive three Grammy nominations (one for best newcomer and two for “Stupid Girl”). Manson clearly found the experience stressful, but she is proud of what the group achieved and its legacy, of proving pop and heavy rock could co-exist in beautiful harmony.
“If there was more than one of me in the band, it would have been a disaster,” she says. “If they hadn’t had me, it would have been a disaster. I didn’t think anybody in their right mind would listen to that first record. Shows you what I know”.
I am going to end with one of the many positive reviews for Garbage. Even if some feel the album has not aged well and it was a bit of a mis-mash of Grunge, Alternative Rock and commercial Pop, there is no denying that artists of today have been inspired by Garbage. It is an album that I feel stands up and has very few weak moments. It is a brilliant work that deserves more respect and love ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. This is what Rolling Stone offered in their review:
“Apprenticing in cheap and fast sessions during the '80s in Madison, Wis., at his Smart Studios, producer Butch Vig helped give structure and lucidity to the music of young bands such as Killdozer, Tad and Urge Overkill. Then he rewrote the pop book on distortion with Nirvana's epochal Nevermind. Quickly he became current rock's best shaper, a quietly logical guy who could navigate the complicated corners of, say, Sonic Youth and still remember the big beat, chewy tunes and adolescent aggression that make pop fly. Now, Vig has formed Garbage with Shirley Manson of the indifferent Angelfish and his longtime associates Steve Marker (Smart's co-owner) and Duke Erikson. Together, this unshy Scottish female singer and guitarist and these three ingenious Midwesterners – who provide percussion, guitars, samples, bass and keyboards – compose a studio band that makes up its own drama and kicks as it goes along.
Garbage screw around with dance pulses and guitar tones, pop concision and 12-inch madness, highly flown confessions and teenage thrills. Their basic attack comes from a known yet infrequently considered road: the rock remix. In the studio-driven world of hip-hop and its millions of track versions, this aspect of Garbage would seem unremarkable. But in rock, where the standard of live performance rules, remixes have been dicier affairs. Still, a few bands explore them, developing parallel sonic landscapes often denser and knottier than dance music's or hip-hop's. Vig, Marker and Erikson have themselves reconfigured sonics for U2, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, House of Pain and others, so this unpredictable remix sensibility arrives intact in Garbage. The rest of the shock comes from Manson, who hardly lounges around in these soundscapes like a pop singer content with her settings. This creates a jumpy, unsettled blur of scrupulously clear music and jarring mixed messages.
Immediately, as the mangy riffs of "Supervixen" begin to churn through space, Garbage drags you someplace else. As Manson's violet throatiness offers to create "a whole new religion," beats chatter, and delicate acoustic guitar notes and those opening riffs float in and out of the song's gently pounding rhythmic foundations. At times the main riff pauses to halt the music altogether. From there, Garbage ease into "Queer," a more roundly shaped tune orchestrated with this same love of junk and command of finesse. Acting as a sensual guide, Manson promises to "dirty up your mind," forecasting a black-and-white path through the strange and the lame as the music makes stringy transitions in ironic technicolor. On the next song, "Only Happy When It Rains," she and Garbage rock righteously as though Manson is running for the presidency of the Robert Smith Fan Club. Just as you think she has won by a landslide, the band swings in with rhythms and riffs whose complex demeanor recolor the whole song.
"As Heaven Is Wide" rides cool grooves high in focus and fiber, locomoting toward unknown dance-floor destinations. "Not My Idea," another querulous high-speed track, patiently explains its depressed circumstances, then bangs its silverware on the plate, insisting that "this is not my idea of a good time." Warm Euro-style balladry shows up with "A Stroke of Luck," but Manson shivers. "Here comes the cold again," she sings with regret. On "Vow," the current single, she's throwing fits again, threatening to tear somebody's world apart to the tune of industrialized guitar noise.
Near the end of Garbage, Manson affects a kind of peace with her own ravings. On "Stupid Girl" she marches along to a funky bass, indicting someone – herself? – for not believing in fear, pain or people she can't control. "All you had," she sings, seething, "you wasted." After another tuneful near-metal tantrum called "Dog New Tricks," she and Garbage crest on "My Lover's Box." On this great piece, arranged with those mangy riffs but reframed with syncopations from the Spinners and outbreaks from Bad Brains, Manson fears she'll never get to heaven and pleads, "Send me an angel to love." The album ends on a lovely two-song coda comprising "Fix Me Now," a wracked appeal for togetherness, and the lush "Milk," a ballad in which Manson and Garbage go grunge torch, and she explains her previous moments of cruelty in terms of having been "lost." Oh, was that it? Garbage teems with such disjunctions of tragedy and junk. Like so much fun and important rock & roll, it's the product of brilliant misunderstandings”.
On 15th August, we will remember Garbage at thirty. The sensational debut of a band who followed it up with another defining album of the '90s, Version 2.0 (1998), they are arguably entering a new peak in their career. They put out their latest album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, in May. A wonderful band I have always admired, I wanted to show love for their mighty debut album…
THIRTY years after its release.