MIRACLE PILL
 |
sept 10
sept 10
sept 12
sept 12
sept 13
sept 13
Thirty-five years ago, a teenager from the heart of Detroit, Michigan decided to start a band. Tommy Two-Hands, as he was known to his friends, had spent a year wading into the punk scene and teaching himself how to drum. It wasn’t until the summer of 1984 that he convinced two of his friends, Ryan Mackay and Josh Peterson, to join him. They called themselves The DeVilles.
“We didn’t know how to play anything,” Ryan Mackay explains as we sit down to discuss Fever Dream and the release of their 12th studio album titled Miracle Pill. “That was just a minor detail at the time though. We figured that everything else would come to us as we went.”
Two months after the formation of the DeVilles, the band called it quits. But from the decay of failure, blooms success.
“I think about that a lot, how significant that was. There’s this kid who straddled the world I lived in and the world Josh lived in. I don’t think we would have met any other way if it wasn’t for him. I’d seen him [Josh] around before at shows, but we came from different sides of the tracks.” He laughs. “You know, I was poor poor, and he was lower middle poor. Everyone was still living paycheck to paycheck but his parents could afford the cans that weren’t dented or expired.”
The pair became fast friends in spite of their differences and quickly formed another band. Then another. And another. After going through a series of drummers and an even longer series of names – The Fuck Yous, Blood & Fuck, Machine, Devoid, B&E to name a few – they met Randy Dagner in 1986 and became Fever Dream.
“I wish I could say it was a magic moment and it all fell into place, but we were still kids and it was just this fun thing we were doing. Over time we learned how to play our instruments, I mean I’m pretty sure I’m still learning guitar, and we started playing covers and then writing our own music. It was all about having fun and meeting girls.”
The girls didn’t come right away.
“Turns out when you’re a punk band, who attends most of your shows? Other dudes. You’re at these shows and watching these guys play and you see one girl talk to them and you think wow, look he’s getting all the chicks. Aka the one girl that’s there. If I’d known that maybe I would have tried a little harder to be good at football,” Mackay jokes.
Eleven years later, the girls started to attend. In 1995 came their first hit, “Name”. It was a departure from the sound the band was known for, but not out of nowhere says Mackay.
“I think it’s real easy to look at Name and think well here’s where they ‘sold out’. This moment here is where it began to change. But I think that’s ignoring our whole back catalogue of stuff. By our third album I was already writing songs that, at least to me, have all the seeds of what came next. But it sure was a crazy time to be at our shows after Name. There’d be all these dudes who were here for the headbanging and moshing, and then I’d break out the acoustic for Name. I’d get so much shit thrown at me. More than usual. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get to finish the song. Then the audiences started changing, there were girls, people would hate the rest of our music and leave after we played Name.”
Their success did not come without a toll. A series of bad contracts had left the band in considerable debt. Instead of quitting, they toured. Fever Dream joined the bill alongside Ocean Avenue, opening for Bush. It helped, but it wasn’t enough.
“It was such a wild ride. I had so much that I wanted to say and do and write, we had so many things we wanted to try. But we felt bound by these contracts. We couldn’t afford to stop touring and work on another record, but we wanted to.”
That was when Warner – then Warner Bros – came and saved the day.
“They really helped us out, I give them shit and I don’t agree with them all the time, but I’ll be forever grateful for what they did for us, how they helped us get to a place where we could really work on some new stuff and got us out from under those bad deals. They created this amazing environment. You want to try a string section? Here’s some strings. You want to play this part on an antique piano from the second world war? Sure, we’ll make it happen. It let us open up what we were doing in such a big way. And after feeling so constricted, it just came out of me. I think they saw something in us, the potential, and let us run with it. Labels don't really do that these days.”
From that freedom came the megahit, “Iris”.
“I get asked a lot what that song meant to me, who it was about, if it’s personal. Sometimes I make answers up. But really, it’s just something I wrote for a movie and it’s about Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan’s characters more than it was ever about me. But I kind of like that, that I don’t have this personal attachment to the song. I’ve never been forced to say it’s about my marriage, or some girlfriend. It’s always been neutral. And then everyone can put whatever it means to them on top of it. I’m out of the equation. It can be whatever it’s gonna be and I can play it and enjoy it. It makes it easier to live with.”
“Iris” was a crossover hit that still holds the record for the most weeks that a song has spent at number one – 18. The song also earned the band three Grammy nominations and in 2012 Billboard released their Top 100 Pop Songs 1992-2012 and “Iris” was ranked number one. The list also featured “Slide” and “Name”, making them the only act with three songs listed.
“I’ll always be living in the shadow of Iris and I’m okay with that. Depending on how I feel in the moment that can come off a little bitter, but that song gave us the ride to where we are today. We’re here because of that song. It let us keep making music and let’s us experiment in a way that keeps us from ever repeating ourselves. I don’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over. That’s so fucking boring.”
From Dizzy Up The Girl the band shifted gears again into the raunchy but polished Gutterflower, and then the ballad driven Let Love In. It was during recording of the follow up album, Something for the Rest of Us, that they hit a low.
“That was the hardest album I’ve ever had to do, I was going through a dark time in my life and we were at odds with our label. They didn’t like what was happening, I didn’t like what they wanted. We re-recorded it twice. Eventually we dumped it in their lap and basically said this is it, put it out or let us go because every time we touch this thing it gets worse. For a long time that messed with me, with my head. I felt like I’d done these songs that meant so much to me dirty. But when we were planning the setlist for the 2018 tour, we listened through that album and I didn’t feel that way anymore, there’s some genuinely good stuff there. To me anyway. It’s funny how time changes how we see things and the further from something you get the more you can appreciate it.”
Two more albums followed Something for the Rest of Us, and Mackay still doesn’t believe he’s far away enough from those to be objective.
“Ask me again in another three or four years,” he says. “I’m not who I was when I wrote the last two, but they still feel fresh, like they’re right on my heels.”
Change. Perseverance. These are the words I associate with Fever Dream. It's not just a running theme in their music, if there is one thing that can be taken away from their history, it’s that they refuse to give up. They’ve outlasted bad contracts, their contemporaries, their labels and – as a recent article on The Ringer put it – their genre.
“There’s freedom in that. One of the best things that ever happened to us was when people stopped considering us a punk band. Not because I have anything against it, I’ll have punk in my heart until the day I die because that’s what it beats to, but because breaking out of those labels was what let us be whatever we wanted to be. Call us whatever you want: Rock, Alternative Rock, Pop, it doesn’t matter anymore. I make what I wanna hear and what I feel, and that’s always changing."
Like the city they come from, there is a hopeful steady push forward. Going backwards is not an option.
"There are always gonna be those people who are sad we’re not out here making Iris 2.0 but it’s not the ‘90s, it’s 2019. Iris existed in a perfect moment in time where everything came together and made it what it was. If I released that song today it wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful because it’s not what people are listening to right now. And I accept that we’re old, we’re never gonna be current or the voice of the young generation, but we don’t want to stay the same. I don’t want to be a relic or legacy act that plays nothing but the hits. So many people we came up with are gone now and sure, sure, you can joke that we missed the memo and maybe we should’ve gone too. And maybe we should have. But we always said that we would stop when we stopped enjoying it or when we felt we didn’t have anything more to say. I went through many periods where I thought I didn’t have anything more to say, when the flow stopped, and the river of inspiration felt like it was running dry. But then I’d dig deeper and find a well. I think that’s what I did for this album. I found a well.”
I’m reminded of the tenth track of their new album, a departure of a song titled “Autumn Leaves” that goes Life is change, we move on. If you pick up Miracle Pill this Friday expecting "Iris" or the punk stylings of Tommy Two-Hands and The Devilles, you will be disappointed. If you pick up Miracle Pill hoping to hear the next stage in the evolution of Fever Dream, you will not be let down. Don’t let the labels or the shine fool you, Miracle Pill is a victorious, honest look inward. ∎
Fever Dream 
