Why Critics Still Love 'Hi Fi Way', Even If Tim Rogers Doesn't

Band: You Am I
Album: Hi Fi Way
Label: Ra/Warner
Release date: 20 February 1995

To the casual observer, things would have looked pretty rosy for Sydney three-piece You Am I in September, 1994. Five years of hard graft seemed to be coming to a nice fruition; their raw-sounding debut album Sound As Ever (1993) had tapped a nerve at home and scored them an ARIA Award for Best Alternative Release, and they’d impressed Soundgarden so much when the two bands had shared the 1994 Big Day Out bill that the American behemoth – then riding high on the back of their smash fourth album Superunknown – had invited their young Aussie counterparts to open for them on a six-week tour of the States, where they played to crowds as large as 25,000 people a show.

Back home, Sound As Ever’s second single Berlin Chair had proved something of a creeper and was still getting plenty of airplay and traction, meaning that the young band’s profile was as high as it had ever been – even in their absence – and in this heady post-grunge era it seemed as if the sky was the limit for heavy guitar bands with an aspect of accessibility; indeed, the lines between the mainstream and the alternative sector were as blurred then as they would ever be at any stage of music history. It looked like for all intents and purposes they’d set a perfect platform to tackle the “difficult second album syndrome” head on.

But over in New York – where they’d chosen to record that sophomore effort, which would ultimately become the classic Hi Fi Way ­– things weren’t all that rosy. You Am I been on the road for what seemed like an eternity and were verging on exhausted, plus the Soundgarden tour in many ways seemed like a wasted opportunity because they had no album release in the States so fans who connected with the band’s thrilling live show had no way of buying any of their music. Plus they’d been so busy that they didn’t have any finished new songs at their disposal, just a swag of ideas and bits and pieces of actual compositions: they’d released four EPs in relatively quick succession leading up to their first full-length, so the band’s backlog of usable songs had pretty much run dry.

They were also beginning to feel the pressure of expectation which came hand-in-hand with the mantle of ‘next big thing’ that had been unwittingly thrust upon them by both the Australian media and their increasingly rabid (and burgeoning) Australian fanbase, a burden that had arrived both quickly and unexpectedly. This was (and remains to this day) a band besotted with actual music rather than the trappings of fame and industry, and neither dealing with adulation nor ‘playing the game’ ever seemed to sit comfortably with them.

“We were pretty close from the outset. Our band doesn’t work as a traditional rhythm section team – we all kinda play together, and Tim’s right hand can drive Russell." — Andy Kent

On the plus side the band’s new structure was working a treat, with drummer Russell “Rusty” Hopkinson having replaced Mark Tunaley behind the kit just after Sound As Ever’s release, joining frontman/songwriter Tim Rogers and bassist Andy Kent in the new configuration. Kent’s recollection is that the new line-up’s transition was seamless, telling The Music in 2013 (when Hi Fi Way was reissued), “We were pretty close from the outset. Our band doesn’t work as a traditional rhythm section team – we all kinda play together, and Tim’s right hand can drive Russell. Three-pieces tend to gel a lot more than larger bands do, in respect to who’s hearing what.” And they were not only veterans of recording away from home (the debut had also been recorded in the States), but producer Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth fame) had already helmed both Sound As Ever and 1993’s Coprolalia EP, having been impressed with the group during the 1993 Big Day Out tour (that festival was pretty good to You Am I in those early years, their manager being BDO partner Ken West’s offsider probably not hurting their cause). So instead of returning home to recuperate following the tiring touring regimen the trio decided to forge forwards and make their second album with Ranaldo in New York straight away, and just see what they could muster.

 “The idea was to come home and to start to think about it, but we felt we’d been on tour for a period of time and we felt we were playing well and some ideas were starting to come through and we didn’t really want to go home and get over the jet lag and then have a chat about it, we just wanted to do it,” Kent recalled to Mushroom’s Shane O’Donohue during a 2013 interview. “So instead of flying out we flew into New York… so there we are, in this incredible basement rehearsal kinda storage space that had Helmet at one end and Sonic Youth at the other and all their gear and we just got in there and I brought some gear to record on which was really so that we could get home each night and each person could have a listen to what was happening ‘cos it was happening so quickly it’s hard to sorta process. So we just kinda cranked into it for five days and then walked into the studio and did it.”

Hopkinson agrees that just rolling up their sleeves and getting amongst it was the band’s major priority, telling the Sydney Morning Herald’s Sean Palmer (also in 2013), “In terms of Hi Fi Way it was the sound of a band that had tumbled through this intense touring and just had a bunch of songs and was feeling like we wanted to go and make a record and then we just went and did it.”

Rogers remembers this pre-production stage relatively fondly despite the obvious pressure on him to come up with material, telling former fan-site You Am I Central’s creator Danny Yau:

 “Hi Fi Way was made when we were living in New York City. East 12th and 2nd Ave, I think... Most of it was written in that apartment or at the Jones Bar, our favourite drinking house in the entire universe. Most of the tunes had their own central idea, but our usually rushed time frame and a complete inability to edit left some ideas more enunciated than others, for example Jewels And Bullets was written in ten minutes just before recording it at 4am on the last night of recording. This year was the first one we spent a long time touring, overseas and at home – a lot of time sitting in diners and bars, looking and thinking. The Applecross Wing Commander is about being nine and pretending you're an airplane (specifically the corsairs in [‘70s TV show] Baa Baa Black Sheep with Robert Conrad) at lunchtime. The Wing Commander’s sister’s name was Jane methinks... Once again there's fiction with the non. She Digs Her, Minor Byrd and Punkarella are about folks, but exacerbated versions of 'em; whenever the truth got in the way of Rusty's fills... the lyric would be forever changed! I mean, do you sleep on your dick? No, well don’t step on the drummer!

“Andy, Russ and I rehearsed in Sonic Youth’s space below Houston in Manhattan... an odd place to finish songs about Pizza Guys from Baulkham Hills. But maybe not; I was reading a Patrick White book Tree Of Man at the time, and it hit me more reading it in the Lower East Side bars than in Centennial Park let me tell you. The central character, a woman and mother, gets caught up in a cyclone, but stands defiantly, just not wanting to be carried with it anymore. Well, I love going to America, but I've never been so sure of where I come from as when I’m there.”

Amidst all of this mayhem the album started to take shape, and the eventual direction they would take also started to coalesce. In Craig Mathieson’s 1997 book Hi Fi Days: The Future Of Australian Rock (Allen & Unwin) Rogers intimated that it all started to take shape when they stopped trying so hard and just began to have fun with it, telling the author, “We’d play Applecross Wing Commander with Russell going off, and it was like, ‘This is fun! Forget about what we’re supposed to do, why not make a song that’s a complete rip-off of [The Who’s] Live at Leeds, or the first Pretenders album. Let’s have a big blustery ending and let’s put that song right in the middle of the album’. Once we started doing that Lee was laughing hysterically, going, ‘Yeah, give me more!’ We thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it! Let’s wing it, do what feels fun!’”

"I think we’d just been listening to more English stuff, like late-‘60s Kinks and The Pretty Things, and there was less Black Crowes-via-Seattle which was the vibe of the first record." — Andy Kent

At the time of the album’s 1995 release, Rogers confirmed that the album bore the fruits of this more laissez-faire approach, telling the Courier-Mail’s Noel Mengel, “Making good records, the records that I really like anyway, seems to be this mixture of people really knowing what they’re going on about, but working with this really ‘winging it’ attitude – let’s just get it down and see what happens. Those two things seem to be total opposites and it doesn’t always work. But if you’ve got a definite idea of what you want the record to be like, you’ll just spend all your time trying to make it sound like what’s in your head. So we just wing it a lot and see what happens. But I know I wanted the record to be different to the last one, I wanted less big chords, big riffs and more… just like a band;  rock, pop, folk, everything I was listening to at the time. And use a bit more imagination with the lyrics too. When we were in the studio with Lee… the focus is all musical, because we’re so dumbly fascinated with rock history and future”.

And the nature of this “dumb fascination” was changing as the band got older and their tastes evolved, Kent telling The Music, “I think we’d just been listening to more English stuff, like late-‘60s Kinks and The Pretty Things, and there was less Black Crowes-via-Seattle which was the vibe of the first record. It was a little more powerful ‘60s English rock, but with its own songwriting skill, like The Kinks for example.”

The bassist shed some light on their favoured recording style of the day, telling You Am I Central’s Yau, “I think we used as little technology as possible. We just kind of knock them down into some good microphones and into a decent desk and hopefully we can capture what we do”.

Kent also shed some light on Ranaldo’s role in the studio, telling The Music, “His thing was to not try and take what you did and manipulate it and turn it into what he thought was the right thing to do – he was into clearing a path really, and letting the band let what they do best come out and come to fruition. He was coming at it from a musician’s point of view, and wanted to talk about music rather than too much controlling and analysing. He was like, ‘Let’s get in there and get going, and I’ll comment where I think I need to’ – it was, ‘Let’s hit record’ pretty much. I think if he was the other way around we would have got different records, because we were pretty impatient bull-at-a-gate types at that point. It was a good mix.”

Ranaldo, for his part, also has a fond view of the Hi Fi Way sessions when appraising them in the rearview mirror. He wrote in the liner notes of Hi Fi Way’s expanded 2013 reissue:

“I jumped at the chance to work with them again. Again we worked Stateside – the band’s growing love affair with my city now in full bloom – at a couple of my favourite studios in New York City. Rusty Hopkinson was now aboard on drums, which really completed the trio in the best possible way. We cut the basic tracks at Greene Street Recording in SoHo, a legendary place that had once been Phillip Glass’ studio, and the same place where Sonic Youth had worked on Daydream Nation and Goo. It was small but comfortable and we worked fast, cutting most of the album in about a week, with my good friend John Siket engineering.

“When it came time to mix, the band had the idea to bring in Jon Auer from The Posies, who I also knew, to do the mixing. We mixed the record at my most beloved studio in New York City, Sear Sound, a legendary place which was just starting its rise to the top of the heap of New York studios. Owner Walter Sear had the best vintage gear and mentored many young musicians in the art of recording over the years. Sonic Youth had recorded and mixed our Sister record there back in 1986, when no-one was really interested in the place…

“Tim, Andy, Rusty, Jon and I moved in and began mixing the songs. Jon’s fine ear for melody perfectly complemented Tim’s songs, which were just fantastic. My English buddy Epic Soundtracks came along to play some organ on Gray. I’m not sure if we knew at the time what an amazing record we were involved in – we knew the songs were good, probably the best Tim had written to that point – but one never knows, whilst in the middle of it, what the end result is going to be like. You just work on the material in front of you in the nest manner you can. But with all the great songs Tim was writing at the time, and with Andy and Rusty working perfectly in sync  as rhythm section behind Tim’s guitar and vocals, it all came together. It’s a record which, to my eras, sounds as fresh today as the day we finished the last mixes. One of the classics of the ‘90s, I reckon!”

High praise indeed, but unfortunately not a view that was shared at the time (or now, as it turns out) by perhaps the most important person in the process; Rogers himself. He told Mathieson in Hi Fi Days…, “When we finished making the album in seven days – it was pretty hazy at the end, and totally amphetamine logic, ‘cause we had no time – I was freaking out, being a total asshole. Lee was being really cool, but then I threw my bag at the engineer John, even though I liked him, but I was just totally freaked out. I went back to this loft we were staying at in New York, at six in the morning, and I was just crying all day. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘I’ve totally fucked up this record, this is shit!’ I spent the next three days at a bar called Boo Radleys on a bender.”

Fortunately even the darkest day has a dawn, and validation would soon be arriving with a vengeance for You Am I. Respected blog Purple Sneakers (named after one of Hi Fi Way’s key tracks and singles), summed up the situation succinctly in a recent retrospective; “Unlike its predecessor, this album was very disorganised by the band got to record it… You Am I were absolutely knackered, and came into the studios without any lyrics to sing, some songs even instrumentally unfinished. After many late nights and rushed songwriting, the album was complete; although Tim Rogers’ heart was not, as he felt that he had ruined Hi Fi Way. Little did he know just how much the critics were going to love it, as it received five stars continuously…”

The album was indeed lauded from the get-go, receiving five star reviews in Rolling Stone and Juice magazines, as well as many dailies and street press titles. Mathieson recalls in Hi Fi Days…, “The critical acclaim was staggering. And rightly so, as Hi Fi Way set a new benchmark. Not just for You Am I, but for every Australian group. It was an endlessly inventive, wholly impressive piece of work from start to finish. It had the accessibility of a pop album and the depth of a rock album. It had a unifying theme running through it giving resonance to Tim’s characters and set-ups, while Russell added punch and Andy flourished far more than he had on Sound As Ever.”

It ended up working on every level as an album, the songs tied together with Rogers’ reminiscences on childhood and life before the band, a series of vignettes about young adulthood which resonated resoundingly with the Australian public – tales of dead end jobs and beer-fuelled escapism, with references to local minutiae such as Glebe Point Bridge, Massappeal, six-packs and private schools. It’s nostalgic without being sappy or sentimental, and there’s nary a dud amidst the fourteen songs, which get in and out quickly and never outstay their welcome (the album’s sub-42-minute run time equates to an average of just under three minutes per track).

Hi Fi Way made its debut at #1 on the Australian album chart – the first Australian album of the 1990s to manage the feat, and the first of three successive times that You Am I would achieve the honour. In the process, it became You Am I’s first gold album, and spawned three official singles – Cathy’s Clown, Jewels And Bullets and Purple Sneakers (with Ken (The Mother Nature’s Son) and How Much Is Enough also appearing on a limited 7” which preceded the album) – all of which made triple j’s Hottest 100 list that year. The record has gathered remarkable traction over the intervening years as well, scoring a creditable 4½ stars on online resource Allmusic, as well as notching;

* #8 in 2010 book The 100 Best Australian Albums (O’Donnell, Creswell, Mathieson)

* #4 in The Age’s 2008 poll ‘50 Best Australian Albums Of All Time’

* #8 in Juice magazine’s 2003 poll ‘50 Best Australian Albums Of All Time’

* #35 in triple j’s 2011 poll ‘Hottest 100 Australian Albums Of All Time’

It went on to score another ARIA Award for You Am I in 1995 – this time for Best Adult Alternative Album – but sadly, even during this heady time, things weren’t great behind the scenes. The band were signed to Ra (a subsidiary of rooArt), which was distributed by Warner Australia. There was interest from the international arm of Warner, but this would have necessitated licensing the album for non-Australian territories from rooArt (and majors have always hated licensing, preferring to sign bands directly). Then Hi Fi Way’s early successes changed the expectations of all invested parties, and things began to sour behind the scenes on a local level. In Craig Mathieson’s 2000 tome The Sell-In: How The Music Business seduced Alternative Rock (Allen & Unwin), he explains how the relationship between Warner Music and rooArt broke down when Warner pulled a You Am I campaign to spend them money on the then-unknown Green Day, prompting rooArt’s founder Chris Murphy (also INXS’ manager) to revert to a P&D deal, which in turn basically caused Warner to lose interest in the band and their album. Mathieson argues, “…Hi Fi Way would also be one other thing; under-promoted… [without the backing of Warner] rooArt couldn’t capitalise on the number one debut and the extensive triple j airplay to drive home the commercial success. Hi Fi Way would break gold, 35,000 copies, but many felt it was a lost opportunity”.

“Hi Fi Way is the perfect mix of spikier punk and indie guitary stuff, but then with all of the ’60s and ’70s classic rock starting to seep through, and in a really odd combination." — Ben Salter (Giants Of Science, The Gin Club)

Fortunately this conundrum didn’t hold them back, You Am I going from strength to strength with their next album, 1996’s Hourly, Daily (Shock), also considered a bona fide Oz rock classic, and the band still firing on all cylinders to this day.

But where does that leave Hi Fi Way 20 years on? It’s certainly been influential enough on the next wave of Australian musicians – Brisbane-bred, Melbourne-based musician Ben Salter (Giants of Science, The Gin Club) recalled to online site Mess & Noise (who were comparing the merits of Hi Fi Way versus Hourly, Daily back in 2012) being a young music fan in Townsville who was so inspired by Hi Fi Way that he wrote his only ever fan letter to Rogers (who replied months later), and offering of the album, “Hi Fi Way is the perfect mix of spikier punk and indie guitary stuff, but then with all of the ’60s and ’70s classic rock starting to seep through, and in a really odd combination. Stuff like having the Mellotron on Minor Byrd. And it was the first one to have Rusty drumming; that drumming style brings a certain ’60s style feel to it… every song on Hi Fi Way I’m just absolutely in love with.”

And it’s stood the test of time well, Trouser Press’ Bill Partsch opining, “Hi Fi Way displays huge leaps forward in songwriting, production and performance. Rogers hits his stride with such endearing gems… Ranaldo’s production and Hopkinson’s dashboard-smacking drumming strike that just-so pop/rock balance, a less aggressive but tighter version of The Replacements in their prime”.

Indeed, even all these years later, it still seems that Rogers is the only party with major reservations about Hi Fi Way’s standing or importance. He seems to see the album (and Hourly, Daily as well) as something of an albatross, telling The Vine back in 2008, “I don’t want to listen to Hourly, Daily or Hi Fi Way. I was there. Some of the songs have a lovely charm and others are dreadful. We live in a country where people want bands to die off”. He recently told Rhythm’s Christopher Hollow that Hi Fi Way’s “lyrics are really fricking naff”, and in February, 2015 he told Melbourne Theatre Company’s Paul Galloway in a feature about songwriting, “I know a lot of people like [Hi Fi Way] but, as for well-crafted songs, there’s not a lot there at all. There’s a lot of good half-written songs on that album. I see that now. Partly that was because we were squeezed for time. We were touring in America and signed to a big label, who wanted us to get back to Australia and spend two months to write a record. And we said no, if you just give us beer money, we’ll stay in New York. Just give us a week and we’ll give you a record. So it was made really quickly, over eight days, with a lot of excitement and adrenaline. And I think that’s why it sounded exciting to people. There’s an obvious immediacy and joy. I’m sure, if we’d spent any longer on it, we would have ruined it. So it was really good luck that New York was expensive and we only had eight days to make it. The album after that, Hourly, Daily, was when I thought: ‘Look, I got to get serious about this songwriting’.”

So, at the end of the day, fans and critics adore Hi Fi Way and shout its importance from the rooftops, yet the main artistic creator seems largely ambivalent about its entire existence. How does one reconcile the massive gulf between these viewpoints? You just don’t, really, because at the end of the day they’re both just that – viewpoints – and neither can be deemed ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The main difference seems to be that the former camp are evaluating the album for what it is, but Rogers was involved in its creation so tends to see it for what it isn’t. His quote that it has “an obvious immediacy and joy” is telling, because that’s clearly what people relate to, but that’s apparently an aside to him. At the end of the day beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Hi Fi Way remains a beautiful piece of artwork indeed, one which – irrespective of its creator’s opinion – holds a massively important place in the pantheon of Australian rock’n’roll. This scribe listened to it 20 years ago, listens to it today, and (touch wood) will still be listening to it in another 20 years’ time (hopefully on the greatest stereo ever) – and anything apart from that is really just smoke and mirrors. Happy birthday, Hi Fi Way.

TRACKLIST

FURTHER VIEWING

A clip of You Am I (now a four-piece) revisiting Hi Fi Way’s gorgeous closing track How Much Is Enough during the 2009 Sound Relief benefit concert at The SCG;