Sorta Rotten And Insane

A strange phenomenon hit radio airwaves in the Australian summer of late-1995. A new Seattle band began to get heavy rotation – so far so de rigueur, this was, after all, at the tail end of grunge's halcyon years – but instead of heavy music with dark lyrics this trio was playing a form of hyper-happy pop quite unlike anything heard before. Their instrumentation was requisitely whacky – featuring regular six-string guitars re-routed into a two-string bass (“basitar”) and a three-string guitar (“guitbass”) for a completely novel sound – but it was the string of happy, nonsensical songs with titles such as Lump, Peaches and Kitty that really grabbed hearts (if not minds) all over the country.

The self-titled album from which these songs all originated was the debut offering by Seattle outfit The Presidents Of The United States Of America, and it ultimately sold enough copies to go platinum five times in this country, making Australia by far the band's biggest market.

“We sold more records per capita there than we did anywhere else,” recalls frontman and songwriter Chris Ballew. “Australia was where we got our Beatlemania moments in; running for a car, barricades collapsing under the weight of the fans, or engineering getting safely from the hotel to the gig and stuff like that. It was nice to have a tiny taste of that life, you couldn't pay me to be in The Beatles though – if that was my life I'd be pretty sad – but it was pretty fun to taste it. It started our love affair with Australia.”

Ballew believes that the reason the songs resonated so well with Australians is that we're a nation of people who enjoy our leisure and our fun.

“I think in my experiences and travels and time spent talking to Australian people, their demeanour is perfect for our music,” he smiles. “In all our time spent making music in The Presidents, the best songs are created out of doing nothing – relaxing with friends, jamming in a backyard in the summertime, or having a day where you'll just ride your bike – and out of that relaxation comes a song. There's an undercurrent where the by-product of living a good life is in the music, and Australian people appreciate a good life – and that doesn't mean a fancy life, it just means taking time to be with the people you love and good food, and that's all you really need. Deep down in the DNA of the music is something that resonates with the DNA of Australians.”

Harking back to the mid-'90s when The Presidents were creating their debut, it seems that at least an element of the band's playful muse was a reaction to the inherent earnestness of grunge and much of the other music dominating culture at the time. Ballew had been raised in Seattle but had been living in Boston when grunge broke, and he returned home to a completely transformed city.

“I dunno man, it's kind of like if your kids were in a sixth grade play, and then suddenly they wanted it to be on Broadway,” he reflects. “Everyone was looking around thinking, 'Who's going to be scooped up next?' It was an exciting time because you could book a show on a Tuesday night and the place would be completely full of people, because everybody wanted to see the next big thing – that was an amazing environment to experiment in, and it turned out to be perfect for us.

“I'd been making music in Boston that was kind of dark – I remember Nevermind came out when I was living [there], and thinking to myself, 'Oh, somebody did this for me, I don't have to make this record', because I was trying to make music like that – music that was melodic but dirty and gritty. So I just happily stopped working on that, because I had to admit that it wasn't really my voice, but I was sort of in a dark space in Boston. So Nirvana came out and I totally identified with it, but then when I moved back I'd worked through those dark vibrations and really wanted to lighten things up.”

Obviously it was a surreal time when the album first exploded, but ultimately massive success wasn't everything that the band had hoped for.

“Yeah, it was everything at once – exciting and disorienting, and a lot of joy,” Ballew remembers. “There was also some sadness, and the relaxed, laidback lifestyle which spawned the songs was gone – all of a sudden we're in charge of a multinational corporation with lawyers and record labels and everything, it was pretty weird. We hold famous people to such high regard, and we think that their lives are this fairytale, storybook experience – we've all plotted and scarpered to get to this supposedly magical party that's happening in fame town – but when you arrive it's actually very complicated and messy, and there's a lot of jerks and the lighting is bad and the lunchmeat is warm. No one wants to hear that though.”

And with success comes expectation. The band's 1996 follow up, II, had some great moments but just didn't gel en masse in the same way, and by the start of 1998 the dream was over – The Presidents split up. They've reunited numerous times in the intervening years and released more music, but never really recaptured the magic of that incredible first spell together.

“The interesting thing is that I felt the pressure but I didn't really define it – I didn't understand fully the dynamic of that pressure for me personally,” Ballew muses. “The Presidents' music had a really innocent core, but with additional innuendo and irony and suggestive lyrics added on – that chemistry between innocence and sexuality was what made us work, but I did not have control of that chemistry as a songwriter. It stressed me out, because I was expected to repeat that – it's like doing a painting with your eyes closed and it's successful and everybody says, 'Do it again!', but you can't do it again because your eyes were closed.

“Not knowing that was the exact dynamic I was facing, I sort of retreated into myself and freaked out and ended up quitting the band and everything. Now I understand it and can appreciate what The Presidents are without feeling the pressure to repeat it, so I get to enjoy that dynamic and that chemistry. There were a lot of things about the situation in the '90s which disoriented me and made me nervous and I didn't understand them, but now I feel like I understand them – I respect what The Presidents have achieved, and I didn't really respect it back then. I felt more like the Sex Pistols – I just wanted to crash and burn up and break up immediately at the height of the first record, but I couldn't convince anybody else to do it.”

The Presidents Of The United States Of America will be playing the following dates:

Friday 8 March - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 9 March - Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast QLD
Sunday 10 March - Palace Theatre, Melbourne VIC
Friday 15 March - UNSW Roundhouse, Sydney NSW
Saturday 16 March - Metropolis, Fremantle WA