Butch Vig (producer: Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Garbage) and Brett Newski chat about finding a calm head space, weird Russia tours, the importance of side projects, Wisconsin life, and making up band names for catharsis.
More on Butch: https://twitter.com/butchvig
Support the pod: https://www.patreon.com/brettnewski1
SNIPPET:
Brett: When you guys got signed, you started to get on the rocket ship to fame, you still had to do shows, if just to shake the rust off. Did you ever do any secret shows under fake band names, so the label wouldn’t find out? Any funny fake band names?
Butch: Yeah, when we started Version 2.0, we played three shows under a fake name. Stupid Girl, obviously that’s a Garbage song, but that’s what we went with.
Brett: Is that before the song came out?
Butch: No, “Stupid Girl” came out on the first album, and this was for the second album. We started off with some pretty high profile shows, and we realized we needed some warmup gigs, but we didn’t want to play under Garbage, so we kept it pretty low key.
Part of it was that we were using some new technology on stage, and were playing new songs for the first time, so we played three shows as Stupid Girl, and it was pretty funny. Some people in the crowd knew it was Garbage, and knew what they came to see, and other people had no idea, but still came to see a band called “Stupid Girl” anyway.
Brett: I love it. You know, one of my favorite things to do, especially over a Happy Hour coffee, is to come up with lists of band names. I just have pages and pages of them on my computer. Tell me what you think of these, I just came up with them the other day.
“Vanity Metric.”
Butch: That’s good, yeah. You know, I agree with you, making up band names is kind of stupid, but it’s fun, and can really entertain you. I’ve been doing that in the studio lately with Silversun Pickups, where every other day it’s like, “Let’s make up a band.”
I also do that with my daughter. She came up with a name recently that I really like. “Evaporating Cats.” I like that a lot. From Kansas City, ladies and gentlemen...Evaporating Cats!
Now what kind of music would Evaporating Cats do?
Brett: I feel it would have to be female-fronted power pop.
Butch: I think so, yeah. Another band name my daughter came up with that’s pretty awesome is “Mouse Cream”
Brett: *laughs*
Butch: Mice Cream, to me, is a power trio, really heavy, sludgy.
Brett: That’s punk to its core. What about “Explosure”?
Butch: *laughs* I love that. Explosure.
Brett: It’s so bad it’s good.
Butch: That could be sort of metal. Could be prog too! Explosure. Yeah!
