The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: The Big Break

February 2000

No grass had grown under Breaker Raskolnikov's feet in the five years since he made his name as house aesthetic terrorist at Dead Calm Records. Twenty-two then—so he said—Breaker's only stated reason for leaving was that he was perhaps not quite as far behind the market, the audience, the undiscovered voice, as everybody else in the place.

Now he was less a power in the mu­sic business than a rumor—or, rather, that was his power. Lithe, wispy, he spoke and moved slowly, but somehow it was impossible to keep up with him. He'd made Truth and Lie the most sought-after consulting firm in New York; while everyone was sure Breaker owned it, he insisted he was just a "front"—which sounded scarier than "owner" ever could. Gossip had him bankrolling Boys Don't Cry after turning down the Hi­lary Swank role, fingered him as the brains behind the move to bounce Clive Davis from Arista. ("Because he's there," Breaker was supposed to have said; Arista insiders claimed Breaker said it was "because he isn't there.")

Not being there was Breaker's strat­egy at Truth and Lie. He sat at the table but insisted someone else run the meet­ings. This week Sony was paying a year's overhead for a one-page memo on their New Discovery—that is, on how to find it, and what to do with it once they did.

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We know what they want," said An­nie Melton, who was born Laura Foster, which happened to be the name of the ex-lover murdered by folk legend Tom Dooley; as a punk, Laura had renamed herself after the woman who helped Dooley commit the murder. Breaker had hired her because she talked as if she could get away with it. "They just want another Backstreet Boys. They want a new discovery for an audience that has no memory."

"They want a Backstreet Boys they can pretend they found in a church basement in Detroit or in a high-school locker room in Nebraska," said ShoLay Jackson, who'd turned down a football scholarship at Grambling to study A&R at Middle Tennessee State. "It won't work. The Backstreet Boys give the game away. They sort of slouch away from each oth­er as if they're rivals. But when they take their turns at the mike, each one sings exactly like the one before him. The same sad lilt, the same little twist on the same words. Individuality's the pose but what the audience gets from each guy is exactly the same. Doesn't it occur to you that that's what they're selling? The idea that there can be no new discovery, that anyone, even you, buying the record, can be made over into what you're buying?"

"I keep thinking about the first Laura Nyro album," Breaker said. "More Than a New Discovery, it said. Did that mean she wasn't a new discovery, that she was, like, a force of nature?"

"That's exactly what it meant," Annie Melton said. "Her saint shtick started right there. But that was the '60s. No one would buy that routine any­more." "Thank God," she added.

"We're not getting anywhere," said Lora Logic, who named herself after the sixteen-year-old saxo­phonist in the 1977 London punk band X-Ray Spex, since both had been born Susan Whitby. (The first Lora had become a Hare Krishna, so the second Lora figured she didn't need the name anymore.) "What if the whole idea of a new discovery is that you don't know what you've got? What if you can get that across? What if you can sell that?"

"Sell what?" said Breaker.

"Sell uncertainty," Lora said. "Sell doubt. Look, I came across this record by a band called Trailer Bride. Whine de Lune, whatever that means. I played it once, zero. I was going to get rid of it, but I thought, No, Trail­er Bride—any band with a name like that has got to have more than I heard. I've been playing it for three months.

"What it is," Lora went on, "is some woman named Melissa Swingle who sings and writes and plays guitar, plays harmonica, plays organ, plays man­dolin, plus guys who play bass and drums and guitar. It's a country band, but the woman in all the songs could be anywhere. You listen to her and she sounds like she's been around the block so many times she's worn her own path in the pavement. There's this song about a daughter, she's singing about how she's her 'Sapphire Jewel,' that's the name of the song—"

"That sounds like Jewel," Jackson said.

"That's the name of the song," Lora said, "but the real song, the real singer, is in the way she just keeps saying 'Mis­ter, what's it to you?' all through it, out of the blue. It's like her whole world is made up of people looking at her funny, as if she keeps thinking she might be able to trust someone, then remembers she can't. There's this moment when she says, 'She used to be real smart,' just like someone would say it in about eighth grade—she gets across a world where no one goes much further than that. She's tired. She's tired of having seen it all before, but there's some sense of humor buried so deep she'll never have to tell a joke, she got it a long time ago, it still makes her laugh, but it'd be death to let anybody see her laugh, so she only lets herself hear it. You know the way Shelley Duvall moves in that funny Altman movie about the Depression, the '30s, what's it called, Thieves Like Us. She knows nothing is going to work out, that life is organized to push her face in shit, but she gets out of a bathtub as if she's wearing new skin. That's this singer: Her way of saying fuck you is to act like there's nothing new you can do to her, so she doesn't care what you do, she's already been through it. That's how she acts—but when she starts a fast song with 'I'm standing at the crossroad, gi-tar in my hands,' you know she went there to find out what it felt like to be Robert Johnson. And what she found out was that there was nothing he could tell her. It was her sto­ry, not his. That's her discovery. And that's what we look for. That's what we sell."

"What you're saying," Breaker said, "is that a new discovery happens not when someone goes out and discovers someone, but when people discover themselves."

"Yes," said Lora.

"Well, I think that's just what you've done here to­day," Breaker said.

"Don't condescend to me," Lora said.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, February 2000