INTERVIEW:

HERE & NOW

With Bruce Gellerman, WBUR / NPR Boston

BG: I'm Bruce Gellerman. It's Here and Now. Last year, songwriter and guitarist Jeff Mellin, formerly of the band The Eddies, brought together a group of Boston-area pop and rock artists to collaborate on a unique project. They came up with an inventive CD called Jeff Mellin Saves the World. The disc was recorded in two parts with two different producers, and the result is a pairing of two very distinct sounds. The song, Frankly, Babe, kicks off part one.

Jeff Mellin joins me in the studio. Hi, Jeff. Hi. How are you?

JM: I'm well. Thank you.

The first half of the CD, Jeff Mellin Saves the World, was produced by Pete Weiss, a very well-known Boston music maker, and it has a very distinctively 60s sound to it.

It's very “jangle -pop” …we like to call it…

It's got elements of Beatles, Yardbirds, all of the kind of…

…The Turtles…

…the British invasion…

…Hermans Hermits...

Right, exactly. Very sweet.

Well, I love all that sort of stuff. With the Eddies, my old band — I guess at this point you'd call us a “mod-pop” band — we always walked the line between roots country music and that more 60s pop stuff. It was never really clear which we were, I guess. So the idea with this was like, okay, let's do the Lost Beatles record. Let's do a real British pop record.

It sounds like the Beatles on the cut “Shocked.”

I suppose it does. Yeah, that was actually interesting because originally my intention was more roots-oriented with the organ parts on it and things like that. And my vocal treatment was a little more on the rock side of things. And Pete, because he's a brilliant producer, said, “let's pretend that you're Peter Noon” or something, and do it that way. And it was perfect. It balanced out the harder elements and it made it much more interesting.

Why produce the album in two parts?

Originally more…economy than anything…

It's cheaper by the half-dozen.

Well, it was more that the original project was really originally intended as just an EP. And then I had been doing some work with the band Slide.

Charlie Chesterman is on this?

Charlie Chesterman is NOT on this. His band (Andy Pastore and John Clarke of the Legendary Motorbikes) is the band that backs me on the first part in the Pete Weiss section. So that section was really sort of Pete's project. And then the second half was, “let's try something with Slide.”

So conceptually, how do they differ?

Well, the first part is a very produced record. You know, where we went in, we did the basic tracks and we did all the overdubs and we redid the overdubs and we added things and we added sound effects and all that sort of thing. And the second half with Slide was really done in, you know, basically one take. We just did it in a completely opposite manner. Completely unprepared, very stripped down just to see what would happen.

But in between the two parts is a transition song. It's “Wilson's Squared Airport Disaster.” What is that transition song therefore, obviously, to make a transition, but...

Well, sure. It definitely quiets things down to sort of prepare you for the sort of more intimate feel of the second half. But again, we've got an artificial quality to it because we've added Miss Mary from the Oscillators doing a sort of pieced together dialogue that sort of introduces it.

She gets on the airplane. It's her airplane trip.

…and that was actually from a long monologue and we pieced it together from different parts and kind of created a story out of it. And then made that acoustic song… It kind of has false starts to it. Just kind of, again, I guess it's a transition…

The first song on the second half is Half Moon in 4/4. Did you have the temptation to say, hey, let's do that again?

I mean, there are things that if I were going to go back, I might change about those recordings — little nuances here and there — or there was part of me that wanted to add a harmony part to something, or “gee, if we could put a tambourine on this, or something, it'd be great.” But I had promised myself that that half was going to be that simple.

Simple yet darker.

It is darker. In fact, when we had the record mastered, Ducky Carlisle (of Barrence Whitfield and Savages), who mastered the record — he also produced that second half — he said to me, “Did something terrible happen to you between the first half of this record and the second half?”

The life crisis! How did Ducky Carlisle's production technique differ from Pete Weiss's in the first half?

Well, interesting. It's hard to say just because the approach was so different as far as the two different projects, because Ducky had to get good sounds the first time around, and all of the echo and everything on all the instruments and anything that seems like an effect was all done right in the mixing board at the time of the recording.

What you hear is what you get.

There was no remixing of that at all. It was all done completely live to two track. So inherent in that, it was a different technique.

At the beginning of the songs, you have these stops and starts and thinking of “Oh No, Joey Tussaud”…

I left that in because I wanted to show the liveness of the fact that we were sort of working it out as we were going. And at the beginning of that song, you'll hear Dimitri Fane, who's playing upright bass, had decided sort of at the last minute that he was going to — instead of plucking the strings — he was going to bow the strings. And he tried it once and it sounded great. We're like, “oh, that's amazing. We have to do that. It's so bizarre sounding. And it's so deep and so dark.” And then he plays it on that first take and it made this horrible screeching noise on the first note. It just squeaked. It was terrible. And he stopped. And we're all so upset because it was such a dark song and to have this terrible noise at the beginning would have been fantastic. And of course he realized that he shouldn’t have stopped…

..and he just kept on rolling.

Basically we just wanted to keep that live feel.

Well, Jeff, thank you for coming in.

Thank you for having me!

It's a great CD.

Thank you.

Jeff Mellin's new CD is called Jeff Mellin Saves the World and it's on the local record label, Stereorrific Recordings. •

Originally aired in 1999 on WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station