ON THE MOUTH (Merge, 1993)

Jon: We rehearsed for this album in the basement of a house that Jack McCook (original Superchunk guitarist), my brother Lane and I shared in a town about five miles from Chapel Hill called Calvander. This is also where we shot the video for "Precision Auto". We wrote the songs in the summer of 1992. It's interesting to look back on what the working titles were for some of these songs. "I Guess I Remembered It Wrong" was originally called "Lemon Tree" (a reference to a song George Costanza was trying to remember the title of in a 'Seinfeld' episode), "Package Thief" was "Old Lady Package Thief" (about a neighbor of Mac's whom he thought might be stealing parcels from his porch), "Swallow That" was "It's Just A Body". There were a couple songs that we abandoned in the basement and did not take with us to Los Angeles, the only title I can recall is "A Short History Of Beaks". Sounds like a good one, eh?

We recruited our friend John Reis (he's in a band called the Rocketz) to help us with the recording of the album and he recommended a studio that he liked to work at in Hollywood called West Beach. The idea of recording in California appealed to us so we booked some time. We also decided to play some shows on the way out to California in an effort to work the new numbers into shape and add to our collection of rock club T-shirts. I'm sure I'm leaving a couple towns out but I remember playing: Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis, Houston, Austin, Dallas and maybe Albuquerque. Basketball's Polvo was with us for some of it. We arrived in San Diego (I think we played there as well) and stayed with John for a day before going up to L.A. to "make magic".

Recording went pretty smoothly from the beginning. We did no more than 3 takes of anything with the exception of a still unreleased version of Adam and the Ants' "Beat My Guest". I remember that Mike Watt was watching us attempt our sixth take of it and thinking how embarrassing it was that we couldn't get this crappy (in a good way) song down. There was also a cover of Government Issue's "Blending In" featuring Jim Wilbur's lead vocal debut.

We recorded and mixed the whole thing in seven days (it felt like less) and set about to play our way back home. Actually it was only a couple of shows: San Francisco's Kennel Club and George Washington college in St Louis. We decided on the title of the record at an Italian restaurant in SL (there's a commemorative plaque above the booth). Upon return Mac and Jim felt that the panning (placement) of their guitars was two extreme (Mac was panned to the left and Jim to the right) and we decided to remix a few of the songs at TGS studio in Chapel Hill with the help of Jerry Kee. The back cover photos were taken in my backyard.