Blake Babies History Part 8
After Even left the band, we tried auditioning some bassists. We quickly realized we’d been spoiled by Evan’s playing. He was so perfect for our band—a musical as well as a personal fit. The auditions were laughable. One Berklee student who seemed to be into cool music showed up with a fretless bass and played jazz licks. It wasn’t that they were bad players. We’d been spoiled by having the perfect bandmate who bailed. It was hopeless and depressing.
Juliana and I realized one of us would have to play bass. In a sense, we’d always been a trio since our first time playing together back in the spring of 1986, with a revolving door of not-quite-right fourth members. Evan was right but fundamentally not right because our band couldn’t contain his immense talent.
I offered to play bass and even learned the parts, but Juliana said she wanted to learn. I felt relief because I loved playing guitar and felt like I was making progress. Juliana permanently borrowed Evan’s black Rickenbacker bass and learned his parts. She adopted his melodic style—a guitar player’s approach to bass with a heavy pick attack, lead lines, and two-note power chords high on the neck. She learned to sing and play her parts quickly, and within a couple weeks we had our trio set down. To me, it immediately felt leaner and tighter, and gave me space to experiment on guitar.
We finished the album with some strong new material, much of it co-written with my chord structures and melodies and Juliana’s lyrics. We hit our stride as a writing team with Cesspool and Dead and Gone, which opened the album. A friend of Freda’s from the art college where she worked painted the folksy image for the front cover. As much as Nicely, Nicely felt like a Hail Mary act of desperation, the album we called Earwig felt more deliberate and confident. We had better material, we’d learned to play well together, and it finally felt like we had some momentum.
We ended up selling most of the copies of Nicely, Nicely to distributors and set aside a couple hundred to service college radio stations all over the country. Jesse from The Lemonheads shared their label’s college radio list and we packed our own mailers. As soon as we had our living room back, Marc launched his own label, Aurora Records. His first album release was Today by Galaxie 500, a band of Harvard grad students. That meant once again we had dozens of boxes of vinyl records filling up our space. And once again, a new band emerged on the scene, perfect and fully formed. Unsurprisingly, the copies of Today didn’t take up room for long.
