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When I moved to Chicago, I took the cassette I had made at our rehearsal in the empty house in East Austin. I really enjoyed listening to it in the car. The songs had a lot of potential, and it bothered me a little that nobody else was likely to hear them. I kept in touch with Duane in Austin, and when Rapeman broke up in November 1988, I proposed that we record an EP.

The best thing to come of my Faustian affiliation with Rapeman was that it left me with enough money to pay for the Pure recording. Duane and Yow were dead broke, and it’s tough to get a record label interested when you’ve never recorded or even played live, so I fronted the money.

We recorded Pure on sixteen-track at Studio Media in Evanston, Illinois. The drum machine was an Alesis HR-16, which is still in a closet at my apartment. Duane flew up to Chicago and played the red Yamaha SBG500 guitar that he used before he started using Travis Beans. It was a budget version of a guitar he’d seen John McGeoch play on a 1981 Siouxsie and the Banshees tour. Jim Ellison of Material Issue loaned a fifty-watt Hiwatt combo amp for Duane to use. All the music was written by Duane.

Pure has some interesting ideas and a few great moments. It’s evocative of a very exciting time for me. Creatively, we were figuring out how the band was going to work, and things were wide open with respect to what we could do. We went on to make better records than this one, but I really enjoy hearing it, even while I don’t really expect other people to like it as much as I do. Touch and Go did end up putting out the record and reimbursing us for the recording costs. The owner, Corey Rusk, wasn’t crazy about Pure, but he thought the band could make much better records, and he wanted to get in on the ground floor.

Being a bass player, and human, the sound of my bass on a record is going to be a big factor in my opinion of it. So, I also like Pure because I like the bass sound. The low end has a heft that’s lost on some of the other Touch and Go records, and the volume in the mix feels right to me: it’s not overwhelming the other elements, but I’m not struggling to hear it, either.

We hired Steve Albini to produce the record, and he would go on to record the next four albums too. He’s averse to the word producer, but I never noticed a significant difference between what he does in the studio and what other producers do. It was like so many decisions bands have to make: a primarily economic choice. Steve worked quickly and cheaply, and got good deals at studios. He lived in Chicago, so we didn’t have to pay any travel costs to record with him. He was inclined to offer more input than we were looking for, but didn’t seem to mind that we generally ignored him.

Some thought on the songs:

Blockbuster: I’ve probably played “Blockbuster” more than any other song in my career. I wrote the lyrics, and this is the only released recording of me singing. Or, “singing.” The lyrics are about a crazy malicious neighbor we had at the first Chicago apartment David Yow and I lived in, which we called “the Ranch.” The guy smashed eggs on our roommate’s car. On the first couple of tours, I sang the shouted vocal part, but after a while it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to set up a second microphone for just one song, so we let it go. This and “Bloody Mary” were the songs that became regular parts of our live set. Duane is rubbing the edge of a quarter on the strings in the beginning and end of the song. He plays two nice guitar solos here, one a barrage of sixteenth notes, the second a mix of arpeggios and semirandom chord fragments. As the first song, I like how “Blockbuster” establishes what the band would later go on to do best. It’s heavy and dark without resorting to knucklehead metal clichés.

Bloody Mary: This song is a nice illustration of something that Duane does better than anybody I’ve ever played with: guitar arpeggios. His arpeggios are remarkably smooth and fluid. Yow wrote the lyrics. Duane uses a diminished scale here (as well as in “Starlet” and “Rabid Pigs”). If you’re playing it in G, it would go G-A-Bb-C-Db-Eb-E-F#-G. It’s a strange scale for rock music, with a spooky angular feel. I never had any luck writing stuff with it, but it works out pretty well for Duane.

Rabid Pigs: David Yow and I wrote the lyrics, which are about Scratch Acid’s record label, Rabid Cat Records. We were very angry with them at the time. That’s all water under the bridge, and everybody’s friends again now, so it’s a little embarrassing to hear this today. Duane does some cool artificial harmonics at about 0:53, where he fingers the chord and plucks the strings an octave above the notes. There’s a very nice guitar solo and a great guitar freak-out at the end.

Starlet: I wrote these lyrics. This was inspired by a night when I got too drunk and couldn’t remember what happened the night before, but knew it hadn’t been good. This, to me, is the least interesting song on the record.

Happy Bunny Goes Fluff Fluff Along: This instrumental is my favorite song on the record. On the original US release, we called it “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” trying to pass it off as a Neil Sedaka cover, as a joke. Duane is playing two melodic lines at once, one ascending and one descending. On some measures, I play the ascending line, on others, descending. The crazy industrial noises at the beginning are made by David Yow on the Alesis drum machine. He made some drum patterns with different drums playing at the smallest time interval possible, so that they sound like tones rather than discrete beats. When he rode the tempo on the HR-16 up and down, which you can do with a fader on that drum machine, it made the apparent pitch of the tones go up and down. We recorded some screams and put a lot of reverb on them. Albini made the cool whipping noise with the tape machine. We doubled the bass with a piano in places. I always wanted to do a lot more of this kind of thing, the experimental weird stuff. After Mac joined the band and we started touring all the time, the emphasis moved more to live performance, and our subsequent songwriting reflects that. We didn’t do much weird studio stuff again until we recorded Blue with Andy Gill.

I shot the photos used on the cover, and Yow did the layout.

DAVID WM. SIMS

It’s weird listening to Pure now. It takes me straight back to when Duane was first playing those songs for me, even before David had started playing bass. It was so stripped down. Like a leg with the skin and muscle pulled off. I like this record. My favorite part, however, is David’s photography on the cover.

DAVID YOW

When I first came up to Chicagoto audition as the drummer, the way we clicked as a band from the beginning was astonishing. It felt as if we had already played together for years, like we had known each other much longer than we had. We played as many shows as we could from the start, and after a while we were on the road more than we were at home. The thing that helped our band more than anything was the number of live shows we played. That live context strips away the fat. When you play your show consistently in an uncontrolled environment, you get good at it. Every time we went into the studio, it was shortly after completing a tour, so we were ready. Most of our studio recordings were first or second takes. This gave David Yow a strong net to roll around on with his vocals. We just knew what we were trying to achieve.

I was extremely fortunate to play with these guys, and having the privilege of calling them close friends to this day is something I will always hold in the highest regard. I don’t know any other way to say it.

MAC McNEILLY