Day Two of the Slam tour, 30th-anniversary edition. Were you at this show? 5/31/90 Richmond at Metro. I’m sure that things will improve as we move along but I’m trying to remember these first two gigs of the tour and I’m drawing a complete blank so let’s talk about something else and hope some fans can fill in the gaps in the memory. We had played Richmond only once before on the return from an east coast Camper VB tour and had gotten the feeling that it wasn’t exactly an alternative music hotspot. Was it us? I mean, we could play in a much smaller city like Charlottesville, VA and have a much better time. Maybe Richmond lacked a good college radio station? Discuss.
Anyhoo, at this point, we had no idea how things were going to go for the record. When we left Reflection Studios in February, we were pretty hot on the record but early reviews had been lukewarm, with the main complaint being that Slam was too slick. We knew by putting keyboards and horns on some songs that we ran the risk of alienating some of the fans that had loved us for our rough, early sound but we didn’t know that we were driving into a fierce headwind of backlash. Truth be told, we had never sold a tremendous amount of records (not that we had ever gotten an actual accounting from Homestead) but we had mostly enjoyed good reviews in the press. Christgau trashed the record in the Village Voice, calling it ‘just sad’, and giving it a C+ and the reviews didn’t get much better from there.
In addition to a shiny new album, we produced a video for the first single, ‘Love Barge’ that cost almost as much as the entire record to produce, thanks in part to the decision to use Doug Freel, who had wild MTV success with Roxette videos. I’m not sure why anyone would think that Roxette magic would rub off on a bunch of scruffy rubes like us but Epic was willing to pay him a lot of money and we stupidly went along. Phil Morrison was the runner-up in the battle to produce the video and he just went on to direct some of the best videos for Yo La Tengo and others while we got this mess of a video, filmed in an abandoned building on the lower east side of NYC.
We had to perform the song standing in a sea of discarded needles, thoughtfully left behind by the junkies who used the spot to shoot up. Meanwhile, we saw Mr. Freel for about 10 minutes the whole day, the rest of which he apparently spent in his trailer doing blow with our video advance money. A quick check on the 120 MInutes archive shows that the song got played a total of 2 times on MTV before getting tossed into the dustbin. (btw, there are 18 seconds of silence before the video starts)
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