Chevelle

The debut CD from Chevelle, the full-length Point #1, was released in early May and is beginning to cause quite a stir in the world of both college and mainstream rock radio. Point #1 is arguably one of the best CDs to be released in 1999 to date, and to put it simply and undisputedly, Chevelle just fucking rocks. The three piece crew is made up of three brothers from Chicago—Sam, Pete and Joe Loeffler—who were recently picked up by the smart guys over at Squint Entertainment, who then hooked the band up with producer/god of indie rock/pure production genius Steve Albini. The result is the debut CD from a band that will make an impression on the world of rock.

The band's members don't deny that they are influenced by more mainstream rock acts the likes of Tool, Helmet and Filter—in fact they are up front about it. While the aforementioned three bands may have an influence on Chevelle, the crunchy indie trio purely takes it to a different level. I talked with drummer/de facto bandleader Sam Loeffler last week while he was taking a short break at his Chicago home.

I started playing when I was 13. It's been almost 11 years I guess.

Yes.

When I picked up drums, one of my brothers picked up the guitar. We started writing songs together. Then Joe picked up the bass up about four years ago. That was all by coincidence because someone left their bass equipment at our parents house. So he just started playing it and after a year he got really good and we started writing a lot together and he joined up.

I really don't think so. I've been in other bands but nothing that was ever that big of a deal. It kind of feels normal because it's always been this way.

That was about five years ago. We started playing the Double Door and the Metro. Double Door was the hottest club in the city and it was weird that we got right in there, but we had no draw then. It was cool but it was weird.

We were out doing a tour with a band that we had played with. We were in Alabama and the guys in the other band talked us up to Squint and the club gave us some extra time for our set, we really tried to blow everybody from Squint away, and I guess we did. That night we went out to the Waffle Shop at like 2 AM and they told us they wanted to work with us. The whole thing took us like eight months to sign, but that's pretty normal.

Yeah we did that. We were out there for R & R. We've been doing a lot of industry stuff, which is good.

Well that's where you can create the buzz.

Yeah, and it teaches you to play in a stressing environment. When we played the Viking Room in LA it was tough to play, you look around and you think, 'Sony's here.' So it's a little bit stressful.

Well, being that we're in Chicago and we wanted to stay in Chicago, Steve Taylor, who is our A&R [Artist & Repertoire] guy said that Albini is from the city and we should find out what he's doing. Albini has his own studio called Electrical Audio, and he built that around two years ago. He just built a second one which is like a really top of the line studio—it has everything. The other one is sort of the punk rock studio. It's a little more stripped down. We ended up recording in both studios. We just called him and he said yes.

Actually I had heard some stuff but I had never gotten into it. But after we were there I got into Shellac. We actually went out to see them when we were in Tennessee. It was really cool.

Man, I've got to tell you, they are one of the most amazing bands live. Between the drummer and Albini, Steve is nuts on stage. They are all about attitude, right, and so whole time the bass player was sitting there watching TV. They were awesome. I was totally into the record so I recognized everything they played. They were so tight.

At first it was very matter of fact—he does how ever many bands per year… hundreds? It was very matter-of-fact, he walked into the studio one time and we met him and that was it. He just came into the studio and was setting stuff up. He never really asked what we were going for, what we wanted to do or anything like that. It was just sit down, put the mikes on it and play. His words were, "On your horse, on your horse, lets go." After a while we became friends, we got to hear a lot of cool stories about Robert Plant, Nirvana, Courtny Love—nothing I can repeat. Everybody's a character. It was cool, we really became friends. He really stuck to it. We were in there for 18 days and we just paid the studio prices. He doesn't take points on records. I don't know if you knew that.

He can, we even offered it and he said, "No I don' take points." For our band, being that we're on an indie label doing something that is prospectively budget… he just said, "This is what my studio costs, this is what I cost if you want to pay it." And we did.

He has this thing he always says: "Ya' know, none of this here is black magic, it's all very simple stuff" I'm very amateur as an engineer and I looked, and he's got good analog equipment and good mics. He doesn't do anything different. He just has a technique, he always records with flat EQs on the board and he always mixes with flat EQs. Virtually the entire record was mixed flat.

Yes and no. Live, my drum kit is really tight, and in the recording it's a little boomy. Live, I think we're tighter sounding. As far as our equipment is concerned, it's actually the true tone of our equipment. It's the extreme it really is, a Smashing Pumpkins record is really produced, and ours isn't very produced, it's very straight-forward. They are both really good ways of doing it, just different.

Well we're touring right now. We're doing a lot of four and five day [trips], things like that. We just hired Dave Curry at The Agency to do our booking, so we're getting more into it. We've got some bids in for stuff but none of the big stuff is finalized as of yet.

Bookmark: