Cover Story: Fig Dish • Renewal and Rejuvenation
Fig Dish (circa 1997)
There’s an electricity in the air of late, bristling arm hairs here in Chicago. There’s the injection of HGH into the DNC going into their convention. The recent acknowledgment that the music industry spotlight is once again illuminating Chicago’s rock music scene in a seemingly cyclical fashion. Then there’s the excitement brewing about Fig Dish, one of Chicago’s beloved, underrated; some may say (including the band members themselves) overestimated rock bands, releasing a new album, Feels Like The Very First Two Times, on September 6th, and playing live for the first time in a decade (two sold-out shows in fact, after the first sold out in minutes), September 5 and 6 at GMan Tavern.
Speaking to three of the four Fig Dish members via Zoom, including Blake Smith, who is now a father of three, his oldest driving the car next to Smith during our interview, I wondered if his kids care at all about hearing Dad’s music or seeing him rock out in front of a sold-out crowd.
“No, they don’t really care,” Smith said. “I took my daughter to see Chappell Roan at The Vic the other night. I’m not coming out in a Marie Antoinette dress and rolling around on the ground for two hours. I can’t compete with the music that they listen to now.”
Perhaps someday, Smiths kids will be interested in hearing about their father’s quasi-fame and rollercoaster music career, which has led to a new record after 25 years and two sold-out shows.
Thank-you notes can be directed toward one dedicated fan (and label boss) who now grants the wishes of artists and music lovers who dream about comebacks and second chances. Forge Again Records is a labor of love for owner/operator Justin Wexler, who started the label in 2000 while he was in college to release music for his band, Stillwell. “It was just a last-minute thing,” Wexler recalled. “We were going to do a split seven-inch (single) and then realized nobody wants vinyl in the year 2000. So we ended up doing a CD instead.” He never planned to continue putting out music after that first CD, but friends, friends of friends, started coming to him, asking him to put music out for them. Here it is 25 years and 77 releases later, yet he never thought he would end up working with some of his favorite bands from his teens, like Fig Dish.
“Triple Fast Action had just posted randomly on Facebook that they were looking for someone to [re-release] Cattlemen Don’t,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Well, holy shit. I love this record. I’d love to do it.’” After the success of their first reissue (a deal for TFA’s debut LP Broadcaster also worked out, and in June of this year, they reissued a deluxe, gatefold double-LP version), knowing that Triple Fast Action was friends with Fig Dish, Wexler mentioned to them that he would like to reissue their albums as well. Fig Dish was another major label artist from the ’90s that he was a fan of – “A little older, a little cooler,” he admitted. “So I started talking with them.” But like the TFA scenario, getting Fig Dish’s former label to sign off would take time. So again (like with TFA), Wexler discovered that they, too, had unreleased music. “So I was like, ‘Why don’t we release that in the meantime?’ And they were game to do it.”
For new fans unfamiliar with Fig Dish’s career trajectory, let us recap: Born amidst the prolific 1990s, Billboard-declared “Cutting Edge’s New Capital” era, Fig Dish aka Rick Ness and Blake Smith (guitarists/vocalists), Mike Willison (bassist/vocalist), and Andy Hamilton (drummer) might have gotten caught in the undertow of Chicago artists who had begun generating a wave of industry interest before they had a chance to get a toe in the water. Despite a cache of energy and displaying an adroit foundation for songwriting growing up on The Replacements, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr., Cheap Trick, The Smiths, Big Star, and Elvis Costello, their live shows were often alcohol-soaked and slapdash. So, while other Chicago artists were getting record deals, Fig Dish was getting the shaft.
Where they lacked discipline, Ness decided to make up with ingenuity. Without telling the others, he sent demo tapes to a handful of label A&R reps with a fake note that read, “Dear ____, I saw this band at CBGBs, and they were fucking great. Totally your type of thing. You should check them out.” Then he signed the note “Steve.” “I figured everyone knows somebody named Steve,” Ness quipped. The ruse was a success; out of six notes sent, two of them responded, and one was a rep for Atlas/Polygram, who signed them in early 1995. Within weeks, the band recorded with renowned producer Lou Giordano (Bob Mould/Sugar, Juliana Hatfield, Goo Goo Dolls) in Woodstock, New York.
Fig Dish’s debut, That’s What Love Songs Often Do, was released in July 1995, and MTV began playing the video for the song “Seeds” while the band was touring. Along with a plethora of predictable, entertaining road stories came a series of unfortunate events that, while inevitably causing some worry lines, ultimately joined the others on the list of tales to tell at parties and holidays and to journalists 25 years later.
“It was our first big tour, so I remember thinking, ‘This is going to be so decadent,’” Willison recalled. Then we saw [Vinnie Dombrowski from Sponge] coming into our dressing room. He kicked us out so he could drink protein drinks, jump rope, and do push-ups!” There was a time when the band was detained at the Canadian border due to a misunderstanding about drummer Andy Hamilton’s diabetic syringes. Then there was the time they threw a half-eaten sandwich from the seventh floor of the Hyatt in Hollywood, which splattered on the head of Marilyn Manson (luckily, no charges were filed…must have been tasty cold cuts). Then, a month before recording their second album, they had a near-fatal accident in Nebraska when their van and trailer spun out on some black ice on I-80, tipped over, and slid in front of some oncoming semi-trucks – an incident so traumatic their drummer Andy Hamilton quit the band and went to law school.
Then, in February of 1998, after their second LP, When Shove Goes Back to Push, had been out for seven months, the marketing people at their label Polygram thought it would be a brilliant idea to make a video for the single “When Shirts Get Tight” with an adult-film actress. At that low point, after MTV summarily rejected the video and thus failed to save their languishing record deal, Fig Dish regrouped and recorded songs with Andy Gerber at his Chicago Million Yen Studios for what they hoped would be a third LP. What they didn’t realize was that it would take some time apart to explore other musical partners and paths (Smith and Willison formed Caviar, and history repeated itself, then Willison moved to Portland; Ness formed Ness and experienced inertia despite his creative genius, so he played yacht rock with other Chicago notables, then moved to Madison to apply his creative genius to academia) before roads would lead them back to Fig Dish.
“We spent a long time figuring out what they wanted [the first release] to be,” he said. “The initial ask was to do a collection of all [of their unreleased] songs.” But Andy Gerber, who produced all of Fig Dish’s unreleased music, had a different idea.
“I said, ‘If you do that, it’s going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack for the good stuff,’” Gerber recalled of the initial planning stages for Fig Dish’s new LP Feels Like The Very First Two Times. Gerber has produced many local and international artists over three decades at his Million Yene Studios, including most of Local H’s music, The Tossers, Smoking Popes, Braid, Kevin Flynn & The Avondale Ramblers, and many others.
There’s been some discussion amongst people involved in this new Fig Dish album that the age and origins of the tunes therein might be best blurred “for legal reasons”… Maybe there’s an app for that? Like the “face erase” apps that make a 50-something person look 27 again? As they say about those crow’s feet and laugh lines, they are an archive of a life well-lived – in this case, a music career – a kind of roadmap to accompany one’s biography.
The murmurs may have been misinterpreted, however, since the band members themselves have provided some timeline references in the liner notes about the 12 songs’ origins, in addition to what they shared during interviews for this story. The tracks are buried treasure, dusted off and polished back to their original sheen like Monty Python’s Holy Grail had it been discovered.
The resulting album of hand-picked songs is a crucial follow-up to their second LP, despite being 25 years later. The thing about music is that it may evolve with technology and fads, and today, songs can be deconstructed and rebuilt. But once a song is recorded and put out in the universe, it becomes timeless. There is so much music to be heard now that it hardly matters when it was recorded or released. The thing about Fig Dish, too, is they are a band with three equally talented writer-singer-guitarists, which means they not only have three times the material but also can complement each other in writing style and instrumental instincts.
Gerber convinced Wexler and the band to take the 12 best songs and make one really good album rather than put all the songs out simultaneously. “For better or worse, everybody agreed,” he said. “I actually remixed three or four of them, and we sequenced them so that they work together because this was from five or six different sessions. Then the mastering guy, Carl Saff, did a great job of pulling it together to make, I think, a pretty cohesive 12-song record.”
Songs like Smith’s opener “Burn Bright For Now” blast the door open with a melodic Moog line, bashing beat and ear-snatching harmony-layered chorus hook. The second track, Ness’s The Ragged Ones, is equally as ecstatic as it builds in intensity to another infectious chorus of chugging guitar layers and Ness’s razor-throated vocals. Next is Smith’s “Science Goes Public” (for which the band is working on an AI-created video), a blistering psychedelic guitar tour de force that will surely be a memorable moment for upcoming live shows.
Mid-record is Willison’s first entry, “Karoline Waits,” which pulls the listener back from the ferocity of the first half with an isolated snapping guitar reminiscent of Scott Lucas, a longtime friend of the band. The vocal is reminiscent of Wes Kidd. Willison proudly admits emulating both.
Ness’s next turns, “Tear The Atmosphere” and “Cellophane And Sulphur,” are some of his best post-Polygram work. The former is a slow-building, emotive, atmospheric trip, and the latter is a cheery, pop hook-heavy psychedelic romp.
“If we weren’t listening to The Wrens, we were listening to Lotion and a bunch of angular music that was complicated but pop-y,” Smith recalled of the inspiration for the next track, “Senior Circuit.”
“When we were mastering the album and trying to get the timing right between songs, I think from ‘Senior Circuit’ into ‘If Not Now When’ we were trying to do the Journey ‘Feeling That Way’ – ‘Anytime’ [transition],” Ness recalled.
“Side 2 [of the vinyl] opens up with ‘Cellophane and Sulphur,’” Gerber continued. “I was heavily influenced by an Alaska record when we were making that song, so it has some of those abrasive stop-start sounds. Then there are two Blake heaters, sort of venting, and it was time for a break at that point in the album. I thought Mike’s song ‘AD+D’ was really beautiful and fit in a good place on the record there.”
“I think Fig Dish’s first record especially is really terrific,” said Gerber. “They’re all very talented and obviously went on to do cool stuff after the fact. But I think they deserve a second listen. I think there are fans who liked them back then who would be interested in hearing this new stuff, and I think there are people who haven’t heard them yet who would want to hear a good record. It’s been long enough now that nostalgia is set in, so people who are fans of that music back then are older now, and maybe their kids are grown, so they have time on their hands and can indulge their rock-and-roll interests a little more, and I think it’s cool. They sold out Gman two nights, so I think that’s exciting. It shows that there’s interest.”
The newly polished record will be on vinyl and CD on September 6th. And if the reunion wasn’t enough to celebrate, the news that original drummer Andy Hamilton is joining them at GMan further elevates the moment. Since there will probably be disappointed fans who couldn’t get tickets to either GMan show, follow Fig Dish, Forge Again Records, and IE on social media for news about a Forge Again label showcase Wexler is planning for January 2025. Then, if the deal goes through, Forge Again will reissue both Fig Dish records. “They also have talked about doing new material,” Wexler added. “Blake says he’s wanted to do a new Fig Dish record for years, so I’m hoping that happens. I would one hundred percent love to do that with them. So we’ll see what happens next year.”
Appearing 9/5 and 9/6 at Gman Tavern, Chicago.
– Penelope Biver
Category: Cover Story, Featured, Monthly
