Technically Ecstasy
This month’s diamond espied in the dust: a marriage of beauteous pop and emotional pain.
Pernice Brothers Overcome By Happiness SUB POP, 1998
KNOCKING 30, a classic age for such activity, Joe Pernice was taking stock. A Master of Arts from U-Mass in Amherst for whom a career in teaching had beckoned, he was in a band – Scud Mountain Boys – with their third album released by Sub Pop and a keen following on the alt-countr y scene. What he knew and his bandmates didn’t, however, is that they were about to split.
“It was nothing personal,” the soft-spoken Pernice sighs today. “You know, those guys were some of my closest friends. But musically, I was just bored. We were pigeonholed as a sound – and to be fair, we kind of painted ourselves into that corner.”
With proceeds from the Scuds deal, Pernice had bought his first CD player and copies of Pink Moon and Sgt. Pepper’s. “Then I bought some Burt Bacharach and suddenly I was all over the shop,” he recalls. “I didn’t care if I was listening to Dinosaur Jr. or Carole King. The one thing I wasn’t listening to was countr y music.”
Forming in Pernice’s head was Overcome By
Happiness, his debut album as Pernice Brothers. In 1998, it would alight as a fully-formed masterpiece of bittersweet popcraft, with spiritual cousins in Badfinger and Teenage Fanclub. In 2023 it’s mentioned in hushed tones by its adherents – a fandom likely to swell from May 18 when an expanded reissue is released by New West – but as Pernice told the Scuds’ Sub Pop A&R Joyce Linehan in 1996, he could offer no guarantee that his new direction would pan out: “I wanted strings, I wanted horns, but that was about as deep as I went. And she said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”
Early Pernice Brothers songs were recorded at Joe’s brother Bob’s house in Carlisle, Mass – Sub Pop single Jimmy Coma featured Joe and Bob on guitars and Stephen Desaulniers from the Scuds on bass. Others were demoed at home and assessed in Pernice’s knackered 1979 Pontiac Bonneville, its 8-track converted to play cassettes. Their melodies were creamy, ascendant, carrying finely-tuned miniatures of doubt and regret, and worse. In 2023, Pernice acknowledges, “There’s a lot of pain in that record for me, a lot of personal things. Anxiety and me go way back.”
Most striking of all, the exquisite Chicken Wire followed a young woman to her garage and her suicide. The last objects she registers as she slips away are a bale of chicken wire and a rusty lawn mower, the Carver-esque bathos underlined, in the final album version, by a lone, Bacharachian flugelhorn.
“The person was real, someone I knew at high school,” says Pernice of the song’s tragic heroine. “I was an awkward, weird-looking teenager and this person was super-popular, beautiful, artistic. Even as we got older, she would write to me every once in a while but I had no idea that she was tormented. When she took her own life I was absolutely stunned by it.”
Pernice describes the five weeks of recording the album at Studio .45 in Hartford, Connecticut – with Tom Monahan and Michael Deming at the controls and key contributions from New Radiant Storm King guitarist Peyton Pinkerton and Lilys drummer Aaron Sperske – as “magical”, a hermetic experience fuelled by Pinkerton’s gourmet cooking and a case of 50 per cent ABV Allen’s Ginger Brandy. “There was a period of seven days where I didn’t go outside,” says Pernice. “I was starting to get scur vy, probably. My skin was translucent.”
Tracking the strings and brass – the elements that had defined his vision from the start – the stakes were high: “because it might sound like a hat on a hat, right? Too much. But hearing the strings come off that fat two-inch tape, it was thrilling. I remember thinking to myself, I don’t want to ever stop doing this.”
With the masters boxed, Overcome By
Happiness was everything Pernice wanted it to be. Would anyone else notice? Not his concern. “I just figured, I made the record. And then it’ll come out. And it’ll sell 2,000 copies if I’m lucky. And then maybe I’ll get a chance to make another one.”
The “zero expectations” policy turned out to be prudent. Sub Pop had found themselves in a post-grunge slump – “partly through signing people like me,” says Pernice – its processes in disarray. Joyce Linehan had resigned her post (in order to become Pernice’s manager) and Pernice’s new A&R was working part-time. But he’s not bitter about Overcome’s hard landing. Softening the blow over the years, its boosters could hardly have been more vocal. One of them, the late Rhino Records executive Gar y Stewart, used to keep CD copies of the album in the trunk of his car and hand them to people he felt needed to hear it. (That turned out to be most people.) Stewart is thanked, poignantly, in the sleevenote to the New West reissue.
Pernice doesn’t spend much time picking apart his old albums. He’s had other records to make, a career to sustain. But he’s surprised himself by welcoming the renewed interest in Overcome
By Happiness, 25 years on. “For some reason, I think it’s pretty cool,” he smiles. “I’ve never been a fantastic one for taking compliments. But maybe I’ve got a much bigger ego than I thought.”
Pernice Brothers’ Overcome By Happiness 25th Anniversary Edition vinyl box set is released by New West in May.
“Anxiety and me go way back.” JOE PERNICE