Creem - April / May 1994

Don't feel bad if you missed it. I did, too. The reverbations from L.A.'s art-punk underground in the very early '80s were barely felt outside that sprawling city's limits. A precursor to the huge punk-metal explosion that threatened to eclipse it totally by the mid-'80s, it gave birth to such eclectic bands as Debt of Nature, Severed Head in a Bag, and Four Way Cross.

Though such outfits raised many an inquisitive eyebrow, widespread acceptance just wasn't in the cards. Instead, three major components, vocalist Beth Thompson, drummer Jim Goodall, and guitarist/noisemaker Brad Laner, came together to form Medicine.

Performance art coupled with distorted melody, Medicine would probably be best described as Abrasive Pop. The band's current album, The Buried Life, (its second, on American Recordings), makes an odd salad of well-penned melodic tunes tossed with a thick dressing of dissonance.

"It's easy for us to write a pop song and it's easy for us to make a cool noise," notes Medicine main man Brad as he, Beth, and Jim sit Indian-style on the bedroom floor of his North Hollywood guest house digs (down the alley, next to his 'crappy' white Toyota).

"We're having our cake and eating it, too, as far as being as experimental as we want and as unashamedly pop as we want," he says as he hand-rolls the Drum tobacco cigarettes which he shares with Beth. "Guitars can do anything. They're just pieces of wood with some metal wires stretched across. So I just sit down and make a noise and what comes out, I use. I'm lucky if I can duplicate it."

He's not kidding. For the song 'Never Click,' he amplified the sound of a Bic lighter. He's also the proud owner of a "shit guitar," which he says he merely needs to tune up, put next to an amp, and watch it go. And he doesn't have a monopoly on creative sound effects, either. On 'Emmeline,' Beth miked her "beautiful and lovely" pet toads on tape and fed the result to the studio for a sound that lends a certain je ne sais croak to the album.

But it's Beth's breathy and sweet vocals that define The Buried Life with a certain quirkiness. A wisp of a girl with blonde/brown rasta-like hair and fragile features, this sylph-like creature is responsible for such lyrics as, "A butcher's grin from ear to ear/ No one outside who can hear... Pull the wings off lightly/ Break the bones politely" from 'I Hear,' which she describes as beautiful, though it was inspired by a book of murder evidence photographs.

Brad agrees that their lyrics are heavily influenced by physical and emotional pain. "It's inspiring and definitely a good way of working out some evil stuff. It's good lyrical fodder when you're upset about something."

Jim chomps on chocolate chip cookies and jokes that they have a new song called 'Angry Castrating Woman' based on the John Wayne Bobbitt case. "I like the fact that his name is John Wayne," notes Brad. "it's like (Bobbitt's wife) cut off America's dick."

Odd lyrical influences aside, the three are more concerned with their immediate agenda, which includes a spring tour beginning in Europe (a guest guitarist and bassist will join them). Their most fervent wish is that this tour doesn't replicate past horrors.

"We played a steakhouse with the Flaming Lips in San Luis Obispo," recalls Brad. "The Flaming Lips had this amazing amount of fog machines which they turned on full blast so that the entire steakhouse was filled with smoke."

"It just crept over the whole club in a bank, really slow," remembers Jim. "Everyone just panicked. We went outside and it was coming out of the chimneys and stuff."

Their terrors aren't exclusively on these shores. "We played Nottingham, England once and our dressing room was the men's room," says Beth, rolling her eyes behind her tinted glasses.

"It smelled like a thousand years of piss," adds Brad. "...and then they took us out after playing an hour-long show," continues Beth, "took us out up over the roof, down over and across another roof, and down a flight of stairs. They didn't feel we could walk through the audience to the dressing room when we were opening for the Smashing Pumpkins. i don't think anybody cared. They were all waiting for the Pumpkins."

"And then they made us wear those little tiny Robin Hood suits," quips Jim. "yeah. That arrow kept poking me in the back," jokes Beth. "But we never looked better. Those little wooden elf shoes..." Brad throws into the mix.

"We keep playing these cold places in the middle of the winter," shudders Beth, "because (American Recordings) is trying to get us sick."

"They figure we're more creative when we have pneumonia," jests Brad. "But we feel so lucky to have hooked up with (a record company) who smelled some possibilities. We're kind of like their retarded child."

"We like that," he smiles. "Want a cookie?"

--Adrianne Stone


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