Thursday, February 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: The morning after

The Breeders clean up their act

By Newt Briggs

Being popular can be a real bitch. At least it was for identical-twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal of the Breeders, whose multimillion-selling 1993 album Last Splash launched them into a heroin-fueled tailspin of codependency and creative impotence. By the end of the following year, Kim had abandoned Hollywood for the Midwest, and Kelley had been confined to a court-ordered rehab in Minnesota. Exhausted and bitter, the rest of the band drifted apart, forming side projects that included the Amps and the Josephine Wiggs Experience. None would prove capable of capturing the lightning-in-a-bottle success of the Breeders.

But that wasn't the end of the story. Although the lineup that recorded Last Splash never regrouped, the Deal sisters resurfaced in 2000 at an underground show in Los Angeles. It was their first performance together in six years, and they were backed by guitarist Richard Presley, bassist Mando Lopez (both members of Fear) and drummer Jose Medeles. Not long after, the group reconvened in the studio, eventually releasing Title TK--a drastic but appropriate departure from the goofball ferocity of Last Splash.

"Kelley has a saying about it," says Presley, a distant relative of Elvis and nephew to Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. "She says that Last Splash was the party record and Title TK is like the morning-after record."

It was a morning after that was almost a decade in the making. More or less written off as damaged goods by a dried-up, post-grunge music industry, the Deals have put past squabbles behind them and settled into a saner, more sober lifestyle.

"It's wacky," Presley says. "They're twin sisters and they have this dynamic between them that's just, well, kinda freaky. Like, sometimes they'll argue about something a little bit, but then a few minutes later they'll be talking about their favorite `Buffy' episode or something. It's a trip to watch."

But just because the Deals are currently the picture of domestic bliss doesn't mean strange things don't still happen to them. Like the time Kelley almost accidentally torched a popular British vacation getaway.

"We were playing in England at this resort place, and all the bands and crews were staying in these little motel rooms," says Presley. "There wasn't much to do, so at night Kelley would park herself in front of the TV in this old living-room area. This one night, she's laying on the floor watching TV and I guess she dozed off or whatever. It was freezing outside, but she had the windows open and she had these little candles burning around her. So while she's sleeping, the wind started blowing these plastic curtains toward the candles. Anyhow, they caught on fire, and the whole room was engulfed. Luckily, she woke up in time, and she was like, 'Kim! Kim!' Kim came running out there and they tugged the curtains down and they jumped on them and threw them into the shower and stuff. But the room was a wreck and it stunk the whole place up something awful."

Thankfully, this unexpected bout of firefighting has been about the only major trauma in the girls' lives of late. Tuning up for a tour of Australia and Japan and currently recording songs that revisit the quirky, garage-rock roots of Last Splash, the Breeders seem set to reassert themselves as the distortion-friendly saviors of indie-pop. Still, it's easy to wonder why things went so drastically wrong the first time around.

"It's a classic story that we've all heard many times," says Presley. "In any situation--whether it's a marriage or a band or a business or whatever--drugs always just fuck everything up. It wasn't anything inherent in the girls. They did have any animosity towards each other. It was just a series of bad situations. A lot of people fall into that trap. But it's all good now. They are fully aware of what happened in the past, and they take care of themselves to see that it won't happen again in the future."