From the Chicago Reader:

Post No Bills

By Peter Margasak

June 14, 2002

The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

Liam Hayes looks more than a little like Bob Dylan — specifically Dylan circa Blonde on Blonde, after a shopping spree on Carnaby Street — and fans and supporters will attest to the magnitude of Hayes’s vision almost as fervently as Dylan’s did his. Yet in the past 12 years his band Plush has released just two singles and — as of February, when Fed came out on the Japanese label After Hours — two albums.

It’s not that Hayes is lazy or otherwise occupied: he works at making music every day, living frugally so he doesn’t have to take a day job. But he is by all accounts cripplingly obsessive. He spent about two years recording Fed with a cast of more than 30 musicians and engineers, spending a good six figures in the process. No label fronted the money — After Hours licensed the album only after it had been completed. At times the dense mix of blue-eyed soul, Brill Building songcraft, and Beatles-esque pop sounds like it should be called Stuffed: the confectionary arrangements always go for more where less might do. But they work for the well-written songs and not the other way around. Hayes plots his hooky melodies along strings of shimmering chords and fleshes them out with layer upon layer of brass,
strings, winds, keyboards, percussion, backup singers — yet his own clear, delicate vocals are the indisputable center of the mix.

Most of the album was recorded and mixed a year ago, but Hayes spent
another year tweaking and rerecording. Basic tracks were cut all over the
city — in traditional recording studios like Delmark’s Riverside and Steve
Albini’s Electrical Audio, with a mobile setup on a soundstage, at the
Congress Theater, and even on the roof of a south-side loft building. Hayes
hired Tom Tom MMLXXXIV (formerly
Tom Tom 84), a veteran arranger who’s
worked with the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire, Phil Collins, and the Jacksons

— to polish the brass and
string charts and recruit topflight session men
to play them. Each song
was painstakingly assembled — on tape, no
computers — from the numerous
sessions. “When it came time to mix the
album there was a stack
of tape seven feet long and three feet deep on the
floor…probably 50 reels
of tape,” says Isotope 217 bassist Matt Lux, who
played on the entire album.

“Nothing was ever settled,” says Albini. “You could be seconds away from having the mix be totally finished and then he would want to listen to alternate versions of the introduction from takes that you hadn’t listened to in nine months.” Late in the game, as the brass was being overdubbed, Hayes brought in drummer Morris Jennings — another soul and jazz pro — to rerecord basic drum tracks. “This methodology of doing it and the pace that we worked and the combination of deliberation and spontaneous choices — that complicated mosaic is what makes the personality of the record,” says Albini.

Hayes grew up in Chicago;
he attended Lincoln Park High School and the

Chicago Academy for the
Arts and then took (but never completed) a few

music classes at Roosevelt
University. He began performing sporadically

with Plush in 1990, and
in ’94 the band released a remarkable, beautifully

orchestrated single on Drag
City, the label owned by Hayes’s childhood

friend Dan Koretzky. A less
satisfying single came out on the now defunct

Flydaddy label in 1997,
and the following year Drag City released Plush’s

long-awaited debut album,
More You Becomes You — for all intents and

purposes a solo piano record.

Hayes recorded it alone partly
because his fellow musicians weren’t living

up to his standards. “I
think there’s people whom I’ve played with who are

playing at their best, and
there’s other people I’ve played with who could

play better, but who were
not self-critical enough,” he says. “That whole

environment that they’re
a product of is not self-critical enough.”

Koretzky notes that Hayes
spent eight months perfecting the cover art, done

to look like a grade-school
drawing.

When Hayes began recording
Fed, Koretzky let him use his car and his credit

cards, dispatched Drag City
employees to help him lug equipment, booked

recording sessions, and
loaned him money. He says Hayes had agreed to

license the new record to
the label, just as he had More You Becomes You.

But when Hayes told him
he wanted “a heavy five-figure” licensing fee up

front, Koretzky had to walk
away. “I knew it was probably time to think

about just buying a copy
of the record when it came out,” he says.

“This was just a record that
got out of control as far as the expense of

making it,” Hayes admits.
Neither Lux nor longtime Plush drummer Rian

Murphy has been paid or
expects to be, but Hayes had to fork over for the

hired guns and much of the
studio time. He says he spent enough of his own

money (earned in part by
playing on records by Smog and Palace and

appearing in John Cusack’s
High Fidelity) to buy a “nice shiny new car or

put a down payment on a
house,” but the rest came from friends, family, and

friends’ families.

“I am one of many people
that Liam was on the hook to while making this

record, and I’m sure that
some of this is going to come back and haunt

him,” says Albini, who eventually
extended him credit. “He wasn’t trying to

screw people, it’s just
that he was single-mindedly pursuing this record

and ignoring everything
else in his life, including his obligations. I’m

sure eventually Liam will
be even with everybody.” Lux agrees: “He doesn’t

intend to screw anybody
over, and he certainly intends to pay every cent

back. Whether that can happen
or not, I don’t know, but I’m sure if

something happened and he
got some money he would be extremely generous.”

If anyone has a right to
feel slighted it’s Murphy, who’s known Hayes since

high school and had played
in Plush for more than a decade when Jennings

was brought in. But Murphy
says he was relieved: “I was like, `Finally.’

The year before I stopped
getting calls was a year of constantly thinking,

`How much more of this can
I take?’ But at the same time, those tunes have

always knocked me out, the
vision has knocked me out, and it’s always been

fun to be a part of what’s
going on with him because he’s genuinely, like,

crazy. He’s one of those
music personalities that you read about, except

that I was in the room when
crazy things would happen. When he sent me a

copy of the CD it included
a letter that said, `It’s finished, I think.’ He

could tinker with it the
rest of his life; it could be another Smile.”

“His approach to the crudities
of the business of it are as deluded as his

approach to the music itself,”
says Albini. “He has as many misconceptions

about that as he does about
how records are made, or how bands are run, or

how one goes about conducting
an adult life. He’s equally misguided about

all of them. But the reason
people are so sympathetic to him is because

there’s a kernel of greatness,
and there’s an absolute purity in everything

about Liam. He’s not behaving
the way he does for effect, he’s behaving the

way he does because he genuinely
thinks that’s the way it should be done.”

Fed has yet to be picked
up by an American label; it’s currently available

only as an import, and the
price is accordingly steep (it lists for $25.99

at Reckless). Nonetheless,
Plush will play a record-release show — its

first Chicago show in four
years — on Friday, June 14, at Schubas. The

lineup is Hayes, Jennings,
guitarist Chris Bruce, and bassist Dave Monsey.

THANKS TO RAYDEEN

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