American Music Club was formed in San Francisco by Eitzel, in 1982, after he moved from Ohio back to his native California. The band started out with a steady revolving door of musicians, none of which survived the first year, but 1983 brought with it band stalwarts Vudi on guitar and Danny Pearson on bass who both shared Eitzel’s love of rock, country, blues, folk, pop and punk, synthesizing it into an incredibly unique and engaging musical melting pot. Eitzel's enigmatic presence, heartfelt vocals and brilliant song writing featured alongside Vudi’s highly original guitar playing. Songs often became an unpredictable marriage of Vudi and Danny’s free-form jazz tendencies and Eitzel's downbeat poetics. Eitzel had spent most of his teen years growing up in Southampton, England, where he witnessed the birth of the UK punk movement, and this provided him with a musical background he now built on.
The band's debut album, Restless Stranger, their American answer to Joy Division, steeped in post punk, received little attention on its release in 1985. AMC's first UK release, Engine (1987), featuring the first of Eitzel's many classic songs, 'Outside this Bar', a theme he carries with him to this day, was closely followed by what many critics call the first of their three masterpieces, California. The next year built on their new-found British following, with a UK-only release aptly titled United Kingdom - a collection of live tracks and superb studio tracks, not merely a stop-gap record but a release that still stands on its own merit to this day. Like many US bands at this time (Green on Red, Gun Club etc), AMC found they were given more attention on European shores than back in the States. Everclear came out in 1991, with the addition of pedal steel maestro Bruce Kaphlan who produced the album as well. It landed Eitzel "Best Songwriter of the Year" in the Rolling Stone Critics Poll, not to mention a "Hot Band" pick from the same publication. With all this attention and sell-out performances on both sides of the Atlantic, the major labels stepped in to release the band’s sixth album, Mercury (1993), considered by many to be a masterpiece of modern popular music and AMC’s most focused record.
The band’s live shows were incendiary and unpredictable, swinging between quiet acoustic moments to soaring guitar and pedal steel heights, the dynamics of which matched that of the Bad Seeds or the Bunnymen at their best. AMC played with Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam and the Bad Seeds, incessantly touring through the early 90s, but the spring of 1994 saw the band settle down to produce a set of songs that emphasized the line-up's new-found steadiness and a wealth of new perspectives. They called it San Francisco. This, their seventh album, was full of introspective songs that twisted and turned like the ambivalent emotions that created them. Once again, though critically acclaimed, it failed to produce the radio hit they needed to move on to the next level. In part due to this frustration of being only critics darlings but not commercially successful, American Music Club split up, albeit amicably.
Eitzel went on to create of reservoir of much-loved solo efforts, including 60 Watt Silver Lining for Virgin, moving over to Matador Records for Caught in A Trap, which included members of Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo. The electronic based Invisible Man followed and Eitzel began the new century with two albums’ worth of covers. Pearson went on to play with Clodhopper and release solo recordings, while Vudi fronted LA band Clovis de Foret, as well as playing with 80s revisionists Ariel Pink and Mooney set up his own Closer studios.
Interest in the band grew with the likes of Divine Comedy recording AMC’s ‘Johnny Mathis Feet’, with a 30-piece orchestra to back it up. Calexico, Lambchop, M Ward, Willard Grant, Steve Wynn and Chris & Carla soon followed, recording AMC covers for AMC tribute album Come on Beautiful. With heavyweights Coldplay, Radiohead, REM and Pearl Jam publicly proclaiming their love of AMC, offers for them to reform rolled in from Europe. In the summer of 2004, AMC got back together for a sold-out performance at London’s Southbank Centre and began recording together again. Eitzel had been working on a batch of songs and the band decided that these would be the seeds for their new record Love Songs for Patriots. Uncut gave it Album of the Month, with a 5-star review and said it was “Absolutely fu*king brilliant … this band belongs together”. The rest of Europe’s press agreed. The band followed this up with a European and US tour and went straight into composing and performing a live soundtrack for the silent film classic ‘Street Angel’, in San Francisco. Sadly the film’s European tour was cancelled due to major problems obtaining a workable film print of adequate quality.
Four years on and the band is back with an even greater album, The Golden Age, written and recorded throughout 2007. This release sees the band exploring their quieter side, and it also sees a new rhythm section, with Steve Didelot on drums and Sean Hoffmann on bass and guitars. While not disbanding the old line-up, Eitzel felt that he wanted to involve Vudi more with the recordings than he was able to on Love Songs for Patriots, and the only way to do that was to move to Los Angeles where Vudi lives and works. Vudi had been working with a local rhythm section from a band called the Larks. At the AMC rehearsals, it soon became clear that it was not workable for Pearson and Moody to be constantly traveling to and from LA, so after months of rehearsals with Didelot and Hoffmann, Eitzel felt the new line-up was far better suited to the new material and recruited them in as the new rhythm section.
(read less)
