I recently stumbled onto Doug Martsch’s internet basketball game at Builttospill.com/jams, and though I apparently lack the transition gene from typing for a living to keyboarding for successful gaming, I could not stop waging hoops-war with the Built to Spill singer/songwriter. Avatar Martsch drubbed me Globetrotters-v.-Generals style, but with “Conventional Wisdom” from 2006’s You In Reverse blasting on automated loop, I cared not a whit, my Pavlovian humiliation salved by exploding glissando bursts and endless layers of guitar-generated ear candy.
So there’s something roundballers and music lovers can agree on: Martsch got some serious game.
Martsch chuckled when I asked him a few days earlier about the tendency of some BTS fans to get all Clapton Is God-like about his guitar playing. He calls it a “media-perpetuated mythology” and says it only comes up in interviews, adding that he doubts even the journalists asking about it believe it.
“I’m comfortable with how I play guitar, but there are so many people, just hundreds of thousands of them, who can just totally shred over me,” he says. “I think when someone plays a guitar solo, especially a long guitar solo, people are just going to assume, ‘well, he must be good if he’s even bothering to do it.’ I know how well I play guitar, and I am not a guitar hero by any stretch.”
But count me among the believers. I elevated Martsch into my pantheon of favorite guitarists when a friend turned me on to Built to Spill’s 1997 cosmic-kaleidoscope masterpiece, Perfect From Now On.
Today, great guitar playing is about texture and sound, mood and emotion — which is why grind-it-till-you-find-it Neil Young and Sonic Youth noise-maestro Thurston Moore inspire today’s best guitarists, and the Hendrix/Clapton/Page franchise inspires tired carbon copies. What Martsch has been doing since Built to Spill’s 1993 debut, Ultimate Alternative Wavers, may trace its roots to Crazy Horse and J. Mascis’ Dinosaur Jr., but since hitting maturity this band sounds like nobody before them (well, maybe there’s a little Wipers in there). Full marks for originality, in other words.
Case in point, Built to Spill solos never feel like solos. They’re just another element used to sculpt Martsch’s shifting sonic landscapes: Strands of reverb buttressed by cello swells and aerobic rhythms; narcotic wah-wahs swirling in Far Eastern-flavored synths; speaker-weeping melodies with phase shifters heralding End Times; and Martsch’s pinched vocals offering his lonely-misfit-tossing-bricks-at-pricks narratives. In the past, Martsch would obsess over his four-track, endlessly tinkering with textures until they revealed their logic while band mates came and went. (Perfect From Now On wound up scrapped three different times.)
But after recording 2001’s Ancient Melodies of the Future, the meta-approach left Martsch a husk in need of new inspiration. And like many musicians who begin by tearing down everything that came before to make elbow-room for their own ideas, Martsch eventually turned back to the music’s fundamental roots and the same musical wellspring that inspired folks like the Holy Trinity: the blues.
“My whole musical paradigm shifted,” he says of his journey back in musical time. “I grew up liking people that didn’t necessarily play their instruments well and couldn’t sing well but just had a lot of crazy ideas, and this was the exact opposite; this was people who could play and sing really well but didn’t have that many original ideas because they were basically playing the same blues songs. So for a little while I just wasn’t interested in listening to the way we played.”
A 2002 solo record — Now You Know — explored those roots, and after a reflective hiatus with his girlfriend and their new boy in his hometown of Boise, Martsch reconvened the band to record You In Reverse. With a steady lineup in place — drummer Scott Plouf, bassist Brett Nelson, guitarist Jim Roth and the full-time participation of touring guitarist Brett Netson (who Martsch calls the band’s best guitar player) — Martsch took a new, more collaborative tack.
“Everyone was more involved, and to me it was more exciting because I was getting to hear new things happening through other people’s brains,” he says. “To me that’s way more exciting than sitting for hours and hours by myself to come up with one little guitar part. I’ve been down that road.”
Renewed vigor lights up You In Reverse like electric current, from the epic guitar cook-off “Goin’ Against Your Mind” that opens the record through the nervy dream-pop of “Liar” and the Gypsy-meets-Rasta “Mess With Time.” Most hailed the record as a return to Perfect‘s grand scope, only with a looser, live-in-studio feel.
Martsch says this is where Built to Spill’s future lies, starting with the end of this tour when they go back into the studio to record again.
“I think some bands kind of discover where their strengths and weaknesses are, and I don’t think we’ve got to that point yet,” he says. “I don’t think we’re that comfortable in our skins where we really know what we’re doing. In a way, that’s good because it leaves us open to experiment and try some new things.”
I thought about that later as Avatar Martsch administered cans of virtual-hoops and sonic whupass, and a line from “Conventional Wisdom” kept reverberating long after the glissandos: “Some things you can’t explain/ Like why we’re all embracing conventional wisdom/ In a world that’s just so unconventional.”
It may be the philosophical equivalent of a wide-open lay-up, but it’s no less essential in our final tallies.
Built to Spill and The Meat Puppets play the Neighborhood Theatre on Monday, March 3 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $18 in advance, $20 at the door.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2008.
