When four esteemed underground music veterans joined forces in 1997 to record their Thrill Jockey debut album as Pullman, their entirely acoustic, overdub-free sound was a surprising but welcome contrast to the vastly more experimental work that Ken (formerly Bundy K.) Brown, Doug McCombs, Chris Brokaw and Curtis Harvey had been making for years in projects such as Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise, Directions in Music, Codeine, Come and Rex.
With its folk-forward, fingerpicked guitar ditties, Turnstyles and Junkpiles sounded way more like a lost John Fahey or Leo Kottke album than the minimalism-inspired, bass-dominated strains of Tortoise, Brown’s expansive, studio-as-instrument stoner masterpiece Directions in Music, the tightly coiled, noisy rock of Come or the spartan slowcore of Codeine, who Trouser Press accurately described as “just about the first band to risk terminal transmission damage by operating in perpetual low gear, dragging their chassis through all manner of psychosexual detritus in the process.”
The quartet returned to Pullman in 2001, this time abetted by veteran Chicago scene drummer Tim Barnes and a willingness to forego the acoustic-or-bust vibe for a more nuanced feel and style. And then, the group dropped off the face of the earth and pursued other projects, only for fate to intervene and bring its members back together after Barnes was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2021. While the musician was still healthy enough to make music, he worked closely with Brown to record material based on ideas sent in by a host of peers from around the world, including all of the original Pullman crew plus members of Sonic Youth, Wilco, Minutemen and Slint.
These recordings have been released in recent years on Bandcamp as Lost Words and Noumena, but the sessions also inadvertently led to the creation of an entirely new Pullman album, III, which is out now on Western Vinyl. Brown jumped on Zoom (replete with a backdrop of Bay Area rapper E-40) from his home in Louisville, Ky., to talk with SPIN about the long road to its completion, Pullman’s ever-evolving sound and the enduring, healing power of friendship and music.
The first Pullman record sounded very different than the music its members were making at the time. How did you settle on the acoustic framework, or even the lineup of the group?
In ’97, I went to Brooklyn to record Rex 3. I don’t remember if it was contemporaneous to, before or after the Loftus record. Brian Deck and I co-engineered that record and Ben Massarella came out. Brian, Ben and I all played on the Rex record. Curtis and Doug both had lofts in Brooklyn and [Rex member] Phil [Spirito] had an apartment that was less than a quarter mile from the studio. I remember that being like a collective — hanging out and really enjoying ‘90s Williamsburg. Curtis and I had talked about how I might contribute or maybe play some guitar or bass. He said, well, there’s this one song I’d love for you to take a crack at playing some guitar on, so we went into a lounge area of the studio and played guitar together. It’s on Rex 3 under the title ‘Oafish.’
The ironic thing about it is, that song was written by Phil, and for whatever reason, he wasn’t around when we were working on it. When we got together with him later in the day to play it along with his original bass part, it just didn’t work and that’s why it’s called ‘Oafish,’ because Phil was like, this beautiful, melodic guitar thing you’ve come up with doesn’t fit with my oafish bass part (laughs). The Rex guys decided they wanted it to appear on the album even though it was just Curtis and I having a guitar duet. We really enjoyed working in that way. It was awesome.
Around that time, I had been playing a lot more guitar. It was right after the first Directions record and I kind of moved away from playing bass. I said to Curtis, I’ve had this idea for a long time that I want to do an acoustic guitar-focused record. The Rex song worked out so great, so wouldn’t be awesome if we kept going? Curtis is unquestionably one of the most prolific musicians I’ve ever met. He had a mountain of material. He was like, that sounds great, and we stayed in touch about it. As it came closer to the rubber hitting the road, he said, it would be awesome to invite Chris Brokaw to do this. And I said, if we’re talking about other people, this could be an opportunity for me to continue playing with Doug, which I haven’t done since I quit Tortoise. I continued working with Tortoise and all of the guys in Tortoise at some level, even after I quit. But this was a way for me to explicitly ask Doug to contribute to this thing that we’re talking about. I think at that time, Doug maybe had only met Chris in passing, but he knew Curtis from when Rex did a tour with the Sea & Cake, where he was the merch guy.
So, we settled on the four of us. I remember saying, I really want this to be acoustic, but also wouldn’t it be awesome if we just recorded it all live? We don’t have to book studio time. I was living in the Tortoise loft [in Chicago] at the time. I don’t remember if Doug was living there then or not, but there was a shitload of amazing microphones and recording equipment around and because we were going to do it live, we didn’t even need to use [Tortoise member] John [McEntire]’s main studio space. That loft was massive — it was probably like 7-8,000 square feet. I think less than six months passed from when we started to talk about it to actually making it happen. Curtis and Chris were super happy to come to Chicago and do it. It unfolded over the course of four or five days in the Tortoise loft.
Did any peers have a quizzical reaction to it being acoustic, or did it just feel like the next in a line of different projects that all of you were working on?
Before we convened, I talked to [Thrill Jockey founder] Bettina [Richards] about it. She was such an enthusiastic supporter that I don’t even remember if I told her it was going to be an acoustic record. But she was a huge fan of Come, so she was 100% behind whatever I told her we were doing. I could figure out when this happened relative to Rex III and Loftus, but it was one of numerous things that were just kind of in the soup. We were all so busy at that time, although I think I was the only one that had a real day job. We all had the bandwidth to be in a million things.
How did the second Pullman LP come together, particularly in terms of Tim’s role in it?
I definitely do not recall when the conversation started about doing another one. Tortoise had a much higher profile by then, but I think Come was going through a lineup change and Rex was definitely either broken up or sidelined. All of Turnstyles was recorded live to two-track, with no overdubs, editing or replacing parts. I remember that when we decided to do the second one, we were all like, let’s not make the album that way again. We also realized it doesn’t have to be all acoustic, and that we wanted a drummer. Before all four of us had a conversation, I was hanging out with Doug at the Rainbo Club in Wicker Park one night, and I told him that I wanted a drummer for the album who played like Jim Keltner. Doug knew exactly what I was talking about — someone who had that pocket and feel. Immediately, he said, I know exactly who we should ask: Tim Barnes. I knew Tim but I was not all that familiar with his drumming aside from Silver Jews’ American Water. Doug was familiar with him because Tim was playing in Jim O’Rourke’s band at that time and Jim had opened for Tortoise. We were very lucky. We reached out to Tim and he said yes and made time immediately. So, we knew there would be drums. We knew that we were going to do it in a studio with multi-tracking and overdubs. Because of that, it was kind of a relief. We all lived in different cities, but we realized we could rehearse less intensively and just track what we have. If someone isn’t ready to record, we can overdub or fly their part in later. It took a lot of pressure off, because on both, we just showed up and started writing material together. People may have had riffs or kernels of ideas, but there was no sending around of tapes or anything. It was like, when we get together, we’re going to make this stuff up.
Tim got his diagnosis in 2021. How did that lead to the two of you making music again both on his behalf and for what turned into this new Pullman album?
Tim had symptoms for awhile and had been undergoing batteries and batteries of tests both here in Louisville and then at the Mayo Clinic. They consulted with doctors across the country, because ironically the very first test that they did on him, in maybe 2018 or 2019, was to rule out Alzheimer’s, which they did immediately. A couple years later, they came back to that as the final diagnosis, which Tim went public with almost immediately. I have a pretty vivid memory of sitting on Tim and [his wife] Erica’s back porch, maybe like the day after they publicly announced it. I said to Tim, what do you want? What do you need right now? What we arrived at was, it would be really awesome to figure out ways for Tim to collaborate with people remotely. He’s also a recording engineer and had all the gear in a studio in his attic. I thought, we can record some stuff and maybe you can do some long distance collaboration with all of your friends from over the years. We’ll put it up on Bandcamp and even if we don’t raise very much money, it’ll be a way to keep you busy and allow you to interact with all of these friends that want to support you. Tim was all in and Erica was all in. They loved the idea. And then, probably in less than a week, one of their friends from the East Coast started a GoFundMe and it raised thousands of dollars.
For the first nine months or a year, there wasn’t even any idea that we were going to make a record. I sent this email blast out to everybody that we had contacts for, saying, Tim wants to make music. Send me stuff. Or, if you want me to, I’ll record him and I’ll send you stuff. All the other Pullman guys were in that email blast, and we had made some noise maybe three or four years prior about doing something again. To be honest, I was the one who had other concerns going on in my life. I was being kind of entrepreneurial and trying to start a company, and I told them I just didn’t have the bandwidth.
When the Tim project started rolling, it became obvious we were going to make some records out of it. The original genesis of the material that became Pullman III was just one song intended as part of the compilation material, which turned into “Weightless.” I know for a fact that the nugget that launched that song was one of the very first things that Tim and I started working on in the broader Tim project. As we continued to work, I realized there was enough for there to be a separate Pullman thing. That’s when the conversations started, like, this can just be a piece of Tim’s thing, or, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll eventually have enough material for something else. We didn’t even know if it would be an LP at that point in time.
To my ears, the music splits the difference between the acoustic sound of Pullman and the more experimental, atmospheric side of Loftus and Directions in Music. How do you hear this material in the context of your prior work with these guys in other projects?
It unfolded over about a year of just sending tapes around and doing one song at a time with one participant at a time. ‘Weightless’ started with a loop that I made on my computer and then Tim and I played together. I was playing bass and Tim was playing drums, which in this case just ended up being some cymbals. Those were the types of things that I’d send out to Doug, Chris and Curtis to play over. But, it became very clear pretty early on that they couldn’t really add something without hearing what everybody else is doing. So, we had to do it one person at a time. In that sense, it was very organic and everybody was just responding to the material. Still, it would all come back to me and then I’d have to edit it together and knit something out of it. We even talked about, was there any opportunity for some portion of us to get together in one place, or a couple places, to finish this? At a certain point, it was clear it would be up to me to assemble it in the computer if we wanted to get it done in a timely fashion. I can’t send it around and everybody gets to vote. I just started making decisions about how it was going to come together aesthetically. It wasn’t explicit. It wasn’t intentional. It just was circumstantial that some part of this was going to be heavily pushed by my vision. The two loop-based tracks, ‘Weightless’ and ‘October,’ could have been knit together in other ways. ‘Weightless’ more than any other speaks to that Directions-type of minimalist drones, but then also the post-Tortoise/‘this was put together in a computer’ aesthetic. Both of those pieces really speak to that, but Pullman never really pushed too hard against that sound in the past. The first record was very different from that kind of thing.
The other thing about ‘Weightless’ is because it was the first thing I worked on with Tim, he was able to be engaged in the mixing and editing process. That went away later as his dementia progressed. There are at least two other pieces on the Tim records where he was involved in that part of the process. That was me sitting in front of the computer and Tim sitting next to me, deciding where to move stuff or around or asking what he thought of a sound.
As his condition progresses, is Tim still able to make music at all?
Oh, no, it’s definitely not possible. He lives in a full-time care facility now and he’s on a memory care floor. He’s surrounded by other patients with dementia. But on the positive side, my wife and I went over there to see him around the holidays and we had advance copies of the Pullman record. While we were listening, the first thing he did was pick up an instrument. His room is filled with hand drums and percussion instruments. Glenn Kotche, his longtime friend, was in town with Wilco and went to visit him, and he told me that they played together. I’ve only taken him out of the facility twice, and he went in almost exactly a year ago. The kinds of things that we can do with him now are pretty limited, and the idea of him sitting down and working, even in a very loose environment, on music seems like a big stretch at this point.
What about this experience was particularly meaningful for you, especially with so much time having passed since the prior album and Tim’s health challenges?
This is the thing that occurred to me only after it was done. I have gone to great pains to say that this was not something intentional or something that we set out to do, but I think it’s reflected in the nature of the music. Again, all of us responded to it very organically. But I feel like as I listen to the record, it does reflect this dream state vibe to it, which speaks to the state of Tim’s condition. People think if you have Alzheimer’s you just lose your memory, but I don’t think it’s the case with Tim. Eventually he became unable to speak or form full sentences, but the way I think about it is that the Tim we have known for years is still in there. There’s a physical shell that his body represents, but the neural connection to the outside world is broken. If you think about that and reflect on the dreamlike state that is the sort of aesthetic condition of the album, I think it speaks to existing but somehow disconnecting from the actual world that we inhabit physically.
Have you been working on any other musical pursuits of late?
One of the things that came out of the experience of working with Tim was that the two of us and [former Slint drummer] Britt Walford played regularly, on a bi-weekly basis, for about a year. One of those recordings is a digital bonus track on Noumena. We reached the point where Tim couldn’t play with us any longer, so Britt and I continued to play together for about another nine months or a year. Some of that material got released on Bandcamp under the name Jungle Boogie. And then, Britt and I decided not to keep doing that thing. We had just started playing some shows in Louisville and Chicago, and people were calling us to book gigs. So, I started fulfilling those commitments as a solo electric bass project. The last set I did like that was opening for Tortoise in Lexington, Ky., in November. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to retire that material or find another way to realize it. I recorded all of the live sets, so those could go on Bandcamp. All of the solo material was an outgrowth of what I was exploring with Britt, which was all improvised but cut from the same cloth.
I also found an old live recording of Pullman from which maybe one or two songs may get released as digital singles, because they didn’t make it in time to be attached to the album. I have a handful of things that are all just in the ‘being talked about’ stages right now, so we’ll see what comes out of them based on the bandwidth that I have this year.
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