Mike McCarthy’s Birthday - A Celebration of the Wizard

March 1, C-Boys Heart & Soul, Austin, TX

In 1999, not too long after getting dropped by Elektra, Spoon put together version 1 of the album that would eventually become Girls Can Tell. We’d recorded these songs ourselves, it was the first time we’d done so. And though the recordings were rudimentary, I was convinced that the new stuff had more soul, better lyrics, and more emotion than anything we’d done before. We made dupes and sent them out to whatever music people we could think of, hoping we’d get lucky and find a new label. I went to New York for the summer. Every couple of weeks I’d spend my lunch break in a phone booth in the lobby of the Marriott in Times Square talking to our manager or lawyer about which labels were definitely not interested in putting out an album by Spoon. There were only two people that I could point to who were into the new music, but luckily those two seemed to love it. One was Gerard Cosloy, who would later put the album out in Europe on his new label 12XU, and the other was a producer named Mike McCarthy.

I’d known Mike for a few years, though not well. Mike wasn’t a big fan of the records we’d made before but he did love the new recordings and said he thought they were the best thing we’d done. Mike came and stayed with me in my sublet above the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg. He convinced me he had good taste by helping me make a loop of stomps and claps for an upcoming solo show that sounded just like “Baby Love” by the Supremes. I knew he was adamant about recording on tape, I knew he was obsessed with vintage gear and had an old-school approach to record making, and considering the direction of the songs on the record we were making (and his near-singular expression of interest in it) Mike seemed like a good match. Eventually we went back to Austin and Mike ended up producing the album with us – re-recording some and mixing the rest of the songs we’d worked on alone – and recording three new songs that would make the album finally feel whole: “Everything Hits At Once,” “Believing Is Art,” and “1020 AM.” Over the next 5 years he’d produce 3 more albums with us – Kill the Moonlight, Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and he’s also helped out on the two albums since.

The gist of this is to say that Mike helped turn some pretty amateur recordings into the first album that brought us any success, the first one that people really took to. And since then he’s played a major role in the creative output of Spoon as he has with so many other Austin bands – OBN IIIs, White Denim, Patty Griffin, Heartless Bastards, And You’ll Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Feral Future, A Giant Dog, Sweet Spirit, Sound Team, Fastball, Girl In A Coma, Stretford, 16 Deluxe, David Garza, and Crooked Bangs, to start. He’s a hidden gem of the Austin music world, and Austin music over the past 15 years couldn’t have been the same without him – there wouldn’t have been as many opportunities (certainly not for my band) or as many amazing sounding records without him. So on March 1, a few of the bands Mike has worked with are gonna put on a party to celebrate his birthday, with sets by Feral Future, Stephen Patterson of the White Rabbits, A Giant Dog, and some kind of combination of me playing with members of Trail of Dead and Sweet Spirit. If you see Mike between now and then, be sure and thank him for his many years of service the way you would a uniformed soldier and then please wish him a happy birthday. – Britt

Tickets are on sale here http://www.continentalclub.com/Austin/Confidential/boxoffice.html