- Artists - J
- Jump, Little Children
Jump, Little Children
PART ONE: SCHOOL ( first published 1998)
... PART ONE: SCHOOL ( first published 1998)
Ward was the only one with a scholarship. Ward is the smartest member of the band. Ward also had a car in 10 th grade and was the most popular geek that I knew. When we went to lunch in high school I would watch as Ward went from one side of the lunch area to the other, chatting with his friends as they followed him like little disciples. He had a blue jean jacket with "the Wall" emblazoned by hand (his) on the back. He had long hair and a winning smile. Ward was everyone's favorite, and I pretended to hate him just to be different until he came over to my house one day with a chessboard.
Jay was his sister Cary's brother. I didn't hear him speak until 1994. In school Jay was the one that would get in front of the entire school during an assembly and sing a James Taylor song, perfectly. And then he would simply vanish into thin air. It was an amazing act.
Evan went to the same school, too. He hung out with the skaters and was a vegetarian, much to Mom's chagrin. When he went to the North Carolina School of the Arts for the visual arts, he started wearing long scarves and floppy hats. I didn't see him that much when school started... I think that all little brothers have to go through a phase where they hide from their older siblings, and he did a good job.
I had been told at public school that the North Carolina School of the Arts was full of drug users and homosexuals. I couldn't wait to get there. I immediately began studying ballet dancers and taking clarinet classes. I was a very emotional player, but my teacher knew that I never practiced. My ear-training teacher asked me if I had ever done anything that I was exceptionally proud of, that I spent a lot of time and energy on. I told him that I loved to write my name, and he suggested that I become a scribe.
And then there was Chris. When his family moved across the street from Evan and me, our family went out to greet them, and we were amazed to see five Pollen children, in order of height and age, standing like soldiers on their front lawn. Chris was the youngest, and his first mission in America was to become a punk. He did very well. Christopher was hilarious in that slightly dangerous sort of way: he'd pull fire alarms in a frenzy of excitement and scream in quiet libraries. He had a death wish from an early age, and this made him my best and most frustrating friend. Nothing would calm him down. Nothing could soothe his racing mind. At school he was the one that started playing in the snack bar, not to pick up chicks, like the other classic guitarists did, but in hopes that someone would get pissed off and try to make him leave.
But no one asked Chris to leave. This was an early mission statement of Jump, Little Children, and it has lasted forever: You Cannot Deny Us Forever. We went to an art school, the kind that they made a movie of (Fame), and it is a very intense place. Art, art, all the time. Several hours a day of practice on your individual instrument, individual and group lessons with your music teacher, lessons on ear-training and music theory, rehearsals with the school orchestra, and required attendance to classical music performances by both students and professionals. And in the rooms next door were dancers, actors, visual artists, lighting designers, all doing similar things in their fields. People were usually much more curious than they were offended. This made for lots of fun.
Ward and Jay were in a band called the Soundpainters (Ward's idea). They were the most popular band on campus, and played all the school events, like Homecoming, in which our "football team" challenged a fraternity of Wake Forest to a game of football, and the entire campus (800 students) came out into the field to cheer our team on. (Our mascot was a giant green Pickle, and we voted for a Homecoming "Queen", if you know what I mean) The Soundpainters played Simon and Garfunkel and Crosby Stills and Nash and the Humpty Dance. Their originals were about moons and mountains and rivers and suns and going to your high school graduation. They were great.
Chris and I started playing Irish music on a lark. I had a tin whistle and he had started learning tunes on his guitar. We played an open mic night at the Rose and Thistle Café and my hands were shaking so badly I could barely make a sound. Ward was in the audience that night, and asked if he could come over and "jam" with us sometime. He was a long-haired hippie.
Evan was still playing with paints.
One day after we had been "jamming" with Ward in the Snack Bar at school, Jay came in with a tin whistle that he had made. "Me Make", he grunted. The tin whistle didn't sound very good but it turns out that he had already written a tune on it, called Taibhreamh. This is the first official Jump, Little Children song, I suppose. Our friend Michael Bellar (of the As-Is Ensemble), another long-haired hippie in those days, accompanied the tune on piano.
Ward and Jay grew tired of the Soundpainters. They wanted to play with Chris and me. So we took our Snack Bar art school "happenings" and tried to get some shows. We had great success at first: our first official gigs happened on January 1 st , 1992, in various shops of downtown Winston-Salem, NC-- we were the "First Night Band" for a festival celebrating New Year's Eve. Chris managed to break several hundred dollars worth of handmade pottery.
But we still didn't have a name! Our friend Rosemary McCarthy suggested that we drink a lot of egg nog that very night and sit around and brainstorm for a good name. Her suggestion was "The Four Motherf*!@rs ". That was my favorite, but "Jump, Little Children" got the most votes. "Jump, Little Children" was the name of a song that we played by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (found on the album "Brownie's Blues"). The song speaks of the jubilation one feels when one suddenly finds oneself ungoverned by rules and regulations. It's rather punk for a blues song, and fit us well.
PART TWO: LEAVING SCHOOL
Ward didn't want to leave school. We didn't want Ward in the band. I had the job of telling him that we were kicking him out, so I invited him to lunch at the Rainbow Café in Winston. I was very nervous. When he sat down I didn't know what to say, but luckily he started. "I think that I need to leave the band," he said, straightforwardly. "I know that you guys want to leave school to go to Ireland, and I just can't do that. I want my degree. You should go on without me." So we did. No hard feelings and I didn't look like a jerk.
We spent the summer of '92 traveling and learning and saving money to go to Ireland. There were just three of us: Jay, Chris and Me. Evan was getting tired of painting but we wouldn't let him join. What would he play? we wondered. He didn't know how to play anything. (He bought a drum that summer.) We played festivals, public radio stations, coffeehouses, anywhere people would take us. We recorded a few songs (Taibhreamh, Leave Behind it All, Forget My Loss) with friends in home studios. We started dreaming of having our own tape. But we were still learning. We had a lot to learn.
We had quit school with the pretense of going to Ireland, and finally made it in the winter of '92. We stayed in hostels and with Christopher's many relatives, who were usually Franciscan Monks (brown robes, monasteries, the whole bit). We spent our nights in pubs, hoping that a kind old soul would teach us a tune at the end of the evening. We had our own gig, for a full week, in Delores Keane's Pub of Galway (don't bother looking, it's gone now) and were some sort of freak show--the posters read "All the Way from North Carolina! Young Lads Jump, Little Children!" and we had people come to see the Americans play Irish music badly but energetically. We busked on Grafton Street and saw a foxhunt in Co. Wexford and nearly fell off of the Cliffs of Mohr. It was beautiful.
When we returned we realized two things. 1. We had to leave North Carolina if we were going to continue to learn Irish music, and 2. Evan had learned how to play the Irish frame drum AND the hammered dulcimer, and could sing in Irish Gaelic. So we started talking about moving to Boston immediately, and asked Evan to go with us.
We spent the summer of '93 trying to make the money to move to Boston. We played festivals and coffeehouses and public radio stations. We recorded a few songs (Sean O' Flaherty's Accordion, Lannigan's Ball, Jump, Little Children). We were still dreaming of having our own tape. But we were still learning. We still had a lot to learn.
Our father offered us a job restoring damaged pews at St. Michael's Church, in Charleston, SC. The money was good and it was only for a few months. Little did we know that the job was going to be a nightmare. We used a chemical called "Zylene" which stripped the old dirty paint from the pews but also stripped us of the use of our minds. But we still spent our evenings playing in the local café's and bars of the Charleston music scene. We fell in love with the city. Most people do... there is something magical about "the Holy City" that you just don't understand until you visit. The Spanish Moss, the restaurants, the people. One person that we especially liked was Jonathan Gray, a local bass player, who came to see us almost every night. We played a few shows with him (and recorded songs like "Jonny Jump Up" and "Trip to Aulander" with him) and even asked him to join the band. But he was finishing school. We had to get to Boston. We promised him that he'd be welcome any time, and we left for Beantown with hope and joy in our little hearts.
PART THREE: BOSTON
Every band has a few dark periods in their history. Boston was a black hole for us. For many years after leaving it, really until we have started playing the city recently, I had blocked out much of the worst parts of being there. It wasn't Boston, exactly. It was just circumstance. To tell the story properly I actually have to start from New York City. Jay, Evan and Christopher went early to find an apartment in Boston, and stopped over in New York. While they were there they had a tragic accident involving the recreational use of LSD. Christopher had a very bad reaction to the drug and his normally mildly psychotic demeanor became an extremely psychotic one. For the full story listen to the song "Opium". Needless to say when I saw my friends next they were shells of human beings. This was not a great start to a new adventure.
In moving to Boston we managed to hit one of the worst winters in the city's history. It was snowing when I arrived, and it snowed to the end of May, and I never saw the front steps of our apartment. In our front yard was a sign that read "Dangerous Intersection" and I knew that it was an omen. Everything was cold that winter-- our house, the streets, the people in the streets, our hearts. We had saved some money but it started to go fast, and we had to get jobs. Sad little day jobs. We missed home immediately.
Christopher's chosen job was to play in the subways. There he met some long haired bearded men that took him home and fed him. They were members of a religious community and had extreme beliefs but they could cook. At first Chris thought they were crazy. He would laugh at the things that they had told him (women should be subservient to men, homosexuality was wrong, Jesus is coming at the end of the world and saving men with long hair and beards and their subservient wives). But he kept going back to see them, to talk to them and eat their food. And one day he didn't come back to us. He left us all his possessions and was basically out of our lives forever. Losing a friend like that can be worse than losing a friend to death. We knew that he was still alive but that he had become someone else, and he would never be the same crazy Chris that pulled fire alarms and screamed in libraries. At the same time, we let him go. He was, and still is, happier there, and safer than he would be elsewhere. He found peace... how could we argue with that?
Besides, we had our own cult to deal with, the cult of Jump, Little Children. When Chris left we almost gave up. We certainly didn't know what to do. A friend of ours, Tim Connell, fought for us to stay together. He got us a few gigs by helping us to put together our first tape, self-titled, which featured songs that we had recorded in the past, like "Ocean Grace" and "Mountains so Grand". It was a shoddy little piece of work but it proved to us that we could still be a band without Christopher, so we immediately started selling it at the ridiculous price of $10. I feel very bad for all the people that bought that first tape. It was so indie rock. It kept us alive...
But barely. We ran out of money in the summer of 1994. We were poor, depressed, and hated Boston. We packed our little Subaru full of our instruments and possessions and left the city with our tails between our legs. We waved goodbye to Tim. He was mad that we were leaving, and we didn't blame him. We owed him a lot of rent. The Subaru literally made it as far as Charleston, SC, and stopped dead. We had called Jonathan Gray the night before and asked him if we could crash at his place. He knew that we'd be back, and gladly let us stay. Little did he know that we were actually moving in with he and his two other roommates, for nearly a month. We thought we were on our way to Atlanta. But we're glad we didn't make it.
PART THREE:CHARLESTON
We spent the summer of '94 busking on the streets of Charleston. To busk is to perform for money. We had made a few Summer Resolutions when we crash-landed in Jonathan's driveway: 1. We would never take day jobs again. 2. We were not going to play Irish music any more, and 3. We wanted to Rock. The first one wasn't too hard. By selling our little tape for it's ungodly sum and making noise we were able to pay the rent. Quitting Irish music was hard until we had enough original songs to play, and Rocking is an art form that folk musicians have a hard time grasping at first. But everything was wonderful in Charleston. The stifling muggy heat felt glorious to us and it took us a long time to thaw out from the icy winter of Boston. Jay hadn't written many songs since his Soundpainters days, and with all his new experiences he was a regular song-writing factory, penning "Smiling Down" and "Dancing Virginia" about cities and the people in them, and "Matchbox Whistler" about long lost friends. We felt so good we called our old college graduate friend Ward Williams and asked him if he would re-join the band. He had nothing better to do with a cello performance degree, so he came right away.
Things moved very quickly. We played a few festivals, and coffeehouses, and bars, anywhere people would take us. We recorded a few songs (Lamplight, Dancing Virginia) in the home of our good friend, the genius Henry Dorn The local rock and roll radio station had even started playing a song of ours, "Quiet" and people were asking for a CD in record stores. . By the fall of 1994 we had our first manager, an old family friend of Evan's and mine that worked as a publisher in Nashville, TN, and with his connections we were able to get into a real studio and make some quick demos. Jay drank a lot of Licorice Tea in those days. And he was talking up a storm by then... coincidence or miracle cure for shyness? We named the first CD "the Licorice Tea Demos". It had songs like "Someone's in the Kitchen" and "U can Look but U can't Touch".
I remember that the first dozen or so times we played the Music Farm in Charleston, SC, something was always wrong with the sound. We'd come out to cheers and applause (or not) and gesture dramatically to the crowd, pick up our instruments, and a horrible wave of feedback would shake the entire building, nearly killing everyone in the audience. We dreamed of having a great rock show. But we were still learning. We had a lot to learn. Our theme nights were based on little puppet shows that Evan and I would do as children. I would write the screenplays (spoofs of Simon and Simon and James Bond movies) and our stuffed animals would act them out. We would force our mother, a professional actress, to watch these plays. Little did she imagine that we would grow up to do rock shows where we dressed as Cowboys or 50's Greasers or characters from 'the Wizard of Oz'. I have never seen "Tommy" but the video for U2's "Zooropa" tour changed my life. Bono is the ultimate rock star. No one has done it better, in my opinion.
I watched the "Zooropa" tape a lot during the recording of "Buzz", our live EP, finished in the fall of 1996. We recorded in our favorite venues in Charleston, Winston-Salem, and Athens, GA. We were writing very quirky pop songs then, like "Easter Parade", "I Can Feel You" and "Innocent Kiss". 1996 was a quirky year.
And so was 1997. We toured a lot. We were on the road most all of the time. At some point we decided that traveling around in a little blue van and trailer wasn't going to cut it. So we bought the first of our two Park n' Flys--and became known as the Band that Drives Around in an Airport Shuttle Bus .
PART FOUR: NOT A LOCAL BAND ANYMORE
Early on we decided that our goal was to make it to David Letterman. This would involve getting signed to a major label. We didn't trust these labels but carefully set about trying to find one that was cool. There were a few that were nice. But most of them didn't feel right. We needed a label that would allow us to keep doing what we were doing: play live shows with symphony orchestras and ballet dancers, tour the country on our own, and write music that we liked. And give us lots of money. We didn't think that this would be asking too much. until we found Breaking Records, ran by John Caldwell and Rusty Harmon, and owned by Atlantic Records. They weren't sure about the "lots of money" part but they liked what we did and wanted us to keep doing it, and have done just that so far. They wanted us to have an album out by the end of 1998, so we went into the studio in early May of that year.
Brad Jones is one of the most Zen people I have ever met. I don't even know what the word "Zen" means. But Brad should be included in the definition. He's in his thirties, very good looking, produces some records (Jill Sobule, Imperial Drag), plays with some bands (Jill Sobule, Matthew Sweet) and never gets angry. And he loves pie. Needless to say he did a great job producing our first major label release, Magazine. People wondered whether it was the label's doing that the songs on Magazine were much heavier and faster, much more pop and rock. Fans wondered where the heavy distortion and racing tempos came from. They came from Brad. And we loved it. I wish that everyone could have been in the studio with Evan Bivins when Brad started cracking the whip on him--"faster! Louder! Heavier!" Evan was dissolving into a wall of sweat. And the stench... I've never smelled so much hard work before in my life. Brad brought the plodding song "Come Out Clean" to life, but stripped down the delicate "Cathedrals" to simple guitar and strings and vocal. We enjoyed our time in the big studio.
Magazine brought us people from every city in the USA, and some of Germany and France, too. Even now you might have looked for this webpage because you heard the song "Cathedrals" in your local IKEA. Or you may have seen us on tour with your favorite band Guster, or 7Mary3, or Rusted Root, or the Marvelous 3. These are the very nice things that happened while we were on the major label. But, luckily, the story did not end there...
PART FIVE: MAJOR LABEL ( published 2004)
Being on a major label can be fun. People talk to you like they mean what they say when they tell you that you'll be rich and famous. Of course, it's in their contract to talk to each and every band that way. We soon realized this, and once we did, it didn't bother us too much. When you laugh at life you will usually have a better time.
The song "Cathedrals" did fairly well for us across the country. Specifically I remember playing a show in Little Rock, Arkansas, the home of the former president, and a city we had never played before. When we arrived we had been told that the local rock station had been playing our music, and that's why we were there. And lo and behold, there were people in Little Rock to hear us play! It was a nice feeling. It was the first time that we understood the power of radio, and of being signed. That part was nice.
So was getting to play in Paris, France, for two weeks in the winter of 1999. A blissful, romantic "vacation" where we stayed at the base of the Moulin Rouge and drank wine each night. We played at a now-defunct bar called the Chesterfield Café, that was home to many English-speaking types and Parisians that wanted to be English-speaking types. Nothing is better than playing a "residency" in a beautiful city like Paris. It was a dream come true and one that we have been trying to have again ever since.
Meanwhile, back in the States, "Cathedrals" continued to do well. Atlantic was pleased. Magazine was selling fairly well. Not extremely well, but well enough for them to consider going to "Phase Three". "Phase Three" would have been another "big push" from the label...more money spent on radio promotion, more money spent on publicity, etc. Jump, Little Children was an option for them to spend money on, but there were other options for them, as well, including a new Christmas album by an Alaskan yodeler named Jewel. Atlantic was going to keep checking the market, to see who best to spend their cash on. You know, hopefully, that the music industry is just a big gambling racket. Put enough money behind anyone for the most part and they'll do well. It's just a gamble for these folks. No one can truly predict the future. You just hope that what you spend your money on sticks, and you get a jackpot.
PART SIX: FEELING VERTIGO
And in the end Atlantic decided to fold on us and "Cathedrals". They were very apologetic about it. It wasn't really their fault that they went with Jewel's Christmas album. It seemed like a sure bet. It's too bad that it didn't do well, but you know...who would have thought that America didn't want to hear Jewel sing yuletide classics? We spent a disappointed Christmas knowing that Magazine had run its course.
The president of Breaking/Atlantic, John Caldwell, was mightily pissed, though. He had been counting on his friends in the NYC branch of Atlantic to make us big rock stars, and didn't understand why they didn't. He decided that he was tired of being in the record label business and asked if he could make a transition to be our manager. We thought this was a great idea, and JC started working for us. Before he left Breaking, though, he made them promise to make another album with us. They were fine with this. So in the fall of 2000, we started recording Vertigo.
Jay and I met with producer Brad Wood in LA that summer. He was a nice enough guy. He was the biggest name producer we had ever talked to, and had worked with some amazing acts: Liz Phair, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Better than Ezra. He was a tall, lanky dude that had a beautiful wife and daughter and liked to talk a lot. Mostly about himself. To be honest, he was a very interesting fellow. But regardless, Jay and were a little bit worried when we met with him the first time. Brad seemed to have some great ideas and was willing to take a chance on us so we made plans to get to work.
We know that a lot of bands have had a great experience working with Brad. We've talked to them. We're not sure why our experience was less than stellar...but we did not have a good time. He got some great sounds out of our instruments. He knew how to mic an accordion, that's for sure. And he had lots of amazing rock and roll stories, that he told us as our time was quickly ticking away. In the end, Vertigo was listed as being produced by Brad Wood and Jay Clifford, because Jay really had to step up to the plate and make things happen.
I've never seen my good friend Jay so angry as I have while we were making that album. I never want to see him that angry again.
But there were some good things about making Vertigo : Daily trips to the Coffee Bean and Tea Co., having the Illumina Quartet (a group of fabulously beautiful string players) play on the album, playing video games in the lounge, working with John Porter (the smiths, Eric Clapton) who engineered the album, In and Out Burgers, and lots and lots of Tex Mex.
The album was mixed by David Leonard, who produced the Barenaked Ladies most popular album, and knew Prince personally. Without that man, Vertigo would have sucked. Plain and simple. He saved the album for us. Brought all the parts together, added some that were needed. Thank you, David. Vertigo will always be one of the things that we have been most proud of making, and a lot of that feeling comes from what David did to save the project.
PART SEVEN: SKIP THIS SECTION IF YOU HATE SAD STORIES
And so then the story starts getting really dark. You can skip ahead a few paragraphs if you don't like sad stories.
Vertigo was done, we were so glad, it sounded great, and we couldn't believe that we had pulled it off in the end. We were ready for Atlantic to release it. We went to NYC, worked on the artwork for the album, had a ridiculously expensive photo shoot, and waited for the release date.
And waited. We were playing a college in New Orleans, a month before Vertigo was to come out in stores, and JC makes a surprise visit. We're confused...JC lives in LA, and the New Orleans show wasn't that big of a deal. We knew that something was up. Ward joked when he saw JC: "Hey, JC, so why are you here? Did we get dropped?".
JC laughed, but it turns out that it wasn't that funny. This was April of 2001. Bush had been "elected", and the economy was in turmoil. AOL had just merged with Time/Warner, who owned WEA, who owned Atlantic Records, who owned Breaking Records. Everyone was getting nervous about the state of the economy. Cuts were being made. That year I think that nearly every single "boutique" label on every major, including Breaking Records, was cut from the roster. And all the acts on those labels went down with their perspective sinking ships. So a month before our brand new album was to be released, Breaking was dropped, and we were dropped with them.
We were heartbroken, of course. Confused, devastated. We had just finished everything! We had just had fancy pictures taken! And they knew all along that we weren't going to be on the label any more. It was very difficult for me to go to the website and try to explain to everyone that our album was going to be delayed. Because that was the next piece of bad news: we didn't own Vertigo.
In fact, Atlantic didn't own Vertigo , either. They had given the album to Breaking Records, to do with what they wanted. At first we were relieved. "No problem," we thought. "The boys in Hootie will give us our album back. Surely they'll understand our situation." You must remember that Breaking had been started by Hootie and the Blowfish, and now they were suddenly in control of a record label.
The problem was that Hootie didn't know how to run a record label. Breaking was just a division of Atlantic. It couldn't stand up on its own. Without Atlantic, Breaking was just a name, and now that name owned our album.
They tried, though. They tried to keep the label going. They thought that with us as an act, they'd be OK. That they'd suddenly have the know-how to run a record label. Even though they had never done such a thing. They hired some "specialists" that didn't know what they were doing, and in the meantime, Vertigo wasn't being released, by anyone.
It got very bad. They wanted to keep us on Breaking, we didn't want to be signed anymore, to anyone. They wanted us to pay an exorbitant sum to get Vertigo back. We didn't have it. They sat on the album for half a year, going back and forth about what they were going to do with us...one month they were ready to give the album back, and then the next month they were going to keep it some more. We were pulling our hair out. "You're hurting our careers!" we cried. "And our feelings, too! Don't you understand what you're doing to us? Aren't you in a rock band, too?" we asked.
There aren't many hard feelings left. I think that the members of Hootie know now that they shouldn't have thought that they could be presidents of record labels. Hell, I couldn't do it, either. I understand that they meant well. But it was lame, and the experience put such a dark cloud over the release of Vertigo it was almost doomed to "fail". We were financially broken by the experience; trying to release an album at the last minute will crush you.
2001 was a nightmarish year for most people. But for some reason, it was a regular House of Horrors for us. Besides getting dropped at the last minute from our record label, we found that our money manager had run away with a few thousand dollars of our meager savings, to Mexico and beyond, and had royally made a mess of our financial standing. Evan's and my father passed away in August of that year, after battling lymphoma for three years. His funeral was two days before September 11, 2001. I was living in NYC at the time, but "luckily" Dad's funeral was held in Charleston. Ground zero was ten short blocks from my apartment. After a while, when you stop crying, you have to laugh. That much bad news in one year is almost funny.
PART EIGHT: JUMP
When you get dropped, a lot of people start closing doors on you. You are marked as having bad luck. As being "done". Radio personalities that you counted as friends stop returning your phone calls. Magazines don't want to review your album. Other record labels tell you that you are old news. This is all pretty silly, of course. We were the same band that we always had been. Nothing had changed in our minds. Our fans were still there for us. We were still writing music. Our mothers still loved us. But the music industry didn't want to hear about "Jump, Little Children".
So we didn't talk to them, either. We started touring. We did our best to promote our hard-earned Vertigo . We wrote more songs. We went to Italy, for a USO show, and drank Camparis on the beach. We made the mid-west, and the west coast, part of our regular touring schedule. We filmed a DVD of a particularly fun tour, and released it on our own. Basically, we didn't give up.
We couldn't give up. A lot of our peers did, but we just couldn't. Not until the fat lady sang. And that would only be when we weren't having fun anymore. If we didn't have any more music to play. Sure, it was definitely harder. We had had the wind knocked out of our sails for a bit. We suddenly felt older. But we kept going.
In the summer of 2003, the band took its first real hiatus, and everyone worked on projects that they had been wanting to work on for years. Side projects were developed, and extra money was made. It was strange not to be together but it was good, too. The "Cult of Jump" was less important to us, now. We had other cults that seduced us, now, and felt like we were learning more in some ways, imagining what it would be like without this band to call home.
In the fall of 2003, we all sat down and had a long talk about what the future of Jump, Little Children was going to be. We were still in financial trouble. We had lots of new songs, but not necessarily a producer or the money to make a new album. We felt that something big had to change, for us to keep going. We needed a new lease on this life, and something that made this feel good and real again.
We started with the name. Though our cellist's first name is actually "James Edward Williams III", he goes by "Ward". We liked our name OK, but the previous years had put a dark mark on it, and we thought that it might be interesting to make a little change. So we tried calling ourselves "Jump", just for the heck of it. It felt good. Similar, but just different and fresh enough to make us feel like we were starting a new phase of our lives. And our fans had always called us "Jump", anyway. So we decided to take the path of least resistance.
We found some financial help. Guardian angels in human form known as "Marc Levy" and "Barry Perlman" told us that they believed in what we did, and wanted us to continue doing it. They paid a few debts but have given us so much more than just a financial boost. We made them our official sixth and seventh members of the band and accept their guidance and support!
We found a producer. Rick Beato, a cocky Sicilian and former jazz professor/rock star living in Atlanta, liked our stuff, and promised to make the best album we would ever make. He made good his word. In fact, working with Rick was paradise compared to our last studio experience, and we had such a good time we didn't even realize that we had finished an album when it was all over. Recording music should always be that easy and fun. In the studio we met Sir Elton John, who told Jay that "Cathedrals" was "one of the best f#$king songs he had ever heard". Things immediately felt like they were looking up.
We found a label to distribute the new album. Michael McQuarry, former owner of Mindspring/Earthlink ISP, started a indie label in Atlanta and asked if we would serve as guinea pigs for his new venture. We liked McQ so much we told him "yes". So we are now helped by Brash Music, whose unofficial motto is "we've worked with assholes all our lives...we're not going to be assholes".
In the meantime, we started our own record label. Sort of. EZ Chief Records is the name of the company that we have put two of our releases on: Vertigo and the Early Years, vol. One . But it's mostly just a name. Ezchiefrecords.com, however, is a pet project of ours that we're extremely proud of. At ezchiefrecords.com, you can listen to hundreds of songs...some early Jump, and music by about seventeen (and growing) of our favorite bands... and then make CD mixes of your favorite songs, that we'll gladly burn for you ourselves and send to you via snail mail. It's a little bit old skool in this day of iTunes downloading, but we're still pretty psyched about it. EZ Chief allows us to introduce our fans to our friends' music. And it allows us to support our friends in this incredibly cut throat music industry. Everybody wins.
In April of 2004 we released our fifth album, Between the Dim and the Dark. With all the excitement of Magazine , tempered with the maturity of Vertigo . The release was a ray of sunshine, breaking through a three-year stretch of dark clouds. We're excited about the future, again, we feel like we're doing the right thing. In our trusty Park n' Fly we hit the road, in search of fans and adventure, and pray that whatever has kept us this lucky so far...lucky in more ways than we can count...will continue to do so for more years to come.
[by Matthew Bivins, from official site]
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Ward was the only one with a scholarship. Ward is the smartest member of the band. Ward also had a car in 10 th grade and was the most popular geek that I knew. When we went to lunch in high school I would watch as Ward went from one side of the lunch area to the other, chatting with his friends as they followed him like little disciples. He had a blue jean jacket with "the Wall" emblazoned by hand (his) on the back. He had long hair and a winning smile. Ward was everyone's favorite, and I pretended to hate him just to be different until he came over to my house one day with a chessboard.
Jay was his sister Cary's brother. I didn't hear him speak until 1994. In school Jay was the one that would get in front of the entire school during an assembly and sing a James Taylor song, perfectly. And then he would simply vanish into thin air. It was an amazing act.
Evan went to the same school, too. He hung out with the skaters and was a vegetarian, much to Mom's chagrin. When he went to the North Carolina School of the Arts for the visual arts, he started wearing long scarves and floppy hats. I didn't see him that much when school started... I think that all little brothers have to go through a phase where they hide from their older siblings, and he did a good job.
I had been told at public school that the North Carolina School of the Arts was full of drug users and homosexuals. I couldn't wait to get there. I immediately began studying ballet dancers and taking clarinet classes. I was a very emotional player, but my teacher knew that I never practiced. My ear-training teacher asked me if I had ever done anything that I was exceptionally proud of, that I spent a lot of time and energy on. I told him that I loved to write my name, and he suggested that I become a scribe.
And then there was Chris. When his family moved across the street from Evan and me, our family went out to greet them, and we were amazed to see five Pollen children, in order of height and age, standing like soldiers on their front lawn. Chris was the youngest, and his first mission in America was to become a punk. He did very well. Christopher was hilarious in that slightly dangerous sort of way: he'd pull fire alarms in a frenzy of excitement and scream in quiet libraries. He had a death wish from an early age, and this made him my best and most frustrating friend. Nothing would calm him down. Nothing could soothe his racing mind. At school he was the one that started playing in the snack bar, not to pick up chicks, like the other classic guitarists did, but in hopes that someone would get pissed off and try to make him leave.
But no one asked Chris to leave. This was an early mission statement of Jump, Little Children, and it has lasted forever: You Cannot Deny Us Forever. We went to an art school, the kind that they made a movie of (Fame), and it is a very intense place. Art, art, all the time. Several hours a day of practice on your individual instrument, individual and group lessons with your music teacher, lessons on ear-training and music theory, rehearsals with the school orchestra, and required attendance to classical music performances by both students and professionals. And in the rooms next door were dancers, actors, visual artists, lighting designers, all doing similar things in their fields. People were usually much more curious than they were offended. This made for lots of fun.
Ward and Jay were in a band called the Soundpainters (Ward's idea). They were the most popular band on campus, and played all the school events, like Homecoming, in which our "football team" challenged a fraternity of Wake Forest to a game of football, and the entire campus (800 students) came out into the field to cheer our team on. (Our mascot was a giant green Pickle, and we voted for a Homecoming "Queen", if you know what I mean) The Soundpainters played Simon and Garfunkel and Crosby Stills and Nash and the Humpty Dance. Their originals were about moons and mountains and rivers and suns and going to your high school graduation. They were great.
Chris and I started playing Irish music on a lark. I had a tin whistle and he had started learning tunes on his guitar. We played an open mic night at the Rose and Thistle Café and my hands were shaking so badly I could barely make a sound. Ward was in the audience that night, and asked if he could come over and "jam" with us sometime. He was a long-haired hippie.
Evan was still playing with paints.
One day after we had been "jamming" with Ward in the Snack Bar at school, Jay came in with a tin whistle that he had made. "Me Make", he grunted. The tin whistle didn't sound very good but it turns out that he had already written a tune on it, called Taibhreamh. This is the first official Jump, Little Children song, I suppose. Our friend Michael Bellar (of the As-Is Ensemble), another long-haired hippie in those days, accompanied the tune on piano.
Ward and Jay grew tired of the Soundpainters. They wanted to play with Chris and me. So we took our Snack Bar art school "happenings" and tried to get some shows. We had great success at first: our first official gigs happened on January 1 st , 1992, in various shops of downtown Winston-Salem, NC-- we were the "First Night Band" for a festival celebrating New Year's Eve. Chris managed to break several hundred dollars worth of handmade pottery.
But we still didn't have a name! Our friend Rosemary McCarthy suggested that we drink a lot of egg nog that very night and sit around and brainstorm for a good name. Her suggestion was "The Four Motherf*!@rs ". That was my favorite, but "Jump, Little Children" got the most votes. "Jump, Little Children" was the name of a song that we played by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (found on the album "Brownie's Blues"). The song speaks of the jubilation one feels when one suddenly finds oneself ungoverned by rules and regulations. It's rather punk for a blues song, and fit us well.
PART TWO: LEAVING SCHOOL
Ward didn't want to leave school. We didn't want Ward in the band. I had the job of telling him that we were kicking him out, so I invited him to lunch at the Rainbow Café in Winston. I was very nervous. When he sat down I didn't know what to say, but luckily he started. "I think that I need to leave the band," he said, straightforwardly. "I know that you guys want to leave school to go to Ireland, and I just can't do that. I want my degree. You should go on without me." So we did. No hard feelings and I didn't look like a jerk.
We spent the summer of '92 traveling and learning and saving money to go to Ireland. There were just three of us: Jay, Chris and Me. Evan was getting tired of painting but we wouldn't let him join. What would he play? we wondered. He didn't know how to play anything. (He bought a drum that summer.) We played festivals, public radio stations, coffeehouses, anywhere people would take us. We recorded a few songs (Taibhreamh, Leave Behind it All, Forget My Loss) with friends in home studios. We started dreaming of having our own tape. But we were still learning. We had a lot to learn.
We had quit school with the pretense of going to Ireland, and finally made it in the winter of '92. We stayed in hostels and with Christopher's many relatives, who were usually Franciscan Monks (brown robes, monasteries, the whole bit). We spent our nights in pubs, hoping that a kind old soul would teach us a tune at the end of the evening. We had our own gig, for a full week, in Delores Keane's Pub of Galway (don't bother looking, it's gone now) and were some sort of freak show--the posters read "All the Way from North Carolina! Young Lads Jump, Little Children!" and we had people come to see the Americans play Irish music badly but energetically. We busked on Grafton Street and saw a foxhunt in Co. Wexford and nearly fell off of the Cliffs of Mohr. It was beautiful.
When we returned we realized two things. 1. We had to leave North Carolina if we were going to continue to learn Irish music, and 2. Evan had learned how to play the Irish frame drum AND the hammered dulcimer, and could sing in Irish Gaelic. So we started talking about moving to Boston immediately, and asked Evan to go with us.
We spent the summer of '93 trying to make the money to move to Boston. We played festivals and coffeehouses and public radio stations. We recorded a few songs (Sean O' Flaherty's Accordion, Lannigan's Ball, Jump, Little Children). We were still dreaming of having our own tape. But we were still learning. We still had a lot to learn.
Our father offered us a job restoring damaged pews at St. Michael's Church, in Charleston, SC. The money was good and it was only for a few months. Little did we know that the job was going to be a nightmare. We used a chemical called "Zylene" which stripped the old dirty paint from the pews but also stripped us of the use of our minds. But we still spent our evenings playing in the local café's and bars of the Charleston music scene. We fell in love with the city. Most people do... there is something magical about "the Holy City" that you just don't understand until you visit. The Spanish Moss, the restaurants, the people. One person that we especially liked was Jonathan Gray, a local bass player, who came to see us almost every night. We played a few shows with him (and recorded songs like "Jonny Jump Up" and "Trip to Aulander" with him) and even asked him to join the band. But he was finishing school. We had to get to Boston. We promised him that he'd be welcome any time, and we left for Beantown with hope and joy in our little hearts.
PART THREE: BOSTON
Every band has a few dark periods in their history. Boston was a black hole for us. For many years after leaving it, really until we have started playing the city recently, I had blocked out much of the worst parts of being there. It wasn't Boston, exactly. It was just circumstance. To tell the story properly I actually have to start from New York City. Jay, Evan and Christopher went early to find an apartment in Boston, and stopped over in New York. While they were there they had a tragic accident involving the recreational use of LSD. Christopher had a very bad reaction to the drug and his normally mildly psychotic demeanor became an extremely psychotic one. For the full story listen to the song "Opium". Needless to say when I saw my friends next they were shells of human beings. This was not a great start to a new adventure.
In moving to Boston we managed to hit one of the worst winters in the city's history. It was snowing when I arrived, and it snowed to the end of May, and I never saw the front steps of our apartment. In our front yard was a sign that read "Dangerous Intersection" and I knew that it was an omen. Everything was cold that winter-- our house, the streets, the people in the streets, our hearts. We had saved some money but it started to go fast, and we had to get jobs. Sad little day jobs. We missed home immediately.
Christopher's chosen job was to play in the subways. There he met some long haired bearded men that took him home and fed him. They were members of a religious community and had extreme beliefs but they could cook. At first Chris thought they were crazy. He would laugh at the things that they had told him (women should be subservient to men, homosexuality was wrong, Jesus is coming at the end of the world and saving men with long hair and beards and their subservient wives). But he kept going back to see them, to talk to them and eat their food. And one day he didn't come back to us. He left us all his possessions and was basically out of our lives forever. Losing a friend like that can be worse than losing a friend to death. We knew that he was still alive but that he had become someone else, and he would never be the same crazy Chris that pulled fire alarms and screamed in libraries. At the same time, we let him go. He was, and still is, happier there, and safer than he would be elsewhere. He found peace... how could we argue with that?
Besides, we had our own cult to deal with, the cult of Jump, Little Children. When Chris left we almost gave up. We certainly didn't know what to do. A friend of ours, Tim Connell, fought for us to stay together. He got us a few gigs by helping us to put together our first tape, self-titled, which featured songs that we had recorded in the past, like "Ocean Grace" and "Mountains so Grand". It was a shoddy little piece of work but it proved to us that we could still be a band without Christopher, so we immediately started selling it at the ridiculous price of $10. I feel very bad for all the people that bought that first tape. It was so indie rock. It kept us alive...
But barely. We ran out of money in the summer of 1994. We were poor, depressed, and hated Boston. We packed our little Subaru full of our instruments and possessions and left the city with our tails between our legs. We waved goodbye to Tim. He was mad that we were leaving, and we didn't blame him. We owed him a lot of rent. The Subaru literally made it as far as Charleston, SC, and stopped dead. We had called Jonathan Gray the night before and asked him if we could crash at his place. He knew that we'd be back, and gladly let us stay. Little did he know that we were actually moving in with he and his two other roommates, for nearly a month. We thought we were on our way to Atlanta. But we're glad we didn't make it.
PART THREE:CHARLESTON
We spent the summer of '94 busking on the streets of Charleston. To busk is to perform for money. We had made a few Summer Resolutions when we crash-landed in Jonathan's driveway: 1. We would never take day jobs again. 2. We were not going to play Irish music any more, and 3. We wanted to Rock. The first one wasn't too hard. By selling our little tape for it's ungodly sum and making noise we were able to pay the rent. Quitting Irish music was hard until we had enough original songs to play, and Rocking is an art form that folk musicians have a hard time grasping at first. But everything was wonderful in Charleston. The stifling muggy heat felt glorious to us and it took us a long time to thaw out from the icy winter of Boston. Jay hadn't written many songs since his Soundpainters days, and with all his new experiences he was a regular song-writing factory, penning "Smiling Down" and "Dancing Virginia" about cities and the people in them, and "Matchbox Whistler" about long lost friends. We felt so good we called our old college graduate friend Ward Williams and asked him if he would re-join the band. He had nothing better to do with a cello performance degree, so he came right away.
Things moved very quickly. We played a few festivals, and coffeehouses, and bars, anywhere people would take us. We recorded a few songs (Lamplight, Dancing Virginia) in the home of our good friend, the genius Henry Dorn The local rock and roll radio station had even started playing a song of ours, "Quiet" and people were asking for a CD in record stores. . By the fall of 1994 we had our first manager, an old family friend of Evan's and mine that worked as a publisher in Nashville, TN, and with his connections we were able to get into a real studio and make some quick demos. Jay drank a lot of Licorice Tea in those days. And he was talking up a storm by then... coincidence or miracle cure for shyness? We named the first CD "the Licorice Tea Demos". It had songs like "Someone's in the Kitchen" and "U can Look but U can't Touch".
I remember that the first dozen or so times we played the Music Farm in Charleston, SC, something was always wrong with the sound. We'd come out to cheers and applause (or not) and gesture dramatically to the crowd, pick up our instruments, and a horrible wave of feedback would shake the entire building, nearly killing everyone in the audience. We dreamed of having a great rock show. But we were still learning. We had a lot to learn. Our theme nights were based on little puppet shows that Evan and I would do as children. I would write the screenplays (spoofs of Simon and Simon and James Bond movies) and our stuffed animals would act them out. We would force our mother, a professional actress, to watch these plays. Little did she imagine that we would grow up to do rock shows where we dressed as Cowboys or 50's Greasers or characters from 'the Wizard of Oz'. I have never seen "Tommy" but the video for U2's "Zooropa" tour changed my life. Bono is the ultimate rock star. No one has done it better, in my opinion.
I watched the "Zooropa" tape a lot during the recording of "Buzz", our live EP, finished in the fall of 1996. We recorded in our favorite venues in Charleston, Winston-Salem, and Athens, GA. We were writing very quirky pop songs then, like "Easter Parade", "I Can Feel You" and "Innocent Kiss". 1996 was a quirky year.
And so was 1997. We toured a lot. We were on the road most all of the time. At some point we decided that traveling around in a little blue van and trailer wasn't going to cut it. So we bought the first of our two Park n' Flys--and became known as the Band that Drives Around in an Airport Shuttle Bus .
PART FOUR: NOT A LOCAL BAND ANYMORE
Early on we decided that our goal was to make it to David Letterman. This would involve getting signed to a major label. We didn't trust these labels but carefully set about trying to find one that was cool. There were a few that were nice. But most of them didn't feel right. We needed a label that would allow us to keep doing what we were doing: play live shows with symphony orchestras and ballet dancers, tour the country on our own, and write music that we liked. And give us lots of money. We didn't think that this would be asking too much. until we found Breaking Records, ran by John Caldwell and Rusty Harmon, and owned by Atlantic Records. They weren't sure about the "lots of money" part but they liked what we did and wanted us to keep doing it, and have done just that so far. They wanted us to have an album out by the end of 1998, so we went into the studio in early May of that year.
Brad Jones is one of the most Zen people I have ever met. I don't even know what the word "Zen" means. But Brad should be included in the definition. He's in his thirties, very good looking, produces some records (Jill Sobule, Imperial Drag), plays with some bands (Jill Sobule, Matthew Sweet) and never gets angry. And he loves pie. Needless to say he did a great job producing our first major label release, Magazine. People wondered whether it was the label's doing that the songs on Magazine were much heavier and faster, much more pop and rock. Fans wondered where the heavy distortion and racing tempos came from. They came from Brad. And we loved it. I wish that everyone could have been in the studio with Evan Bivins when Brad started cracking the whip on him--"faster! Louder! Heavier!" Evan was dissolving into a wall of sweat. And the stench... I've never smelled so much hard work before in my life. Brad brought the plodding song "Come Out Clean" to life, but stripped down the delicate "Cathedrals" to simple guitar and strings and vocal. We enjoyed our time in the big studio.
Magazine brought us people from every city in the USA, and some of Germany and France, too. Even now you might have looked for this webpage because you heard the song "Cathedrals" in your local IKEA. Or you may have seen us on tour with your favorite band Guster, or 7Mary3, or Rusted Root, or the Marvelous 3. These are the very nice things that happened while we were on the major label. But, luckily, the story did not end there...
PART FIVE: MAJOR LABEL ( published 2004)
Being on a major label can be fun. People talk to you like they mean what they say when they tell you that you'll be rich and famous. Of course, it's in their contract to talk to each and every band that way. We soon realized this, and once we did, it didn't bother us too much. When you laugh at life you will usually have a better time.
The song "Cathedrals" did fairly well for us across the country. Specifically I remember playing a show in Little Rock, Arkansas, the home of the former president, and a city we had never played before. When we arrived we had been told that the local rock station had been playing our music, and that's why we were there. And lo and behold, there were people in Little Rock to hear us play! It was a nice feeling. It was the first time that we understood the power of radio, and of being signed. That part was nice.
So was getting to play in Paris, France, for two weeks in the winter of 1999. A blissful, romantic "vacation" where we stayed at the base of the Moulin Rouge and drank wine each night. We played at a now-defunct bar called the Chesterfield Café, that was home to many English-speaking types and Parisians that wanted to be English-speaking types. Nothing is better than playing a "residency" in a beautiful city like Paris. It was a dream come true and one that we have been trying to have again ever since.
Meanwhile, back in the States, "Cathedrals" continued to do well. Atlantic was pleased. Magazine was selling fairly well. Not extremely well, but well enough for them to consider going to "Phase Three". "Phase Three" would have been another "big push" from the label...more money spent on radio promotion, more money spent on publicity, etc. Jump, Little Children was an option for them to spend money on, but there were other options for them, as well, including a new Christmas album by an Alaskan yodeler named Jewel. Atlantic was going to keep checking the market, to see who best to spend their cash on. You know, hopefully, that the music industry is just a big gambling racket. Put enough money behind anyone for the most part and they'll do well. It's just a gamble for these folks. No one can truly predict the future. You just hope that what you spend your money on sticks, and you get a jackpot.
PART SIX: FEELING VERTIGO
And in the end Atlantic decided to fold on us and "Cathedrals". They were very apologetic about it. It wasn't really their fault that they went with Jewel's Christmas album. It seemed like a sure bet. It's too bad that it didn't do well, but you know...who would have thought that America didn't want to hear Jewel sing yuletide classics? We spent a disappointed Christmas knowing that Magazine had run its course.
The president of Breaking/Atlantic, John Caldwell, was mightily pissed, though. He had been counting on his friends in the NYC branch of Atlantic to make us big rock stars, and didn't understand why they didn't. He decided that he was tired of being in the record label business and asked if he could make a transition to be our manager. We thought this was a great idea, and JC started working for us. Before he left Breaking, though, he made them promise to make another album with us. They were fine with this. So in the fall of 2000, we started recording Vertigo.
Jay and I met with producer Brad Wood in LA that summer. He was a nice enough guy. He was the biggest name producer we had ever talked to, and had worked with some amazing acts: Liz Phair, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Better than Ezra. He was a tall, lanky dude that had a beautiful wife and daughter and liked to talk a lot. Mostly about himself. To be honest, he was a very interesting fellow. But regardless, Jay and were a little bit worried when we met with him the first time. Brad seemed to have some great ideas and was willing to take a chance on us so we made plans to get to work.
We know that a lot of bands have had a great experience working with Brad. We've talked to them. We're not sure why our experience was less than stellar...but we did not have a good time. He got some great sounds out of our instruments. He knew how to mic an accordion, that's for sure. And he had lots of amazing rock and roll stories, that he told us as our time was quickly ticking away. In the end, Vertigo was listed as being produced by Brad Wood and Jay Clifford, because Jay really had to step up to the plate and make things happen.
I've never seen my good friend Jay so angry as I have while we were making that album. I never want to see him that angry again.
But there were some good things about making Vertigo : Daily trips to the Coffee Bean and Tea Co., having the Illumina Quartet (a group of fabulously beautiful string players) play on the album, playing video games in the lounge, working with John Porter (the smiths, Eric Clapton) who engineered the album, In and Out Burgers, and lots and lots of Tex Mex.
The album was mixed by David Leonard, who produced the Barenaked Ladies most popular album, and knew Prince personally. Without that man, Vertigo would have sucked. Plain and simple. He saved the album for us. Brought all the parts together, added some that were needed. Thank you, David. Vertigo will always be one of the things that we have been most proud of making, and a lot of that feeling comes from what David did to save the project.
PART SEVEN: SKIP THIS SECTION IF YOU HATE SAD STORIES
And so then the story starts getting really dark. You can skip ahead a few paragraphs if you don't like sad stories.
Vertigo was done, we were so glad, it sounded great, and we couldn't believe that we had pulled it off in the end. We were ready for Atlantic to release it. We went to NYC, worked on the artwork for the album, had a ridiculously expensive photo shoot, and waited for the release date.
And waited. We were playing a college in New Orleans, a month before Vertigo was to come out in stores, and JC makes a surprise visit. We're confused...JC lives in LA, and the New Orleans show wasn't that big of a deal. We knew that something was up. Ward joked when he saw JC: "Hey, JC, so why are you here? Did we get dropped?".
JC laughed, but it turns out that it wasn't that funny. This was April of 2001. Bush had been "elected", and the economy was in turmoil. AOL had just merged with Time/Warner, who owned WEA, who owned Atlantic Records, who owned Breaking Records. Everyone was getting nervous about the state of the economy. Cuts were being made. That year I think that nearly every single "boutique" label on every major, including Breaking Records, was cut from the roster. And all the acts on those labels went down with their perspective sinking ships. So a month before our brand new album was to be released, Breaking was dropped, and we were dropped with them.
We were heartbroken, of course. Confused, devastated. We had just finished everything! We had just had fancy pictures taken! And they knew all along that we weren't going to be on the label any more. It was very difficult for me to go to the website and try to explain to everyone that our album was going to be delayed. Because that was the next piece of bad news: we didn't own Vertigo.
In fact, Atlantic didn't own Vertigo , either. They had given the album to Breaking Records, to do with what they wanted. At first we were relieved. "No problem," we thought. "The boys in Hootie will give us our album back. Surely they'll understand our situation." You must remember that Breaking had been started by Hootie and the Blowfish, and now they were suddenly in control of a record label.
The problem was that Hootie didn't know how to run a record label. Breaking was just a division of Atlantic. It couldn't stand up on its own. Without Atlantic, Breaking was just a name, and now that name owned our album.
They tried, though. They tried to keep the label going. They thought that with us as an act, they'd be OK. That they'd suddenly have the know-how to run a record label. Even though they had never done such a thing. They hired some "specialists" that didn't know what they were doing, and in the meantime, Vertigo wasn't being released, by anyone.
It got very bad. They wanted to keep us on Breaking, we didn't want to be signed anymore, to anyone. They wanted us to pay an exorbitant sum to get Vertigo back. We didn't have it. They sat on the album for half a year, going back and forth about what they were going to do with us...one month they were ready to give the album back, and then the next month they were going to keep it some more. We were pulling our hair out. "You're hurting our careers!" we cried. "And our feelings, too! Don't you understand what you're doing to us? Aren't you in a rock band, too?" we asked.
There aren't many hard feelings left. I think that the members of Hootie know now that they shouldn't have thought that they could be presidents of record labels. Hell, I couldn't do it, either. I understand that they meant well. But it was lame, and the experience put such a dark cloud over the release of Vertigo it was almost doomed to "fail". We were financially broken by the experience; trying to release an album at the last minute will crush you.
2001 was a nightmarish year for most people. But for some reason, it was a regular House of Horrors for us. Besides getting dropped at the last minute from our record label, we found that our money manager had run away with a few thousand dollars of our meager savings, to Mexico and beyond, and had royally made a mess of our financial standing. Evan's and my father passed away in August of that year, after battling lymphoma for three years. His funeral was two days before September 11, 2001. I was living in NYC at the time, but "luckily" Dad's funeral was held in Charleston. Ground zero was ten short blocks from my apartment. After a while, when you stop crying, you have to laugh. That much bad news in one year is almost funny.
PART EIGHT: JUMP
When you get dropped, a lot of people start closing doors on you. You are marked as having bad luck. As being "done". Radio personalities that you counted as friends stop returning your phone calls. Magazines don't want to review your album. Other record labels tell you that you are old news. This is all pretty silly, of course. We were the same band that we always had been. Nothing had changed in our minds. Our fans were still there for us. We were still writing music. Our mothers still loved us. But the music industry didn't want to hear about "Jump, Little Children".
So we didn't talk to them, either. We started touring. We did our best to promote our hard-earned Vertigo . We wrote more songs. We went to Italy, for a USO show, and drank Camparis on the beach. We made the mid-west, and the west coast, part of our regular touring schedule. We filmed a DVD of a particularly fun tour, and released it on our own. Basically, we didn't give up.
We couldn't give up. A lot of our peers did, but we just couldn't. Not until the fat lady sang. And that would only be when we weren't having fun anymore. If we didn't have any more music to play. Sure, it was definitely harder. We had had the wind knocked out of our sails for a bit. We suddenly felt older. But we kept going.
In the summer of 2003, the band took its first real hiatus, and everyone worked on projects that they had been wanting to work on for years. Side projects were developed, and extra money was made. It was strange not to be together but it was good, too. The "Cult of Jump" was less important to us, now. We had other cults that seduced us, now, and felt like we were learning more in some ways, imagining what it would be like without this band to call home.
In the fall of 2003, we all sat down and had a long talk about what the future of Jump, Little Children was going to be. We were still in financial trouble. We had lots of new songs, but not necessarily a producer or the money to make a new album. We felt that something big had to change, for us to keep going. We needed a new lease on this life, and something that made this feel good and real again.
We started with the name. Though our cellist's first name is actually "James Edward Williams III", he goes by "Ward". We liked our name OK, but the previous years had put a dark mark on it, and we thought that it might be interesting to make a little change. So we tried calling ourselves "Jump", just for the heck of it. It felt good. Similar, but just different and fresh enough to make us feel like we were starting a new phase of our lives. And our fans had always called us "Jump", anyway. So we decided to take the path of least resistance.
We found some financial help. Guardian angels in human form known as "Marc Levy" and "Barry Perlman" told us that they believed in what we did, and wanted us to continue doing it. They paid a few debts but have given us so much more than just a financial boost. We made them our official sixth and seventh members of the band and accept their guidance and support!
We found a producer. Rick Beato, a cocky Sicilian and former jazz professor/rock star living in Atlanta, liked our stuff, and promised to make the best album we would ever make. He made good his word. In fact, working with Rick was paradise compared to our last studio experience, and we had such a good time we didn't even realize that we had finished an album when it was all over. Recording music should always be that easy and fun. In the studio we met Sir Elton John, who told Jay that "Cathedrals" was "one of the best f#$king songs he had ever heard". Things immediately felt like they were looking up.
We found a label to distribute the new album. Michael McQuarry, former owner of Mindspring/Earthlink ISP, started a indie label in Atlanta and asked if we would serve as guinea pigs for his new venture. We liked McQ so much we told him "yes". So we are now helped by Brash Music, whose unofficial motto is "we've worked with assholes all our lives...we're not going to be assholes".
In the meantime, we started our own record label. Sort of. EZ Chief Records is the name of the company that we have put two of our releases on: Vertigo and the Early Years, vol. One . But it's mostly just a name. Ezchiefrecords.com, however, is a pet project of ours that we're extremely proud of. At ezchiefrecords.com, you can listen to hundreds of songs...some early Jump, and music by about seventeen (and growing) of our favorite bands... and then make CD mixes of your favorite songs, that we'll gladly burn for you ourselves and send to you via snail mail. It's a little bit old skool in this day of iTunes downloading, but we're still pretty psyched about it. EZ Chief allows us to introduce our fans to our friends' music. And it allows us to support our friends in this incredibly cut throat music industry. Everybody wins.
In April of 2004 we released our fifth album, Between the Dim and the Dark. With all the excitement of Magazine , tempered with the maturity of Vertigo . The release was a ray of sunshine, breaking through a three-year stretch of dark clouds. We're excited about the future, again, we feel like we're doing the right thing. In our trusty Park n' Fly we hit the road, in search of fans and adventure, and pray that whatever has kept us this lucky so far...lucky in more ways than we can count...will continue to do so for more years to come.
[by Matthew Bivins, from official site]
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