North Carolina Newspapers

{The Blue Banner} Page 12 Merge Records owners enlighten Malaprops By Cassady Sharp News Editor CBSHARP@UNCA.EDU Today’s independent music scene would not be the same without the sac rifice of hundreds of rabbits. After a failed attempt , at a 2 a.m. Grand Canyon excursion on their way back from visiting Sub Pop Records founders in Seattle and realizing their van simply could not avoid hundreds of rabbits in the road, Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan founded Merge Re cords, the independent label responsible for Arcade Fire, Spoon and the Mag netic Fields, among other foundational artists. The decision to start their own record label was more of a necessity rather than a creative side project. McCaughan played guitar and sang lead vocals and Ballance played bass for the Chapel Hill band Superchunk. “People ask the question a lot, ‘Why did you decide to put out your own re cords?’ But it’s not like there was any one else asking to put them out,’’ said McCaughan in Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, published last month, coinciding with the label’s 20th anni versary. At a small gathering of music nerds at Malaprops bookstore last Friday, Mc Caughan and Ballance played acoustic versions of Superchunk, Spoon and Magnetic Fields songs and read pas sages from Our Noise, which they co wrote with John Cook, a reporter for Chicago-Tribune, Gawker Media and Radar magazine. The book includes behind-the-scenes photos and profiles of Merge artists, handwritten artifacts like set lists and postcards and an introduction by Jack sonville native and notorious Ameri cana music troublemaker Ryan Adams. “I had a friend in the publishing busi ness who wasn’t even that into music. He said, ‘This is an interesting story, let’s do a book.’ And I thought about it and answered, ‘It’s not that interesting of a story, so let’s not do a book,”’ Mc Caughan said. After compiling thousand of images and artifacts and with the help of Cook, McCaughan and Ballance realized their story was worth telling. McCaughan and Ballance met in Cha pel Hill in the summer of 1987. Bal lance had just finished her freshman year at UNC and McCaughan had just moved there, taking time olf from his kA^r'^ 1. ^ Hayes - Staff Photographer Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, founders of the Chapel Hill-based Merge Records, perform a Superchunk song at Asheville’s Malaprops bookstore book-signing. Ballance, below, reads an excerpt from the new Merge book, titled Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records. studies at Columbia University. They both worked at Pepper’s Pizza on Frank lin Street, where McCaughan talked a hesitant Ballance into playing music. “I felt like I was pushed into it. Mu sic was important to me, but I had never wanted to actually play music or be on a stage,” Ballance wrote in Our Noise. “I was mystified by Mac and his friends’ knowledge of all these obscure punk- rock bands.” McCaughan was ultimately success ful in his persuasion, and the two went on to play side-by-side in Superchunk, eventually embarking on international tours and traveling with Sonic Youth, Pavement and Built to Spill on the tour ing 1995 Lollapalooza. But what set the band apart from their alternative music colleagues was thejr refusal to answer to superior label ex ecutives. McCaughan, a grungy guitar player, and Ballance, a goth girl from Durham, were the label executives. “The label was totally Mac’s idea. To call it Merge was my idea,” Ballance said to the Malaprops crowd, reminisc ing about the rabbit-killing road trip. “We were driving through Colorado, and I started reading road signs while I was thinking about a name for it. I actu ally thought it was a pretty dumb name for a long time. But it’s certainly better than ‘Pronghorn antelope,’ which is an other thing I saw while driving on that trip,” she said. The young Merge founders were driv ing back to North Carolina, inspired by their friends at the year-old Sub Pop re cords in Seattle, who would later sign Nirvana and Soundgarden. See our noise Page 13 I