Secret History: Chisel's 8 A.M. All Day
Our occasional series "Secret History" features profiles of classic D.C. albums as a way of looking back at the District's contributions to music over time. This installment finds DCist speaking with members of Chisel about their debut LP, 8 A.M. All Day (Gern Blandsten, 1996).
Before the Pharmacists ever prescribed their first dose of politically-infused, Thin Lizzy-informed indie rock, Ted Leo headed up the D.C.-by-way-of-South Bend neo-mod-punk outfit Chisel. Filtering post-punk and hardcore through mod and soul, Leo and his accomplices created a thrilling and exciting sound with a debt to the past but an eye on the future. Chisel stood out from the pack of early '90s punk-poppers due to an abundance of style and clever concepts, setting the foundation for Leo's subsequent sound and establishing the Jersey troubadour as a talent to watch.
Chisel, with Leo on vocals and guitar, Chris Infante on bass, and John Dugan on drums, formed at the University of Notre Dame in the early 1990s. Leo was a veteran of the New Jersey and New York all-ages punk scene, while Dugan had been playing in D.C. hardcore bands since high school. After Infante graduated, South Bend native Chris Norborg replaced him on bass.
Norborg’s tastes were a bit different, and helped to shape the more mod-influenced direction of the group. “I had never been a big punk rock kid," Norborg said. "I was always a big '60s music fan. I loved The Who and the Beatles and Big Star…. To be fair, my coming into the band, I think there was a natural evolution towards being more sort of a mod/pop '60s sort of rock band.
"[Early Chisel] were very different from how we ultimately turned out, because Ted was much closer to his hardcore roots at that point. The stuff that they were doing was much more in line with East Coast hardcore stuff."
In 1994, Chisel relocated from Indiana to D.C., falling in alongside such local heroes as Fugazi, Jawbox and the Dismemberment Plan, and working to establish themselves in the local scene.
“The [D.C.] music community we were a part of was kind of split into punk and indie pop camps in the early ’90s—and Teenbeat had its own, much quirkier thing going, of course,” recalls Dugan. “All the scenes were so small that you couldn’t help knowing people in all of them…. Mark Robinson booked us for our first Fort Reno show, I believe. The folks from Chickfactor liked us a lot, and Velocity Girl asked us on tour with them and supported us massively. The punks from the Dischord circle were incredibly supportive.”
“John and I lived with a couple of people who were in the band Tuscadero,” Norborg said. “We played with them quite a bit at the beginning, especially… We also played with Fugazi a few times. But I think probably our comfort zone was the Make-Up,” Ian Svenonius’s post-Nation of Ulysses punk-funk garage gospel freakout. “Probably any [band] involving Ian, in particular, they had to headline. ... You couldn’t play after them because they were too over the top. Fugazi could get away with it, but it would be very difficult, and Chisel certainly couldn’t have gotten away with it.”
Dugan recalls the much-missed alternative rock-formatted WHFS being very kind to Chisel, giving the band a great deal of exposure. “We got a lot of play on Now Hear This and did a Dave’s Garage session, and they put us in front of 20,000 people at the Washington Monument with unplugged acoustic guitars and a tiny PA system, opening for the Cranberries. They also booked us with Radiohead at the Convention Center. No joke.”
In D.C., Chisel began to embrace a sharp tunefulness and live-wire energy informed by early British invasion acts and their antecedents. “By the time we reunited in D.C., we were all turning on to mod music, ’60s rock, things like that,” says Dugan. “That was cool by me—the Jam had been my favorite band in my teen years, but I had kind of forgotten about them. I had gotten into darker, moodier music, post-rock, etc. Where we might have been covering the Buzzcocks or Superchunk a few years earlier, we would be encoring with [the Small Faces’] ‘All or Nothing’ or ‘Start’ by the Jam in 1995.”
“Strangely enough,” Dugan noted, “it was Sooyoung Park of Seam who first called us a mod band, after we did some shows in Ohio with Seam in 1994. I think that was kind of a spark of inspiration for us, perhaps unconsciously, to explore that sound. It also brought in the harmonies, which really set us apart. At the time, math rock was kind of ‘in,’ and sometimes it felt like we were reacting against that clinical and heavy approach.”
Over the course of their too-short career, Chisel released a bunch of singles and 7"s, an EP (1995's Nothing New), and two LPs, 8 A.M. All Day and the 1997 swan song Set You Free. 8 A.M. All Day is their strongest offering, a roaring collection of tight-fitting and well-turned-out garage mod mayhem, bursting with memorable melodies and insistent riffs that manage to capture the cool essence of '60s and '70s rock-n-soul without sounding goofy or derivative.
Nearly every song here buzzes with raw pop power as the band pushes the limits of the three-piece setup. Leo's guitar playing is, as always, incredible: the sound he coaxes out of just six strings is consistently surprising, blending choppy, chunky chording with bursts of blazing fretwork. Throughout, Norborg and Dugan provide an unwavering foundation of pulsing bass runs and deft drum fills, the beats finely balanced to bob heads and shuffle dancing shoes while occasionally delving into reggae and dub-influenced rhythmic territory. "Hip Straights" blasts out of the blocks with violent strumming and soaring backing vocals, the skewed main riff bouncing off the rhythm section to excellent effect. "Your Star is Killing Me" swaggers through frantic distortion and troubled treble, while "Citizen of Venus" is almost impossibly catchy, built around a downbeat wavering between stomp and glide. The LP's title track is a taut, anxious anthem marked by one of the album's most vivid vocal hooks.
Chisel tapped Velocity Girl’s Archie Moore to record 8 A.M. All Day, working at Moore’s home studio in Oxon Hill. “I was friends with John and Chris beforehand,” says Moore. “Chris and I played in a band called the Heartworms, and we recorded an album in my basement. Chisel decided to do three or four demos there. That was the first time I met Ted. I had heard exactly one Chisel song, which they had done with Jim Spellman from Velocity Girl. Shortly after we did the demos, they told me they liked the demos enough to use for an album, and wanted to track the rest of an album at my place. I think lack of recording budget figured largely in their decision-making.”
“We recorded everything live,” recalls Norborg. “We were always kind of chasing daylight. We’d get there and record, or mix, and it was pretty quick. There were some random snippets of goofing around, even on the record, of just playing piano and goofing around. If you’re going to make a great record, I think it helps just to have a lot of time to hang around in the studio, and have a lot of taped stuff that ends up not being heard. But it was great fun. It really felt like we were going out in the country, to the middle of nowhere.”
“It was a loose, laid-back vibe,” said Dugan, “Archie was great, lots of fun, and funny, too. He was open to all kinds of ideas. I played a trashcan on ‘Red Haired Mary,’ and I think he suggested recording my improvised piano interludes. Chris and Ted were really on fire with their writing and performing; they liked to do things fast in the studio. We were having so much fun, we started recording songs we hadn’t really played before: ‘Breaking Up with Myself’ and ‘Looking Down at the Great Wall of China.’”
"Everything was done with a minimum of fuss," said Moore. "They played together, in the laundry room. Only a few takes per song. A few overdubs: vocals, guitar solos, a little percussion. It was very exciting to hear them play the basic tracks, but then hearing Ted do his vocals and solos was just ridiculously cool…. I think they would've made a fantastic album no matter where they did it, so I feel quite lucky to have participated.”
8 A.M. All Day's high-voltage production suits the tenor and tone of the songs perfectly, amping up the tension and sharpening every hook. Says Norborg, “Sometimes, if I listen with a severely critical ear, I’m bothered by the thin sound, and I do blame that a little on the medium,” referencing the digital equipment used to record the LP. “But at the end of the day, if I try to imagine it being recorded in the most polished way possible, and then I imagine how that would sound in my head, I don’t like that as much.”
“It has a raw, trebly sound that’s a result of the cheap equipment, our relative inexperience, and of course the band's energy,” observes Moore. “It has a bit of that teeth-gnashing amphetamine sound that reminds me of the early Who or the Creation.”
A decade-plus down the road, 8 A.M. All Day sounds as quick-witted and spit-shined as it did the day it was released. Looking back, Dugan sees 8 A.M. All Day as a group highpoint. “The Chisel material took a huge leap forward in 1995—we knew something was happening,” he said. “I think that Ted’s songwriting really matured with 8 A.M. I feel like there’s a theme of arriving in a new place and being somewhat unimpressed, even a bit angry, with what was available socially, but ultimately it’s also a really explosive, energetic album.”
Says Norborg, “I think we performed the songs on Set You Free better, but I think, overall, 8 A.M. All Day was a better album.”
Repeated attempts to reach Leo for this piece were unsuccessful.