To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact rgierisch@indyweek.com Katharine Whalen and Tom Maxwell, outdoors at Kingsway PHOTO BY ROGER MANLEY
Steve Balcom: As a label, it wasn’t obvious to us that this was something that was going to work on a modern rock radio station, much less on a Top 40 station. Tom Osborn: [Being at a small label] afforded me this luxury of going, “Well, I just think that ‘Hell’ is a better song for radio. I’m going to go with that.” I wasn’t doing it with a flippant, fuck-you attitude. I had stations that were like, “Now look, I don’t want to play this song, but I have to play this song. If you call me again, I’m going to drop the song, but I’ll give it a test.” Tom Maxwell: [KROQ] played it during the lunch drive time as a joke—this is the story, anyway—and the phones never stopped lighting up. They did market research on it, the stuff they call “saturation research”— “How many times can we play this song until people call and scream at us to stop?” They couldn’t find the end point. Lane Wurster: We’d get the new Soundscan reports that would come out on Tuesdays. We’d be like, “Holy shit, this thing is really blowing up.” Tom Osborn: People gave it a shot, and it really did take off, because nothing sounded like that on the radio. It sounded so remarkably fresh at a time where music had really been incredibly stagnant.
Mike Napolitano: I was in Seattle, and Chris Phillips called me to tell me, “It’s going to be gold.” I thought it was a joke. “What do you mean it’s going to be? How do you know that?” It just seemed implausible to me, both that it would happen and that you could predict that it was going to happen. Jimbo Mathus: I was the bandleader. I have to kind of shrug it off. It has to be like water off a duck’s back. People had different reactions. I was just like, “Thank you, Jesus.” I think we deserve it, I think we stand out, I think the song’s great. Let’s go. We’ve got great songs here; let’s just keep our nose to the grindstone and work. Ken Mosher: We come [to Mammoth] and they’re like, “The record sold thirty thousand last week in L.A.” Their idea is to stop recording and go there immediately. And what, just go play at the airport? Tom Maxwell: But we have to go play Clinton’s inaugural ball. There’s this idea that we were a Cinderella thing when “Hell” hit, and we were somehow lifted from obscurity. But we had a nationwide touring base and were selling good records. The Clinton people had already asked us to do the thing before “Hell” became a hit, and we had already played the summer Olympics in Atlanta. We were getINDYweek.com | 8.17.16 | 17