The terrific new documentary The Smart Studios Story ends with the blast of Against Me!’s “New Wave,” which—with its DIY call to arms “We can be the bands we want to hear”—would serve as a perfect tagline for the film title. Smart Studios’ co-founder Butch Vig might be best known as the producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind and one-fourth of the band Garbage, but the movie doesn’t even get to Nirvana until almost the 2/3 mark.
Instead, it focuses on the heart of the story, which is how Vig and his buddy Steve Marker came together and built Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1980s with no formal training, no big-name acts to build on, and no money. Vig had been playing drums in Madison’s Spooner (which courted major-label signing), and became frustrated by paying hundreds of dollars for professional studio time when he was pretty sure he could get that same sound—or better—doing it himself. Starting out renting 900 square feet inside a warehouse on East Washington Avenue, he and Marker scavenged egg cartons to glue to the walls, cobbled together a recording and mixing setup from rummage sales, and opened their doors to literally anybody who wanted to come by and record, whether there was any money to be made or not.
Soon enough, they were recording almost around the clock, and bands like Milwaukee’s Die Kreuzen and Madison’s Killdozer—both of which served as prototypes for sounds that found much larger audiences later on—were recording at Smart, along with just about every local band of the 1980s: Appliances SFB, The Weeds, The Other Kids, Tar Babies, Honor Among Thieves, Ivory Library. Word of mouth spread among the burgeoning college rock and hardcore scenes, and eventually Smart became the studio of choice for bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Young Fresh Fellows, and yes, Nirvana.
At the center of the film is Vig and Marker’s DIY, anything-goes ethos and the community that grew around Smart Studios. A common thread running through all the musicians interviews is that Smart was a place they both felt comfortable and were encouraged to push themselves to musical places they might not have otherwise gone. Jeff Jagielo of Ivory Library says that Vig could “conjure a sound out of those of us who weren’t that skilled.” One of the best segments of the film finds Vig and members of Killdozer recalling sitting at the Crystal Corner bar, coming up with a list of sounds they wanted on their next album, everything from the rotating barrel of a revolver to a radio station farm report.
Despite the DIY approach, Vig could be every bit the studio perfectionist, but he says he “met my match” in Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan. As Corgan recalls the recording of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Rhinoceros”—during which he spent 8 hours singing “she knows” until Vig was happy with the results—I couldn’t help but think of the brutal Jimmy Iovine/Bruce Springsteen sessions where they worked all night just to get the right snare drum sound on Darkness on the Edge of Town.
There’s a tension that runs through the second half of the movie—the tension between a fundamental commitment to the integrity of the music and the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible. Vig says that he wanted to record music that was “ambitious and adventurous, but could get played alongside anything on the radio and sound just as good.” That he was able to do so from the inside of one of the ugliest buildings in Madison—1254 East Washington, a building Vig says people mistook for a crack house—is the perfect metaphor for the music created therein. As Dave Grohl says, “Butch could turn your noisy garage band into something the world would love.” And when you first hear “Rhinoceros” or Nirvana’s “Breed” come thundering out of the speakers, it’s every bit the jolt it was the first time you heard them—uncompromising, but welcoming.
After the success of Nevermind (for which early recordings were done at Smart, with later recording done at Sound City in California), Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish, L7’s Bricks Are Heavy, and others, Vig began producing more at studios outside of Smart. Still, he and Marker returned to their roots in the mid-90s—playing around with sounds, sound effects, and tape loops; Marker says that, when they started in his college apartment in the 1980s, the songs “were just something that we made up to give us something to record.” Those experiments formed the foundation for Garbage, the band Vig and Marker started in 1993 along with former Spooner member Doug “Duke” Erikson and singer Shirley Manson. As Garbage went on to international success, it took up more and more of the studio’s bookable time, ironically leading to the point where it wasn’t making enough money to keep going. Smart Studios closed its doors in 2010.
The movie is a joy to watch, clearly as much a labor of love for its director Wendy Schneider as Smart was for Vig and Marker and everyone else who created music there. And it makes clear that, rather than Smart succeeding in spite of the fact that it was in the middle of “flyover land,” it succeeded in part because it was miles away from the music biz pressures and pretenses of New York or Los Angeles. Schneider is from Brooklyn but has lived in Madison for more than 30 years, giving her insider and outsider perspective, so the film neither romanticizes nor deprecates the midwest.
If you were in Madison in the 1980s and 1990s, you’ll see plenty of familiar faces, gig posters, and exterior shots, and the performance footage of Die Kreuzen, Appliances SFB, and others are thrilling to watch, capturing the essence and energy of the times and the scene, whether you were part of it or not. Vig said he always wanted Smart to feel like a club house, but one where everyone was welcome, and that’s what The Smart Studios Story feels like, too.
The Smart Studios Story is available now on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play; you can also order it on DVD or get the vinyl only soundtrack from the film’s website.
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