Spiritualized Take Their Medicine
In the same Melody Maker issue where Medication was #1 on the “Indie 45’s” chart, this is the blurb about the song “Medication” from the EP of the same name. I was still in school, and still shell-shocked that I was not only getting paid to make music, but getting paid to make music with bands I already knew and adored. As dysfunctional as I was at the time, that simple fact made it difficult for me to do anything other than put the “rock stars” (in my mind) I was working with on pedestals, leading to all kinds of interpersonal issues with the bands I was working with.
I was so grateful to have the opportunities that kept presenting themselves to me, but I was absolutely wholly and completely not equipped to deal with any of the attention that came with it. I had no idea how to network with bands, record labels, and the inevitable line of managers that were banging down my door. Oddly enough, what bands I chose to work with or not were all filtered through either Wayne Coyne or Jason Pierce. IF they didn’t like a band, then I didn’t like them either. This would prove to work against me on so many different occasions, as I would eventually turn down gigs with bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Weezer, and a few others, simply because Wayne Coyne thought the bands and “everything they stood for” sucked.
So, if Wayne Coyne hated a band and their music, then so did I at the time!
But I was so overjoyed that people were responding positively to my first record production that was truly mine outside of the Flaming Lips and/or Mercury Rev. Wayne Coyne had convinced me on numerous occasions already that I would be nothing without him or the band, and that if I ever crossed him or the band, that he would do absolutely everything in his power, until the day he died, to ruin me and any chance I might ever have in the music business. Wow. But, I was the perfect victim at the time and he was the perfect predator, so I was under his spell long before I was approached to engineer and produce “Transmissions from the Satellite Heart” on my own without the studio wizardry of Dave Fridmann at the helm as he usually was with the Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev.