Three decades ago this year, a pop punk band from suburban Chicago released their debut LP Get Fired and managed to completely upend expectations of what punk music could sound like. The four-piece – comprised of brothers Josh, Eli and Matt Caterer along with Mike Felumlee – merged a raucous, sloppy mix of distorted guitars and hard-hitting drums with a crooning vocal style that managed to combine elements of both Frank Sinatra and Morrissey.
The Smoking Popes first snagged the attention of bigger bands from the underground punk scene – in particular Green Day on the cusp of taking over the world – and eventually caught the ears of tastemakers at major labels that signed the band and lifted them from regional status outing them on the road eventually touring across the U.S. and U.K.
On August 17th, The Smoking Popes will be releasing a special 12” LP vinyl re-issue of Get Fired. The re-release features expanded liner notes, including recollections from the band about the recording and songwriting process, along with never-before-seen outtake pictures from the cover photo shoot and other memorabilia from that time. The band will also be touring the Midwest and Northeast to celebrate the release before getting back to work on their new LP.
Smoking Popes frontman Josh Caterer spoke with Glide Magazine recently talking about what he remembers about Get Fired.
It’s been 30 years sense the first record came out. This was your first LP correct? What do you remember about writing and recording this album as opposed to the first two EP’s?
I remember as far as the writing; I remember that some of the songs were written while I was working at an injection molding factory. I was a machine operator at various factories in the area. I had graduated from high school and knew I wanted to be in a band, so I didn’t go to college. So, I was working at these factories to make ends meet. But some of these songs were written while I was at work sitting at this machine. I’m not sure if you’ve ever done this kind of work before, but it’s pretty predictive, almost meditative work where you just do the same action over and over again and you can kind of just let your mind wander. So, I would just write lyrics there. I’d have all day to work on a set of lyrics for a song.
Did you just keep a notebook and pen next to the machine?
No, I would just keep the lyrics going in my mind until it was break time. And then I would find some paper in the break room and scribble them down and bring them home with me. And then when I got home, I would sit down with a guitar and kind of play what I had been thinking about all day. I did that with “Let’s Hear It For Love,” for sure. That’s the kind of vibe you’d get from working at a machine shop.
Going into that record did you guys know ahead of time that you were gonna put out an LP after doing a few EPS or did you just realize you had enough songs to fill an album when you were done writing?
We went into that knowing it was gonna be an album. There are nine songs on that record, and we had all nine of them ready to go and recorded them in one weekend. We drove down to Lafayette IN and stayed with the guy who owned the studio and was the engineer. We stayed at his place and just spent all weekend recording and mixing the album.
Were you surprised that you got so much attention from that album?
The following record, Born To Quit, got us the attention of Capitol records, but this record got the attention of some very important people because Green Day were aware of this album. So, when they came through Chicago touring for Dookie and they asked us to open for them. And I remember to this day watching Green Day play and they get to a song with a break down and they’re vamping a bit and Billie Joe ad libs different things and at one part he starts singing lyrics to one of our songs during their set. That’s when I go ‘oh wow, they really do know about us.’ At that point it was just an indie record that wasn’t getting a ton of distribution but Green Day at that point had their finger on the pulse of the underground independent music scene and they found out about our stuff.
I’ll tell you the attention that we got specifically from Green Day was very instrumental in taking our “career” to the next level. Because at that time, right when they were making that transition from underground band to a mainstream band they made an effort to bring a lot of bands with them. Some of the bands they had been playing with at little club shows, they invited those bands to play with them as they moved to larger venues. They wanted to get them some attention. And we reaped the benefits of that because later Green Day’s managers reached out to us and asked us if we wanted to be part of the label they were starting. That tipped the dominoes generating wider interest from larger labels.
Get Fired was released 30 years ago. How do you think it would be received differently nowadays given that the entire music business has changed immensely? Even the influence of radio stations have changed drastically.
That’s interesting to think about. There used to be more of a discernible mainstream. So, if you had songs getting played on a big station like Q100 or a station like KROQ – they were calling it alternative at the time but it really was quite a mainstream endeavor they had going – and if you could get your music played on those stations, it’s was quite an accomplishment and you knew that that was something that everyone was listening to. It’s not like that anymore. It reminds me of like when you hear interviews with Jerry Seinfeld now and he’s talking about the popularity of Seinfeld and that kind of popularity that they had, you couldn’t have now. Because back then there were only a few channels so, if you got your show on one of those channels everybody was going to be watching it because they didn’t have other options. If Seinfeld came out now, he would be one show out of literally hundreds that people have to choose from with all these different platforms and it just wouldn’t have that water cooler phenomenon.
In pulling together the liner notes for this record, did you remember things that you had long forgotten about when working on the record?
I went back and listened to the entire album and focused on each track. I would listen to track one and then stop and write a paragraph about what I remember about the writing process of that song. And I did that for the entire album. It’s not necessarily that I noticed anything new about it, but it reconnected me to the time and made me think about the process of all those songs coming into existence in a way that I really enjoyed. It’s pretty much a snapshot of where my head was when I was writing all that stuff. Everybody in the band wrote something for the liner notes and it’s pretty cool, everybody has a slightly different take on how they remember those times and different feelings about it. There are also a lot of different pictures in there that are a cool encapsulation of that time.
Also, there are some really cool outtakes from the cover. The front cover is of us standing in front of what are just these painting tarps because our drummer’s dad worked for Sherman Williams. He was one of the executives there, so he had a lot of Sherwin Williams swag at the house including these giant tarps set up in the basement for him to practice golfing. So that’s where we stood for our photo shoot. We were able to reach out to the photographer to see if he had any of the outtakes and he did. A bunch of those photos are included in the liner notes as well. It’s just another aspect of where we were at as a band.
Three decades later what are your thoughts when you go back and listen to that record? Are you proud of it or are there things you wish you had changed?
I like the songs. I was trying my best to write good songs that incorporated different aspects of what I thought good songwriting was. I wasn’t just trying to write punk songs or pop punk songs. I mean our style was pop punk, but I was just trying to write songs that compared to songs that were being written for Frank Sinatra, songs that were being written by Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin were writing. Not that any of my stuff is that good, but those were the kind of songwriters I was impressed by. I was being influenced by those types of songwriters as much as I was influenced by The Ramones and The Buzzcocks. So, I was trying to bring that all together in my songwriting and I think I got better at that as we went along. I was at least trying to point myself in that direction when I wrote these songs for Get Fired. So, I’m proud of it and also as a band we all kind of acknowledge that we were a little loose back then. The performances were all a little bit spastic. We hadn’t quite locked in together. There’s kind of a reckless abandon that was cool.
And as a band you’re working on a new album, right?
We’re working on it. We’ve released two singles from it so far and we’re still going in and recording. We’re recording a couple songs at a time waiting a month and recording more. We’re working on the album piecemeal but as soon as we get 10, which hopefully will be by the end of the year then we will assemble those into an album which will hopefully come out by next summer.
