Jeremy, are you okay?” I’m talking to my sometime bandmate Jeremy Scott about his solo album, Bear Grease, being released this week on Back to the Light Records. When I mention that the guitar solos are absolutely on fire, all I hear is maniacal laughter. I know he’s okay, though. In the mind of singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Scott, casual rage and absurdist humor often sit side by side.
For many months, back before the pandemic, Scott spoke of an acoustic album in the works with another multi-instrumentalist, Graham Burks. “Great!” I thought. “This will showcase Jeremy’s kinder, gentler side.” Now that it’s finally coming out, though, the end product is a bit more in keeping with the maniacal laughter I hear over the phone.
Take the lead single, for example. “Fred Neil Armstrong” isn’t exactly maniacal, but it is slightly touched in the head — charmingly so. If the first two titular words invoke the great folk/pop songwriter behind “Everybody’s Talkin,’” the song soon takes flight to the moon in honor of that other famous Neil and dances merrily around the lunatic fringe. “That song had some of Fred Neil’s attitude,” says Scott, “although I don’t sing like him at all. It came out sounding more like Lovin’ Spoonful.”
Indeed, that evolution from acoustic folk intentions to rocked-up final product typifies much of the album, which is steeped in Scott’s love for the folk rock and psychedelia of the ’60s. Apparently, though he started with acoustic intentions, he couldn’t help but let his rock instincts take over. The guitar solos evoke The Electric Prunes at their best; the riffs jump and jangle; the beats stomp your blues away.
“I pretty much thought this would be an all acoustic record, sort of like Oar by Skip Spence,” Scott admits. “But I realized that wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. Then, as I was writing, some of these songs got more electric. And as Graham and I worked on them, they’d get louder. Of course, ‘Patron of the Arts’ was always intended to be more of a rock song.” He’s not lying — just listen to him scream, “I ain’t no fuckin’ patron of the arts!” with a vengeance. “And ‘Your Ice Cream’s Gonna Melt One Day’ came to me when I was listening to a lot of Paul Revere & the Raiders. Although it came off sounding more like the Byrds, that’s kind of a rip off of ‘Cinderella Sunshine.’ The single version. The one with the fuzz.”
Ah yes, the one with the fuzz. In another instance of trivia-springing-to-life, Scott covers “What Am I Talking About” by the relatively unknown Kenn Kweder. “Nobody outside of Philadelphia knows about Kenn Kweder, but he’s been around since the ’70s. He used to have a band called the Secret Kidds. That song is really catchy and funny as hell. ‘I went out last night, I got totally screwed up, I fell asleep on an awning’? [laughs] I mean, who hasn’t been there?”
It’s worth noting that Scott will soon celebrate his 20th year as a DJ on WEVL, where he leads listeners down the rabbit holes of power pop, folk rock, and alt-rock deep cuts with aplomb. Now, with Bear Grease, his mastery of music history minutiae translates into a performative mastery as well. He can digest decades of pop references in deft turns of phrase over undeniably catchy chord changes and arrangements. And yet the end result avoids being a glossy vanity project by Scott’s folksy singing and the casual ease with which Scott and Burks laid down the tracks.
“Graham, having been in Pezz, has an understanding of punk, so that helped things stay raw in a good way. It’s imperfect, and it should be. It was a really good, organic situation because Graham and I did 98 percent of that record ourselves in little three- or four-hour bursts in his backhouse. Most of the basic tracks are first, second, or third takes. We wanted it to sound organic, and I think being relatively unprepared worked in our favor.”
Jeremy Scott leads a full band in an album release show at 9 p.m. on Friday, January 28th, at B-Side Memphis. The Alicja-Pop band will open.