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The lanky Seattle singer-songwriter, who achieved near-fame earlier in the decade with his punk-pop band Best Kissers in the World, had just released his debut solo record, I Had to Laugh Like Hell, a collection of somber tunes that depicted a world of forgotten dreams and failed romance. Less than two years later, he's back in a Portland bar, this time the blues club Balzer's. He quit drinking a while back, but his cowboy hat remains, as does his soft Southwestern drawl and searing homespun wit. "I've made every wrong decision in the past," he says. "So all I have to do is not make them again and maybe it'll be all right." Collier is in town for the first of a slew of intermittent Portland gigs at various venues over the next two months--known in the biz as a residency--touting his self-titled major-label debut on Revolution. The mistakes he refers to were mostly made as a member of Best Kissers, a band that began in Arizona and relocated to Seattle in 1989, signing to MCA and releasing an EP and a full-length before getting dropped and subsequently audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Three years ago, he started over, picking up his guitar and writing in an idiom that resembled folk more than anything he'd done before. Songs like "God Never Lived in My Neighborhood" and "Bender (I'm on One)" struck a precarious balance between bitterness and melancholy; for I Had to Laugh, he augmented his guitar with countrified arrangements played by Seattle musician friends on fiddle, pedal steel and drums. Then a different group of musicians approached Collier and persuaded him, against his wishes at first, to allow them to be his permanent backing band. "I wanted nothing to do with it," he says of the offer. "I was like, 'I don't want a band. I don't want to do this anymore.' They kept after me. I went to a rehearsal one night and they knew every song up and down. It was remarkable." The quartet--Collier, bassist Jeff Wood, guitarist Bill Bernhard and a drummer who's since been replaced by John Fleischman--toured the West and eventually attracted label attention. They signed with Revolution and began formulating a plan for Collier's second album. "I really needed some up-tempo material, or else people were gonna be drawing chalk lines around themselves and I was gonna have bodies on my hands," he says. "I didn't want that. It was a mutual decision between me and Revolution not to make a 3 a.m. record. We wanted something more upbeat." Though it's hardly joyful, the just-released album comes from a straightforward rock angle, with colorful guitar riffs and forceful, impassioned vocals. Collier was granted his wish to work with Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, who gained prominence for their production on Hole's Live Through This and their mixing on Radiohead's The Bends. Their clearheaded approach lends itself to the type of soulful delivery Collier exhibits on the moving "Truth or Dare" and helps the singer-guitarist and his band pull off a graceful segue into a dead-on cover of Pink Floyd's overlooked classic "Fearless"; the segment alone is worth the price of the CD. Collier and his label's latest plot is to keep the group on the road for much of '98, starting with a series of residencies in Portland, Spokane, Seattle and Idaho, to build an audience. "I've always been of the impression that recordings and live shows should be two different things," he says, pushing up the brim of his hat. "One of my idols, Willie Nelson, was a proponent of this. How many times could you hear 'Whiskey River' on record? And yet when you see him live, you feel like you've just been to church." Though the surroundings at Balzer's seem foreign to him, Collier looks infinitely more relaxed than he did at the Benson a few years earlier, his eyes and expression exuding a hard-earned wisdom. Asked what he'd do differently if given the chance to begin anew as a young guitarist with the Best Kissers, he smiles deviously. "I wouldn't change a thing," he says. "I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box. I had to go through six years of being an asshole. I had to learn a few things the hard way in order to appreciate what I've got now. And I wouldn't change a single thing." |
