Mention the band Garbage to an LGBTQ person of a certain age, and that person's eyes may glow.
Inevitably, that person will start humming a favorite song. There are many choices: "Queer," "Androgyny," "I'm Only Happy When It Rains," "When I Grow Up" and "#1 Crush," for example. The band's debut album, Garbage, turns 20 this year, and a new expanded and remastered edition came out this month.
Frontwoman and vocalist Shirley Manson, Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erickson will be stopping by the Rivera Theatre Saturday, Oct. 17, to bring their hits to life with the "20 Years Queer" tour. Windy City Times chatted with Marker, Garbage's guitarist, by phone about producing music that lasts, the amazing Shirley Manson and Chicago.
Windy City Times: How does it feel to be celebrating the 20th anniversary of an album that changed a lot of people's lives?
Steve Marker: Well, pretty amazing, if that's true. I know it changed my life. Really, when you do anything you have no idea whether it's going to last or not. It's not even what you're thinking about at the time. If you write something, you hope it's going to stick around and be well-accepted and going to mean something to people, but you never really know. So I think we feel really lucky that we're still here and that people still like the record.
WCT: When you were making music, did you ever have an ideal listener in mind?
SM: I think we were making it for ourselves, and kind of combining everything that we loved from a pretty long history of pop music and punk music. It wasn't specifically aimed at anyone, but I guess as it turns out there's a lot of people who kind of feel like we do about a lot of things, and maybe like a lot of the same musical influences. I guess that's kind of how we found an audience; people feeling like we do about all sorts of things—music, life, society, whatever.
WCT: What were some of those musical influences?
SM: Oh, man—I think we had parents that were very much into music and very much into sort of Frank Sinatra pop music, their era, and we kind of grew up with that. And the Beatles were always around. What the three of us shared with Shirley, when we met her, was we all loved basically late '70s UK music: people like the Clash and the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees. And the New York stuff, like Patti Smith and the Ramones, and Television. Even though Shirley was a bit younger than us, she grew up listening to the same kind of music. So that was the common ground that we found when we got together.
WCT: What's one of your favorite memories of Shirley?
SM: There's quite a few over 20 years. It's really kind of impossible to think of just one. But I think that her ability to come into a situation where there's three people who had known each other for a long time and worked together for years—three guys in the band and then she kind of came in and didn't know us at all. And she was from a completely different country and different background and everything, and she was a woman as well.
For her to be smart enough to figure out how to fit in and contribute and become an equally contributing member—and pretty early on, also figure out how to become a leader—and kind of took us to places we wouldn't have gone without her, was an amazing skill and talent that she had and that she developed further after she met us, I think. There's a million episodes that fit into that memory, but I think just her development as a person and strength as a person.
WCT: The sound of the band underwent some evolution. What was your favorite album to make?
SM: You know, I think this first album was probably, looking back, the most exciting, because it was made with no preconceptions, no idea that it was going to be successful—no idea what the hell we were doing, really. We were trying to take a lot of influences and elements that we loved and thought would be interesting to stick them all together. There were no plans [and] the pressures weren't too bad. Butch, at the time, had a reputation as a producer; I know that there was pressure on him but, for the rest of us, we were all just trying to do something cool and see if it worked or not. We had no idea we'd be going on the road to play it again 20 years later.
WCT: What are you enjoying about this tour, and what's next?
SM: It's been really fun to go back and listen to this first album, and try to figure out what's good about it. A lot of the songs we've played so many times over years, they've kind of evolved, and for this specific tour we're actually trying to go back and nail what made that record work. So that's been a really interesting experience, kind of trying to do it old-school again, and it's going to be really fun. Chicago's always amazing, and we can't wait to get there. Everybody's really excited about that show.
WCT: What does coming to Chicago bring back for you?
SM: Chicago is almost like a second home to us. We lived in Madison for, like, 25 years, so we used to go down there for shows all the time. That was where we first saw Shirley play, where we had our first band meeting. She was playing with the band she was in before our band, and we all went down to see her on Clark Street, and we had our night of drunken debauchery as we started to bond.
WCT: What message do you have for your gay fans?
SM: We've always enjoyed incredible support from the gay community, and we've tried to respect that. It means a lot to us, and we really, really appreciate it. I don't know what to say except "Thank you—it's been fantastic."
Garbage plays Saturday, Oct. 17, at the Rivera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine Ave.
