An interview with Cell
Guitarist Ian James discusses the band's return after 30 years, not selling millions of records like Nirvana, touring with Sonic Youth and Pavement, and being used by their label to sell grunge.
An album can be memorable for many reasons. Whether you’ve listened to one a thousand times or burned the image of one you’ve never even heard into your brain because it’s just so brilliant, it doesn’t take much to form some kind of attachment to a record. The debut album by New York City’s Cell, Slo-Blo, is one of those for me, not so much because of the music or the album cover (which is pretty memorable), but because throughout my life I have seen it in countless bargain bins across record shops in North America. While that might seem like a slight, it’s not intended as one. It was in one of those bins back in 1994 that I picked up a copy of the CD, which I have continued to listen to for 30 years. (Full disclosure: I have since upgraded to a vinyl copy.)
Cell were one of the many bands that benefitted from the great major label sweepstakes or as NPR called it “the great grunge gold rush.” With the dawn of alternative music came countless bands that were plucked out of the independent music scene in hopes of replicating the success that Nirvana achieved with 1991’s Nevermind. Cell and Nirvana shared a label, DGC Records (aka The David Geffen Company), a subsidiary of Geffen Records, along with Teenage Fanclub, Hole, Sloan, Beck, Weezer, and Sonic Youth, the band that acted as pseudo A&R to bring a number of artists to the label’s roster.
Unfortunately for Cell, like the majority of these major label alternative acts, they wouldn’t go on to sell millions or even hundreds of thousands of records, as the labels projected. And so after Slo-Blo failed to live up to expectations, they were immediately crossed off of DGC’s priority list. Their second album, 1994’s Living Room, may have had stronger songs, thanks in part to producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., The Amps, Redd Kross), but by that point Cell were as good as done. The band broke up quietly in the months following, fading into obscurity.
But now they’re back!
Thanks to a news post by Stereogum, I learned about a Cell reunion show - their first performance together in 30 years. The original line-up are set to reform to play DromFest ’24 in late August along with a number of their peers, many of whom have also just returned from the ‘90s: The Figgs, Scrawl, Sleepyhead and Tuscadero. (Cell will also play a one-off show at the Mercury Lounge in New York City on September 3.) I could never have predicted that Cell would reunite, especially considering there is little trace of their existence online. Slo-Blo is not currently on any streaming services, leaving Living Room as the only recording you can find on Spotify amidst all the other artists named Cell.
I had a chance to speak with guitarist Ian James about the Cell’s return, as well as the band’s rise and fall, what it was like sharing a label as Nirvana, playing the Lollapalooza side stage, and the pitfalls of being labelled a grunge band.
So, do you have any horror stories about being in an unknown band signed to a major label in the ’90s?
Ian James: Well, one of the stories you might hear or one of the typical stories we used to hear in those days was like, “Oh man, they signed us but they didn't get behind this.” Geffen or DGC totally got behind us. They did as much as they could for us. This was also at a time when labels and the media scratched each other's backs right, so who knows how they got us into Rolling Stone or how they got us reviewed because we were really a nobody band that was hyped. I remember when they flew us out to L.A… we had already recorded our first record on our own and they gave it to the [George Cowan] who mixed …And Justice For All by Metallica. Anyway we fly out to L.A. and you know, they're bringing us into the office and the secretary took me aside and said, “When I listen to your record I hear cash registers.” As someone coming from the punk world, first of all, I’m thinking, “Awesome, because I don't hear any. So, you know, maybe it's true, maybe we'll get rich, who knows?” But also, “That's really icky and gross, if that's what you take away from the music and that's what you're here for, you know?” Cell kind of just got together and happened to rehearse in the right space and had the right friends at the right moment. I was in a different band with the guys from Versus called Flower and Jerry [DiRienzo] was in a band - Cell’s guitar player, he's the main guy - with Thalia [Zedek] from Come. So we came from those worlds, then graduated to the corporate world, which seemed to be the new thing. So it was kind of our turn in a way. It seemed weird but at the same time, like, if you can make money at it, why not?
How long had you been together when you signed with DGC?
We were pretty new. We had played a few shows around New York, some real undesirable types of shows. Just bad basements of clubs, instead of the actual club, but it was probably like six months, because we had connections. We didn't think much of ourselves, and City Slang said, “Hey we'd like to put out your record,” which was really cool. So they did, and I think they paid for the original $6,000 it cost to record it and put it out. That's when Geffen started sniffing around, but we actually insisted that City Slang get European rights, which was unusual because normally Geffen would have worldwide rights.
You mentioned Slo-Blo was remixed. Does that mean the version on CIty Slang is different from the one on DGC?
I believe they're a little different, in terms of the actual materials and the printing. But that's a good question. I don't know. It's possible that City Slang was farther along in the process but had yet to actually press the discs, but I don't think there's a difference. I think it's the same mix.
So you guys made the album City Slang was putting it out and then Geffen came knocking. Where does Thurston Moore come into the story?
Well, Jerry the guitar player and Keith [Nealy] the drummer were kind of friends with Thurston, Kim, Steve and probably also Lee. Sonic Youth went on a little jaunt of a tour, like two weeks, and they just brought Jerry and Keith along as drum tech and guitar tech. So that was the connection and also our rehearsal space was close to theirs. There was a place in Hoboken, a hole in the wall with four or five rooms where Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Das Damen, which is where we got Dave [Motamed] the bass player from. So yeah, we knew [Thurston], not me personally, but they would be in and out of our space. Like we'd be rehearsing and they'd be rehearsing and they'd kind of wander over and we'd wander over there. I was a little starstruck because I was a huge Sonic Youth fan from about ’84, so they really blew my mind and changed the way I thought about music. Jerry and Keith I think were much more like, “Oh, they're just people,” and I was like, “No they're gods!” But I’d heard stories about Thurston bringing bands to Geffen. I don't know if he had an official role but was he kind of acting as an A&R guy. I doubt we had a manager until Geffen came on the scene, but then we got Lyle [Hysen], the drummer from Das Damen, who just facilitated a meeting.
I know of so many bands in that position where they released albums in the ’90s, but the rights belong to some major label and it’s impossible to get a hold of anyone that knows how to obtain the masters to the recordings.
A master tapes storage facility burned down and I'm pretty good friends with the guys in Jawbreaker and I know that they lost a bunch of stuff. They were signed to Geffen too. We don't know where our tapes are. We don't know anything because we just walked away.
I read that Geffen gave you a $1.5 million advance when you signed with them. Does that sound right?
I don't know if there were millions of dollars attached to the contract. I'm not sensitive about the subject. It's all major label money too, right? Like the way it works is that you get certain money but you have to recoup it but you don't really actually make any money until the record company gets paid. It's all just a shell game. I do remember we spent $15,000 on a used van and Jerry and I got new guitars, I think Dave got an amp. That was the money. What does that add up to? About $50,000? We bought a van and then split the rest up. But you also have to pay lawyers. And I don't think we got $1.5 million. It was a seven-record deal but I think we cut it down to five. It's just a very funny. There are a lot of promises and dreams sort of floated in front of you. It’s like playing Let’s Make A Deal. “What's behind door number three?” or “You can have this $1.5 million signing bonus or take the passenger van!”
You said you said the people at Geffen were pretty good to you though.
As far as record labels go, yeah, they were good to us. But when you don't make money… you know, I think our first record sold somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000, which is pretty good. I mean 70,000 people bought the record. Like 70,000 real people, but at the same time they were expecting 250,000 copies, so 70,000 was a failure. For the second record, we got the cold shoulder. Like, “Yeah, I'd love to have dinner with you guys but I'm busy.” But as I was saying, they had counted on us for success, and I think the songs weren't that strong. I think the first song they chose to lead with, “Fall,” was weaker than the second single they had planned, “Stratosphere.” It was the same plan they had with Nirvana. They felt “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was better off as a teaser, which they would then follow it up with the big punch, “Come As You Are.” They thought that one would be the song that would push Nirvana and make them big. They didn't realize the first one was gonna do what it did and that really was the game changer, especially that video. So they did the same thing with us and led with the weaker song but a weaker Cell song is much weaker than a weaker Nirvana song.
I know in hindsight it’s easy to see that indie bands were signed to majors because of Nirvana’s success, but did it seem like that to you at the time?
At the time, it did it seem like Nirvana was the reason why a lot of bands were getting signed at that moment, so all of a sudden they're coming to bands like us and Jawbreaker. I do think the bands they reached out to were legitimately good bands. I don't think there was a lot of fake indie stuff going on that was getting signed. It wasn't like hair metal where suddenly you hear Poison and you dye your hair and grow it out. With alternative it was a lot harder to do that and the bands that got signed had already been playing for a while. So Nirvana hit it big, and there was also Soundgarden and the whole Seattle thing, which did pretty well too. But nothing was as big as Nirvana. They were a special thing.
Did it feel like Cell got lost in the major label system?
No, but I think you might get different opinions from other members of the band. I'm looking forward to having the discussion with them because we haven't really ever sat down and discussed it. But it seemed at the time that some of us were very hurt that our friends at the label kind of gave us the cold shoulder after the first record didn't do well. My view of it was, well, that's what happens because they were never our friends.
It's funny that you mentioned the first album not doing well because for a while at record shops in the ’90s I would see Slo-Blo in bargain bins, where the reduced CDs were kept. But that's also the reason why I bought it because it was it was cheap and I was curious because you were signed to DGC, like so many bands I liked. I had also heard your song on the DGC Rarities compilation.
That also goes to show that Geffen really expected us to sell a lot more records. That's why there were so many! It's just funny. I'm glad I'm part of the story because it helps me understand how things were, and I'm totally comfortable with it because there's so much luck involved. And right now, honestly, I just don't think our music was appropriate for the masses. That's not because it was better or above people, I think we were just a certain taste and not our music didn't supersede anything more than a narrow group of people that would like it.
I know it's a hypothetical question but do you think if Cell had been on, say, an indie label like Matador Records or Touch & Go things would have been different?
No, but we might have been a little bit more loved. Nowadays no one gives a shit but back in the day it was kind of like, “Why is this band getting a $1.5 million signing bonus? Why them and not us?” And that's a great question. It's just because we knew the right people. And that's not fair, so there's a little bit of understandable skepticism and we had to win people over. That's the thing, the choice came down to Touch and Go and Geffen. I have two Necros shirts, I have a Die Kreuzen shirt, so I love Touch and Go. Cory [Rusk] flew out to New York and had dinner with us, and that's more our true roots.That was our true place, but how often do you get a chance to sign with something like Geffen? The way we looked at it was, “This is a crazy time and there's not gonna be another time when we have the option to see what it's like to sign to a major label with a lot of money.” And that may sound cynical but that's okay. It doesn't really bother my ethics and I'm a pretty ethical person, but why would you turn down that chance? I know what the arguments would be but you're likely gonna disappear at some point anyway, so you might as well see what it's like.
Right. I interviewed Sloan recently and they talked about speaking to other labels, but at the time Nirvana had just released Nevermind, which they all loved and then Nirvana blew up. So because of that success and because they were fans of Sonic Youth and Teenage Fanclub it just made sense to go with Geffen.
It just made sense because at the time Geffen was doing great things for these cool bands. I don't think most people would have said no to Geffen. I mean Sloan is a great example of a band because look at their longevity, look at their legacy. Obviously they are a legit good band and some other bands might have been the same thing, but Cell really was Jerry's band. I had other stuff to do.
Obviously because of the time bands like Cell were referred to as grunge. I guess because of the Geffen thing grunge was kind of unavoidable for a band like Cell?
I don't get upset about it. I just think it's silly. We were in Entertainment Weekly or maybe it was People, and the article was about “how to be cool grunge person.” And one tip was “buy a Cell shirt,” among many other things. Like there's a picture of a cool grunge person with their flannel and a Cell shirt. I'll bet Geffen even paid them to put that shirt in there. That's how it goes. We were in Guitar Player and Guitar World and I couldn't play guitar for crap! It was more of that quid pro quo. Like, “We'll give you access to Kurt Cobain if you write this small article on Cell.” So we were in a lot of things back then. But the grunge thing, I mean, even Nirvana wasn't grunge. Grunge wasn't really a thing.
It's funny that you mentioned you weren't a very good guitarist because Cell were often compared to Crazy Horse and Television - two very guitar-heavy bands. And I get it because you and Jerry really played off each other.
Well, when I look back at videos I'm shocked I'm that good, and that's not saying that I was great, but I brought up my game playing with Jerry. He's a great guitar player, so when he would write a part and I would want to double it for part of the song, I had to learn it, and he really helped my guitar playing, probably as high a level as it could possibly ever get. I'm relearning the songs now, and luckily there is a modicum of muscle memory still in me. Jerry's riffs are tricky but they were fun to play and figure out because nothing was a straight bar chord.
How did you find being a part of the Lollapalooza tour in 1993?
We got on the tour in New Jersey, which was basically the New York City stop. We went down the East Coast and hopped off after our two weeks was up. They would basically do two-week stints for second stage bands, and our two weeks ended somewhere like Orlando or Tampa. It was super fun, super weird, but Tool were dicks. They had just graduated from the second stage to the main stage, where they would play at noon or something, and their egos were huge. That was pretty early and we had never heard of them. I know that's also not especially shocking news but I can verify it at least in the way they treated other bands. But the tour was really fun. There was a puppet show and a chainsaw juggler on the second stage. Like they would have a band play and then they'd have a puppet show and then they'd have another band. One of the people in the puppet show was Jennifer Balgobin, who played Debbie the punker in Repo Man. She was one of the puppeteers. I was terrified. I didn't talk to her but it was a rewarding experience. It didn’t do much for our careers but it was fun. We'd play in the afternoon and head on to the next town and get ice cream and you know it was very is very wholesome and good summer.
On Instagram you shared a poster of a UK tour you did with Sonic Youth and Pavement. That must have been a pretty awesome tour. What do you remember from it?
That was the peak of our career. Pavement was kind of coming up along the same time as us at that point. They were about a year ahead of us and I gotta say they were super deserving of any accolades they got. We loved those guys. I still see some of them around occasionally. But Cell had just replaced Sebadoh on that tour. They had that slot before us, so the other bands were all mourning the loss of Sebadoh when we arrived. Now that I know Sebadoh - my band Flower reunited in 2019 and we toured with them - they’re all awesome guys. But that tour was fun. I brought a video camera with me with all of this good stuff. I've got to figure out a way to edit it together and in some way that won't piss anybody off. Like would Thurston Moore be mad if I posted the part where he farts into the camera? I feel like I've seen him do worse things and I think he would be like, “Dude, you have to put it in!”
So what happened with Cell? When exactly did the band end?
I was sort of the first to go, in ’94, not long after Living Room came out. I quit between two tours because my wife - I was married really young - was like, “This is stupid. Why are you going out on the road for eight months when nothing's happening?” And so I sort of had an ultimatum from her. So I said to them, “The band is just not that important to me.” And I feel like there was a little bit of contention - and we're probably gonna have to discuss it this summer when we get back together - but they were mad because we got a bunch of money after we recorded Living Room and then like a month later I quit. I mean, I waited for the cheque to come. It wasn't timed or anything, but the guys were like, “It’s kind of weird that you're leaving as soon as you got your money.” But that money was paying me for the last year. It wasn’t for the year coming up. I guess it's just how you look at it. It wasn't a big cheque. It was about $30,000 for the year that you get to live on. So it didn't even pay off my credit card bills from being in the band. The label was like, “We're signing you and we're giving you some money in order to set you up to be successful but the actual money is not going to happen unless you actually sell records.”
Are you guys still paying that off?
No, that would be awful. We had Sonic Youth's lawyers handling it for us. Basically the same group of people that handled Nirvana and Sonic Youth. They made sure the right language was in the contract. I mean, honestly, I think it was very generous at the time. Like, “Here's living money, here's rent, here's enough money to buy a van, here's money to make a video,” and that's more generous than they were to a lot of bands. I don't know if they signed us and Sloan and St. Johnny all to the same basic contract or not. Maybe they wanted to treat bands a little better than had been done in the past. I don't remember everyone that was part of DGC, but based on what I've read some of them were coming from underground labels and stuff. So I think they had a better understanding of what the potential was for some of these bands coming from like independent music scene. They're not necessarily gonna blow up the way that Nirvana did. Sonic Youth never blew up the way that Nirvana did either but they were stately sort of godparents of the whole situation.
So what led to the Cell reunion?
I mean, it's been 30 years, and we're all friendly. Jerry is one of my good friends but the problem is Keith lives in Berlin and Jerry moved to L.A. as soon as Cell broke up. Dave and I stayed in the New York area, although I'm now in Massachusetts. So we don't see each other in person. The only time I see Jerry is when I'm on tour with another band and we play in L.A. But we like each other, they're nice guys and it was an unfortunate sour ending I guess. The whole thing kind of turned a bit sour and was disappointing, so we just needed a little bit of time to come to terms. We had this adventure and we can look back and say, “Wow, what we did was pretty amazing, pretty interesting.” I was in other bands that started more organically. Like I got introduced to Cell because they were looking for a bass player and I just left Flower. Suddenly we're in a band, we're making money, and I liked the guys - there's no question about that - but I wasn't sold on the music. I thought they had some great songs but I thought there was some filler, and I was like, “Well, we'll see how this goes.” Next thing you know, it all got real very quickly and we got locked in and committed.
Maybe now that you’re back together you can figure out why Slo-Blo isn’t currently on streaming services but Living Room is.
We’re still trying to figure out what rights we have to re-release or make public any of our old stuff because we will if people want it. We are recording a new song. Well, it was a song we wrote right before I quit. But it's in a live video on YouTube from a show we played in Germany. And the song is pretty good. The video has a bunch of Living Room material and some Slo-Blo songs. So I was watching it and there's some new song that we play that I didn't even remember and it's pretty good.
Right now there's a group text where we're just like, “Hey, we should play this song” or “Do you know what the chord for this song is?” We're really re-learning the songs and we're starting to get excited about seeing each other. But in the group text we’re all wondering why Slo-Blo isn’t on streaming and none of us know. I highly doubt we own it. I think we would have to go and buy our rights or try to negotiate the rights.
PS In addition to the Cell reunion, Ian also plays in the pre-and-post-Cell band Flower, with members of Versus, and French, with members of Flower.