“Everclear was going to be my last band,” he says via phone from a Lubbock, TX tour stop. Everclear brings its 30th anniversary tour to Mentor Civic Amphitheater on Tuesday, July 12. “I started with a couple of younger guys. I didn’t know what we had. You hear something recorded, and it didn’t do it justice. When I had a chance to record for $400 for trade, I did it not with the idea of making record but to see what we had. We came out of it, and it sounded like a record. I knew there was something there. I could be objective and put on my record guy hat and knew there was something there.”
The band was accepted into South By Southwest and started getting better local gigs. It recorded its first album, World of Noise, for Tim Kerr Records.
Even though World of Noise put Everclear on the musical map, it went out of print in 1999. After recently discovering the original tapes, Alexakis is re-releasing the album to coincide with the band’s anniversary tour.
“It’s got six bonus tracks on it, two that had never been released before,” Alexakis says of the deluxe reissue. “It’s got 18 songs total. It’s on iTunes and Spotify for the first time. It will come out on the vinyl but just the original 12 songs, and we’ll just do a colored vinyl 45 with the bonus tracks that will go inside.”
To promote the reissue and tour, Alexakis hooked up with old friend Matt Pinfield, the former host of MTV’s 120 Minutes, to record a multi-part video series that provides an overview of the band’s career.
“I’ve known Matt since 1993 or 1994 when our first tour,” says Alexakis. “He was a music director in New Jersey. We’ve been friends ever since. We both are very open about our sobriety and recovery. We’re bonded like that as well. When this came up, and I told him we were doing it, he said he wanted to talk to me about it and put it on the Internet. I wouldn’t have done it with anyone but Matt. It was going to be five minutes, but there was so much to talk about. We started scripting out ideas, and we did it. I’m really proud of it.”
The band caught the attention of Capitol Records, who signed and put out Sparkle and Fade, its major label debut. After working with only a few hundred dollars on its first album, the band now had a budget of more than $100,000. The album stumbled out of the gate when the punk-y “Heroin Girl” didn’t catch fire.
“That’s what people did. They put out something hard and then followed it with something poppier,” Alexakis explains, alluding to the album’s second, more successful single, “Santa Monica.” “In 12 markets ‘Heroin Girl’ played in, it went crazy. Some markets wouldn’t add it because of the word ‘heroin.'”
The band’s follow-up album, So Much for the Afterglow, would become Everclear’s biggest hit, but a record label exec deserves at least some credit for its success. He advised Alexakis to go back to the drawing board after he heard it for the first time.
“We did everything you were supposed to do,” says Alexakis of the initial sessions. “We went to mix it in January of 1997. I remember when I was doing it, I wasn’t sure what I had. I played it over the phone to my AR guy. He said it was an okay record. He said it wasn’t great and wouldn’t give me the career I deserved. It was harsh. I was like, ’Okay.’ I licked my wounds and just stayed in New York in a hotel for about two weeks, walking around watching movies and reading books and writing down ideas to add production to songs. When I finally had written two or three new songs, including ‘So Much for the Afterglow’ and ‘One Hit Wonder,’ I got that World of Noise-attitude back. It might not sound like it music-wise, but I had that fire in my belly again.”
Alexakis told the label that Andy Wallace (Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters, Slipknot) needed to mix the album, including the new songs he’d recorded. He wanted Wallace to give it “that big sound.” It turned out to be the right call.
“It became our biggest selling album,” says Alexakis.
Since it celebrates the band’s 30th anniversary, the current tour will provide an overview of the band’s career, and Alexakis doesn’t mind catering to his fanbase.
“We’re doing songs from just about every record,” says Alexakis. “It’s fun. We do a lot from World of Noise and fan favorites. There are lots of fan favorites and all the hits. We always play the hits. I hate it when bands don’t. It’s a really great set.”
This article appears in Jun 15-28, 2022.
