The Long Countdown
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Though the delay is hardly unprecedented–the hardscrabble roots-rock four-piece is only the latest in a regular armada of bands to run up on the sandbar of major-label bureaucracy–it’s nonetheless been rough on the Bottle Rockets. “Trying to have a life gets frustrating,” says Ray, who turned down all employment offers this past winter in anticipation of a tour. “I just hung around waiting for the call and it never came. All of a sudden I started running out of money. I take this old Catholic martyr guy approach to it–the meek shall inherit the earth, so fuck it.”
It was the group’s critically hailed second album, originally released by the Minneapolis independent label East Side Digital in late 1994, that got the Bottle Rockets noticed in the first place. The Atlantic affiliate TAG reissued The Brooklyn Side in the fall of ’95, and the album has since sold 70,000 copies–a respectable figure for a band of the Bottle Rockets’ stature, but not what a major label would consider a “hit.” Since then, their relationship with Atlantic has been practically nonexistent, thanks largely to an internal restructuring in which TAG got folded into the parent label.
Postscript
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Uncredited photo of Bottle Rockets.
