Fans who saw Scott McCaughey and The Minus 5 on their recent West Coast tour saw the same core of musicians who made the band’s latest — and approximately 16th — record, Oar On, Penelope! (Yep Roc): longtime collaborators Kurt Bloch (Fastbacks, Young Fresh Fellows), Linda Pitmon (Zuzu’s Petals, The Baseball Project) and Peter Buck (you’ve heard of him), plus a newer one in vocalist/keyboardist Debbie Peterson (The Bangles).
That star-studded band is not the one that’s coming to play the Woodtick Music Festival in Darby Saturday. But as both a former Portland resident and a former Missoula resident, I’m here to tell you that Montana is just as lucky to get this one. It’s the Minus 5 that plays semi-regularly around Portland, with a bit more of a communal, local bar vibe.
Which is not to say that it’s the Pioneer League version (to mix/borrow a metaphor from one of McCaughey’s other bands). While stalwarts Buck — with whom McCaughey first played as an additional member of R.E.M. — and Jenny Conlee-Drizos (the Decemberists) can’t make the trip, that still leaves a rhythm section of drummer Paul Pulvirenti (Eyelids) and bassist Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven, The Third Mind), plus guitarist Casey Neill (a member since 2012, and a solo artist in his own right, as is Krummenacher. Which is why they’re also playing Woodtick as a duo Friday).
The Darby music festival is in its second year under the tutelage of Missoulian Sasha Bell, the longtime member of East Coast indie psych-pop bands The Ladybug Transistor and The Essex Green, who also has her own eponymous group with Missoulians John Fleming, Bryan Ramirez, Chris Bacon and Colin Johnson. McCaughey can probably relate — originally best-known as the frontman of Seattle’s Young Fresh Fellows, he also spent almost 20 years as a hired gun in R.E.M. while also revving up The Minus 5. Started as essentially a solo or recording project, the M5 has turned into McCaughey’s primary — but always ever-changing — band. Buck, who, like McCaughey, now lives in Portland, is probably the biggest constant; the Minus 5’s fifth album, 2003’s Down With Wilco featured Buck, McCaughey and, you guessed it, all of the members of Wilco.
The Pulp spoke to McCaughey via Zoom on the same day his good friend Jeff Tweedy announced he was releasing a triple album by his solo band, which truly makes them birds of a feather: between Oar on Penelope, an upcoming Young Fresh Fellows record and another new one from Luke Haines and Peter Buck, McCaughey’s got three in 2025 himself.
So I think you previously told me you went to see The Ladybug Transistor play in Portland last year, and Sasha Bell said you should come to Montana and play her festival. Is that about right?
Yeah, I don’t know. I got to be friendly with the Ladybug folks. I think we might have played a show a long time ago together at Maxwell’s. I could be dreaming it, but I feel like we did. And I hung out with them in Norway at Egersund Visefest a couple years ago, and they were a super-great band,
Sasha had asked me to play the Woodtick Festival [before] and I was like, I can’t do it. But this time it came up, and I thought, I think we could do that! And so I got the local Portlander Minus 5 crew to sign on. I think it’ll be really fun to go to Montana and play. We don’t get to play there very often.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure this is the first time you’ve played the Missoula area since you were opening for Tweedy on that first tour by his solo band, at the Top Hat.
I think it is, yeah. Sasha said she was at that show, too. 10 years ago, or 11 years ago? [2015]. I think that might be the last time I played in Montana. Kind of ridiculous, because it’s not that far from [Portland], but, y’know, it’s not that close either. We’ll just zoom out there for one show. Ten hours both ways, so it takes a little bit of doing.
You’re gutting it out. No Spokane before or after.
No. We wanted to, but I didn’t really think about it in time.
Instead you were gonna play a warm-up show in Portland. But “warm-up” got too literal: it was almost 100 degrees there Wednesday, and the chosen venue wasn’t air-conditioned. You were also going to have Debbie Peterson for that gig, but she isn’t coming to Montana?
No. I didn’t even ask, because I just figured, we’ll go with a four-piece. Keep it focused. And I didn’t even know if she’d be around. I asked Paulie and Victor and Casey if they could do it a long time ago. Then when we decided to do the warm-up, I thought, well, Debbie’s here. She could play a warm-up show if she wanted to. And she did want to.
But actually, Sasha is going to play keyboards. She’s gonna sit in. I don’t know how much of the set she’s gonna play, but she’s welcome to play as much as she wants!
The Minus 5 Facebook page said the warm-up show was going to feature a never-before-seen line-up. Which means that Saturday will also be one.
That’s true. First-time — maybe only-time — lineup. Hard to say.
Do you have any idea how many lineups there have been?
I have no idea. There’s gotta have been at least a couple of hundred different lineups. I really, firmly believe that. Because there’s four or five hundred people who are in the band, which means anybody who recorded or played a note with us, in the studio or on stage. From the get-go, that was the concept. Anybody who took part in a session or a show was in the band forever. Whether they like it or not.
I know my fellow journalist Peter Blackstock, who lived in Seattle and co-founded No Depression, takes great pride in having been a “member.”
He’s pretty happy with that. Max Weinberg, on the other hand, I don’t know. He might not even remember that he’s in the Minus 5. But he is!
You always viewed it as sort of a rolling band?
I do. It wasn’t even supposed to be a band at first. It was going to be like a studio collective thing. And then we started playing [live], and I was like, oh, that’s cool. We can play with whoever wants to do it, whenever something comes up. Certain periods, it becomes like a real band, where a line-up will stick for two or three years.
But it’s not really feasible these days. Like, we just did the West Coast, and I really wanted to do some part of this tour for the album to be the lineup that’s on the album. So we managed to pull that together for 10 days.
And Peter and Linda and I are doing the Luke Haines and Peter Buck tour in the UK in August for three weeks. And so I thought, well, that’s three of us. Can Minus 5 open? So that means Luke and Nick Fowler, the other English guy who plays with us, are in the Minus 5. Another new lineup.
And then we have like five days off and do a three-week Baseball Project tour in the US. And I thought, well… could The Minus 5 open that one too? It’s all the same people, except Steve Wynn will be playing lead guitar, and Mike [Mills] will play organ and sing backup.
It’s floating, it’s a little complicated, and it’s a little bit of a pain for me to keep track of who knows which songs. So it’s way more work than it should be. But I built this machine, and I’m the one who has to keep it running somehow. It’s lucky that we’ve had this much time, like, 40 shows with The Minus 5, June through September. That’s a lot of shows for us, which is great, because this record’s really, really great. I really want people to hear it and know about it as much as possible.
How do you know or decide, like, okay, now it’s time to make a proper Minus 5 record that the record company is going to put out versus what you put on Bandcamp, or self-release as “Scott The Hoople.”
I don’t really think about it. I just record, and when I feel like something looks like a record, I’ll talk to the label and say, when can we put this out? Yep Roc has a very finite amount of records they can do a year, and they get scheduled far ahead of time. So I had to kind of wait around a little bit for this one. I had these songs recorded for quite a while. I thought this is a really good grouping of songs.
And I got Ed Stasium [Ramones, Talking Heads, Translator, The Smithereens] to mix it. That’s when I started talking to Yep Roc. I said, Well, I want Ed Stasium to mix it. Can you pitch in some money? They did, which was great. Typically, I don’t even want to ask the label [for anything]. I just do what I do, and if they want to put it out, great.
And they typically do. But then sometimes I put out records on my own. The last Minus 5 record, Calling Cortez, I asked Yep Roc to put it out at the last second because I was going on tour with the No Ones, and I thought it would be nice to have something new out.
Calling Cortez was one of three records you made there were both inspired by and features lots of covers of Neil Young. What draws you to him over and over?
Ah! Just the songs. The songs and his personality and his lyrics. He’s just kind of everything I want to get from a musician. Somebody who, you never know exactly what he’s going to do. And some of it’s not that great. But overall, he’s way up at the top. He’s just done so many amazing records. I like that they’re really immediate, and that he doesn’t try too hard. Not saying he’s not trying. But he knows if it feels right, he’s not going to labor over it too much.
I actually tried to do that on the latest Minus 5 record. Tried to let it just happen. We went in the room, we played the songs, they were pretty much done. And I tried not to add a lot of stuff like I always do at home. I think it sounds really good because of that: really fresh and really live and kind of classic in a weird way. Which is probably Ed Stasium. It was really cool to hand this one over to somebody who really knows what he was doing. He knew exactly what I wanted. He likes all the music that I like [laughs
So, thanks to this line-up of The Minus 5, you’ve also given Sasha and Woodtick a second artist on the bill.
Yeah. She said, “would you want to play a solo set,” and I said, “not really.” I’m just not that good at it. But Casey and Victor are really great together. They kind of trade songs, but it just sounds like they’ve been doing it for a long time. So it was perfect for them to be able to do it.
And that way we can go for the whole weekend. Get in the vibe. Lots of good people playing. Of course, I hear it’s going to be really hot there too. But it’ll be super fun to get out there, play some place different and hang out with friends.
Woodtick runs Fri., July 18 and Sat., July 19. Music starts Friday at 1 PM and at 11 AM Saturday. Pre-show yoga is Saturday at 9 AM @ Chaffin Creek Road in Darby. $35/$60. Visit woodtickfest.com for more info.
