photos by Caitlin E. Curran
The sky was still pitch-black on Saturday morning—6:45 a.m., 51 degrees—when a school bus rumbled into a nearly empty parking lot near the baseball fields at East Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina. The ride from nearby Durham had been bumpy, which accentuated the jittery nerves of at least few on board. “I think they’re just trying to freak us out about how long 15 miles is, by driving us this real crazy way,” one runner said.
The passengers were here to run a 25K (15.5 miles) celebrating the 25th anniversary of North Carolina-based Merge Records. An early morning race that’s longer than a half marathon may seem like a very un-rock'n'roll way to fete a record label. “My first reaction was ‘Oh my god, no! We don’t need more to do this year,’” Merge co-founder and Superchunk bassist Laura Ballance said over decaf tea the day before the race. Earlier that week, Merge had announced the initial line-up of bands for its four-day 25th anniversary festival in July. Passes sold out in ten minutes.
“There’s a small contingent in our office who’ve taken up running,” Ballance said, “And the festival only appeals to specific people. We wanted to reach out to the local community.” Ballance, who is 46 and has cyan-hued hair, is clearly already a community fixture, saying hello or chatting with nearly everyone who passed through Scratch, the Durham cafe where our conversation took place.
And so, in November, Merge put the word out about the 25K. “It was classic Merge,” Ballance said. “We decide to do something, and it’s really last-minute.” Still, it worked: By the day before the race roughly 800 runners had signed up and more kept trickling in.
The 25K’s somewhat hastily-planned but undoubtable success is reminiscent of Merge’s founding, which was recalled in loving detail in Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the 2009 book Ballance co-wrote with Merge co-founder/Superchunk bandmate Mac McCaughan and writer John Cook. On a cross-country road trip in the summer of 1989, a friend of Ballance and McCaughan’s took them to see the Sub Pop offices, meet founders Bruce Pavitt and Jon Poneman, and attend the label’s first Lamefest, where Nirvana opened for Mudhoney. On the drive back to North Carolina, Ballance and McCaughan decided they should start their own label.
“It helped that we didn’t have grand ambitions,” Ballance said. “If someone started a label now, their goals would be different.”
Over a beer at the 25K after-party at Motorco, McCaughan agreed that starting a Merge-esque label in 2014 would be difficult. “People are so inundated with all forms of media, not just music," he said. "You’re vying for people’s mental bandwidth.”
The secret of Merge’s ability to get inundated media consumers’ attention (and sustain it) has been the same since the beginning. “We’ve always put out records that we like, without thinking ‘Will people like this?’” Ballance says. Their influence as tastemakers is clear even from the handful of Merge artists I surveyed.
“They love music,” David Kilgour of the Clean told me via email. “That may sound funny, but I’ve met a lot of ‘industry’ types who don’t give two shits about music.”
“They really changed how I thought about music,” Mikal Cronin said, also via email. “They do it all right: Find great bands, keep the business side low-key and transparent, be one-hundred percent artist friendly, and on top of that they've built the reputation and respect to get shit done in a big way.”
The finish-line party took over a block-long stretch of Rigsbee Avenue, in the Central Park district of Durham. Runners and partygoers sipped bacon-topped Bloody Marys and ate breakfast tacos, coconut ice cream with Girl Scout cookies, and food truck pizza. Kids of all ages, some of them in bright pink hearing protector earmuffs, watched bands play at Motorco.
The line-up was distinctly Merge in its diversity. The Bouncing Bulldogs (“an international rope skipping demonstration team,” according to their website) drew an enthusiastic crowd in the middle of the street. On stage at Motorco, Vertical Scratchers (who just released their debut on the label) played fast, aggressive power pop, reminiscent at times of both Wire and early Weezer. Opening the night was Cosmic Punk, a pop-rock trio fronted by Elayna Madden, a 17-year-old graduate of Girls Rock North Carolina with cool vintage glasses and a metallic blue guitar. In a song called “What Now?” Madden sang, “You don’t like me, but that’s OK/ I’m much cooler than you, anyway.”
The after-party felt like a look into the future of the label. Earlier in the week, Ballance had admitted to me that even during the label's 15th anniversary—after the musical triumphs of Merge bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, the Magnetic Fields, and Spoon, and just as the newly-signed Arcade Fire was beginning to drum up buzz—she could only marvel at the label’s longevity. “At 15 I was like, wow,” she told me. “Now I think it’s going to keep going on forever.”