The most important life lesson that a teenage Craig Wedren ever received may have been something that his voice teacher loved to repeat: “Take your bel canto and make it a can-belto!” Wedren, fortunately, was a born belter. A precocious middle-class kid from the Cleveland suburbs, he knew he wanted to be a rock star as soon as he discovered KISS. He sponged up the music his mom played in the car—Elton John, the Doors, Carole King, the Bee Gees—and internalized every lick of it. That knowledge served him well as a young teen: Cover bands were a central feature of middle-school social life in early-’80s Cleveland, and Wedren had both the repertoire and the voice for them.
He honed his falsetto by imitating vocalists like Freddy Mercury, Ozzy Osbourne, and Journey’s Steve Perry—stars who embodied the notoriously high registers of ’70s and ’80s rock radio. Singing into the Shure 58 he’d received for his bar mitzvah, and sharpening his vibrato to cut through the midrange, he learned to make himself heard over his eighth-grade bandmate’s Marshall half stack. They called themselves the Immoral Minority and played at being new wavers—a video shot by Wedren’s childhood friend David Wain, future director of Wet Hot American Summer, captures the 13-year-old singer in all his budding New Romantic splendor—although in Cleveland at the time, there wasn’t really any difference between underground and commercial, cool and uncool. The Bee Gees and the Germs, Def Leppard and Dead Kennedys—they all swirled together in the local teens’ tape decks, their only common denominator the big adolescent feelings they were capable of summoning.
That spirit of openness, combined with his teacher’s technical advice, fatefully shaped young Wedren’s voice and vision, planting the seeds that would yield Shudder to Think, one of the strangest and most distinctive bands ever to emerge from the cauldron of American hardcore punk—creators of the 1994 album Pony Express Record, perhaps the unlikeliest masterpiece of the post-Nevermind major-label alt-rock signing frenzy.
In 1985, when 16-year-old Wedren moved to Washington, D.C. to live with his dad, kids from coast to coast were shaving their heads, shouting choruses, jumping off stages, and figuring out the bare minimum number of chords necessary for a 90-second juggernaut masquerading as a song. A loosely connected network of scenes was coalescing around the nascent American form called hardcore, and the nation’s capital was one of its major hubs, thanks to bands like Minor Threat, the Faith, Void, Government Issue, et al. At the center of the action was Dischord, the staunchly independent, fiercely idealistic record label helmed by Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye.
Inspired by the example MacKaye and his acolytes set, teenagers assembling at venues like the 9:30 Club and DC Space—not to mention VFW and Grange halls across the region—were realizing that anyone could be in a band; why shouldn’t they? One of those kids was high-schooler Stuart Hill, who taught himself electric bass and cobbled together a group called Stüge. He recruited one bandmate, guitarist Chris Matthews, from Bob’s Famous Ice Cream in Glover Park, where they both worked. (The pipeline from ice-cream scooper to hardcore shredder was a popular career path in ’80s D.C.) Their drummer, Mike Russell, was a university grad with a day job in engineering. When Stüge’s singer left for college, Matthews’ girlfriend suggested that they talk to a new kid from her high school who’d just been kicked out of his band and was desperate to find someone to play with: Craig Wedren.
It was an inauspicious audition. In preparation for the gig, Matthews’ girlfriend had passed Wedren a tape of the band, but Stüge’s approach—Wedren would later describe it as “boom bap boom bap boom bap D.C. hardcore with shouting and vaguely political lyrical content”—couldn’t have been further from his own melodic instincts. “We had Craig come over and we played for him and he totally hated our music,” Hill recalled in a 2015 oral history. But the uneasiness was mutual, he added: “Actually, I didn’t like his vocals at all. He freaked me out when he started singing.” Still, Wedren was bored and lonely, and Stüge apparently didn’t have any better options on the table. “They didn’t like me, I didn’t like them,” recalled Wedren, “but by the end of the rehearsal I was the singer in the band anyways.”
Somehow, something clicked. “There’s just something about putting my vocal style on top of this music that turned it into something else,” Wedren recalled. Constitutionally incapable of shouting out the songs like the band’s old singer, he began finding new ways to attack the lyrics—stranger melodies, odder phrasings, slinkier ways of projecting. In their 1987 demos, you can hear Wedren feeling his way across the contours of the music like a vine seeking purchase on a mottled brick surface: The chugging guitars and double-barreled snare rolls are bog-standard hardcore with a touch of metal thrown in, but instead of barking or screaming, Wedren mercurially pleads, warbles, keens, shrieks, and purrs, theatrical in a way that was unheard of for hardcore frontmen at the time.
Perhaps it was Wedren’s idiosyncratic vocal style that sparked some latent spirit of iconoclasm in his bandmates. As they contemplated their future on a rehearsal commute one day, Russell winced behind the steering wheel: “I shudder to think we’ll be just another boom-bap hardcore band.” For Wedren, it was a eureka moment: They’d been contemplating a name change for their first official gig. Now they had one.
By 1987, the harder-faster-louder ethos of D.C. hardcore had morphed into something more unpredictable, searching, and rhapsodic. Bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace had twisted hardcore’s sturdy steel girders into undulating shapes, eking expressionist forms out of brutalist materials. The nascent Shudder to Think fit loosely into this mold of what was becoming known—with extreme reluctance on the part of the style’s originators—as emotional hardcore, emocore, or simply emo. Their debut 7", It Was Arson, and LP, Curses, Spells, Voodoo, Mooses—both released in 1988 on Amanda MacKaye and Eli Janney’s Sammich label, a kind of younger sibling to Amanda’s brother Ian’s Dischord—paired hardcore’s muscled churn with yearning bass melodies, lightning-bolt zigs and zags, and Wedren’s garment-rending croon, often multi-tracked and closely harmonized in a way that suggested that all that emotion was too much for the tape to handle.
Shudder to Think joined Dischord proper with 1990’s Ten Spot, an even more ambitiously idiosyncratic showcase of the band’s evolving melodic sensibility and Wedren’s increasingly angelic coo. (Sadly, it was also marred by tinny, two-dimensional production, as though someone had decided to lock all that longing in a lead box.) The band was now officially part of D.C.’s inner circle. But even within a punk scene where individuality was notionally a badge of pride, they felt like misfits.
“People really didn’t like us at first,” Wedren said. “They didn’t get it.” It didn’t help that Shudder to Think were playing opening slots for far more traditional hardcore bands (their first cross-country tour was with Canadian punks SNFU) whose audiences could be knuckleheaded at best. Flying projectiles—bottles, coins, batteries—frequently hurled from the crowd, along with homophobic epithets directed at Wedren, whose style of dressing could be as gender-ambiguous as his voice. (The missiles would continue well into the band’s major-label years; Wedren got hit with a bottle at Lollapalooza 1994, and the meathead crowds when they toured with Foo Fighters could be just as hostile.)
“We were kind of shoehorning ourselves into something we didn’t really fit into,” Hill would later recall. “A lot of people had an expectation with Dischord records, and we just did not fit that mold.”
“At the time, there was this sort of leaden stigma attached to D.C. hardcore,” Wedren said. Especially outside the city, “people’s perception of D.C. hardcore was very narrow and very conservative, and that was difficult for us. We were always trying to shed that and to convince people or prove that we were something else.”
What most set the band apart from its D.C. peers was its apolitical identity. Leftist politics and a communal ethos had become central tenets in the Dischord world. In 1985, a group of D.C. scenesters had staged a “punk percussion protest” at the South African Embassy—the first action in what Fire Party’s Amy Pickering had dubbed Revolution Summer, an attempt to wrest the hardcore scene from the violence and misogyny that was threatening to destroy it, as legions of thrill-seeking male newcomers flooded the pit at shows. That same year, Mark Andersen and Kevin Mattson founded the activist collective Positive Force DC with the intention of redirecting hardcore punk’s creative energies toward social justice and political change. But, aside from Wedren’s tendency to unintentionally draw out the worst in the scene’s most homophobic members, Shudder to Think were largely apolitical. That was especially true of Wedren’s cryptic lyrics.
“That was a straight-up ‘fuck that’ choice on my part,” Wedren told Anti-Matter zine of his lyrical approach in 1995. “Fuck the big messages. Big messages make small music. … I honestly don’t give a fuck about most singers’ opinions about politics. I’m inundated with political information. I don’t need to hear knee-jerk left-wing responses by punk-rock has-beens.”
Wedren’s lyrics were the opposite of knee-jerk—they were head-spinning, running from nonsensical (“The moon bakes all my dough/Who buys it, I don’t know/The bread they make there/Tastes like thin air”) to free-associative (“Cockroaches on the clocks and the cuckoos are all Jewish/I’m naked except for the plaid patch you’re stitching into my groin”) to whatever you’d call the self-indulgent surrealism that closed 1991’s Funeral at the Movies, setting dream-journal spoken-word against the repeated exhortation, “Ride that sexy horse, ride that sexy horse.” While other hardcore singers were focusing their agitprop, Wedren was taking experimental theater courses at NYU, listening to John Coltrane, and reading John Cage, discovering an off-balance world of “delicious discomfort.” (There was also a fair amount of acid involved, he’d later admit.)
By 1992’s Get Your Goat, he and his bandmates were doing everything they could to delight and discomfit in equal measure. The band’s playing on the record is virtuosic, at least by hardcore standards, full of dazzlingly complex time signatures and counterintuitive feints. The songs are colored whirlwinds striking wild poses, like columns of smoke caught beneath strobe lights. Wedren changes forms like a Greek god, shifting on a dime from operatic powerhouse to muttering conspirator to mournful sylph. If Shudder to Think had broken up after 1992, they would likely be remembered today as the authors of one of Dischord’s greatest, most improbable triumphs. But they had bigger things in store.
After three albums for Dischord, they’d lasted longer than most of their peers, and they felt like they were outgrowing D.C. scene politics. Russell and Matthews had both gotten tired of van life and quit the band, replaced by Jawbox drummer Adam Wade and former Swiz bassist Nathan Larson. Wedren and the band didn’t want to be scrappy indie heroes, or big fish in a small, insular pond. “Our aspirations were not to be like Pavement,” he told Pitchfork in 2008; “they were to be like the Cars or Van Halen or Duran Duran.”
There was no time like the early 1990s to try to make that happen; the recent success of Nirvana’s Nevermind had major labels on the prowl for potential crossover jackpots. And Shudder to Think had some powerful fans in their court. One was the Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha; Shudder opened for the group on a run of dates in 1993. Another was Eddie Vedder, who tipped off Michael Goldstone, the A&R exec who had signed Pearl Jam to Epic. Goldstone knew a thing or two about unconventional, uncompromising alt-rockers, having also signed Rage Against the Machine. He offered Shudder to Think a two-album deal, with the option for up to six more LPs.
Whether you were a day-one fan who’d been following the band since its first releases or a newcomer enticed by Epic’s marketing spend at Tower, the first time you heard Pony Express Record probably came as a cosmic rug-pull. It is bigger and stranger than anything Shudder to Think had yet recorded, by several orders of magnitude. It slips sneakily between known forms and swaggers with cock-rock abandon, an avant-garde behemoth in hair-metal spandex; Gastr del Sol masquerading as Def Leppard, or vice versa—Van Halen getting their rocks off as Slint.
