Albums Not ‘Automatic’ for Jesus-Mary Chain

Normally when a rock band goes nearly three years without a new album, there’s a tangible reason for the delay: label problems, personnel changes, perhaps a timeout to allow for solo projects.

Not so with the Jesus and Mary Chain, whose long-awaited follow-up to 1987’s “Darklands,” the critically acclaimed “Automatic,” finally came out last Halloween.

They just took their sweet time.

“That’s how long it took us to make this record,” said Jim Reid, the co-leader--with brother William--of the dark, emotionally charged British rock group that will appear tonight at the California Theater downtown.

“And, instead of worrying why it took so long, it worries me more that other people do it so quickly,” he said. “In the music business, 99% of the bands release an album every year, and that makes me feel suspicious.

“It’s impossible that they can sustain the same songwriting rate over such a short period of time, and that raises suspicions that they just release albums to make money. I think everyone should take more time; it would be a lot more healthy.”

Indeed, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s new album--so long in the making--was well worth the wait, Reid unabashedly maintains.

“I don’t mean to be big-headed when I say it’s better than anybody else’s. All I’m saying is it’s better than anybody else’s to my taste,” he said. “And that’s because we took the time to do something different, just as we’ve tried to do with all our albums.

“There’s no point in repeating yourself. I mean, if the Beatles had done 15 albums exactly like their first, we never would have had a ‘Sergeant Pepper’s’ or a ‘White Album.’

“Bands should be encouraged to make something new. Every album should be different than the one before it--it should perfectly suit your own taste, it should completely satisfy you--and sometimes that takes a little extra time.”

This perfectionism, this desire to constantly outdo themselves, is understandable, given the pressure the Jesus and Mary Chain felt after the release of their brilliant 1985 debut. “Psychocandy” was hailed as a musical masterpiece, a compelling mix of beautiful melodies, melancholy themes and brutal guitar feedback.

Several times in the British rock press it was even suggested that the group should split up because they’d never be able to come up with another record anywhere near that good.

So, when it came time to cut a second album, the band approached the studio with a fair amount of trepidation.

“It was real scary, because everybody was either saying we couldn’t or we shouldn’t,” Reid recalled. “It was a nervous time; the band hadn’t been together that long, and to be faced with that kind of pressure was unnerving.

“So, when we started working on the second album, we purposely set out to make it different than ‘Psychocandy.’ And, in retrospect, maybe we made it too different--you should always go into the studio with an idea of how an album should be, not how it shouldn’t be, and that’s the mistake we made.”

“Darklands” certainly is different, with a lot more polish--and a lot less feedback--than “Psychocandy.” The brothers Reid subsequently toured the United States, Europe, Australia and even Russia, all the while writing songs and rethinking their musical direction once again. In 1988 Warner Brothers Records released an album of odds and ends, “Barbed Wire Kisses,” that, despite its haphazard assembly, wound up on several critics’ Top 10 lists that year.

The band finally returned to the studio last summer, and the result is “Automatic,” which many critics consider their best yet. Wrote one: “The Jesus and Mary Chain still works the same few rock archetypes--blues, Velvet Underground two-chord rise and fall, Stooges’ grunge riffs, Ramones’ bubble-gum punk--and this time, the Reids really make it sing and surge and soar.”

“With ‘Automatic,’ we were a lot more confident,” Reid said. “We had gotten over the hard part, and what we tried to do was get back into the raw, energetic sound we had on ‘Psychocandy,’ but not in the same way.”

Jim and William Reid were born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland. “Our father worked in a factory and is now unemployed,” Jim Reid said, “and our mother worked in a fish-and-chips shop.”

While growing up, he said, he and his brother “listened to all the glam stuff, T-Rex and Slade, and then when punk rock came along, that had the most impact on us.”

“The thing that always stayed with me,” he added, “was the whole punk idea that anybody could make a record if they really wanted to, even if they weren’t musicians.

“So, when we were still in our teens, we began making experimental music and cutting demos. We used to use an echo box, hit things with a hammer, use some obscene words and add a synthesizer drone.

“It took us a long while to realize that that wasn’t going to pay. If we were going to make our mark, we were going to have to write songs.”

Still, the brothers Reid didn’t begin writing songs until after they had finished high school.

“We were bored and (unemployed), and when you’re in that situation you either force your way out or you go under,” Reid said. “And, in our case, our way out was through music.

“In the beginning, we merely wanted to entertain ourselves, to make the best of a bad situation. We had no idea we could actually make money at it.”

But make money they did, moving to London in the early 1980s and immersing themselves in the pub scene. On the strength of an independently released single, “Upside Down,” they landed a recording contract with Britain’s feisty Blanco y Negro Records in early 1985.

And, after scoring several U.K. chart hits that summer, they cut “Psychocandy,” which by year’s end had been released in the United States.