Eighteen months after suffering a stroke, the Portland indie legend returns in both Filthy Friends and The Minus 5
Scott McCaughey has made scores of records over the past 35 years – with his Seattle band, the Young Fresh Fellows; with his more recent Portland rock and folk collective, the Minus Five; as the “fifth member” of R.E.M.; and as a utility player for countless others, including M. Ward, Robyn Hitchcock, Wilco and The Monkees.
So it’s not unusual that McCaughey is spending the spring and summer of 2019 touring, recording and releasing music with at least five different bands: The Baseball Project, Buck/Arthur, The Minus 5, the Fellows, and Filthy Friends. What’s unusual is that the 64-year-old musician is doing that after spending most of 2018 recovering from a stroke – one that initially had doctors questioning whether McCaughey would ever sing or play again.
Instead, he began writing lyrics for the latest Minus 5 album, “Stroke Manor,” right there in a San Francisco intensive care unit. Later, back in Portland, McCaughey augmented his medically prescribed rehab and physical therapy with The Therapy Sessions, a series of shows at the Laurelthirst Pub in which he worked his way through his favorite Beatles and Neil Young songs, while also re-learning songs from his own catalog.
Originally a limited-edition release for Record Store Day in April, "Stroke Manor" gets its full release from Yep Roc Records on June 14. It’s a dark, exuberant and sometimes discomfiting album – psychedelic pop where the mind-altering weirdness is clinically, rather than pharmaceutically, derived, with lyrics that capture McCaughey’s hospital experience, even when he didn’t always know what he was writing. The title of the album’s first track, “Plascent Folk,” uses a word that doesn’t actually exist (“I think it’s a cross between ‘plangent’ and ‘nascent,” McCaughey says), while the album’s haunting closer, “Top Venom,” is built around clauses from a card stroke patients point to when they’re unable to speak (“I am short of breath/I am in pain ... When is this tube coming out?”).
This week, McCaughey also kicks off a monthlong tour with Filthy Friends, the band comprising Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, McCaughey, his Young Fresh Fellows bandmate Kurt Bloch, and The Baseball Project drummer Linda Pitmon.
FURTHER READING: Say hello to our Filthy Friends
Their second album, “Emerald Valley,” came out from Kill Rock Stars on May 3, with a (sold-out) release show at Mississippi Studios on May 11. On June 15, The Minus 5 play their own record release at Doug Fir, then hit the road for a national tour built around a slot opening for Wilco at their Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts. McCaughey and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy are longtime friends and collaborators; Tweedy plays on several of Stroke Manor’s songs, while a track on his latest solo album, “Let’s Go Rain,” includes this loving, if mysterious, verse:
Maybe you’re not a believer/Maybe you don’t have a choice
Or maybe it’s a fever that you haven’t caught yet/’Cause you haven’t met Scott McCaughey
Street Roots talked to McCaughey recently over coffee on Albina Avenue, and then again by phone.
November 15, 2017
McCaughey was on the road with Buck, Bloch and Pitmon, backing Alejandro Escovedo. The tour had just arrived in San Francisco. “It was probably three o’clock. Beautiful fucking day in San Francisco. Just gorgeous. I went out to walk to Cafe Trieste, which is an old beatnik Italian-like coffee shop in North Beach. I got about halfway, two-thirds of the way there, walking down the sidewalk, and all of a sudden something was going on. There was no pain or anything, but I just slowed down. I was like, man, I feel really weird. It felt like I was going to pass out.
“I grabbed onto a scaffolding that was in front of this building and I hung onto it for a while, thinking, I’ll just wait for this to pass. But it didn’t pass. Eventually, I lost all my feeling in my right side and I slid down, kind of half in the sidewalk, half in the street. Just lying there. I was like, man, I’m fucked.
“People were stepping over me, because it’s San Francisco: join the crowd, a guy down on the sidewalk! But finally a woman stopped and said, are you all right? She dialed 911, and another guy stopped, and they were kind of looking after me. The ambulance came really fast. I could hear them saying he must have had a seizure or something like that. I was trying to say something, but I couldn’t talk. But I was totally conscious this whole time. I remember getting thrown in the back of the ambulance and driving up the hills, looking out over beautiful San Francisco. Then when I got to the hospital, it started getting kind of fuzzy. I don’t really remember what happened after that. I’ve heard the stories, and I don’t really want to.”
Inside joke notwithstanding
At the hospital, they called the last person on McCaughey’s call log, who was Linda Pitmon. Except that’s not what her contact info said. “Her name in my phone is Miss Georgette Polycarp. Which is another story. So she got the call and somebody said, ‘Uh, Miss Georgette Polycarp?’
“And she’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah. What the fuck McCaughey?’ She thought it was me, harassing her. And they said, ‘Well, we found your number in this guy’s phone, and he’s in the hospital,’ and she was like, “Oh shit!” She found out where we were, and she and Peter came, and they got in touch with my wife, Mary.”
MRI
It was Peter Buck who insisted that the doctors check McCaughey for a possible stroke. “Yeah, but not until the next day. Because the doctor didn’t want to think I had a stroke. He thought I was just a drunk or a drug addict or whatever.
“The MRI was a big ordeal, because apparently I didn’t want to go into the tube. I was trying to get out, the whole thing, and Mary tried to hold me down. Eventually they finally got me in, and the guy was like, ‘Oh yeah, he had a stroke.’
“They were able to do this thing where they raised my blood pressure to an insanely high, dangerous level, to try to flush out the clot so they wouldn’t have to operate. And it worked, to keep as little of the brain dying as possible. They had to monitor me super-closely, because my blood pressure was up so high.
“After a day or two of that, I came back to where I could try to communicate a little bit. But I was really frustrated and messed up. I was saying what I thought was in my mind, but it wasn’t what was coming out of my mouth. And I was hearing things that weren’t what people were saying. Then they finally started writing stuff down: I could see it on visual, just my hearing and my speech were all fucked up. That was a breakthrough. They would write down whatever bullshit I’d said and I’d be like, ‘no, that’s not what I said!’”
Beatles forever
Buck put a guitar in his friend’s hands almost immediately. “Probably a day or two after I’d been in there. He brought it, set it on my lap and I put my hands on either an A minor or a D chord and I just realized, oh, I can remember how to play guitar! That was a real relief. I couldn’t play, but I remembered how to. I remembered where my fingers would go.
“Right away I started listening to music. Peter made an iPod playlist of all Beatles, like, hundreds of songs. I listened to that non-stop, which was amazing. Listening to the Beatles music – listening to all the music I was listening to – I feel like it was kind of the first time I’d heard them, since before my brain was different. It’s like certain songs I remember that I heard when I was on LSD. Like, I liked the song, but I never heard it at this level.
“I also started watching YouTube videos, seeing if I could maybe play a song. And after a couple of days I started scratching out words in my notebook, writing whatever came to my mind. The first song I wrote, it was called ‘Little Red’ in the notebook, but I ended up calling it ‘Beatles Forever.’ I didn’t know what I was writing, but it started talking about the Beatles somehow in some way.”
Thanks, Obama
As a self-employed working musician in the United States of America, McCaughey has sometimes had health insurance via his wife’s job, and other times not at all. Fortunately, at the time of the stroke, they had a policy through the ACA exchange. “So luckily, we were covered. Of course the bills were still insanely high, but enough of it was covered that it took the sting out of it a little bit. And then of course all the fundraisers and the concerts – everything really just saved my life, basically. If it had happened a couple of years ago, we would have been completely screwed.
“So I have to say thank God for Obamacare, you know? Or rather, thanks to the people who did this compromised half-assed version of health care, which really added up to something for me. And now they’re busy trying to get rid of it. So, fuck (Republican Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell. You can quote me on that as much as you want.”
Stroke Manor
Back in Portland, McCaughey began to turn all of those hospital words into an album, adding melodies, riffs and arrangements to lyrics he barely remembers writing, and couldn’t always make sense of. “Yeah. They’re weird. They’re hard. I don’t know how I’m going to sing them. I’m having trouble remembering any lyrics at all, including lyrics of songs I’ve sung my entire life, and that I’ve sung a hundred times in the last couple of years. But these new ones ... I don’t know if it’s a block in my mind, that I don’t want to remember them because of what they bring back to me, or if I just can’t remember them because they don’t make any sense! They just don’t want to be memorized. Especially by me.”
If I only had a brain
Another song on the album is called “Scar Crow.” “It was written when Peter and I were in the ICU and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ came on TV. It was like I was tripping on it. I knew exactly everything that was going to happen, but I was seeing it with different eyes. Now I look back and I can see a little bit of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (in the song), but a lot of it – I dunno what I was thinking. When I was writing those poems and words, I had ideas I wanted to say, but my brain wouldn’t let me.”
Musical therapy
In the hospital, McCaughey’s rehab and physical therapy was about regaining the use of his right side. Then came The Therapy Sessions. By last fall, he was out on tour with Buck/Arthur (Peter Buck’s band with singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur, also featuring Pitmon), and he’ll be on tour for most of the next three months. “I was amazed at how quickly it came back to me. But I’m not satisfied with my progress. I’m going to be putting it to test with Filthy Friends, a three-week tour, not much time off.
“But it’s The Minus 5 one that’s going to be harder, because singing puts a whole other tax on me. Remembering the words is really taxing. I want to get back to where I don’t have to think about the words so much, but maybe it’s always going to be like I’m reaching back and trying to find them. At least I can find some of them, which is great, because the first couple of months I couldn’t do anything. There were times where suddenly stuff would start popping in my head and I’d realize they’re still there somewhere. Even though there’s a part of my brain that is dead, there’s a way to get to those memories.
“I know maybe I’m being hard on myself. I should be just – I am – overjoyed that I can even get up on stage and pretend to play. I feel super, super, lucky. It could’ve been way worse, in any way you would want to think of that.”
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