—from "Hollywood," by Bertolt Brecht
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By the fall of 1992, Mary’s Danish had entered the zone — the catbird seat of breakthrough beginnings, the fantasy scenario that makes students at the Musicians’ Institute of Technology drool off into space. They had recorded and sold 55,000 units of their second album, Circa, then, only three months after its release, were rushed back into the studio to record American Standard (for which they received an additional $250,000 advance). They were packing shows, indulging in the delicious mischief of backstage parties, speeding out of town in a souped-up tour bus. They were reeling with thanks as David Letterman’s Thanksgiving band, patted on the back by Jay Leno after a hometown performance with friends and family hooting loud, and they were inches away from landing the feather-in-the-cap of all American bookings, Saturday Night Live.
In Rolling Stone and the L.A. Times, they were hailed as L.A.’s "great white hope." The Weekly urged readers to attend a series of shows at the Troubadour "guaranteed to blow the minds of all lucky audience members," and the now defunct Village View put them on the cover with the headline "GREAT DANISH: Don’t Tell Mary’s Danish They’re ‘The Next Big Thing’ — They’d Rather Forge a Lasting Career." When bassist Wagner needed a costly hip operation, a benefit concert for him at the Hollywood Palladium featuring the Beastie Boys, Thelonious Monster, the Chili Peppers and Roseanne Barr brought in $70,000. "It was staggering," says Gretchen. "You’re like, holy shit, how great! We had worked so hard — rehearsing five to six days a week — because we really wanted it to work. And now it was."
They were on the road in the Southwest when they got the dream call: Jane’s Addiction, one of Gretchen’s favorite bands, needed an opener for a short tour. Immediately, they interrupted their headlining tour and flew to St. Louis. They played through frazzled nerves to a packed house, managing the rare feat of getting the audience to temporarily forget the band they had paid to see perform, meeting backstage afterward to compare ecstatic notes — the center floor suddenly combusted into a swirling mosh that had hands clapping and cupping bodies, suggesting to Mary’s Danish that soon lighters would be sparked in a wave of authentic support. When Jane’s Addiction went on, Gretchen slipped to the side of the stage — as she would every night of the tour — studying, admiring, feeling the chills of all-access privilege, the close-range fantasy of this all being hers. "At that moment it was this overwhelming ‘Oh my god, this is great, this is what it’s like to be really successful and really happy doing what you dreamed.’ I couldn’t have been happier. I thought, yes, this is exactly how I imagined it."
But weeks later, back on their own tour, they arrived in Baltimore to find the club plastered with posters of only the opening act, a band with the ironically ominous-sounding name of Failure. In fact, Morgan Creek had sent nothing ahead to the club. Maybe Baltimore wasn’t on the label’s list, the band reasoned, or maybe a new batch of posters had been held up at the printer. And what’s a rock tour without fuckups, anyway?
Columbus, Ohio, was harder to dismiss. They were met by the same label field representative from Baltimore who said he would follow them across half the country in a rental car. On their previous tour, there had been a different tour rep in each town who had a special rapport with each local club and radio station. Now they had a guy fumbling with maps, promising them he’d find the radio station in time, leading them cold to DJs who had never received their bio. And on several legs of the tour, claiming he couldn’t afford his rental, the rep had to hitch a ride in their bus. Gretchen began to have anxiety attacks in her bunk.
When the band reached Chicago, no one was there to meet them. "It didn’t matter that we were selling out theaters," she says, letting out a shaky exhale of bad memories. "We’d show up in a record store and there’d be no records. We were doing better and better, but there’d be no field representative, or if there was, we’d be like, ‘We’re starving, want to take us to dinner?’ And they’d be like, ‘Sorry, there’s no budget for that.’"
At the height of their success, a nasty faultline split through the estate of their good fortune: On one side, the resounding calls for encores; on the other, the nagging complaints of the label accountant that the band should just live off pizza. When they asked a field representative if he could find them a place to watch the rough cuts of their video — which the director had overnighted for their final approval — he told them to go down to Sam Goody’s and pretend they were testing a VCR. When they arrived at a record store to perform, they discovered that no one there was expecting them. Several radio stations were also surprised at their arrival, and had to rearrange airtime to fit them in. When the woman who ran their fan club ran out of photos and called Morgan Creek for more, she was told there would be no more printed. And each time the band called Morgan Creek in L.A., fewer and fewer of the people they knew and counted on were still employed. The remaining few hemmed and hawed. The greatest surprise came when the group was asked to open for the Stone Temple Pilots’ tour, and Morgan Creek refused to fund it. The label that had pledged to make Mary’s Danish its priority had clearly pulled the plug.
