‘Get Me Through It’ by The Purrs | New Live Collection, ‘We Thought There’d Be More People Here’
Exclusive video premiere of ‘Get Me Through It’, taken from the new live collection, ‘We Thought There’d Be More People Here’ by The Purrs.
The live album was recorded at venues in and around Seattle between 2002-2014.
Guitarist Jason Milne about ‘Get Me Through It’
The opening track, ‘Get Me Through It’, is droney-durge captured live at Patti Summers, April 14 2002. The venue was on the lower level at the Pike Place Market, owned and ran by Patti and her husband Gary. During the first three years of the band, we played Patti Summers at least once a month. I booked bands at the venue from 2000 to late 2003, so I was able to give a stage to many up-and-coming bands at the time and provide a stage to gig-swap with cool Portland bands. It wasn’t intended, but we created a small “scene”. We started to pack out the venue, but honestly people didn’t come purely for the music. It was “The Purrs after-show party” that became the draw. The booze-weed flowed, generating a comfortable raft to encourage 2am ingestion of mushrooms and/or molly (and/or other substances). To be clear, after most shows, we continue to almost-always hold an “after-show party”, but much tamer.
The Purrs have a timeless quality for lovers of rock as a mystery religion, the kind of venue-addicted musicians and fans who unite in worship of the car wreck lifestyle, transmitting heavy vibes both Medieval and futurist between psychedelic music and post-punk rock. Back when live music consumed your nights, they were Seattle’s best bet for a rigorous, relatable, trippy, dark yet comradely great time.
After recording several full-length albums — including the Johnny Sangster-produced pinnacle of soulful-punk ‘Destroy the Sun’ last time around — and a few EPs and singles under numerous independent labels, Milne came up with an idea for a necessary release in era of quarantine quandary, which he explains:
“Coming into 2020, the band’s 20th anniversary, we had been working on demos for the next new album. We had a string of shows scheduled in early April with Blue Glass to get the songs healthy exposure to being played live. And we had a week of studio time at Crackle+Pop to record primary tracks for the new album. We were hoping for a Fall release and were discussing NOT touring the West Coast, but tour Maui instead. We got burned on the last tour. But that’s another story.”
“COVID-19 hit,” Milne continues. “During the 2nd week I went through some boxes and found some random old live recordings. We know there is more, but we can’t find it. I thought it would be a good idea and put out a live album and new videos for our 20thanniversary rather than sit on our asses.”
Produced by Sangster and The Purrs, live albums are rarely as sensually intoxicating and filled with crepuscular verisimilitude as ‘We Thought There’d Be More People Here’, in which you can smell the neck of the pint-wielding giant in front of you and the sweat of the sweetest, deepest fans dancing perilously near your toes.
This is a band that has startled and seduced audiences who probably came to hear Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Pearl Jam, and Okkervil River (“I don’t think it does a band very much good to just play with those in your own genre,” Milne says), but left with fistfuls of Purrs CDs and seven inches from their merch table. Their evolution of 80s Paisley Pop into third psyche wave era sound rangers lit up audiences at Bumbershoot, CMJ, Voodoo, and other fests. The cave-shadow fire and black acid of those in-concert classics are in this cohesive, thrilling collection as well.
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