Prelude to Home Is a Strange Place – Article from The Pitch

What: Short piece from The Pitch out of Kansas City about Paw’s efforts (and renunion) leading up to the release of Home Is A Strange Place

When: May 11, 2000

Around Hear

May 11, 2000 

By Robert Bishop

Jim Strahm medical fundraiser number two takes place this Saturday, May 13, with a star-studded lineup at the City Market, featuring Southern Culture on the Skids, Alejandro Escovedo, Parlay, a reunited Billy Goat, and an acoustic set from Paw. For more proof of Midwestern Music mainstay Strahm’s historic involvement in the scene, Paw’s Grant Fitch offers this brief but telling recollection: “I bought one of my first guitars from him.”

I like girls who wear Hennessey and Fitch
Speaking of Paw, original vocalist Mark Hennessey is back in the fold after a brief hiatus during which Season to Risk’s Steven Tulipana took his place. Now, however, Lawrence’s legendary Paw is gearing up for a new release, the first collection of material in almost five years, and Fitch couldn’t be happier.

From Left: Mark Hennessy, Grant Fitch, and Jason Magierowski

“Mark and I fell in and out of love periodically over the last 11 years. It’s happened a couple of times too many, but we’re remarried and going to live happily ever after,” Fitch says, noting there was no ill will toward Tulipana that prompted him to take up with his former partner again. “I think when this record deal came around, it was clear that Mark and I had some unfinished business, and we’re excited to finish it together.”

That unfinished business will be released in August and is titled Home is a Strange Place. It’s actually been in the can for about two years now, dating back to when Paw was still affiliated with A&M, the label that released its first two records, Dragline and Death to Traitors. “We had originally recorded the tunes as demos, but A&M was on its way out at that point and the writing was definitely on the wall,” Fitch says of the days before it was released in the Great Label Massacre of early 1999. “We sort of held on to our guns, and another year passed, and another year came, and I started listening to them and I thought, ‘Man, these are really killer tunes, and the basics are really happening.’ So I set to work on finishing up the vocals and doing some overdubs, mixed it last spring, and then I started shopping it.”

Koch International was the label that ultimately picked up the record, which, oddly, makes Paw labelmates with the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA. “Michael Koch is no dummy,” Fitch says. “He’s wanting to do hardcore urban, and he’s wanting to do hard rock, and he doesn’t want to mince words about what’s in the middle. He doesn’t really want the alternative, and he doesn’t necessarily want folk. They’re trying to get a vibe going like in the Def American days, where they had Rick Rubin working with Beastie Boys and Run-DMC, and then he’d work with Slayer — sort of all over the place, but very meticulously all over the place.”

Fitch says he’s fairly certain that the outlook is good (even though the band is still on the lookout for a permanent drummer), especially compared with the shoddy treatment Paw got at the hands of its former label. “Mark and I were in New York last week for some label meetings and a photo shoot, and it was kind of weird. We went into the perfunctory roundtable boardroom with the president of the label and the head of A&R, and they hashed it out. They put the CD on and talked about the single, and they talked about their plan,” he recalls. “It was supposed to come out in July, and I think kind of all at once everybody looked at each other and said, ‘We really need to make this work; let’s push it to August.’ If I had been 20, I probably would have pounded my fist and said, ‘No, dammit, we want our record out.’ But being 32 and coming up on 12 years in this, I was very happy to hear them say, ‘We want to really set this up.’ It made me feel good about the label; they’re really thinking about it.”

Home is a Strange Place isn’t the only Paw record Koch will be serving up. The label has given the green light for Paw to start working on some brand new stuff and is going to re-release Death to Traitors, which didn’t get much of a chance on its initial entry into stores. “My running joke is if you listened hard enough, you could almost hear the record not coming out. The record came out in the beginning of August ’95 and … all the posters and flats and stuff weren’t even printed until September. It was clearly a label that was on its way down,” he explains. “When Dragline came out, A&M was on the upswing of Soundgarden, Sheryl Crow, Gin Blossoms, Sting — a lot of success. I think the powers that be all watched their personal stock go through the ceiling, and they one by one sort of filtered away. By the time the second came out, we were working with the B crew — a lot of people who really didn’t know how to work a record label, and a lot of people who shouldn’t have had jobs there in the first place.”

That’s all water under the bridge now, though, and Fitch says that he’s mellowed out a bit and is trying to stay focused on what’s important. “I used to be really hands-on, and some would even say a control freak, but I swear to you I just don’t care anymore. You can sit up all night and worry about what the label’s going to do to your single, you can read through 15 treatments for a video, you can kick and scream about where they’re going to place your ads, and you know what? It doesn’t matter at all. They’re either into it or they’re not,” he says. “It sounds very un-indie, but at this stage in my life, I’ve got a lot of other stuff going on. It’s okay for me to say, ‘Okay, I want to write great rock and roll songs, I want to be heavily involved in the production of those songs, I want to make sure the artwork is representative of where we’re at’ and other than that, just let people deal with their jobs, and hopefully they’ll do them right.”

With that said, Fitch is still thankful to get a do-over. “I feel very lucky that Mark and I have another chance to not only work together but to make another record,” he says. “It’s interesting to get together and to be writing again and playing again and looking at each other like, ‘This is really still a vital partnership, this is going to be good.'”