Imagining that the members of the band Cotton Mather might be bitter and resentful isn't a stretch. The record deals they should have been offered never showed up, while DJs in the States refused to give their music airtime.
Despite Kontiki, the band's second release, being hailed as "the best album The Beatles never recorded" by the Guardian and championed by Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, the record just never gained a foothold.
Basically, as the band's frontman Robert Harrison put it, their experience in the music world was a "one-act tragedy of incompetence."
After one more record, the band broke up.
Somehow, though, the band wasn't bitter. They each went their own way, joining other bands, moving to different cities while Kontiki, the album that should have put them on the map, faded from memory and went out of print.
"It felt a little wrong, because we knew we were good," Harrison recalls. "We knew that we could do a lot more, but we knew we couldn't do it all by ourselves."
As time went on, Harrison continued getting questions about Kontiki and why they never released another album. Harrison remembers an incident that occurred when a couple of teenage girls he hired to clean his studio stumbled upon a vinyl copy of Kontiki. Impressed that Harrison had even heard of the album, which was one of their favorites, the musician says he had a "great little rock star moment" and told them he was in the band. While he says he didn't think they were too impressed, the incident did lead him to realize that people were still interested in the album, and really had no way of obtaining it except by ripping it online.
He was in the process of putting together a new studio and thought that re-releasing Kontiki with a few bonus tracks would be a good way to "get things going again."
"That's when it got interesting, because as I began listening to these tapes I got quite inspired by what we had done," Harrison remembers. "And I really started missing those guys."
He spent several months listening to old recordings the band had made, whittling it down to one full record of extras to release. After the album was compiled, Harrison took to Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website, to see if he could raise the $12,500 he estimated he needed to re-press the album. He called in favors from admitted Kontiki fans like Noel Gallagher and Britt Daniel of Spoon to phone in personal appeals to the public for money. He ended up raising a total of $17,107.
"We've been away for all this time, and when we come back there's a crowd, there's a big crowd...that's pretty cool," he says of the outpouring of support. Adding, with a laugh, "I don't really ask them where they were 10 years ago...I'm not asking, I don't want to scare them."
The decision was then made to release the album during the annual South by Southwest Festival in Austin and have the band fly in to do a reunion show, despite Harrison's admitted reservations about such shows.
"I'm very leery of reunions, because I think they tend to be kind of flat affairs...you get to see the guy who now works at Motorola who hasn't played his bass in 10 years and he's bald and it's kind of depressing....like I'd rather just have those nice little scrapbook memories of this band I used to see in the valor of their youth."
The show, though, was anything but "flat."
Harrison recalls thinking mid-performance: "Oh my God, we're better. It's better than it was."
Afterward, as the band hung out together, Harrison realized that he was not the only one that felt like the band had more to give with every member of the band voicing the same feeling of excitement.
What was meant to be a one-time album release has now become several shows around Austin, and a desire to work on a new album, while a band whose members live all around the world and a lack of underwriting is making that a little difficult.
"I'm certainly not going to put anything out unless it's really good...If we've got something good to say, we'll say it," Harrison says. "But we're not going to put out something that sounds...just like Kontiki but more wizened. I have no interest in trying to recreate that—that was a different time."
For now, though, Cotton Mather is just enjoying getting to play together and finally having a bit of the recognition they've always deserved.
