1 Oct 2026
Mercury Rev’s Grasshopper on conquering Europe – while remaining strangers at home.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit tonyfletcher.substack.com (https://tonyfletcher.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7)
Welcome back to the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (https://substack.com/@danepstein) (the “Yank”) and Tony Fletcher (https://substack.com/@tonyfletcher) (the “Limey”) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond. Dan had an enforced absence for this episode; fortunately, we had already arranged for a first ever special guest to join us in the studio.
Mercury Rev formed in the late 1980s around the State University in Buffalo, on the northern edges of New York State, after Grasshopper, a local resident and guitarist/clarinetist/saxophonist, met burgeoning singer and guitarist Jonathan Donahue, who had been born downstate in Kingston Hospital. The group’s early 1990s albums Yerself Is Steam and Boces were celebrated for drug-influenced freakout abandon, gaining the group a foothold in the UK due to the act’s successful hunt for a label there.
However, following a major line-up change that trimmed Mercury Rev down to a permanent core of Donahue and Mackowiak, their 1995 album See You On The Other Side, for all that it was more composed and musical, highlighting Donahue’s beautiful falsetto, failed to catch on during the UK’s manic Cool Brittania period, and American audiences continued to prove resistant to the group’s charms. As such, and despite landing a new deal with a new record label, V2 in England, the duo approached what would become their 1998 opus Deserter’s Songs as “a last-ditch effort.”
Instead, the album - which embraced an almost symphonic approach to arrangements while streamlining the group’s melodies, resulting in a dreamscape rock music with little by way of easy comparison - won instant accolades in the UK press, whose collective and individual critics’ charts Deserter’s Songs largely topped at the end of that year. Videos by Anton Corbijn helped solidify the group’s artistic appeal (see the Catskills-shot “guerilla video” for “Goddess on a Hiway” below), and consistent touring accompanied by equally ecstatic live reviews resulted in Deserter’s Songs going top 40 across Europe. Yet despite good press in the States and the presence on the album of The Band’s alumni Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, both Catskills residents at the time, Deserter’s Songs failed to connect widely in the States.
In this special episode, Grasshopper discusses all of the above and more: why the group got thrown off Lollapalooza 93 and a subsequent Dinosaur Jr. tour, the truth behind him supposedly checking into a monastery for five months, why the mass breakthrough of Deserter’s Songs in the UK proved such a surprise, the reasons for the belated US success of their 2019 album Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited, whether the Catskills are truly “cosmic,” and why the group never played in Kingston itself until a local festival appearance at the Old Dutch Church in 2022.
As always, the first 10 or so minutes of this episode are free for all to hear. But to listen to this episode in its entirety, along with all of our previous complete (https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/podcast)CROSSED CHANNELS episodes (https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/podcast), just sign up for a paid subscription to one of our Substacks — or, better yet, sign up for a paid subscription to both of them!
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Theme music is "Blue Diamond Fire" by Dan's musical project The Corinthian Columns (http://TheCorinthianColumns.bandcamp.com). (Tony's main musical project is The Dear Boys (http://thedearboys.bandcamp.com).)
