Ears of Experience
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Rice had no intention of making a name in music when he moved to Chicago in the summer of 1988. “I came here to do visual art, not music,” he says. “I sold all of my records.” He’d studied political science and art off and on for several years at Ohio State University, but spent some of his most gratifying time there playing guitar in a primitive punk-rock band called Control and the Swans-like art-punk outfit IDF, which also featured future Nerves drummer Elliot Dicks, future Atavistic Records owner Kurt Kellison, and Kellison’s wife, filmmaker Paula Froehle. During his first year in Chicago, Rice mounted a show of paintings and several performance pieces. By the following year, however, he’d returned to music, forming a snotty punk band called Dog with fellow Columbus expats Dicks and Joaquin de la Puente (who still uses the name for various projects today).
Dog became the opening band of choice for other loud indie-rock acts. Rice befriended the movers and shakers of the early Wicker Park rock scene, including Precious Wax Drippings (with future Tortoise drummer John Herndon) and Friends of Betty (some of whom would go on to start Red Red Meat). When Red Red Meat drummer Brian Deck, who cofounded Idful studios with Brad Wood, pulled out of the business in 1992, Rice was offered an engineering position–even though his resume at the time consisted of one album for IDF and the first EP by Chicago punks Burnout. But he proved a quick study. “I was really interested in the physics of it,” he says. “It was a chance to get paid doing something related to music instead of banging nails or painting houses. I had an interest in the job as a career for a while–until I realized what it meant.”
When the recording was released, Bailey singled out Rice’s work for praise in the British avant music magazine the Wire. “Fast as fuck and really shifting,” he marveled. “The old jazzers reckon that the one thing you can’t do with machines is make ’em swing, but some guys can make ’em swing, and Casey Rice does.” Bailey and Rice were supposed to play together at the Empty Bottle in the summer of 1999, but scheduling conflicts arose, so when the guitarist learned that Rice would be at All Tomorrow’s Parties to do Tortoise’s sound, he suggested they try again there. “I was really surprised,” says Rice. “The guy remembered this one thing I did for like the 800th record he made.”
