Eleventh Dream Day Gives Atlantic a Second Chance
Eleventh Dream Day’s new album, El Moodio, will be released next March on Atlantic. That’s surprising news, given the band’s history with the label. After its first two records, Beet and Lived to Tell, it looked like the band was going to leave Atlantic, and like Atlantic didn’t much care. But then circumstances changed.
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But sources say that the top echelons of the label didn’t understand the future of alternative music and never really backed up the department. After Eleventh Dream Day’s second album didn’t sell well (despite some very good reviews, notably from Greil Marcus in Artforum), corporate interest in the group waned. Redd Kross left the label, and the Lemonheads simply didn’t record. It didn’t help that label reps were rumored to have dismissed beloved Minneapolis rockers Soul Asylum (now on Columbia and moving up the charts) and–perhaps apocryphally–passed on Nirvana. (“It won’t sell,” an A and R man is supposed to have said.)
“We were planning on leaving,” admits Janet Beveridge Bean, Eleventh Dream Day’s drummer and, sometime singer and songwriter. “Between our first and second records things had changed: the same people weren’t there. We were just a band in the alternative department that no one had heard of.”
Next Big Thing tried to move the show, but some club owners balked and clubs that didn’t were the wrong size. “We support the Metropol’s owner,” says Tumpson. “We do 50 to 100 shows with him a year, and we understand his concerns. But we’re disappointed that this artist, who I personally feel is an important artist, isn’t playing here. I think he speaks from a culture that needs to be understood a little bit more.”
