Fame Scratches at the Door
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The 26-year-old native of Portland, Oregon, began his musical career as a drummer; he’s since become adept with electronics as well. He enrolled at Oberlin College in 1987 as a percussion major, but before long switched to a program called Technology in Music and Related Arts, and his interest in musique concrete and contemporary composition began to coalesce with his interest in punk rock. He played briefly with Cleveland’s My Dad Is Dead, but his membership in Bastro, led by Gastr del Sol’s David Grubbs, both tied him to Chicago and set in motion a permanent shift toward unconventional music.
McEntire left school before finishing in 1991 and moved to Chicago. Shortly thereafter Bastro morphed into Gastr, and he joined Gastr bassist Bundy Brown, drummer John Herndon, and bassist Doug McCombs in a peculiar guitarless project called Mosquito. After the discovery of a Jad Fair project by that name, the band was rechristened Tortoise. During Tortoise’s infancy McEntire returned to Oberlin to finish his degree, but couldn’t pass the required sight-singing test, and by the spring of 1993 he was back in town to stay.
John Hughes III, the 20-year-old son of the prolific teenpic auteur and the music supervisor for Reach the Rock, is an avid fan and sold first-time director Bill Ryan on McEntire’s work. In addition to hiring him (for an undisclosed sum) to compose an original score, Hughes approached Tortoise, the Sea and Cake, June of 44, Dianogah, and Chapel Hill’s Polvo–the sole non-Chicagoans involved in the project–to contribute original songs to the sound track, which will be released jointly through MCA and Hughes’s Hefty label, which has thus far issued a recording by his own quirky pop band, Bill Ding.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo of John McEntire by Brad Miller.
