Doug Martsch, the leader of Built to Spill, is a visionary with vision problems. Just as he was preparing to hit the road to support “You in Reverse,” the group’s first album in five years, he had to undergo emergency surgery for a detached retina. Martsch hadn’t even noticed he was losing his sight in one eye until it was almost lost for good.
“My eye had been messed up for a long time. I already had blurred vision from a wrinkled retina,” he says. “I didn’t notice the point when it got worse until my vision disappeared.”
At the moment, he’s halfway through 12 weeks of recovery.
“It’s still pretty messed up,” says the bearded songwriter. “I’m wearing an eye patch because I have some vision in my eye but it’s way off. So it’s awkward.”
The new album is out Tuesday, and since the tour won’t begin until June (it hits New York in October), Martsch can enjoy his favorite pastime – NBA hoops – from the comfort of his home in Boise, Idaho, instead of searching for post-show sports bars.
Martsch is admittedly obsessed with basketball – he once named an album after a Lithuanian player on the Portland Trail Blazers, the now-retired Arvydas Sabonis.
And local BTS fans may remember a show at Irving Plaza where, near the end of an epic guitar jam on Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” Martsch placed his guitar against an amp for feedback, then picked up his backpack and quietly walked off the stage, leaving the band to play on. The crowd awaited his return, but Martsch never came back. It all felt quite arty, but in fact it was all about hoops.
“I had to hurry back and see the Blazers in the playoffs,” he says. (For the record, Martsch is now a Pistons fan, having shifted his allegiance after Blazer Rasheed Wallace landed in Detroit in 2004.)
Martsch walked away from the band in a more significant way soon after, taking an 18-month hiatus after touring for the 2001 disc “Ancient Melodies of the Future.”
The break seems badly needed.
“I was tired of Built to Spill and its music,” says Martsch, who founded the band in Boise in 1992. “I didn’t want to hear ‘my’ kind of music again.”
Instead, he released a blues album and went on an acoustic solo tour where he played blues songs, covers and solo versions of BTS songs.
When the band – Martsch, bassist Brett Nelson, drummer Scott Pouf and new guitarist Jim Roth – got together three years ago to start “jamming, touring and writing songs,” the sound didn’t change much, but the process did.
Martsch formed BTS on the premise that he’d write all the songs and have a band of revolving musicians – the same way Conor Oberst is Bright Eyes. For this album, however, a lot of the songs include parts the band wrote together during jam sessions, making “You in Reverse” a much more collaborative effort than previous BTS records.
And the songs on the disc, which Martsch initially planned to record live, are much more stripped down than usual, without a lot of overdubbing or effects.
After all that soul-searching, however, Martsch admits, “I don’t know if the sound changed.”
Which is probably is a relief to their fans.