Aneurysm rock
Stevie Chick on Scarce's rocky road
Chick Graning knows about luck. The Knoxville-born singer-guitarist spent the late 1980s as a member of alt-rockers Anastasia Screamed, whom he met by chance on a bus shortly after moving to Boston. When that group ran aground, he moved to nearby Providence, Rhode Island, and formed Scarce, named after a Knoxville girl who had drunkenly driven her car off a cliff, almost killing her passenger - Graning himself.
One of the finest groups to surface during the post-Nirvana gold rush for underground American guitar-rock, Scarce seduced with venomously melodic riffing, tenderly bruised lyricism, and the boy-girl vocal interplay of Graning and bassist Joyce Raskin. Fresh off a successful European tour supporting Hole, Scarce retreated to Providence in summer 1995 and prepared for the release of their darkly brilliant debut album, Deadsexy.
"And that's when I had the aneurysm," remembers Graning, matter of factly.
Scarce had been due to rehearse on June 12 1995. But when Graning didn't show up and failed to answer a number of increasingly panicked phonecalls from Raskin, she drove to his apartment with drummer Joe Propatier (who'd joined only two days previously), and found her bandmate lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood.
"I woke up in hospital 18 days later," Graning says. "The nurses said I had an AVM, an arteriovenous malformation. It's congenital - a vein and an artery in the brain share a common wall, and when that goes, generally, you die. I was lucky to be found when I was having the aneurysm; Joe and Joyce saved my life."
Scarce's label, A&M, postponed Deadsexy's release until a year later, scuppering the momentum they'd already built. Raskin and Propatier rallied around Graning, performing acoustic gigs and arranging benefit shows to buy him a computer. In the meantime, the recovering Graning discovered the aneurysm had scrubbed his lyrics from his memory, so he relearned them all from the album sleeve.
Six months after the AVM, Scarce were back on the road. "But I was kinda numb," sighs Graning. "I was an emotional flatline for a couple of years - that's what the brain stuff will do to you."
"When Chick came back," says Raskin, "everyone wanted to say 'Oh look, it's a miracle!' But nobody - myself included - remembered that he'd almost died, and maybe he needed some time off. The label wanted the album out as soon as possible. It was very hard, because Chick always made the group's decisions. All of a sudden, I had to grow up, and I couldn't handle the pressure. I was only 24! My best friend had almost died!"
The group split late in 1997, after a series of miserable tours "doing circles in the midwest, playing to no one". Graning spent the next 10 years pursuing a low-key solo career and working as a stagehand to make rent. Raskin suffered a breakdown and moved back home with her parents, where she began writing about her experience in Scarce and her struggles with self-confidence. Aching to Be, her emotional autobiography, was published last year.
"At first, the writing felt like vomiting," she laughs. "It made me ill to go through it all again. But once it was finished, I didn't feel desperate any more." Upon the book's completion, Raskin called Graning for the first time in several years "to apologise as much as anything else. And we picked up right where we left off."
Their friendship rekindled, Graning and Raskin have reformed Scarce with drummer Propatier, and have recorded a batch of songs every bit as hauntingly, brilliantly off-kilter as Deadsexy, which they intend to sell over the internet. It's a surprisingly happy ending for a group so cursed with bad luck.
"The disappointment of Scarce was something I had to chew on for a decade," admits Graning. "But what can you do when something like that happens? It's so awful that it's funny. Like Charlie Chaplin fallin' off a piano, out a window and bouncing off a buggy across the street-type funny. You can't give into self-pity. You just gotta keep on truckin'."
• Scarce play the Islington Academy, London, on Sat 18th Oct
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