There's a website called
Leon's Temple that archives music made by Kalamazoo bands in the high old college/alternative rock days. There were a shitload of bands in Kalamazoo then, especially in the confusing post-Nevermind period, and everyone was sort of high on the idea that our town would be the next scene to blow up big, like Chapel Hill or Seattle. Sort of delusional, sure, but there was even a NY label called Grass Records that started signing Kalamazoo bands in the hope that something would stick and it would be a hot scene. Rollinghead, Doxie and twitch were the names of these bands.
twitch was eventually signed to RCA--the brass ring!--and I remember some fuckhead record label guy got quoted in the local papers saying he was gonna put them on the cover of Spin--but they got dropped a while later in favor of the Verve Pipe (at least I think that's how it went down) who scored a big hit later on with a song they'd been playing around Kalamazoo for five or six years. That song was called "The Freshman" and the first time I heard a version of it the first George Bush was president.
Anyway, the point of all this is that now on Leon's Temple there's a page for my old band Fletcher, with a long bio and the four songs from our one and only 7-inch. The Judy Lumpers--Vim Sweeney's band in my novel--is based mostly on Fletcher with a little bit of my high school band Brainstorm thrown in. It is with a certain swallowing of personal pride that I link to these songs. On the one hand I think they hold up pretty good. I mean I know I was no Conor Oberst-style prodigy but . . . On the other hand I was 20 when we wrote and recorded these songs and that's a fucking long time ago now. So what I'm saying is please find it in your hearts to be kind.
At the time of these songs, 1995, Fletcher was a vehicle for our Jawbreaker obsession. We were all really into that band and their best album (24 Hour Revenge Therapy) had come out the year before. If you've ever spent much time listening to Jawbreaker, this will be clear, especially in the octave breakdown of the second song "Sheep."
"Sheep" was about this time I went to New York and visited a girl I was really obsessed with. I felt sort of weird because she and all her friends were really political and talking about how they hated the pigs and stuff but I felt sort of out of it, like a bland midwestern guy hanging out with these young radicals. And the girl told me I was too negative and slipping into an existential rot (her words) and that I should try and live. Plus she was gay but we ended up making out anyway and it was like a moment out of time, like 1992, which is when I met her and became obsessed. I was only there for three days so at the end I'm singing "it was pretty fun, it was neat, three days."
"Teenage Keg Party" was about this time when I was a senior in high school when my best friend Weston and I took acid and drove around in a blizzard and ended up at this party way out on Gull Lake. We walked through the party and obviously everything looked strange to us in our drugged-out minds. The first line "when will this begin?" is about waiting and waiting for the acid to kick in, "if it hasn't killed us yet it won't kill us to take another," i was always scared i'd take too much acid and die, "this party has done me in but don't drive me home yet i don't think i can face my mother," i'd always feel guilty coming home fucked-up after parties. then there's the last line "I shouldn't have gotten this broken," just sort of a self-pitying but also self-mythologizing line about being sad about everything for no reason.
I wrote the lyrics to "You're a Tramp" when I was sitting in jury duty. It was a car-accident case so there's the line "smashed up my Blazer," and then a lot of stream of consciousness stuff. "i've got a thing about fat girls and Halloween, i've got a thing i despise, i wanna see your room, fairies are tender, we make up, we swoon." The last lines go: "the cattle are slaughtered for sale, we loved, we divorced, we are freaks, around this time i recall i couldn't think clearly for days." Later I was named the jury foreman and we ruled in favor of the defendant, whose first name was Dale.
I don't know what "White Trash Quiz Bowl Champion" is about--probably just a bunch of cobbled-together lines from a notebook--except the one line "we have water but we want steam" is about having something but never being happy and always kind of wanting a different version of the same old thing. I think that's what I meant. And I threw in the "i know, i know, i know" part in the background vocals because i thought it sounded like Girls Against Boys. Always reaching for the stars, you know?
Anyway, thank you for indulging me and maybe you'll even like one or two of these songs.