The Releases: Isolation Drills (LP—TVT, 2001) / Chasing Heather Crazy (Single—TVT, 2001)
Last week I was driving with my friend/bandmate/podcast co-host/occasional Strange Currencies contributor Tim; and, as I was in the process of preparing for this piece, I had Isolation Drills on when I picked him up. Tim’s familiarity with Guided by Voices largely sticks to the heyday of the band’s “classic lineup”: Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, and some of the surrounding releases. However, when we reached “Chasing Heather Crazy”—Isolation Drills‘ first single, and (arguably) finest track—he mentioned that the song had made the rounds on local radio several years back.
GBV? On the radio? While this entire concept was foreign to me, Tim grew up here in Portland. And even though Isolation Drills‘ spring 2001 release represented a decidedly different era for the city—Everclear were arguably its most readily-identifiable contemporary export, The Decemberists’ were but a glimmer in Colin Meloy’s bookish eye, and Elliott Smith was still alive—Portland has always had a reputation as a music town. Therefore, it stands to reason that its rock stations were probably a bit more adventurous than the ones that I was accustomed to growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona.
I stopped listening to the radio intentionally at some point during the second half of the nineties. This was partially a rejection of the complete lack of imagination demonstrated by Northern Arizona station programmers, who never discovered a decent song—or even a terrible one—that they didn’t immediately want to run into the ground. I know that’s a well-worn trope about radio, but seriously, if I could dig up a sample itinerary of a Flagstaff rock station from the mid-nineties, you’d probably be shocked at how comically repetitive (and predictable) it was.
This rejection was also in response to the post-grunge sound that seemed to define the times. I wrote about this a few years back, in a piece that—among other things—discussed how a once-favorite late-night radio program so quickly devolved from the kaleidoscopic, anything-goes post-Nirvana landscape of Beck, Weezer, They Might be Giants, and Blur, to the utterly humorless and melody-deprived likes of Seven Mary Three. It was a dramatic fall that a single show, its parent station, and ultimately (for me) an entire entertainment medium would never recover from.
Lastly, my movement away from radio was also the product of a growing CD collection; one that—when combined with some choice selections lifted from my older brother’s stash—could capably fill the 100-disc changer that I acquired in the summer of 1995. Suddenly, I could shuffle through roughly 1500 songs—most of which I liked, and many of which I loved—and treat my own library as a semi-curated radio substitute; one with a zero-percent-chance of pulling up “Cumbersome.”
Granted, this radio embargo wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule by any means. I didn’t avoid the AM/FM bands in the same way that a hillbilly avoids cities, or a hippy avoids employment; I just preferred to be in control of my own listening whenever it was possible, and I had amassed enough of a collection to do so without it becoming too redundant. And this has remained true in the thirty years since. To this day, I’ve never programmed a single radio station into the car stereo of a vehicle that I owned. I’ve only intentionally listened to radio shows when I’ve personally known the host, and/or when I knew that my own music was going to be featured on it. Even when I’m driving a moving truck—which happens surprisingly often for someone who has lived in the same house for almost a decade—I either ride in silence, or listen to a baseball game through my phone speaker.
And I try (really, I do) to have this not come off as posturing. After all, I get annoyed by those who, when on the periphery of a conversation about a popular television show, feel compelled to interject that they “don’t even own a tv.” And even though I don’t really care all that much about football (Go Birds, I guess…?!?), I despise it when people—even some that I like—feel an urge to smugly post about “sportsball” on social media during the Super Bowl. Yeah, I can be a snob about a lot of things, but I try (again, really…) to spend my time talking about the things that I do like, rather than disparaging the ones that I don’t. But still, every time that I catch a few minutes of commercial radio in passing, I’m reminded of why teenaged me made the listening choice that he did.
There was however one brief period of exception to this otherwise-unbroken run of radio silence. Virtually every memory that I have of listening to the radio between 1997 and the present-day can be confined to a stretch between late 2000 and the fall of 2001. And this Cal Ripken-like streak was broken for the most common of reasons: I fell in love with a radio listener. Now, this particular girl could have been a gun enthusiast, a business major, and a Mets fan, and I still would have overlooked those character flaws; so sure, the fact that she listened to the radio may have been less than ideal, but it was hardly any kind of a deal breaker. And, almost all of her radio listening happened within her truck. Yes, I fell in love with a radio listener, who also drove a truck.
That girl and I started dating in December of 2000. In fact, our first date was on December 9th. I drove that night, and while I can’t remember every disc that was in my ten-CD changer at the time, I know that our first outing together was soundtracked by The Bends and Rubber Soul—a pair of all-purpose crowd pleasers, if ever such a thing existed. This, by the way, wasn’t accidental. I knew that she liked The Beatles enough to have asked to borrow my copy of the “Red” compilation for an afternoon, and I figured that Radiohead’s most accessible record was a safe bet. And for someone who has spent an inordinate amount of their life thinking about music, there was no way that I would let my first date with a girl like this be left to any old album.
Despite what turned out to be a relatively ‘meh’ first date, we hit it off pretty well. Before long, we were spending a lot of our time together. And whenever I was the one driving, I put genuine consideration into the music that would accompany our time together. I noticed that she responded positively to genial-and-semi-nuanced ‘alt rock’: Travis’ The Man Who and Remy Zero’s Villa Elaine were easy sells. However, if I went too far down the experimental end of that particular spectrum, I was likely to get some push back; a mid-January listen of Kid A—one born perhaps of overconfidence on my part—nearly created an irreparable rift in the still-new relationship.
And though she was incredibly considerate of my obsession—for example, she bought me The Lonesome Crowded West after overhearing a conversation that I had with her roommate’s boyfriend—I can say, with 100% certainty, that she didn’t put as much thought into the music selection when she was the one driving. Her station of choice was one of Flagstaff’s several personality-free Top 40 options. Among its heavy rotation tracks that winter were the horrible Shaggy song where he cheats on his girlfriend, at least seven different songs that I just assumed were all Destiny’s Child, the other horrible Shaggy song that (honest-to-God) has the line “closer than my peeps you are to me” in it, and exactly one certified banger in Outkast’s immortal “Ms. Jackson.” Occasionally, she would have one of the local rock stations on instead, but their current rotation was every bit as bleak.
So yeah, we didn’t place the same level of importance on music. And the songs that soundtracked our courtship ranged from legitimately great to truly awful, with a lot of merely okay in the mix as well. And while all of my contributions to that soundtrack were carefully chosen, and hers were simply left to chance, I ultimately had a hand in plenty of the merely ‘okay’ myself. I wouldn’t have recognized (or at least outwardly acknowledged) that at the time, but I can admit it now.
That girl and I got engaged in the first week of February 2001. For those keeping track, we dated for less than two months. Shortly after getting engaged, we drove from Flagstaff to her hometown of Farmington, New Mexico, so that I could meet her parents. She drove, and I spent the roughly four-hour trip playing deejay, pulling CDs from a CaseLogic folder. Weirdly, I don’t recall a single song or album that I played on that drive. However, I definitively remember a brief moment in the trip where we listened to a radio broadcast, likely out of Gallup, or possibly Albuquerque. Out in the middle of nowhere, on a pitch black stretch of US-491, we inadvertently caught a few minutes of a late-night doo-wop program. The only complete song that played before the station faded into dead air was “Bristol Stomp,” a 1961 track by The Dovells. I had never heard it before, and it would be over twenty years before I heard it again. And when I finally did, it was exactly as I remembered it: gawky, frenetic, and charming all the same. Again, I couldn’t tell you what Frank Black track(s) I undoubtedly played that night, but I have a crystalline memory of the one new-to-me song that accompanied a wider experience that was anything but familiar.
About six months later—and with a few more radio-specific memories mixed in—that girl and I were on our honeymoon in New England. We had chosen a ‘practical’ destination, as I was less than a year from graduating college, and we had our sights set on moving to the East Coast, to a state where teaching is a slightly more lucrative career choice than in Arizona. Staying for a week in Boston, we rented a car to drive down to Newport, Rhode Island—mainly for the purpose of going through Providence, which we had somewhat-arbitrarily decided was our ‘ideal’ future home—and then eventually up through just enough of New Hampshire and Maine to say that we had been to each. It was only a day trip—with little in the way of specific destinations—and really, mostly an excuse to drive through a region that we had built up in our minds as something approaching idyllic.
Whether by virtue of the rental car not having a CD player, or me forgetting my CaseLogic—I honestly cannot envision a scenario in which the latter oversight was even remotely possible—the music for that entire day trip was ultimately left in the hands of the deejays of New England. Unfortunately, they proved to be no more imaginative than their Northern Arizona counterparts, as that day seemed to be little more than a battle between which station could play Lifehouse’s “Hanging By a Moment” the most. The only reprieve that I got was a brief moment walking out of a Providence convenience store, right as a guy pulled into the parking lot BLASTING Pavement’s “In the Mouth a Desert.”
Ultimately, the point here is that real love doesn’t need to be aided by external factors like music, or politics, or weather; but those things add context and richness to stories that are—at least to the people on the inside of them—always worth remembering. Over the next five years, that girl and I became parents to two talented, empathetic, and brilliant kids. The first band that both of them ever heard was The Beatles. That was intentional. And though it doesn’t make our relationships any better for them to have heard Paul McCartney’s voice before the guy from the Goo Goo Dolls, it means something to me that I was able to create a moment, right off the bat, in which I shared something that I love about this world with each of my girls. And in the years since, there have been plenty more of these moments—ones that were planned out with great care, and ones that were just left to chance.
Ratings: Isolation Drills (8.3) / Chasing Heather Crazy (★★★★1/2)*
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “As we vegetate and wait around for brighter days / And can dance contented to the sound of money / Could I have seen a sight / Much greater than your twilight eyes / That penetrate our silent lives” (“Twilight Campfighter”)
Next Week: Another gear shift, as GBV return to Matador Records and settle into an equilibrium point often described as ‘mid-fi.’
