CAN YOU HEAR THE FOGHORN?

From mid-2003 to late 2004, I toured regularly across America with Wrangler Brutes, the good-time hardcore punk band I sang(?) for. These tours stand out to me now as separate from other tours I’d made with other bands in the 1990s. The internet made everything easier, but 9/11 made everything scarier, and by that point, each of us had seen a lot of the United States. I was in my mid30s and grappling with the realization that there was to be no more of that see-the-oil-fields-at-first-light romance of the open road. I was playing the same cities, often the same clubs, and sharing bills with bands that might as well have been the same ones I'd played with a decade earlier. Touring was no longer so new and exciting for any of us.

Perhaps because of this, my bandmates and I stumbled onto a new way to pass the time while driving from city to city. We’d listen to the same albums on repeat, sometimes at intervals throughout the drive, or the week, or the entire tour. There was no set criteria for which albums we’d listen to over and over and over again. The work had to present itself. I’m not sure any of us set out to listen to the albums on repeat. It just sort of happened.

I can’t speak to my bandmates’ listening experiences on these drives. But for me, these repeat plays had three distinct stages. Stage one, Adjustment, was the natural response of any human brain confronted with punishing repetition. At a certain point, the music became like breathing, something I could choose to engage or ignore: the blare of the foghorn to the keeper of the lighthouse. Stage two, Internalization, came shortly after, usually late at night, when I’d abruptly understand that the songs were still playing in my head, running as a sort of background program. Sometimes, when we stopped for bathrooms and snacks, I'd catch my bandmates sheepishly humming these songs. Sometimes they’d catch me.

Then came the surprise third stage, Breakthrough. This wasn’t quite the breakthrough of a DMT trip, where one visits the next universe over and cavorts with the machine elves. But it was close. Listening to something ad nauseam doesn’t always make the listener nauseous. Sometimes there is a sort of mystical infolding, songs open into trapdoor dimensions, and you start to hear things you never noticed the first 862 times.

Three albums stand out from those trips.

TAROT BOLERO Vaudeville Rising (Ace Fu Records, 1998)

Within the scenes that formed our band, Tarot Bolero were a minor supergroup. Guitarist Myra Power played bass in Slant 6, a top-tier Dischord Records act, and singer Aaron Montaigne drummed for early1990s San Diego hardcore band Heroin (disclaimer: My record label co-released their debut LP). Montaigne later formed Antioch Arrow, now credited, perhaps unfairly, with launching screamo (disclaimer: I don't personally recognize “screamo" as a valid artistic genre). Antioch Arrow’s final LP, Gems of Masochism, was itself a weird little gem of experimentation, “goth” as reimagined by talented schizophrenics.

I hadn’t yet heard Gems of Masochism, making Tarot Bolero a far sharper departure from expectations. Their one and only album is a 1990s take on 1890s Americana, a mutant fusion of cabaret and vaudeville. Heavier piano songs sound like the background music that greeted me at Shakey’s Pizza when I was a kid, a sort of child’s version of the ambient jingle-jangle of a casino floor. Points in the record feel as if one is listening to a spirited civic theater musical. Some songs sound like Mr. Show gags, and many of the songs involve the supernatural, although it’s a very G-rated, Scooby-Doo version of the supernatural. The cover art seems to nod toward Pee-wee’s Playhouse, despite the band’s lack of smiles.

I cannot emphasize enough the power of this record to crawl into the listener’s psyche, the way the songs would still play in my head at 3 a.m. as I pumped gas in the absolute middle of nowhere. But it was also the source of many daytime discussion sessions, as if our small group was conducting a mobile college seminar on the LP. Once someone realized that the band’s name was pronounced “terrible arrow,” we had to entertain the prospect that the entire album was a big gag. Aaron’s hammy, full-throated vibrato didn’t make things any clearer. But as we got deeper and deeper into the record, the character he played— the bit or shtick or whatever it was he was doing—grew more and more intriguing. Who was the odd crooning fellow? What was his backstory?

There was another bit of context here. Our tours covered an America abruptly plunged into two hot wars at once, and another, sort-of third war against terror that, in those initial, fraught years, seemed to promise more carnage in what was now called, ominously, the Homeland. The country we crossed was dotted with fresh American flags and imbued with heavy dread. After 9/11, Montaigne enlisted in the Army and was promptly sent to Iraq. We listened with the knowledge that he was, at every moment, living in circumstances so horrific as to defy comprehension. In between Wrangler Brutes’ winter tour of the South and a late-spring jaunt up the West Coast, he’d been in his first major firefight in Fallujah and had killed his first person.

WARTIME Fast Food for Thought (Chrysalis, 1990)

Men my age struggle with a secret shame: the chronic parasocial relationship with the music of Henry Rollins. So I was shocked to learn that my bandmates had never heard of Wartime, his 1990 major-label debut. This one-off project band was Rollins' version of Lard and Pailhead, an A-lister punk frontman dipping his toes into the world of drum machines, samples, synths, and noodlefunk slap-a-bass (courtesy of Andrew Weiss, who would be unceremoniously booted from the Rollins Band, for being a “bitch,” just a few years later).

The album is a phantasmic absurdity. Rollins raps angrily over what might as well be the Seinfeld theme. During the chorus of the title track, his voice drops in pitch, Hulk-style, as if to ask: How much angrier can he get? The third track, “Right to Life,” is a study in the depoliticized male rage of Denis Leary and Dennis Miller that flourished at the dawn of the 1990s. It’s what his Lollapalooza tourmate Siouxsie Sioux would soon call the “G.I. Joe chic that he took to such hilarious extremes,” only now utterly untethered from the burdens of good art. In the video for the opening track, “The Whole Truth,” Rollins does a parody of Madonna rolling in Malibu surf in the Herb Rittsdirected music video for her 1989 song “Cherish.” The bit always seemed more homage than parody: bullshit recognizing bullshit. The record ends with a grueling Grateful Dead cover.

This record was initially released in 1990, making it a perfect bookend to Rollins’ first decade as a performer. He began the decade with State of Alert, another top-tier Dischord Records act. A year later, he sang on Black Flag’s Damaged. We listened to Damaged only once, and no one said a word while it played. It would have been disrespectful. There was a nice symmetry to this. To have a decade start with Damaged and end in the disgraceful labyrinth of horseshit that is Fast Food was to provide all of us clear goalposts. I appreciated that.

SYSTEM OF A DOWN Toxicity (American Recordings, 2001)

If the first two records offered dimensional infolding, this record was DMT squared, little eddies and whorls of Mandelbrot fractals receding down into infinity. Twenty years later, I remain baffled by this album. It seemed to be a parody of everything I held dear about the music of my teenage years, all the punk and metal and rap and weirdo music smooshed into something soft and silly masquerading as something sly and smart. Or was it vice versa? It was also, somehow, Brian May guitar compositions and shitty Long Island hardcore band demos and both the awkward earnestness and irrepressible immaturity of 14-year-old boys. In its countless folds lurked the creepy machismo of nü-metal bands and the gentle dignity of Joan Baez. It was prog rockers and math rockers and posers and heshers and drama nerds and grindcore Cookie Monsters and Guitar Center jam dudes and New Age douchers and performance artists and desert wizards and Renaissance Faire lutists and Borscht Belt stand-up comics, all cast down into a vast Dante’s Inferno circle pit of human absurdity. It is a record in turns relentless, hilarious, infuriating, sincere, and cynical, needlessly complex and gloriously self-sabotaging, hypnotically boring and religiously uplifting.

And while there was none of the somber pomposity of Rage Against the Machine, I detected a very particular eau de toilette of Hippie Whiff. I began touring in an era of self-serious hardcore bands, when performative leftist politics began to trump artistic expression. Hardcore records of the mid-1990s often included long, dry screeds about sustainable farming or gender equity. And yet I don’t remember any of these bands being ballsy enough to actually read statistics about American incarceration rates in their songs, as SOAD singer Serj Tankian does in the opening track, “Prison Song.” It was as if someone had taken the worst of that world and cracked the code to make it massively commercial. But how could that be possible? I still feel disoriented.

HONORABLE MENTION:

RUSS STEDMAN Duct Tape Shall Make You Free (self-released, 2003)

This record was an outlier because we only looped one track: the album’s final song, “Smoke Some Weed,” a loopy, jammy takedown of stoner culture. It took many listens of Wartime to catch Rollins’ Flipper reference. It took far more listens of “Weed" to unearth the Black Randy and the Metrosquad sample from their obscure 1979 album Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie.

Stedman was part of a cool little scene from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In hindsight, this song played a vital role in each of those Wrangler Brutes tours. It reminded us of that long-lost promise of all punk band tours, the assurance that there are still weird innovators out there in the world, still people interested in making wild, uncompromising art, and if you searched the hinterlands long enough, with a pure enough heart, you could still find them.

The song is on Bandcamp. Go buy it.