“and don’t forget the songs
that made you cry, and the
songs that saved your life”
The Story of Starflyer 59
by J. Edward Keyes
And so this kid is just completely
freaking out. It’s my fault,
really, I should have known better than to ask this kid, this kid who paid a
total of $75 for Starflyer’s notorious Drop 7” (that’s $75 for three, count em,
three songs, five minutes, working out roughly then to $15 per one minute of
music), this kid whose license plate, and I’m serious here, folks, this kid
whose license plate is: STARFLYR,
this kid Andrew Horton who courted his current girlfriend by giving her a copy
of Le Vainqueur, I asked this kid of all people, “What’s the big deal about
Starflyer 59?” And now, here he is, completely freaking out.
“I don’t even know where to
start,” he says, spinning dizzily backwards into a fifth-gear recollection of
buying Starflyer’s Silver album six years ago, hating it, mocking it, then
breaking up, painfully, messily with his girlfriend, listening to Silver again,
loving it, and finally ending up on the phone with me two weeks from his
twentieth birthday. He talks fast,
quick bombs of sound bursting in tight, desperate little groups.
“Silver is pretty short, so I just
basically ended up putting it on repeat all the time,” he rat-a-tats. “Just
this wall of noise constantly for about three months straight.” The unposed,
understood, “Do you see how much this means to me?” hangs momentarily in the
air before plummeting, unexploded.
He hurries on.
Horton’s opportunity to meet Jason
Martin – an opportunity he willingly, giddily blew off finals and drove five
hours for – resulted in the sort of classic fanboy freak out: “I could barely
even stand up,” he laughs. “My mom
and I ended up cooking the food for the band, which was like the biggest honor
for me…”
It starts to occur to me, as I
listen to Horton talk so frantically, so earnestly, how much he is like so many
fans of this band – memorizing every last looping second of feedback in “The
Dungeon,” hunting down obscure, limited run 7-inches on the internet. Then it
further begings to occur to me
how very similar he is – how very similar they all are, these pop music
junkies, these album addicts – to the founding member of the band they so
feverishly revere.
Jason Martin had no musical
training, not until he began taking piano lessons in his early teens. His mother (who
describes him as a
“funny, goofy little kid”) was not a music teacher, his father did not pen a
series of folk hits in the 60’s (“My dad doesn’t get much more recent than
Bobby Darin”, Jason will later tell me).
He didn’t spend hours hunched like Leroux’s famous Phantom over a piano
in his basement. He didn’t have a
wild-haired, eccentric instructor who barked commands at him in German during
grueling, ten-hour lessons.
What Jason Martin did have were
records. At first, he had records
by Christian bands. Not the
hack-job groan-inspiring spandex rock of 80’s Christian metal, but bands of
substance and vision like The Altar Boys, L.S.U., and Daniel Amos (whom Martin
still counts among his favorites).
In High School, a friend loaned him a copy of The Smiths landmark The
Queen Is Dead album, of which Martin recalls, “I just could not handle how much
I loved that thing.” It was this
minor epiphany that fostered his interest in bands whose outlooks were
decidedly secular, bands like The Pixies, Chapterhouse, and Ride. When he was fourteen,
Jason’s brother
Ronnie had purchased with his allowance.
Jason had been playing drums and piano for three years, but hearing the
agonized writhe and thrash of guitar on LSU’s Shaded Pain piqued his interest
in the instrument. Lamb was his
immediate, ideal choice for instructor because, as Jason laughingly recalls, “I
thought it was just phenomenal that he could play all the Altar Boys
songs.”
Of the Martin brothers, it was
Ronnie who was the more aggressive musician, forming and re-forming countless
bands, all of which consisted of essentially the same members – Ronnie, Jason,
and occasionally Randy). Jason’s
participation in the perennially mutating collectives was always by
default. “In the early days it had
a lot to do with Ronnie, “he admits.
“I never thought about being in a band my life. He kind of just included
me out of
mercy.” It is a recollection
echoed by Jason’s mother: “Ronnie
was always very vocal about (wanting to pursue music). Jason just sort of quietly
eased into
it.”
The
Martin’s volleyed through a
series of names, each smacking a sort of youthful rock & roll idealism that
characterized the brothers: A Link
of the Haunted, Two Lads, Chant of the Flowered Underground, names which Jason
rattles through laughingly, lovingly.
The baffling part about all these
non-stop memory-greedy recollections: Jason Martin has the reputation for being
a difficult interview. While he is
lucid sometimes to a fault about other topics (he and I have, on one occasion,
discussed how much we would pay to see a Smiths reunion for a total of – and
I’m serious here – 120 minutes), when talk centers on him, his sentences are slow-to-come
and terse on arrival. He deflects
questions with a lazy “Oh, I don’t know,” responds always with the obvious
answer (Example: Q: How was The
Fashion Focus different from your other records? A: Oh, I don’t
know. Just a different batch of songs. End
Quote.) His cadence is vintage California cool: lazy, expressionless. Yet he recalls his adolescence with the
sort of eager relish and flustered laughter that betrays a genuine
protectiveness toward these memories.
I get the immediate impression that Jason doesn’t want to avoid or erase
these days, these relentlessly optimistic visions of footlights, hit records,
rock grandeur… He wants to relive
them. “Oh, Keyes,” he says, a
trace of genuine sorrow coloring his trademark aloofness. “I could go on and
on about the early
transitions.”
Jason Martin’s first live
performance was with The Two Lads at a Mexican buffet for his high school’s
Senior Banquet, and despite what snobbish indie-cool kids may want you to
believe, no one has a recording of it.
The performance was a success, winning the Martin’s admiration of their
peers and the adulation of young females.
Yet the metamorphosis continued: after the high techno of The Lads, the
brothers flirted with guitar rock, rotating through another series of prosaic
names until finally settling on the C.S. Lewis-inspired Morella’s Forest. They
continued playing small local
shows, some of which were attended by Jason’s high-school friend and future
Starflyer bass player Jeff Cloud (“He showed up basically to laugh at us,”
Jason recalls. As Morella’s
Forest, Jason and Ronnie recorded an entire album for California’s Narrowpath
Records, but the label went bankrupt before it could be released.
Though their own career was
beginning its tentative lurch forward, the Martin’s were still nurturing their
own pop music obsessions, attending every area concert by local rock icons
LSU. When the ever-enterprising
Ronnie caught word of the fact that LSU frontman Michael Knott was starting a
label, he slipped the singer a copy of demo he and Jason had been working
on. An impressed Knott signed the
duo (whom he rechristened Dance House Children) to his infant Blonde Vinyl
records. “And that’s when all the
guitar rock faded out [of our sound],” Jason sighs.
Though Dance House Children was
primarily Ronnie’s brainchild, Jason did deliver a short stack of songs for the
pair of albums the band released.
His contributions are dizzying, psychedelic affairs, standing in stark contrast
to Ronnie’s spry pop. There are
hints of the Starflyer sound in the ominous “Eve Leaf” and the freakout tone
overload of “Sea Breeze.” By the
time Blonde Vinyl collapsed in late 1992, Jason was privately working on a
handful of songs that would eventually evolve into Starflyer’s landmark Silver.
Interesting cultural art artifact:
Take a look inside the linear notes of Ronnie’s Rainbow Rider album, released
in 1993. Beneath the recording
credits, before the lyrics, nestled squarely within the special thanks, is the
following proclamation: “Thanks to Jason Martin and Andrew Larsen and their
brilliant new group, Star Flyer 2000!”
Jason had been recording material
at home with the intention of releasing it on Knott’s next label venture, Siren
Records (which, when all was said and done, ended up having the life span of a
sea monkey). His plans altered
significantly when he met Brandon Ebel at a California music festival. Fortuitously,
Jason had a copy of his
demo with him at the time, and gave it to Ebel, who was himself wrapping up a
four-year stint as a DJ at Oregon State.
“I was playing bands like Sonic Youth and The Heartthrobs [on the
radio],” Ebel recalls, chattering madly through colorful, cinematic
recollections, “so I popped in Jason’s demo, and I was just freaking. It
started with Blue Collar Love, and I
was just like, this is over the top.
There is nothing like this in the market.” Ebel quickly contacted Jason with the offer of a short
contract, a proposition that stymied the bashful, introverted musician. “When
he said he wanted to do a
record,” Jason recalls, enthusiasm seeping into his voice as if it was suddenly
happening all over again, “I was just like, Oh, I can’t believe this! It
was crazy. I was just so excited I couldn’t contain myself.”
In the months that stretched between
his departure from the Dance House Children in 1992 and his encounter with Ebel
in early 1993, Jason had been splitting his time between fits of songwriting
and truck driving duties for his father’s company. It was a commonality in Riverside, California, scores of
post-high schooler’s under their father’s employ, hanging out in basements and
diners and hashing over the latest records. On the occasions when Ebel would join them, the discourse
would leave him mystified. “They
had their own vocabulary,” he laughs.
“They’re all blue collar workers, you would think these big truck
drivers would be into AC/DC or the Eagles, but they’re all into Britpop. And
they all speak the Martin
language.” It’s a scene lifted
from Levinson, young Jason and Ronnie and a gaggle of cap-wearing
twentysomethings crammed into the rear booth of a smoky diner, each voice
battling the other for top volume, for conversation control. “I’d be sitting
there with them,” Ebel
continues, “and they’d all be like, Hey, did you get that new Blur album,
what’s going on with that? It was
just like this weird little subculture, and I would be sitting there thinking,
where did you guys come from? None
of them even liked sports or anything.”
One of the few musical members of
the Blue Collar Cult was Andrew Larsen, and it was him whom Jason chose to
collaborate with for Starflyer’s debut.
Mortal’s Jerome and Jyro, who were at the time operating under the
pseudonym Blood, oversaw he album’s production. The session was frenzied, with only a scant two weeks
passing between conception and completion.
Jason’s initial expectations for
the project were low. “At the time
I was thinking, well, if nothing ever happens after this, it’s cool. At least
now I have something to show
my kids. But when I finally heard
the record all mastered, I was kinda like, man, it sounds like we’re a real
band. I didn’t know it was going
to sound this good.” He chuckles,
“After all these years, having about eighteen bands and playing in buffets, I
just thought it was too much to take.”
Remembering his friend Cloud’s one-time ambition to start a band called
Beige and release an all-beige album, Martin nixed all artwork suggestions for
the debut and opted for a cover of solid silver.
After the record was completed,
Jason quietly returned to his home, continuing to drive trucks and hang out
with his California circle of friends, unaware of the ripples his record was
causing amongst music buyers (particularly Christian music buyers) who had
purchased the record and spent the next month trying to pry their jaws loose
from the floor. When Jason arrived
with Larsen and Poor Old Lu drummer Jesse Sprinkle to play the Cornerstone
Music Festival in the summer of 94, the fan response was sudden, massive, and
smothering.
“People
kept coming up to me
telling me how great they thought the record was, and I just kept thinking, you
guys are crazy.” He pauses
suddenly, laughter drying up. His
words come slow, deliberate. “It
was just weird because usually I was the guy going up to other people, telling
them how much I liked their songs.
And now people were coming up to me.”
Starflyer records tend to break up
into certain specific categories, making a Cliff’s Notes version of the bands
discography read something like this:
1.)
Silver: You broke my heart, and I have a record contract.
2.)
Gold: You really, really broke my heart.
3.) Americana: You’re not as cool as you think you are.
4.) The Fashion Focus: Man, I’m getting old.
5.) Everybody
Makes Mistakes: Man, I’m getting bored.
Don’t
believe me? See for yourself. Three songs
on Gold contain titular
references to being messed up, six on Fashion Focus pine for youth, while half
of Mistakes wonders how much longer the band can keep this up.
It’s a question Martin has been
asking himself since the recording of Gold, a record that, over time, would
become revered amongst Starflyer fans.
Privately, Jason still wonders
whether or not the band peaked in the months following Silver. After Cornerstone,
the band toured with
both Mortal and The Prayer Chain, the biggest drawing names in the market at
the time. “I found myself
thinking, Oh gee, this rock & roll thing is so easy. We were playing in front
of like 1,000
kids a night.”
**[Tangent – and feel free to skip
this – it is during this time that I had my first encounter with Jason Martin,
an encounter that, like most things in my life, I bungle royally. Half-delirious because
I, yes even I,
was one of those starry-eyed youths for whom Starflyer’s Silver record took on
religious significance, I approached the ultra-introverted frontman, my mind
scrambling like a hobo in a trash can for the ideal introductory line. And so when
I finally get within
speaking distance, and Martin is taking in all 5 feet of me with his dark
sleepy eyes, I stammer out the only thing I can think of: “I just saw a review
of your record in –“ and I’m intentionally omitting the name of the magazine
here. Jason, looking only
partially conscious but trying – to his unbelievable credit here – trying to be
a good sport about the whole encounter, volley’s back: “Oh yeah? What
did they have to say?” At which
point I am completely stymied because the magazine (whose name I have, once
again intentionally omitted) hated the record. So naturally, I parrot out: “Oh, they hated it. They said it really
sucked,” and then
proceed to flagellate myself endlessly because here is this guy – this guy I
have never met before – who is out hitting endless miles of looping asphalt to
play for twenty minutes to a bunch of kids there to see another band entirely,
this guy who has a single record to his credit, and in waltz I, nameless
faceless teenager #753, stumbling over to tell him that despite all of his hard
work and tenacity, there is a music magazine out there who thinks the sum total
of his creative output is worthless, and I have separated myself from the crowd
and intentionally sought him out to tell him this. His eyes go bug eyed and I jam my hands into m pocket and
shuffle back into the crowd feeling like the moron I know myself to be. When I relay
the story to Jason now,
years after the event, he laughs riotously and claims to harbor no recollection
of the event. Between you and me,
I think he’s lying].
Jason returned from these tours
elated, primed to begin Starflyer’s sophomore LP (a handful of leftovers and
alternate takes from the Silver sessions had been released as the She’s the
Queen EP in the months following the debut’s release). But despite Jason’s
initial enthusiasm,
he would eventually become disenfranchised enough to scrawl the following verse
wearily on Gold’s inside cover: “The Lord is near to the broken hearted and
saves those who are crushed in spirit”.
The first inklings of trouble came
when Jason entered the studio alone, all prior collaborators conspicuously
absent. Even today, five years
later, Jason refuses to discuss the circumstances, chalking up his isolation to
“internal tension.” I don’t push.
It’s abundantly clear that it won’t get
me anywhere.
Martin
entered the studio with
engineer Bob Moon – and wouldn’t emerge again for a month. Not to sleep. Not to visit friends.
Not for anything.
Moon’s recollection is vivid. “It was just insane. I remember at one point standing
outside the studio with Jason, and hearing him say that it was the first time
he’d seen the daylight in seven days.”
“I didn’t leave the Green Room for
a month. Period,” says Jason,
desperately trying to impress upon me the direness of his situation. With a slight
pause, a change in pitch,
Martin dramatically let’s drop his shield of emotional indifference. “I
was having a semi-breakdown,” he
admits. “It was a sick
experience.” Compounding the
grueling recording process was Jason’s decision to stuff the songs with veiled
references to the disappearance of longtime friends, all of which would later
be mis-read by fans as romantic lamentations. The record’s bleak subject matter and the dark, insistent
claustrophobia of the studio took the breath out of the once roseate musician. “I
thought it was going to be so epic,
and…” he trails off. “The whole
time I’m thinking: This isn’t even fun. This is stupid. I don’t
have anyone to here to
help. I don’t even want to do this
anymore, this is ridiculous.” He
breaks to collect his thoughts.
“But we had all these commitments – we had to go out on tour, we had to
play Cornerstone. It was a mess.”
Toward the end of the process,
Prayer Chain drummer Wayne Everett, with whom Jason was about to embark on a
nationwide tour, began appearing in the studio to assist Jason with drum
tracks. The sessions ground on,
deadlines were missed, Jason grew more despondent, and the onset of the tour
grew ever imminent. “It was
literally the night before we were going to leave [for tour],” he says, “and we
still had five songs with no vocals.”
“I was a zombie after those
sessions,” laughs Moon – his humor more gallows than glee. “As soon
as the last vocal track was
done, it was literally like, OK, lets start mixing. We didn’t have and break or anything. We were just fried.”
Jason’s initial reaction
to the
completed record was one of disgust.
Being trapped into making the record alone, he recoiled at how large his
shadow loomed over the songs. “I
hated it. There was just too much
me.” Indeed, Gold does bear the
earmarks of a solo record – long, swooping guitar solos; layer upon layer of
rhythm guitar; lazy, meandering time signatures. While over time it is these very aspects that have made the
record more enduring, to young Jason in 1995, they seemed nagging, brutal
artistic overkill. “It was just so
overindulgent. The music became
longer and longer with those stupid solos because I was in there and I just
wasn’t thinking straight.”
The ashen aura of doom hovering
over the record grew several shades darker when it was finally released. Fans of Silver’s
triple-tremolo-assault
retaliated viciously when they heard the muted mope of its follow-up, often
vocalizing their distaste to Jason in person. “Oh, they hated the thing,” Jason says of his acolytes’ initial
reaction. People mistook
intentional underproduction for budgetary constraints, criticizing the sound
that Jason and Bob Moon had gone to painstaking lengths to capture. “We had
six rhythm tracks going, going
through three different amps, getting a low guitar tone, a mid guitar tone, and
a high guitar tone, and then doubling all those to get this wall of
sound.” Despite their efforts, the
fans were not impressed. People
walked up to Jason at concerts and asked, point blank, “Why does your new album
sound so bad?”
“I’d hear stories funneled through
friends,” Jason says, “people saying, man, Starflyer really choked on this
second album.” Defiantly,
Starflyer embarked on a second tour that year with the heirs to an old Martin
moniker, fledgling Tooth & Nail act Morella’s Forest. Knowing that Gold
was the last record
he contractually owed Tooth & Nail, Martin recorded a series of those
concert dates to release as Plugged on the independent Velvet Blue Music label
to keep remaining fans satiated until the next Starflyer release.
And that’s when a strange thing
started happening. People started
liking Gold. No one quite knows
when it happened or how, but suddenly sales of the record began jumping, and
fan defense of the songs became more ardent, more impassioned. Jason’s cryptic
lyrics began resonating
with disaffected teenagers, and the mammoth, almost supernatural guitar sounds
started seeming more calculated, the shrieking solos more tortured, more
precise. Gold went on to nearly
triple the sales numbers of its predecessor, and take solid root not as a
failed follow-up, but as a triumphant return. By the time all this finally happened, however, Jason was
contemplating his next venture.
It is the habit or fans to attach
tremendous significance to Starflyer’s lyrics, when the truth is that roughly
half of them are, by Jason’s own admission, meaningless. Although Gold was littered
with
references to betrayal, it was balanced with just as many lyrics that were the
artistic equivalent of empty calories – words without weight, happenstance
afterthoughts. Jason has made a
habit of this – sprinkling just the right amount of significance into his songs
to give each album a sure, specific theme [See above], while simultaneously
keeping other compositions blissfully duty-free. Behold the origins of the following Starflyer classics:
-“The Dungeon” is the nickname
given to a shadowy backroom in the Green Room studios.
-“Blue
Collar Love” is a reference
to the Martin’s middle-class roots.
-“One Shot Juanita”
is the
nickname of a girl Jason and Cloud went to school with.
-The lyric
“express the world on
time” in “Card Games and Old Friends” was written after Jason saw a Federal
Express box sitting on his kitchen table.
-The opening line of “All
The
Time” was lifted from a MasterCard commercial.
-“We Want
It Bad” was inspired by
Jason’s tube compressor.
If there is any one Starflyer
album whose lyrics are disproportionately important, it is Americana. Having completed
the agonizing, endless
tour cycle in support of Gold, Jason began work on Americana almost
immediately. He had made a series
of personal vows to prevent the sort of creative melt down that occurred during
the Gold album’s recording. Chief
among them were:
- Not
to play every note of every instrument on every song.
- Not
to produce the record himself.
Wayne Everett had been playing
with the band on several stops of the tour supporting Gold, so it was the next
logical step for him to begin playing drums in the studio. At a California stop on
the Gold tour,
Jason was approached by Eric Campuzano, at that time bass player for The Prayer
Chain. Campuzano informed Jason
that the Prayer Chain was planning to dissolve within a matter of months, and
that when that happened, he would be interested in playing with Starflyer
59. Jason quickly agreed, and the
trio began work on Americana in mid-1997.
In an attempt to undercut the lack
of perspective he felt while making Gold, Jason contacted veteran producer
Eugene to oversee the recording of Americana.
Listening to the record now, it is
easy to see it as a direct reaction to the excess of Gold: songs on Americana
blast from verse to chorus to verse with the little dalliance for solos or
feedback. Jason had skillfully
woven wobbly synth leads through nearly half the compositions, and where Gold
had favored languid, loping ballads, Americana was all pomp and swagger, with
Jason transforming from the teary, abandoned boyfriend to the smirking,
confident frontman. It is
difficult to imagine that just a few months prior, Jason was considering
exploding the whole enterprise, that he was laying nerve-frayed and exhausted
on the floor of the Green Room. It
is also difficult to imagine that just beneath Americana’s self-assured veneer
the band was coming apart at the seams.
Though the cliché has been
exercised to the point of exhaustion, it is nevertheless accurate to call the
dissolution of the Starflyer trio a case of artistic differences. Songs were pulled
taffy-like in
trillions of directions, pulled almost to the breaking point, three sets of
hands tugging from decidedly different angles. Members would leave the studio only to come back and find
songs completely re-worked, which led to frequent, highwire-tense debates. A fiery
disagreement over the best
possible approach to “Help Me When You’re Gone” only exploited the tensions the
members had been working furiously to suppress, and the three realized that
this would be the first, last, and only studio project they could collaborate
on.
Having
nowhere to funnel his
frustration, Jason poured most of his feelings into his songwriting, resulting
in, up to that point, his most lucid lyrics. It is a bitter irony, then, amongst fans who clamor
feverishly for the slightest morsel of meaning in Jason’s songs, Starflyer’s
most autobiographical album is also its most overlooked. Given the benefit of distance,
Jason
notices only the album’s strengths.
“I like that record,” he says, satisfied. “It was the first time we had a real band on the record, and
it sounded like it. I wasn’t
embarrassed about my vocals. It
wasn’t mechanical.” Indeed,
Americana may be the most successful of the band’s noisy records: Tracks like
“The Voyager” and “You Don’t Miss Me” effortlessly merge rock’s cocky preen
with Starflyer’s wall-of-guitar sound.
Where past Starflyer songs quaked violently but ultimately stayed in one
spot, the songs on Americana stalk and strut freely and feverishly. An off-the-cuff
comment from Jason
during recording sessions would lead to the record being permanently
branded. “Somebody asked me, what
have you got on this record? And I
said we’ve got a couple Black Sabbath riffs, and the next thing I know
everyone’s calling it The Metal Album.”
Though fans are still reticent toward Americana, Jason defends the
record staunchly, calling it “Ten times better than Silver,” the debut he
admits he can no longer listen to without cringing.
Faced with a
touring obligation,
Jason needed to find musicians to fill the gaps left by Americana’s fractious
recording sessions. “And that’s
where Cloud came in.” Jason speaks
the words as if they should be preceded by the word “Finally,” as if Cloud was
always meant to be a member of the band, it merely took Jason four years to
figure it out. Until that point,
Cloud had been acting as the band’s touring manager, so he was familiar with
the band’s catalog and work ethic.
Despite this, the initial tours were tense and difficult, with Jason
having barely enough time to teach Cloud the songs before they began their
two-month stint in support of Americana.
“When he first approached me, I
said, Jason, no way,” admits Cloud.
“I played guitar real badly, and I didn’t even know how to play
bass.” But Jason persisted until
Cloud reluctantly decided to grapple with the instrument. He has no illusions about
his first
time on stage: “It was just really horrible. Wayne even chewed me out after the show.”
Their performances would steadily
improve, but by the close of the tour, Jason’s endurance and enthusiasm were
miserably deflated. He had endured
two demoralizing recording sessions to find himself in sudden, dire financial
straits. The promise dangled at
Cornerstone 1994 and in early tours seemed distant, mirage-like. The erstwhile fan
was becoming the
perennial skeptic.
I am going to say something here,
and feel free to disagree with me, but I am going to split up the center of and
combust if I don’t vent some of this volatility. And the thing is, Jason will never say this himself – he’s
too humble, too polite. But after
paging through hundreds of Starflyer reviews and seeing one single descriptor
appear to with the frequency of a smack addict in an indie film, I feel this
needs to be declared once and for all: Starflyer 59 do not now, nor have they
ever, sounded like My Bloody Valentine.
The description is a lazy one, resulting only in boosted sales of
Loveless amongst Starflyer fans too young to have bought the record when it was
released in 1991. Though Jason deflects the label with trademark modesty
(“We’re not nearly as brilliant as they were”), he admits that by the end of
the Americana tour he was beginning to feel a bit pigeonholed. Having found his work
with Gene to be
the most beneficial of his career (“Working with him, I knew I never wanted to
do my own record again”), Jason contacted the producer to collaborate on its
follow-up, a follow-up that would feature the new lineup of Martin, Cloud and
Everett.
“I
felt Americana was the last
time we were going to rock,” Jason admits. “In my head I was thinking, I don’t even know if we’re gonna
keep jamming like this. So before
we went in to do The Fashion Focus, I talked to Gene and said I just don’t want
this to be the same record [as Americana] at all. It was kind of reinventing the whole band.”
Cloud remembers the conversations
that would eventually inform their approach to the album. “We were on tour,
and we were trying to
figure out what kind of record the fans would most want to hear. Finally we just said,
this is stupid,
let’s just make a record that we would like to buy ourselves. And if it has
no rock and roll, so be
it.”
Jason
turned the entire Starflyer
formula inside out for The Fashion Focus, slashing away with broad razor
strokes at the thick coating of noise the band had worked for four years to
create. The record would have to
announce the transition from the get-go, its first song kicking off with not a
guitar, but a keyboard, a sure, bold, and calculated denial of every notion
about the band that had been circulating since its inception. Jason worked closely
with Gene,
dismantling and reassembling songs, perfecting melodies, knocking down walls
within the three-minute mini-masterpieces to allow ample breathing room. The
sessions pumped new blood into Jason’s hollow veins, renewing his optimism and
his commitment to the band as quickly Gold and Americana had destroyed them.
“It was probably the most fun
record we’ve ever done, and I was certainly the most excited I’d ever
been.” He glows even still,
talking about The Fashion Focus, the songs (those with meaning) were focused
instead on aging, grappling with the loss of friendships and yearning for
youth. Jason sounds nostalgic
about his adolescence, the days in diners discussing the Charlatans, even the
awkward performances at buffets with his older brother. For the first time since Silver,
the
musician was, paradoxically, the fan once more.
“My brother has this syndrome,
too,” Jason explains, “for some reason we both live in the past. I’m
only 27 but I feel like I’m
80. Three years from now I’ll be
looking back on this period like it was the best ever.”
In some ways, it was. Fan reception to The Fashion
Focus was
the warmest it had been since silver.
Rather than rejecting the bands new, pop-friendly approach, Starflyer’s
disciples embraced it as the next logical progression. The Fashion Focus garnered
the band the
best reviews of their career, and restored some of the magic that had grown
faint and dusky after four years of strain. Four albums into their career, Starflyer 59 was debuting
again.
I
harbor and nourish a series of
apprehensions within my cramped, haunted psyche, but none is bigger than the
fear that I will wake up one day, sit at my computer, and the words won’t
come. The thick, damp terror that
I will pound my fingers into the keys, that I will pace the floor and tug at
hair, but for all my efforts, the screen will remain bare, blank, threatening.
That overnight my ability to summon words from the air will leak out of my
fingertips, through the floorboards and into the dirt. When I mention this dread to
Jason he
laughs riotously.
“Oh, man, I worry about that all
the time. It’s not as easy as it
was for me a few years ago, you know?
It’s more work than it used to be for me to come up with an album.”
Jason spent the months preparing
for Everybody Makes Mistakes dodging the same demons that haunted the Gold
sessions: fear that the follow-up
would not surpass the original, worry that his ability to write had become
crippled. But this time, he was
not stranded in the studio alone.
His friendship with Gene was growing steadily, the trio of Jason, Gene
and Cloud becoming almost inseparable.
But because emotions were
running
so high after The Fashion Focus, and because Jason feared driving himself into
the same rut he had with Gold, the sessions for Everybody Makes Mistakes felt strangely
anti-climatic. “It seemed
strangely routine,” Jason admits.
“It was the most routine record we’d ever done. We started recording
it nine months
after The Fashion Focus, and at the time it just didn’t seem too special.” Jason
concedes that part of the problem
was that, due to the short span of time between the records, Everybody Makes
Mistakes became viewed as a sort of partner record to The Fashion Focus, the
second half of a double-album coming one year after the fact. “After it was
done, I thought it was
great, but I remember in the middle of it the whole thing seemed standard. I kept
saying, Gee, I don’t know,
Gene…”.
Despite Jason’s reservations,
Everybody Makes Mistakes garnered even greater praise than The Fashion
Focus. The band received glowing
write-ups in CMJ, Magnet, and Alternative Press, the latter of which blessed
the record with a perfect 5 out of 5.
By this point, Starflyer had
established a pattern of alternating recording with touring, and they wasted no
time in embarking upon a cross-country jaunt in support of Mistakes. Due to prior
obligations, Wayne Everett
decided not to tour with the band in support of the album. Jason recruited Joey Esquibel
to assume
percussion duties.
The band was at their peak,
reaping the benefits of two brilliantly executed records and enjoying the
adulation of the pop music press, even if only within the splinter-size
independent market. Jason’s own
enthusiasm about the record swelled in proportion to the accolades it was
receiving, and by the end of the tour, he felt decidedly enthused.
It was a high that would come to
an abrupt, tragic end in mid-March of that year.
“I was in
my truck making a
delivery,” Jason recalls. He is
speaking slowly now, somber, wrapping words in low sorry sighs. “I just couldn’t
believe it. I was in my truck and Tim Taber called
me. He said, Jason, Gene is dead.”
Gene “Eugene” Andrusco died during
the night of March 19th, 1999, at the age of 39. He had been working in the studio until
late in the evening and passed away peacefully in his sleep.
Jason’s first reaction was one of
disbelief. “I just couldn’t
believe it. I said to Tim, what
are you talking about? Are you
kidding around? And I didn’t feel
anything until that night. I was
standing outside, and it just really hit me hard. And I broke down.”
Jason is fast and furious in his
praise of Gene, spilling out coveted memories of afternoons spent at racetracks
and inspired lunacy within the studio.
“Man, that guy was so talented.
He was it. He was the best
guy to work with. When he was
laying down keyboard parts, I just let him do what he wanted.” Coming from a
perfectionist as
notorious as Jason, this decision to remain laissez-faire is praise of the
highest caliber. “He had a lot of
impact on me. I learned so much
just staring at him in the studio.
I was so excited to give him the next batch of songs, and then…” he
trails off, and the silence that follows is awkward, painful. “I don’t
know. It kept making me think, man, I wish I
would have hung out with that guy more, or, I wish we would have started the
next record sooner, I wish I knew that the last time I talked to him would be…”
Silence again.
“I think about that guy a lot.”
The thing about being a rock star,
besides the privilege of being paid to play guitar, beyond the teeming droves
of froth-mouthed followers, is that eventually you get to meet the people you
grew up admiring. Faced with the
challenge of filling a producer’s role so adroitly executed by Gene, Jason’s
thoughts returned to the records that had monopolized his turntable for so long
as a teenager, and placed a nervous phone call to Daniel Amos founder and
frontman Terry Scott Taylor.
“He was real eager,” Jason says,
himself near-to-bursting at the prospect of working with his personal
icon. His words rattle with
laughter, spinning off into tangential whirlwinds on potential album titles and
packaging concepts. “This is the
most excited I’ve been about a record since The Fashion Focus. This could be
huge.” As he spills forth endless confidential
detail, it becomes clear that the vivacity that he felt as a young man hearing
silver for the first time, the zealousness with which he reinvented the
Starflyer formula four years later – all of these are returning.
Jason Martin is falling in love
with music again.
I have just finished interviewing
Jason for the third consecutive night when I decide to conduct this little
experiment. And it was probably a
stupid idea, because it is basically grounded in deceit and double-dealings,
and unless certain people have a mammoth sense of humor, I am setting myself up
for a kind of artistic defenestration.
But, see, I have been nurturing this sort of hypothesis, and it goes
roughly as follows:
That Starflyer fans compensate for
their small numbers with big guns, and that anyone who raises a finger against
any past or present member of the band might as well mock Heston before a
gaggle of NRA members.
So this is what I do:
I creep on the the Velvet Blue
Music website during what pioneers and puritans used to refer to as The
Witching Hour, that pitch-black, graveyard-silent half acre of time sprawling
out past the boundary of slumber.
And I am all strung out and delirious on Dark Roast and two clicks past
exhausted when I invent a false name for myself (LisaMetChelsea – Glasgewains
of the world unite), and post the following curiosity:
Did I see someone post on here
that there was going to be a starflyer box set??...that seems kind of weird to
me, because they’re not really that good…
Exactly five
minutes elapse
between my post and the first seething retaliation. Within 24 hours, there are a total of 25 posts, each either
dissecting me or defending Starflyer [some of them really kind of cunning and
priceless, like: “I know you’re kidding, Lisa-person. Or you’re on crack.
Hey, do you have a box set? Probably not,” and “If you don’t like them,
they are above you,” and my absolute favorite: “Hi all…just a word for ya:
I seriously doubt that LisaMetChelsea
has a clue – probably some 12 or 13 year old kid who listens to N-Sync, Spice
Girls and such and has nothing better to do than get kicks from poking fun at
Starflyer where she knows it will get a rise out of everyone. LisaMetChelsea –
maybe when you get a
little more mature (or get a clue) you’ll understand why we all love our
beloved Starflyer – until then, stick with what you know, i.e. cute 13 year old
guys, giggling, and really bad commercial pop music”].
It’s fascinating, scrolling
through, these responses, each testifying to the effect Starflyer had on their
lives. And it’s not too hard,
really, to find within these posts the shadow of two young boys in Riverside,
California, trying to perfect Alter Boys covers as their parents smiled and
covered their ears upstairs. It
would be easy to be sarcastic about these Starflyer fanatics, but ultimately
cynicism would prove mean-spirited and ill-advised. Because the simple fact is that the love of music breeds
reverence, and that reverence spawns emulation, and all too quickly the tables
are turned, the roles are reversed, and adorer becomes adored. And it’s hard
to tell, scrolling
through these endless posts, if their veneration is hunched over his desk in
1985, stringing exaltations together on loose-leaf to mail to Daniel Amos. And sitting
here in the past-midnight
hush, reading these hymns of the faithful, I can’t help but smile. Because who
knows. In five years, I may be writing their
biography.
~Fin~
The author wishes to thank: J.
Martin, B.
Ebel, J. Gockley, C. Keyes
Special thanks to: A. Horton, J. Edwards, N.
Perreault, and J. Chiebowski
For allowing me to quote them.
