The drive after work one evening from Oregon’s Willamette Valley to the Tri Cities of interior Washington is every bit of five hours. The next day is another ten to Billings, and the day after that about the same to Sioux Falls. East beyond Sioux Falls the land folds into hills again, and trees begin to bunch up between the fields and sometimes into actual woods and forests of their own. The world’s finest unknown band is on a “jukebox” tour across the country, playing every one of its 100+ recorded songs over the span of the two-month run, and the obvious challenge is to see as many shows and hear as many different songs live as possible. My itinerary involves a drive to Wisconsin and then shows in Milwaukee, St. Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Portland. It’s a fairly long trip there and back again, and it’s been a fairly long time coming.
I was an anxious late teenager in the pre-internet early
1990’s, probably looking through Screaming Trees CDs, when my friend and music
oracle held up a copy of I’ve Seen
Everything by the Trashcan (back then “Trash Can” but we will stick with
the more modern Trashcan) Sinatras in a Pottstown, Pennsylvania mall CD store
and told me that this is what I should be buying that day. I didn’t, but the syllables of the band’s
name stuck in my head for longer than the friendship did. Months later I happened upon the same CD in a
different store and bought it, and then—after fate cocked an eyebrow—my then-girlfriend
held up Cake above a bin of used CDs in
a used record store in downtown Lancaster, and I spent somewhere around four
bucks to buy it, too. At the time, I was
shocked that this band from Scotland with this name had actually made two albums…which
I had discovered in reverse order in two different small towns in Pennsylvania.
For the first two years I owned these albums I probably
absorbed about 7% of them. Both are decorated
with shiny features up front—Cake
begins with “Obscurity Knocks”, one of the band’s Greatest Hits, with a lovely guitar
melody and a waterfall of instant-memory lyrics, and I’ve Seen Everything leads off with an endearing iambic combination
of “Easy Read” and “Hayfever”. (The two
songs aren’t actually in iambic feet…but the first song is unstressed and the
second one is really very quite stressed.)
. . . . .
The Milwaukee venue was only a block or so off the lake, and
the show began a charming stretch of nights during which I tried to locate
street parking in a residential district of a city I didn’t know very well, in
the dark. Walking out of the cooling
Wisconsin night and into the club brought forth the newest version of (for me)
an oft-repeated series of sights: low
lighting, mellow pre-show house music, intimate seating, humble merch stand,
and a few sightings of skinny band members ducking back and forth from the
backstage accommodations.
The band have been a lovely live act for as long as I have
been seeing them live. Frank Reader in
the middle of the stage has always appeared somewhat like John Irving described
his character Owen Meany: "light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times." His thinning hair continues to sail back as a
lofty quiff, and his stage-light squinting eyes and chunky glasses combine for
a captivating portrait of a soul possessed of overwhelming nervous smarts,
passion and awkwardness. Lately on tour lead
guitarist Paul Livingston has taken to sitting down, to the left, and staring
at his fingers as he works his magic, only then looking up at his mates over
the final notes of every song with an expression that seems to say “that came
off alright, did it not?” John Douglas to
stage right is in charge of most of the storytelling and with his acoustic axe
charts the melodies for a surprising number of songs, as well as lending either
background or occasional lead vocals.
The between-song glances and grins and jibes between them cast a spell
of deep, enduring friendship (let’s be grownups and call it love) which cannot
help but radiate outward across the audience.
Thus has it been at every TCS show I have attended, and so shall it ever
remain. The effect is almost a match for
the beauty of the music.
. . . . .
I had neither the
open mind nor the musical palate to venture further into either Cake or I’ve Seen Everything for a long time, but their early tracks were
more than enough to keep both albums in my collection, safe and sound if
largely untouched. As college blurred
past, silently in the library and years before portable digital audio, fate
intervened again and my mom, vacationing in Europe, located a copy of third
album A Happy Pocket—never actually
released in the US—in a CD store rack. I
walked for a diploma in 1997 with a complete collection of Trashcan Sinatras
albums out in the car in a plastic packing crate.
Years later during adult career years I would turn back to
both Cake and I’ve Seen Everything and I would fall in love with both of them,
hopelessly. With Cake it has always been two tracks in particular, beginning with
track 2 “Maybe I Should Drive,” which remains one of the world’s most hilarious
phrases and here is also a shambolic-to-manic song about a lunatic nationalist
(wait, what? It was written in the late 1980s,) and contains a non sequitur verse
about accidentally driving over a songwriter in the rain.
The jewel of Cake, however, is closing track “January’s Little Joke”, which despite years of
occasionally crying over I would not have the fortune to hear live until this
jaunt across the country. The song
remains something that sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday. “January’s Little Joke” begins with a
gobsmacking orchestral flourish and a pair of simply brilliant word-play verses
about a night of despair, agonizingly superimposed over a holiday season party:
Now turns into then,
dream turns into dreamt,
spend turns into spent,
one turns into one too many
followed by
I knew what argue-ment,
and I knew what punish-ment,
and I knew what embarrass-ment,
I never found out what achieve-ment
That would be quite enough for a song to remember forever,
but that is just half of it. After, per
the narrator, “all heaven broke loose”, the song is called to nearly a full
halt for the dropping of the title phrase, and just before the chills and tears
have time to dissipate, the final movement of the song—again orchestral—washes
the listener away. It is a masterpiece.
The band were in their grizzled early-mid twenties and aloft
on the debut success of Cake when
they released follow up album I’ve Seen
Everything in 1993. It was a headier
work and it remains so, with a bracing opening volley of songs and a row of
classics lined up at the end. In
between, almost every middle track remains an audience favorite, and a solid
bet to appear in concert 25 years later.
For all of the pressure the band may have experienced as they drew up
The Dreaded Second Album, I’ve Seen
Everything is in most ways a triumph of upping the ante.
The hilarity of announcing that you have seen it all before
age 25 was the type of artful smirk that the Trashcans have long since
mastered. The title track of I’ve Seen Everything might still be the
single greatest thing the band have ever done, and—again, this was on album
number two—it is a song of comfort for the fans written because the narrators have
evidently decided that they are done and
going away. The entire gorgeous
chorus is a repetition of the line “it was all a big mistake,” and in between
come verses of cheery forever goodbyes.
Soothe your fear, we’re off where it’s warmer,
Here’s to all of us, I know you are worried,
We’re leaving here, regret to inform you,
Leaving everything, it’s just that we’ve got to
And later,
The last three cheers, we’re shaking the bottle,
Pull the cork on us, there is no tomorrow,
Nor yesterday, and we won’t be sorry,
We knew all along we’d never matter
Given the happenings on the band’s distant horizon back
then, maybe someone should have filed an official Karma Warning about taunting
destiny in such a way…but the song is so shatteringly perfect that, had it been
true about the goodbyes, it might still have been worth it.
1997’s A Happy Pocket,
strangely enough, is where this story begins to accumulate some heft. After college came Medical School. All professional school experiences, to some
extent, are hermetic—we begin to separate and specialize, and the randomization
of college, with its randomized line up of friends and acquaintances, falls to
the wayside. And the hours can be
horrible. In a daylight basement apartment
on a drowsy old town street, weeks and months of study and worry passed on
repeat. My bedroom Aiwa stereo—really a
boombox with detachable speakers—was chief companion and counselor.
I was folding laundry one late evening in front of the Aiwa
when A Happy Pocket shuffled into a
deep track called “I’ll Get Them In.”
What followed was probably my first lifetime instance of halting what I
was doing because the Trashcans sounded too lovely to concentrate on anything
else. Many similar spells have occurred
since. “I’ll Get Them In” begins with a
fairly formal acoustic melody, just a tad foreboding and probably very well
suited to a nighttime basement apartment on a lonely night—“It’s a half-masked,
two-faced place to go,” Frank sings.
But here’s where the magic happens. The chorus arrives and just like that the
scenery changes, from dark to loaded with boozy possibility. There is a chord change here that probably
changed my entire life of music appreciation, and a series of free verse
choruses about finding the good kinds of trouble in a night full of
drinks. From folding laundry to beers
with classmates in just a few lines of song.
I couldn’t stop listening to it, for months.
A Happy Pocket is
a sprawling fortress of an album. It had
enough third-album chutzpah to lead off with a five minute instrumental track—a
five minute very lush instrumental
track, itself led off by some seconds of birdsong—followed three tracks later
by a very lush cover of “To Sir, With Love.”
It was clearly recorded with house money, and in fact it was recorded
with actual house money, years after the band had been handed a wad of cash for
Cake and purchased their own studio-slash-living
arrangement.
The enormity of the album was a godsend for a
sleep-deprived, anxiety-prone wastrel of a medical student. During a nightless June rotation in Nome, Alaska
(literally, there was no nighttime) I would stumble home from an overnight
shift in the ER and fall asleep at 745 am to the sounds of that soaring leadoff
track, snoring before “To Sir, With Love” ever started. I spent subsequent months of infatuation
individually with almost all of the songs on the album. A piano ballad early in the album called
“Unfortunate Age” was my favorite song of record by any artist for the better
part of 10 years. In three svelte, spare
verses, the narrator describes a life of love in three parts, including failing
while young (“I applied, and eventually they replied,”) marrying (“bride to be,
for my benefit marry me,”) and leaving this earth as part of a dearly held
relationship (“bury us, with shovel and bible fuss.”)
By the end of medical school my official hobby wasn’t indie
music so much as it was the Trashcan Sinatras.
In the still-early internet days there was essentially one
website devoted to the band—it was run by a fan and for at least a little while
featured a splash page with the title phrase “I Hate Music.” By the end of medical school and its hundreds
of study breaks, I had memorized the website, including its lyrics and band
history FAQ, band member “interviews” (often lists of questions submitted to
the website and sent off for written responses,) and member biographies (one of
the band members listed “LA Story” as a favorite movie.)
A Happy Pocket was
released in 1996. I started medical
school in North Carolina in late summer 1997 and the band were well on their
way to a seven-year Wilderness Period which would almost exactly overlap with
my four years in school, and my three subsequent years of residency training in
Colorado. During those seven years the
band lost their record contract and lost their studio, and, it seems, very
nearly lost each other in the process.
There were no more albums, and at that time there were no smart phones or
twitter updates, and there was no crowdfunding.
It was just a Loss of Signal from Ayrshire, and a lot of increasingly
desperate checks of the website for news.
At one point there was a four or five show skeleton tour of the
northeastern US, and I recall that one of the shows was at a club called The
Khyber in Philly—at the time, it seemed like it might as well have been at the
actual Khyber Pass, so far removed was I from ever being able to see this band
live.
By my final year of medical school, with a geographical
relocation, an actual income and an exam-free life in the offing, the band came
very close to burping up an album…but did not.
I was in the computer lab on a middle floor of the hospital eating lunch
when I read that they had recorded a collection of songs, felt that they
weren’t good enough for public consumption, and “threw them in the bin.”
And it was off to Colorado with me. Still with three albums and a growing obsession,
spiced with worry that this band might disappear into Scottish mist, in tow.
The chief and pertinent difference between medical school
and residency is the pure number of hours that one spends awake in the smallest
hours of the night during the latter, peering into the blue glow of computer
screens and attempting remain functional between overnight, sleep starved
patient encounters. They aren’t study
breaks so much anymore as they are sanity breaks, except that the ultimate
effect is further sleep deprivation, so any sparing effect upon sanity remains
marginal. For me this meant another
iteration of band-website-stalking (we were still pre-social media and
pre-smartphone) and trashcansinatras.com remained my daily, or nightly, go-to destination
for distraction, and hope.
They were still out there, we learned. They were on terms and still noodling over
songs, trying to piece together plans for creating and distributing a new album
during the dying years of an era when you actually needed a label and a
contract to do that. Because residency
wasn’t sleep deprivation enough, I also ended up doing a weekly community radio
program with a classmate of mine—we would alternate sets for two hours beginning at midnight every Friday
night, and at least half of my sets contained at least one TCS song, dopplering
out from our drafty studio and across the sleeping mesas of western
Colorado. I wished the band could hear our show, hear
themselves—deep tracks also!—on the radio.
. . . . .
Milwaukee came and went, including stops for beer and fried
cheese curds, followed by frozen custard.
Then came a pedal-down drive to St. Paul for another show, and a dive
south for a stayover night in Des Moines en route to a barbecue joint and a
show in Kansas City. In the railroad
town of KC the club was sandwiched between the lines of the Kansas City
Southern and Union Pacific railroads, and on a night of flatland thunderstorms
the band held forth as trains and thunderclaps rattled past. I was three shows into a seven-concert road
trip across two thirds of the country, and had established a rhythm of
arriving, guzzling two IPAs to calm down as a stranger traveling alone in a
strange land, and then euphorically singing my way to sobriety over the ensuing
two hours.
The Kansas City venue was packed. It was small but it was standing-room-only,
and it was quite possibly the place on Earth equally-far removed from the band’s
modern dual home offices of Western Scotland and Southern California. The concert was 27 years after Cake and nowhere near anything connected
to the band, and the ticket was a difficult get. This would be surprising were it not another
very minor miracle in the band’s long run of major ones.
. . . . .
We were perhaps three shows from the end of our radio show
run in Colorado in Spring 2004, a month or so from yet another geographical
relocation, when my website-purchased copy of an EP arrived. The band had done it; the EP featured three
tracks from an actual, completed, forthcoming album called Weightlifting. The album
itself I purchased in an actual record store after my summertime relocation to
Oregon for a post-residency actual grown-up job. The guitar-heroic leadoff track “Welcome
Back” featured the lines, “Everyone’s alive!
Everyone survived!” Pinch all of
us, all of the fans alighting upon the website in 2004. It was actually happening.
Weightlifting has
multiple immortal songs but the one-two-three time capsule submissions are
tracks 2 “Got Carried Away,” 3 “All the Dark Horses” and 12 “Weightlifting.” Of these three, “Got Carried Away” might be
the Rosetta Stone, offering as it does a glimpse into the wilderness
years. The narrator has messed up a few
times and burned a few bridges, and it is clear that dearest friendships
spanning decades may have survived into song only because the guy to stage
right with the acoustic guitar grabbed his wayward bandmate and held him until
they started to get along again. “Hey,
it doesn’t matter / Hey, we’ll work it out / I love you and I know that you’ll
be better / next time.” It has since seemed
entirely possible, at an untold number of live performances of this song, that
the singer is singing words spoken to him by his bandmate. Again, tears.
After Weightlifting
was released, it seems, things began happening more quickly, or at least with
more direct communication from the band.
By autumn 2004 I was driving at breakneck speed up to Seattle after work
to see the band live for the first time.
I was practically sprinting down the sidewalk and into The Crocodile
when I heard the notes of A Happy
Pocket’s “How Can I Apply…?” pouring out past the doorman. The band toured Weightlifting a few times, the website continued to rev up in the
Message Board Era, and in 2007 the first iphone was released. After that came social media and after social
media came crowdfunding. The last of the
Music Industry Dragons snarling between the Trashcan Sinatras and the fans had
seemingly been exterminated.
The band crowdfunded their next album, 2009’s In The Music. For a band with (lush instrumentals aside) a
tendency toward taught song structure, the album--which could likely have been
called In Love, given the slant of
many of the songs--actually veered slightly toward acoustic jamming, a hint of
Not Very Widespread Panic.
There were
still stories of recording contract shadiness, and the band can find a bad
music industry guy like a Kestrel can find a vole, but after years of lyrical
angst and years of near-oblivion, the Trashcans seemed to be at something
closer to cruising altitude. The music
is not oversimplified: “Morning Star” features a piano line that swirls around
like candy pieces in a DQ Blizzard; headphone aficionados listening to “I Wish
You’d Met Her” will find a very pretty embedded countermelody in the left
ear.
. . . . .
After the Kansas City show I turned the car back west and it
was on to Denver, and Salt Lake, and then up to Seattle and Portland for a pair
of shows on the home stretch.
My Starbucks account brimmed full of bonus stars reaped from mornings of
onto-the-interstate chai lattes. The
trunk accumulated hotel bags of dirty workout clothes in the aftermath of early
morning treadmill runs. The country is
gorgeous everywhere in October, with chilly mornings and days full of sunshine
and occasional showers.
The show at Dante’s in Portland did not have enough seats
for these seated shows, and lots of us ended up standing in a wide and
irregular semicircle around the back of the room as the band wound down the last
of the seven shows on my trip. Late in
the show they played an interior track from Cake
called “Even the Odd,” a song I definitely played on the radio and a song I
spent a few quality weeks with on repeat during those same residency
years. As the song concluded, a husky
guy a few years older than me to my left leaned over and told me he had just
heard his favorite song live for the first time, and then he apologized for
crying. I told him not to worry about it
because it had happened to me earlier in the tour for similar reasons: “Minnesota,
‘January’s Little Joke.’”
. . . . .
The Trashcan Sinatras’ most recent album Wild Pendulum was also crowfunded before
its release in 2016, but unlike In The
Music it arrived overflowing with an almost mischievous creativity. There are studio hijinks all over the songs,
a lot of them sounding eerily vintage, like things Johnny Marr added to Smiths
albums in the studio in the 1980s to sound like the songs had been conceived in the
1950s.
The stunned-to-awe track for me
has remained “Ain’t That Something,” which melds postcard portraits of Omaha
(where the band did some of the recording) and LA with soaring wordless
choruses that sound like the best genetics of REM’s “Belong” and “It Happened
Today.” It may very well be among the
best handful of things the band have ever done—almost thirty years after they
first started writing songs together.
Because tears have been a theme, save a tissue for the closing track “I
See the Moon.” The astronomy ballad
about finding your love in the great wide universe is the wedding dance song we
always knew the Trashcans had in them.
What else to add?
It’s been a grownup life for me, and a grown up band, ever since Weightlifting came out. I no longer worry about the band ending
before its time—six albums of excellence is an enviable career for any indie
band, and of late the Trashcans have seemed happier and more comfortable on
tour than ever. They now seem capable of
funding and releasing albums whenever they want to make them. The entire back catalog has become a live plaything, every show a wrapped present which could yield anything when the
bow comes off. They sound and play
better than they ever have. We have
them. They have us. They have each other.
. . . . .
Somewhere one night in an October prairie town the band
uncorked “No Gasoline’, a pearl of a B side from a generation ago that ended up
in regular rotation during this run. The narrator meets a girl, a Cowboy Girl,
and ends up on a whirlwind tour of a carnival approaching the End of the Run,
trying to rescue love and wonder from the dangers of fair debauchery and the
final foe of Time being Up. With
hundreds of miles of fading field all around the town, all around the concert
hall, and growing season yawning toward its close, this brief perfect song
about roughneck danger, romantic adventure and loss fills the room. It can clearly double as a loose metaphor for
being out on tour, or a career as a bandmate in this dear band.
It’s three slim Scotsmen and three guitars in the middle of
America, but the spell is loose and all of us now are off with them. Carried Away.
As the song lifts past its midpoint, the narrator casts his lot with the
carnival and sings the worry of loss away.
“I’m in. I’m in.
Amen.”
