Thursday, March 4, 2021

A Breakdown in the Discourse: Police Teeth's Real Size Monster Series, 12 Years Later

Do you remember the spreadsheet that you wrote up way back in 1993?
Nobody ever says that changed my life, nobody says "that inspired me"
Now i'm happy to make a living but there's one thing that my boss will never know
There is a mountain of difference 'tween a good day of work and a record or a show
- "Bob Stinson Will Have His Revenge on Ferndale"


In a fit of nostalgia and missing my friends, i threw on Police Teeth's 2009 slab, Real Size Monster Series, on the drive to work the other morning. It was released in February of that year, so it recently just passed its twelfth anniversary, which means i missed the chance to do a ten-year retrospective on it by two years. Which is appropriate, since "just a couple years too late" is probably a good summary for their music, their six-year run as a band, and pretty much the entire grip of loud-ass freewheeling rock 'n' roll bands they associated with. Man, there was a time there when i really thought Police Teeth would be the band that saved us all--not that i really knew what i meant by that, but it had something to do with their unique blend of PacNW Wipers-meets-Superchunk style riffs, their blue-collar everyman roots, and their brutally acerbic laughing-in-the-face-of-despair lyrics. Oh, and our shared amusement at the inherent ridiculousness of the music business.

Back in 2009 my own band was pushing a similarly themed work, a record built on concepts of fame vs. infamy and the desperate depths people could sink to while chasing the twin dragons of fame & fortune. A friend had invested his own money in putting our disc out on his record label and a promo campaign to push it on the populace, and we felt obligated to do everything obnoxious in our power to hype it, lest our buddy lose his ass (which he probably did). Of course, the amount of hustle one can afford in between work days can only take you so far -- touring two weeks out of the year on vacation days is no way to build an audience. But we still felt an obligation to try, because outside of the monetary investment, well, that's just what you do when you're in a band, right?

My musical generation is one that came of age in the wake of the 1980s Alternative Nation and the Great Nirvana Explosion of 1991/92. It was a time when Warner Brothers gave Faith No More three albums to grow into their own skin, and then threw money at Mr. Bungle because they were related. Shit, Warner threw money at The Boredoms. A Japanese noise band that utilized neither melody nor English. What? bands like Jawbox and Shudder to Think(!) got major label deals because the record companies were chucking water balloons full of cash at any group with weird haircuts and a girl bassist, trying to unearth the next Kurt Cobain. So yeah, it didn't seem out of the question that a willfully obtuse noise-rock band from Wisconsin could grab a wider audience between 8-hour shifts. 

Young and dumb, what can you do.

You'll never make a living doing what you love - what a fucking joke
The field's already lousy with graphic designers and audio engineers
Once we get done pissing on your dreams
We'll chip away, we'll hack away, we'll chip away at your prospects for a successful career
- "There's a Big Heap of Trash at the End of the Rainbow"

We sort of knew the Police Teeth guys via the internet, thanks to the message board we all hung out on. Their guitarist James had run into us on tour with his previous band, USS Horsewhip, on a wild night where i got my teeth smashed in during an on-stage band fight, the drummer of one of the other bands pulled a knife on our guitarist, and a table collapsed under said guitarist after he announced that we had successfully drunk all the Everclear. Surely we were meant for the big time. Anyway, when James put together a new band that cribbed their name from a thread of joke band names on said message board, we made sure to pay attention, as we were now baptized-by-grain-alcohol brothers in rock. The first offering, 2007's Jazz Records for Sale, was solid and full of jams, but then these guys dropped Real Size. The opening "I Made Out With You Before You Were Cool" and "Psychedelic Vasectomy" were immediate and pulverizing in that special Greg Sage kind of way, but then "Bob Stinson Will Have His Revenge on Ferndale" came on, and the breakdown immediately grabbed me:

Yeah the clubs won't touch us without label support
Yeah the labels won't touch us 'til we're back from tour
And i can't save for tour if i don't have a job
But i can't hold one down if i'm gone all night long

I started laughing out loud. Oh my god, these dudes get it. With every bitter couplet, every fuzzed-up riff, every squalling lead, i lost myself more down the rabbit hole of adult-onset angst. "Who Wants to Fuck a Millionaire?" and "Jenny Nails" grabbed me with a melodic mid-90s indie rock feel pulled right out of an Archers of Loaf record. I could hear similarities between my drumming and Richy Boyer's: very meat-and-potatoes, in the pocket but always pushing it ahead of the beat, never afraid to roll all the way down the toms, blast all fours on the snare, or bust into a sick triplet fill for dramatic effect. Hell, James and their bassist Chris even did the "let's alternate between the shouty guy and the less shouty guy who sings a little more" schtick that we do. Is this the sort of band i would have ended up in had i grown up in Bellingham? Shit, maybe!

"Big Hearts, Small Riffs" kept up the venom, dissecting the disconnect between "art and entertainment," declaring that "rock stars' airplanes always crash," and asking a hilariously succinct hypothetical: "If we set our equipment on fire/Will our cut of the door increase?/Maybe hire a hot girl in her underwear/Come onstage and play tambourine." 

DIY if you can afford it
DIY if your parents are footing the bill
Try living that way for a couple of years
All you'll get is debt and an addiction to pills

And then the party jam happens. "Northern California" is the second last song on the record, a blast of fist-pumping singalong joy, a genuine smile after a half hour of sneering. If Police Teeth ever got big, this would have been the hit single they would have gotten sick of, the uncharacteristic "Epic" or "Walk Like an Egyptian." But Jesus Christ, is it great. A string of hilarious tour stories set to an impossibly infectious guitar line, the chorus repeats: "Getting high/Getting drunk/Cranking Bathory in Northern California." It's the sonic equivalent of finally getting to play the show after a 12-hour drive, a 30-minute party set condensed into three and a half minutes. 

Which makes it even more hilarious that the album then concludes with the bleakest song on the record BY FAR: "There's a Big Heap of Trash at the End of the Rainbow." We go from getting high and drunk in Northern California to "Your dreams have come and gone/You waited far too long to mean that much to anyone/No fire escape is gonna save you." Tour's over and it's time to go back to work, forever. 

That chorus is infectious as hell, by the way.

Could have stayed in college, picked a real job
What makes you think you're above punching a clock
We don't all get to be astronauts when we grow up
Who gives a fuck if you can't write a song
You blew your chance, you shot your wad
Now you're playing Tuesday nights at the sports bar

Hahahahahahalolsob. 

Police Teeth are nearly 10 years in the ground now, with the dudes all having moved on to other, equally kickass projects, and while we're all older and prrrrobably more chill, there's still plenty of acerbic energy to go around. But goddamn, what i saw when these dudes were at their peak was a supernova. We played together for the first time in Seattle, when we got out there on tour about six months after this record came out. (That was one of two times we hit Seattle on tour in 10 years of once-a-year two-week vacation tours...again, way to build a fan base, guys). James, with only the one teeth-smashing experience under his belt, apparently warned his bandmates that he wasn't sure how things were going to go that night, but we were much more well behaved, and an instant life bond was formed between these two noisy bands that dared to try to tiptoe between writing hooks and blasting the room with feedback. 

So, about all that music biz grousing: i like to think that both our bands were trying to navigate that space between art and entertainment that James sang about in "Big Hearts, Small Riffs," and frankly, that path is an inherently frustrating one. You end up too weird for the pop kids, and too pretty for the punk kids. So why some of us thought that was a pathway to success is pretty perplexing in retrospect, until you remember that the Butthole Surfers had a top 40 single while we were learning to play. 

But the hard truth about art and entertainment is that the business side of it is more of a class war than anyone is comfortable talking about. Writing a bunch of bitter lyrics about how the majority of musical success stories are underwritten by old money and inherited wealth seems petty on the surface, but it's also a microcosm of our whole goddamn existence. The world is run by the rich, and the rich only care about themselves. That's obvious to anyone with two eyes, but it's a drag when you realize that popular music, something supposedly escapist and fun in its nature, is often dominated by the same fucking caste system. It's possible to acknowledge Taylor Swift's talent while acknowledging that she wouldn't be famous if her rich dad hasn't bought a percentage of the label that signed her. I dunno -- singing about universal truths is always a good way to create art that lasts, in my book.

Fortunately, there's a path beyond getting pissed about it, and that's ignoring that scene entirely. Police Teeth never saved the world, but the boys are still doing their thing in SEMINARS, [B r a c k e t s], Freeway Park, and Mr. Dude, and they're doing just fine without the Music Biz. And in railing against and snarking about sisyphean dreams of fame and rock stardom, we all managed to stumble upon what really fucking matters about making art and performing music: we reached halfway across a continent toward each other and made a connection

Crank this shit:

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