Beyond the False Horizon: King James Version at 25

“All this, this luck—what did it mean? Coming so suddenly,
and on such a scale, it was as baffling as a misfortune.”
— Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth

It didn’t seem like such a tall order at the time.

Which is, of course, proof of the bewilderment the band had settled into after nine months of touring, video and photo shoots, promotional visits to radio stations, TV appearances, phone interviews with regional press, arguments about insidious threats to our precious integrity, frustration over the way we were apparently perceived, hair-trigger hypersensitivity to attempted manipulation, an almost allergic aversion to the old songs (one song in particular), and—as a consequence of an almost total inability to properly communicate with one another—the utter dissolution of our capacity to write new ones.

That’s where Harvey Danger stood at the end of our year of overnight success. “Flagpole Sitta” had become a freakish, out-of-nowhere hit, and after four years of obscurity as a Seattle club band, we had become (technically) professional musicians. we made money. we were lowercase f-famous And all of a sudden—to convey just how sudden would require a larger sheet of paper, I’m afraid—the humble little art project that had only ever mattered to four people, was suddenly exposed to, if not the whole world, then at least that portion of it still occupied by aiding, abetting, assessing, opposing, and above all selling what radio stations and record labels saw fit to dispense.

I’ve spent a stupefying percentage of the past 25 years trying to find a way to articulate the way all this felt, while trying to observe the irrefutable principle that complaining about how your brief, instantaneous rock stardom didn’t feel as amazing as you had hoped is unlikely to yield either sympathy or interest from the person forced to endure the sound of it. Not that it was all bad, or even most. We were playing to hundreds, thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands of people every night. We were selling upwards of 30,000-40,000 records per week. “Flagpole Sitta” carved itself inescapably (and, as fate would have it, ineradicably) into the pop culture firmament: on the radio, on MTV, in a succession of films and TV shows, and, increasingly, on the shared drives of innumerable Napster and LimeWire users.

A year before all this hullabaloo, no more than 500 people in the world had ever heard of us. This was, one hastens to add, better.

The colossal scale of our sudden good fortune was never lost on any of us, no matter how tawdry our version of pop success sometimes felt. Neither, sadly, was the gnawing sense that we had unwittingly but complicitly been steered onto an industrial and cultural path that all but guaranteed the ride would be a short one.

The four of us had always thought of ourselves as a band, and generally thought everything the band made was of more or less equal worth, even if we tended to favor the new ones. We’d met in college, lived together in shabby rental houses, listened to the same records, read the same magazines, attended the same shows, and essentially formed our young adult selves in a shelter created by our mutually voracious hunger for the music leading up to, out of, and around the earthshattering arrival and heart-shattering departure of Nirvana.

Harvey Danger was the first band any of us had been in. We learned how to do everything a band does, including and especially songwriting, by doing it together. This wasn’t the smartest or easiest way to do it, but it was our way. Everyone had veto power over everything and no one was more important than anyone else.

After three years together, we’d met now-legendary (and then-legendary) NW rock producer John Goodmanson, and together we’d made a record that collected the 10 best songs we’d written thus far. It cost about $3,000. The initial pressing was 1200 CDs with silk-screened cardboard covers we folded and assembled in our living room. It seemed an absurdly large number, more liable to take up space in the discount bins at Cellophane Square or in one or all of our closets than to be painted gold and framed when it sold over half a million copies.

The larger point is that for us, and for more or less everyone we knew, the essential unit of measurement was the band. You could always love a song or a record, but when you did, it followed that you would investigate the people who made it, learn their names, delve into their whole body of work, their previous bands, their lo-fi side projects, contextualize, discuss, discuss, discuss.

This was why, as the initial wave of “Flagpole”-mania crested, and our crowds thinned, and our second single tanked, and our third single never existed, what we all felt can only be described as relief. We were tired. Our first tour had lasted almost nine months, with scant few breaks. Though the adventure of it was undeniable, so was the fact that our audiences never seemed to feel like our peers—and our peers never seemed to feel like they were interested in the world we’d come to inhabit. All of which was fair enough. But it also made it incredibly difficult to gauge the moral and aesthetic value of what we were doing, And what were we doing, aside from playing “Flagpole Sitta” a minimum of two and as many as five times a day, and trying to get anyone, anyone to take an interest in anything else we had to offer?

What we were doing was getting ready for the project that would deliver us from the chintziness of entry-level alternative rock notoriety.

As noted in the first paragraph of this little leaflet, the hardest part of our success was that we had withdrawn from one another-not easy to do when vour whole world is a van, and then a bus, but we managed. It’s not that we didn’t speak to each other (though I’m sure there were days when any two of us didn’t; It’s that we all engaged with the staggeringly complex new reality we shared by turning inward and either refusing, or simply failing, to relate. Every band that lasts more than a couple of months begins to stockpile resentments, and many of ours had calcified into ugly convictions about our confreres’ personal and musical deficiencies.

After years of living like four beavers in a muddy lodge, we still hadn’t developed the tools to truly confront each other about essential matters, or to open all the way up to the only three other people who knew how it felt. We had reached the perilous point of intense familiarity that assumes you’ll always know exactly how the other will respond, so what’s the point of even saying anything? The point of mistaking the intimate knowledge of a close partner’s pain for the ability to see right through him.

We were scared.

We were alienated.

I typed and deleted “we were a mess,” because I’m not sure whether we were a mess. I massively was.

At all events, we were not the same people or the same band we had been a year ago, and never would be again.

HOWEVER!

The conspicuously tattered sleeve of Harvey Danger still held one throbbing ace, the single dream we all held in common, even after all of the above. And best of all, it was contractually guaranteed: We were going to make our second record. And this time, we were going to do it right, with a big budget, in a proper studio.

The promise of HD2 was the glittering grail we all believed would justify the enormous piles of record and radio shit we had to eat every day to boost the first record’s outsize success. It would legitimize every concert in every mall parking lot, every 3am Denny’s dinner, every dipshit DJ’s 6am “which one’s Harvey?” badinage. It would redeem us. It had to. Nothing else would.

It didn’t seem like such a tall order.

Second records are second records. They matter a great deal, all the more to bands with a conspicuously successful debut. Not to suggest we weren’t proud of Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?, but it was nearly three years old. It felt like juvenilia.

We felt we had a lot to prove—to ourselves, our friends in Seattle, and to anyone else still listening. And so, as 1998 gave agonizing way to 1999, we began writing for album two, with an eye toward a February deadline to begin pre-production. We hadn’t been home for more than a couple of weeks, and the last people any of us wanted to see were each other. Still, we tried. And tried. And do you know what we did next? We tried some more. The results were inconclusive. And slow. And virtually free from any element a sensible person would characterize as a “hook ” There were moments, but we were rusty at writing, and the way we wrote was complicated by the fact that we could scarcely make eye contact, and no three people ever seemed engaged by the same idea, and every disagreement invariably felt like a personal slight.

Added to which, nobody felt much like rocking. The idea of trying to replicate the boisterous energy of the first album seemed absurd, not to mention impossible given our current states of mind. Instead, we leaned toward quieter, statelier sounds. These weren’t generally considered our forte (get it?) by those who worked with us, but it had always been a dimension of our sound that we were proud of.

For my part, lyrics were incredibly difficult to generate—not just good ones, but any at all. Having yearned since adolescence for someone, anyone to pay attention to what I had to say, I found that the prospect of addressing a waiting (be it with knives drawn or breath bated) audience utterly stultifying. What should I say? What could I say? What do I even think/feel/want/remember? How would I know? In one unfinished song, “Something Else Again,” after rattling off several disconnected lines about how terrible I felt, I began wailing the plea spoken by Akim Tamiroff in Alphaville: “conscience, tendresse” again and again for what seemed like hours. A little of either or both would have been nice.

At length, a few songs took shape and joined the handful of reliable numbers written after the first album was finished but before it took off, among them “Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” “Pity and Fear” (later foolishly retitled “Ballad of the Tragic Hero” by me), “My Human Interactions,” “Defrocked,” “The World’s Greatest Living Dancer,” and incipient versions of what would become “This Is the Thrilling Conversation You’ve Been Waiting For,” “The Same As Being in Love,” and “(Theme From) Carjack Fever.”

“Pike St./Park Slope” had begun as a guitar piece conceived by Aaron, and then (maybe at my suggestion, but maybe not) transformed by Jeff into the gorgeous piano ballad it became. It was the story of a guy I slightly knew who ran a gloriously shabby hole-in-the-wall movie house called the Pike St. Cinema on Capitol Hill. He’d decided Seattle was too provincial to appreciate what he had to offer, and wanted to decamp to New York, but couldn’t afford to unless his ex-wife agreed to buy out his half of the condo they still co-owned. I imagined a series of emotional exchanges between them that reflected both his desperate hauteur and her exasperation with having to field his delusions. She bought his share, but not before delivering some plainspoken truths about what happens when you blame everyone else but yourself for your troubles. (In real life, he wound up opening a small theater in Park Slope, which was beset by the same problems his previous place had been, and closed in a year.)

Revisiting and refining the song for album two provided helpful guidance through the lyrics blockade. Not just the expression of feelings, but an interrogation of them, in the hopes of revealing the flawed conceits that kept people locked in isolated misery. Good note.

Breakthroughs came in the form of “Authenticity,” a pastiche of both ‘70s and '80s glam that gave me a chance to slather sassy mustard on the snide voice of “Flagpole,” as well as to address a vacuous value that neutered essential cultural conversation. And then “Humility on Parade,” which somehow sought to combine the American Civil War and the departure of Brian Eno from Roxy Music. This made sense to me at the time.

The idea of covering, and radically-re arranging “Underground” arose from three precepts: 1) I utterly love the song. 2) We had played several shows with This Busy Monster, and its members had become some of my closest friends. The gesture of acknowledging them was directly inspired by our friends Death Cab for Cutie covering their friends The Revolutionary Hydra’s song “The Face That Launched 1,000 Shits” on their first album. Though Harvey Danger always seemed a little gauche to fit snugly in the cosmology of Bellingham indie rock, it remained a significant inspiration to me from the moment I stumbled into it. 3) We had been trying to write a song that sounded like OK Computer for over a year, this was a good back door.

Just as we’d hit our stride, MTV asked us to contribute a cover of a song released in 1981 for their all-star film 200 Cigarettes. We were reluctant because writing was starting to go well, and the studio awaited. But it was the kind of offer that would be crazy to turn down. Our label insisted that we select “Save It for Later,” a fantastic song, though it would have been nice if they’d disclosed they were about to re-release The Beat’s entire catalog. (Our choice was Devo’s “Beautiful World”). Nevertheless, the project was a very happy one that required more agility than we normally had in the studio, and the song came out really well. Not to mention Evan Bernard’s video, which offers the unlikely spectacle of us sharing the screen with Paul Rudd, Dave Chappelle, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, and Courtney Love.

Apparently, we were still in show business.

A week later, armed with what felt like a promising batch of material, we decamped to Bearsville, NY, just outside Woodstock. Our manager was friendly with owner Sally Grossman (whom you will no doubt recall from the cover of Bringing It All Back Home) and got us a rate. I liked her a lot. The scale of the studio was breathtaking, but also daunting. It had been built for The Band in 1969 once they’d outgrown recording in houses and had hosted bands from R.E.M. to Deep Purple.

It was still winter, and the studio and living quarters were on a wildlife preserve, many miles from the nearest village. The snow was thigh high. Enormous stands of pine trees rose 50 or maybe 100 (or maybe 1,000?) feet. Gigantic deer and five-foot-tall wild turkeys were everywhere you looked. The shower water reeked of sulphur. Abbey Road it was not. It was more like a three-week long horror film. We did some good work there, but you couldn’t ask for a better indication of intra-band relations than the tableau of three of us standing 50 feet apart from one another while the fourth was holed up in a tiny isolation booth in the next room.

After some additional recording at Bear Creek Studios, much closer to home, everything was starting to take shape. Jeff’s string arrangements on “Pike St.” and “Underground” were exquisite, and harmony vocal visits from Grant-Lee Phillips and Lois Maffeo gave me genuine thrills.

Mixing followed in Los Angeles. We honored the rockstar cliché of staying at the Hyatt House, where Little Richard eyed Aaron up and down like a Tex Avery wolf, and I saw Randy Newman play across the street at the House of Blues three nights in a row. And then we were… done? We certainly wanted to be, but I’m not sure we believed we were. We returned home and tried to believe we’d made the album we wanted to make.

Then John did some remixes in Vancouver, at a studio owned by Bryan Adams. The main thing I remember is looking out the window and seeing a man standing naked in his own window. He had, by some distance, the largest penis I’ve ever seen.

So, wait. Now was it done? An odd thing is that throughout these months, we hadn’t heard a single word from anyone at the record label. Not a phone call. Not a fax. Not a good luck. Not even a “we don’t hear a single.” Nothing, In a way, it was nice to be free of their interference, but it was starting to feel ominous.

On December 10, 1998 (one day before “Hit Me Baby, One More Time” debuted on MTV), the liquor conglomerate Seagrams Co. had purchased the entertainment corporation PolyGram for $10.6 billion. It was big news, and we had taken note since our label, Slash/London, was distributed by PolyGram Group Distribution. But we’d been advised that in all likelihood there was nothing to fear.

Then we got the phone call. The entire company had been thrown into utter disarray. All PolyGram labels were being assimilated into Universal Music Group (which Seagrams already owned). Thousands of people were being laid off. No one knew who they worked for, who owned which contracts, or how long the impossibly complicated reorganization would take.

For little old Harvey Danger, this meant a few things. First: Our record would not be coming out any time soon. Second: The label we’d signed to probably no longer existed. Third: None of the money we were owed by the label or our publisher (close to $300,000) would be forthcoming any time soon. Fourth: There was no way to solve this problem, no one to call, no one who knew anything at all.

It was the summer of 1999, one year after “Flagpole Sitta” had been an out-of-nowhere success, and here we were, right back in the middle of the exact same nowhere, with a finished record no one was allowed to hear and a contract binding us to a company that didn’t even exist. Everyone I knew had read Steve Albini’s legendary essay, “Some of Your Friends May Already Be This Fucked.” But not even he could have anticipated this situation. Had we really, truly, shaved our legs for this?

The only plausible option was to wait, live our lives, and keep writing. In the months that followed, we wrote and recorded several new songs in the same studio where we’d made our first album. Two of them would end up making the album, “Show Me the Hero” (inexplicably retitled, again by me, “Meetings with Remarkable Men”), and “Loyalty Bldg.” Both songs are redolent of a very different energy than the rest of the album, probably because in all the furor over the label bullshit, we’d all managed to drop our guards a little, and taken a step back towards one another and remembered that playing music together was the most fun any of us had ever had. That sense of fun can’t be faked, nor can its importance be overstated. It transformed the album from an incomplete, wishful self-portrait to a document of who we really were as a band, for good and ill. It was the final revision. The King James Version. It proved to be the exact right title, which is just as well since the runner-up was Hip-Hop Millennium Robot.

At long last, we got the call that the label had reconstituted as London-Sire (fine by me!), and they were ready to go. The release date was set for September 12, 2000. After months of waiting, we were now in a rush to get back to work, and we were all determined to do it right this time. Photo shoot, nailed. Video shoot, starring Ione Skye, done. Big photo and feature in Spin. All signs were really promising, and then… absolutely everything went perfectly, almost comically, though more like tragically, wrong. Radio stations weren’t interested in “Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo.” We toured for about two months, mostly with bands we didn’t love in front of increasingly hostile and bovine audiences. The age of asshole rock had arrived, and there was no place in it for us.

Though reviews were mostly excellent, most everything else was tumbleweeds. Every door that had flown open for us the first time around remained steadfastly locked. This was the scenario every other band complained about when telling their major label story. And now it was our story, too.

Then, in the unkindest of all known cuts, MTV fucked us over in the most demoralizing way imaginable: Having alerted us that the video for “Sad Sweetheart” would debut on 120 Minutes, they made a big show of announcing the new song from Harvey Danger (remember them?), here it is, “Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo”… And played “Flagpole Sitta” instead.

And that, my friends, was that. No explanation. No meaningful apology. And no future for King James Version.

But a funny thing happened over the ensuing two-and-a-half decades: We all kept meeting people who said they loved the album. Many of them claimed to prefer it to Merrymakers. You’d be surprised how often it happened. Happens.

As years passed, the awful sense that King James Version might have been nothing more than a cosmic object lesson in not taking good fortune for granted began to fade. In its place arose a small, private fantasy that it could join the ranks of unjustly undiscovered and underrated cult records that lie in wait for subsequent generations to discover. On reflection, that was always the kind of record we were trying to make: The kind you cherish all the more because you have to seek it out. The kind that makes people scoff when you say you love it, until you play it for them. The kind that merits a 25th anniversary limited edition vinyl pressing.

The tallest order of all.

— Sean Nelson
Nashville, 2024