Where, Indeed?

In the 17 years since this album’s original release, I’ve had no shortage of opportunities to write/talk/think obsess about the story of Harvey Danger. These efforts have tended to dwell on the complicated process of reconciling the band’s history with the fact that, as far as most people are concerned, that history begins and ends with song two, side one.

Harvey Danger agonistes is an easy story to tell: We were a small-time band. We had a big hit. We never had another one. Basement practice space one minute, heavy rotation on MTV the next. In short, to purloin the parlance of the ever-apposite Morrissey, dial-a-cliché. Evan, Aaron, Jeff, and I have all spent varying percentages of the past decade-and-a-half trying to make sense of those two minutes (both of which felt simultaneously longer and shorter than their requisite 60 seconds), and carving out a workable model for passing all the minutes that have followed it. This project has been lubricated by time’s erosion of the burning need to explicate every multiqualified grace note of our uniquely unlikely assimilation into the Music Industrial Complex. The further away we get from our little year zero, the easier it gets to lean on broad strokes and bullet points: No, we weren’t exactly “going for it,” but we weren’t exactly not. Yes, being medium famous had its moments, but by and large it was disorienting and weirdly tawdry—far from feeling like a validation of our work, it actually had a distancing effect. Yes, it felt good to have a hit, but it also felt like being raised onto the shoulders of a mob you never belonged to and that never wanted anything to do with you before or after you were aloft. Yes, we wrote the songs together and split everything four ways (based on the R.E.M. model, or at least the version of it we half-researched and half-conjured from compulsive listening, reading, discussing, luxuriating, and projecting; in our quest for a paradigm within the larger cosmology of bandness Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe was the oracle we always returned to). Yes, sex (but more not). Yes, drugs (but only barely). Yes, rock’n’roll (but, you know, within reason). This seems to be the story people want to hear, if, indeed, they want to hear any story at all.

And yet, no matter how vehemently this narrative asserts itself, and both seems and is true, I’ve never lost the nagging sense that the band’s real story has gone so long untold that even its four main characters have… not forgotten, but let’s say misfiled it. Lost in the glare of hi-beam anecdotes about our brief fame ride and all that did and didn’t come after, the story I’m referring to remains off to the side, out back smoking, obscured by the tall grass in the long-unmowed yard of the house where we all used to live together. That house very pointedly adorns the cover of our first album, which is undoubtedly in your hands or on your turntable even now, having been pressed for the very first time on vinyl by the thoughtful diligentlemen at No Sleep Records, whose idea this reissue was. (Thanks, guys!) Under the long shadow of 17 years’ worth of memory, I must say that listening back to the 10 songs that changed everything for us is a bracing sensation. To hear the person you were when you weren’t yet who you are now is to understand how little you understood, and to recognize how little you even could have understood. This is doubly bracing when you consider that the person you were then had everything riding on the depth of his understanding. It’s tempting to be hard on your past self, the one who made all those idiotic mistakes, who scorched so many friendships, who insisted he knew exactly what we was doing while steering car after car into ditch after ditch. And yet, temptations aside, it feels a lot better, and in a much bigger way, to hoist hindsight’s binoculars to your deteriorating eyes and spy something you love.

A stroll down Merrymakers lane nearly two decades later reframes the narrative of Harvey Danger as it existed before anyone knew or cared about it, when success consisted of finishing a song, of scraping together a couple hundred bucks to pay for a weekend session at John & Stu’s Place, of piling into Jeff’s Volvo to listen to the rough mixes of “Private Helicopter” and “Terminal Annex” on cassette over and over again for literally hours, of holding the hand-screened cardboard covers and stuffing the CDs inside, of a weekend show at the Crocodile (where I later learned the bar staff would sardonically refer to us as the house band), of getting a two-line mention in The Rocket, sharing the stage with Hazel (a truly great band whose patronage and friendship I will always treasure), of playing on KCMU’s The Live Room (Cheryl Waters por vida), and loading out of Jack Straw Studios in time to nip down to Moe to see Pavement. I could keep going, but nostalgia is purgatory, and life, as the poet reminds us, is brief.

The characteristic I hear the most flagrantly in this album—not so much in the content of the songs (which, let’s face it, don’t exactly burn with optimism’s flames), but in their very existence—is hope. Runners-up: enthusiasm, exuberance, reach, restraint, coltishness, command, delicacy and damn-the-tormedos-and-double-the guitars rock and roll. I hear the bands we listened to, together and separately, and I hear how our unusual collaborative process invigilated against the band ever actually quite sounding like them. I hear compound yearnings: to assert an identity, to be recognized as clever and formidable, to send up a signal flare to fellow misfits underserved by an inane cultural landscape, to blur the line between the urgency of emotional immediacy and the imposture of worldliness that belies its authors’ years. Most strikingly, however, and maybe most obviously, I hear a band being a band. Harvey Danger was never (not even once) a songwriter backed by three dudes: it was a 4-headed, eight-armed partnership, in which all musical decisions were a shared responsibility, predicated on the fact that when we began, none of us knew any better. On reflection, this was a profoundly unsustainable, naïve. and probably wrongheaded system. It was, however, ours, and its benefits were all the more satisfying for the self-imposed obstacles we had to clear just to get past the goddamn intro. At its worst it was like a roomful of alarm clocks debating the virtues of daylight savings time. At its best, though, it felt like a miraculous telepathy. It was also the surest way to guarantee that the band belonged and mattered to all of us equally. In the years following our dissolution, I’ve learned that mutual enfranchisement is actually more important to a band than being good. It also made things slightly more awkward than you might expect when the band stepped onto the big stage and I got all the attention. I mean, in a way, duh. I was the singer. The singer always gets all the attention. I was also a good deal more flamboyant and demonstrative than my confreres, and, frankly, lyrics are a lot easier for most people to talk about and consciously appreciate (or conspicuously not appreciate) than say, basslines. Though I always made an effort to be very clear about the band’s collaborative nature, I can’t deny that the spotlight was nice and warm, and I had always more or less yearned to feel it—however uncomfortable its comparatively muted glow almost immediately became. Listening back now, I’ve never been more aware of the things I wish people had paid more attention to while they lined up to tell me they’d just gotten their tongues pierced. So permit me, at the risk of gaucheness, to swerve the spotlight briefly band-ward.

First, and best: Aaron Huffman’s bass stepping up to take those delectable lead lines, its tone carved into a gorgeous lightsaber of distortion. I’ve always thought that sound—the bass as melodic lead instrument (and the way those melodies arise from the limitations of the instrument in the context of the songs)—was the thing that made us not merely interesting, but unique among bands of our stripe. It inverts the musty punk canard of no-more-guitar-solos—which people still unaccountably pretended to care about in the late-’90s—and establishes its whole own aesthetic microverse. It was what kept us from veering too closely into the tempting shallows of pure pop punk, which we had an affinity for, but not enough of one to commit to so narrow an aperture. Aaron’s bass melodies bust out all over this record—one of my favorites ever is the intro riff to the very first song. Played fast and dirty, that DA-nah-nah-nah-nah-NAH-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah figure is great in at least five ways: 1) as song intro, 2) as an ALBUM INTRO, 3) as a bass line, 4) as a sound, 5) as an argument—which I by no means believe Aaron was in any way actually having—with the orthodoxy of guitar rock. Oh, and 6) as rock. Because it does. See also: the intro to “Old Hat,” the Evel-Knievel-revving-up-to-traverse-Snake-River blast midway through “Terminal Annex,” the majestic counterpoints throughout the choruses of “Problems and Bigger Ones,” and, obviously, the soaring instrumental hook at the top of “Flagpole Sitta.” (Confidential to the cover bands of the world: the reason you can’t get the song to sound right is because you’re not playing the leads on a bass.)

Unlike your typical one-guitar band heroes (Buck, Mould, Cobain, Townshend, Marr) Jeff was a player largely without the impulse to flourish. His work on the record is similarly antagonistic to the presumptive demands of rock guitar, primarily because—with the leads being played on the bass—it’s content to hold down a more physical, rhythmic role, although the double-slide solo in “Jack the Lion” (a noise trick borrowed from the late, great Portland band Pond), the harmonized lead midway through on “Old Hat,” and the heartbreaking violin lines in “Wrecking Ball” make excellent cases for his melodic acumen. Jeff’s playing was visceral and precise: the guttural chorus riffs of “Carlotta Valdes,” “Private Helicopter,” and “Terminal Annex”; the frugal arpeggios of “Problems and Bigger Ones.” Where he really came alive was when the opportunity arose, courtesy of our producer/mentor/friend/Obi-Wan John Goodmanson, to build his intentionally elementary chord structures into dense layers of noisy texture full of magic tones and secret notes—the squalling Jaguars of “Woolly Muffler,” the full stadium Klieg lights of “Jack the Lion,” the epic snowball-rolling-heroically-down-Everest that is “Radio Silence,” and elsewhere. And how exactly had I managed to forget the interplay between guitar and bass on this record? Jeff and Aaron were the founders of the band, which began the day they rode the bus to American Music and bought a guitar, a bass, and two practice amps, and commenced, in the anyone-can-do-it spirit, that prevailed in prelapsarian Seattle, to learning these instruments together. The results was the musical equivalent of friends so close they finish each other’s sentences. Their individual styles would emerge and diverge as years and albums went by, but when I hear the intros to “Woolly Muffler,” “Terminal Annex,” “Wrecking Ball,” etc., I’m reminded that the way these lines curl around one another, unmindful of the instruments’ traditional roles, is and will always be the nucleus of everything we ever did.

It’s impossible for me to hear the drums as anything other than a rolling dialogue between Evan and the other elements of the band, especially the vocals. Though his style bears no other similarities to Keith Moon’s, his beats and accents have an uncanny way of responding to the words I’m singing, annotatig them like lines drawn under text in a book, framing them like gilded molding, contradicting them like a devil’s advocate, or stepping forward to join with them like a harmony singer. From the very first Harvey Danger practice, which found him kneeling on the floor in front of a loose snare drum and a busted ride cymbal resting upside-down on a paint can, Evan’s drumming style was an extension of his restless, inquisitive mind, and his fiercely devoted soul. Though his parts did the work that drum parts need to do, they also benefitted from a tireless quest to bend a fundamentally ineloquent instrument to the uses of a verbally dextrous person left otherwise mic-free in a band increasingly marked by a torrent of words. Hence, the perfect fills on “Carlotta,” “Private Helicopter,” and, let’s face it, “Flagpole Sitta,” but also the delicate taps in “Woolly Muffler,” the heartbeats in “Old Hat” and “Problems and Bigger Ones,” the loping stumble down “Radio Silence” from Gary Young to Steve West, and everything in between.

Which brings us to the vocals, about which there’s no graceful way for me to express my thoughts, so pitter patter, let’s get at ’er: I’m embarrassed that “Carlotta Valdes” was misspelled with a “z” on the original pressings of the album. The title of “Flagpole Sitta” was intended as a reference to mindless trend-following, as well as an homage to both Pavement and N.W.A., and occurred before the lyrics “I’m not sick but I’m not well” existed. We played the song live for months with only the bop bop bahs as a chorus, and only when we finally recorded it did the lines occur to me, basically as I sang them; only later did I realize that they contained an unconscious swipe from one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands, Guv'ner, who sang “I’m not healthy, I’m not ill/just I had a lotta time to kill” on their immortal “Amplituden.” Whoopsie daisy. (The lyrics also contain direct allusions to The Connells, Aldous Huxley, and Irving Stone, so in a way, I suppose it’s fitting.) It was a throwaway title not because the song was a throwaway, but because titles were hypothetical for a band without a record. The choice to leave it intact is probably the best illustration of Harvey Danger’s fractious relationship to art v. commerce, and also, therefore, the reason I’m not typing these words on a yacht. “Old Hat” is the oldest song on the album, and was the first all-the-way-good song we ever wrote. It was also the closest I ever got to communicating the uncomplicated thrill of being newly in love. Abby Grush’s out-of-nowhere countermelody in the bridge is my proudest musical contribution (somewhere there’s a video of me conducting her singing it.) “Private Helicopter” is sort of a response to “Old Hat,” one half-rung up the latter of emotional maturity, confessing that love can do more than just die. “Jack the Lion” is pure autobiography, about visiting my grandfather on his deathbed. The loud, anthem-y arrangement was less about semi-ironic detachment than about trying to find a way to sing extremely personal words without telling listeners how to feel while I did it. I still have the sense that the words for “Problems and Bigger Ones” and “Terminal Annex” were never quite finished. Both songs contained experiments in a discursive, vaguely cut-up writing style, and as a result, I hear myself strugging to find a voice that wasn’t exactly mine. Despite and because of those difficulties, I love them both, and the lesson they taught me about how songs aren’t finished until people hear them. I have no idea what “from damage to damn control” means, but there are plenty of people in our audience who have construed plenty from it, which makes the line mean far more to me than it otherwise might have. (And also, the overflowing cup couplet is probably my favorite line on the record.) The song that evokes my most cherished memories of being in Harvey Danger is “Radio Silence,” which I received as a fully-formed instrumental demo from the lads the day I returned home from my first trip to Paris. The fact that they had labored over it in my absence, the fact that it was clearly a big step forward, and the implicit challenge it contained to step up my own game resulted in the song that, even more than “Wrecking Ball” (which, on reflection, is pretty effectively sad), demonstrated that we had more going on than our early, funny ones might have suggested. (And, at the risk of one’s-own-horn-tooting, I might suggest that the complaint in the lyrics seems just as apt today as it did then.) Regrets? I have a few. But then again, it’s not bad for a 22-year-old kid.

Though Harvey Danger experienced what Kermit T. Frog memorably called “big time showbiz” under the most favorable conditions, it was indisputably not our milieu. Nor did we appreciate how favorable those conditions were. We all took extra special care to make sure nobody developed the impression that we were enjoying ourselves out in the world of Pro, owing to our perception that we didn’t belong in that world, and were unlikely to stay in it very long. Wondering now if we might have stayed a bit longer had we not been quite so determined not to is one of those niggling questions that tend to subside—in intensity if not frequency—as one ages. But it’s not like we were ever entirely comfortable in what is charmingly called the Seattle music community, either (though let no one say we didn’t put in the hours). I don’t know when it became so easy for me to overlook that Harvey Danger was a band built by misfits. I’d like to say “and for misfits,” but that isn’t quite correct. We built it for ourselves, largely without help or encouragement. (Until we met John Goodmanson, that is.) We had no experience of being in prior bands. We had no “vision.” We had no plan. We had no sound. We had no look. We had no prospects, no network, no sub-scene, no cool friends, none of the things you’ve come to expect a band to need to have any hope of making a name for itself. We didn’t even have a van. In place of these vital assets, however, we had each other. As it turned out, this wasn’t all we needed, but it was undoubtedly what we needed most, and understood least when beset by the success for which we unequivocally were not dressed. You don’t have to be Joni Mitchell to figure out that you only really appreciate a gift like that after you don’t have it anymore (see above, re: intensity, frequency, aging).

Our first glimpse of interdependence had come in October or November of 1993, the very first time we ever got together. Jeff and Aaron, who had formed the band the previous year, had agreed to let Evan try out on drums (at least partly because he lived in the house where they practiced). Evan invited me on a whim because I said I’d always wanted to try singing in a band. Our friend Jim Brunner (from Slugfest!) stopped by with his guitar, and we all five dicked around for a couple of unfruitful hours before someone suggested there might be a cover we all knew to focus our attention. I suggested the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On.” I mean if we couldn’t play that… A basic arrangement got sorted out quickly, and we dug in. And then stayed in. We played the impossibly simple, impossibly rich song in an infinite loop the rest of the afternoon. There was no PA. I sang into a Crate guitar amp. Someone thought to press record on a Walkman with a mic and for the next few weeks, we all took turns with the tape that contained the 17-minute (and still incomplete) take of Lou Reed’s deathless gem. Not long after this, in the same small basement of Eastern House in Wallingford, Jeff, Aaron, Evan, and I made our fledgling attempts at writing together. As all bands must, we learned to communicate by inventing a language. The process was arduous, but it led to the inexpressible, otherworldly, superhuman joy that comes from harnessing the infinite field of chaotic nothing made by four people in a room and taming it into a song that is your song that you wrote with your band. Almost immediately, there arose among us the mutual willingness to make the pursuit of creating this band the main thing in our lives. Jobs and relationships came and went, often dramatically, but there was never any question that Harvey Danger was going to be the center of our universe.

For the four years that followed, we lived together, wrote together, rehearsed together, played shows together, went to shows together, laid waste to our revolting communal kitchen together, got drunk and high together, watched movies but never ever TV together (I didn’t know anyone who watched TV back then), and above all talked together, incessantly, about our band, about other bands, about bandness, band life, band culture, and why, oh why, our band seemed to hover on an eternal fringe of it. No value judgment is intended when I say no band in Seattle sounded anything like us. At all. I’d like to say we wouldn’t have had it any other way, but the truth is that any other way was not an option. We only knew how to do everything exactly the way we did it, for good and ill. All our role models were strangers, and most of the other bands in our weeknight ghetto were either not very good or brazenly careerist. Or both. They probably thought we were, too. Community was elusive. We didn’t make sense. We weren’t cool, either, and once we realized it, we stayed that way defiantly, because cool is fucking stupid.

A small group of friends started to come see our loud, drunken, shambolic shows, but beyond that, no one in the world had any reason to expect that Harvey Danger would ever amount to any more than the other willfully hopeless hobby bands that everyone in Seattle knew at least a dozen of. Afflicted though we were with the anti-ambition syndrome that defined NW rock for many years (which I’m embarrassed to recall but still can’t deny wishing I saw a little more of nowadays), we shared a tacit understanding that what we were doing was not only good in the way all bands basically secretly believe their music is, but also special in some inexpressible way. Not that we would have expressed it, at least not in public… Our deep discomfort with both feeling and showing confidence can be chalked up to our tender ages and callow psyches, but above all to the times in which we were coming of age. News of Kurt Cobain’s suicide broke two days after our first show (April 6, 1994, Lake Union Pub). Let’s be clear that while we had many “influences,” Nirvana was the North Star of Harvey Danger; our inciting incident, our Beatles on Ed Sullivan, our Sex Pistols at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall AND at Winterland. And truly loving Nirvana meant always having to say you’re sorry. Ambition was detestable. Careerism was despicable. Failure was inevitable. But quitting was unimaginable. We knew we were onto something, but we strained under the awareness that we weren’t quite there and didn’t know how to get there, or even where there was. So on we yearned. We’d never have survived to make this record if we hadn’t all believed that the massive boulder at which we were passionately and ignorantly chipping away for all those years did in fact contain a sculpture. But the sculpture wasn’t really the issue. The boulder was. We knew no one could ever care as intensely about that boulder as we did. And though the dauntingly ardent members of our audience through the years make a strong argument to the contrary, I humbly submit that no one ever has.

And so, after a lot of wild rhubarb, the band made another record (King James Version), broke up with a whimper; reformed three years later with a new drummer and made a third record (Little By Little…), then broke up again with honor restored. In the meanwhile, the members pursued other projects, musical and extra- (and sub-), got married, got divorced, had kids, and didn’t. But whatever else we ever did, or will ever do, none of us will ever again have the chance to make another first record, to preserve on tape (tape!) the people we were when we were young and couldn’t possibly have known any better. Frankly (Mr. Shankly), I’m astonished to still be talking about this album 17 years later. But I’m not surprised.

Which leaves only one question: Where have all the merrymakers gone? Why, they’re right here, of course, where they’ve been all along. Only this time they’re on vinyl, at long, sweet last. Thank you for waiting, and for remembering.

And in the immortal words of Let It Bleed, “This record should be played loud.”

— Sean Nelson (lead vocals)
Seattle, 2014