My hmphs

Every so often, in a state of anxiety, I’ll wonder if, like oil, melodies are a finite resource and that we’ll soon run out of them. And judging from the lawsuits arising from hip-hop’s unauthorized uses of riffs and snippets of other songs, you wonder if that day is quickly looming

Then you hear Calling Distance Stations from the Nines, and all is well with the world. In fact, it’s so well that you wonder if lead vocalist Steve Eggers has cornered the market on the best melodies, discovering some secret formula for creating tunes that elicit such joy and euphoria.

I’ve mentioned The Nines previously on this blog, and this won’t be the last time, either. In their 10-year career, the band has released four albums, the latest being last year’s Gran Jukle’s Field. But Calling Distance Stations is a masterpiece.

From the opening chords of the fast-paced “Drama Queen,” Eggers channels Ben Folds, but without the attitude. “Take What You Want” has multiple hooks - so many, in fact, that you wonder (back again to a finite supply of melodies) if he shouldn’t conserve and just use a couple. The fact that he doesn’t take this advice and instead crams them all into one song is a wonderful experiment in melodic excess.

The production is fairly simple. “Mary Jane” seems straight out of a Wings album, sounding sad and beautiful at the same time. It begins with a simple piano, and builds slowly with a horns section. There’s something about adding horns that makes a song sound important, and that feeling is not lost with this song.

Other times, Eggers uses the simplicity to perfection, with only a keyboard and his voice to express his thoughts. “Marigold” has a turn-of-the-century, Americana feel, touched slightly with strings. And “Goodnight My Love,” a lullaby for his daughter, can bring tears to your eyes.

As I’ve said before, Steve Eggers has so many ideas he’s uploading snippets under pseudonyms on MySpace, at times using nonsensical syllables in place of words just so he can get the melodies down. He is an unknown master composer, and it’s a shame his music is not better known. So go buy his records. It will help him pay the bills, and it will bring a smile to your face.

• Buy “Calling Distance Stations” at CD Baby
• The Nines’ MySpace Page
• The Nines’ Second MySpace Page
• Lewiston Smithe’s MySpace Page - Lewiston Smithe is Steve Eggers’ alter ego. This page is a place for him to post little demos of songs - Tin Pan Alley, barbershop, old-time piano ditties that are fantastic. (And this is his throwaway stuff?)

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I wrote the following article for Youthquake magazine in 2004, but it still retains its sugary-sweet goodness.

And In The End…

For fans, the end came suddenly. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in February 1994 that the band was writing songs for its next album. Then, three months later, word came of the band’s demise, citing “creative differences.” As with any breakup, there are 10 different stories as to what happened; getting a synthesis is difficult, but one could surmise that personality conflicts between Sturmer and Manning arose, and the songwriting process seemed broken. They both went into the studio to record “Think About Your Troubles” for a Harry Nilsson tribute album, and that was it. Apparently, the two former friends haven’t said a word to each other since. The second coming of Lennon and McCartney had, like their mentors, split in a huff. The band members did move on to other things:

• After leaving Jellyfish, Chris Manning was in a band called Honey, which broke up in 1996. He is now a producer and engineer in San Francisco and has worked with such artists as Santana, Metallica and Third Eye Blind.
• Jason Falkner, free from being the odd man out, chose yet another band for his next project. The Grays, a collection of musicians from other bands who didn’t like being in bands, released “Ro Sham Bo” in 1994. Then they broke up, because they didn’t like being in bands. Since then, Falkner has released several solo albums and counts many in the Jellyfish faithful among his fans.
• Roger Manning, like Paul McCartney, has kept himself busy after the breakup but has found limited success. He and Eric Dover formed the power pop band Imperial Drag and released one album. Manning was also the creative force behind the Moog Cookbook, which played popular hard rock tunes (“Black Hole Sun,” “Cat Scratch Fever”) on Moog synthesizers. In 2006, Manning and Falkner joined forces in a new-wave retro group called TV Eyes and released a debut album in Japan. He has released two solo albums and has also been a member of Beck’s backing band.
• Tim Smith formed Umajets with former Hollyfaith member Rob Aldridge and released a few albums that sound like lost Jellyfish albums. He is probably best known as Sheryl Crow’s bass guitarist. Finally, Andy Sturmer has all but disappeared. He got married, wrote some songs and produced a Jelly-like album by Sweden’s the Merrymakers. On the other side of the world, he produced and played on several releases by the Japanese group Puffy AmiYumi. Lately his name has popped up as the composer of the themes to several children’s shows, most notably “My Friends Tigger and Pooh” on the Disney Channel. Numerous Sturmer demos have surfaced, as have rumors of a solo album. But he has spent his post-Jellyfish years lurking in the shadows. There have never been any rumors of a Jellyfish reunion. So you would think that yet another band had come and gone, all but forgotten. Wrong. The band had developed a small but fanatic following worldwide. The “Jellyfish Army,” as they called themselves, continue to flourish a decade after the band split in discussion groups and among the group’s side projects. They clamored for more Jellyfish material, and a box set called “Fan Club” was released in 2002, consisting of demos, live recordings and unreleased songs. (A box set! That’s only reserved for rock legends such as Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin.) Andy Zax’s liner notes for “Fan Club” include a fitting epitaph: “For now – and let’s face it, forever – we’ve got two albums and this box of demos, one-off covers, forgotten songs and interview bits … And that’ll have to do, really. Listening to the four discs at hand reminds me of a lot of things, but mostly of how hard Jellyfish worked, how they always tried to get the details right, how completely unwilling they were to settle for anything less than the best they knew they were capable of.” Maybe that hard work will not be forgotten. Maybe a future pop group will be asked about their influences, and they will point to Jellyfish, and the group will have their place in music history alongside their idols. Who knows? Maybe we’ll hear “Joining a Fan Club” in a Volkswagen commercial one day.

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I wrote the following article for Youthquake magazine in 2004, but it still retains its sugary-sweet goodness.

Crying Over Spilt Milk

Jellyfish had finally arrived. The band was being mentioned in the same sentence as the Beatles, and Sturmer and Manning were being compared to Lennon and McCartney.

And it drove them crazy.

“I hate the word ‘Beatlesque’ with a passion,” Sturmer told Daily Variety. “We get hit with that tag all the time, and I feel that it’s extremely inaccurate.” Nevertheless, the comparisons were inevitable. In a sense, Bellybutton was Jellyfish’s Revolver - an ambitious album that gave hints of greatness and laid the stage for bigger and better things. After a long tour, the group felt that it was time for them to make their Sgt. Pepper.

But before they could start, the band quickly began to disintegrate. The tour had taken its toll; Roger’s brother Chris decided that being a rock star was not for him and left. Jason Falkner became dissatisfied with his lack of input in the songwriting process (George Harrison, anyone?) and quit the group to pursue a solo career. That left Roger Manning and Sturmer, who were left to pick up the pieces. “We were very tired,” Sturmer told Billboard magazine. “By the time we started doing demos for the next record, everybody was totally stressed out.” A band was hastily thrown together to record the album. Bassist Tim Smith eventually became a regular; other musicians such as Eric Dover, Jon Brion and Lyle Workman filled in on the recording sessions and subsequent tour.

Not a good way to start an album. To make matters worse, the record took an agonizing six months to record. Take after retake, tracks overdubbed on top of tracks, the process was glacial. Paul McCartney, the ultimate perfectionist, would have been envious of such obsessive-compulsive recording.

When Spilt Milk was released in February 1993, critics didn’t know what comparison to make anymore. Jellyfish, in a sense, had out-Beatled the Beatles. It was Queen meets ELO meets Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys meets 10cc - all of their icons rolled into one album. But then there was that circus music. And the kids’ songs. And a power ballad, a polka and a lullaby. I give up; who the hell did these guys sound like?

Let’s set aside comparisons for now. Spilt Milk was an ambitious, innovative, almost apocalyptic album that tested the limits of pop music and, well, the human ear. It began with a sweet a cappella lullaby, “Hush,” with such gorgeous harmonies reminiscent of the Beach Bo … oops, never mind. Then, as soon as you were relaxed and asleep, BAM! A heavy metal guitar riff introduced a … piano? … as Andy Sturmer launched into “Joining a Fan Club,” a bombastic, in-your-face ode to a rock star’s fan club. This song had it all - guitar solos racing pell-mell, feedback, several key changes and what sounded like 20-part harmony. Ear candy. And the wonderful heartaches began.

“Sebrina, Paste and Plato” was a rock operetta that started with a piano reminiscent of a children’s television show. The playful verse was followed by a rousing refrain that sounded like a bar full of drunken sailors, which was answered by a child’s voice saying, “Kool-Aid, sandwiches and chips for all the shoulders!” The drunken sailors replied, “Lunch is on the table, soon dessert is on the floor!”

Huh?

But then the chorus, the lovely sing-song chorus (”So serene, Sebrina makes me feel so serene …”) found its way into your heart, and it started all over again. By the end of the song, you were dizzy from the short, manic trip, and you didn’t care what the lyrics meant.

The genius of “Spilt Milk” was in the first six songs - one masterpiece after another. “New Mistake” provided an earful of guitars that sounded so bittersweet, complemented by a 10cc-like chorus (Dang it, did it again). “Glutton of Sympathy” was the classic that never was - a beautiful mid-tempo ballad that was made for radio. It was followed by the ill-fated first single, “The Ghost at Number One” - Queen resurrected. Sorry, but I can’t help it this time. It was Queen, dammit. All that was needed was Freddie Mercury. Then, taking a page from “The King is Half-Undressed,” we heard a bridge in a different key that turned the song upside down - multi-layered harmonies over a harpsichord. Now the group was doing its best Beach Boys imitation. It was dead-on, really.

The rest of the album continued the voyage through the looking-glass. “Bye Bye Bye” was a polka, complete with accordion and oom-pah-pahs. “All is Forgiven” was a thundering, wonderful, noisy anthem; the operatic, falsetto Queen/ELO harmonies made another appearance. The song ended abruptly into the quiet “Russian Hill,” an homage to Henry Mancini laced with strings and a flute.

How do you end such an album? With a circus tune, of course. “Brighter Day” was a slow, plodding song that sounds like it came straight from a calliope. You could almost hear children laughing and barkers peddling cotton candy. The song ended just as the album began: with a music box and the same note that started “Hush.” You had come full circle, but you felt as if you had been on the merry-go-round for 45 minutes, and it was about to start again.

The album was magnificent. Forty-eight mixed tracks of voices, strings, brass, flutes, banjos, chimes, theremins, harpsichords, accordions, balalaikas and other noise squeezed into 12 songs.

And it tanked on the charts.

Jammed smack in the middle of the grunge era, “Spilt Milk” presented a problem for Charisma Records, who didn’t know how to market the group. Try pitching an album as varied and intense as “Spilt Milk” alongside Nirvana and Pearl Jam and see how far it gets you. It got the album as high as No. 164 on the Hot 200 chart. And it was the beginning of the end for Jellyfish.

Tomorrow: And in the end…

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