Sleeping through heaven

In the first half of the 1980s, I was a college radio DJ.  I thought my musical tastes were pretty cool, far ahead of the crowd, and I took some pride in that.  But it didn't make my life okay.  My personal life, in those days, was often a perfect storm of solitude, introversion, youthful misery and angst.

Somehow, I remained entirely unaware of a band called Game Theory.  Even while taking a course in mathematics on the subject of game theory, in 1983, I was clueless that there was a record or two, probably on the station's shelves, right under my nose, that I would have loved.  I would have noticed that name if I had seen it.

By the time Real Nighttime was released (1985), I was no longer a DJ, but still was listening to my college station, still thinking myself a musical sophisticate.  In retrospect, that album is so much in line with my tastes at the time that it's inconceivable that I might have heard it and ignored it.

If someone had banged on my door and told me what I was sleeping through, my 20s would have been enriched beyond belief.  I can imagine my 23-year-old self wearing out the grooves of the song "24," and continuing to find more resonances in it over the years.

About a decade later, sometime in the mid-90s, there was a faint knock.  I happened to tune in one night, and heard a DJ doing an hour-long retrospective on the music of Scott Miller, and his bands Game Theory and Loud Family.  "Catchy," I thought, and I typed those names into a database of random personal notes.  I turned over and went back to sleep.

Time passed.  At a record store, I saw a used CD by the Loud Family, vaguely remembered that I had liked something of theirs, and bought it.  The cover featured a bright blue sky, and a hill of beans.  I set it aside for a few months.

One day, I popped it into my CD player.  What I heard was a droning, choppy harmony, an electronically processed wordless chant.  It seemed to go on forever.  I found it very irritating.  Was this ever going to end?  After what seemed like way too long, I lost patience and decided this music was unlistenable.  Back into a box it went.

Fast forward another few months.  Now I'm 36 years old, not 24.  Early evening, in my office on the 38th floor of a skyscraper, overlooking — well, actually overlooking very little, because my office windows faced another skyscraper that almost entirely blocked my view.  Bored, but unable to leave the office, I decided to give that CD another chance.  Through inertia, more than anything else, I left it on past the point where I had given up before.  And suddenly, the irritating drone paused, resumed, burst open, and spread wings into a beautiful song — which was all the more beautiful for having pushed me, with it, out of a cocoon.

I continued to listen, increasingly realizing what a complete idiot I had been to set it aside.  After the fourth track on the CD, I hit the stop button.  I had just heard something almost entirely unlike any song I'd ever heard before, and I needed time to wrap my brain around it, to assimilate the shape of it.  I played that song again, and a third time, before I was ready to move on to the next one.

My musical world had changed.  Within weeks, I had bought most of the albums that Game Theory and Loud Family had recorded in the 1980s and 1990s, and I discovered to my amazement that some of those were even better.

In the 13 years since that belated discovery, I still have never met another person face-to-face (outside of my old college radio circles) who had ever heard of Scott Miller, Game Theory, or Loud Family.  I haven't successfully won over any new fans, not even my wife.  Occasionally I would read that yet another music critic had mentioned Scott Miller's work, referring to "the best band nobody has heard of," or an "unrecognized work of genius," "godlike genius," "certifiable genius," "20+ years of pop song genius."  A thread becomes readily apparent, and it's all true.  This review was pretty representative of them all:

...another deliciously screwed-up slab of pop genius from America's most consistently underrated singer-songwriter, Scott Miller.  Miller has labored in relative obscurity ever since the early '80s, producing album after album of hook-laden and profoundly literate rock-and-roll in his bands, Game Theory, and now, The Loud Family.  Although he is a favorite among critics and has a small cadre of obsessive and adoring fans, Miller has consistently doomed himself to demi-stardom by producing songs somewhere just on the other side of what's considered "accessible."

And eventually it must have become too much to live with.  I suppose his death shouldn't have been a surprise to me, foreshadowed as it was in so many of his lyrics.  When a guy writes his own obituary in a 1987 song, and writes another song called "Slit My Wrists," and another called "Just Gone," and puts something of that kind in every one of his albums — perhaps a hint in almost every song — I suppose I should ultimately be grateful that he stayed in my world as long as he did... as long as he could.

And still, I listen, and I read through his lyrics; I look on his works and despair.  I am Heston on the beach, raging up at the torch.  I want to go bang on every door.