Ten years ago today we lost Scott Miller of the Loud Family and Game Theory. In the weeks after, in late spring 2013, I wrote a long essay on his music and what it meant to me, and the community that it helped form. It's 4000 words, published in a format that does not exist anymore, so I'm resharing. Also, we really need a MORE: feature.
The news came hard, and it's never been taken right
Amidst of a dreadful week of Boston attacks and fertilizer explosions, there was one tragedy you might not have been aware of - the sad and untimely death of Scott Miller. Miller led two minor bands, neither of which even escaped obscurity at the national level. Through a career in music, he attracted glowing reviews but scant audiences - those audiences making up for in devotion what they lacked in numbers. Miller died last week at the age of 53 leaving his widow and two young daughters.
For me to explain the significance of Miller's music in my life I need I preface anything I say with a lot of caveats. I never heard the music of Game Theory during its existence - it was a college band while I was in elementary school and high school. To my chagrin, I never even heard the Loud Family while I was in college, running a radio station. The name was out there somewhere, on the pages of the CMJ and probably in the stacks at KRLX, but the music never so much as crossed my ears. Instead it was via mail order from Northfield MN, while I was living on a kibbutz in southern Israel, that I first heard the Loud Family's INTERBABE CONCERN on the basis of glenn mcdonald's rapturous and completely over-the-top two-week review, which probably comprised several thousand words. That review prompted me to add the disc to an order, and it arrived, replete with its baffling in-joking liner notes and its audacious overlay of scraps of noise and found sounds on top of hummable harmonies and wry humor.
INTERBABE CONCERN is not the easiest place to pick up the work of Scott Miller. In retrospect it may be Miller's finest achievement under the Loud Family, but there are easier records to start with - specifically, PLANTS AND BIRDS AND ROCKS AND THINGS, the first of the Loud Family albums. But living in a desert setting in a foreign country, before the age of instant-anywhere access to music online, I listened to it obsessively. I recently re-read a review I had written of INTERBABE CONCERN, from a desert outpost in Israel, and this section emerges as an accurate synopsis of my thoughts at the time:
He writes pop, to be certain, but he writes it as if he weren't. Lyrical convention is completely absent; while the songs deal with girlfriends, breakups, and fading nostalgia, the images, language and metaphors are completely alien to the pop music standard. In terms of the sound of the songs, the hooks which define a great pop song are there in abundance but never left on their own. False starts, shards of guitar noise, counter melodies, peculiar instrumentation and pieces of found noise intrude and wander in and out of the mix as if in abeyance to the lo-fi ethos of permitting and celebrating mistakes. But the liner notes declare proudly "Everything on this album was on purpose," which appears to demonstrate conclusively that Scott Miller has somehow sought, and found, a long-lost no-man's-land between Crowded House and Sonic Youth, and wishes to share its treasures with those few brave enough to accompany him.
Capital, whispering in my ear
Returning to the States, I joined and became an active part of the wildly entertaining, extraordinarily discursive community of Miller disciples, known as the loudfans. Finding common cause with Miller's fans was easy; finding Miller's actual music was a lot harder. Pretty much every Game Theory CD and vinyl record was out of print, and even the Loud Family - a going concern at the time - usually required a special order.
I would buy the Loud Family records from the band itself, or from one of a few sympathetic CD stores in Washington. Once or twice, I would stumble across a used Game Theory CD in the misc. G section of a store, like Annapolis' Oceans II. Otherwise, I scoured listings of used CDs online. Securing LOLITA NATION was the high point. I had listed the album on want-lists for literally years when a copy suddenly became available from a sympathetic collector. What I paid for it was a scant reflection of the album's going value online.
The band's peripatetic nature - Miller rarely maintained the same band members two albums in a row- and home base in Northern California meant that East Coast appearances were scant. In 1998 I played a small part in rectifying that situation, securing an in store gig at DCCD, a smallish (and now long-defunct) independent record store in Adams Morgan. DAYS FOR DAYS was just released and DCCD only stocked it because I specifically requested it be on order, but the owner humored me and scheduled the in-store on the day the band was scheduled to play in town on one of their infrequent tours.
My memories of that day are pretty vivid, but if they have been obscured by the passage of time, I have my notes written that day. The DCCD in-store show was attended, err, sparsely. Perhaps twenty people in the store including the band and the store employees, and maybe ten people were there to see the band. The set-list was short - five actual songs and two of the interstitial bits from DAYS FOR DAYS. They did "Dee-Pression" and "Crypto-Sicko," plus two other DfD pieces, and the surprise for me was "Asleep and Awake on the Man's Freeway," from INTERBABE CONCERN. They played only about twenty minutes total, and unfortunately people were arriving to see the band as they were finishing. Charmingly, they had issued a call to their fanbase to provide mix tapes for them to listen to on the road, and I made a mix of New Zealand pop, mostly from the Flying Nun label. Scott and the rest of the Loud Family were unfailingly welcoming, appreciative, and sincere in their appreciation of the effort that their few fans had made on their behalf. Scott famously wrote extended, ironic, grateful notes to his fans, and I have a few handwritten notes from him thanking me for helping to arrange the in-store, and subsequent emails thanking me for the kiwipop mix tape.
It was sweltering in DC that July afternoon. After the usual hassles moving equipment out the door, etc., the band drove off to the Metro Cafe. I walked over later, just avoiding the torrential downpour that appeared out of nowhere and completely obliterated the humidity that had prevailed up that point in the day. The subsequent rainbow was spectacular, and bode well for the performance. But the opening bands went on far too long, and the modest audience's attention was waning. The crowd was somewhere between forty-sixty, but very knowledgeable, and people were regaling Scott with stories of seeing their first Game Theory gig in 1985, or whenever. I felt out of place among these decade-long fans, but people were singing along, albeit awkwardly at times. The crowd response was more energetic when - bizarrely - the manager tried to get the Louds off the stage without an encore, much to everyone's dismay.
Crowd reaction forced his hand, and they came back for two more songs, closing frantically after midnight with "Here It Is Tomorrow" from the Game Theory days. There were highlights from the Loud Family catalogue and two covers, which were intriguing choices (Beatles and My Bloody Valentine). The band rocked, and on and off-stage, they proved to be about the most charming, self-deprecating, sincere folks you're likely to run across. Ironically, if they were your neighbors, they'd have been the exact opposite of an actual loud family - they'd invite you over for vegetarian barbecue, make sure they weren't playing the stereo too loud, and walk your mail over if it went to the wrong address.
Friend of the family
So, in short, I was a fan, and I began interacting with the other fans more intently. In fact, Loud Family-linked listening formed the core of my musical life for some years, and I made lasting friends through that fanbase in DC, Boston, Portland, etc. Indeed, for years, if I was traveling to a new city for work or personal reasons, I would reach out to the loudfans list for recommendations on record stores, bands to see, decent food, or just an opportunity to hang out.
In 2000, ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE was released, and with it came the unmistakable sense of the band having run its course. It was clear that the band was unlikely to continue as a touring concern, based on the record sales (or non-sales), and comments that Miller had made. The album featured some spectacular valedictory songs - "Blackness, Blackness," and the closer, "Motion of Ariel." The band toured for that album, though, and I saw them in Cambridge, MA in April 2000 along with a host of other East Coast fans, some of whom trekked to the venue from substantial distances. It was a special but bittersweet moment, since it seemed unlikely that the band would be touring again. But for their last tour, they certainly went out with style. I had never realized what an absolutely great guitarist Miller was, or how effortlessly drummer Gil Ray pulled off the most insanely convoluted drum fills ever. Pianist/keyboardist Alison Faith Levy sang lead on several songs including the most catchy number on the new album, and Kenny Kessel on bass is the lowest-profile band member but he is also extremely technically savvy, and the band uses rhythm and dynamics far more effectively than Game Theory ever did. They emphasized the new material but they also did a couple of earlier Loud Family classics, including "Inverness" and "Rosy Overdrive" from PLANTS AND BIRDS AND ROCKS AND THINGS, and a few Game Theory chestnuts ("Erica's Word" and "The Waist and the Knees").
On the band's final tour, Miller was violent, abusive, drunk and ill-tempered -- no, of course he wasn't. He was polite and self-effacing, the band was lovely, and everyone was happy to see them. Of course, with the scant number of fans, there were a lot of chances to visit with the band and speak to Scott.
And, yet again, that was the extent of my personal relationship with Scott Miller. He played periodically in San Francisco and the East Bay, often sitting in with friends famous (Aimee Mann) and obscure. He recorded a final album with Sacramento power pop auteur Anton Barbeau, but didn't tour outside of the region, and I never was in San Francisco during one of his infrequent live shows. He did answer the odd email from me, and he was typically effusive and engaging with his fans on Facebook and his delightful, if sporadic, "Ask Scott" question-and-answer column on loudfamily.com. But I never met Scott personally again, and that's certainly my loss.
All the way down Van Ness Avenue
Miller was definitely Californian: land of freeways, parking lots, suburbia. Much of his fan base was always there. He sung about California in tones both direct ("Bad Year at UCLA," which replaces the un-rhymable UC-Davis) and wildly elliptical ("Why We Don't Live in Mauritania)." It's clear he had a love-hate relationship with the place, "hanging out near Manson slayings / industrial decayings / inverse utopia." But it was what he knew, and the setting informed a lot of his lyrics. He once was quoted as saying that if he'd been born poor and black he'd have sung the blues, but his music was rooted in the 60s and 70s guitar pop that white kids of his day would be hearing. He was just far, far better at understanding the music than the average kid - even the average record store geek.
Miller played music from so young an age that he apparently never recalled when he first tried to play guitar. And that attitude of being a fan and a music lover, even before creating his own music, never waned. He did covers all through his career, from renowned and obscure artists alike. He was unabashed about the holy trinity of power-pop Bs (Beatles, Big Star, Badfinger) but also did a truly inspired Hollies cover, Brian Eno, dB's, Pixies, Cat Stevens, Zombies, and often included Roxy Music and Bowie in his band's sets. And, yes, he did cover Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy," and Perry Como, too.
Miller's fandom and deep insights into pop music history informed his book, Music: What Happened?, a learned and witty commentary on the pop music from 1957 (his birth) to 2011, structured as mix tape selections from each year. Yeah, he was a fan, and a knowledgeable and penetrating one when it came to the music that moved him. That insight, shared among many of his fans, helped to shape much of my listening outside of the Loud Family oeuvre, through mix tape swaps and recommendations on the loudfans list and the Ask Scott column. And for those years of great records and bands and concerts brought to my attention, which I might have never experienced, I again owe Scott greatly.
I got a feeling it's all rigged
It's an inescapable sensation, listening to Game Theory and Loud Family records in no particular order, that Miller in a sense saw life - romantic, commercial, political - as a game in which the puzzle pieces never lined up right for him, in which the goalposts kept shifting, in which the ground was slanted ever so slightly in the wrong direction. "That was my mistake/I didn't spot the setup." Game Theory was initially a "next big thing," and got some videos on MTV in the early years. The Loud Family, too, was once seen as a potential commercial success in its initial days, but that never panned out either.
He had, based on his interviews and his reams of writing online, an exquisite sense of self-deprecation about the commercial success that eluded him. It was expressed with great humor and no shortage of wit, as in, "Like the Beatles, I've somehow managed to write lyrics a lot of people think have hidden meaning to be deciphered, but I've done it without any of the burdensome worldwide superstardom the Beatles had to put up with."
Miller was never going to be a Beatle. He lacked the populist instincts, and even when he was at his most ineffably hummable moments he would often sabotage a song with a puzzling lyric or a deliberately convoluted chord change.
Production was where Miller wreaked the most havoc on his own pop songs: An immensely respectful tribute in the Guardian last week praised Miller's songwriting and lyricism but noted some "shocking aesthetic choices" in the Game Theory records. I'm pretty sure Miller and longtime producer Mitch Easter knew exactly what they were doing when they juxtaposed crushing guitar chords and dinky drums and synths, or when they most of the side of a double LP to a lengthy found-sound experiment whose unrepeatable name is an extended joke on Nabokov and Lolita, Paul Simon, and the programming language LISP.
While lyrics were Miller's metier, and he packed his songs with double-meanings and literary references, Loud Family and Game Theory were by no means all a slog through impenetrability. Yes, he quoted Joyce and Nabokov, but also Star Wars and misunderstood parking directions by his wife ("Good, there are no lines in the street" became an ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE song, "Good, There Are No Lions in the Street"). And of course, there are the indelible earworm melodies, those should've-been-hits like "Take Me Down (Too Halloo)," "We Love You, Carol and Allison," "Aerodeliria," "My Superior," "Crypto-Sicko," "Inverness," and dozens more. I doubt anyone who listens to a Game Theory or Loud Family "single" (not that such things existed) for the first time doesn't hear a vivid and approachable band - maybe one slightly out of time, never belonging to an au-courant movement, but worth hearing and cherishing regardless of the context.
But still, recognition was something that Miller seemed to crave, and it may have been a disappointment that audiences never responded to his music the way that critics and fellow musicians did. Game Theory and Loud Family were perpetual cult bands - the intensity of their fan base in inverse proportion to the bands' visibility and record sales. And that must have hurt.
Wake up, you're sleeping through heaven
Reading this set of thoughts you might think Game Theory and Loud Family would make some pretty depressing listens. And they did, in haunted minor chords and achingly lonely lyrics. But that was just a facet of Miller's songwriting. At his most inspirational, Scott Miller could depict - in musical and lyrical terms - a desperate drive to live life and experience the possibilities within it. The archetype of that is the Game Theory song "Sleeping Through Heaven," which I included on mix tapes for years, and which provided the name for my personal thread on a discussion board for many years. Its lyric is couched in the terms of a would-be relationship with a girlfriend, as much pop music is, but its message is universal:
I want to go bang on every door
And say "Wake up, you're sleeping through heaven"
And I don't care who knows, I don't know who cares
If you don't want yours then let me have my share
Shine in column inches on the page
There have probably been more words written about Scott Miller in the past week than in the past decade and a half, and that's a shame. Many of these are from listeners immensely learned in pop music, with personal history with Miller that far exceeds my own limited involvement. (I suspect most of the people reading this note will be represented in that description, and I apologize to them for any glaring errors or mischaracterizations.)
Among these tributes from around the world, they are mostly white music nerds, recognizing one of their own. A touching number of those are from fellow musicians, including those who achieved greater renown that Miller ever did. Aimee Mann, who sang with Miller on many occasions and promoted his work incessantly, and her husband Michael Penn, both shared heartfelt words of appreciation. Ted Leo, Mary Lou Lord, Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, and a lot of other cult artists shared their fond memories.
The band which I feel best embodies Game Theory - in at least some of its modes - is the New Pornographers, and Carl (AC) Newman was positively heartsick in his commentary on Twitter. (Someday I would love to hear Neko Case and Carl Newman blasting through "Shark Pretty" on a tribute album.) The success of a band like New Pornographers, of whom I first heard via the loud fans mailing list, and whose music was championed by Miller in the early days, demonstrates that there is a market for hyperactive pop with cut-and-paste pastiches from glam rock, day-glo harmonies, and stomping choruses. They are a great band, and they deserve their audience. Couldn't Miller have shared a small portion of their success?
What I need is not to cut costs
Dealing with this loss, of a man I barely knew but whose music has been a big part of my life for the past 17 years, makes me sad and inexpressibly mournful about the unfairness of it all. Miller was, from every interaction I had with him, and every story I've read, not only enormously talented, but humble, funny, kind, appreciative of his fans, and a loving husband and father to his children. He held down a day job in a computer field for decades, applying his insights and aptitude in arcane technical gadgetry to a productive livelihood when his music failed to succeed on a commercial level. He wrote drolly at once point, "I'm utterly serious about music, I just respect the buying public's judgment that it's not what I should do for a living."
In short, he's the sort of person that anyone would want to succeed, regardless of the music he might have made. And part of me wants to yell, pointlessly, "Yes, you did win." You won an incredibly devoted fan base, you won acclaim from musicians and music critics around the world, and you won a beautiful and seemingly happy family (queue Tolstoy, etc.) You could have, it seems, focused on family life and day job and released the odd Internet single or collaboration, and it would have been a noble and worthy continuation of your work. But now that won't get to happen.
The outpouring of grief and recollections of fans and admirers around the world are testament to your victory. Rest in peace, Scott Miller.
Where to begin
If you're unfamiliar with the music of Scott Miller, the sheer volume can be a bit daunting. The loudfamily.com website has made all the Game Theory albums available for free downloads, which means that for the first time ever, GT music is easily accessible. Better late then never.
TINKER TO EVERS TO CHANCE is the "hits" (ha) compilation, with some of the catchiest and most accessible moments. True fans of course will dismiss it, and seek out the full-lengths for the full interplay of pop savvy with noise experiments and weirdness. Much of the earliest material was re-recorded for the compilation, including songs from Miller’s very first band, Alternate Learning, and the famous garbage-bag-wrapped first Game Theory EP. Candidly, I think it's great, and listen to it more than any single Game Theory album. LOLITA NATION is the "difficult" "impenetrable" "cult" album, and it tops a lot of fan lists. Don't listen to it if you're just checking the band out for the first time. Instead listen to BIG SHOT CHRONICLES, which has the highest ratio of pop single wannabes, and is glistening and immediate. REAL NIGHTTIME (Big Star reference) and BLAZE OF GLORY both have lots of amazing material, but I admit I don't listen to them as often as I could. The final album TWO STEPS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES is puzzling; some very good songs, some middling pacing and sequencing, and too many odd leads by the other band members.
Loud Family material is almost all available on iTunes and Spotify to stream or download. CDs are also pretty available, often via his friend Sue's 125 Records. The easiest place to start is the 1993 debut, PLANTS AND BIRDS AND ROCKS AND THINGS (classic joke about America's "Horse With No Name"). It is amazing - Aimee Mann called it one of the top five albums of all time - and it has a host of what should have been hits. "Jimmy Still Comes Around," "Idiot Son," "Sword Swallower" show the ability of Miller and his band to be as catchy as Game Theory was, but with a more emphatic rhythm section. "Aerodeliria," "Inverness," "Take Me Down (Too Halloo)" and others are immensely hummable and show the band's ability to craft an indelible melody. If anything could have made Scott Miller a star, it would have been this. (The New York Times described the songs as "shimmery-sweet").
INTERBABE CONCERN is either as good, or better, but far less immediate. It may be my favorite, but it was also my introduction to the band, and there are some experimental pieces at the end that can grate a bit. After that both DAYS FOR DAYS and ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE have a host of great songs - DAYS is catchier, but both also have some rather mournful elegiac material as well. THE TAPE OF ONLY LINDA is kind of at the bottom of the barrel, in part due to poor production, even though it has a few tremendous rock songs ("Soul Drain," "My Superior"). And WHAT IF IT WORKS?, a late collaboration with Anton Barbeau, is a worthwhile addendum, even if it's slight on new material and long on covers. They're still good, but it's not core to the Loud Family body of work.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/15/2023 06:33AM by zwirnm.
