Now I've got a V-chip

Sometimes you hear a phrase for the thousandth time, and something suddenly clicks, and you see a particular song in a new light.  And sometimes that causes everything around it to fall into place as well, and you think you've got a grand unified theory that explains a whole album.

That was my experience this morning.  Maybe my interpretation of the album, in light of Scott's life at the time it was recorded, is correct.  Maybe it's not.  I have no hard evidence outside of the lyrics to back up my interpretation, nothing from Scott's public writings to solidly confirm it.  It hasn't been raised in album reviews or in discussions that I've seen.

I want to share my minor epiphany, to discuss it with others, but I'm finding that I can't do it.  No matter how respectfully and sensitively I might be able to write, something is telling me not to try.

Maybe Scott wouldn't have minded, himself.  I recall that in Where They Walk Over Sainte Therese, he wrote of the dead, "I don't absolve them, I won't speak well."  But that's not me.

My speculation is nothing terrible, no absolution is required, and it's not exactly speaking ill of him.  Besides, it's apparent (at least to me) that he alluded to it in one album, even if nobody necessarily caught on.  Perhaps others have seen what I've seen, but kept it to themselves.  It just doesn't feel right to keep engaging in speculation about Scott's state of mind, not where there's some remote possibility of stigma or embarrassment to the living.

Part of me would like to find a way around this.  It's just a dry academic exegesis of lyrics, from a work recorded in a previous century.  It could be hedged with lawyerly disclaimers that my theories are mere speculation.  But it still would smell, to me, like celebrity gossip.

Now I've got a V-chip.  Despite that, I hope I'll still find that I've got something to say, and will know when and how to get out of its way.

Fifty or more

Scott Miller left a thousand fragments of his soul scattered through his lyrics.

Not buried like treasures, I think, because he never hid them.  He sowed them like seeds, he scattered them haphazardly.  If a phrase was evocative and meaningful for him, he didn't try to make it more universal – he used it.

He knew some of those seeds might find fertile ground in people who had shared his experiences:  if you had read James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, or watched a particular Star Trek episode, or studied engineering, you might recognize a phrase and clearly understand why it was meaningful in the context of the lyrics.  There were perhaps a few dozen fans who cared deeply enough to identify and catalogue the specimens; who picked up the seeds, recognized allusions, and gave that recognition back to him.

But even more of those seeds were fragments of his own life, imagery drawn from his experiences or his dreams.  Carefully crafted turns of phrase – I picture a chisel carving shards from his life, "turning" phrases as wood turns on a carpenter's lathe.  "Everything on this album is on purpose," he once warranted.

Perhaps a seed might find soil where it could take root and grow in a different direction.  He once wrote something like this:  even if you didn't recognize why an image was personally meaningful to him, he hoped that maybe the words that were so resonant for him would evoke something in you.

In early June, I wrote a long essay about Scott and Charlie Brown, and I touched upon the song The Red Baron.

Here's something I missed.

I never knew the words Nan Becker was singing... those hauntingly beautiful backup vocals.  I never heard those words clearly until this weekend.

"Fifty or more."  When the words came clear, the reference was instantly clear, because I owned a particular album when I was 8 years old.  I still have it – the only children's album that I still have, the only one I somehow couldn't part with.  Snoopy and His Friends the Royal Guardsmen (song available here).

     Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more,
     The bloody Red Baron is rolling up the score...

My feeling was not the feeling of a puzzle piece falling into place, or an academic riddle solved.  Yes, another layer of the song's meaning was unlocked for me, but that wasn't important.

My feeling was that of the lonely child I used to be... the kid who was called "genius" by other kids who didn't mean it as a compliment.  The 8-year-old boy who never had a friend who loved Peanuts in quite the way I did, with all of its subtext that was mostly intended for adult readers.  My friends liked Peanuts, but loved other things.  Sure, they watched the Charlie Brown TV specials, they probably read the comic strips often enough.  But they didn't get so much out of Peanuts that they owned this album as a child.

Now I know, almost beyond any doubt... Scott owned it too.

How many hundreds of these pieces of himself did he scatter to the wind, sung aloud in performance after performance?  How many seemed to go unnoticed, unremarked?  How often did he wonder whether anybody ever actually got it?  In all the years of openness to his fans, of answering mail, of "Ask Scott" columns, was that one of the things he hoped for?

I am no longer the lonely child I used to be, the child that Scott made me remember.  But there is still a thing I love that nobody in my life – nobody physically present in my life – really shares with me.  This music, unlike any other music.

Damn it.  Now who's going to drive away the loneliness?

Addendum (7/29/2013):

Two of Scott Miller's friends and bandmates graciously responded:

Gil Ray:  Funny thing regarding Scott and Peanuts.  At least a couple of times he described his frustration with record companies etc... like Lucy holding the football, and always pulling it away before Charlie Brown could kick it. Sad... but also funny, I think.

We once played an office Xmas party for one of Scott's workplaces. [Linus and Lucy, a bonus track on Big Shot Chronicles,] was the only christmas-y song we could muster!

Nan Becker:  Scott loved the Peanuts cartoon and watched the specials faithfully as a little boy. We talked about the "50 or more" line when we were learning the song. He discussed the theme of idealism and disappointment when ideals are abandoned or rejected. The Red Baron earned a fearful reputation yet also great respect from his enemies. He represented a kind of ideal for the perfect enemy; he needed to be destroyed but he was still admired for his prowess. The "50 or more" was intended to reference the Snoopy song as a musical joke. It was a song that Scott heard first at our house and then bought the 45 for his own.

Scott especially admired Snoopy. I think that it was Snoopy's perseverance (in Snoopy's imagination) against the odds of a terrible foe that Scott enjoyed. This and the facts of Snoopy himself: a dog that was aware of history, was wilier than his owner and lived a vivid inner life that no other dog could relate to. He was unique and something of a loner because of it, much like Scott. Once strange heroes like The Red Baron and Snoopy are gone or no longer respected "who's gonna say you can't do this to me?"

There's so much in just one song.  One more thing that Nan's comments brought to my mind is the Christmas truce... "Merry Christmas, mein friend."  An ideal enemy with honor, who won't kill you, not today, and you know you can rely on his word and drink a root beer together.  He'll shoot you down next time, of course – nothing personal, old chap! – but not tonight.  (That girl was my first love.  She honorably warned me, before the first kiss, not to fall in love with her.)

Addendum (7/26/2013):

One of the comments that I received elsewhere about this (thanks, Terry) led me to an afterthought...  The seeds he sowed.  They have hooks like thistles, guitar hooks, lyrical hooks.  Over many years, those resonant, perfectly turned phrases have become a part of my internal vocabulary.  I can no longer think of letting it go without being reminded that all advice is ways of saying "let it go."  I think just about the only thing I can do is look down from time to time, and when I see a dandelion puff in my hand, gently blow on it.

Last day that she's young

I am flying to Sacramento for a memorial tribute concert this evening, honoring Scott Miller.  It's a fundraiser for his family, with performances by his friends and former bandmates.

This trip is possibly the most self-centered expenditure of my life, and taking the red-eye back for my older daughter's 10th birthday party adds some bonus stress.  I took Friday off work to spend with her, since I'm missing half her birthday weekend.  On the way home from a wonderful day, I told her, "No favors denied... not on the last day that we're young."  She gets it, God love her, she does.  And having talked with her in recent months about why I was sad, she understood why I'm going.  She cried that I had to go for a whole day, and miss the whole morning of her birthday - but she understood.

One night back in May, she was arranging 24 stuffed animals on her bed, which caused me to start singing "24."  She thought the chorus was cute, and started singing it with me.  I took out my phone, and played the whole song for her.  She liked it.  She wanted to hear it again, and wanted to sing it with me.  I burst into tears, mostly tears of joy.  For the first time in my whole life, someone I love had responded to Scott's music.  It was one of my happiest moments ever.

I am not so lucky in every part of my life, but I count my blessings and believe that I'm the luckiest man on Earth.

Untitled Track

As in Days for Days, here's an experimental variation on my previous post, in the style of James Joyce and Scott Miller's liner notes to Real Nighttime:

Friends, you are about to read off whackademic nerdplay. This manster's project, some mirthless piece of vanity come to me so airyudite. I pled a lot of beanball in my younger days; the dust in diamonds are all gone. On the prey-ground viewed from withering hates, by Chance we metaplayer Joe Shlabotnik. Goat of goats, hollowlujah! Now we're his biggest slans, heirs to the losers (pace original Sinatra). Phrancly, my dare, I bet you never actualleviate this loneliness.

(The reader would be cheated out of the fun if I explained all my references... but I had to include just one link, to a song that's exceptionally beautiful and fitting. And for this purpose, the linked performance is infinitely better than Frank Sinatra's.)

Good Grief

Scratch the surface of Scott's lyrics, even his titles, and deeper layers are revealed, often darker layers.  They can be easily overlooked, but they are a subtle presence that gives depth and weight to the work, even when nearly concealed by the catchy hooks and pop melodies.

The title of Game Theory's 1990 compilation, Tinker to Evers to Chance (free download here), is a baseball reference that I superficially recognized.  It seemed like a clever title for a compilation of greatest hits.  Until recently, I knew only that it referred to some great moment in baseball, and it incorporated three names that are evocative of deeper concepts (inventive tinkering, eternity, and randomness).

Evidently Scott played a lot of baseball in his younger days, or at least more than I did.  From the perspective of the hitter — the perspective of the team at bat, and its fans — the title refers to the exact opposite of a greatest hit.  In the words of the 1910 poem that immortalized the baseball trio:

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double —
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

When I read the poem, another baseball story came to mind, a baseball saga that was familiar to every child in America during the years of Scott Miller's childhood.  After years of persistence, which became decades, it seemed that the young protagonist was doomed to perpetual failure, a failure that reached the mythical proportions of Sisyphus.  This was the story of Charlie Brown:





"Hero or goat" was a running theme in Peanuts for a long while — for example, it also came up in the 1969 movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

I suspect that if Scott Miller ever saw or remembered those classic Peanuts moments as an adult, he would have made (and probably did make) the connection from Peanuts to René Girard.

René Girard, a philosopher of anthropology and religion, was one of Scott's intellectual idols.  Scott wrote, "for me, he is the greatest thinker of our time — as important as Einstein would be if everyday life required that we all move around at close to the speed of light."  (Ask Scott, April 29, 2002).  Others agree; scholarly admiration of Girard's work is supported by billionaire Peter Thiel.

A major subject of Girard's work was the religious concept of the scapegoat.  Scapegoating evidently took a position of outsized importance in Scott's intellectual model of the world.  Referring to politics and ethics, Scott wrote, "I'd had an inchoate sense of the supreme importance of both Christianity … and societal scapegoating structures (mostly, I guess you'd say, from writing "poetry" seriously for a long time), and Girard put a lot of the mysterious elements together into a breathtakingly lucid cultural theory."  (Ask Scott, April 26, 2004)

On the strength of Scott's recommendation, I recently read some of Girard's writings.  But I bring a perspective that differs radically from Scott's.  My chosen profession has schooled me in skepticism and cynicism.  When I see a book titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, alarm bells go off, and red flags are raised.  My first thought was something like, "I hope the title is intended to be funny or ironic, because if it's not, Girard is likely to be either an intentional fraud, or a pompous fool with delusions of grandeur."

After reading further, no humorous intentions were evident to me, but René Girard doesn't strike me as an intentional fraud.  I'm inclined to think that Girard believes, grandiosely, that he has seen the truth and written the truth.  So far, I find that Girard has developed several superficially appealing kernels of insight, and has interpreted them through his own pre-existing biases.  My opinion is that as a result, Girard exaggerates or overgeneralizes some of his major conclusions to the point of being dead wrong.

I do find Girard's insights interesting, and perhaps worth serious consideration.  Girard is probably well-known among a limited population of philosophy or theology majors, who may have taken courses where he was required reading.  I hate to find myself taking a position so contradictory to Scott's, but if I could argue with Scott today, I would argue that the level of Girard's fame as a "great thinker" is just about exactly at the level where it should be, in comparison to Einstein's fame.  In other words, well-deserved obscurity.

If it seems to be called for, perhaps I'll take on René Girard or his defenders in a future post.  But I'm no philosophy major, and as philosophy texts go, Peanuts is more my speed.

It is not a stretch to say that, like Girard, Peanuts dwelled on the concept of the scapegoat as protagonist.  In its treatment of Charlie Brown as the "goat," the boy who could have been a hero but who perpetually let his team down, Peanuts offered us an endearing kind of scapegoat, one who always bounced back to take another blow.

Scott's lyrics often seem to suggest a tendency to take blame onto himself, to make himself the scapegoat.  He had every reason to blame others for his lack of commercial success, but the rich sarcasm in "you were a prince to give me a chance" seems to be balanced by painful sincerity in the line "I didn't spot the setup."  He even reiterated this point, for those who missed its importance the first time, at the beginning of the Loud Family's second album.  Following yet another painful failure to hit it big, he opened with a reprise of "Spot the Setup", disarmingly adding, "I wasn't relaxed and comfortable, I'll do better next time."

In numerous songs that touch upon failure, at least a portion of Scott's bitterness seems self-directed, but hs search for hope or salvation seems outwardly directed.  Consider "The Red Baron," a title that is certainly a Peanuts reference.  Scott's character in the song berates himself for "decisions made too fast," and calls himself "a high ranked jerk" who let down his friends.  Even as the woman he loves leaves him behind, he absolves her ("don't explain a thing," "stay the way I hate you"), and he fruitlessly asks, "Who's going to finance our deliverance?  Who's going to have a little sympathy?  Who's going to say you can't do this to me?"  Scott could have shaken his fist in the air and shouted, "Curse you, Red Baron!" just as Snoopy did when he was shot down from the sky, going down in flames, time and again.  But instead of cursing the one who shot him down, and instead of taking action to change things for himself, Scott plaintively calls upon a third party, an implicit God-figure who could set things right, if only He were listening.

Peanuts was loved by adults because underneath the superficial humor, a darker layer of adult themes gave depth and weight to Charles Schulz's work.  Schulz wrote in 1975, "The initial theme of Peanuts was based on the cruelty that exists among children."  As a scholarly analysis put it:

Schulz repeatedly undermines adult beliefs about childhood as a carefree, idyllic state of grace; insistently, he pokes at the dream of childhood innocence, as if to undercut our utopian hopes.  His version of childhood is rarely sentimental and often piercingly frank; as one reviewer has put it, the children of Peanuts live lives of "quiet malevolence".  Despite the strip's surface cuteness, cruelty among children is one of its earliest and most obvious themes, as biographer David Michaelis notes.  Schulz himself recognized that his cartoon kids were ruthless egotists and that Peanuts may have been "the cruelest strip going".

Schulz recognized, in a 1985 interview, that Charlie Brown's perpetual disappointment "still breaks a lot of hearts, that there are readers out there desperate to see Charlie Brown win a baseball game....  'But I can't do that,' Schulz says.  'Because then your basic premise disappears.  The foundation collapses.'"

Perhaps.  But much to my surprise, I learned that long after I grew up and stopped paying attention, Charlie Brown was allowed to taste sweet victory.  Seriously.  In the Peanuts comic strips of March 30 and March 31, 1993, the iconic loser hit a game-winning home run.  He even had a chance to do it a second time, a few months later:



...and given the chance to prove it was no fluke, to prove that he had finally overcome the "goat" typology, he actually did it again.  (See here and here.)

Charlie Brown never asked for "a life where I've won all the times that I've lost" — instead, after more than 40 years, he was still earnestly trying his best, still taking on his age's dream.  And perhaps one day he looked his creator in the eye, still hopeful, still foolishly optimistic, and Charles Schulz relented.  The crueler, darker side didn't need one more win.

I haven't uncovered any source that tells us why Charles Schulz changed his mind, and extended grace to his creation.  Did Schulz no longer think he was risking the collapse of his premise, his foundation, his creative integrity?  I suspect that Schulz still was worried about that.  But in his greater maturity, he decided to take that risk.  Perhaps he decided that his creation deserved better, or that his readers deserved better, than that dark world of perpetual cruelty and misfortune.  It is well-known that Schulz identified with Charlie Brown, and perhaps eventually Schulz came to believe that he himself deserved a kinder fate.  Or perhaps Schulz became tired of creating that mean-spirited world, day after day, and the toll it must have taken on his own soul.

Charles Schulz wrote, "I recall all too vividly the struggle which takes place out on the playground.  This is a struggle which adults grow away from and seem to forget about.  Adults learn to protect themselves."

Some do.  Others drop their sword and their shield far too soon.

Would another creator, one more powerful than Charles Schulz, have eventually relented and given Scott Miller the grace of a game-winning home run?  Would the shoulder upstairs have forever remained cold?  Would St. Michael have eventually allowed Scott just one win — just one home run, just one solid kick at Lucy's football?

To be honest with myself, I think not.  That's not God's business, that's just the music industry.  (The devil's business, some might think!)  I have a feeling it's all rigged.

Nevertheless, here's something relevant that Scott wrote about grace (Ask Scott, Nov. 30, 1998):

I think the hope for humility and selflessness is that a certain aspect of transcending subjectivity involves overturning notions of how self-love is perceived in one's self and others, and how it is earned.  To think it can be earned as if at a job is to perpetually suspect you haven't done enough lately to earn it — it has to be a matter of grace, a matter outside causality; this is why the great religions talk about faith and forgiveness.  You can't earn personal forgiveness except by the grace of the person you've offended, and you can't earn cosmic, ontological forgiveness — a feeling of self-love — but by the grace of whatever you call God.

The last sentence twists in an interesting way.  Scott analogizes "personal forgiveness" to "cosmic, ontological forgiveness," which is a fair enough analogy.  But then, almost as an aside, Scott equates "cosmic, ontological forgiveness" with "a feeling of self-love."

I could argue with Scott about that.  In every school or workplace, one can find a few unpleasant people who seem to have an excessive "feeling of self-love," but who don't seem to have earned any cosmic forgiveness.  But I'll set that argument aside.

Instead, let's consider Scott's first point.  The Girardian scapegoat, or the "goat" of Peanuts, can achieve his grace, his forgiveness, his self-love, from someplace "outside causality."  It cannot be earned, but is only given "by the grace of whatever you call God."  In other words, not by placing the blame, not by cursing the Red Baron, but by begging mercy from St. Michael.

I truly don't know what Scott called God, and where he placed his faith.  I don't know whether Scott placed his own bets on a nameless grace.  I can only offer my own opinions.

As a believer in God, I think one of a human being's highest callings is to become more like our creator by imitating God's example.  We can follow in God's footsteps by becoming creators, by producing works of creativity.  When we become artists, we are both a creation and a creator.  The art can be the artist.

And if I am interpreting Scott's words from 1998 correctly, I think he might agree with this much:  if we who create are able to see the image of our creator in ourselves, then perhaps we can find grace within ourselves, and grant it to ourselves.

But grace is not the same thing as winning the game.

Grace is the ability to see the blessings we have been given, and to be content.


Addendum:
Scott Miller's friend and bandmate Gil Ray graciously responded:

Gil Ray:  Interesting stuff. Way over my head, though..didn't get much book learnin'. Scott would go off on this kinda stuff during radio interviews...I quickly learned to a. quit going to them, and b. look for beer. :)

Additional responses from longtime fans of Scott are reproduced as anonymous comments below.

The point of sweating what's done

Until now, most of what I've blogged started out as emails.  I had to pour out my thoughts to somebody.  They were all in my head, and they needed an outlet.  I wrote those emails to someone who cares about me, but who cares nothing about Scott or the music.  That wasn't enough.

I looked at my writing, and I thought it was pretty good.  I had created something, and it was something that I needed to share.  I felt a need to show it to a larger audience, to people who might understand what I was saying.  I have written before, but I'm not sure I've ever truly experienced this creative need before, the need for an audience.

After rewriting, and editing, and more editing, I posted each installment.  Then I mentioned them on Facebook, and looked at my pageview statistics in Blogger, and checked Facebook again to see how many likes and comments I got.

I used to want people to like me.  Now I want people to "like" me.

Being slightly dense, it actually took me until today to realize that what I felt, when I tried to drum up an audience that would appreciate my writing, was a miniature version of the same need that is felt by artists everywhere, and by Scott Miller in particular.  It's the impulse that he wrote about, again and again.  It's the impulse that gave a name and a theme to this blog.

As Scott expressed it, when he was asked directly (Ask Scott, 9/11/2000) about the desire for fame:

Fame is probably the strongest de facto experience of the sacred that most people will ever get. What constitutes the sacred is a hairy topic, but if you've had close contact with a very famous person, and were left groping for a way to express how he or she was simply more radiant than an ordinary person, that is the sacred. Not a developed experience of the sacred, but the real thing.

The same general mechanism compels people to want to accrue fame. I'm a sufferer of this disease, and I know [the] need to separate the work from the acclaim. There are times and places when working ambitiously toward fame works cleanly, but it's usually it's a pretty polluting burn. Having to fascinate people is usually a bad business for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that if you're in the process of soliciting fame, you're by definition unqualified to relate to anyone as an artist. An artist's job is to relate the truth of experience, and if in fact what you're doing is selecting for which simulated experiential truth will fly, you will acquire the habit of replacing truth with schlock when schlock flies. It's not an absolute rule, but it is a real and insidious tendency.

Wanting to be "liked".  It really does makes me feel cheapened, even polluted.  Scott was right about that.  There we were, biting nails like debutantes and waiting for a call...

And here I am, sweating what's done, obsessing over whether my carefully selected words found their targets.  Maybe they reached you through the air.  Did I sparkle and charm, just like Paris in the spring?  How many tickets to me did I sell?

Of course, wanting fame, even wanting it desperately, is one thing.  An artist's temptation to compromise his creative integrity for fame is a very different and far more corrosive thing.  The "pernicious effects of fame-whoring," to which I don't believe Scott succumbed, will be the subject of a future post (credit to Kate Evans for that description, and for locating Scott's quote above).

I think too much — I always do

It is clear that Scott Miller's works resonated strongly with self-described nerds, including me.  Scott himself confessed to being a music nerd:  "I think I am a nerd.  I definitely sound like a nerd when I read my own writing." (Ask Scott, 10/1/2007).

Personally, I take "nerd" as an intellectual compliment.  I am quite sure that I wouldn't call Scott a nerd in the stereotypical and unflattering sense of the word.  As a performer, he dazzled on stage, and was a legitimate rock star, if only to a limited audience.  As a person, every account from those who met or corresponded with him is consistent:  he was intellectually dazzling, but also generous, earnest, approachable, and self-deprecating.  He was sociable in a way that many nerds aren't.

Perhaps the nerdiest of nerds are those with Asperger's Syndrome.  I will begin by saying, as unequivocally as I can (with no medical education), that I don't think Scott Miller had Asperger's Syndrome.

I have a family member with Asperger's.  In childhood and beyond, Asperger's often manifests in serious difficulties in comprehending social interaction.  They may be brilliant, verbal, and multi-talented, but they lack the social intuition that comes naturally to others.  They may need to be taught to do things like looking at a person they're talking to, instead of looking downward.  They may need to learn that there's a purpose for this, enabling them to systematically evaluate the facial expressions of others, and match them against a mental catalog of what a particular facial position might mean.  They might need to be taught appropriate responses to make, if the other person's face shows signals of boredom or distress.  There are web sites (such as the aptly named wrongplanet.net) where alienated "Aspies" commiserate about their feelings of "pretending" to be human.

As for me, I am a nerd, not an Aspie.  I've had this checked and confirmed by qualified medical practitioners, and my diagnosis is "nerd."  :)

Nevertheless, I perceive a clear difference between the way I communicate and the way others do.  I don't hold myself back from saying certain things that pop into my head, even when I know that nobody wants to hear them.  Specifically, I am drawn to analogies, drawn to puns, drawn to making a connection between one thing and another seemingly unrelated thing.  That moment of light-bulb inspiration, when unrelated things connect, gives me a rewarding rush of stimulation.

I'm drawn to obscure references that others probably don't get, and yet I find them so compelling that I speak them, in hopes that someone will feel the same resonance that I feel.

In this song, from the Loud Family album Interbabe Concern, Scott held a mirror up to that compulsion to say things others won't understand.  But far more painfully, he perfectly captured my self-image at the lowest points of my college years, in my nerdiest and most socially inept moments:

Maybe I say the dull things I say
Maybe they reach her through the air
Maybe I'm thinking of it as a task
Maybe it really is a task, and I'm not up to the task
Maybe the answer is don't ask

Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell ...

Maybe I see the things I look at (maybe I should know)
Maybe I look right past what's wrong (maybe I don't know)
Maybe she thinks in terms of sets of boys
Maybe she knows the set of boys, and I'm not in the set of boys
Maybe the signal is the noise

I became attached to the song, and to my own interpretation of the lyrics, years before I came across the official music video:



The video (directed by Sondra Russell) is interesting and amusing, and it doesn't contradict my interpretation at all, but the video moves the focus elsewhere, and makes it harder to find one's own meaning among the possibilities that are offered by the lyrics.  My interpretation turns on this:

For an electrical engineer/computer science major, like Scott, the last line is weighty.

The signal/noise metaphor can be understood by most people on a surface level, but it is even more compelling to those who share his engineering background, and appreciate the signal/noise metaphor at a deeper level.  I know that Scott took courses, just as I did, concerning the problem of distinguishing an information-bearing electrical signal from background noise.

So there he is, the narrator of the song (not necessarily Scott himself) — a man trying to understand signals from a woman.  That's a totally commonplace situation.

Why can't he read her signals?  He's had math and engineering coursework in digital signal processing.  He knows algorithms that he can apply to the waveforms, he can visualize all the zigzags on the screen of the oscilloscope.  He knows how to filter out the noise — because that's what electrical engineers do.

In case of doubt, here's support from the official video: 

A wizardly Ernie Kovacs figure sweeps his hand, and an oscilloscope line emerges in its path.

For those who missed the signal, Scott gives us a closer look – sure enough, that's a signal on an oscilloscope.

And despite all of his expertise, it isn't working.  He knows there must be a signal, other people can read the signals, but he can't isolate the signal from the noise.

Maybe the signal is the noise.

Impossible.  An electrical engineer knows better, and cannot believe that to be true.  It's an oxymoron coming from his lips — the signal is not the noise.

But maybe.  Maybe it is a social truth.  There's another line in this song:  "Respect the weight of the sounds in the room."

The "noise" is background.  It is context.  It's "the sounds in the room."  It's all the stuff he should see, but doesn't see.  It's right in front of him.  Just like me, he somehow looks right past it, and it doesn't even register.

He knows he's smart, and that he should be able to figure this social stuff out.  He wants so desperately to have it all fall into place, to have that light-bulb moment of clarity when previously unrelated things connect.

He knows he's missing something important.  I can hear the pain in his voice.  He knows, he knows so much, but he just doesn't get it.

The narrator of the song may or may not have been a proxy for Scott's self-image... but that was me.  I recognized myself, the kid who used to overthink everything.  Unable to communicate normally.  Drawn to nerdy math/engineering analogies, and compelled to share them.  Hopelessly paralyzed by uncertainty, by too many maybes.

In my previous post, I wrote that there were three things that caused Scott Miller's music to become locked into its place within my head.  The first was the pure musical experience, different from any other, and tuned to cut through my defenses.

The second piece of the puzzle was Scott's seeming understanding of me — the mutual experiences reflected in some of his songs.  That cemented my personal bond with him.

The third might be the most addictive.  As I wrote above, "That moment of light-bulb inspiration, when unrelated things connect, gives me a rewarding rush of stimulation."  "I'm drawn to obscure references that others probably don't get..."  Scott's lyrics are full of those.

That language of mutually-understood obscure references, the frisson of shared secrets known only to an inner circle — engineers, literati, philosophers, music nerds, whatever — continues to hook me on these songs.  There's still a little dopamine rush, each time a hidden meaning clicks and my light bulb goes on.

And it's not only the obscure references embedded within the songs, but also the songs themselves, which became a secret that I shared with the too-small group of Scott Miller's devoted fans.  It's no accident that the phrase "cult following" is commonly used to describe fandom of this sort, with its cultish mysteries (i.e., trivia) known only to True Gamesters.

Musical complexity, mutual personal experiences, and obscure shared references.

That's why I listened to one CD in 2000, and within weeks, rushed to buy everything he'd recorded in the 80s and 90s.  The magnetic power of that combination yielded an effect that no other artist has ever had on me.

But I guess I'm weird that way.

Keys and vulnerabilities

I'm a pretty rational, unemotional guy.  But there has always been a chink in my armor.  Music.  Music affects me more strongly than most people, I think.

A sad occurrence in real life can make me cry, sometimes.  A particular event might bring me to tears once or twice.  Very little except my mother's death and the events of 9/11 were able to bring me to tears more times than that — but even then, the sadness faded, and the ability to make me cry weakened over time.

But there are two words, two notes of music that bring me to tears without fail, every time I even think about them.  They're not from Scott Miller.  They're the final words of the musical Into the Woods:  "I wish."  As I wrote this paragraph, it had the same effect on me, undiminished, and wholly predictable.  Stephen Sondheim precisely targeted my weakness and dropped a bomb into it, not unlike Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star.

Sondheim did it with genius-level talent, but it doesn't take a Sondheim to slide through that gap in my armor.  Any stupid movie or TV show can make me cry, if the score is in a minor key and there's something on the screen that resonates with my life, my hopes, or my fears.  It happens again and again.  It always makes me feel foolish and easily manipulated.

As you already know if you've read this far, Scott Miller resonated with me.  I rank him with Sondheim; perhaps others might not.  No matter.

There are three things that caused Scott Miller's music to become locked into its place within my head.  The music, the pure sonic experience, was the first piece of the puzzle.  Scott Miller was equipped with a jailer's ring of minor keys; a circle of fifths, jangling with about a zillion chords.

It was all perfectly modulated to go cleanly through the hole in my armor.

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.

About this blog

The goal for this blog, as it develops, is to be a personal and academic exploration of the writings of Scott Miller (1960-2013), the inventive genius who led the bands Game Theory and The Loud Family.  Miller wrote intellectually complex lyrics to match the musical complexity of his songs, and authored a book of musical criticism.

The original name of the blog, “Sword Swallower,” referred to one of Miller's enduring themes: the frustration of performing to meet the expectations of others, while trying to meet far higher self-expectations.  The song can be heard here.

The original URL for the blog, ticketstome.blogspot.com, is a nod to another example:  “I won't go knocking doors to find out how many tickets to me I can sell.”