Remembering Scott Miller
Scott Miller died last week. I knew him, but not well, and hadn't seen him in over ten years. He was a warm, funny, and intellectual guy. I remember him getting very excited about ordering a veggie burger with bacon, and then, not two minutes later, getting equally excited about a French philosopher he was reading.
You've probably never heard of Scott, but he left his mark on the world in the most unambiguously positive way.
Scott was the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for two rock bands: Game Theory in the 80s and The Loud Family in the 90s. I first came across his work in summer of 1996, when I was writing for an online music magazine and received a promo from Alias Records of the Loud Family's Interbabe Concern. The album was long and quirky, punctuated with blasts of semi-organic noise and deliberately obnoxious songs like “Where the Flood Waters Soak Their Belongings.”
But then there was this:
Where They Go Back to School But Get Depressed (Spotify)
This song fucking blew my mind. I was already a huge music nerd—I wrote for a music magazine—but this was the best song I’d ever heard. It has a little foley artistry, but it's not an experimental track, just a straight-ahead pop song about trying to recapture one's wasted youth (“And did these girls show interest as I walked across the lawn?”).
Nothing dismantles and reconstructs the brain in short order like a great song. I've seen it happen to my daughter. Once she was sitting on the couch reading a book and suddenly looked up. “WHAT IS THAT SONG?” she said. (It was “The Tailor,” by Blitzen Trapper.) She didn't even look happy, exactly; she looked like a person being tickled to the point of discomfort. I knew how she felt, because I'm addicted to this music-induced feeling and seek it out over and over. A songwriter is, in a way, more powerful than a great chef or writer or filmmaker, because a song can ambush you and deliver its full artistic payload, even in public. You will not find yourself in a Starbucks unexpectedly treated to Citizen Kane or a dish by Thomas Keller, but you might hear, say, Elliott Smith's “Waltz #2 (XO)” over the PA. And when you hear a song like that, particularly for the first time, you're no longer having the same kind of day.
Few songwriters have the power to write even one song like that. Scott Miller did it over and over and over, from the early 80s until 2006, when he released his final album. He never became a household name, but it's been gratifying to see great songwriters like AC Newman (of the New Pornographers) and Ted Leo credit Scott as a formative influence.
My wife and I became Loud Family superfans. This was an easy band to love, because they were not massively popular and were very appreciative of their fans. When they came through Seattle on tour in 2000, Scott, bassist Kenny Kessel, and drummer Gil Ray slept in the living room of our small apartment. Later on that tour, a promised San Francisco date fell through, so Scott invited a dozen or so fans to his house in San Mateo for a solo acoustic show in his living room. When he asked for requests, the shout-out was unanimous: play “Throwing the Election”!
Throwing the Election (1988, YouTube)
This was a couple of years before widespread broadband internet made Jonathan Coulton possible. Like any fan of any artist, all I want is more, and I wish Scott had given the self-released internet basement genius thing a try. I think he would have been good at it.
I've put together a Spotify playlist with a few great Loud Family songs. I understand how tedious it is for some guy on the internet to tell you to listen to his favorite band, but these are immortal songs that are very easy to like and will, at the very least, improve your day.
Game Theory's catalog is out of print, but many of their songs are on YouTube, and Loud Family webmaster (and longtime friend of Scott's) Sue Trowbridge has made all of their albums available free online. I’d start with The Big Shot Chronicles. It’s loud, hopeful, and packed with astonishing hooks. The Loud Family often ended their shows with “Like a Girl Jesus” from this record, and since I can’t figure out how to finish this appreciation without getting really embarrassing, I’ll do the same.
Like a Girl Jesus (1986, YouTube)
