I

             A Pink Floyd style break-in, like in the middle of a deceptively quieter track on The Wall. A mesmerizing three note riff played over a driving mid-tempo anthem...?!?

        This is Starflyer 59? The moody noise pop band that the guitar player from System of a Down obsessively digs to find his Zen? The band that has compromised nothing, that has stayed on its label for over a decade now, carefully picking up fanatical devotion by never trying too hard?

        Starflyer 59 is going for the big bottom, Big Beat sound?

        “The fans are going to freak out,” bandleader Jason Martin almost whispers, flashing that craggily handsome grin, sitting near a beverage-littered console and an ancient Orange amphead. “This is the music I really enjoyed as a kid, but could never admit it. I hope people understand we're taking it seriously, that this is really what we want to do. We're more mature than we used to be; we're not as concerned with looking cool.”

        It is an especially cold January evening in 2003 on Capital Hill in Seattle when BANDOPPLER editors Jason Dodd, Chris Estey, and I meet Starflyer at Tooth & Nail's recording studio, The Compound. We're listening over and over to producer Aaron Sprinkle rewinding a newly recorded fragment of a track from the band's new full-length, Old.

        There's something altogether strange about hearing SF59's usual Cali take on Britrock style transmuted into damn near sincere sounding 70s progressive rock, via help respectively from indie mellotron and percussion experts Richard Swift and Frank Lenz, with a nice slather of 80s art-kitsch production from the renowned Sprinkle (Poor Old Lu). Also standing quiet and considered in the room is Jeff Cloud, bassist, longtime business/band partner and close friend of Martin's since early school days.

        Martin again asserts that the new album is exactly where he's always wanted to go with SF59. “Sure, there's some tongue-in-cheek aspect to what we're doing now, but not much.”

        Flabbergasted by this new direction, we have come to investigate and ask what the inspirations were behind the record. Martin denies anything specifically, his attitude rewinding me back into a usually one-sided argument about songwriting I've had with him since 1994.

        “This is not chaos,” Martin insists. “I don't believe in chaos in songwriting. There is an order to it. It either makes sense or it doesn't. This chord goes into this chord for a chorus. It's two plus two.”

        Cloud defends a similar position. “We both to this day still feel there is really no ‘art’ in most music,” he asserts. “‘Art’ isn't in everything. People like to think everything is art. Arranging flowers, writing poems, making a latte—these are just actions, not art. Plugging in an electric guitar, playing four chords, adding bass and drums, and singing words in key is no more ‘art’ than a guy opening his tool box, putting on a 9/16 socket, replacing a belt, and getting the lawn mower running again.”

        No real art to making music? This from Martin, who when barely a teenager coined his first band “Morella's Forest,” after a name randomly selected in the mordantly progressive writings of Edgar Allen Poe, combined with art-wave rockers the Cure's song, “A Forest,” off the self-consciously minimalist Seventeen Seconds?

        No real art to making music? This from Cloud, who named his own independent record label, Velvet Blue Music, in homage to the work of cinematic chaos agent David Lynch?

To avoid dehydration, a gallon of filtered water was passed around. As luck would have it, the jug had been sitting in the sun all day. As I took a toasty swig, I looked out the window to my right towards an industrial park below and noticed towering flames shoot out the top of a smoke stack.

II

        Martin and Cloud of Starflyer 59 share the same nasty vice. They like to gamble away their earnings while they're out on the road.

        “[It started in] about ninth grade,” Cloud states, like an alcoholic extrapolating his disease in a moment of clarity. “In high school all we really did was have poker games. On tour, it's almost like we're on vacation and inconvenienced because we have to play shows.”

        Rewind almost a decade into the past, and further into their fraternal tradition. Somewhere in a cheap motel bedroom in the nameless Midwest, money is sprawled out, cards are in hand, and there are half a dozen young musicians jonesing from the rush of the all-American rock tour pass time.

        Never in my life did I think I would witness this—Martin sitting Indian style in boxer shorts, cigarette dangling from his lips, cold hard cash on the bedspread.

        But I did.

        There are few times in my life that I've actually reached a true unattached, euphoric—and for lack of a better term—Zen state. Each time I find myself there, it's admittedly never due to mastery over my mind, will, or emotions, or adherence to esoteric eastern mysticism. And I don't possess an extra reserve of cosmic personal virtue. It has, however, thankfully come when I've reached the end of my personal rope, and am running on sheer survival mode, that a new awareness arrives out of the amorphous unpleasantness of a current struggle.

        Each one of those moments could be characterized differently but the setting has always involved the performance of rock music somehow, and it usually occurs when I'm away from home running on minimal sleep. In each instance, I experienced the existential amalgam of a lizard-brain struggle for reason, an intense amount of discomfort, lapses of logic sliding into insanity, chronic insomnia, and constipated intestines from weeks of bad truck stop food that translates as un-translatable experiences based in actual reality. Thankfully, all of my faculties worked together to protect me from a genuine nervous breakdown by transporting me into another realm, where everything merges as one.

        The first moment.

        I found myself in an overcrowded restroom in Austin, Texas, yakking my guts out, the smelly facilities buzzing with excited teenagers. Between heaves, an overzealous fan, oblivious to the fact that I was clearly violently ill, asked me questions about my band as I retched, grabbing the hot and cold handles of the sink (being the only available vomiting receptacle at the time). Luckily, Tom, a fellow touring companion, escorted the lad out Vulcan-shoulder-grab style a la Mr. Spock, reinforcing in words what I apparently wasn't communicating with my barfing by simply stating, "Now's not a good time.” Tom's kind gesture afforded me the opportunity to empty the remaining bile from the far reaches of my digestive tract in relative peace. Later that night, after the show on our all night drive to god-knows-where, I lay sleepless till morning in a severely dehydrated state which prompted hallucinations darting in and out of the shadows on the side of the road cast by our tour van's high beams.

        The second moment.

        Chicago, summer of ‘95. The whole Midwest region was experiencing one of the most ferocious heat waves of recorded history. It was well over a hundred degrees with high humidity. We were late for a show, stuck in stop and go rush hour traffic, and I was seated shotgun in our rickety tour van. The heat on the dashboard controls had to be turned on full blast in an effort to get the little red needle on the control panel next to the thermometer symbol to edge out of the red in an effort to save the engine from seizing up. Instead, we took the physical abuse our engine just couldn't afford. Besides, we still needed reliable transportation for a good couple of weeks more. We were all wearing the bare minimum of clothing. Some understandably stripped down stark naked. I sat perched in my boxer shorts, careful to not to let any part of my body touch anything or anyone. Every pore of my body emanated perspiration. Sweat trickled down my chest, settling in a little pool in my navel, and ran down my arms, dripping off my elbows. To avoid dehydration, a gallon of filtered water was passed around. As luck would have it, the jug had been sitting in the sun all day. As I took a toasty swig, I looked out the window to my right towards an industrial park below and noticed towering flames shoot out the top of a smoke stack.

        The third moment.

        Lying on the hard floor of a windowless cargo van, trying desperately to take in a short nap after several sleepless nights driving down the interstate, somewhere in the middle of Michigan, in the dead of winter. Due to the vices of our travel companions, my floor-mate Ed and I were forced to inadvertently breathe gusts of thirty degree filter-less Lucky Strike air while laying our heads next to dustings of cigarette ash that had settled on the bottom of the van. During naptime, between driving shifts ourselves, it became increasingly difficult to keep from inhaling said debris as it increased daily. Cloud, our fearless chauffeur and roadie at the time, chain-smoked to calm his nerves as he swerved down icy roads at excesses of seventy miles per hour in an effort to make it to the next show on time.

        Each of these summarized events is a glimpse into what could accurately be depicted as a certain kind of Hell on Earth. However, when the sum total of those experiences were simply accepted and transformed into pure being, that magical Zen state took over. Once that otherworldliness was achieved, there was nowhere else in the world that I would have rather been, and the winter tour of ‘95 with Starflyer 59 was ripe with said occurrences.

I don't know if we have exact surf influences.... The surf stuff probably comes through my love for Daniel Amos and the Pixies, my two favorite bands when I was a teenager.

III

        To accurately set the stage, it should be known that I've always had a soft spot for Starflyer 59. Ever since their debut Silver came out, I was hooked. To me, it was like members of a seminal Brit-pop noise band had collaborated with a 70s rock guitar hero for an album. The noisy drones, whispery vocals, and washes of white noise guitar segued into balls-to-the-wall Gibson Les Paul onslaughts that would cause any serious rock fan to raise their pinky and index fingers skyward devil-horns style. He accurately captured the artsy, introspective, getting-hugged-by-a-friendly-swarm-of-bees cacophony akin to the likes of 4AD label artists, while still managing to employ that traditional guitar-phallic machismo. It was the best of both worlds.

        There was no denying Martin's ingenuity. He had begun in a quirky techno band with his brother (Dance House Children, two albums on Blonde Vinyl at the turn of the decade), and no one who was aware of his work to that point knew he could even play guitar.

        The SF59 debut was a hot topic around the group house I lived in at the time. Across the hall, my roommate Ed Carrigan played the record as often as I did. In fact, after I'd caught on to our collective listening habits, I'd just wait and see if he already had it on since his stereo was better than mine anyway. Though it was never spoken, I think the reason we were both drawn to Silver was because it was the perfect soundtrack to our melodramatic post teen years. It was atmospheric, moody, lovesick, and romantically lonely sounding, the ideal music for a stay indoors, drizzly Seattle winter.

        A few years later, after a short tour of the west coast (with my then current band) in the spring of ‘95, I was recruited to help re-locate some folks from SF59's label, T&N, back to Seattle. Martin was nearing the completion of their second album (Gold) at the time, and I finagled a copy of the pre-mastered mixes. I was given a brand new cushy SUV to drive back in with a more than adequate stereo. The drives were long, beautifully scenic, and I must have listened to those mixes a dozen times at full volume.

        After getting acquainted with that follow-up, it was clear Martin was aiming to blaze a new trail while still staying close to his previous formula. Gold wasn't a complete departure from Silver, just more straight forward rock in orientation. The vocals were still hushed, but the effects pedals that were so successfully put to work on Silver that created that spacey atmosphere were rarely used, save for the opener, “Housewife Love Song.” The instrumentals were drenched in Fender reverb, while the intros and outros were punctuated by bombastic layers of overdrive. The fadeouts at the ends of the songs were commonly laborious solos, which later came to be known as a SF59 trademark.

        A common thread throughout Martin's songs is the lyrical themes of loneliness, heartbreak, and nostalgic portraits of friends. The Gold album is ripe with all those sentiments, but one might deduce while listening that Martin had just gone through the ringer romantically.

        “Really the themes were more about broken friendships than anything else,” Martin says.

        Cloud explains further: “The Gold album is more about the loss of friends, as opposed to girlfriends. A lot of the songs people have just assumed were about a girl really weren't. They were actually about boys. Not in a homo way, but in a lost friends type of way.”

        If Martin was borrowing from UK influences when the group started, Gold showed reverent nods toward the Beach Boys in songs like “You're Mean,” “Somewhere Where Your Heart Glowed the Hope,” and “Do You Ever Feel That Way” — an influence which has continued with the band over several more albums, up to last year's Leave Here A Stranger.

        “I don't know if we have exact surf influences,” Martin claims. “The surf stuff probably comes through my love for Daniel Amos and the Pixies, my two favorite bands when I was a teenager.” (For a brief description, DA is the long-suffering Elvis Costello-Neil Young-XTC artistes of Christianity-based rock, having to cover a lot of bases in a wide field short on real talent. DA leader Terry Taylor eventually produced SF59's Leave Here A Stranger, in mono, no less.)

        Later that summer at a festival, I spotted Martin and started pestering him to make me his fill-in drummer for his next tour. I had heard through mutual friends of ours that he was looking for a temporary line-up to support the Gold album. I was fortunate enough to make the cut, and took a plane to LA with friend, roommate, and fellow SF59 appreciator Carrigan in tow as bass player.

        Martin was living with his parents at the time, in a beautiful country club type neighborhood a la “90120” on a bluff in San Clemente, about a mile from visible ocean. Due to limited space at the area’s practice studios, we opted to rehearse in the Martin family garage in the afternoons, while the cul-de-sac dwellers on his street were away at their corporate jobs. After two or three rehearsals of getting accustomed to the live versions of the songs we'd be performing, we were more or less ready for our first show.

        On our way out of town to play our first date in Fresno, California, we stopped to pick up our tour manager/roadie, Cloud. He had taken the liberty to pick up some “tasty treats” at the local tobacconist, and got enough cigarettes and cigars to asphyxiate a large horse. One of his primary tour duties, as he saw it, was to insure we all enjoyed smoking regularly. Since Carrigan was the non-smoker of the group, he got cigars for the special occasion, so he wouldn't feel left out. Even though I indulged infrequently enough to be considered a non-smoker myself, I was regarded as part of the gang and encouraged to puff away on a vast array of meticulously packaged and expensive import brands. Seven years later, and I'm still not convinced that my lungs have fully recuperated.

        Within the first day of our travels together, I realized if I was to properly communicate with Martin and Cloud, a vernacular briefing was in order. As during conversations, crucial details were lost in subtleties.

        When an unfamiliar word surfaced, I'd pipe in. “What the hell does 'shin’ mean?”

        “Shit.”

        “Oh.”

        They'd also use acronyms, like NCMO and CMO, respectively pronounced “nick-mo” and “c-mo.”

        Example one.

        Martin, in regards to his new girlfriend, Julie, whom he's now married to: “Man, I'm through with the mess. (‘The mess’ indicating the anguish associated with bad relationships.) No more NCMO for me.... I'm a new man. It's all about the CMO now.”

        “What the heck is nick-mo?” Ed asked.

        Martin was wide-eyed with shock that he wasn't wise to the lingo.

        “Non-Committal-Make-Out! C'mon, Carrigan!”

        Then I gave my shot at it.

        “So, CMO means Committed Make-Out?”

        Martin: “Well.... Yeah! Of course, Johnson!”

        That was another thing. None of us had first names anymore. It felt like we had enlisted in the military or were transported back into a high school gym class.

        Example two.

        Cloud in response to Martin's inquiry of a possible love interest: "Yeah, I thought that girl was pretty fresh ... until she stepped out from behind the counter.... She's got OPA, Martin!”

        “What's ‘OPA?’” I asked.

        Martin: “Out of Proportion A!”

        “A” of course meaning “ass.” You see, they never cussed. The bad-word list was as follows: ass=A, shit=Shin, fuck=Eff (e.g. “What the Eff?”), and dick=D. It was like some young, devoutly Christian blue collar truck driver pop musician had been transported from the 40s or 50s, the fake cuss words seemingly a claim to some sort of masculinity. Even Martin's clothes and hair recalled a certain kind of nostalgia. He wore clunky black leather work shoes, Russler jeans from K-mart, and simple button-up shirts. Before we set out on our tour we paid a visit to the barber. Martin got a flat-top. I hadn't known anyone in years who'd actually sported one, but somehow it fit him perfectly. He even wore cheap after-shave, I think Brut, claiming that “the chicks dig it, ‘cause it reminds them of good times with their old man when they were little.”

        Seriously.

        All these quirks of personal style and old-school tough guy-ness were shrouded in a detached California cool veneer. My question was—is it an act? My thought had always been that those truly possessing coolness pay no mind to the aloofness that they're exuding to the rest of the world. That's the whole point. They just are. Did Keith Richards ever have to aim at coolness when he entered a room? Like, the Fonz, he doesn't have to try. Martin and Cloud, however, were constantly pre-occupied with all things “bitchin,” be it cigarette packaging, clothing, hairstyles, that certain quality in musical genres (best embodied on that tour with the band Girls Against Boys), or a certain understated poise.

        Not to say that they were poseurs necessarily, as it sometimes seemed that their obsession with cool was in fact a very pointed mockery of cool. And other times it didn't seem like mockery at all.... I suspect, though, that this kind of perceptual confusion is exactly what they were aiming to create. It would be consistent with their pervading sense of passive-aggressive tongue-in-cheek humor....

Maybe we're the only thing they're allowed to listen to.... So, I feel cool about it, because I know how much Daniel Amos meant to me, and if for some reason we're that same kind of thing to them, where it's, like, something they can listen to.... [In that context,] I think it's cool.

IV

        The turnouts at the shows in ‘95 were fair. We weren't bringing in crowds that circled the block, but at least it wasn't uncommon to play for a hundred people or so. True to live SF59 form, renditions of the songs were stripped down to their barest elements. The lush multiple layers of atmosphere on the recordings were lacking within the limitations of a three piece, but for those open to experiencing the songs in a new way, they got bare bones rock versions.

        Martin was inclined to solo more frequently in that context, ripping out his trademark two-maybe-three-note bend—a trick he claims to have learned from listening to Brian Doige (then guitarist for California spiritual goth rockers, the Lifesavers Underground) as a teenager. The coughing, gagging feedback was limited to between the endings and beginnings of songs.

        The set-lists generally clocked in at less than forty minutes every night (a slender amount of performance time the band still practices to this day—as a blue collar guy, Martin respects employment boundaries even in the world of independent entertainment). The next to last song was usually the only time Martin addressed the audience. Unless there was a technical problem, or someone shouted out a request—to which he'd usually reply, “Sorry, we don't know that one,” his one statement was always: “We just wanna give all honor and glory to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ this'll be our last song,” screeeeeeechhh bom bom bom bom bom bom bommmm screeeee!!!

        After sets, we would be wrapping guitar chords and wiping off sweat, and there was always a kid by the side of the stage watching Martin's every move. This is when I observed another intriguing facet of Martin's persona. He has the uncanny ability of deflating a gushing fan's sense of awe. I saw the morale-debasement-of-a-saucer-eyed-devotee scenario time and time again. The fanatic would eventually get Martin's attention, and then proceed to go on and on about his utter genius. Martin was always cordial, but once the eager disciple ran out of awkward introductions, and Martin had a chance to get a word in edgewise, he would reply, “Thanks very much. By the way, I'm not a poet.” To which, in most cases, the disciple would respond by simply staring off doe eyed and perplexed.

        Of course, Martin was never intentional about destroying the musical genius ethos his fans thrust upon him, but from his point of view, we're all just “normal Joe's.” (Martin would later actually address the matter repeatedly in his songs, in no uncertain terms. Especially on The Fashion Focus—“Fell In Love At 22,” “I Drive A Lot,” and “We’re The Ordinary” are about just what their song titles indicate.)

        “[Starflyer] wouldn't exist without those people,” Cloud said later of the band’s obsessive fans, “but sometimes it gets annoying. It's overbearing. It's like—I don't know you. You've been here for thirty minutes, as if you're my friend, but I don't know you. So, [we] just be patient and try and be polite.”

        Neither Cloud nor Martin ever told anyone to “Get a life!” in such situations, though, and Cloud carefully cultivates a respect for the band's fans' loyalty through his website and on message boards, however bemused he is by the often excessive nature of their devotions.

        Each Starflyer release has appeared on Tooth & Nail, which has always been understood as a Christian or Christian-friendly record company, and consequently the band’s fans are frequently young, white, Protestant youth group attendees looking for a personality or figure to give them some kind of cultural and intellectual representation. Because of this, members of many T&N bands frequently find themselves being pushed into a role-model status they didn't ask for, regardless of their actual individual religious convictions.

        While many associated with the label have found the stigma unsettling, Martin didn't seem to mind discussing his beliefs with strangers, just so long as they didn't “get weird” on him about it. This is partly due to the fact that Martin himself grew up in a strict religious environment—where he was allowed to listen only to Christian rock in his early teen years—so he does identify with his rabid fans.

        “Maybe we're the only thing they're allowed to listen to,” Martin muses. “So, I feel cool about it, because I know how much Daniel Amos meant to me, and if for some reason we're that same kind of thing to them, where it's, like, something they can listen to.... [In that context,] I think it's cool.”

        Martin's own musical influence broadened during the mid-80s. “A friend of mine had The Queen Is Dead by the Smiths in 1986,” Martin recalls, “and when I heard that thing I was like, what is this?!? It freaked me out. I'd be, like, slipping over to his house after school, like I was doing some dirty thing, just absorbing it.”

[Songs] don't just come together by frolicking around reading poetry. You're sitting down and saying, ‘Does this chord make sense? How's my melody fit with this chord? Maybe I should go to a minor here.’ It's not some random event.

V

        I had a great time on that tour in ‘95, but about a week into the tour we launched into the debate about good songwriting skill being like math. As previously mentioned, as far as Martin and Cloud saw it, songwriting was arithmetic-oriented, in the way that combinations of certain chords just add up to make a great song. I have been rehashing that debate in my head ever since, and felt it was time to revive it with him ‘for the record’ during our conversation at The Compound.

        As if they had been planning their attack before we got there, Martin cites the same concept, using auto repair as his modus. I admit that some of their examples are points well taken. Flower arrangement as art? Making a latté? Please. But writing a poem? Let's not be hasty. And music arrangement being likened to lawnmower or auto mechanics? Comparisons like that seem so odd when you consider what transformed Martin's life—the Smiths, the Pixies, DA—all very ‘arty’ bands, right? Anybody can learn chord combinations on the guitar. Regardless of the correctness of chord structures, though, something can still suck if it doesn't have that ... certain something.

        But do you think that you create art? I ask pointedly.

        “No,” Martin responds. “I just think that the word ‘art’ is way too broad of a term, even regarding its creation. Since it is so overused, and everything can't be art, I'm willing to say, ‘Yeah, we're not art, we're music.’ A guy with a freaking brick hanging off his ear is considered art these days, but I don't think so.”

        I bring up an example. Consider Joy Division—we listened to them frequently while we were out on that ‘95 tour, so the parallel here is appropriate. Ian Curtis can't sing, but Joy Division just cannot be denied. And now Interpol, a band that has very similar qualities to Joy Division, is finding contemporary success, yet I don't think people will be discussing their music as we do Ian Curtis' this many years since his suicide. The "math” in Interpol may be correct, in fact it is probably more “technical,” but it's not compelling in the same way as their inspirational band.

        “I think there is true art,” Martin responds, “but I think that ninety percent of what people think of as true art is not.”

        What is art?

        “I don't know, man, honestly,” he says. “I consider what I do as a craft. One just needs to be good at their craft. In other words, if you read an interview with someone getting extremely artsy, about when they wrote a song, and all that stuff, I find that to be b.s., because if you go to write a song, you're writing a song. [Songs] don't just come together by frolicking around reading poetry. You're sitting down and saying, ‘Does this chord make sense? How's my melody fit with this chord? Maybe I should go to a minor here.’ It's not some random event.”

        “If somehow we could ban the word ‘art,’ everything would be fine,” Cloud adds. “It's just that some songs have that magical aspect to them, and some don't. How do you make those or don't make those, I don't know.”

        “I'm probably just a pissed old man,” Martin finally confesses after an admittedly overdrawn struggle on the nature of art. “I just got sick of kids saying they were artists, so I say, ‘Piss on you, man.’ That's probably really what it is.”

        And turning to his most recent records, we probably should have realized this was the simple case. Leave Here A Stranger was saturated with Martin’s boredom/disdain with the pop mythos, as well as the form itself. As he sings so tiredly in “Give Up The War,” Martin’s “played all the chords / and it doesn’t matter at all.”

        This also might explain Old, the first really drastic musical shift for Starflyer since Gold—and knowing Martin, I sincerely doubt the poetically inverted titles are entirely coincidental.

I'm just sick of the guy with the brick hangin' off his ear.

VI

        I used to believe that Martin's resigned cool was perhaps a misplaced effort toward a sort of Christian humility. I originally saw his aloofness as a disservice to his talent, according to his own theological worldview. I meant to convince him that it's okay to take a compliment, and to recognize giftedness for what it truly is. In all honestly, I had thought that the seemingly disengaged person I knew six-odd years ago would be the person I interviewed.

        But the Jason Martin I interviewed in January was genuinely humble, unflinchingly candid, and willing to accept praise. He was the adult, simple family man version few enthusiasts know outside of the magical allure of pop music. And it seems that maybe his aversion to the word "art" has been a genuine attempt to cut the pretension from the beginning.

        In light of these ponderings, I was reminded of a story I read about seminal-punk icon, Henry Rollins, who had a crazed fan that was essentially stalking him, so he decided to momentarily invite this fellow into his world. “This is what I'm doing here around my office. Here's the publishing company I'm running, the record label,” et al. The person left, bored and disenchanted. This was work for Rollins, a vocation, and he was not a visionary sage in a mystical tabernacle of angst-filled art.

        I will not admit to being mystified by Starflyer's artistry juxtaposed with Martin's aloofness, but I was reminded that it's the day-to-day simplicity of everyday life that can be such a strength to mature art—or in Martin's case—craft.

        In Martin's words: “I'm just sick of the guy with the brick hangin' off his ear.”

        And who isn't?