Toxic History: The Story of The Airborne Toxic Event

By Glen Hoos

Ten years ago, a distraught freelance writer locked himself in a room and furiously scribbled his way out of a cataclysmic week.

Though Mikel Jollett entered his hovel intent on penning the great American novel, when he emerged a year later, it was not with the fictional book he had in mind, but a book of songs fueled by all too real tragedy. Those songs required a band, and that band would be The Airborne Toxic Event.

This unlikely group, a collection of five players from wildly diverse musical backgrounds, became an even unlikelier success story. Defying all established conventions about how success was supposed to be achieved in the early 21st century music business, they forged their reputation on the back of a surprising smash single, expanded it through relentless touring, and solidified it with a singular body of work that blends punk, folk, pop, symphony, literature, poetry and – above all – naked honesty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483455310

Book preview

TOXIC HISTORY

The Story of The Airborne Toxic Event

BY GLEN HOOS

edited by Julie Stoller

Copyright © 2016 Glen Hoos.

Written by Glen Hoos

Research and copy editing by Julie Stoller

Cover design by Glen Hoos

Cover photo by Jennifer McInnis

Internal design by Glen Hoos and Lulu Publishing

Originally published online at This Is Nowhere (thisisnowhere.com)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5530-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5531-0 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 8/4/2016

Contents

PRELUDE

The Writer

DEBUT

The Week from Hell

Formation

What’s in a Name?

Echo

Moving On

Midnight

Spaceland

A Major Deal

Unplugged

Self-Titled

Torches and Pitchforks

The Snickering on This Flickering Screen

30 Shows in 30 Days

Speechless

Island Getaway

1st INTERLUDE

Late Night

The Girls in Their Summer (Festival) Dresses

All I Ever Wanted

Neda

Touring with a Twist

ALL AT ONCE

The Bombastic

All At Once

Go Show

All At Once Videos

2nd INTERLUDE

Hot Gossip

Wounded Warriors

Red Rockin’

SUCH HOT BLOOD

A Timeless Secret

Such Hot Bombastics

Such Hot Blood

Label Wars

3rd INTERLUDE

Hell and Back

Three Bassists and a Baby

Firing and Brimstone

Something New

WHISKEY MACHINE

The Fillmore

Dope Machines

Songs of God and Whiskey

Videos of Dope Machines and Whiskey

Riding the Whiskey Machine

POSTLUDE

Pursuit of Happiness

Acknowledgments

Notes

For Missy Becca

PRELUDE

1.jpg

Mikel Jollett: The Mod Club, Toronto, ON, March 4, 2009.

Photo by Dave MacIntyre.

The Writer

I t started on a mid-seventies California commune: an inauspicious beginning to an unlikely story.

Mikel Jollett’s upbringing was anything but mainstream. One of a pair of sons born to a pair of hippies whose deep-rooted love for their children was chiefly expressed in intangible ways rather than through the material trappings of a suburban middle-class lifestyle,i Jollett enjoyed the time and freedom to pursue his own interests – even when those pursuits set him apart from the rest of the family.

My folks were down with whatever it was I was gonna do, explains Jollett. I was definitely into things that not necessarily everyone in my family was into.ii

One of those pastimes was writing, to which a young Jollett took at a very early age. I come from a family of very poetic people, in their own way, but probably not formal language, that was more my thing. When I was a kid I used to write stories a lot. It was like a thing in my family… my uncle would ask, ‘How’s the writing Mikel?’ when I was like, 8. I would always write short stories, invent characters, and tell stories.iii

That proclivity for storytelling would eventually come to define his life – but not before his path took a few detours along the way.

College – itself an oddity in the Jollett clan (I come from a long line of mechanics and ex-cons, he laughs)iv – took Mikel to Stanford, where he applied himself to an education not in writing or literature (I guess I always felt that studying writing is cheating, and that somehow I didn’t want to learn all these tricks so I couldn’t tell the tricks from things I actually thought)v, but psychology.vi While there, he also starred on the track team, running 12-15 miles per day and earning all-Pac10 in the 10,000 metres.vii

As might have been expected given his unorthodox background, Jollett was something of a fish out of water at college. There was a status orientation at Stanford that I didn’t even know existed, he recalls with obvious distaste. I was not good at the game, I was just confused. My dad was a heroin addict before I was born, and these [Stanford] kids who grew up on golf courses were taking drugs and drinking. And I’m thinking, ‘you’re supposed to be curing cancer, what are you doing?’ I didn’t understand it. To get to Stanford, and meet all these people whose idea of education was that they were kind of over it? I just highly rejected that.viii

After escaping with a degree in 1996,ix Jollett once again chose an unexpected road. Setting psychology to the side (at least in any official capacity), he tried his hand at teaching, coaching track and even carpentry,x before finally landing in the most unhippie place possible: a corporate office.

I was 25 years old, working a hundred hours a week in an office, he says. I hadn’t really set out for that life, but you know how those things go. You’d trade a kidney for an extra zero at the end of your paycheck, and so on. My days were filled with 5-year plans, capital-amortization reports, key-performance indices - i.e., the tortured lexicon of the modern office.xi

It was in the third year of this job that Jollett came to the first of a couple crossroads that would shape his future. I would find myself walking the fluorescent-lit corridors of that ungodly building with reams of green-and-white printout paper covered with endless rows of numbers, a big, round gut hanging over the 38-inch waistline of my green slacks, seething about the budget. ‘Have you seen these numbers, people?’ Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse of my reflection in the office glass and wonder who the fat man was.xii

I just knew I had to get the fuck out of that fluorescent-lit, corporate horseshit, he explains. I made the decision that I would rather be homeless than do that anymore.xiii

Looking to recapture his lost sense of possibility, Jollett was attracted to the idea that you can shake your life up like a soda bottle and smash it against the wall. That whatever prisons we construct in our lives - whether it’s an awful job, a gut, an unhappy marriage, an addiction, the things in life that hem us in, that make us wake up in the morning in a cold sweat and think, How did I get like this? and How can I escape? - all these things are transient. For me, and maybe for anyone, the answer was, just leave. Tear the entire thing down.xiv

And so, naturally, he traded in his business suits for the grubby garb of a ranch hand – and a big pile of books.

–––––––––––—

At the age of 27, just as many of his peers were starting to settle down, Jollett spat in the face of convention by ditching his office job and relocating to a horse ranch out in the desert. For a year, his world revolved around three things: shoveling horse manure, reading and revisiting his first love: writing.

I brought with me a ton of books, and sat there for a year and read and wrote, and that’s all I did, Jollett remembers. "I was like a stable boy where they gave me room and board if I worked for 3 hours a day, shoveling horse manure. So I did that, and just read a bunch of books. I didn’t have a literature background; I was a science person in college, so it was all really new to me. And I just fell in love with it and started writing all the time. I did some music journalism, a lot of personal essays, I also wrote about politics, and during that time, 50,000 words of a novel… I just wrote and wrote and wrote.xv I’d be shovelling horse manure all day, and then at night I’d work on my novel – which was, to be honest, another form of shoveling horse manure."xvi

As he sharpened his skills over the next few years, Jollett’s fledgling writing career began to take flight. The credits started piling up: The Los Angeles Times, Filter Magazine, Men’s Health.xvii He wrote and recorded essays set to music for National Public Radio,xviii which eventually offered him a regular column.xix All the while, he was devouring the great writers of our time: Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Philip Roth, among many others.xx

Looking back on those days, Jollett is careful to note, "I was never a professional writer about music. I was really, really broke during all that time. I wanted to be a novelist and I liked music a lot. I wrote under a lot of pen names and I made very little money, like less than 20 grand a year. (As Managing Editor of Filter), I worked from home and I never met the people I talked to. Mostly I was a writer and I got a title because I would write under different names. I think it sounds really important but literally, I was here, the same place I am now… I knew I liked music and I knew I wanted to meet David Bowie and Robert Smith. So it was a way of doing that. (My friends and I) were sacrificing so much just so we could write our dumb little pieces about The Cure or David Bowie or Lou Reed. And it was because we were writers and we liked music and wanted to write about music. We weren’t critics, we weren’t paid anything. We literally made it up as we went."xxi

Ultimately, however, being a music journalist – professional or otherwise – was not what drove Jollett. He had something bigger in mind.

I’ve felt all my life that the smart people in this society were the writers, those were always the people that I respected and admired, Jollett explains. So whenever I thought about becoming a writer, I’d get a little tingle in my spine, you know, kind of nervous and excited. Whether I had any proficiency at it is another question. But I certainly was interested in it.xxii

In 2006, having given up journalism to focus on creative writing, Jollett seemed on the verge of a breakthrough. He wrote a story, The Crack, which garnered interest at The New Yorker before McSweeney’s (the gold standard publication for up-and-coming American scribesxxiii) agreed to publish it. His first piece of published fiction, it tells the story of four friends, who are all dying of various illnesses, walking around in one of those weirdly surreal rainy days in LA. They’re all dying – I tend to write about death a lot – and they’re all dying, but mostly they just smoke a lot of pot, watch movies, hang around Los Feliz, and crack jokes; it’s just about the relationships between these 4 friends.xxiv It’s long for a short story, around 10,000 words, and he was working on turning it into a novel – a project that remains unfinished to this day.

Meanwhile, Jollett had secured an agent for the novel-in-progress, and had been invited to the prestigious Yaddo artist colony in upstate New York, previously attended by such notable scribes as Saul Bellow and William Carlos Williams.xxv

Getting into Yaddo was a huge honor for an unpublished fiction writer, Jollett admits with just a hint of pride. So I got in there and I got the prime spot in the summer, they gave me 2 months. I had a really good literary agent I’d landed, and I had a novel that was just about done that he was really excited about.xxvi

Years of struggle, of pursuing a nebulous dream that perpetually seemed just barely out of reach, appeared finally on the verge of a major payoff.

But this is Mikel Jollett, and things are never quite that straightforward.

DEBUT

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Mikel Jollett: The Mod Club, Toronto, ON, March 4, 2009.

Photo by Dave MacIntyre.

1

The Week from Hell

M y whole life I was invincible like everyone else, says Mikel Jollett, thoughtfully fingering the patches of his scalp. You’re the talented one, the smart one, the cute one, and then suddenly it’s like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna lose all your hair and your face is gonna turn white and you’ll die. Oh and so’s your mom.’" i

The week that changed everything came at the worst possible time. With Jollett seemingly poised to take his shot at literary greatness, the other shoe didn’t just drop – it kicked him in the head, and then in the balls, on its way down.

Early in 2006, Jollett endured a series of catastrophes unfairly squeezed into a handful of horrific days. It was a week that would irrevocably alter the direction of his life – assuming he survived at all, that is.

The first shot came when Jollett was diagnosed with a genetic autoimmune disorder: a degenerative skin disease. Though not fatal,ii it will certainly do a number on whatever vanity to which one might be clinging. I’m losing all the hair on my head and my face and my body, he explains matter-of-factly. And I’m losing all the pigment on my body. I’m going to look like Moby.iii

Stunned by this unexpected turn of events, a reeling Jollett was not even afforded the luxury of time to process the blow before the next one found its mark. The following day, his mother called with news that put his own misfortune in perspective. Cancer.

Though Jollett has never gone on record about the specifics of her diagnosis or the ensuing battle, other than to gratefully report that she was victorious, its lasting effects upon the son are as obvious as they were profound. My mom getting sick pretty much scared the shit out of me, he admits.iv The fear that was birthed that day would continue to swirl well beyond the duration of the crisis, consuming his thoughts and fueling his future work. I think I write music because I’m afraid to die, Jollett states bluntly.v

Jollett’s hellacious week was not limited to physical afflictions, either. Misfortune doubled down and invaded the heart when he split from his long-time girlfriend – a break-up that would become part of Airborne Toxic Event lore through its immortalization in the band’s signature song, Sometime Around Midnight.

During times of crisis, most people lean harder on their loved ones. Not so Jollett. Although the timing was terrible, the decision to end the relationship was his.vi Why he felt the need to distance himself from her, and at that point in time in particular, is unclear. Maybe it had been brewing for some time, and the combined traumas of the week pushed him over the edge. Or, perhaps it betrays a fear of intimacy, of being seen at his most vulnerable. Whatever the reason, it would prove to be anything but a clean break, as the couple would be on again/off again for another year before moving on for good,vii while the regrets stemming from that relationship would continue to plague Jollett long after that.

As if to pile on himself, Jollett also picked that moment to quit a two-packs-a-day smoking habit – a resolution which, while necessitated by his newly diagnosed medical condition,viii certainly couldn’t have helped with the emotional turmoil.

And still, the universe had one last wicked trick up its sleeve. After several days spent keeping vigil with his mother in the hospital, Jollett came down with pneumonia.

It was the final straw in a week of final straws.

Something in me snapped, Jollett says. "Like, I literally just lost my mind and didn’t care about anything.ix I spent a month walking around in a daze – hazy, depressed, like I was in a diaper.x It was like the moment in my life I realized I was going to die."xi

Though the black cloud would dissipate in time, its impact would not. In a very real sense, everything that Jollett would do over the next decade would be part of a protracted attempt to make sense of the events of that week and come to grips with a life that includes disappointment, disease and death.

It’s hardly surprising that the process began with the writer locking himself in an apartment for a month and a half with pen and paper. What was surprising was the form the writing took: not prose, but music.

I remember it really clearly, reflects Jollett. It was January 3 – I came home and picked up the guitar and just started playing for five hours, and the next day, eight. I couldn’t even really sing that well, but I would try to, every single day, just sing and play and write. And ever since then, that’s all I’ve done.xii

Just as he had earlier banished himself to a horse ranch in the middle of nowhere to turn his thoughts into a novel, he now exiled himself to his apartment in a self-inflicted solitary confinement, pouring his pain into poetry. The novel was shelved as the author discovered that some anguish cannot be adequately expressed through words alone; it requires rhymes and melodies.

"All I did was make music. The feeling wasn’t that I had so much more to say but that I had so much less time to say it.xiii It was like being bit by a bug or something, I can’t explain it. Suddenly all I wanted to do was play music. I had no ambition before that to do music and had given up music years ago, but I just started writing all these songs and it just started to take over my life. All I ever wanted to do was play music and write songs and sing and sing and sing, like 8 hours a day. It was like having OCD but with a guitar or something."xiv

The resulting songs (and there were hundreds of them) were intensely self-revealing and unflinchingly honest. There was no grand plan to start a band and perform them in front of an audience; just an urgent need to translate into words a life turned upside down. Given the state of affairs at the time, there’s an undeniable darkness to the work.

I think that you write about what’s around you, Jollett explains. "I hope it’s not the case that I can only write about devastatingly bad times. I’ve just had some devastatingly bad times. I didn’t choose ‘em, I wouldn’t want ‘em back… You ever have stuff happen to you in your life that just breaks you in half? You never plan for it… Shit happens in your life, use it, make something from it, make some art from it. The things that are terrible in life that happen to you are also beautiful, and you can find the beauty in all that terror.xv For me I think a lot of it had to do with sort of wrestling with my demons or devils or whatever it is, and trying to create something out of it, as opposed to it just being a knock on my life. You could just say, ‘That really sucked,’ or you can say, the decision to become an artist was a decision to create something out of that… kind of the raw materials of that experience and that emotion and trying to turn that into something you can share with the rest of the world."xvi

Though Jollett had dabbled in songwriting as early as the age of 15, the transition from wordsmithing a novel to penning songs did not come easily. That he would go on to enjoy a measure of success is a testament to the power of relentless commitment and sheer hard work – qualities that Jollett points to as the keys to achieving anything of value in life.

"I mean, you can become the best apple pie baker in the world if you bake an apple pie every day. You know what I mean? Like, you just have to make a decision to do it by whatever means you have. For some people that’s, you know, rehearsing ten hours a day. For some people that’s recording ten hours a day. What I will tell you is it takes a long time to get good at something and people who think you’re born with talent are just wrong… You develop talent. You know, wasted talent’s the most abundant resource in the world… You have to get better. And the only way you get better is by practicing.

I’m serious. Like, sit down tomorrow, decide you want to be a songwriter, and go about acting like your life depended on it. And, you know – It’s really hard. It’s actually, like, really hard… People are always testing to see if they have the talent for something… they’re hoping that through minimal effort they have some innate talent. And it’s true that one in every, like, hundred million people have that. You have a Mozart every now and then, but most of us aren’t Mozart. The other nine hundred ninety-nine million, you have some talent and you have to develop it. Spend a lot of time. Make it your business… I promise you, if you write a thousand songs one of them’s gonna be good.

Once you make a decision to do something the universe kinda gets on your side about it. But only if you’re serious. It also tests you and asks you if you’re serious. You know, I was flat broke and ruined my credit and living in a tiny little squalor of an apartment and, like, you know, defaulted on every one of my credit cards and was halfway to homeless. And at each one of those things like, life is like, ‘Do you mean it? Do you mean it? Do you really want to do this?’ And if your answer is anything other than 100% yes, you just don’t have a stomach for it, go to fucking law school or something.xvii

Jollett took the leap. There was no Plan B. To the astonishment of his family and friends, he declined the invitation to Yaddo, put the novel on the shelf and – along with new drummer friend Daren Taylor – set out to start a band.xviii

Time has given the gift of perspective. It’s funny because my whole life, I was like the cute boy in high school and college to some extent, he reminisces. "I started a band not until I was 30-something, and then I got diagnosed with this disease, and it changes the way I look. And suddenly everyone is taking pictures of us, shooting videos of us, and I look at them and go, ‘Wow, you don’t have that much hair,’ or ‘Your skin looks funny,’ and… it’s really nerve-wracking and weird. When it comes to just the art of it, you don’t care, you just want people to care about what you write or what you sing or what your band is doing. But then there’s this real thing about being in front of people, and other people telling you, ‘Hey dude, gosh, you kind of look weird.’ So that line where he says, ‘We’re ugly but we have the music’ (Leonard Cohen in ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’), that really speaks to me. I feel like I didn’t have the music until I became ugly, and that was my trade-off with the world. And so I couldn’t try to be the cute boy who fronts a band or tries to sleep with groupies… I had to write songs I meant, I had to be with bandmates I truly cared about, I had to do things that I really believed in. I wasn’t going to get away with just trying to be cute because I wasn’t gonna be cute anymore… I was going to lose all my hair and my skin pigment and look like Moby.

"The songs are all real; everything in there is true, everything really happened. Like in the case of ‘Innocence,’ I just wanted the entire world to see this horrible event for what it was. Or a song like ‘Midnight,’ you write that sitting alone in your apartment, and like with all writers, you want to be able to tell the entire world that THIS happened to me and I want others to know about it because it was so overwhelming to me that it happened.

My best moments are always those moments where you come back and this thing was written, and really, truly it’s not like you wrote it, it’s like you wrote it down. You’re just this desperate, pathetic, fucking, mongroling little thing who just wanted this one moment to be right. And you don’t care what you’re accused of, you don’t care how you look the next morning, you don’t care what sort of person you come off being, you don’t care what judgments other people are gonna make about you… you just put yourself out there because you believe that people are gonna get it.xix

2

Formation

I t was a monumental decision, and yet it was hardly a decision at all. The muse, as it turns out, has a mind of her own, and she made the choice for him.

Mikel Jollett’s course was set the moment he emerged from his room at the age of 31 with a scant few thousand words written towards his novel, but armed with hundreds of songs. He just had to wrap his mind around it.

I had to make a decision, he recalls. If I went to Yaddo (the writers’ residence in New York), I wasn’t going to be able to start the band. And suddenly, it was ‘Am I a writer or am I a musician?’ I remember telling my folks, because they’d seen me struggle for years and years trying to establish some kind of writing career and working on the novel forever, and they said ‘You’re out of your mind!’ They thought I was nuts. And I was like, ‘But I met this drummer and he’s really good, he’s a great drummer,’ and they were like, ‘Who cares!’ But then I chose not to go and instead, I locked myself in the warehouse with Daren for a few months, played music, and started Airborne. And we haven’t looked back.i

–––––––––––—

Daren Taylor, 26 when he was introduced to Mikel Jollett by a friend,ii took up the drums in grade school on a lark. It was a weird coincidence, Taylor recounts. I mean, it was literally like, I was over at a friend’s house on lunch break during high school, and I sat down on the drums just to mess around, and I wasn’t very good. And he said, ‘Well, our drummer isn’t here, so you’re gonna be the guy.’ It was kind of something that just got placed upon me, and then I started to feel it and it was like, yeah, this is where I need to be.iii

What began as a whim soon became a way of life, the easy-going, diminutive Taylor constantly tapping out a beat on something – anything, really. Jollett jokes, It is my theory that Daren really just likes to hit shit. Hard. You know, he wakes up in the morning and wants to bang on things. We’ll go out sometimes and be at a bar or something, and after a few drinks, he can’t contain himself. He just has to hit things – drum his fingers on the table, knock a glass with a spoon – whatever. I love this quality in him.iv

Having just moved south to L.A. from the Fresno area, Taylor was at loose ends, looking for something to keep him occupied.v For his part, Jollett had burned through a number of musicians in his quest to find the right partner.

I had met a lot of people who were session people who were hired guns and didn’t have a particular orientation; they were just kind of lame,vi Jollett remembers. I’d played with a few other drummers and bassists and stuff, but they just kept leaving. I wasn’t sure why, but I think maybe a band has to have a certain chemistry and I just didn’t have it with them.vii

He found what he was looking for in Taylor. (When) I met Daren, it was like, ‘Aaaaaaaah’ (cue angel choir). The clouds parted… There’s so many people that are like, ‘I want to be a funk drummer,’ and you’re like, ‘That’s cool… but that’s not what I do at all, so this was fun, but…’ Daren just made sense.viii

Though Taylor, who came from a punk backgroundix and once played for a band called It’ll Grow Back,x could flat out play, it was more about that elusive chemistry than his technical skills, about which Taylor jokes, I have a certificate in drums. It’s not a degree, just a certificate.xi

"I played him some songs and he liked them and then he played his drums with them and it was just instant. Then he told me his e-mail address was something like [e-mail]. I fell smack in love,xii admits Jollett. There was an immediate chemistry. Like, ‘Cool, so I got that drummer/singer thing covered.’"xiii

"Daren liked to play music and had always wanted to be in the kind of band I wanted to start. He had grown up on The Cure and The Pixies. We lived in the same world aesthetically. We met and I played him some demos and he liked them and it all clicked. We spoke a similar language about music.xiv He’s such an incredibly talented kid, and I think, wanted to do a lot of the same things I wanted to do."xv

Jollett and Taylor quickly developed a brotherly rapport. (Jollett: Daren has an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock beats. Taylor: Actually, there’s only three. Jollett: It’s a really short encyclopaedia.)xvi Having made that connection, the pair threw themselves into arranging the songs Jollett had begun in that apartment, which had now been traded in for a warehouse fit for two.

It started out with me and Mikel in a room, summer 2006, playing, sweating, jumping, laughing, crying, stomping, shouting… Taylor reminisces. We put together the foundation of the songs.xvii

Jollett looks back on that period with obvious fondness. We just started playing endlessly. We spent months alone in this practice room, twenty hours a week or something just playing and playing and playing. Drinking, I guess. Screaming, stomping, dancing… It was a lot of fun.xviii

The cohorts were not exactly constrained by convention. At one point they took a field trip to a local junkyard to sift through rubbish in search of a ‘big metallic sound.’ With golf club and bat in hand, the two began banging until they stumbled upon just the right clunk: the hood of a 1969 Alfa Romeo, which would later be incorporated into the gaggle of L.A. shows that they would play over the next year.xix (Mikel later joked that if the band really hit it big, they’d add more trash to create a whole junkyard percussion setup for Daren – an idea that has tragically yet to come to pass.)

After four or five months of banging away in the warehouse, they were ready to take the next step and perform for an audience. There was just one problem – they had no bandmates.

Though they briefly considered launching as a two-piece (to wit, when they eventually released their first three songs on MySpace, the tracks were accompanied by a black and white photo of Jollett and Taylor alone),xx that was never their preference. We didn’t have any plans to be a two-piece; we just couldn’t find any bandmates, laughs Jollett. It’s actually really hard to put together a band it seems, and I’d gone through a couple of drummers before I’d met Daren too.xxi

Not content to just wait around for things to happen, they took a leap of faith and booked their first datexxii – prepared to play alone if necessary, but still hoping to bring others into the fold.

–––––––––––—

With the maiden gig looming, pieces started falling into place. The first came in the form of Steven Chen, 27, a native Angelino who grew up in Pasadena.xxiii

Jollett and Chen had actually known each other for half a dozen years,xxiv having swum in similar circles for a time when both were budding writers in San Francisco. Chen had attended Columbia University for journalism; in a strange coincidence, future bandmate Anna Bulbrook was actually at the same school for a time as an R.A., though their paths never crossed.xxv

During his schooling and after graduating, Chen took a multi-pronged approach to establishing his writing career. He was a writer/editor for a magazine, while also freelancing – work he continued during the early days of the band.xxvi And, much like his band leader, Chen was working on a novel on the side.

I write a lot of articles and used to write about music as well, said Chen shortly before the release of the band’s debut album. I write a lot about film now. You get to a point where you don’t know how to write about music anymore. It’s weird because once you start playing music you can’t write [about it], it’s a trade-off. So I started writing more about film and at some point, I had some really, really good ideas about fiction. I was always more comfortable with non-fiction. Fiction always seemed to be very indulgent and I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. But after a while I just started wanting to write really, really fun stuff. Mikel and I differ in that, Mikel’s writing is more heart wrenching and very serious, and it’s very depressing a lot of the time. I tend to gravitate more to the Seinfeld school of thought where you can poke fun at anything. So that’s kind of where I came from.xxvii

Chen was introduced to Jollett by a mutual friend who thought the latter might be able to give Chen a bit of career guidance. It was the universal language of music that ultimately bonded them – specifically, a shared interest in bands like The Smiths, Pavement and Archers of Loaf.xxviii Oddly, though, the topic of their own musical pursuits never came up.

A friend introduced us and we sort of bonded late at night over bands and whatever. And it’s strange to me that playing music never came up, ruminates Chen. It just wasn’t part of the conversation. We’d talk about bands and stuff but I didn’t know he was doing what I was doing at home, playing guitar and making songs. I was surprised when I found out that he played as much guitar as I did. I dunno… I guess neither of us wanted to be boastful about the fact that we could play music, because who are we, we’re just some writers.xxix

Eventually, both of them relocated back to Los Angeles. Sometime later, Jollett remembered that Chen played some keyboard, and invited him out to the warehouse to jam. Chen happily accepted – but not before making it clear that the guitar was his preferred instrument, a switch he had made as a teenager.xxx

Every Asian kid growing up, their parents make them play piano, admits Chen sheepishly. I think I was six years old when I was forced to play piano. They don’t want you to pursue it; they just want you to have that skill, like a classical education. And I think when I was 12 or 13, a couple friends started getting guitars, and I got really excited every time I would play with their guitars. But I really didn’t know what to do with it. My parents saw it as this foreign object that had nothing to do with music; it had such associations with rebellion, and it was very non-classical. But I begged my parents and they finally gave in, and when I was 13 they gave me a guitar. Ever since then I’ve been playing guitar. It was always a hobby; I never thought it would become something that I did professionally.xxxi

When Chen met Jollett and Taylor in their