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Every Record I Own - Day 759: Modest Mouse This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About

It’s been five months since I’ve written one of these album posts, mainly because 2022 was such a busy year. When I made my last album post on August 1st, I was still talking about my favorite albums from 2021. While I enjoy talking about current music, I think I get more enjoyment writing about music that I’ve had plenty of time to sit with, and consequently, I felt like I was running out of things to say about new releases.

I wasn’t sure how to dip my toes back into this project. Then on New Year’s Eve I got the news that Jeremiah Green passed away.

I’m sure Modest Mouse meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And for most people, their impression of the band starts around 2004 with their big hit “Float On.” For me, Modest Mouse will always be that curious local band from the early ‘90s.

A quick recap on Seattle in the ‘90s: Nirvana blew up in the fall of ‘91, and their success helped turn the spotlight on Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, and Mudhoney. Seattle was suddenly seen as a hub of underground rock music. But the reality is that we were a geographically isolated city with restrictive liquor laws and the Teen Dance Ordinance, a law that made all ages concerts virtually impossible. Rock music in Seattle was for the 21+ crowd. If you were a kid and you liked going to shows, you had to go to the youth centers out in the suburbs, or you had to go down to Tacoma and Olympia, or you religiously attended the one tiny all ages venue in the sketchiest part of downtown, The Velvet Elvis, that was strangely exempt from the ordinance on a technicality (namely, it had fixed seating, so you couldn’t “dance”). There was a distinct generational gap between the crowd that saw Nirvana play at the Central Saloon the summer before Nevermind came out and the local teenagers who picked up guitars in its wake.

Botch started playing in ‘93 and by the end of ‘94 we were playing shows at The Velvet Elvis. We were also playing spots like The Old Fire House in Redmond and Ground Zero in Bellevue, the suburban youth centers that held weekly concerts for the underage crowd. Some weeks you’d get a touring acts like Neurosis or Rocket From the Crypt, but we were so far off the standard touring circuit that most of the time you just got local bands. 

Modest Mouse was a name we saw around a lot. The name sounded a bit twee for our tastes, but we knew their drummer Jeremiah had been in a hardcore band called Drown, and he’d been an early fixture at The Old Fire House. Despite the small nature of the underage scene in Seattle and the crossover in our musical  interests, I wouldn’t hear Modest Mouse until Botch went out on our first tour in ‘96. In San Francisco, we played at the famous Epicenter Records. The bill was Modest Mouse, Scenic Vermont, Trial, and Botch. There were maybe 20 people there. But man, Modest Mouse fuckin’ ruled. They could be sweet and pretty one moment and screaming over distortion and feedback the next. We all became fans that night.

There was so much I identified with in their music. For one thing, it felt like every song started with a nugget of an idea—a solid verse/chorus structure—and then drifted off into some noisy exploratory jam session. It didn’t feel far off from what Botch was doing in that regard. We’d start a song with a couple of riffs that worked together, and we’d just jam in the basement until the rest of the song fell into place. It’s funny… I just assumed that was how every band wrote together. That’s what Fugazi and Drive Like Jehu did, after all. But in hindsight, I think it was a very unique approach, or at least it’s one that’s fallen out of favor with newer bands. When I listen to those early Modest Mouse songs, you can feel the excitement of a band bouncing ideas off of each other, letting happy accidents turn into whole new parts. 

There was something else that really resonated with me about those early Modest Mouse records. There was a sense of wonder with the western landscape, a fascination with geography, and a sense of loneliness and alienation when you become uprooted from your childhood home. It was all there in their record titles—Interstate 8, The Lonesome Crowded West, This Is a Long Drive. I’d only moved to the Northwest in ‘92, so I felt uprooted too. But there was also this new appreciation for wide open spaces. After living on an island you could drive across in a couple of hours, it boggled my mind that you could just get in a car and drive for several days and still not see the other side of the continent. Modest Mouse’s music captured that excitement for the open road and the possibilities it offered.

This Is a Long Drive had come out just a few months before that SF show. This album, along with the Broke single, got a lot of plays in our camp after playing with them. National success for Modest Mouse was still somewhere on the horizon, but by the time summer was over it felt like they were taking off regionally. They sold out a show at The Velvet Elvis that fall. I didn’t even know bands could sell out The Velvet Elvis back then. Sure, it held maybe 125 people, tops, but I didn’t realize there were 125 kids hip to the weird art house theater tucked in an alley in a grimy part of downtown. 

By the time The Lonesome Crowded West came out, they were a national act. A year or two earlier you’d only hear their music at friend’s houses or on the local college radio station. Now you heard their music in coffee shops, bars, and record stores all over the States. They belonged to the world.

Weirdly enough, my only interaction with Jeremiah would happen years later. At some point in the late ‘00s, after the success with Good News For People Who Love Bad News and his brief hiatus from the band, I was at a grocery store in Seattle with a mutual friend. “You guys know each other, right?” the friend asked in lieu of a proper introduction. We both shrugged and smiled, introduced ourselves, both saying “yeah, I know” in response. We were the same age, had come up in the same scene. I’d gone in to work a shift at The Old Fire House Teen Center the day he stopped by to talk to my boss about quitting Modest Mouse. We were in the same musical orbit, likely going through the same growing pains at the same stages of our lives, which is probably why their music hit me the way it did.