Is there room in this party for moral congruency? The possibility gets mucked up beyond recognition, like a CD covered in old, sticky Mountain Dew and stuck to another one for a whole week. It seems, sometimes, to believe in rock and roll is like a practical joke we play on ourselves.
But then, he was “Puck” the whole time, right? Third Eye Blind lead singer Stephan Jenkins, before signing what was then the biggest major label record contract for a debut album in history, formed part of Puck & Natty, a San Francisco rap group that was originally named Tuck & Patti and rechristened resultant of an extant, local jazz group of the same name. Puck, as we know, is Shakespeare’s trickster figure in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a “merry wanderer of the night” particularly given to casting spells on sleeping unwittings and thereby souring up love affairs. His calling card is causing mischief, in other words.
Jenkins’ version of Puck’s “beguiling,” which may find a phenomenological parallel in Shakespeare given some lee-way and literary analogy-hunting, was, surreptitiously, before the release of Third Eye Blind’s debut album, establishing “Third Eye Blind Inc. as a corporation, naming himself as the corporation’s sole owner and shareholder, without telling anyone else in the four-member group, (guitarist Kevin)… Cadogan said” [1]. This is according to the New York Times. As reports to mtv.com, “Following his split with the band in June 2000 [2], Cadogan filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the band and singer Stephan Jenkins, citing fraud, wrongful termination and breach of contract” [3]. Flood states that “(Cadogan) settled out of court… His payout was small due to statutes of limitations, he said” [4].
Now, you might say, litigious, celebrity crap like this goes on all the time. What’s the big deal? Third Eye Blind, as a band, obviously survived this abrasion and even is still together, to this day. They even rocked the Republican National Convention in 2015.
Sure, at the end of the day, it is just an instance of one man screwing over several others. It’s not like he killed anyone. And it’s just money. Prince himself said that money doesn’t matter: of course, he did own his own gymnasium and roller skating rink while saying this, I’m pretty sure.
Well, it matters to Stephan Jenkins. That much is sure.
What’s funny, and which will be much of the focus of this book, is that music seems to matter to him, almost just as much. That is to say, given the circumstances, his subterfuge in cheating his bandmates out of money and unscrupulously reaping the benefits, it would be easy, per basic theory, to jump to the conclusion that it would be impossible for Jenkins to display true artistic merit. I guess that’s what separates this contract scam, to me, from a Martha Stewart or Lori Loughlin white-collar crime. Rock bands are supposed to mean something. Third Eye Blind found their arc in the late ’90s, when skinny, tattooed dudes were flooding MTV and there were songs about everything from someone’s mom being lonely at 3 A.M. to moving into the country and eating a lot of peaches. The world was subsumed with rock and roll and it was a lifestyle. Sure, there was money being exchanged — sure, it was a marketable commodity. But you were also required to hate disco and not shy away from drugs and transgender sluts feeding you jello shots out of their tits. There was a strong proclivity for recklessness: see Eddie Vedder jumping off the stacks at a concert into the crowd, a potentially life-threatening feat, and Kurt Cobain playing guitar while spinning on his head [5], surely destined to destroy all the band’s gear at the end of a show.
And your bandmates were supposed to be like your brothers. As prevailing theory would dictate (which, again, is often null and void in my current expedition here), it’s impossible to create anything meaningful, in creative or artistic realms, without a strong bastion of trust and camaraderie solidifying the connection between bandmates.
This, in a sense, is what this book handles, on the whole. Third Eye Blind operate on their own set of theory, one hitherto deemed impossible by scholars, philosophers and scientists, but one which has cranked out some of the most cranked-up, hummable guitar pop our world has ever heard.
“Semi-Charmed Life,” in South Bend, Indiana, my hometown and current residence, plays on Sunny 101.5, a station typically dedicated to cheesy ’80s pop like Boy George and Paula Abdul. It’s not like they’re getting spins alongside Everclear and Semisonic, in other words. They have, in fact, superseded the late-’90s post-grunge zeitgeist and ingratiated themselves to a larger pop realm, commercially speaking, one whose constituents would be much more likely to grace The Today Show or Good Morning America than, say, Fastball [6] (or the Republican National Convention, for that matter). I’ve legitimately, too, worked in a kitchen where five teenagers could be heard singing every word along to the ubiquitous 1997 hit, in 2017, nonetheless, hence indicating that they would have not even been born yet at the date of the single’s release. The breadth of popularity is thoroughly undeniable.
But “sensitive” is a strong word. “Nuanced,” though, might be a little more viable. Jenkins is quoted in a Rolling Stone interview as saying “I have a Sarah McLachlan moment, too.” Wait, this guy likes Sarah McLachlan? This alt-rock good fella who embezzled millions of dollars? He likes Sarah McLachlan?
What would be the impetus for pretending to like Sarah McLachlan? Well, plenty, in the ’90s: actually, back then, women went for the sensitive man, big time. I remember Maxim making fun of the Jewel book of poetry, quipping that, if you’re a guy and you own it, “You will do, or say, anything, to get laid.”
But you’ve gotta admit: it’s a pretty elaborate coup on Jenkins’ part. It’s quite possible that there’s some strain going on in Jenkins, around this time and thereafter, which is preternaturally tailored to artistic output, which, obviously, is an adjacent entity to capital gain, at least theoretically. By way of a prior assumptions, too, it should also be adjacent to personal merit and integrity. But then, here’s where the Third Eye Blind theory comes into play, enabling such a miser to behold such an outpour of legitimate, important creative material.
Former bandmate and guitarist Kevin Cadogan put it rather pithily in an interview, as transcribed by The Ringer: “Stephan Jenkins is a total megalomaniac freak… He’s no narcissistic that he’s not really capable of rational thought” [7]. Illicit drug use, specifically LSD — one typically associated with bulbous creative musical output — will be a focus of this book, and may have well played a factor in Jenkins’ ostensibly abnormal psychology. And if it seems questionable that I’m putting so much clout in this Kevin Cadogan quote I could point to numerous corroborations of the singer’s callousness by other musicians who have toured with him, and also to the point that Cadogan has always cast an introverted, guileless figure, not typically the type to make waves when it’s not absolutely necessary. He’s also the epitome of a genius, in my opinion, whether that’s to my point or not.
Another matter I’ll attempt to elucidate in this book is the exact effect of original guitarist Kevin Cadogan on the music of Third Eye Blind, and how the band’s artistic output was altered by his termination from the group in 2000. Back in the 1990s, growing up, my friends and I used to say this phrase “Bros over hoes.” Now, allowing for a little pig-headed, inarticulate baseness, of course, this phrase still idealistically rests on the idea of nurturing friendships in the long-term, even in the face of things like ephemeral lust and our raging, teenage hormones. Stephan Jenkins, it’s safe to say, isn’t a “Bros over hoes” type of dude. And, I have to admit, Out of the Vein (2003), the band’s first album without Cadogan as guitarist, is better than I remember it being. Perhaps I were just a robust music snob in 2003 when I heard it (I was in college, so likely wedged in an overly cerebral musical disposition), and perhaps I were just really pissed off at the tyrannical Jenkins for ruining his band’s lineup and dynamic. The truth is, the production on Out of the Vein is pretty cool, and, by and large, the songs are hummable and bearable. There are two things, anyway, that it does lack when juxtaposed with Blue (1999), which did indeed feature Cadogan on guitar. The main thing Out of the Vein lacks when in comparison to the band’s former work is any kind of virtuosic showmanship on guitar: the ingenious riff which opens “Wounded” (and which Cadogan would perform, by himself, on guitar, on the No Guitar is Safe podcast), the emphatic rhythm part governing “Farther,” the electric frills ornamenting the chorus to “Darkness,” etc. Without Cadogan, in addition, the band becomes extremely, extremely poppy, a malady making the Out of the Vein album pretty cringe-worthy in its staunch adherence to romantic lyrical themes, and its terribly predictable song structures. Out of the Vein, by and large, is composed of dentist office music, whereas the former album’s “Wounded” just cut way deeper, a song about rape that’s so catchy and gorgeous that you want to listen to it anywhere, just maybe not around a bunch of old people. And it seems to rest on that incessant guitar riff, in sharp contrast to the band’s post-Cadogan material.
Did the band, then, lose its identity, with the departure of Cadogan? Sadly, no: Jenkins seems more gung-ho than ever, that is, to pump out these reductive fast food jingles about his trophy girlfriend, or whatever, and sounds endlessly amused, in his own right, somewhat like a cat playing with a little lust-driven ball of yarn for all of eternity. I mean, the band is still together after all these years, and the m.o. hasn’t really changed, at a nuclear level, since “Semi-Charmed Life.” You’ve gotta admit, that’s pretty impressive, in Jenkins’ own, sick way. But this strange adamancy, then, in proceeding down this banal path of poppy love songs, and ironically seeming to wield even more enthusiasm than when he had a classically trained guitarist who rattled off a litany of alternate tunings [8], represents another point on which Third Eye Blind seems to defy universal law, and exist on, entirely, their own plane of phenomenological rules and metaphysical artistic catalysts.
The most stupefying thing, then, to me, about Third Eye Blind, is that all their old stuff still seems to WORK. I mean, with my left brain, I hate this Stephan Jenkins dude, but then when I sit down to listen to the music, it still seems to pay off, and what’s more, do so in a holistic sort of way. I mean, I listen to Jenkins’ lyrics and I BELIEVE them. They work, still, on a phenomenological level. It’s absolutely mystifying, what he’s done.
It’s like he’s just a bloodhound with the knack for sniffing out artistic motifs that are going to work, and work in the long run, in a way that can even, maybe, help you sleep at night or give you solace. I dunno. In terms of persona, on the band’s self-titled debut, along with several forays into third-party perspective (“Narcolepsy”; “Graduate”), we get, perhaps most centrally, “London.” This track 10 tune is a quick, loud, frustrated rock song whose chorus plays as “I don’t wanna go to London / I told you I don’t care / I don’t wanna go to London / To live there”. I mean, in a weird way, the guy is keeping it real. He really doesn’t wanna go to London, and sure, at his most effective, discursively, on this first album, he’s saying the word “I” in every chorus (“Losing a Whole Year”; “Semi-Charmed Life”; “How’s it Going to Be”; “Burning Man”; “London”). But maybe there’s something do this: maybe we all don’t wanna go to London, deep down, and need this loud, cathartic rock music to complement said malady. Maybe life just sucks, on the whole, and none of us want to split funds with out bandmates equally. I mean, Christ, rent in San Francisco is freakin’ through the roof.
Also, in addition to being the man who bequeathed us “You’re the flash of light on the burial shroud” (someone get the fire extinguisher on this man…), there are two numbers on Blue (1999), an album I find to generally throw bows with Third Eye Blind (1997) for best band album, that seem to cut diamonds with their musical prowess, and even make sense lyrically. “Farther,” track 10, might be the funkiest thing the band ever did, and is spiced with treated vocals and depraved, urban lyrical imagery, also being built on a simple, killer chord progression, in true 3EB fashion. It’s an energetic rock song that’s also a song of mourning: in the chorus Jenkins sings “But I’m farther from you every day”, a simple mantra similar to R.E.M.’s “talk about the passion” in its ability to pack loads of meaning and thought-provoking within one simple, repeated phrase.
And when Jenkins sings “I’m farther from you every day”, the enlightened listener can’t help but wonder if he’s singing to his bandmate Kevin Cadogan, who likely devised this very chord progression (though this song is probably a little light, relatively speaking, on the show-off guitar tactics of certain other tracks) and who will soon be departed from the band, never to be fully replaced, from an artistic standpoint. It’s like Jenkins has this uncanny inability to dissociate from his own actions and mourn their consequences as if he had nothing to do with them in the first place.
Either way, again, the common thread is that it makes for some killer, perennially playable and hummable alternative rock, perhaps even coming to a more compelling head in “Darkness,” one of the last tracks on Blue [9]. Within this song is the haunting, almost hilariously appropriate set of lyrics: “I want you to love me / Like you did before you knew me”. It’s like this bizarre phenomenon of the conscience being replaced by artistic merit. He moves along, that is, at the speed of late-’90s alternative rock, not dwelling on the matter but rather bracing for the cataclysmic chorus (this sense of mid-song climax is also gone with the departure of Cadogan, in my opinion), wherein Jenkins sings “’Cause the world darkens around me” [10] and Kevin Cadogan fills in with some killer, potent and timely licks on that guitar. There is, simply, no other song like “Darkness,” either within the rest of Third Eye Blind’s catalogue or progeny of any other band in history. And that’s why I’m as mystified as you. But let’s get to the bottom of it, shall we?
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[1] nytimes.com/2002/06/20/arts/the-pop-life-a-part-of-a-band-as-the-whole-band.html.
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[2] This date discords with other reports I’ve heard which stated Cadogan was fired in January 2000 during a tour.
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[3] mtv.com/news/gv6tqf/third-eye-blind-lawsuit-ends-with-settlement.
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[4] floodmagazine.com/39035/how-its-going-to-be-why-two-former-members-of-third-eye-blind-cant-call-themselves-former-members-of-third-eye-blind/.
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[5] This surreal image was captured by the trenchant, pioneering grunge photographer Charles Peterson and is referenced in the documentary Hype! centered on that same musical movement.
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[6] Of course, it’s ironic that Fastball is considered so small-fry, since the chorus and melody “Out of My Head” lent itself directly to a Machine Gun Kelly mega-hit and that’s like the 10th-best song on that Fastball album All the Pain Money Can Buy (1998).
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[7] theringer.com/2021/6/9/22525595/semi-charmed-life-third-eye-blind-max-collins-eve-6.
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[8] Please consult the Kevin Cadogan episode of the “No Guitar is Safe” podcast for an extensive delineation of this phenomenon.
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[9] In regards to this, my first Blue CD had what’s still my favorite end-of-album sequencing: a brief, non-instrumental take on “Slow Motion” at track 11, which was basically just an intro and then a couple of choruses, then “Darkness” at track 12, then culminating with the goofy, light-hearted “Darwin.”
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[10] It’s certainly, in light of this, pretty easy to imagine Jenkins at some point following a couple lawsuits falling into a period of considerable depression and self-loathing, which would obviously further authenticate these lyrics.
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