The surrounding buzz, the chatter, the drunken blabbering in front of the television at family reunions, get so prominent sometimes that you’re not really sure what you know anymore. People’s love affairs with the sounds of their own voices become the primary truth.
So what do we know? What is certain? And, I mean, if this stuff doesn’t BANG, doesn’t rock, doesn’t take us to a place where we’re forgetting about our workdays and car registrations and things like that, what’s the point?
Vision is a funny thing. It can occlude other things. It can occlude common sense. That’s what this book is about. Third Eye Blind are a phenomenological initiative that defies truth. They defy life. They rock in spite of universal law and spit fire in the face of the dawn.
Well, the music is sovereign, leaving me speechless, and that’s the way it always should be. Granted, the 1990s encompassed a premiere era in music in especial relation to abilities of record companies on a corporate level to issue music that was original, meaningful and defiant. Green Day shirked convention by writing punk rock songs with the anthemic efficacy of The Beatles and singing about doing dirty deeds to, uh, yourself, and it’s discussed in the video documentary Heart Like a Hand Grenade that Warner didn’t want to, originally, sign Green Day, and took some convincing from label scout Rob Cavallo, who ended up producing all of their albums [1].
Then, again, sitting here auditing Third Eye Blind like some sort of music cop [2], I am still just myself, and cannot encapsulate a “third party,” like the kind you’d find in the medical field. Luckily, anyway, “death” is not a side effect of listening to music, and I feel incredibly enlivened, rejuvenated, from the experience.
“Narcolepsy”; as is widely known, is a song Stephan Jenkins wrote from the point of view of his bandmate, Kevin Cadogan, who was struggling with the disorder. Appropriately enough, then, Cadogan steals the show on “Narcolepsy” with some killer, trippy and undulating guitar texture. His guitar sound is enough on its own to likely make the tune Grammy-made. “Semi-Charmed Life” is the greatest song of all time by the greatest band of all time and “How’s it Going to Be” has the greatest opening guitar riff ever administered within a commercial rock song.
Out of all the other discussion points which are possible, then, from lyrical dynamism to heterogeneous song structure to just yelling your head off on the mic at the end of a pealing grunge rock song, what I’d primarily like to focus on in this chapter is the public’s reaction to Third Eye Blind as a general entity, and its potential thematic parallelism to the main focus of this book, which is the ironic convergence of Third Eye Blind’s unscrupulous approach to band finances and their stratospheric stature as an entertaining rock band.
Well, aside from the little cluster of 14 songs I’ve just listened to and which are denoted below, a genus which is near-perfect but perhaps left me thirsting for jamming in the spirit of Califone’s “Heron King Blues” or The Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold” (sic), almost nothing about the band is likeable. Even in the immediate wake of this era illustrated in my audit, when Kevin Cadogan was fired from the band, the music started to sound different, with less purpose and intensity, and Stephan Jenkins’ lyrics seemed to adhere to a path of hedonism, or perhaps even Narcissism.
So the band’s predicament of being widely hated makes a certain sense, in spite of the heaven-reaching accomplishments to which they are beholden as a collective in worlds of arena rock. But none of the complaints against Third Eye Blind, I’ve noticed, are very elaborate or emphatic. It’s usually just along the lines of “They suck,” by some ignorant simpleton jealous of their success and their romantically themed lyrics. Anybody familiar enough, that is, with the underlying development of Jenkins’ miserly financial practices, is probably by said point enamored enough by their music, and its stylistic eclecticism, tonal depth and stalwart emotion, to find themselves within a similar moral quagmire to my own, as I wield the impetus for this book.
Of course, it’s possible that the band’s very element of “coolness” acts as a hindrance on them, in terms of their ability to be holistically accepted by the general public and grey masses. Again, I feel, jealousy was largely a factor in this. Third Eye Blind, too, is undeniably “cool,” with rampant songs about high-profile, romantic relationships, a silver-tongued, majestically crooning singer with an effortless knack for the erudite [3], and even a psychedelic, sonic tinge to their otherwise everyday, pedestrian guitar riffs.
Let’s compare them with Green Day, who’s now been in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for nine years, and for whom the HOF often seems like a home-away-from-home by way of inductions and charity concerts. Green Day, for all their credit [and I must confess to being a huge Green Day fan, right up through the brilliant side B of Father of All… (2020)], are, let’s face it, pretty much the cosmological antithesis of “cool.” They have a song about masturbation, their album is called “dookie,” and you pretty much won’t catch them writing a love song if you put a platoon of cops on a stakeout. Whereas, for Stephan Jenkins, romantic themes seem to roll off his tongue effortlessly, almost as a sort of default.
Green Day, then, seemed preternaturally destined for the RRHOF, while Third Eye Blind, on the other hand, aren’t even apparently being associated with the institution by any critics, scholars or press hounds. In truth, though, Third Eye Blind has sold 6 million copies in the U.S., only 4M behind Dookie. So it’s not like the difference in commercial popularity is astronomical. Third Eye Blind has even sold marginally more copies domestically than Nimrod, the Green Day record that gave us “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”; a song that for a while in the late-’90s might as well have been our national anthem.
I met one girl out in Colorado who named Third Eye Blind as her favorite band. I worked with her in this grocery store. She was very adamant about it: “I am a HUGE Third Eye Blind fan,” she uttered, with a look in her eyes as if she were discussing methods for dismantling a bomb presently located in the meat department. But she was setting them apart, is the idea. And maybe when people express a general, vague, uninformed sort of distaste for them, as has been a pervasive practice, I’ve noticed, it’s not so dissimilar of a maneuver, after all, to the people who single them out and extol them, along the lines of there being a thin line between love and hate.
My point is that society, in general, while pretty much unilaterally enthralled with and doting on the artistically and commercially similar Green Day, still seems to be on the fence about whether they love or hate Third Eye Blind, and there’s not much in-between territory materializing anywhere. Another interesting sector is the liberal press, which, since the end of the 1990s, and even during that decade, has seemed more or less to condescend the band, to treat them like a bunch of mainstream male bimbos making dumb, commercial rock music. In particular, I’ll point to the instance of the band playing a RRHOF show in 2016 coincident with the Republican National Convention. The whole discourse seemed to dissolve into reports of the band actually playing the convention, which wasn’t the case, and not much buzz was made over Stephan Jenkins’ trolling of the conservative crowd: “Do you guys believe in science [4] [5] [6]?” It’s almost like a huge, oblong, continual act of sweeping these guys under the carpet, as a way of alleviating the mind of a figure that might, otherwise, occlude some of the given individual’s “cool” factor, within the grey masses. But then, what does it matter anyway? Everything is in how you frame it and the Sun-Times office is the size of a pin point from the top of the Sears Tower.
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[1] Par for the course, this is the same entourage that once dropped Wilco in the immediacy of their premiere LP, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, only to pick them back up a couple years later on a different company subsidiary, to release the same album.
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[2] My audit comprised a 14-song playlist, culling seven songs each from Third Eye Blind’s first two albums, of “Narcolepsy”; “Semi-Charmed Life”; “Jumper”; “How’s it Going to Be”; “Thanks a Lot”; “The Background”; “God of Wine”; “Wounded”; “10 Days Late”; “Never Let You Go”; “Deep inside of You”; “Camouflage”; “Farther” and “Darkness.”
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[3] As he was, you’ll kindly remember, valedictorian of his class at UC Berkeley in his procurement of a BA in English.
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[4] Amanda Petrusich, in her New Yorker article contemporaneously published “The Republican Party’s Unrequited Love of Rock Music”; does at least do a nice job of illustrating how delusional the right has been in its attempts to use rock songs in campaigns, given the invariable, vituperative backlash from bands, in response, on social media. Perhaps, rather than it having been her own negligence, it was just the surrounding buzz from the media that seemed to downplay Jenkins’ subversive gesture, and to assimilate the band with the RNC, despite their non-involvement with it.
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[5] Of course, given how seemingly innocuous this question is, and subsequently, how intense the negative reaction to it was on the part of the right-heavy crowd, it’s pretty easy to posit that the group’s values are easily belittled.
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[6] To be honest, it kind of surprised me that Jenkins gave a flying mess about politics, or anything social or cultural, for that matter: it’s nice to discover that his brain these days is anything more than an algorithm for pumping out catchy, disposable pop songs, I suppose.