“Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes, but no one ever does”

Of all the great bands that ended their careers, declared an end to their discography, and went their separate ways, I think that the one I miss the most is Harvey Danger. They were criminally underrated during their career, and while they did get some good measure of popularity with “Flagpole Sitta”, they never got recognized for what they truly were: one of the cleverest and most artful bands of the past 20 years. They were a unique voice in American music and it’s sad that that voice never got the broad audience it deserved.

“I think I get it.”

For me, the sound of Harvey Danger will always be a comfort, a relief, and an invigorating thrill. Their whole discography feels like a great inside joke, all the more hilarious because I feel like the only ones who get it are me and my stereo. Of course, as someone (I honestly don’t recall who), said, the problem with singers is that they say that to all the girls. And so it’s not really my inside joke; it belongs to anyone who cares to listen.

But Nelson’s wry lyrics embedded in the band’s flawless, hooky compositions make make it feel listening to the rantings of a dear and clever friend.

“Edith cannot fix another engine”

Listen to the shuffling snares, the building composition, and then pay special attention to guitarist Jeff Lin’s solo guitar solo, leading right up into one of my favorite lines in any song ever: “Give it a rest / a give it a rest / a give it a bad night’s sleep”

But also just watch the video. Nelson and co. are artists of the first degree, and I think that’s genuinely reflected in the video. I know Sean Nelson is an actor and cinemaphile, and I think his eye is displayed well in the way the band are passively involved in mini psychodrama of a woman’s unfulfilled aspirations. If it weren’t a music video, one might be almost tempted to think that it were real, proper, capital-A-Art.

But of course it is. And that’s the real tragedy here. Here’s some real art that evokes universal, existential, human pains and does it with consummate craft. But most folks only know the band as “those guys who did ‘I’m Not Sick, But I’m Not Well’ or whatever it’s called.”

“I am a rrrazor, please cut your wrrrists with me”

I sometimes wonder what to make of the correlation that some of my favorite bands and most personally influential bands started with people with little to no musical experience. After all, Evan Sult and Sean Nelson supposedly had no musical experience when they joined up with Jeff Lin and Aaron Huffman. The Germs had no songs prepared and could barely play their instruments when they did their first live show at the Orpheum. Supposedly, they were unceremoniously thrown off the stage after five minutes, but not before Darby Crash stuck the mic in a jar of peanut butter.

Of course the tempting stock answer is to say that great music is born out of a desire to make music first, and letting technical skills come later. But that answer’s pretty unsatisfying. After all, we never get to hear the bands of the make-music-first sorts who fail. And there’s a lot of people out there with spotless technical pedigrees who make great music.

So if it’s not a question of authenticity, then maybe the bands that had the disadvantage of musical inexperience had to survive on something else until their technical skills developed. Harvey Danger had passion, good humor, and one of the best lyricists in modern music. The Germs were well versed in starting riots.

“I figured wrong, with a capital R”

Of course the simplest explanation is that there’s really no correlation at all. Josef Skvorecky said that “Art is art because nobody has yet quite grasped the art of doing it.” So it is with music. There’s no sure formula for music that sets the soul alight, either in the general case or for a particular audience or listener. Despite the best efforts of the music labels from the 50s through the late 90s, one cannot repeatably create good music with fixed curricula.

And so good music comes from the technically proficient and well-schooled, but it also comes from the college kids saying, “hey, let’s buy some instruments and start a band.”

But no matter the roots of the band, they all come to an end eventually. The author John Green said that all relationships end in break up, divorce, or death. The same is true for bands, except that the divorces are called “solo careers”.

So in the end, the show must eventually not go on.