{"id":94949,"date":"2016-02-24T17:40:33","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T22:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=94949"},"modified":"2016-02-24T18:06:44","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T23:06:44","slug":"supercalifragile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/24\/supercalifragile\/","title":{"rendered":"Supercalifragile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Game Theory\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Lolita Nation, thirty years later.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"scottmiller\"<\/a>

Scott Miller, 1983. Photo: Robert Toren<\/p><\/div>\n

This month, Omnivore Recordings rereleased Lolita Nation<\/em>, the 1987 double album by the San Francisco pop band Game Theory, who were dissolved in 1990 by their leader, Scott Miller. (Obligatory note: he\u2019s not the Scott Miller from the V-Roys<\/a>). It\u2019s the latest and most prized offering in Omnivore\u2019s reissue of Game Theory\u2019s complete catalog, long out of print\u2014original pressings of Lolita Nation<\/em> sold for more than a hundred dollars\u00a0on eBay.<\/p>\n

Lolita Nation<\/em> checks off all the boxes of the sprawling, ambitious double album: its twenty-seven tracks, mostly of Miller\u2019s knotty but grabby songs, are interspersed with outbursts of experimental noise, rash new musical ideas, a backward-masked Beatles crib, and references to the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Joyce, and Kubrick. There\u2019s a\u00a0song in 5\/4 time, loosey-goose instrumental interludes, and self-referential snippets of other Game Theory songs\u2014a trademark Joycean habit of Miller\u2019s\u2014all of it marshaled into an apparent concept album about the anxious transition from youth to adulthood. But Lolita Nation<\/em> defies thematic pigeonholing, just as its songs resist easy listening, and it still sounds fresh and compelling almost three decades after its release. Mitch Easter, who produced it along with five more of Miller\u2019s albums, told me, \u201cScott was always modern in a way that took me a minute to say, Are you sure?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Miller is not here to celebrate Omnivore\u2019s rescue of his music. He committed suicide in April 2013, just after his fifty-third birthday, shocking his family and friends. Although he was introverted and emotionally guarded\u2014\u201cSpock-like,\u201d as a Game Theory bandmate put it\u2014he didn\u2019t seem worryingly depressive, not even with songs in his catalog like \u201cSlit My Wrists\u201d and the surprisingly bouncy \u201cDeee-pression.\u201d Dan Vallor, his longtime friend and Game Theory associate, and the primary producer of Omnivore\u2019s reissues, told me, \u201cThe idea of him as the tortured artist is a wrong read of who Scott was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who was he, then? Miller\u2019s fairly ordinary Sacramento upbringing led to associations at University of California, Davis, with the burgeoning \u201cPaisley Underground\u201d pop scene. Game Theory\u2019s first two records garnered enough attention to attract Mitch Easter, who had produced R.E.M.\u2019s first three records. \u201cI was excited to work with him,\u201d Easter said. \u201cI thought his band clearly was up to something. His degree of individual, this-is-my-shit creativity was really, really strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Easter went on to make more albums with Miller than with any other band, including his own<\/a>. Game Theory\u2019s punchy 1986 single \u201cErica\u2019s Word\u201d drew some attention, but they had still only \u201creached national obscurity, as opposed to regional obscurity,\u201d Miller joked. When the band returned the studio to record their third LP with Easter, Miller had little at stake commercially but everything, it seemed, artistically. According to Easter, \u201cScott said, I want to make a double album so that everybody can say it would have been a great single album.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"lnation\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I once asked Miller about the relationship between\u00a0Lolita Nation<\/em>\u00a0and Nabokov\u2019s book, and was surprised to learn he\u2019d never read it. (\u201cToo relentless,\u201d he explained. He preferred, not surprisingly, the trickier, self-referential Pale Fire<\/em>.) In his Ask Scott\u00a0Internet column<\/a>, he answered:<\/p>\n

\n

I knew all I needed to know for my appropriation of the concept to work for me. In my midtwenties I felt powerless and persecuted. What did the world want me for? The title made me think of an entire generation of Lolitas: someone\u2014our parents? God?\u2014needed us to be there, but the need felt neurotic and uncompassionate. In \u201cWe Love You Carol and Alison<\/a>\u201d (my favorite Game Theory song) I’m trying to express that teen alienation thing that the kids go for, but I\u2019m also fishing around for a basis of proper adulthood.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That fishing around for adulthood gives Lolita Nation<\/i> its conceptual framework, but there\u2019s also plenty of sheer fishing for musical ideas, and not only Miller\u2019s. The band\u2019s keyboardist at the time, Shelley Lafreniere, told me, \u201cScott was still writing as we went. He even used a bit of lyrics that I came up with. We were all just hanging out and feeding off of each other.\u201d\u00a0Perhaps the \u201cproper adulthood\u201d most urgently on Miller\u2019s mind was more pedestrian than literary: the IRS was after him while Game Theory was recording Lolita Nation<\/em>, whose lyrics contains numerous references to his looming tax audit. He felt \u201ca desire to throw out a lot of what I began to think of as tyrannical conventions, and I just ended up with a big, very contentious record.\u201d (It did not go unnoticed by some clue-seekers that the date of Miller\u2019s suicide was April 15.)<\/p>\n

Most of the basic recording for Lolita Nation<\/em> was done with the full band in Berkeley, California. Afterward, Miller and Easter decamped for Easter\u2019s Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he produced R.E.M.\u2019s first single, \u201cRadio Free Europe\u201d and their debut Chronic Town<\/em> EP, making him and his studio the southern epicenter of eighties East Coast college radio. In 1994, Easter built a new studio, the Fidelitorium, in nearby Kernersville, about an hour from my home in Durham. When I visited him there recently, the old two-track machine he used to mix Lolita Nation<\/em> was just a few feet from where we sat, and he still has the handwritten track sheets from the sessions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Mitch Easter<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe finished it together, just him and me,\u201d Easter said. \u201cEvery bit of that \u2018sound design,\u2019 you might say, did not exist and had to be made up. We recorded some of the noise bits, and the funny bits, and the chopped-up editing things.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was especially curious about one of those \u201cchopped-up editing things,\u201d a two-minute crazy-quilt of twenty-eight fragments, mostly of other Game Theory songs. (There\u2019s also \u201cVacuum Genesis\u201d: possibly a reference to the Big Bang; definitely the sound of Miller vacuuming the Drive-In while singing \u201cIllegal Alien.\u201d) Despite its scavenger-hunt enticements, Easter said it wasn\u2019t at all premeditated, and that for Miller its design may have been as much visual as aural:<\/p>\n

\n

We sat there one afternoon and just grabbed stuff, quickly, and printed it and ran it through reverbs and turned it backwards and just worked really fast, having our sort of afternoon of musique concr\u00e8te<\/em>. We did it with a billion razor-blade edits, and we had a lot of fun looking at the editing tape go by: f\u2019p-f\u2019p-f\u2019p-f\u2019p<\/em>. He wanted to have a CD track ID on every one of those things, because CDs were happening then and he was excited about them. I think he wanted to see the numbers go by really fast on the LCD. But whoever mastered the record wouldn\u2019t put a code for [each one].<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That masterer\u2019s act of resistance to Miller\u2019s musical ideas seemed to stand in for the world\u2019s. Although \u201cLolita Nation<\/em> has about seventy minutes of songs and four minutes of explicitly experimental material,\u201d Vallor told me, \u201cthose eighties alarmists missed the great big beautiful forest for the trees.\u201d Easter said: \u201cIt really is a typical double album in feeling a little bit dissipated in some ways. The thing about that that works really well, if you can hang with it, is the sort of rise and fall of conciseness and un-conciseness, catchiness and un-catchiness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Game Theory made one more album with Easter, the smoother and more accessible Two Steps from the Middle Ages<\/em> (1988)\u2014an easier introduction than Lolita Nation<\/em>\u2014and then went into limbo during Miller\u2019s protracted breakup with his girlfriend, Donnette Thayer, who was one of Game Theory\u2019s members. But Miller kept writing songs, on what he later called \u201ca hot streak.\u201d Easter visited him in the Bay Area. \u201cHe was living in Burlingame, this slightly sad, kind of funny lonely-guy existence where he was showing us how he worked on his demos by getting into a sleeping bag and zipping it up and singing inside it so nobody would hear him in the apartment building.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was heard anyway. Miller got special notice in Christgau\u2019s Record Guide: The \u201980s<\/em>: \u201ca prototypical \u201980s rock artist,\u201d Robert Christgau wrote: \u201cserious, playful, skillful, obscure, secondhand.\u201d Meanwhile, Miller found a new record label and bandmates. He renamed them the Loud Family, after the infamous ur-reality TV show, An American Family<\/em><\/a> (the real-life Louds signed off on the name). The Loud Family\u2019s first album, also Easter-produced, the harder-rocking Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things<\/em> (title borrowed from America\u2019s \u201cHorse with No Name\u201d), landed the band in a Rolling Stone<\/em>\u00a0New Faces feature with Liz Phair and Radiohead. Years later, Miller wrote: \u201cFunny to think of a time when no one knew which of [us] would soon enough own the new century and rent out space to everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mitch Easter, Michael Quercio, and Scott Miller, recording Lolita Nation<\/i> in 1986. Photo: Robert Toren.<\/p><\/div>\n

After a second Loud Family album with Easter sold poorly, Miller self-produced three more albums by the group in the nineties. The third, Attractive Nuisance<\/em> (2000), borrowed from Eliot\u2019s elegiac Four Quartets<\/em> and Shakespeare\u2019s muse-relinquishing Tempest<\/em> to suggest his retirement. He didn\u2019t exactly retire, though. Instead, his Ask Scott column transmuted into another musical project, a series called Music: What Happened (another shrewdly borrowed title<\/a>, as his biographer<\/a> Brett Milano points out\u2014the \u201csecondhand\u201d quality Robert Christgau observed). These were capsule song reviews and notes for ostensible mixtapes, one compilation for every year from 1957 to 2011. They\u2019ve since been collected into a book<\/a> of pop-music criticism: wide-ranging, erudite, and disarmingly funny, it\u2019s also Miller\u2019s de facto autobiography and statement of personal aesthetics. In 2006, he and the Loud Family made a joint album<\/a> with likeminded Bay Area popster Anton Barbeau, but by then Miller was married (for the second time) with two daughters. He\u2019d settled into a life of \u201cwork and days and mornings,\u201d as he sings on Attractive Nuisance,\u00a0<\/em>a Silicon Valley breadwinner.<\/p>\n

Later in life, Miller\u2019s literary attention turned from Joyce and Eliot to the controversial cultural theorist Ren\u00e9 Girard (\u201cmy pick to be remembered as the important humanities theorist of our age\u201d). Girard, who passed away last year, at ninety-one, taught at Stanford, near Miller\u2019s home; like Miller, he was revered in small circles (one of the immortels<\/em> of the Acad\u00e9mie fran\u00e7aise) but virtually unknown to the world at large. And the eulogistic praise of Girard by one of his colleagues perhaps suits Miller, too: \u201cA solitaire<\/em>. His work has a steel-like quality\u2014strong, contoured, clear. It will be there and it will last.\u201d<\/p>\n

There might have been more of it. After Miller died, it transpired that he\u2019d recently started planning a new Game Theory album\u2014the band\u2019s first in a quarter century\u2014to be called Supercalifragile<\/em>. He had done some preliminary home recording and talked to former members about reuniting, but he never played them his demos. \u201cVery suddenly he lost confidence,\u201d his old bandmate Gil Ray told me. Dan Vallor also observed Miller\u2019s abrupt \u201cretreat to an uncharacteristic lack of self-assurance. This was not Scott in a clear state of mind. He didn\u2019t doubt his work.\u201d Supercalifragile<\/em> was barely begun when Miller killed himself. His widow has enlisted pop maestro Ken Stringfellow<\/a>, who collaborated with Miller in the nineties, to elaborate the material into a full album with former Game Theory members and other musicians from Miller\u2019s devoted circle of admirers, including R.E.M.\u2019s Peter Buck; Aimee Mann (with whom Miller also once made some preliminary recordings, now evidently lost); and her partner in the Both<\/a>, Ted Leo.<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9 Girard is best known for his \u201cscapegoat theory\u201d: \u201cmimetic desire,\u201d he argues, causes rivaling conflict invariably settled by transferring it onto a sacrificial victim. In game-theory terms, perhaps: a<\/em>\u00a0and b<\/em>\u00a0are triangulated (and reconciled) by an arbitrary c<\/em>. It\u2019s tempting to think of Miller\u2019s death as the saving act of the scapegoat, but that notion doesn\u2019t withstand any kind of scrutiny. \u201cHe was really just intrigued by the power of the \u2018third point,\u2019 \u201d one of his friends suggested. If his conflict was existential, perhaps Miller\u2019s crisis of confidence over Supercalifragile<\/em> dispossessed him of c<\/em>\u2014his music, that necessary third point.<\/p>\n

Revisiting not only the newly reissued Lolita Nation<\/em> but all of Miller\u2019s records, delighting in their sonic experiments and \u201cgazillion chords,\u201d as Aimee Mann once said of her favorite of Miller\u2019s songs<\/a>, I realized that despite years of attention I don\u2019t actually know most of Miller\u2019s lyrics. When I read them, I admire their searching complexities and their quadruple rhymes (\u201cfriends against me [\u2026] frenzied ten-speed\u201d), but I don\u2019t quite understand them. Their potency, for me, is in how Miller sings them. On Game Theory\u2019s final album, he credited himself not with vocals but \u201cmiserable whine,\u201d cheekily appropriating a Sacramento critic\u2019s complaint (later he shortened it to \u201cLe Mis\u201d). His natural range was very high, his tone plaintive and straining, all raw nerves and excitement\u2014a supercalifragile voice, perhaps. It cuts right through the welter of his musical ideas in the passage from speakers to ears, a live wire of perception and emotion, ardor and wit, and surprising carnality: \u201cthe stuff of life,\u201d as he called Game Theory\u2019s music, long ago. I am thinking of the last sentences he ever published, from the final entry in Music: What Happened<\/em>. He quotes the climactic line from Wild Flag\u2019s \u201cRomance<\/a>\u201d: \u201cSound is the blood between me and you.\u201d And he adds, in parting: \u201cI think it is, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adam Sobsey is the lead author of Bull City Summer<\/a>. His biography of the rock musician Chrissie Hynde is forthcoming from University of Texas Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Game Theory\u2019s\u00a0Lolita Nation, thirty years later. This month, Omnivore Recordings rereleased Lolita Nation, the 1987 double album by the San Francisco pop band Game Theory, who were dissolved in 1990 by their leader, Scott Miller. (Obligatory note: he\u2019s not the Scott Miller from the V-Roys). It\u2019s the latest and most prized offering in Omnivore\u2019s reissue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":514,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[21281,21277,21279,775,21272,513,21275,21276,10706,966,21271,18012,21273,46,21282,6050,21274,21280,21278,8139,18517,93,21270,6024,967],"class_list":["post-94949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-aimee-mann","tag-bay-area","tag-brett-milano","tag-california","tag-college-rock","tag-depression","tag-double-albums","tag-ericas-word","tag-game-theory","tag-lolita","tag-lolita-nation","tag-lps","tag-mitch-easter","tag-music","tag-omnivore-records","tag-pale-fire","tag-rem","tag-rene-girard","tag-robert-christgau","tag-rock","tag-rolling-stone","tag-san-francisco","tag-scott-miller","tag-suicide","tag-vladimir-nabokov"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSupercalifragile: Scott Miller and \u201cLolita Nation\u201d at 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