Marvelous 3 - ReadySexGo

When Elektra Records picked up the Marvelous 3 and released Hey! Album as a major label debut in 1998, they thought they were signing a hit act. After all, the flagship single from that album, the mercilessly hooky “Freak of the Week,” had done quite well for itself as an independent release, notching near-ubiquitous airplay on the band’s local Atlanta radio stations and earning the Butch Walker-fronted power-pop-rock trio a passionate fanbase. But the wider mainstream audience wasn’t really ready for the catchy, idiosyncratic sound of Marvelous 3, which blended biting sarcasm, bitter lyrics about failed relationships, and easy-to-swallow melodies together into a unique concoction. Instead, the radio was turning toward boy bands and rap metal, and as “Freak of the Week” failed to score a high chart position, Elektra realized that they had signed anything but a hit pop act; they had signed a band that, in that age of pop music, wasn’t marketable to the average radio audience. At all.

In such a situation, a decent record label would have tried to make the best of a bad situation: they would have worked to promote the Marvelous 3 as the torchbearers of the 1980s revival that would explode a few years later, or tried to market Walker’s budding production talents as something that pop music listeners should have been paying attention to (which, given his wildly successful career as a producer, was true). But money troubles and a slew of similar unmarketable acts left Elektra scrambling to fix things the easy way, and the result was that the record label left bands like Marvelous 3 in the dust. Feeling the neglect of a label that didn’t give a shit, Walker, Jayce, and Slug recorded an album that melded their power pop influences with their 1980s hair metal roots, creating a shameless and fearless record full of larger-than-life arena rock songs. Of course, the band was still writing sarcastic lyrics about sex and love gone wrong, but with their third record, titled Readysexgo! it all took a turn for the grandiose, and the result was the greatest record these three guys ever made in each other’s company.

It was also the last record they made in each other’s company. Beneath the anthemic choruses, the epic guitar solos, and Butch’s layers of studio wizardry, Readysexgo! was, at its core, both a love letter to the Marvelous 3’s loyal fanbase and a middle-finger-in-the-air “Fuck You” to Elektra Records. Rather than try to adapt their sound to fit the changing radio format, Walker and company consciously drove off a cliff in the opposite direction, writing what was probably one of the least marketable albums from a major label act back in 2000. Sure, there were still plenty of catchy songs, but they weren’t 2000s radio catchy. The opening trio of this record—“Little Head,” “Grant Park,” “Get Over”—was and is a parade of some of the best hooks Walker ever wrote, but there was far too much attitude and tongue-in-cheek sensibility in those songs for them to ever have a shot at radio airplay. “Grant Park” was about a guy who walked in on his wife hooking up with another woman, while “Little Head” had a line about “falling off the short bus and landing on your head.” In a year where the number one hits consisted of sap fests like Savage Garden’s “I Knew I Loved You” and Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open,” these songs were destined to be dead in the water. Hell, the album’s fourth track, “Sugarbuzz,” relied heavily on a hook that read, “You can stick that sign up your ass/The one that says it won’t last,” and it was the lead-off single. If Butch and his bandmates weren’t intentionally trying to mock the state of mainstream music, they sure did a good job of doing it by accident.

Whatever the band’s intentions behind Readysexgo!, the label wasn’t among the album’s fans.From the sounds of it, there was a lot of neglect, dishonesty, and double-dealing going on in the Elektra offices around the time this record his the streets, and since the guys in the Marvelous 3 had all been screwed over by the music industry once or twice before, the poor treatment didn’t sit well with them. Years later, when Butch would tell the story of what happened between the September 2000 release of this record and the band’s farewell show in Atlanta the following August, the order of events that led to the dissipation of the Marvelous 3 would shift around a bit, but the outcome was always the same: the band decided to cut ties and walk away in order to escape the abuses of Elektra—or, as Walker called the label in the band’s break-up notice, “Neglectra”—and the chapter of the Marvelous 3 came to a close.

“We had this hit song and everything was cool, and then the record company said ‘hey guess what?! We’re done promoting you. But we’re going to keep you on our contract if that’s okay with you,’ and we’re like, ‘No, that’s not fucking okay.’ So we said...I guess the best way it is that...the best way that they can’t, you know, take anything from us or keep us from creating art was to break up. So we broke up, and we said ‘fuck you’ to the label, but we stayed the best of friends and that’s the most important thing, ‘cause friendships last and mean more than any fucking band could ever mean.”

I didn’t personally hear Readysexgo! until 2005, so I can’t comment on how the record hit for fans listening to it for the first time on release day. However, looking back now, it’s fairly clear that the record was written as a farewell album. On the surface, album centerpiece “Radio Tokyo” is a towering arena rock anthem—complete with a guitar solo ripped straight from Butch, Jayce, and Slug’s hair metal days—but listen to the lyrics and the song rings as an anti-establishment tirade. It’s the most prophetic song Walker ever wrote, painting a picture of a world where labels and mainstream radio formats don’t matter anymore, where rock ‘n’ roll recedes back into the underground, and where all the kids tune their receivers to pirate radio stations in the middle of the night because that’s where the truly vital music is playing. For me, the song is more indicative of what happened in music over the course of the 2000s than just about any other—though the revelation came by way of downloading and the internet rather than via pirate radio. It all gets kicked a notch higher by the last line (“Seven hours later, they stopped the elevator to the second floor/And there was no more”), which feels like a strikingly final statement, even amidst a record full of songs (“This Time,” “Better Off Alone,” “I Could Change”) that crackle with climactic energy.

But the song that truly lays the Marvelous 3 to rest is, appropriately, the final one. Frequently introduced by Butch at concerts as “the last song we ever wrote, we ever performed as a band, and ever put on a record,” “Cigarette Lighter Love Song” is a bittersweet finale that stands as one of the best songs anybody wrote last decade. It’s Butch’s first utterly flawless song, from the delicate piano intro to the way the band kicks in at full force just in time for the first chorus. On record, it’s indelible, borrowing the general melodic contour of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” for the chorus—David Bowie even gets a tongue-in-cheek co-writing credit in the album liner notes—and building it into a sky-scraping power ballad.

Live, “Cigarette Lighter” has appeared in many formats, almost always as the highlight of whatever set it graces. For the final Marvelous 3 concert, it was an emotional coda to the 15 years these three guys had spent playing together; early in Butch’s solo career, for the fantastic acoustic live album, This Is Me, Justified and Stripped, it was a bare-bones piano confessional. And since I started going to live shows, I’ve also seen the song take many forms. In the first rock concert I ever went to, it was the penultimate linchpin for the main set, beginning as a solo piano arrangement, plunging the audience into pure darkness during the second verse, and then exploding in electric instrumentation as the full band returned and the house lights went up for the show’s grand finale. On the 2007/08 live album, Leavin’ the Game on Luckie Street, it was once again a punched-up, muscular rocker, with a snippet of Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” blasting through the noise during the final moments of the song and adding even more power to the proceedings. And on recent tours, Butch has taken the song to its highest levels of emotion and meaning by stripping it down to its barest essentials and utilizing it as an a cappella show opener.

“Cigarette Lighter Love Song” might well be the definitive Butch Walker song. It was his parting gift for the followers of Marvelous 3, and it’s continued to follow him through every stage of his solo career, taking a new form every time he plays it. To this day, when I hear the bridge (“Everything’s supposed to have a happy ending, but the record keeps skipping and the needle keeps bending/Like the road I’m driving to the bridge that has no end/I wanna take back everything that I’ve broken, but the bridges behind me are burning and smoking/I guess this is the end”), I find it difficult not to get choked up. Very few album closers are this powerful, this sweeping, this anthemic. I certainly don’t think I’ve ever heard another closing track that serves so well as a swansong. By the time Butch was singing those lines, he’d been bouncing around the music industry for years: he’d conquered the Atlanta music scene, playing shows six nights a week, when he was still only in high school. He’d served a quick stint in a major label hair metal outfit and he’d turned out three great records with the Marvelous 3. But “Cigarette Lighter Love Song,” this moment of complete honesty and emotion, tacked onto the end of an album and a band career that often emphasized sarcasm and cleverness above almost all else, this is where Butch Walker found his voice, and that’s why it’s the most important song he’s ever written. With Readysexgo!, Walker may have been at the end of one musical journey, but with “Cigarette Lighter Love Song,” he gave fans a preview of the many great things still to come.

Marvelous 3 - Hey! Album

In today’s other review, I wrote that Math and Other Problems, the debut album from Butch Walker’s 1990s power pop trio, the Marvelous 3, felt like a half-formed statement from a band that was still very indebted to their influences. On Hey! Album, the group’s sophomore-record-turned-major-label-debut, the leap forward is almost remarkable. Don’t get me wrong, Walker and company don’t try that many new things here: it’s still a slick, catchy album full of punchy power pop songs and with a foot planted firmly in 1980s alternative rock. But instead of spending the whole record imitating his influences, Walker establishes himself here as full-throated rock ‘n’ roll frontman, with the charisma, the passion, and the songwriting ability to go the whole nine yards. Naturally, his band follows suit.

The version of Hey! Album that most Marvelous 3 fans know—the one with a bed on the cover—was released by Elektra Records in late 1998, but the album wasn’t originally conceived as a major label hit parade. Instead, Walker, Jayce, and Slug recorded Hey! Album in the same manner as their previous album (on Walker's old Pro Tools rig) and released the songs independently earlier in the year. It wasn’t until one of those songs, a pop-rock gem titled “Freak of the Week,” began to collect radio play that the major labels came calling. With radio stations in the band’s native Atlanta putting the song into regular rotation and increasingly large audiences showing up at the band’s hometown shows, it was only a matter of time before Walker and his two best friends were roped into the major label system. “Freak of the Week” was already a minor hit, an almost guaranteed success in the hands of the correct label, and with the right levels of promotion, there was no reason that several other songs off the uniformly hook-laden Hey! Album couldn’t crack the charts as well. Right? Well, maybe not.

Signed by Elektra Records mid-1998, the Marvelous 3 were rapidly corralled into the nonsense of the 1990s major label scene. Hey! Album was remixed, edited, and covered in an appropriate level of radio rock sheen. Several songs from the independent version remained on the cutting room floor (gems like “Fastboat” and “I Just Wanna Go Home”) while another, the propulsive “Cold As Hell,” was put on hold for the band’s next record. Meanwhile, Elektra went about positioning “Freak of the Week” as a flagship first single (which it was) and building the band up into an outfit of hitmakers (which they never would be). “Freak” was a minor hit, landing at number 5 on Billboard’s modern rock chart. In most circles, the song was and is inconsequential, a forgotten gem from a band of 1990s also-rans. For Butch Walker and the guys in the Marvelous 3, it was the cause of a lifelong designation of “one hit wonder.”

Undoubtedly, Hey! Album’s lack of holdover success pissed Elektra off, so much that the label more or less derailed the career of the Marvelous 3 a few years later, but if the band guys were bothered by the disappointing radio reception, they certainly didn’t let on at the time. Walker and company spent the months and years following the release of Hey! Album on the road, occupying both opening and headlining slots, playing their songs to loud and appreciative crowds, and building a fiercely passionate following along the way. They may not have been a match with what was going on with mainstream radio at the end of the millennium—take a look at the number 1 singles from 1998 and 1999 and you will see precisely why Marvelous 3 never stood a chance—but their songs were catchy as candy and their live show was one of the highest-energy exports in rock music. In other words, these guys would have been just fine if their label hadn’t gotten in the way. But that’s a story for tomorrow.

Going back to Hey! Album today, it’s almost remarkable how fresh everything sounds, from the sing-along hooks of “Until You See” and “Write it on Your Hand” to the seriously weird, hysterically funny spoken-word monologue that concludes album closer “Lemonade.” Where Math and Other Problems only had one or two songs that I would consider to be among Walker’s best, Hey! Album is more or less chock full of them. Opener “You’re So Yesterday” storms out of the gate with a patent, snarling Butch Walker verse and an earworm chorus (not to mention a "Sweet Caroline" snippet toward the end of the song), while “Indie Queen” showed just how adept Walker was at creating pristine moments of pop perfection, falsetto vocals and all. “Vampires in Love” plays around with dumb puns (“And now I know that I suck at this, and you suck at it too/And now we’re nothing more than vampires in love,” goes the pre-chorus) and sounds a little too on-the-nose today, in the age of Twilight, but also still manages too be both endearing and innately hummable. “Every Monday” remains one of the few Marvelous 3 songs Butch will revisit live, a rousing slice of power pop with some of Walker’s most unforgettable lyrics (“I called up Marie, she have sex for free/But for 10 bucks an hour she’d listen to me”). And the cigarette-lighter anthem that is “Let Me Go” is the album’s peak, a realization of the balladic prowess that Butch only hinted at with “The Last Sleep” on the first record.

In their brief write-up for Hey! Album, All Music Guide called the record “a near-perfect combination of angst and bliss,” referring to the fact that, while these songs are loaded with memorable hooks and supremely melodic verses, the lyrics are all about break-ups, bad relationships, drinking binges at the bar, and cancelled TV shows. Since this album, Butch has thrived time and time again on songs that blend perfect pop sensibility with emotional intensity. In fact, from the relationship-breakdown-in-Los-Angeles that was 2004’s Letters,to the ode for the things he lost in a wildfire on 2008’s Sycamore Meadows, Walker has largely defined his career on a dichotomy of pop sheen and confessional songwriting. With the upcoming Peachtree Battle EP and the recent passing of his father, it looks like Butch is poised to return to that sort of emotional touchstone once more, making Marvelous 3’s Hey! Album that much more pivotal as a piece of his history. Math and Other Problems may have broken the ice, but this was the true debut because it planted the seeds for the songwriter that Walker would become.

Marvelous 3 - Math and Other Problems

In the years that followed the dissolution of the Marvelous 3, a 1990s one-hit wonder power-pop trio fronted by Butch Walker, Butch would often remark that his band was “15 years too late and five years too early.” After all, Walker and his bandmates—bassist Jayce Fincher and a drummer who was only ever known as “Slug” in the album liner notes (his real name is Doug Mitchell)—didn’t really fit in with the broody nineties crowd. There’s not a single iota of grunge in any of the three records Walker and the rest of the Marvelous 3 ever produced, nor is there anything akin to the boy-band/pop-princess radio fodder that was poised to take over the world as the decade and the millennium ground to a close. Instead, the guys in the Marvelous 3 were disciples of eighties hair metal and trashy pop-rock songs, with a fair amount of classic glam and singer/songwriter mentality thrown in for good measure. Those influences probably meant the band was straight fucked from the moment they signed with Elektra Records, a label that became known for screwing over similarly-minded pop-rock acts (Third Eye Blind and Nada Surf, for example) before they ran out of money and went bust in the face of the Napster revolution. But for a few years at least, the Marvelous 3 got to act like rock stars, and in the process, they produced three of the finest power pop records of the past 20 years. 1997’s Math and Other Problems was the first.

For the record, Math and Other Problems was not an Elektra release. This album comes from before the band had captured enough mainstream attention to get signed—a feat I discuss in today's other M3 review—and that means that it’s the rawest, weirdest, quirkiest album that Walker has ever made. Not only was the record’s primary influence a guy that most born-and-raised nineties babies probably wouldn’t hear about for another five years, at least—Elvis Costello, one of Walker’s foremost idols—the songs boasted bizarre, tongue-in-cheek lyrics that weren’t always easy to get a handle on.

Of course, the hooks were there: this wouldn’t be a Butch Walker album without a mountain of catchy choruses and hummable vocal lines. But they were bundled with the kind of double-take lyrics that made you wonder whether or not the band was playing games. “Come on baby eat my heart,” Walker belts on “Appetite,” the Cheap Trick-ish opening track. And on “Katrina,” the album’s freak-rock finale, Butch weaves a tale about a lesbian stalker who covers his science project in glue and envisions him as “the guy who always gets shot in every movie you see.” By the time the song reaches its spoken-word climax, an anecdote about a 400-pound Jabba-the-Hutt look-alike with Katrina’s face tattooed on the side of her neck, the album has officially descended into WTF territory.

Math and Other Problems is very obviously the portrait of a band (and a songwriter) in its infancy. While the songwriting on the whole is very good, Butch hadn’t really found his voice yet on this record, and as a result, the project ends up sounding more imitative than any of his other work. Costello is definitely the main template, as Butch’s voice wobbles and shakes on songs like “Cars Collide,” “Make Up,” and especially on the rapidfire “In the Beginning of Relationships,” in a manner that more recent albums would indicate was not so natural for him. Those songs are fine, as are retro power-pop boppers like “I Wanna Go to the Sun” and “Bottle Rocket”—it’s interesting to recall that the closest anyone else came to doing this sound and actually making it popular in the nineties was Smash Mouth with their first record—but the finest material is the stuff that shows where Walker would go as a songwriter in the coming years.

The definitive track is “Valium,” a drug-induced break-up anthem with shades of the stalkerish sensibility Butch would adopt years later for “Mixtape.” Where much of Math and Other Problems is about paying homage to Walker’s influences, “Valium” is a pristine 4-minute pop song that could come from no one other than Butch himself. From the blissful pop chorus to the 1980s hair metal guitar solo and the power-pop ready back-up vocals, “Valium” could fit snugly onto any Butch Walker album and into any Butch Walker concert setlist without sounding out of place. It’s one of his best songs, and it’s the only thing here that earns that designation.

The other highlight is “The Last Sleep,” which, though it sounds miles better in stripped-down acoustic format, more or less showed the balladic direction that Butch would take later on in his career. The soaring chorus and the punchy bridge show the unimpeachable rock ‘n’ roll frontman that Walker would become once he started singing with his own voice, but the real revelation is the lyrics, which strike a resonant and personal chord that rings loud and powerful amidst a record full of sarcastic and cynical one-liners. Fans wondering where the introspective break-up balladry of Walker’s solo albums come from need only look back at “The Last Sleep” to see the template. This was a song about a guy with his heart split open for all to see, and Walker’s confessional vocal carried the burden with ease. The tempo may be jarringly accelerated to fit the power pop sheen of the rest of the disc, but it’s still not hard to see the song as the odd ball of the set.

Math and Other Problems is not, by any stretch of the imagination, Butch Walker’s best record. The recording occasionally sounds sloppy (Butch recorded and produced the thing on a pre-historic Pro Tools rig in his parents garage), the songs and performances are imitative (and sometimes even parodic), and Walker hadn’t yet found the elements that made him so special as both a singer and a songwriter. But despite its flaws, Math and Other Problems is a lovable and idiosyncratic record, one that makes up for its lack of uniform direction and its pastiche of influences by cranking up the energy and heart to 11 and charging forward with all the reckless momentum that most radio rock acts today haven’t got a clue of how to maintain. It’s the weakest album Walker has ever made as the sole songwriter, but as a genesis rock of sorts for the guy who would become one of the biggest songwriters and producers in pop music, it’s still an essential and eye-opening listen.

Green Day - ¡Tré!

Green Day - ¡Tré!
Reprise Records, 2012
7.5/10

Those who read my delayed review of Green Day’s ¡Dos! back in early December will likely recall that, for all of my disenchantment with ¡Uno!, the first piece of the band’s ill-advised triple-album, my distaste for the trilogy grew tenfold with its follow-up. ¡Dos! was an unmitigated disaster, a musical recycling pile of pop cliché and cardboard garage band imitations that ranked instantly as the worst release in the band’s catalog. But, as I noted at the end of my review, ¡Dos! wasn’t a complete waste: its vicious awfulness at least had the positive impact of making ¡Uno! sound decent. And luckily, that same impact counts for double with ¡Tré!, the final piece of the trilogy and the only truly “good” album in the bunch.

In a lot of ways, the songs on ¡Tré! are precisely what I hoped to hear from the band as they blasted past their rock opera phase and back into the realm of the more “fun” or “spontaneous” music they were making around the turn of the century. Indeed, the best moments of this record are collisions of the band’s most well-executed musical ideas to date, from the classic-pop-with-epic-sweep opening of “Brutal Love” (which sounds like it could have been an American Idiot b-side) to the punked-up, multi-part, soon-to-be live show staple that is “Dirty Rotten Bastards.” Even the songs that fall a notch below the highlights, stuff like “Missing You” or “8th Street Serenade,” come across as exactly what Green Day were trying to accomplish with this trilogy, and exactly what they missed the mark on throughout the majority of the first two discs. These are songs with solid hooks, full-bodied performances, and altogether more life than the band showcased on ¡Uno! and ¡Dos!, even on their best tracks, and the result is a record with infinitely more replay value than we've heard from Green Day in quite some time.

In fact, the band sounds so much more engaged here that it’s almost difficult to believe these songs came from the same sessions that produced drivel like “Troublemaker,” “Kill the DJ,” or “Nightlife.” Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong sings like a new man on “Brutal Love,” hitting notes hard, fast, and with more soul and attitude than he’s manifested since Idiot. Another key cut, the irresistibly addictive “X-Kid,” takes less than four minutes to boil down the band’s last 15 years into a should-be radio single, a song that’s both retro and fresh, nostalgic and of-the-moment. “Hey, little kid, did you wake up late one day?/And you're not so young, but you're still dumb/And you're numb to your old glory, but now it's gone,” Billie Joe sings over a halting guitar scratch during the song’s opening moments, revisiting the bored and restless kids that populated Dookie and the politically disenfranchised rebels of American Idiot, and showing us where they ended up once they hit middle age. For a band seemingly embroiled in the second identity crisis of their (still relatively brief) career, the song is a moment of clarity, an acknowledgment that they don’t quite know where to go next. Ironically, but perhaps appropriately, that revelation comes during the best song they’ve written in years.

¡Tré! has no overarching theme or unity of sound, though it’s a bit funny to note that this album, which the band called a “mix” or “grab-bag” of styles going in, is the most cohesive installment in the trilogy. Where both ¡Uno! and ¡Dos! tried to veer close to a pair of genre styles (the former was supposed to be the “power pop” record, while the latter was all about “garage rock”), ¡Tré! masters both with more confidence and energy than the genre-specific records ever managed. See the album’s mid-section, which blazes through fast and loose pop numbers (“Little Boy Named Train,” “Amanda,” “Walk Away”) with effortless power-pop gravitas. That effective mid-section plays like a nostalgic time machine, its songs ringing with slick melodic sensibilities and crackling attitude that land somewhere between the band’s roots, early Weezer, and the pop-rock genius of Butch Walker’s Marvelous 3.

“Dirty Rotten Bastards” kicks things back to the 2000s, playing like a truncated version of “Jesus of Suburbia” or “Homecoming,” American Idiot’s shape-shifting centerpieces. “99 Revolutions,” on the other hand, is more indicative of the overall sound of the trilogy, an upbeat pop-rocker that sounds destined to be played over the opening or closing credits of teen comedies for the next decade. Meanwhile “The Forgotten” closes out the record with a sappy bit of piano-laced balladry, its Twilight soundtrack roots masking the fact that it’s a dead-ringer for some of 21st Century Breakdown's most dramatic moments. While the song doesn't have the climactic force of the band's best closers ("Whatsername" from Idiot, or "Macy's Day Parade" from Warning), it's a fitting conclusion for both the album and for the weird, disjointed trilogy that it's a part of.

Just like its predecessors, ¡Tré! is neither flawless nor game-changing. These songs very much thrive on their hooks, featuring mostly naval-gazing lyrical content that leaves no real impression on its own. Then again, Green Day has hardly ever been known as a force of great poetry, relying more on all the fun, energy, and attitude that they can generate with only three or four chords, and that surge of melodic sensibility is very alive and well here. ¡Tré! isn’t quite a great record: it’s not going to define a generation of scene kids like Dookie did, nor will it take over the radio waves and invade all public consciousness like American Idiot. (And don’t expect to see the album’s narrative, whatever the hell that is, played out in a Broadway musical). But the true strength of ¡Tré! is found in the way it redeems a trilogy that many had written off after its first two installments, and for me at least, that's enough to serve as a reminder that Green Day can still make music worth caring about.