“This Feels Unaccountably Ludicrous,” Anne Eickelberg wrote in her diary in April 1995. “Torrential Flood of Ugly Losers.” “Thwarting Forever Ubiquitous Lameness.” “Tit Fuck Uranus Lengthwise.” “Turds, Farts, and Uber-Logs.” “Tour Flunkies Under Live.”
Eickelberg was proposing variations on the initials of her own unwieldy band name: Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, the kind of name that arrives as a lark and settles in as an albatross. Seven months before, they had released Strangers From the Universe, an album that opens with a punk-surrealist ode to an enviable tortoise and closes with a folk-surrealist ballad about the end of humanity as we know it. The music between may be best summarized in the fragmentary style the band itself often put to brilliant and frustrating use.
Surrealism is a part of it. Pranks. Noise. Free improvisation. More interest in structure and sweetness than you might think at first, when all you notice are the smash cuts from one strange musical scene to the next. Soundtracks to imaginary pulp films, or religious rituals. Five singers, three guitars, bass, drums, banjo, mandolin, Optigan, taking turns or all going at once. Aching beauty, childhood regression, grotesque desire. Sort of like a lullaby that carries you into a nightmare from which you awake laughing. This was Thinking Fellers Union Local 282’s idea of a commercial record.
The last of Eickelberg’s proposed alternate names had to do with the band’s particular circumstances in April 1995. They were getting ready to hit the road and open for—to be Tour Flunkies Under—Live. Yes, Live, the quartet of musical goatees then in the process of sending the magnificently dour single “Lightning Crashes” to the top of the Billboard rock charts. Humorless, messianic, bald, successful, they were everything Thinking Fellers were not. The Fellers’ accounts of the disastrous arena shows that followed are like scenes out of Heironymous Bosch: basketballs hurled from the audience whizzing past their heads, a fan in the front row who “nearly broke his middle finger off giving me the finger so hard,” a conspicuous recurrence of the word hatred. For Eickelberg, the experience was educational. “It answered a lot of questions for us, too,” she later said in an interview with Perfect Sound Forever, “because it made it so clear that there was just no fucking way that we ever gonna get bigger than we were.”
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, in this musically astounding and commercially disappointing stretch of mid-to-late life, was Eickelberg on bass; Mark Davies, Brian Hageman, and Hugh Swarts on guitars; and Jay Paget on drums. Everyone sang, contributed to songwriting, and played instruments other than their primary one. (An earlier album’s liner notes simply credit all five with “instruments.”) The four string-playing Fellers had grown up in Iowa and moved to the Bay Area in the mid-’80s, where they soon linked up with original drummer Paul Bergmann and commenced living the dream of bohemian band life, with all five members shacking up together and practicing in the same Oakland house. A detailed timeline of the band’s existence on their official website gives a window on their habits around this period: “drinking generic burgundy, listening to two big band radio stations at the same time, and writing songs.”
Rent was cheap and the music industry’s brief but intense fascination with “alternative rock” made an actual career for a band as strange as this one seem worth pursuing. They’d even opened for Nirvana once, a month after Nevermind came out. It’s hard to imagine their particular sensibility—driven by mind-meld improvisation and arcane inside jokes, so intensely collaborative as to render individual authorship nearly moot—emerging without this period of cohabitation and the economic conditions that enabled it. They must have spent so much time practicing, bouncing ideas, fucking around, hanging out.
By the time of Strangers From the Universe, they were four albums and three EPs deep and seriously considering quitting. The last two full-lengths had come out on Matador, a label whose combination of curatorial boldness and distribution muscle made it perhaps the ideal home for them, but their signing hadn’t translated to big sales or reliable crowds. Eickelberg and Hageman’s extensive tour diaries, archived on the band’s website, are wryly candid catalogs of the thrills and indignities of life on the road. “The dread that we won’t get our guarantee, that we’ll be hog-tied or kicked out,” Eickelberg wrote at one particularly empty and dispiriting show in Buffalo. “And, of course, there’s the hideous certain prospect of playing for 45 minutes to the bartender…[and] the more basic underlying anger at having to pay dues for ever & ever unto infinity.”
After touring relentlessly for several years, they took a yearlong hiatus in 1993. They’d stopped living together and moved into a new San Francisco practice space full of junkies and squatters. The situation was dire, but something about it inspired them to keep going, to take a big swing and see if they could make a real living in music after all. “We did sporadic things during that time, but we were kind of trying to take a break from each other,” Davies said of Strangers From the Universe’s gestation. “And then at the end of that period we basically said, ‘Let’s try to push it more instead of giving up.’” On your first listen to Strangers From the Universe, you might wonder: What the fuck were they thinking? This was going to be their commercial break? It’s true that the quotient of songs to noise experiments was a bit higher than on previous albums, but the songs themselves are more open-ended, further abstracting the influence of post-punk and no wave into a dream zone where anything at all might happen. And though the mix was cleaner than it had ever been, it only served to reveal Thinking Fellers’ inexorable weirdness in sparkling new detail.
They sometimes sound like they’re under the impression that they must invent a whole new way of playing together with each song they write. It’s the kind of radical naivete you might encounter in Zen Buddhism or the comedown from a powerful psychedelic trip. Who says a mandolin isn’t a percussion instrument? Why can’t a few staccato blasts of guitar noise serve as a song’s hook? Can we both play bass on this one? “February,” with its intricately gnarled figurations of banjo and furious electric guitar, might serve as the basis of an entire subgenre if anyone else could be bothered to pick up the baton, progressive punk for the acid hoedown scene. It’s not just the unusual instruments, it’s the way they all tangle and spar, at cross purposes one moment and in tandem the next. Paget plays drums like the caffeinated offspring of Can’s Jaki Liebezeit, finding deep pockets in a groove that might otherwise sound like so much clattering. Eickelberg’s bass bounces and weaves, offering elaborate countermelodies and emphatic punctuations. “Everything’s the same, it’s just more of the same,” goes the barked chorus, an account of depression that could also serve as an indictment of other bands’ complacency.
With “Guillotine,” a tapestry of chiming strings and stoned group chanting, they were nearly to the point of inventing Animal Collective, a band of Feller fanatics so devoted they once convinced their heroes to reunite for a few shows. The song’s crisscrossing arpeggios start out pleasantly dreamy but slide here and there into foreboding dissonance. There are no drums. The whole thing feels like it might float away if not for a knotty descending riff that shows up every once in a while to keep things tethered to the ground. At some point, so gradually that you hardly notice it happening, the dissonance takes over. The tether slips, childlike voices chatter insanely at the margins. Without ever losing its sense of hazy reverie, the song becomes genuinely frightening, a good high gone bad.
“Guillotine” first appeared in truncated instrumental form under the name “Firing Squad” on The Funeral Pudding, the 1994 EP that immediately preceded Strangers From the Universe. It was one of the brief and stubbornly abstract bits of improvisation that recur on every Thinking Fellers album, running amidst the more developed songs like a babbling river of the subconscious. Fans affectionately call these pieces “Feller filler.” “Bomber Pilot WWII,” the third track on Strangers, is a typical example: some lonesome guitar ambience accompanied by crunchy low-end sounds of uncertain origin, all drifting nowhere in particular for about a minute before cutting out.
Feller filler occupies a complicated place in the Thinking Fellers canon. On one hand, you could skip it all without missing much. On the other, its persistence across their catalog, even on an ostensibly listener-friendly album like this one, suggests it was a crucial element of the band’s self-conception about which they were not willing to compromise. They wrote many of their songs through collective improvisation, and they often jammed onstage; Feller filler both lays bare the inner workings of their process and serves as a gauntlet for any would-be fans who can’t hang. They were practically begging Live’s crowd to throw basketballs.
Thinking Fellers’ surreal humor and penchant for undercutting their own ambition can obscure the fact that they were top-notch musicians. They would expend enormous energy on what might seem like jokes, like a note-perfect three-guitar arrangement of the orchestral theme song to a 1950s variety show, performed live on the Strangers From the Universe tour. The individual members had little if any formal training on their instruments; you get the sense that they learned to play by playing together, honing their group sensibility over what must have been countless hours of rehearsal. Like their shaggy San Francisco forebears in the Grateful Dead, by living together and playing constantly, they all found instrumental voices that were perfect for this particular band, even if they weren’t necessarily the kind of professional-grade virtuosos who would thrive in any context they encountered. Rarely is anyone playing lead in a traditional sense—there’s simply too much going on—but if you focus on any particular instrumental part, you’ll often find a marvel of intricacy. Their songwriting is less a matter of chords and a melody than the architectural arrangement of these gleaming and misshapen riffs, laid at seemingly impossible angles of mutual support, like pillars in an Escher drawing.
The album’s crowning achievement is “Cup of Dreams,” a nearly seven-minute agglomeration of childlike synth melodies, spy-movie basslines, mechanized piano runs, and dream-pop guitar hooks that stands as one of the most beguiling creations in all of ’90s indie rock. It feels a bit like one of those Paul McCartney medley-songs that involve stitching together the best parts of six different abandoned compositions, one refrain after another. For Thinking Fellers, the equivalent of “If I ever get out of here…” is someone moaning through distortion so thick you can only make out half the words over rainfall sound effects and a keyboard coming in from the next room. And yet—it’s fucking beautiful. Beautiful in some fleeting subconscious way, like a memory of an old friend you can only keep on the surface of your mind for a half-second at a time. You can almost imagine the version of Thinking Fellers that did make it big, with legions of freaks pulling out their lighters and singing incoherently along.
There are lots of silly lyrics on Strangers From the Universe: gooey sex jokes, outlandish creatures, bathetic nosedives from the romantic to the juvenile. “My Pal the Tortoise,” the opener, might be cloyingly whimsical if its series of questions and answers about its shell-dwelling hero weren’t so funny and oddly poetic. (“What does he file at the hall of records?/A proclamation of tortoise intent.”) But even in its more antic moments, the album is often preoccupied with endings and what comes after them. In “Socket,” martial snare rolls and bee-sting guitar lines soundtrack a story about a childhood near-death experience, followed by a lifelong sense that something went irreversibly wrong in that moment of survival. “Hundreds of Years,” alternately frenzied and sedate, contrasts the petty concerns of people with the peace of trees that will long outlast us. The few intelligible lyrics on “Cup of Dreams” speak of a cleansing flood that will “drown our mouths,” “make our heads explode,” and “wash out our dirty minds.”
“The Operation” is a musically triumphant and lyrically nightmarish account of a surgery that seems to kill its patient. In keeping with the album’s prevailing tone, death is experienced not as tragedy but transcendent release. The Fellers deliver the crucial lines in drunken-chorus mode over glorious guitar grind and cartoonishly massive drum fills, the raggedness of their delivery belying the delicate polyphony of the vocal arrangement: “Graceful became my hands, they fluttered away from me/Graceful became my heart as it pumped apart from me/Graceful became my tongue, rhyme and meter running away.”
When writing Strangers From the Universe, “We weren’t thinking of going anywhere,” Hageman said. “We were thinking about ending.” Needless to say, the vision of giant clubs filled with adoring freaks didn’t come to pass. For Davies, Strangers and the tour that followed represented “a pinnacle of sorts” for the band. Not everyone seems to have felt that way at the time. “This lifestyle and this pursuit seem more and more meaningless to me,” Eickelberg wrote in her tour diary in November ’94, at the end of an entry about getting sick without health insurance. “I feel silly, being in a band and touring and hanging out in ugly, boring rock clubs (at my age.) When I look at us I think we are ridiculous sometimes.” “Half of the time on this tour I’ve thought—I’ve strongly believed—that we are fooling ourselves and shouldn't be in this business (at OUR ages),” she wrote soon after. Two months after the album came out, Thinking Fellers’ final push at making an honest living in indie rock was beginning to sputter.
The entire quixotic notion of alternative rock as a commercial prospect was sputtering, too. Kurt Cobain had died the previous April, but the rock charts were still peppered with bands that had credible ties to the underground. Within a year, Live’s Throwing Copper would become the biggest rock album in America, helping to usher in the “post-grunge” era, when the majors stopped pretending to care about ingenuity and focused instead on signing increasingly faded carbon copies of Pearl Jam. The symbolism of Thinking Fellers’ opening slot on the Live’s 1995 tour is almost too perfect: The freaks get chased offstage and the professionals take over.
Thinking Fellers toured for another year, parted with Matador, made another album, 1996’s equally dazzling I Hope It Lands, and stepped back from the band as a career pursuit. They still played the occasional show and labored sporadically for years on their 2001 swan song, whose very title, Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner's Celebrity Avalanche, is enough to signal the retreat of whatever aspirations to rock stardom they once held. It’s more elegiac than you might expect from the name: “91 Dodge Van,” titled after their old tour chariot, opens with autumnal guitars and Eickelberg sighing the lines “Looking back over our days, I know we’ve won/Sometimes it feels like that’s erased by moving on.” It also has a song called “Boob Feeler.”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s still one song on Strangers From the Universe to discuss, one final daydream before real life sets in. It’s called “Noble Experiment,” it closes the album, and it’s the only Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 song you’ll ever hear played around a campfire or performed by the sorts of indie rock stars the Fellers never became. The words were written by Davies and delivered by Eickelberg, with the other Fellers joining in harmony as the verses go by. “If the sadness of life makes you tired,” it begins, “and the failures of man make you sigh/You can look to the time soon arriving/When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day.”
