A decade ago, I loudly expounded upon Beat Happening's Spartan beauty to a pack of rabid, cynical post-hardcore friends of mine who, try as they might, could only see childish amateurism in Bret Lunsford, Calvin Johnson, and Heather Lewis's rustic childhood sing-alongs. I was a teenage devotee. When naysayers complained that Dreamy was hollow, I explained that Beat Happening didn't need a bassist because Calvin's voice was deep enough to supply endless roots. When Mel Bay graduates groaned about the primitive rock drumming and simple guitar strums, I wrote essays in the school paper about why the trio's minimalism eloquently flew in the face of cheesy rock star excess; and besides, the Olympians perfected a dark, perverse sweetness I only ever really saw in my favorite books.
In the sparest of tunes about hot chocolate boys, holding hands after sex, or eating wild cherries and french toast at cemeteries, Beat Happening's songs were dumpster-diving romantic. Live, Calvin's oddball dances and wide-eyed charisma created a dose of creepy punk-confrontation-cum-childhood-trauma and was more unnerving than the faceless dudes next door wallowing in a generic sea of uninspired tough-guy Sam Ash tropes. Subsequently, these darker, headier aspects of Beat Happening's poetry were lost to twee-pop groups like Cub, Bunnygrunt, and dozens of pixie-stix-sucking copycat dorks who misinterpreted the trio's outer-id lyricism as a call for lunchbox-toting kindergarten cuddlecore.
Though I'm no fan of Bret, Calvin, or Heather's later work, as Beat Happening they epitomized a Blake-as-teenage-punk philosophy. Their aesthetic was so pared down that it barely allowed room for a misfire from their formative bare-bones autism in the early 80s to 1992's fleshed-out grand finale, You Turn Me On. Second maybe only to Fugazi in my formative musical worldview, and ripe for a reconsideration by youngsters who perhaps only know the autumnal anthem "Indian Summer" through Luna's soporific cover, the band's entire output was collected on last year's Crashing Through-- titled after a track from 1988's Jamboree-- a retrospective seven-disc box set complete with an extensive 96-page booklet authored by fellow salad-day traveller Lois Maffeo.
Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, which was included with that box set, compiles fifteen songs recorded between 1984 and 2000, including the original version of "Nancy Sin" and the four dense, acrobatic tracks that comprised the band's 1988's split EP with Screaming Trees. Other highlights include Beat Happening's newest, but equally spare compositions: "Angel Gone" and "Zombie Limbo Time" from 2000's Angel Gone seven-inch, and the still-great "Foggy Eyes", which was first included on their self-titled 1985 debut and later covered on the 1991 Beat Happening tribute Fortune Cookie Prize by Seaweed in a version predictably raucous enough for even the most macho of naysayers.
Fifteen tracks, of course, is but a tiny blip in a lengthy oeuvre, and despite my high opinion of Beat Happening, Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, like most hodgepodge singles collections, not only ends in a preposition, but lacks narrative cohesion as though waiting for the rest of the sentence to show up and complete the thought. I'm a stalwart fan of original album sequences, especially the way songs play off one another after years of close proximity; the new placement of these tracks doesn't feel correct somehow-- it's more like the ahistorical, catch-all desktop of an MP3 fanatic than those fully realized rainy-day adventure stories for which I enjoyed Beat Happening the most.
Most kindly put, Music to Climb the Apple Tree By works as a reminder of a particularly great band, and it had me cycling obsessively through the lost corners of my record collection for my copy of Dreamy. If this is your first listen, use these tiny pop moments as the impetus for a more complete investigation of a band you should already know by heart.
