College rock is an archaic term at this point in the taxonomy of music—it became subsumed by alternative rock right around the time R.E.M. first went platinum—but even as a relic of the 1980s, the genre retains a distinct identity. Sophisticated, precocious, cerebral, and self-aware enough to playfully poke at its own pretensions, college rock played a key role in the evolution of '70s post-punk into '90s alternative—a path that Michael Azerrad only touches on in his parallel, punk-heavy chronicle of the '80s American rock underground, Our Band Could Be Your Life. Above all else, college rock was an archly clever form of guitar pop, the kind that found a home on college radio stations in the '80s. It had no qualms about fostering wider ambitions, though; it didn’t need to directly address the college experience, let alone be played by college students. Yet the entire, decade-long lifespan of college rock can be neatly bookended by two songs penned by college-spawned bands, and that even reference specific schools by name. The later of the two is “U-Mass”, released in 1991 by Pixies; the earlier one is “Bad Year at UCLA”, released in 1982 by Game Theory.
Game Theory may be the quintessence of '80s college rock, but the band is synonymous with Scott Miller. The singer-songwriter—who died in 2013 at the age of 53 and was the group’s only constant member throughout its eight-year existence—formed the band in 1982 as a reassembly of his prior outfit, Alternate Learning. Blaze of Glory, Game Theory’s debut album, came out the same year. In the wake of Miller’s death, it’s being given a deluxe, expanded reissue, an extravagant treatment for a record that was recorded in Miller’s old bedroom at his parents’ house in Sacramento not long after he finished his studies at nearby UC Davis. Alternate Learning was his college band, and their two releases—1979’s ALRN EP and 1981 Painted Windows full-length—created a template not only for Game Theory, but for much of college rock to follow. The name Alternate Learning even sounds like the missing link between alternative rock and college rock.
Four selections from ALRN and Painted Windows appear among the fifteen bonus tracks on the Blaze of Glory reissue, and they’re a potential-rich premonition of what would come; Painted Windows’ “Another Wasted Afternoon” is baroque on a budget, a wannabe Left Banke or Zombies daydream strained through post-punk starkness and denuded of ornamentation—unless you count frantic polyrhythmic drumming and ice-rink organ fills as frilliness. And ALRN’s “What’s the Matter” is as close to punk rock as Miller ever came, a distorted rush of sunny melody that feels like a beach-party Buzzcocks.
Alternate Learning’s cocky innocence holds up wonderfully, but Game Theory served as Miller’s graduate program in pop songcraft. While at UC Davis, he’d bunked with a fellow aspiring songwriter, Steve Wynn, who moved to Los Angeles and formed the Dream Syndicate in 1981. But where the Dream Syndicate (and the Paisley Underground movement that sprouted up around it) updated West Coast psychedelia for a post-punk world, Game Theory rolled itself out on new-wave training wheels. As opposed to Alternate Learning, who deserve to be ranked just below the Feelies in the jittery-nerd pantheon of the American post-punk era, Game Theory branch into Devo-esque, back-’n’-forth jerkin’ on “White Blues”; that engagement with the new wave zeitgeist circa 1982 goes deeper on “The Young Drug”, whose keyboard-clipped angularity and furtive Beatles worship echoes what XTC was up to at the time. “It’s not 1962”, Miller yelps on “The Young Drug”, and it might as well be a psychedelic manifesto for the skinny-tie set.
While never as kaleidoscopic as his Paisley Underground counterparts, Miller spikes Blaze of Glory with one of his most flagrantly trippy compositions, “Stupid Heart”, a venom-dripping, flange-smeared odyssey of romantic dystopia. Nothing screams “my college years” like petulantly bitter love songs, and Miller goes on obliging. On “All I Want Is Everything”—as peppy as ALRN’s “What’s the Matter”, only minus the pseudo-punk fuzz—Miller sings, “Don’t ask me why/ I get so happy” as he spits the ironies and paradoxes of attraction into Cupid’s teeth.
“Sleeping Through Heaven” is Blaze of Glory’s keenest glimpse into Miller’s inner workings. He named Game Theory after the mathematical analysis of conflict, decision, and logical strategies—Miller himself wound up working in computer engineering—and the lyrics to “Sleeping Through Heaven” lean heavily toward that titular theme. “I will play the deck no matter how much it’s stacked,” he sings with wispy, soaring melancholy, before delivering an anthem-worthy slogan: “I want to go bang on every door/ And say, ‘Wake up, you’re sleeping through heaven.’” There’s an underlying lushness to its otherwise Spartan, synth-braced structure— a flowering around the edges that recalls contemporaries like the Psychedelic Furs, although Miller himself more closely resembles Robyn Hitchcock in all his Soft Boys glory. He goes on to add, “Maybe I’m too dumb to stay depressed”. Miller’s lyrics are as subtle, self-negating, and quixotically triumphant as his flippantly complex chords and melodies. Post-collegiate ennui might be the most privileged state of existential angst imaginable, but Miller milks that First World problem for all the pathos it’s worth. As Franklin Bruno writes in “Blaze of GI—: Scott Miller: An Appreciation” from The Pitchfork Review #2, “‘Sleeping Through Heaven’ knows what it wants to say, and enough about how it needs to be shaped to put the point across.” More than anything, that emerging confidence in the face of the gaping chasm of the future is what makes Blaze of Glory so exhilarating.
But it’s “Bad Year at UCLA” that emblemizes Blaze of Glory. The song is iterated three times on this reissue: there's the album version, a charmingly rickety live version, and a thirty-second acoustic reprise that’s more of a crosshatched sketch. Combined, they flesh out the full range of Miller’s vision at Game Theory’s outset: from singer/songwriter idleness to twitchy new-wave populism, “Bad Year at UCLA” combines Miller’s various ambitions into a single, vivid document. “You’re wondering if pain so beautiful/ Should earn a happy ending,” he bleats, his voice boyish and vaporous.
Game Theory are often pegged as power pop, but that genre, as great as it can be, is comparatively junior high to Miller’s post-grad ruminations on purpose, destiny, and the vicissitudes of lust. Blaze of Glory’s title sardonically hints at some kind of fatalism, as if the album might have been Miller’s first and last real stab at immortality. Illustrating his own contradictory nature, he packaged some of the original copies of the LP in a trash bag. Instead of being a desperate one-shot, though, Blaze of Glory wound up as an inspired beginning.
