Jonathan Fire*Eater’s Walter Martin once interrupted a meeting with Dreamworks label brass to see about capping sales of Wolf Songs for Lambs, their major label debut, at an even half-million, lest the band grew too big, too quickly. Ambitious, but perhaps a bit premature; Wolf Songs wound up selling about 10,000 copies in the early going, a few zeros shy of the Appetite for Destruction numbers Martin was gunning for. Chutzpah isn’t everything, but it’s certainly not nothing, and what DC-to-NYC before-their-timers Jonathan Fire*Eater lacked in bankable success, they more than made up with unshakable faith in their own abilities. Through their brief, tumultuous tenure, the elegantly wasted JFE looked, acted, and frequently even sounded like heirs apparent to the big crown. They never really came close.
Yet, while traditional markers of fame and fortune may’ve eluded them, Jonathan FireEater’s influence on a generation of stall-hogging, scene-making New York rockers—some of whom did go on to the kind world-conquering fame JFE only grasped at—is incalculable. Flip through the first few chapters of Lizzy Goodman’s NYC scene tell-all Meet Me in the Bathroom, and you’ll see one bold-face name after another singing JFE’s praises, if not openly copping to stealing their moves. JonathanFire Eater were it; and then, just as suddenly, they weren’t.
For years now, Jonathan Fire*Eater have been a band more talked about than actually listened to. That’s largely been a problem of access: For nearly 20 years, just about the only record available through the usual channels was the spiny Wolf Songs for Lambs, which served as many curious Karen O fans’ first and only taste of JFE. And Wolf Songs is a stellar record, all subterranean scrum atop squealing organs and clattering drums. Now, Third Man has brought Tremble Under Boom Lights—the band’s 1996 mini-LP, released a year before Wolf Songs—back to shelves, alongside five bonus cuts and a chapbook of Stewart Lupton’s poetry. It’s not quite Marvin Berry holding the receiver up to Marty McFly, but two decades on, Tremble Under Boom Lights does manage to sound like a hiccup in the timeline: The brash young JFE didn’t just arrive in NYC fully formed, they showed up to the party five years early.
The short version of Jonathan Fire*Eater’s turgid tale goes something like this: DC boys, prep schoolers all, forge a proto-JFE called the Ignobles. The Ignobles eventually relocate to NYC, recruit bassist Tom Frank, put Stewart Lupton behind the mic, and acquire the asterisk. From there, they hustled: Meet Me in the Bathroom finds Lupton glad-handing at every gallery opening and 4 a.m. bar he could find, shamelessly trying to get the word out. Even early on, JFE had something: They were preppy with an unlikely goth edge, “talky” without digressing into polemic, wide-ranging in their musical interests but still very much rooted in oily, scuzzy rock’n’roll. Once they’d worked through the collective throat-clearing of their self-titled debut, their sound was fully in place: big blasts of Walter Martin’s dusty organ, Matt Barrick’s galvanic drumwork, Frank’s subcutaneous bass, Paul Maroon’s alternately stately and spooky guitar, and the scrawled-past-the-margins picaresques of the late Stewart Lupton.
Lupton was possessed with the kind of preternatural confidence granted to only the heavily deluded and the genuinely dazzling, and after three seconds with Tremble Under Boom Lights, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t kidding himself. He’s a man of 1,000 voices, able to jut nimbly through a dry Iggy Pop drawl, a squawking Timmy Taylor falsetto, and the Jarvis-worthy swoon that closes out “Winston Plum: Undertaker.” Mostly, though, he’s a scene-stealer, a scenery chewer: whether prattling on about yet another estranged relative or passing out in the hotel hallway after too much free record company hooch, Lupton’s never less than compelling, stuffing scene after roundabout scene with past regrets and unsteady futures.
Rollicking highlight “Give Me Daughters” imagines Lupton, years down the road, ringing up his theoretical offspring from some dingy motel. The song is more or less a tacit admission that Lupton’s not about to settle down anytime soon, and like many of his songs, it finds him sliding further and further into a kind of perpetual transience: always on the go, always looking for a new rush, always wondering what his life might’ve been had he hewed a little closer to the straight and narrow. Lupton’s prone to abstraction and red herrings, stocking the pond with characters whose purpose remains somewhat unclear. This Dylanesque combination of cracked imagery cut with bohemian drift is the jewel in Lupton’s crown, the dividing line between JFE and so many other citified mopesters, past and present. “It’s important that you know how I want all the shadows on my street to converge every time it snows and have the conversation that they really need,” he sings on the gnashing “Make It Precious,” the kind of line—and there are plenty like it here—you could spend a lifetime turning over in your head.
The tension between the wild-eyed, increasingly unpredictable Lupton and his more temperate bandmates was JFE’s ultimate undoing, but Tremble finds the two sides sparking each other to new heights. Tom Frank—along with Lupton, JFE’s only non-Walkman—brings an almost visceral heft to the low end with his near-toneless bass. Matt Barrick’s drumwork is, as with the Walkmen, the electricity in the socket: without him, the whole thing never gets off the ground. On the organ, Walter Martin favors a piercing, otherworldly sound that’s more “96 Tears” than the grandiose Rothko techtonics he favored later. They wield this rangy, malleable sound—an ever-shifting mishmash of moddish classic rock and post-punk, speckled with Motown and new romance—with all the foolish audacity of youth. These guys just went for it, and 20 years past its sell-by date, their cocktail of inexperience and gall hasn’t lost a drop of potency.
The five songs from the initial Tremble release are joined here by five additional tunes: three from 1995’s Public Hanging of a Movie Star EP, a pants-free cover of Lee Hazlewood’s “The City Never Sleeps,” and the previously unheard “In the Head.” The spry, mercurial Tremble songs, available for the first time this century, are the real draw here, but the Public Hanging songs—JFE’s first release after their forgettable debut—are where the band sorted out the sonics, pushed the vocals to the front, and came into their own. “In the Head” is thought to be their final recording, finished not long before their 1998 split; it’s tempting to hear the first murmurs of the Walkmen in its “In the New Year” ripple, but the tune belongs, as they all do, to Lupton: Adopting a decidedly Dylanesque wheeze, he inches the ambling track heavenward. By the end, organs are churning, Lupton’s howling, and the whole thing seems to collapse in on itself. Lupton seems right at home.
Influence is a strange currency: It seems valuable enough, but the exchange rate’s lousy. Jonathan FireEater were, for a moment, the hottest band in New York, which was just enough to earn them a massively lopsided deal with Dreamworks and the occasional Paul Banks namecheck. Their stormy, searching sound still looms large over the glammy inversions of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the brackish urgency of Interpol, and so many others, but for too long, that’s how most people encountered their music: indirectly. Once JFE split, Lupton disappeared for a couple years, reemerging as the Childballads and, later, the Beatin’s; Martin, Barrick, and Maroon’s Walkmen called it quits in late 2013, and Frank took a gig with Vanity Fair. Lupton passed away in 2018, a tragically early end. There’ll always be a lot of “what if?” hanging over JFE, particularly now, with no chance of a full reunion. But for all their accidents of fate, JonathanFire Eater accomplished something most bands can only dream of: not many may remember, but those who do won’t soon forget.
Buy: Rough Trade
