Definitely Not the Things That I'm Seeing
Definitely Not the Things That I'm Seeing
Manchester Orchestra's 'The Valley of Vision' and the time I saw the "American Idiot" Broadway musical with my parents
As I’m writing this, I just finished watching the livestream event for Manchester Orchestra’s new album, “The Valley of Vision.”
I remember the first time I heard Manchester Orchestra. It was 2010. My friends and I were driving from Temple University to visit our friends at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. It’s about a 5 hour drive or so. We made the drive in early fall, when Pennsylvania is its prettiest. My friend Noah put on “I’ve Got Friends,” and I was hooked immediately.
(Damn, I used the word “friend” in that paragraph like it was an old Tigers Jaw song.)
“Mean Everything to Nothing,” the album “I’ve Got Friends” is on, is, to me, a masterpiece. A perfect 10 album in my opinion and a perfect 5.2 in Pitchfork’s opinion. Andy Hull and Robert McDowell’s wobbly guitar layers could rival the best of 2000s indie rock like Bloc Party and The Strokes. I don’t think they get quite enough credit as being some of the best craftsmen of that era. Their guitar work has its own personality, and those two can put instrumental puzzle pieces together with the best of them. There’s a reason the now-Oscar-nominated directing duo The Daniels tapped those two to score a movie using only their voices. They complement each other so well. And also they’re brothers-in-law, so that’s fun.
After “Mean Everything to Nothing” in 2009, things only got harder and more aggressive for Manchester Orchestra. Bigger by means of volume and scale. “Simple Math” had songs like “Mighty” and “Pale Black Eye” that amplified the aggression from the harder moments on “Mean Everything” just a little bit. They used string sections and children’s choirs for cinematic swells. And then they did “COPE,” which just hit so fucking hard in its bluntness.
Immediately. Every song. Represented perfectly by the block lettered, black-and-white album cover, Hull said in an interview at the time that the band basically painted with red, black and white to make these songs. As someone who sees letters and numbers as colors in his head, this made immediate sense to me.
On the tour for that album, every song became a “COPE” song. “I’ve Got Friends” became even harsher. Louder. Lower.
It was incredible.
And then they toned it all back. “A Black Mile to the Surface” saw them playing with a lot more than just the bare bones, battering ram style, taking more time to breathe and showcasing what Hull and co. could really do with space around them. They relied less on low guitar tunings and distortion and more on vocal layers and texture. It’s an album full of songs that rely on each other to show the full picture, thanks to beautiful transition work like the connection between “The Alien” and “The Sunshine.”
That trend continued on the next album, “The Million Masks of God,” which I confess I barely spent any time with. It’s a funny thing when you notice in real time when you start losing a little bit of interest in a band that you love so much. It’s sad, really. When you’re wrapped up in what you’d later realize were the halcyon days of the band, you think that it’s going to last forever. You’ll always feel this way, and it will always sound that way. But, of course it doesn’t. Artists explore other directions because that is their right. It still feels like when you start noticing a disconnect between you and an old friend, though, and not because of any singular moment. Just life moving you two in different directions.
Speaking of old friends: I talked with one of mine this morning about these new Manchester Orchestra songs. He was more enthusiastic than I was. I thought about them after listening again and realized, yeah, this is really good. Undeniably really good. Andy Hull is still a supremely gifted songwriter that he always has been. Just because it’s not “COPE” doesn’t make it any less valid.
As I watched the film accompaniment to the new songs, bereft of any “big” volume moments on purpose – Hull explained in his pre-show interview that they made it a challenge to themselves to make the anti-”COPE,” in that they would make something big and consequential without it being loud – I appreciated it even more, and considered that the direction the band has gone in is one that I still respect and, while it would be simple to call something like a movie premier gimmicky, it could be a lot worse.
I know this because that same year I first heard Manchester Orchestra, just a few months later during winter break, I went with my parents to New York City to see the Broadway rendition of Green Day’s “American Idiot.”
Let me be perfectly clear. I love “American Idiot.” Love it. Not a hint of irony there. Pivotal moment in my life, that album. I cannot wait until next year when I can start pitching a 20-year retrospective piece to every editor whose email address I have. I’ll go to bat for that album every day of the week.
I have no shame in my love of “American Idiot,” but something feels shameful about having seen the stage adaptation. Like I’ve gone beyond some boundary. Also embarrassingly, it’s the only show I’ve ever seen on Broadway.
Mostly, when I think about going to see that show, it still feels like a fever dream almost 13 years later.
I had even seen Green Day with my parents before. Not because they didn’t trust me going to a concert alone. They just wanted to see them, too. My dad owned “Dookie” pretty much since it came out, so his fandom precedes mine, and almost precedes me as a physical entity. My parents, being people who appreciate musical theater and don’t care about the optics of paying money to see something like “American Idiot” on Broadway, decided it would be a fun thing for the family to do together while I was home from school.
So, we piled in the car and made the trip to New York City – a place that is magical in December, as evidenced by every Christmas movie that isn’t based in Chicago and/or the North Pole.
I had just gotten a digital camera, so I took it with me and walked around the streets of Midtown Manhattan before the show, taking the kind of bad photos that only a college freshman would appreciate. Here’s one of my favorites:
Wow. Here’s another for good measure.
I did get better at photography. Here’s one I actually took during a Manchester Orchestra show that I covered during the “COPE” tour:
Not great, but better.
When we got to the theater, I bought a bag of M&M’s at the concession stand. I came back to my seat and marveled to my parents that it was $4. I had never really hung out in New York that much except trips to museums when I was very young with my grandparents. I wasn’t spending my own money at the time, so I hadn’t learned just how expensive everything in New York was. Since then, my friends have moved to New York and I’ve spent much more than $4 on things there, but that bag of M&M’s always sticks with me.
So anyway, we’re all sitting in our seats, and a voice comes over the speaker to say:
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight the role of St. Jimmy will be played by … Billie Joe Armstrong.”
The place went nuts – as nuts as a Broadway show gets, at least – even though this was specifically planned. For a second I thought they were actually going to switch it back to the original actor cast in that role, who, upon looking it up on Wikipedia, was a guy named Tony Vincent. Here’s his Wikipedia photo, which looks like if you told an AI generator to make an album cover for Voldemort’s adult alternative album from 2002.
Oh, also, the guy who played the lead was the guy from “The Newsroom,” a show I also watched with my parents but will not go to bat for. He was the guy who was basically the show’s Jim Halpert character.
The thing with making a Broadway musical based on a punk rock album, especially one written by Billie Joe Armstrong, is that there’s a lot of stuff that is like … punk rock flavored but not actually punk, you know? Target T-shirt punk. The punk rock Disneyland ride. You have to appeal to a certain audience, so you have to imagine what a Broadway viewer thinks punks look like.
The costumes look like a punk rocker halloween costume, and they named a character Tunny in an attempt to create a character with, like, a cool nickname I guess?
I know who they’re playing for, but it still felt weak to me. At least the singer of the fictional band in “Green Room” was named Tiger, and they gave them starter pack punk rock T-shirts from bands like Minor Threat and Dead Kennedys.
I have written before about the way Billie Joe Armstrong has depicted punk and protest subcultures for this very blog, so I won’t rehash it.
Back to the show.
It’s a very weird thing to hear songs you love, and have heard live in spectacular fashion, sung by Broadway-trained singers. Yes, some of them were sung by the actual Billie Joe Armstrong, but everything else was firmly in this uncanny Green Day valley. There were live instruments, but they were just too perfect. The singing sounded like “Green Day Night” on American Idol.
Also, it’s inaccurate to depict the show as just “American Idiot,” since they used songs from the album’s sort of unofficial sequel, “21st Century Breakdown,” which I wish I could go to bat for but really just can’t.
When the show ended, I didn’t quite know what to think about it all. It was obviously cool to be in the same room as Billie Joe Armstrong. I did not feel moved by the show, however. The depiction of young people leaving their small town in search of adventure, the way the military chews up and spits them out, and lost love did not resonate on stage like it did on the album I guess. It was contrived. It was, to put it bluntly, supremely un-punk (which Billie Joe might argue made it more punk).
I remember so vividly what I listened to on the drive home, too. In the backseat of my dad’s car, on my iPod with a click wheel, I threw on an album that had just come out about a month prior: My Chemical Romance’s futuristic comic book come-to-life rock opera “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” for which they created new personas and a world full of color to make you forget about “The Black Parade.”
It’s funny in hindsight that I did not make any connection between the two. Not for one second did I meditate on how I was leaving what was, to some, a misguided choice for a band to milk every single drop of its big narrative album, only to listen to another big swing from a band that had just made one of the other great rock concept albums of all time, but would mostly miss the mark and (for the time being) call it quits.
I will go to bat for quite a few songs on that album, by the way.
So, as I sit here and think about the direction that Manchester Orchestra went in for “The Valley of Vision,” one much quieter and less quote-unquote epic by the way I would have defined it in the past, I think about how trying things on isn’t always a bad thing. I think about how I still have the highest respect for Andy Hull and how he’s scratched his various creative itches with dignity. I think he’s one of the greatest literal voices and creators of his genre. He handles the ideas of concept albums and narrative in albums without ever being too overt. I think I’ll listen to this album more than I might have imagined I would this morning, and maybe it will stack up against my favorite work from them. I think knowing that it’s his conclusion to the arc he started on “Black Mile…” will make me appreciate those albums more, too, even if they don’t have that special something that grabs me as hard as “Mean Everything…” did in 2010.
Hull can create characters and storylines without verbose exposition or over-description. I already compared his guitar work to others, but I think in this regard he belongs in the same conversation as other narrative lyric geniuses like John K. Samson and Craig Finn. Most of all, the dude knows how to play with moods and tone, so a visual component feels at home with his music. It feels like it needs that extra sense, because you can practically see it in your minds eye already, at least the colors that he’s painting with. And, honestly, there are moments on “Capitol Karma” where Hull’s vocal interjections over the chorus behind him feel almost Broadway-esque. There’s especially a moment at about 2:20, where he breaks from the quiet melancholy to lift the whole thing up with very plain speak and venture on his own a little bit before rejoining the group (of his own voice) – or rather, the group re-joins him.
Maybe one day they’ll make the jump to something larger than a mini film to accompany an album. But I think, for the most part, the door for large-scale concept albums with life beyond a record has shut. But, rock n’ roll is cyclical, as probably- drunk Alex Turner once reminded us.
So, when Turnstile releases their concept album/stage show/film/skate brand collaboration, it won’t come as much of a surprise.
I think about what Green Day, my favorite band of all time, did after the Broadway run – doubling down on bigger-is-better ethos and making three albums with about an EP’s worth of decent songs, with no indication that they’ll ever make an attempt to go “Back to the Shack” as it were. And that’s fine. I don’t think they owe me or anyone anything at this point, which is why I can’t even fault them for trying this Broadway thing. “I didn’t sell out, I bought in,” and all that.
I think about the guy who played St. Jimmy the rest of the nights when Billie Joe didn’t sit in, and what he would have been like. I think about how the relationship between the main character and this bad influence/sort of alter ego Tyler Durden-type St. Jimmy played out on stage, and how it was not unlike the main characters in “The Nightman Cometh” musical. In my memory, Billie Joe Armstrong always entered the stage putting on a martial arts clinic and hissing.
And then I actually think more about the “The Nightman Cometh” episode of Always Sunny, and how the gang can’t fathom why Charlie would write a musical unless it’s to directly be “versus” someone else, how there needs to be an opponent, and who Billie Joe Armstrong was “versus” when he decided to turn “American Idiot” into a stage adaptation. If it was a direct fuck-you to someone, that’s admittedly pretty punk rock, and I might owe Billie Joe an apology for calling it un-punk earlier.
I think about how apparently Sufjan Stevens is adapting “Illinois” into a stage show, and how it will make the people who feel connected to that album feel to see it in such a way. I also think about how maybe I’ll really listen to that album for the first time.
And finally, I think of another recent stage adaptation of an artist’s musical work. Jimmy Buffett’s “Escape to Margaritaville,” which coincidentally features a main character named Tully. What’s up with that?
I’ll end this rambling post by saying that, no matter what, I will always love Green Day more than any other band, even if they make albums that I don’t like, because they made enough that I love. And I am glad that I came back around on Manchester Orchestra in a different way – not just living for the past albums and overlooking the new ones, but really trying to connect with who they are now, the same way you can’t expect your friendships to be the same as they were in middle school, because now you’re different people. And now that relationship is even richer for it.
Most of all, I will always go to bat for Jimmy Buffett, and I would absolutely love to see his musical. If any editors would like me to review it, please email me.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is The New Pornographers.