The Scott Miller story begins with his first recorded band Alternate Learning (aka ALRN). Scott formed the band in high school with drummer Jozef Becker and guitarist Scott Gallawa. Some other band names they considered, according to Becker, were "Thin White Rope" and "Death Cab for Cutie" (!).
The picture above (taken by one of them) shows the billing for Alternate Learning's first gig at China Wagon in Sacramento (a Chinese restaurant that doubled as a punk rock club). Alternate Learning's debut record was a 7" EP called ALRN released in 1979. It had four songs, three by Scott Miller and one by Scott Gallawa, and a series of colorful inserts.
The less said about Gallawa's song "Gumby's In A Coma" the better (although in this age of Google Alerts, I'll state for the record that it's "okay"), but Scott M's three contributions showed him to be the talent in the group. The second song on side one ("What's The Matter?") was a slice of angry adolescent punk rebellion he wrote a couple of years before ALRN, but the other two ("Green Card" and "When She's Alone") show a pop songcraft beyond his years. "When She's Alone" sounds quite a bit like Big Star, which is interesting because Scott Miller had evidently never heard any Big Star when he wrote it.
The ALRN EP (and their later album) was issued in an extremely limited edition of 1000 copies, and it's been out of print for most of the last thirty years. The ALRN EP and Painted Windows LP have never been reissued, and Scott Miller once told me that he'd reissue them "over my dead body". For the longest time, I never even knew anyone who'd heard these albums, but after I joined the internet, I finally found a good Samaritan who owned these records and made tapes for me (and anyone else on the loud-fans list who wanted to hear them). Not really essential listening, but still worthwhile.
Update: The cover shows "ALRN", but I've always wrote the title as "ARLN". Maybe it's one of those "Fables of the Reconstruction of the Fables" things?
2 comments:
I'm not sure I'd ever seen the artwork for this one before...but boy, that artwork is utterly Scott Miller! Didn't he use those shapes again elsewhere...or are they just very reminiscent of the cover to IBC?
Oh - and on the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't already know, the idea to call the band "Death Cab for Cutie" doesn't make Scott Miller psychic: the common source is the Bonzo Dog Band song of that title. (The song sounds nothing like the work of either band.)
The first time I saw Death Cab For Cutie (at Bumbershoot in Seattle, circa 1999), I was expecting them to be some wacky Bonzos type band, and was surprised to discover that they were a hyper-sensitive emo/indie band. "They don't sound like their name!"
Post a Comment