It's kind of apropos to write about Game Theory's Lolita Nation on the day after Bloomsday, because the album is kind of a pop Ulysses. If James Joyce had come of age in California at the end of the 20th century instead of Dublin at the start of the century, and all the religious and literary allusions in Ulysses were replaced by pop culture allusions to the Beatles and Star Trek and Stanley Kubrick, he would have created something like Lolita Nation.
The album is like a metastasized version of Scott Miller's version. The first track "Kenneth, What's The Frequency?" (taken from the 1986 attack on Dan Rather, with a title later borrowed by R.E.M.) begins with a mix of starts to previous Game Theory albums ("Here Comes Everybody" into "Shark Pretty" into "Here It Is Tomorrow"), and continues with cryptic references to other songs (Game Theory and others) and films and whatnot through its 74 minute span (double LP, single CD).
Songs start and stop at random moments, the end of side one ("The Waist And The Knees") segues seamlessly into the start of side two ("Nothing New"), side three consists of a series of sounds interspersed with contributions by other GT bandmembers (Gil's "Where They Have To Let You In", Donnette's "Mammoth Garden", Shelley's "Toby Ornette"), and side four has my favorite thirteen minutes of music ever ("Chardonnay", "Last Day That We're Young", and "Together Now, Very Minor").
I said before that Big Shot Chronicles was front-loaded with all the good ssong at the beginning. Lolita Nation is back-loaded, with all the great songs at the end, but the songs at the beginning are almost as great. It's as perfect an encapsulation of musical expression as there's ever been, but it's been largely unavailable for the past twenty years.
CD copies of Lolita Nation fetch upward of $50 on amazon and eBay, and even LP copies still can't be found for less than $20. I found a pristine vinyl copy a few years ago. The first thing I did was to defile it by actually playing it, and was blown away by how brilliant it sounded. My LN cd is mastered really crummily, and it was exciting to hear everything at its proper recording level. This album is crying out for a reissue, but there hasn't been one yet.
Here's a rough mix of "The Waist and the Knees", one of the touchstone tracks on Lolita Nation.
The ideal LN reissue in my mind would have an extra disc of rough mixes like this one, which lend a lot of insight into the recording process. A multidisc Lolita Nation Sessions box set would be the most awesome thing ever!
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