Trapping a Modest Mouse

By Shannon McAleenan

With looping guitar melodies and earnest, ethereal lyrics, Modest Mouse entered the big leagues with its most critically-acclaimed album, The Moon & Antartica, in 2000. Picky, picky Pitchfork rates it a rare 9.8, likening it to Radiohead’s OK Computer in terms of mind-blowingness and exceptional importance. Wow, pretty cool.

Even cooler: Modest Mouse heads to the Oldest City for a show at the revamped St. Augustine Amphitheater June 25. Venue manager and Café 11 brainchild Ryan Dettra brought this national act here on the heels of Modest Mouse’s double-header at Café 11 in 2004. This time, they’ll grace the big stage under the tarps with New Orleans legends Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

“It will sell out,” Dettra said. “A lot of people from Gainesville and Jacksonville have bought tickets already.”

Modest Mouse playing in St. Augustine once paved the way for their return. For those lucky enough to have attended the 2004 Café 11 shows, you’ll remember sold-out crowds and big-time hype. It was a risky move for a bigger band to come to St. Augustine, said Dettra.

“They were on the verge of hitting it big and they were still willing to stop at small clubs. In my opinion they were one of the bands that changed everything,” he said.

Founded by front man Isaac Brock in 1993, Modest Mouse has run the oft-unfinished gamut from small-town indie rockers to major-label Billboard chart-toppers. Hailing from Issaquah, Wash., Brock teamed originally with bassist Eric Judy and drummer Jeremiah Green; the trio practiced in a shed adjacent to Brock’s mother’s trailer, honing their volatile sound before recording an EP in 1994 with K Records. After signing to label Up, Modest Mouse released two albums produced by Steve Wold: This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About and Interstate 8.

In the beginning, there was no love for Modest Mouse in the Seattle grunge-rock scene. “When we started, everybody hated us,” Brock told the Sydney Morning Herald. “Going up and knowing that everybody hated what you were doing was hard. I’ve played shows where they turned the power out on me. It wasn’t what people wanted to hear.”

After being evicted from his mom’s trailer in his teens, Brock shuffled between friend’s basements and the future practice space, the shed. Like other Washington musicians of the time, Brock has well-documented struggles with drugs, homelessness, alcoholism and mental illness.

“The way I look at my childhood, it was not any rougher than what others go through,” he told he Sydney Morning Herald. “Music helps you get through life — and it became more than recreation for me.” But, unlike some other northwestern groundbreaking musicians who sought solace in their music — Kurt Cobain, Elliot Smith — Brock escaped the suicide curse.

In 1997, the band released two albums. The Fruit That Ate Itself and Lonesome Crowded West. The latter received a wealth of critical acclaim. Pitchfork announced, “When a band’s oldest member is twenty-three, the active word is usually ‘potential.’ Modest Mouse, however, have arrived.” The release also supplied the band a strong following, laying the foundation for its eventual rise to cult status. Many consider it a defining album of ‘90s indie rock. It combined the band’s usual topics of conversation — confusion, suburban decay, listless wandering — with Brock’s stream-of-consciousness lyrical styling. A little urban turntable scratching here, a little down-home fiddle there, and you have a diverse sound bound by unique lyrics.

Following the critical success of Lonesome, a major-label bidding war ensued — Modest Mouse ended it by signing with Sony’s Epic. Cue up the angry indie-fans. Now the band wouldn’t be their own little gem anymore.

“Unless you work in the music business, you really shouldn’t pay that much attention to that kind of stuff,” Brock told Mean Street magazine. “At the end of the day, it should just boil down to, do you like the f—–’ music? I don’t really give a shit about the business, whether we’re on Epic or Up.” Brock did admit it was nicer to record with the funding of a major label.

Modest Mouse released their Epic debut in 2000, The Moon & Antartica. Whether it was signing with Epic, growing up or some other unseen force, Brock and the band evolved a confidence not seen on earlier albums. It’s packed with fantastical sounds and violent, yearning lyrics exploring the nether regions, metaphysically, of the album’s title. Cult status achieved. Indie fans kept.

It took four years for Modest Mouse to follow up their major-label debut. Brock took some time off to work with his side project, Ugly Casanova, releasing Sharpen Your Teeth in 2002. After that, Modest Mouse struggled to get through recording what would become their best-received album. After firing two producers and (temporarily) losing drummer Jeremiah Green, a murderously frustrated Brock took the band to Oxford, Miss. where they tumultuously recorded Good News For People Who Love Bad News with famed blues producer Dennis Herring.

It wasn’t easy, but in light of the album’s success, Brock took a Machiavellian look at the process. “At times he was looking to push the music out of you, but at times he was just being an evil little shit,” Brock told Mean Street about Herring. “He’s a great producer. I think there’s other ways to approach it, but it didn’t hurt. I kind of like him for it now. Looking back, I’d rather have been pissed at someone who is doing a good job than all cozy and cuddly with someone doing shit work.”

The album’s first single, “Float On,” brought the band commercial success, but it was Brock’s uneasy vocals paired with the band’s left-of-center arrangements that created what Rolling Stone dubbed something “strangely catchy … a little less Pixies, a bit more Talking Heads.” It was also on Good News that Modest Mouse first recorded with now touring partners the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, who provided the “Horn Intro” to the album.

Perhaps on the strength of that release, Brock gathered some rock balls and called The Smiths’ Johnny Marr. Brock didn’t want Marr to help on their next album — he wanted him to join the band. Marr told Spin magazine that when he first found Brock at his house, they faced off in a guitar riff battle. Brock freestyled lyrics “like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Marr said.

We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, the release following Marr’s entry to the band, climbed to No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard charts. The album, in true form, is not optimistic in its outlook at the world — but it is Brock’s band, and that’s his take.

Reportedly, the band is now working on an EP of songs that didn’t make it onto the last two albums. Maybe they’ll even play a few while on tour. The Modest Mouse that plays the St. Augustine Amphitheater this June will certainly be a different band than the one that visited here in 2004. Founding member Dan Gallucci has left … but The Smiths’ Marr replaces him. The band has found continued commercial success. And Brock, notorious for his grumpiness, may be turning over a new leaf — well, at least peeking under it. As he told Mean Street, “Being an asshole is not a good idea.”