Gone Daddy Gone

Jason Lytle, Grandaddy’s master craftsman. Photo courtesy V2 Records.

On my mental list of life’s perfect moments, some items are smarter than others. A dumb-but-fun one happened four summers ago, on a rocket ride with a friend from Red Deer to Vancouver in a rented sports car. We were halfway through British Columbia and stopped for gas in Kamloops, when the sun fell under the mountains. An hour later, zooming south on the Coquihalla Highway, we wondered if the road had been closed. There was no one in sight.

A low moon cut a circle of white in the gloaming. When I killed the headlights (stupid, don’t try it at home), the lane markers glowed bright against the blacktop. On the stereo, volume twisted to the sky, was the soaring space-pop of Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump (2000). It’s a lush, undulating album, with a big rock crescendo — Broken Household Appliance National Forest — stuck near the middle. (Click here and scroll to Grandaddy to hear that and 49 more of their songs.)

The moonlight felt just right. Soon we noticed a sign marking the Coquihalla’s highest elevation: Surrey Lake Summit, 1,444 metres. We met it as BHANF found its peak: a lo-fi, android-punk, earth-quaking revel.

Slump’s last four songs are a long denouement. Jason Lytle, the band’s lyricist-composer-producer-savant, sings them fine and mellow. It starts with Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)  (“You said I’d wake up dead drunk / Alone in the park / I called you a liar / But how right you were”) and Miner at the Dial-a-View (“My home, my friends and you / I watched them fade, but what can I do?”). Electronic chirps, birdcalls and brushes of wind buffet the music. An instrumental track — E. Knievel Interlude (The Perils of Keeping it Real) — adds crackling fire.

Courtesy V2 Records

Then, the coup de grâce. In So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky, Lytle repeats a lone stanza in dulcet tones. I relit the headlights as he began. “So you’ll aim toward the sky, and you’ll rise / High today, fly away / Far away, far from pain...” Yessssss. The car roared down to sea level. We hopped out in Vancouver and hit the streets with time to spare before last call.

The memory feels bittersweet now, because Grandaddy announced its breakup in January. The band hung up a 13-year career that has become too common on the contemporary musical landscape: gifted, adventurous act toils in near obscurity while safe, plastic peers hog the sales charts, video channels and magazine covers. Pick any genre and the margins of stardom are teeming with should-be-giants like these.

Grandaddy hailed from the home of American Graffiti, Modesto, Calif. (slogan: “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health”). Lytle (vocals-guitar-keyboard), Kevin Garcia (bass) and Aaron Burtch (drums) began as a trio in 1992. They self-financed two early albums, Prepare to Bawl (’92) and Complex Party Come Along Theories (’94), which were hardly heard beyond their hometown. In 1995, they added Jim Fairchild (more guitar) and Tim Dryden (more keyboard) to their ranks.

Under the Western Freeway (1997) was Grandaddy’s first LP with label support, from the tiny outfit Will Records. The group sounded most like Pavement (1989-1999), another double-plus-fine California band that fell apart before achieving the mega-renown that their music deserved. For The Sophtware Slump and its humdrum follow-up, Sumday (2003), Grandaddy surfed the same sonic turf as outré-rock favourites Radiohead and the Flaming Lips. The music fretted about feeling alone in a detached, high-tech world. A country tinge (shades of California’s Bakersfield Sound) always played at the edges of its oeuvre.

Lytle et al eschewed major labels (too much hassle, too little liberty) and concert monopolists (Ticketmaster, Clear Channel). In the late ’90s, the group signed with V2 Records, Richard Branson’s boutique label for indie darlings, and stayed there for the rest of its run. None of its singles became smash hits; there are no Grammy awards on anyone’s mantles. In 2002, the band had a great song (A.M. 180) featured in a good zombie movie (28 Days Later). Last year, Honda used Nature Anthem in a hybrid car commercial. Otherwise, Grandaddy was merely one of the best bands that the modern mainstream ignored. It was a semi-star of the underground — but so are umpteen other bands that haven’t yet and probably never will shine in the limelight (the music’s too different, the performers too shy, etc.).

“It was inevitable,” Lytle told NME after the split. Late last year, there’d been a band meeting in Modesto to talk about their future. It didn’t go well; the breakup followed. “On one hand our stubbornness has paid off, but on the other hand refusing to buy into the way things are traditionally supposed to be done has made things worse for us.... The realistic part is it hasn’t proved to be a huge money-making venture for a lot of guys in the band.”

Courtesy V2 Records

That’s a shame, because Grandaddy is exiting on a powerful high. Before breaking up, the group had already recorded its third (and now final) LP for V2, Just Like the Fambly Cat. It arrived in retail stores last week, and ranks among the most excellent new music released so far this year. Sumday underwhelmed because it felt vacant, like there was nothing left to say or play after The Sophtware Slump. That feeling carried through to Excerpts from the Diary of Todd Zilla (2005), an EP that seemed like a collection of cast-off B-sides.

Fambly Cat, though, lifts the band back to the peaks of its past. Lytle has a voice that would not survive two rounds of American Idol — it’s high and thin, and he whispers or screams as often as he sings — but it can also convey five emotions in as many syllables. He reveals them all on Summer... It’s Gone, the first of a handful of Fambly songs (Rear View Mirror, The Animal World, Elevate Myself, Campershell Dreams) to suggest that Grandaddy had more to offer the world than it decided to hear. The project is at least as accomplished as At War With the Mystics, the new Flaming Lips record that is getting much more attention from the middle of the road.

On the surface, Fambly Cat is a concept album about a cat that runs from its family home (“I’ll never return to Shangri-La,” Lytle repeats on the final song, singing as the titular feline). With Grandaddy already gone, though, it feels more like a lament for the major-league career that never was. “Things were stable yesterday / But now they’re blown away,” he sings on This Is How It Always Starts. Too bad that’s also how it ends.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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