by John Vanderslice
"Last night something pretty bad happened,
we lost a friend,
all shocked and broken,
shot down exploded.
Jeddy 3 is what we first called him
then it was Jed
but Jed systems’ dead,
therefore so’s Jed."
"Jed the Humaniod"
And so I drive the absurdly beautiful streets of San Francisco, worried about Jeddy 3, dreaming of the Broken Household Appliance National Forest, of swimming in the Crystal Lake, and I want to go home and do drugs. I don’t even drink alcohol, but I’ve been thinking about revisiting the drugs of my youth, or at the very least smoking the pot that’s been growing stale in my dresser drawer. Grandaddy’s lush, expansive and very sad new record, Sophtware Slump, is goading me on, pushing me, begging me to join it’s very wondrous, apocalyptic world.
This record is loosely conceptual, in the same sense that Neutral Milk Hotel’s masterpiece In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is. In Aeroplane, the story of Anne Frank and the incestuous obsessions of the narrator hover over the entire disc; Sophtware is inhabited by a crew that seems to be mourning the loss of a fellow pilot, Jeddy 3."Found your house and I saw your car, but I’ve no idea where you are," we hear in Miner at the Dial-a-View. All we have left of Jed are radar readings, lost traces, and scraps of paper. Jed has two poems on Grandaddy records, "Jeddy 3’s Poem," on the amazing EP Signal To Snow Ratio, and "Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" on Sophtware. Here communication is made through handcrank transmitters, radar screens, monitors, the Dial-a-View, never face to face. "Close the door behind you, so the world won’t find you," Jed tells us, "drink while things remind you." Jed is "assembled in the kitchen" by his ground crew, "made of this and made out of that, whatever was at hand." We are never sure if Jed, our "2000 man," is human or a flight computer, a sentimental drunk who leaves us his poetry, or an Artificial Intelligence pilot who "fizzles and pops" when he doesn’t get enough attention. "I think of this sad extinction, "says Jason Lytle, Grandaddy’s resident genius, when I ask about Jeddy 3, "this modest, unassuming, regular guy getting swallowed up by this incredible technological age we’re coming into."
"I sit on the toaster like a rock
no need to worry about a shock
all of the microwaves are dead
just like the salamander said
the refrigerator house the frogs
the conduit is the hollow logs"
"Broken Household Appliance National Forest"
In the Grandaddy landscape, nature and discarded human detritus are married in a world that has become a landfill. In the "Broken Household Appliance National Forest," "mud and metal make it good." Fake trees, Duraflames, and coffee carts line the Crystal Lake. But Grandaddy’s world isn’t an eco-nightmare, more of a surrealist juxtaposition a la Ballard’s (out of print!) Unlimited Dream Company. That book centered on another downed pilot, unaware (as we are) of his own death, wandering around a world where man morphs into natural forms. Very Grandaddy.
>>Recording in Little Portugal:
Grandaddy records in Jason’s two-bedroom house, which is in a rural area on the outskirts of Modesto. His bed is in the living room, the bedrooms are crammed with recording equipment and instruments, and the kitchen hosts a piano and organ. His Portuguese landlord has no idea what he’s up to. "If a song needs to be mulled over," says Lytle, "there’s always some vegetables to be steamed while you work things out."
>>Postscript: The Fake Album
Just for laughs, Grandaddy recorded a purposefully horrible record and submitted it to their label, V2. They would get drunk out at Jason’s house and record these "obscenely bad songs," according to Jim Fairchild, Grandaddy’s guitarist. "There’s one that’s damn near a Too Live Crew song, others had these pauncy English accents," remembers Fairchild. V2, of course, was sweating in their boots listening to this crappy cassette follow-up to Under the Western Freeway. Pranksters after my own heart.