Left of the Dial: Grant Lee Buffalo's "Mighty Joe Moon"
In 1994, it seemed that the whole alternative music scene was dedicated to finding the next Nirvana, the next Pearl Jam. The watchword in music was “grunge.” Despite those two acts debuting in 1991, the thirst for the Next Big Thing lasted years, with countless bands being signed and soon forgotten when they weren’t the cash cow labels hoped they would be. As for the musical acts that would never have the Seattle sound, they also briefly benefited from this madness. One of these acts was the L.A.-based band Grant Lee Buffalo, signed to Slash/Reprise records, and with a 1993 debut album that left Michael Stipe of R.E.M. declaring it “the best album of the year hands down,” it seemed that Fortuna had smiled upon them. Surely this next album would be The Big One?
“Devastation at last, finally we meet.” – “Mockingbirds”
Oh, if only. With its eclectic melancholy vibe and healthy dose of electric organ interspersed throughout, Mighty Joe Moon was still not the vibe of the time. Too earnest, maybe, or maybe just too original for the day. I can’t remember how I came to own this album on cassette, but I do remember that it was haunting and magical when I listened to it. “Mockingbirds”--the closest thing this album had to a hit–was a dreamy dirge about being one’s own enemy, and the slow gentle drawl of “Honey Don’t Think” a love song that begged a lover to learn how to read their mind, GLB would never be able to compete with grunge. Mighty Joe Moon is one of those lost 90s albums that has the power to absorb you entirely. For years, I was convinced the songs were love songs (well, for the most part) until I rediscovered it recently. Mighty Joe Moon might have had love in mind for some tracks, but the rest turned out to be a commentary about America, colonization, and reckoning with different demons.
Slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Kennedy Assassination, and the legacy of wars: all of these subjects are referenced in a twangy languorous hurricane of sound, hiding the serious within the banjos and drums and guitar. I never understood that for Grant Lee Phillips–frontman of the band and the eponymous Grant Lee of the band’s name–this was his way of coping with a mad world. Beautiful songs that sounded like the setting sun as you drove West. For some of us, songs are a soundtrack to the road, to escape from whatever we are trying to run from.
“And all I wanted was a little patch of green/we were peasants and the cotton was our king.” –Demon Called Deception.
I was seventeen when this album came out, entering my final year of high school. I still had a great junker of a car absolutely plastered in stickers: SILENCE = DEATH, a collection of Goth bands. One of the things I loved to do was drive the backroads of Mauldin–a satellite suburb of Greenville–in the evenings. This cassette was the soundtrack for a couple of months as I sped through the countryside, smoking my Benson & Hedges cigarettes, wishing and hoping that there was more to the world than South Carolina. September in South Carolina meant warm days but cool nights; the shadows stretch long and purple over the fields, erasing the last of the orange sun.
Past the darkened high school, past fields that would one day become housing, searching to be saved as Grant Lee Phillips’ somber voice warbled from the cassette deck.
“Something wrong in my stars/could you look at my chart/and help me heal these scars?” – “Honey Don’t Think”
To be a teenager is to be lonely is to be a dreamer. For the entirety of my teenage years, I wanted out. I wanted to be elsewhere, where I was sure life was more exciting. I can’t remember what I thought would qualify as excitement at that age, but I knew South Carolina wasn’t it. Music was my way of traveling outside of my head; in songs, I could hoist a drink with Tom Waits in a New Orleans dive bar, or drive across the country with Grant Lee Buffalo riding shotgun. I was waiting to be found and to be loved; it was all I wanted.
These are feelings I talk about with my therapist now: the consuming grief of being abandoned by a parent and looking for that validation in others. Sometimes they were boyfriends, sometimes they were grown-ass adult men who knew that flirting was okay but resisted all my attempts for more. There is so much anger in me at 17, so much anger that I carried out for so much of my life, turning a penchant for self-destruction towards my body and my relationships. The timeline is hazy but I think this is around the time when the cutting became more frequent. I know the first time was when I was 12; admittedly it was very dramatic but I carved the initials of Ian Curtis from Joy Division into my right forearm. But once my mom panicked over that, I knew that when I did it again, I had to hide it. Oh, I was so good at hiding it. Holed up in my room with the stereo on, I used a disposable lighter to heat up razors/paperclips/thumbtacks, and Grant Lee’s voice was there for those nights.
“Never mind the words that came out of my mouth/when all I could feel was pain/the difference in the two of us/comes down to the way you rise over things I just put down.” – “Happiness”
Grant Lee Buffalo is no more; Grant Lee Phillips is still making music and is now best known as being the town troubadour in Gilmore Girls. The band never achieved the fame they deserved, but as I play Mighty Joe Moon again and again at 47 years old, I realize they would have never gotten it. Their sound is raucous and gentle, but the world only wanted one of those in their music at the time. As for me, I’ll take gentle every time.