ham fisted theatrics

Fall thinks it's Winter.

This lionized Fall finds you on the street in an insufficient jacket and Weezer or The Rentals come on your iPod and you remind you that there exists such a concept as California, or somebody in your Drawing class plays a CD of mariachi music on the stereo while you sketch bottles on a table for three hours and you wish they were chips and salsa, and a dude could find himself very homesick. Really, he could.

Neko Case just sang "In California/I dream of snow" when I finished that paragraph. M&Ms, mp3s, and maladies are the things I shove in the tiny cracks between The Busy. Yesterday in class I drew my Shakespeare teacher. There's gonna be at two Drive By Truckers concerts in New York when I'm gone. That's not funny, Whoever.


Chapter Four, my darlings:

REFUGEE FROM SUCCESS: The Only Randall Coats Interview (Ever?)
By April Townes
Thumbscrew Media, August 2003

All of Randall Coats’ things are in boxes. All of his worldly possessions are in two cardboard U-Haul moving boxes by the door on the day he grants me the only known interview he’s given since the insane success of his debut project, “The Moving Furniture In The Dark EP.” All his possessions, that is, save for his cat Misty, who darts out from between his legs when he greets me at the door of his second-floor apartment just off the campus of Oregon State, from which he graduated in May with a BA in English Literature.
“I just gotta go somewhere,” he says. “It’s getting kind of nuts.” For someone whose rampant underground popularity has rested in large part on the brilliant bluntness of his lyrics, understatement seems sort of incongruous coming from his mouth. But after a few minutes in his presence, you get the feeling that he’s never hedging for modesty or effect, it’s just that for him, most things register on a different, quieter, level.
For example, if you or I had two crazed fans ninja through your bedroom window one night and take extensive pictures of your domicile, in order to recreate them in excruciating detail as part of their shrine to you, or a OSU blood bank employee set aside the bag of plasma you donated at a campus blood drive to put up for auction on Ebay (both things have happened to Randall in the past six months) we might be moved to use words stronger than “kind of nuts.” But Randall is eternally, unaffectedly mellow: none of his overzealous fans have had charges pressed against them.
“Man, I wish I could show you where they got it wrong,” Randall says, when I show him the pictures the aforementioned ninja-girls put up on their Randall Coats tribute website of their bedroom-recreation shrine. “You got here like a day too late,” he says, gesturing to the boxes in the corner.
The website, named “Wright Patterson Air Force Base,” after the second track on his ubiquitous EP, has been getting millions of hits per week since going live in June, causing its purveyors, Amy and Irene (last names not given), to have to solicit visitors for donations to pay hosting costs. The thousands they’ve received from likewise Coats-obsessed fans has been more than enough to pay the bills; the site’s most recent update showed Amy next to the used Camry she purchased with the overage, vanity plate reading “RCLUVR1.”
What does Coats think of all this? “I dunno. I read that they flew here from New Jersey on their spring break just to break into my house. How crazy is that? I guess I don’t understand being that focused. I love Elvis Costello, but I could buy a lot of concert tickets with the money I’d spend on buying a glass cutter and slipping into his bedroom at night.” Glass cutter? I ask.
“Yup,” he says, going over to the coffee table and proudly holding up a perfect circle of glass about two inches in diameter. “Like a souvenir of being famous, I guess. I’ve been using it as a coaster.”
What do Coats’ newly nomadic ways forecast for the chances of a full-length album? “Why would you record a follow-up album when you never intended to have a first album?” he asks, chuckling, once we’ve settled on his couch. He refers, of course, to the well-known (and he admits, mostly true) legend of his first and only release: his girlfriend at the time burned a CD of home demos Coats had recorded to a laptop, which she then slipped to her friend, an employee of Portland indie label We Read Sanskrit Records. She presented him with one of the initial 500-copy run for his birthday.
“I was flattered. It was neat to have a CD, but it was like this weird transmogrification of some hobby I had. That’s all I ever intended for music to be, a hobby. It’s like if somebody took your model airplane and dipped it in gold and gave it back to you. It’s cool, but…okay. Y’know?”
Not many of us have the good fortune of having our hobbies picked up by major labels and topping Billboard’s Indie charts for seven months straight (and still holding at the time of this publication,) but Coats says he doesn’t feel much obligation to his fans. “All this stuff has just sort of happened. I haven’t helped it along. I’m not a performer. These are just six songs I guess people happened to like. I probably have about eighty other songs those same people would hate,” he says, “but nobody’s going to hear them because I put a password on my laptop.”
Misty has found his way back to his lap when I start reading him press clippings and fan postings analyzing his lyrical content. I ask him to sum up his message, if only to put a stay on all the verbiage that has tailed his mysterious rise. “I dunno,” he says, a finger fondling the bottom of the cat’s chin. “I just kind of feel like people should stop apologizing.” Can he elaborate? “Sure. I was in a Creative Writing class last semester and before anybody would read anything they’d always have an excuse. Like, it was late, or I really don’t know what this is, or this sucks, flat out, or whatever. And who cares? What do you gain from apologizing? I had this Composition teacher my sophomore year, and he said, Never Apologize, Never Explain. I think those are pretty good words to live by.” The cat purrs and stretches in his lap. His roommate’s keys jangle in the door.
“And naturally, here I am, explaining. Hey Ben.”
“Hey,” says his roommate, who joins us in the living room. “This is the interview thing?”
“Yea,” Randall says, “This is April.”
“Do you have the tape?” Ben asks me.
I’m found out. The tape is the reason I’ve been granted access to Fortress Coats where so many others have been turned aside, what I promised him when I first contacted him, the bait. It’s an industrial educational film from the sixties wherein a schoolmarmish woman teaches a seemingly mentally challenged girl how to use a tampon. Besides the music thing (who knows if that’ll ever go anywhere,) Randall’s other hobby is collecting strange video.
I take the prize from my bag and hand it to Randall. He barely contains his glee. “Let it never be said that I can’t be bought off,” Randall says. “Actually, don’t say that.” He bobbles the video joyfully. “I assume it’s better stoned.”
“Watch it straight,” I say, “you won’t know the difference.” And they won’t.
“We should put it on a loop at your going away party,” says Ben.
My exit upon delivery of the tape is marked by discussion of Randall’s similarly imminent departure to parts unknown. “Haha. I can’t tell you. As flattering as this was,” he says, holding up the glass coaster again, “it’s kind of the only one I ever wanna have, you know what I mean?”
Yes we do, Randall. But I think we wish we didn’t.