By the time “Brick” sank (like the title) on summertime rock radio, we had been hitting it nonstop for quite a while. So we were given a month off as the business folks figured out what to do about the state of our album, which was stalled with no real radio traction. We needed a breakthrough. Touring with a baby grand wasn’t going to be sustainable, and the label wasn’t going to keep investing forever in a band who didn’t yield a significant hit.
Time off sounded miserable to me, but Robert and Darren had the right idea and took the break to get their heads together. I just didn’t know what to do with myself for a whole month. I couldn’t sit still, and I was still reeling from divorce. So, what the hell. I decided to record the pain away and made an experimental LP under the moniker “Fear of Pop” in Bloomington, Indiana. It was a sort of “techno” album, except with all organic instruments. There were no synthesizers or programming. I performed layers of repeating beats and riffs on mostly acoustic instruments, running around the studio like an insane child as Caleb chased me with mics. One song was a faux seventies’ cop-show theme, and to keep it real I had assistant engineers doing donuts in their cars around the parking lot as we recorded it. We even beat up an old truck with baseball bats and recorded that too. There were distorted pianos, backward drums, and singing through a talk box like Peter Frampton. The talk box is a tube that blows loud distorted guitar into your face so you can mouth the words and make the guitar speak. It vibrates your teeth a lot.
The raw tracks of Fear of Pop were a clusterfuck of sound that was unlistenable. But that was just the first part of the plan. The intention was to complete the composition by muting select tracks—the way you would carve a sculpture out of a log. A subtractive approach. The mixes became the performance, which was what had fascinated me about the new techno music in the nineties. This side project consumed each hour of every day for my entire month off. I didn’t believe in processing emotions and getting proper sleep. I’m still glad I made the album.
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During that month, Alan and the label decided they would rerelease “Brick” in the colder months that the song itself evokes. Polly Anthony flew to the big radio stations herself, which was unusual for a label head. That was some real and rare commitment. Sony 550 just acted like we hadn’t released the single in the first place and pressed RESTART. It worked. I’m convinced that without their persistence we would have been headed home with a dead record by the new year.
When we resumed touring in December, Alan came backstage after a show at American University, in Washington, D.C., to tell us we were invited to play Saturday Night Live. That’s the only moment I can remember thinking, Damn, I’ve actually made it. It seemed the fix was in and “Brick” would be a hit. SNL had been the pivotal TV performance for every rock act I’d loved when I was a kid. I held this in higher esteem than I would have any award, opportunity, or endorsement. This one counted.
Our SNL performance was on January 10, 1998. We were told that the music-biz machinery would kick in right after SNL, and what was already a shit-ton of airplay would quadruple. I cringed. “How many times can radio listeners stand to listen to that song?” I asked.
“A lot more,” Alan explained. “A real hit gets pummeled with airplay. Just wait!”
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After performing a ploddingly unlistenable version of “Brick” on SNL, I kicked myself all the way through the cast after-party. Not even being seated next to Samuel L. Jackson was sufficient consolation for having performed so badly on such an important show. I don’t think I said a word to anyone. I just sulked. Our crowd pleaser “One Angry Dwarf” had been cut last minute, due to a rare instance of SNL running overtime, which sucks because we killed that song in the dress rehearsal. But oh well. It seemed their Titanic movie skit went too long and we would have to make our stand on live network television with a quiet ballad on upright piano. Going out to play “Brick” cold fucked me up badly. In trying to keep the tempo slow and make sure the song was sad, we went way too far, and the song dragged. My nerves kicked in harder mid-song as I realized how bad I was sucking on this legendary show. As we hit the bridge of “Brick” I just knew we were finished for good.
Following the Saturday Night Live after-party was the traditional Saturday Night Live after-after party, which I also attended, continuing my drinking and mental self-laceration. And by sunrise, I, along with a panel of drunken entertainment strangers, had decided to fly to Australia for my next month off—I would leave that day.
“Just do it!” One of the crowd egging me on was a girl with whom I’d recently gone on a few dates. And she offered to go with me. Why not? I booked the flights as soon as I stumbled back to my hotel room at 9 A.M. I called Alan from the airport, bitching incessantly about how our career was cooked because “Brick” was the wrong song. I told him that we were “going to be like that fucking Walking in Memphis guy!” (As if being Marc Cohn, a brilliant songwriter, was some kind of death warrant.) I then called my answering machine back home to hear the long train of friends and family who called to say that they’d just seen me on SNL—and asking if I was okay. See? Cooked.
Once I got to Australia I rented a car to drive all the way around the perimeter and face some of that quiet time I’d been avoiding. The girl I’d flown down with decided to go in a different direction from me. She mainly wanted to see Ayers Rock. I drove off to do a lot of sitting on cliffs alone with a notebook to try and get my head sorted. Because something in my life wasn’t quite working. I was getting big prizes like I’d always wanted, but I was more and more miserable. How clichéd, I thought. And I’ve always hated whiners. Especially successful rock whiners. I figured clichéd solutions for clichéd problems.
I drove the coast of Australia with my Moleskine and camera, climbing around on cliffs, taking rides in hot-air balloons, even trying a bungee jump, and sleeping in cheap hotel rooms above pubs. I was a young man at sea—a good melodramatic metaphor for a lost young man. Marriage wasn’t the right anchor, and I must have written that a hundred times in my little journal. I was aware I should avoid relationships for a while. But I did contemplate the possibility of having kids. Even without a partner, maybe. I could ditch the piano tuner and hire a nanny. That might give me a real human concern outside of my work and save me from being a robot. Ah, maybe not, I thought. Hell, I don’t even have time for a dog.
Of course, old patterns die hard, and at the very end of the trip I met a yoga teacher in Adelaide by the name of Frally. After less than forty-eight hours together, I heard myself as I blurted out, “We should have kids!” She seemed to think that was pretty funny. Well, at least I hadn’t proposed. Yet. Before I returned to the U.S.A. to ride the bull up the pop charts, I heard a report on the radio of an American tourist who had to be airlifted from Ayers Rock due to heatstroke and severe sunburn. I found out later it was the girl I’d flown over with.