I’ve instituted a personal tradition for the onset of daylight saving time each year. When I am released from the office the following Monday, with the sun shining miraculously in the sky at 5 PM, I celebrate by cranking up the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” in my headphones, and running most of the way from the Garment District to Grand Central Terminal. Despite the freezing cold – it’s always cold in New York in March – the early sunlight is a glimpse of the finish line, and for me, an injection of straight euphoria. Gregg Alexander’s anthem about mustering strength and love in the face of the capitalist machine pairs with the occasion like a glass of champagne. I don’t know why this is, but I do have fond memories of the song being in heavy rotation as a child. I was ten in 1998, the age when my awareness of music was just beginning to stretch beyond the boundaries of incidental exposure.
It’s two decades later, and we’re at the tail end of another shitty New York winter (though it’s been less shitty than most, so I shouldn’t bitch). I have another week to go before my daylight saving ritual. I’m grinding through the last of the frozen doldrums with another short-lived nineties band, School of Fish. Unlike the New Radicals, School of Fish’s lone hit features nowhere in my rose-tinted childhood recollection – their single “Three Strange Days” was released in March of 1991, and it took me until October of last year to investigate the album which contained it. If the two songs share a common feature, it is that the mood and subject matter have aged unusually well for a couple of one-off guitar bops from the alternative era.
It is my lot in life to fall hopelessly in love with the comprehensive output of bands whose name recognition is bound up in a single three-and-a-half-minute smash. Fastball, Primitive Radio Gods, Harvey Danger, Fountains of Wayne, School of Fish… the list goes on. I have accepted my fate with grace and good humor, except in those cases where the band in question is broken up, or otherwise not actively touring, or subject to some kind of personal or industry-related tragedy. School of Fish ticks all the boxes. After one promising album, and a sophomore effort that failed to generate comparable success, the band broke up and its founding pair went their separate ways. Michael Ward, lead guitarist and songwriter, maintains a career in music and has been a member of both The Wallflowers and Gogol Bordello. Josh Clayton-Felt, guitarist/vocalist and also songwriter, pursued a respectable solo career until he was diagnosed in December of 1999 with choriocarcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. He died on January 19, 2000. He was 32.
Looking at his photograph, I am struck by a feeling of loss that is… cavernous. I never knew him, obviously. I have listened to two School of Fish records and a handful of his estate’s posthumous releases. I have adored everything I have heard, and so I get stuck on the idea of all the songs we’ll never hear, the talent which was stolen by sickness and an early death. I wonder what he would look like at 52, if he would be the kind of artist I might catch on club tours at downtown hole-in-the-walls, smiling and undaunted by the aging, thinning crowds at rock ‘n’ roll gigs in 2020. Maybe, like Gregg Alexander, he would have eventually stepped out from under the stage lights, and opted instead to ghostwrite for the household names.
Maybe he might have contemplated a School of Fish reunion tour in 2021, to mark the 30th anniversary of the band’s eponymous album.
These are selfish fantasies, I realize, because as usual I am hung up on the image of a young man with a guitar, and this is a young man who was also someone’s son. No parent should ever lose a child. He was a brother, a boyfriend, and a beloved friend. I wish I knew what he was like beyond the projections of my imagination, and that spending the past several months becoming deeply attached to his work did not simultaneously feel like the evaporation of a dream.
I want to change the way the world affects me, he sings during the intro above, some of my favorite lyrics to ever open an album. I want to dance in the face of all that could be. It’s the thesis of the record, and our transition into the aforementioned “Three Strange Days,” which condenses the psychedelic musings into what could be a scene plucked from the real world:
For three strange days, I had no obligations. My mind was a blur. I did not know what to do.
When I hear the song, it brings to mind an unstructured long weekend from the previous summer. Having been temporarily unmoored from the autopilot grind of commute/work, commute/sleep, I was left with the feeling of being similarly detached from reality itself. As I wandered the Manhattan sidewalks, guided only by my physical senses and immediate impulses, the whole of my existence seemed absurd, and the city around me an elaborate fabrication. No, I was not on any drugs.
School of Fish is a meditation on the inherent strangeness of being in the world, a soundtrack to highlight the universal moments of disconnect we all experience in modern society. It offers no solution to the confusion, but I am touched by its humility, its embrace of whimsy. Clayton-Felt conveys resignation with a smiling solemnity, enough to lend even the simplest observations an air of profundity: Sometimes I find what I need, he tells us in “Speechless,” and sometimes I don’t find anything. Ain’t that the truth.
It is a testament to the strength of the songwriting that I am more or less unbothered by the album’s only real shortcoming, a stale and pitiful programmed rhythm section. This is a record for guitar people, ultimately, and thankfully I could easily lose myself in Ward’s rich tones and hypnotic maneuvering, all of the sharp edges coated in a fuzzy daydream glaze. “King Of The Dollar” is “Satisfaction” – literally, at one point – filtered through crystalline jangle; “Talk Like Strangers” a lazy prayer to the gods of distortion. One of the album’s most beautiful moments, in fact, comes courtesy of an acoustic, in the “Norwegian Wood”-like intimations of “Fell.”
They save the best for last, though, with the heart-stopping “Euphoria,” and it is possible that the best instrument on display is Clayton-Felt’s voice, which so perfectly encapsulates the breaking point at which misery finally gives way to defiant joy. Lately, with its patient promise of eventual triumph, it is the song that has been comforting me through the cold.
Human Cannonball, the group’s 1993 follow up, leaned away from the sixties-skirting pop embellishments of their debut and into a heavier kind of groove. Personally, I have no problem with the second album’s post-grunge affectations, and there are some intensely rewarding high points: “Take Me Anywhere” is irresistible, head-banging fun, and “Fountain” is a striking, rough-cut gem on par with anything that preceded it. There is an actual drummer and an actual bassist on every song (thank god), and they play hard and heavy as if to compensate for their original glaring absence. I find the whole thing terrifically enjoyable, but it was a pivot that landed with a thud, and in 1993, it may not have offered enough to distinguish itself in a hyper-saturated market of tunefully edgy guitar bands.
What’s really missing, though, is whimsy, that magical element which suffuses the whole of School of Fish and makes it so unexpected, off-kilter, and totally riveting.
Josh Clayton-Felt, the world is less magical without you in it. I wish you were still with us to share your wisdom, your honest and empathetic songwriting, and the lives of your family members and friends. I feel your presence in the day’s small but poignant interruptions, in the occasionally paradoxical relief that comes from noticing the strangeness all around you, and because of your music I walk through the remainder of this winter with a newfound serenity. I only wish I had discovered it sooner.
-Bux
