The Search for Cherry Red (TFS #1)
Jonathan Fire*Eater
[These Fucking Songs is a new series I’m starting as part of Reckless Chants; I plan to publish at least one installment a month, or (hopefully) more. Each installment will be about music I have loved for a long time. Some will be about one specific song, others about an album, and still others—such as this one—will be about a band or artist’s entire discography.]
Sometime in late 1997, hanging out with a girl I was sort-of dating (oh, my teen years and their vast array of complex almost- and partial- romances), I mentioned to her that I was going to try and find a way to get in touch with Jonathan Fire*Eater and interview them for my fanzine. “They’ll be the most obscure band you’ve ever mentioned in your zine,” she said, only half-joking. And she wasn’t wrong. Despite them having just released an album—Wolf Songs for Lambs—on a major label, whereas most of the other bands I’d interviewed or reviewed either put out their own records or were on indie labels, hardly anyone I knew had ever heard of them. Maybe if I’d lived on the east coast I would’ve found more fellow fans, but in the Midwest, where I lived, they were relatively unknown. Which bummed me out a bit, and was part of the reason I wanted to interview them—when I loved a band as much as I loved JF*E, I wanted to tell everyone about them. On the other hand, their relative obscurity may have been part of the appeal for me. I was into punk and indie music, mostly, and was deep in my era of ‘my musical tastes are superior to everyone else’s’ pretension; so a band that felt like my secret, a band of whom I could say ‘I knew about them before you did?’ Well, yeah, that made me feel kinda cool.
I can’t even remember where I first heard about Jonathan Fire*Eater. I know that it was sometime earlier in 1997, and most likely it was in some music mag or other, as I read those often, always on the lookout for a tidbit about some as-yet-unknown to me band I could get obsessed with. Wherever I it was I first heard about JF*E, I was intrigued enough to go seek out their music. The way the writer described them had something to do with it, I’m sure. But I’m also sure there was a photograph of the band accompanying the text, and seeing one Stewart Lupton: Frontman in said photo definitely had something to do with it.
In any case, I immediately ventured online to see if I could find out more about them or hear clips of any of their music. I found some kind of website (not sure, now, whether it was fan-made or official), and downloaded all the available .wav clips—one or two from their 1996 EP Tremble Under Boom Lights, and a few from their forthcoming LP, When the Curtain Calls for You. Which took forever, because this was Ye Olde late-’90s internet, and it took hours to download a single .wav file, and you had to pray that no one would pick up the phone while you were downloading one or you’d have to start all over again. And they weren’t even full songs! They were 20-30 second clips! But it was worth it, because those clips were enough to show me I was right to be intrigued, and the next time I was in a city with a decent record shop (maybe Milwaukee, maybe Chicago), I picked up a copy of Tremble Under Boom Lights.
God, that EP. It is, to me, near-perfect. It’s so garagey, raw and beautiful, with poetic, narrative lyrics. There’s a definite post-punk Kid Congo Powers-era Bad Seeds vibe, but it also harks back to older, bluesier, Rolling Stones-ier rock’n’roll. Starts out with “The Search for Cherry Red” (from the lyrics of which come the EP’s title); there’s that drone of the organ, the angular yank of the guitar, boom-shatter drums, mesmeric noise, and here comes Stewart Lupton’s voice: by turns breathy-raspy, then so down-low-deep you don’t so much hear it as feel it in your guts. Next: “Make it Precious.” Sad, and sexy—I’m crawlin’ through your window to watch you sleep. After that: “Give Me Daughters,” and the excellent screech of the organ, and the wild guitar, and then it’s a creep stomp hipsway jam. “The Beautician:” Sing a little song with a dirty mouth. Yes, please. And finally, to cap it all off, “Winston Plum: Undertaker,” a gorgeous dirge sung from the point of view of the titular undertaker.
A few months later, their first (and what would turn out to be their only) full-length album, Wolf Songs for Lambs, was released. It’s not as perfect as Tremble, but it’s still great. Full of dirty garage poetry; and Tom Frank’s bass work is more prominent in the mix than it was on their earlier stuff. And it’s got some perfect songs. “When the Curtain Calls for You:” hypnotic guitar, rhythmic rock’n’roll drum beat, spooky ghost-organ. “No Love Like That:” a sweet yet rollicking vignette of a song; dig the yowled wooohs! around the 2:00 mark. “Everybody Plays the Mime” begins with just drums, then the bass comes in, then the haunted pedal-steel guitar; and are you locked into a projection booth / that shows the films of your troubled youth? Aren’t we all? “These Little Monkeys” is a wall of noise that starts off quiet, so so quiet, before working itself into a full-on cacophony; also, there’s the moment when Stewart sings about “passing trains” and the guitar (that pedal steel, again) manages to sound like a passing train. And “A Night in the Nursery:” a sinuous spell the likes of which Siouxsie and the Banshees (think: “Spellbound”) or Sonic Youth (think: “Halloween”) would approve of; the music hypnotizing, Stewart intoning come hither, come hither to me.
After Wolf Songs, I spent another six months or so being low-key obsessed with JF*E. (Low-key not in the intensity of my obsession, but rather because I had numerous other bands I was equally obsessed with.) I trawled magazines for any mention of them. (I recall one where they said: “We’re not goths or anything. I mean, we wear white and coffee-colored clothes sometimes.” Much like the lyrics to another track on Wolf Songs, “The Shape of Things That Never Came:” wearing our tea and our coffee-colored clothes.) I also trawled magazines, for, yes, photos of Mr. Lupton, because I was not immune to the sallow-skinned, carved-cheekbone heroin chic look he had (though I did not yet know heroin was the cause of his look and was a year+ away from the onset of my own foray into opiates); also he had this wild Byronic vibe to him that I was also not immune to (and I wasn’t shocked when, years later, I found out that Lord Byron was one of his biggest poetic influences). I listened to Tremble and Wolf Songs on repeat and tracked down their pre-Tremble recordings; I daydreamed about interviewing them for my own zine and about the day I’d get to see them live.
And then, in July 1998, they played their very last show, and that was that. I never got to interview them or see them live, and they never released any more music.
The story of Jonathan Fire*Eater is a fairly common story in the world of rock’n’roll, but it’s no less tragic for that. They formed, garnered a small but rabid cult following, were poised to become the Next Big Thing…and then they broke up, largely due to problems within the band. Mostly, from what I’ve read, due to Stewart Lupton’s struggles with drug addiction. And then Paul Maroon, Peter Martin, and Matt Barrick of JF*E went on to form The Walkmen with Hamilton Leithauser and Peter Bauer—and The Walkmen got way, way bigger than Jonathan Fire*Eater ever did.
And all these years later, it seems Jonathan Fire*Eater are just as obscure as they were back then. They certainly had an outsize influence on other musicians, considering the brief time they were together. Interpol and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, amongst others, have cited them as an influence, and The Kills covered “The Search for Cherry Red” as a B-side to their single “Pull A U.” (I think, of course, of that Brian Eno quote about The Velvet Underground: “The first…album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”) But as far as your average music-listener… It seems like people only know of them in the context of “the band that some members of The Walkmen were in before The Walkmen.”
Before I began writing this, I was searching around on Tumblr for any mentions of JF*E, and I saw a couple (penned by Walkmen fans) saying something along the lines of: “I’m finally listening to Jonathan Fire*Eater, and I just don’t get what the big deal is.” Which, honestly, is what I would say about The Walkmen, if asked. Oh sure, I owned Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone, and I, like everyone of a certain age group and level of hipsterism, related heavily to “We’ve Been Had.” But other than that? To quote Stewart Lupton, from an interview he did with The Quietus in 2007: “…their music interests me about as much as the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s as bland as the New Jersey Turnpike.” Okay, okay, maybe I wouldn’t go that far, but…
The Walkmen sound too clean in comparison to Jonathan Fire*Eater. The music is over-produced; the vocals are too pretty. And they don’t have Stewart’s lyrics, or his presence. It’s the tragedy of rock’n’roll, again. He was too volatile to be in a successful band, but his volatility was, in part, what made them so dynamic. But that’s not really fair, either. What made them dynamic was their moment, their style, their sound; the combination of the particular talents and personalities of Stewart Lupton, Tom Frank, Paul Maroon, Matt Barrick, and Walter Martin. Nothing any of the members did post-JF*E was as interesting. (The Childballads and The Beatin’s, Lupton’s post-JF*E bands, are worth a listen—but they’re no JF*E.) I wish they’d done more. I’m glad I was one of the lucky few to hear them, way back when.
Further listening:
A kind soul made a YouTube playlist of JF*E’s entire discography.
Here’s a video of them live at The Globe in Milwaukee in November 1996. (If only I’d known of them at that point, I could have been at that show!)
There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story that the early World/Inferno Friendship Society song “Glamour Ghouls” is about JF*E. Despite it not being a flattering portrait, I like to pretend it definitely is about them, just because then it’s two eras of my musical tastes colliding.
Further reading:
This interview with Stewart Lupton from Please Kill Me, circa 2015.
These heartfelt remembrances of Stewart Lupton by Tom Frank and Walter Martin. (Sadly, Stewart died in May 2018, at the age of 43.)
This other remembrance of Lupton (and JF*E as a whole), from Dangerous Minds.
Etc.
The next installment of These Fucking Songs is already 3/4 of the way written, so hopefully I’ll have it out to you sometime this month. (It’s about an Ani DiFranco song. Not telling you which one, though.)
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