Day 7: "Short Bus" - Filter (1995)
Today's tale is one of feeling like a 'true music fan' (whatever that means), the struggles of being an industrial music fan in 1995, and the weird way in which music sometimes clues me in to events I'd been unaware of before.
Listen to me here
It seems unbelievable to me now that there was ever a time that we didn't have the internet. It's become such a ubiquitous part of human existence in the less than 20 years it has been a mainstream thing that when I look at this album, of lot of what it makes me think about is how scarce information was in those days.
I'd become an industrial music fan a few years before, when I was relentlessly exposed to Consolidated's "Play More Music" and Nine Inch Nails' "Broken" and "Pretty Hate Machine" by people I knew. I'd managed to find a few related artists, and had started listening to Fugazi on my own initiative, but there wasn't exactly a thriving community of goth industrial music fans in my tiny provincial home town. Without the internet to tell me where to go to find more of this stuff that I liked, I'd just end up going in circles listening to the same few records, or desperately scouring my local record store and asking "have you got any industrial music?", prompting blank expressions from everyone I questioned.
What became my lifeline was Channel 4. Now, you might not believe this, but back 20 years ago, Channel 4 was weird and edgy and interesting, rather than a dumping ground for awful reality TV and inane soap operas. It was Channel 4 that I first saw Twin Peaks on, way back in the day. I watched Simon Drake's Secret Cabaret, an amazingly weird show where I first came across people like James Randi and Frank Abagnale (the guy the film Catch Me If You Can is based on). They broadcast The Word, a weird magazine music show which gave me my first real celebrity crush (Katie Puckrik) and exposed me to a bunch of very interesting new bands in the early 90's.
But what I needed most was Raw Power. A metal focused 30 minute music show broadcast at the prestigious 1am slot on some random weekday, I'd ritualistically set the timer on our VCR to tape it on a weekly basis once a friend of mine alerted me to its existence. This was it, this was holy grail of a musical genre I had very little other way of being exposed to showing me "hey, here's 30 minutes of new shit you might like". It was on Raw Power that I saw the video for Tool's "Sober" for the first time. I heard "Fell on Black Days" for the first time on there, and was blown away by the video for "Black Hole Sun".
And one Wednesday afternoon, catching up on that week's Raw Power, I saw the video for "Hey Man, Nice Shot".
I think I probably rewound that 4 minute stretch of tape about ten times over the next few days. This was it, this was new industrial music which I liked by a band I'd never heard of. I waited impatiently for Saturday to come and raced to the store, cash clutched in my sweaty little hands.
"I'd like 'Short Bus' by Filter, do you have it?" I asked, and a quick flick through a battered stock ledger told me the answer was a definite no. I was crushed.
"I dunno, it's on this release sheet though, we could order you a copy, it will be here next week."
Never had I felt so switched on. I was ahead of the game, I was ordering stuff people hadn't even heard of before me! I felt like king shit when I turned up the following week - now, I thought, I am a true music fan.
I've listened to this album a lot over the years, but not recently. Filter's discography went in a weird direction after the first album. My copy of "Title Of Record" isn't on the shelf (but might be in my uncased CDs somewhere), but when their second album hit and was less grindy and full of angst and more weirdly trippy, it kind of retroactively doused my enthusiasm for their first album. When a friend bought their third album, "The Amalgamut", I listened to it, hated it on principal, and never really went back. That was seven years after Short Bus, and something fundamental had changed. Was it the music, or was it me? Hard to say.
Going back to it today, it's strangely like putting on an old, comfortable coat. When I've been listening to these albums for this blog, I've been trying hard to really pay attention to them, questioning what they make me think of, or how I feel about them now. After opening with "Hey Man, Nice Shot", I found myself listening to the rest of the album but naturally just focusing elsewhere, doing other things. I actually went back and restarted the album half way through when I got to the end of the CD and realised that I hadn't registered any of the last few songs.
It's still a great album, if you like industrial music. Richard Patrick has a really distinctive style on here, not as screamy or abrasive as a Trent Reznor, but still able to feel like there's something fundamentally broken about him as he sings. The first track is still the best, an undeniable appropriation of the grunge formula of "quiet slow verse/screamed heavy chorus", brought into sharp relief by its references to suicide by gunshot (though referencing the suicide of US politician Bud Dwyer rather than the recently deceased Kurt Cobain).
It wasn't until years later that I actually learned of the events which had inspired "Hey Man, Nice Shot". American politics, especially of the sensationalist kind like that, weren't really on my radar back then, but when I ended up years later looking into the song and finding the events which had inspired it, I was amazed and horrified. It illustrates, I think, one of the most amazing things about music, where it has the capacity to not just entertain, but question and inform and educate the listener willing to do more than just sing along to it in their car, but really dig into what the story was behind the songs, or albums, or bands which we have listened to for years.
