Game Theory / The Loud Family

The links you so generously provided to the Game Theory demos are "blocked". Any chance of a repost? [I'll knock a few of my teeth out if it'll help!]

Still not really feeling GT/LF like I did in the 80s and early 90s, but anyone who can call his own songs "young adult hurt-feeling-athons" (or "Y.A.H.F.A."'s for short) is OK by me.

The steamrolling drum lick which explodes into the choruses of "Nice When I Want Something"!!!!!!

i certainly used to know people who were massive addicts and I myself owned the majority of game theory and loud family albums at the time when I felt like I needed to own everything, but these days the only ones I really care about are Plants.... and Interbabe, both of which I think are exemplary and catchy, to the point where, I haven't actually listened to Interbabe in years, but the songs are in my head all the time.

The brilliant use of assonance in "Sodium Laureth Sulfate"! "Wave equation, beta radiation beam" is like a damn wave with the long a's in every other syllable.

Have you guys seen Scott's weekly "Music- What Happened?" series on 125 Records' Loud Family website?

from at http://www.125records.com/loudfamily/index.html

> ...a new feature as a one-year replacement for Ask Scott: you pick a year
> from the fifty-year span of 1957 to 2006, Scott selects and describes
> recordings from that year that would constitute his time-capsule CD.
> One per week in the order requested. Request a year by writing to
> scottmiller (at) 125records.com!

They also just recently posted an mp3 of Scott's cover of Chris Stamey's "Cara Lee" as a free download.

Scott Miller is out there

“I’m utterly serious about music. I just respect the buying public’s judgment that it’s not what I should do for a living.”

ouch.

I loved Music What Happened? project where he made a playlist based on each year. The dude is clearly mega smart.

Really like Loud Family (esp the first and final releases - stuff in between was hit or miss for me) - but Game Theory is in my all time fave bin - Real Nighttime, Two Steps, Lolita, etc. - Scott Miller is a genius --

I got a super clean and cheap Lolita Nation in Memphis a couple of years ago. Pretty outstanding.

Finding a blog with all the Game Theory albums just reminds me how crappy it is that Enigma's demise scuppered the availability of so many great things. (Also regretting that I didn't see this thread when the YSI links above were still available...anyone still have the files for a repost?)

Yup. Hang on a minute.

Lolita Nation demos, part 1
http://www.sendspace.com/file/c105xf

Lolita Nation demos, part 2
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9zo9qp

Big Shot Chronicles demos
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jp9vfz

"Penny, Things Won't," live in 1983
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pboi0vY-15Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTu46oCdSHg

In case anyone needs it, Alternate Learning LP appears to still be available here: http://lix.in/-2f6e04. It's really very good.

Awesome! Thanks, ctrl-s!

Seems I'm a year too late to the party. Please tell me someone still has the Game Theory Lolita Nation demos as well as The Big Shot Chronicles... Send me a message or post a link for a re-up. I'll love you forever! p.s. Have music to trade, including Alternate Learning's ALRN 7" or lots of other bands.

Yes! I would love forever anyone who (re)posted those Lolita Nation demos!

Big Shot Chronicles demos:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6wt4q8

Lolita Nation demos, part 1:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/x02fom

Lolita Nation demos, part 2:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3zjkf8

Much thanks. I'm in Scott Miller heaven right now.

Many thanks again. These is too sweet!

Uhhh... This is... damn typo!

I've been informed that Scott Miller has died. I don't have other more in depth details at the moment.

I went to the Loud Family website for confirmation and found none, but apparently he or someone else uploaded the Game Theory catalogue to Dropbox just hours ago? That's eerie.

I don't think it's public knowledge or news yet.

Holy shit (if true).

http://www.loudfamily.com/index.html

Very, very sad.

Dang, what sad news.

Well, I just feel like I've had the wind knocked out of me.

Scott Miller was one of my Gods during my late teens/early 20s. The Loud-fans mailing list was my first online music-related hangout. He was extraordinarily kind to me when I introduced myself to him at a Loud Family show despite my tongue-tied kid-meeting-his-hero incoherence. Hell, my handle here is taken from one of his songs.

If I recall correctly, he had a couple of youngish children. This is sad, shocking news.

Incredible. What horrible news.

Man, very sad. I still think Lolita Nation deserves way more nods than it gets. It was the Forever Changes of the late '80s. R.I.P.

God DAMN it.

In a few minutes I'll re-upload the Lolita Nation and Big Shot Chronicles demos to share. What's the best free/fast service nowadays? Haven't done this in a while.

Never mind -- I'm putting 'em all on Sendspace. Takes about half an hour to upload 'em all.

Big Shot Chronicles demos:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/7muauw

Lolita Nation demos, part 1:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/8a3c5g

Lolita Nation demos, part 2:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/bkmlp8

Thank you, Scott. Rest in peace.

Thanks so much for posting those. Lolita Nation was huge for me when I was 15, and I don't think I've listened to it in over 20 years. This'll be a sad revisiting.

You're very welcome. I learned of Game Theory in 1983, shortly before The Big Shot Chronicles IIRC, and was lucky enough to see them a few times and the Loud Family once. Wonderful stuff. My life, especially my 20's, would've been much poorer without them.

"Rayon Drive" is great, probably their most convincing rocker to that point. I actually find Real Nighttime less convincing as an album than Blaze of Glory, though it's a step-up in professionalism for sure (finally recording in a studio instead of Scott's bedroom!). Someone online called "Waltz the Halls Always" their best song, while for me it's quite possibly his worst original, a trebly mess.

their best song? christ that is a terrifyingly ignorant call, he was just getting started, just beginning to explore his powers

Holy shit, Wish I Could Stand Or Have. He's done it again! The undisputed master of the sub-2-minute song!

2 Steps From The Middle Ages is both a sign of songwriting greatness maturing and improving, but also a sign of a particular band that had run its course. Easy to say these things in hindsight, but you can absolutely hear what Miller was about to unleash, and why he had to shake up the people who were going to help him

There was an 89/90 Game Theory lineup with Michael Quercio, with Joe Becker as the common denominator with the first Loud Family.
According to the biography, the Lolita Nation/Two Steps lineup was wilder and fiercer onstage than you might think from the records.

Oh, the bonus tracks include some live stuff! A rollicking Baker Street on RN and a fearsome Waist + Knees on 2 Steps! So I can well believe it. But studio recordings were what he most believed in, I'd say

Is it a common sentiment among fans that Game Theory were great and Loud Family greater btw? Or is that just my own particular splitting of small differences?

The Loud Family records were recorded more professionally, with musicians of greater technical skill, but I don't really feel that Miller himself made any particular leap as a songwriter or record-maker between 1988 and 1993. I suspect, though that Game Theory accumulated more fans than Loud Family did - Lolita Nation made the top ten of the college charts, was the only Miller album reviewed in Spin (which is where I heard of them), etc. So there may be a sentimental attachment among many fans to the earlier band. I feel like his music "fit better" in the 80s context, for what that's worth, there wasn't quite the same generic niche for him to inhabit in the 90s.

Well, Lolita Nation is an event album - it sounds years ahead of its time, it's big and bold and mad - probably my overall 3rd-favourite of his and easy to see why it got more cred than anything else he did. 90s stuff pearls before critical swine

I think one mistake he might have made post-87 was to back away from making "boldly conceptual" records. I think he took particular umbrage at suggestions that his music was over-intellectualized, so he took pains to make the theoretical element of his work subtle, under the surface of a "rock record". Once someone suggested on their website that he should make a 69 Love Songs and his response was something like "great, another reason for people not to buy the records". But I think that a project like that could have helped him explore his ideas and given him a hook with potential listeners.

well i mean...he backed away from it for a while, but clearly eventually decided fuck it, they don't want straight rock records, have THIS

and out popped Interbabe Concern and Days For Days, which, fine, aren't quite 69 songs long, but which are utterly uncompromising, panoramic, totalised visions of his musical capabilities

and then he gave pure rock one last perfect bash and they didn't want that either. christ what bastards

little in music makes me more genuinely furious than the shunning of Scott Miller

I think a project like 69 Love Songs benefited from coming along at a time when the internet was well and truly established as a medium for communicating about popular music. It’s an album which makes more sense to read about than to hear random songs from out of context.

If Scott was still (perhaps correctly?) angling for college radio play during the nineties then from a certain angle it makes sense that even relatively fractured albums like Plants & Birds and Interbabe Concern try to have a bob each way.

So a song like “Such Little Nonbelievers” sounds like an appealing rock song designed for radio I guess, but then has lyrics like “ We're fighting smiling Irish / They say that we look good in uniform, and mais oui! / So good you couldn't pry the cold dead fingers / Of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders free”.

But in the end it also makes sense that that very gambit saw the music kind of fall between two stools both commercially and critically.

which is a shame, because such a synthesis makes for incredible compelling art - as I often think about Miller, he thought in terms of a classical pop canon and his tastes were very orthodox in a lot of ways, but within that he was a remarkably experimental songwriter, a tension which brings his work to the level of alternative-pop brilliance

Is it a common sentiment among fans that Game Theory were great and Loud Family greater btw? Or is that just my own particular splitting of small differences?

With an album called "Didactic Debt Collectors", guess I shouldn't be surprised this reminds me of the Loud Family:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCueXPlpBJk

Full album here: https://finalhouse.bandcamp.com/album/didactic-debt-collectors