music – Offbeat NOVA

Offbeat Music: Peace in the Republic of Travistan

By Matthew T. Eng, Offbeat NOVA

If you are over the age of thirty, you remember going to a music store and picking up a CD to buy and bring home. For the most part, you would have very little chance to hear the entire album and assess its merit from start to finish. These were expensive purchases (remember this is the mid 1990s and CDs were still $15-20). Without buying a music review magazine like Billboard, you only had your knowledge of the songs you’ve heard to make your purchase. Even if you did have access to magazines like that, your personal taste might be different than the reviewers. It was always a coin toss.

Sometimes the coin came up on the wrong side.

For mature millennial and Gen X’ers, we’ve all been burned this way. For me, it was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I remember going to my local music store with my father and putting down my birthday money to purchase One Hot Minute in 1995. I was so excited to hear what the album had to offer beyond the first two singles, “Warped” and “My Friends.” I wasn’t stoked on the second single, but “Warped” had a funky quality that I liked compared to the band’s grunge contemporaries. I got home and listened to it. To this day, I can safely say that “Warped” is one of the only songs I liked on that album. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are a taxing band, and that album is quite taxing. That goes double for today. Even if the album was generally well received by critics, it never stuck with me. I thought the critics were wrong. It wouldn’t be the last time.

flippa-dippa-California ding dong (bass noises)

Today, reviews are instantaneous, and anyone can become a critic. In the age of the Internet, they also have the power to sway public opinion, and in some cases, ruin an artist’s career in the process. Thus was the case for Northern Virginia native Travis Morrison and his only solo album, 2004’s Travistan.

A little background first.

Born in 1972, Morrison grew up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax. Morrison went to Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke before leaving the area to go off to college at William and Mary. A promising music career filled in beyond that. It was at Lake Braddock that he met future bandmates Eric Axelson and Steve Cummings, who along with Morrison eventually became the influential dance punk band The Dismemberment Plan, or “The D-Plan,” to their throngs of sad, sweater and corduroy pant wearing emo boys — just like me!

“Hey bro, have you heard the new Mountain Goats?” (c. 2003)

As much as I enjoyed the grunge of the mid-1990s, by the time I got to the end of middle school and into high school, punk, post punk and emo/indie interested me more. The Dismemberment Plan stood at the crux of all three genres, with the syncopated drum tracks and odd vocal inflections coming together to draw on influences ranging from Gang of Four to the Talking Heads and even jazz and hip hop.

Travis Morrison famously devoted much of the lyrical content in his band’s music to Washington, D.C. Emergency & I, released in 1999, is littered with references to D.C. (For instance, “Spider in the Snow” references K Street and “The City” is entirely about Washington itself). I adored Emergency & I (and still do), with our without critical review backing my decision.

As much as he talked about D.C. in the songs he wrote for Dismemberment Plan, there certainly was no love lost for Morrison and the area south of Washington, D.C. He had this to say about Northern Virginia in a 2013 Spin interview:

Have you ever been to Virginia? Virginia is a very strange state, and it’s where we all grew up. It’s kind of the fuzzy line of the South. When I grew up, the line was right south of D.C., which is where three of us went to high school. Now that line has moved southward, so it’s somewhere north of Richmond. I know that blurry zone, that fog between the North and South, really well, because I had to go back to work there. I worked at the Huffington Post when it got bought by AOL. I found myself back deep in Virginia, and “White Collar, White Trash” came from being from Washington, but having to stay in a hotel 45 miles outside of Washington in an industrial park near the airport, near these huge, wide-open rural highways and mansions. It was horrible.
D-Day: Travis Morrison Dissects the Dismemberment Plan’s Return (Spin, October 11, 2013)

Yikes. At least we still have all the great tunes, right?

It was clear that Morrison had better things looming on the horizon and needed to branch out beyond the District. In 2004, Morrison moved to Seattle to start working on solo music after The Dismemberment played their first final show (there have been several in the years since) at Washington’s Fort Reno Park. He moved back to D.C. and recorded Travistan, a 14-song solo album that included Morrison and producer/Death Cab for Cutie member Chris Walla playing the lion’s share of instruments. I remember (ahem ahem) “downloading” the album from the comfort of my college apartment at James Madison University. I especially liked the tracks “Born in ’72” and “Get Me Off This Coin A.” The music has a similar feel to The Dismemberment Plan without sounding like a copycat. There is experimentation in songs like “Song for the Orca” where the risk/reward is rather high, but worked. The album was generally well received by most critics (Spin, Alternative Press, A.V. Club).

Most critics.

Pitchfork, the budding music review conglomerate in its early stages back in 2004, famously gave the album a coveted 0.0 rating. Travistan joined the ranks of a small but growing list of albums that the reviewers at Pitchfork felt had no merit, like Liz Phair’s self-titled 2003 album and Sonic Youth’s NYC Ghosts & Flowers. None of these albums are bad, yet each of their 0.0 ratings did much to damage the reputation of the artists. Such was the case for Travis Morrison. This stands in sharp contrast to his previous projects, which were extremely well received (Ironically, a reissue of Emergency & I received a 10.0 perfect rating years later on the same site).

In the September 2004 review of the album, now-freelance writer Chris Dahlen had very little to say that was good about Travistan. In fact, in his estimation, nothing was good. There’s very little critique here, unfortunately, and it mostly sounds like the writer had a particular bone to pick that one of his favorite bands isn’t playing anymore.

Travistan fails so bizarrely that it’s hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place; the guy who led sing-alongs to sold-out crowds can’t find the words on his own album.

He went on to say that he never heard an album that was “more angry, frustrated, and even defensive about its own weaknesses.” Ouch. Double ouch. One blogger who wrote a 10-year retrospective on the historic review referred to it as a “dick punch.” The response was fairly immediate at a time when the Internet was still in its toddler phase. As a result of the review, many of his shows were cancelled and stores didn’t stock the album. The event has come up in news stories over the years. Essentially, Morrison does not want to talk about it. And why should He continued to play music, albeit in a limited capacity, and is now enjoying life with his family in Durham, NC. As late as July of this year, he posted a single picture of a guitar and practice amp on his Instagram, ending the caption with “time to play some damn shows.” Let’s hope so. The world needs you now more than ever, T-Mo.

There have been other 0.0 reviews from Pitchfork since 2004. Jet’s 2006 album Shine On particularly comes to mind. That doesn’t mean they always stay that way. Pitchfork is famous for rolling back on their reviews of albums that have been certified classics in their own time. Their recent review of Jimmy Eat World’s perfect record Clarity is a perfect example. In that same vein, the site recently released an article re-scoring some of the albums they felt they would change if they could. “These adjustments are born out of conversations we have all the time here on staff, much like the conversations you, our dear opinionated reader, have as well,” they wrote in the introduction to the list of 19 albums that got another chance (for better or worse). Included in that list is Liz Phair’s 2003 eponymous release. The new score, a 6.0, did a modest amount of damage control on the arguably “condescending and cringe” review. I would agree with the score. In a world where indie pop is very much a thing, artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Carly Rae Jepson owe their triumphant walks to the crawling of Liz Phair.

Travistan was absent from that list. When I first saw the list, I was almost certain it was going to be on there. Unfortunately, the review has remained unchanged for nearly twenty years.

In the end, I think we put too much merit on reviews without seeing it for ourselves. I had to purchase One Hit Minute to know it sucked. If I only read reviews, I would think the album was solid, instead of listening to lyrics like “Meet me at the coffee shop/we can dance like Iggy Pop.” Ugh.

Travistan deserves a second listen, especially when others of a similar ilk received better. But maybe I should follow my advice and just give my own silent credit to Morrison’s only solo debut. It’s not a fantastic record, but compared to The Dismemberment Plan, what is?

I think there is also an allegory here for Northern Virginia. As much as we write about the cool, fun, and interesting of this area, it’s hard to get beyond a review of the area as a traffic-soaked suburban dumping zone to the nation’s capitol. There’s clearly more here, just like with Travistan.

So in all seriousness, don’t take my advice. You have to form your own opinion about both. But when I scratched beneath the surface of each of these, I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

Except for The Red Hot Chili Peppers. They still suck. You need more than just a clever name.

Real and Stagnate: Arlington’s Fast Food Music Grail

By Matthew Eng, Offbeat NOVA

I have a confession to make. It’s going to be a hard one to admit to fellow music lovers. Here it goes.

I wasn’t into Nirvana until much later in life. I know…I KNOW.

I was very young when “Smell’s Like Teen Spirit” became the Seattle earworm that congested radio and television airwaves in the early 1990s. When Nevermind was released in 1991, I was only seven years old. My experience with music up until then had been whatever my dad listened to. If you wanted to mosh to some Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor, or Jackson Browne in the early 1990s, I was your guy. I knew all the words to “Somebody’s Baby” and “Run for the Roses” long before I committed the mantra-like meanderings of the band’s biggest hit inside a poorly-ventilated high school gymnasium to memory.

My first real exposure to Nirvana came just before the end the band in 1993 for the televised Unplugged in New York concert on MTV. They played it on the station so much afterwards that I had plenty of time to sneak into our room above the garage to watch it. The entire concert blew me away. What impressed me the most, though, was their drummer, Dave Grohl. I didn’t know anything about him seeing him on stage for that televised concert. Throughout the concert, Grohl played an acoustic drum kit and sang backup vocals perfectly. He even picked up an acoustic bass for one of the songs. How could he be so good at more than one instrument? I had to know more. By the time I did my research about Grohl and the rest of the band (which in the early 90s meant combing through magazines at the local bookstore), Nirvana was over. Cobain died by suicide in April 1994 and the band broke up forever shortly after. Would I ever see my newfound musical hero again? As it turns out, I would.

*Grohl recording* Foo Fighters *(Photo by Michel Linssen/Redferns)*

Unbeknownst to me, Grohl had been secretly recording his own songs while he played drums in Nirvana. Not only was he good at drums, singing, and bass, he was a hell of a guitar player. He could do it all. Six months after Cobain’s death, Grohl booked six days in a local Seattle studio to record what would become the first Foo Fighters record. Besides a few guest appearances, he recorded every instrument and sang every word.

Foo Fighters was released on Roswell Records on Independence Day, 1995. When I heard about the release with my friends, all of which were now enamored with Grohl and grunge music culture, I begged my dad to go to the local music store to get it. He eventually acquiesced my request, and we went to Planet Music in Virginia Beach. I can remember bringing my SONY discman with me so I could listen to it immediately after ripping off the impossibly-hard-to remove shrink wrap encasing the compact disc.

Keep in mind, Foo Fighters would not be my first grunge music purchase at that point. I had several already in my collection by July 1995, including Pearl Jam’s Ten, Soundgarden’s Superunknown, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, and of course, Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York. I had never been more excited up to the point getting a record than when I did with Foo Fighters. “This is a Call,” their first single, released on the radio a few weeks before, and I was in love with the overall sound. It sounded like Nirvana, but more polished. It was punchier and faster paced. One might say it had the existential qualities of punk rock music, a genre I would also embrace less than two years later. But for 1995, it was all about this release.

The first couple of songs were fantastic off the bat. To this day, there are very few first tracks that hit harder than “This is a Call.” The next two songs, which also became singles and iconic music videos to boot, still resonate with me. It’s the middle of the album that I continue to go back to, with one song in particular. Standing up among a three song set exploring some differing styles such as eighties post-punk nostalgia (“Good Grief”) and grunge-drenched shoegaze (“Floaty”) is the two minute and forty-six second brain melt that is “Weenie Beenie.”

“Weenie Beenie” was the first song I ever heard that felt truly aggressive to me. The aggression felt good, even for a middle class kid with a b-plus average. The song starts loud and ends louder. Grohl’s characteristic scream is put on display there for the first time. The drums are open ended with plenty of hi hat filling the empty space between the drones of bass and guitar. The snare hits like hammers on your ear drums. The guitars are tuned down and turned up to a nearly uncomfortable level. In the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel, the amps “go to eleven.” It’s a sound I would identify with for the rest of my life. Just because a song sounds angry, doesn’t mean it IS about anger. Without sounding too nostalgic, the song is an emotional one. Every music lover has a genesis to their obsession. Mine happens to be “Weenie Beenie.”

My first experience with music, c. mid 1990s.

I couldn’t play a single instrument when the eponymous release came out in 1995, but it undoubtedly spurred me to pick up my first, a black and white bass guitar, for my birthday in 1996. I still own and cherish that bass to this day. Over the course of middle and high school, I made it a goal to learn all the instruments Dave Grohl could play. I can play all of them now, in varying degrees of precision (or lack thereof).

It wasn’t until I was in college at James Madison University that I found out through some old archived interview that “Weenie Beenie” was named after a northern Virginia fast food stand nearby where Grohl grew up. I had to go. But geography, my lack of vehicle, and my studies (…right) kept me from making a pilgrimage to this fast food holy grail. After a while, I simply forgot about it, even if I continued to make that album part of my rotation throughout my high school years and beyond.

It’s been twenty five years since Foo Fighters was released. What better time to FINALLY go to this iconic northern Virginia establishment than now? Once we started the Offbeat NOVA project, it was the first thing I wrote down. We had to finally go. I was not disappointed.

Weenie Beenie is located just north of the Shirlington neighborhood in Arlington. The small restaurant, offering walk-up service only (no doubt a great boon for business in the currently pandemic) sits unpretentiously in a small parking lot across from a park. The restaurant is the last remaining of a chain of restaurants created by notorious pool shark Bill Staton and his uncle Carl in 1950. According to the Arlington Public Library, Staton funded the first stand alter collecting nearly $30,000 in earnings from a profitable gambling trip in Arkansas. The namesake of the establishment became the nickname of the pool player for the rest of his life.¹

*The food tasted amazing (Angela H. Eng Photo)*

I asked Angela to put the song on as we drove down Shirlington Road. where the restaurant was located. After twenty five years, I had finally arrived.

When I looked it up, Google said it was known for “BBQ sandwiches and hot dogs.” I wasn’t feeling a hot dog on a hot summer day, so we decided on grubbing on a pair of barbecue sandwiches and fries. As we ordered, our daughter Zelda charmed all of the waiting customers around us. It was so unbearably hot and humid that day (nearly 100 degrees), that all of us waiting for our food attempted to hang out in the small amount of shade the tiny orange eaves the restaurant provided from the direct sunlight. After about fifteen minutes, we finally received our hot bag of food. I brought it back to the car and cranked the air conditioning before eating my sandwich. The first thing I noticed was the bun. Normally a soggy afterthought to barbecue sandwiches, the bun was thick and toasted, holding all of the seasoned meat and cool coleslaw together.

I took my first bite of the barbecue sandwich as Dave growled into the chorus of the song inspired by the place I was finally eating at. The meat was warm and well seasoned, with just a hint of spice to it. It also had a tang to it reminiscent of the North Carolina-vinegar style I love so much. The coleslaw was not unlike the restaurant itself, simple and unpretentious. The sandwich reminded me of a better version of a famous drive-in restaurant I grew up eating at in Norfolk, VA, Doumars. Whereas those sandwiches were small and soggy, the one dished up at Weenie Beenie was large, crispy, and filling.

Zelda and I patiently wait for our food (Angela H. Eng Photo)

But I’m not finished. I haven’t talked about the fries yet. I don’t have a picture of the fries because we ate them too fast. Weenie Beenie serves large, wedge-cut fries with an addicting seasoned coating on them. Complimented by the sugary, umami taste of ketchup, they were crispy and perfect. By the time the song was over, we were halfway through our entire meal. It was gone completely in another two minutes. We drove away from Weenie Beenie still sticky with sweat but full and content with delicious food. It’s definitely not a meal you can have all the time, but surely worth waiting nearly thirty years for. Eating there closed a very important chapter of my life, when music was new and exciting.

I highly recommend giving this local business your patronage. When you roll up on the unassuming establishment in your car, don’t forget to crank the seventh track on the first Foo Fighters album while you do.

Footnotes

Arlington Public Library, “The Weenie Beenie,” Link.