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To continue the theme of finding things on youtube or the internet and general (after looking every couple of years or so), I found a youtube clip of some Jonathan Fire*Eater songs recorded at a very interesting time for them (before their 1997 Dreamworks album) so I thought I'd do a JF*E retrospective post:
The Silver Surfer (from the self-titled 1995 album)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fazI_aahgo
The Beautician (From "Tremble Under Bloomlights)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVy1pasUa2w
The Public hanging of a movie star (from the ep of that name)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pueu1xhkdSg&list=PL0-or6onDTMtWXTfU9D1cyln9uDy93GUp
JF*E (Steve Lamacq 11/7/96 (song recorded between "Tremble under Bloomlights" and "Wolf songs for lambs")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ-7g3EeJjk
The shape of things that never came (from "wolf songs for lambs")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=168KTa3wF54
I've changed hotels (from "wolf songs for lambs")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XVn7gtSckU
Tomorrow's news tonight (b-side from a "Wolf songs for Lambs" single "These little Monkeys")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUIaIwqhfk8
The Walkmen (several former JF*E members) - look out the window
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S-R9pW7750
The Walkmen - inpatient talent show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6xvmMOYBv8
Jonathan Fire*Eater - Inpatient talent show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfvVzSYh5a8
https://www.vogue.com/article/jonathan-fire-eater-interview-reissue
MUSIC
Legendary NYC Band Jonathan Fire*Eater Fell Apart. What Are Its Members Doing Now?
BY COREY SEYMOUR
January 15, 2020
Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history of the rock resurgence in New York City in the aughts, Meet Me in the Bathroom, begins with a kind of establishing shot that also serves as an elegy: While it was bands like Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, and, most prominently, The Strokes that put New York back on the map as both an incubator of raw talent and a playground for young musicians with a taste for guitars and a weakness for dangerous habits, the band that set the table for all of the above was comprised of a quintet of friends from Washington, D.C.’s St. Albans School who relocated to the Lower East Side and called themselves Jonathan Fire*Eater.
In short order, Fire*Eater released a mesmerizing, brilliant EP, 1996’s Tremble Under Boom Lights; were the subject of a furious bidding war among record labels, ultimately signing a three-record deal with David Geffen’s DreamWorks label for a rumored million dollars; released their major-label debut, Wolf Songs for Lambs, to a largely indifferent response the following year; and, with lead singer Stewart Lupton in the grips of a volatile addiction to heroin, fell apart. (Lupton, a poet in addition to a singer and frontman, struggled with addiction for years and was more recently diagnosed with mental health issues; he died in 2018.)
“It was just awful,” says keyboardist Walter Martin. “I mean, we started playing shows together when we were 13 and had always fantasized about being in a band. And then to actually achieve that—living in New York City together and on the verge of making it in a very real way—it was heartbreaking to watch Stew change, and it’s still a mystery to me of what part of that was about addiction and what part was about schizophrenia.”
What’s happened to the rest of the Fire*Eater diaspora? Martin, guitarist Paul Maroon, and drummer Matt Barrick joined up with Martin’s cousin, singer Hamilton Leithauser, to form The Walkmen, who released seven critically acclaimed records before essentially calling it a day in 2014. Since then, Maroon’s written a great column for the Onion’s A/V Club, answering questions about what it’s really like being a member of a touring rock band (more prosaically, he’s done soundtrack work for television and film); Barrick has toured with other bands and done studio work; bassist Tom Frank now writes about politics for Vanity Fair.
Leithauser, who’s released four excellent solo records (one of them with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam), has a fifth one, The Loves of Your Life, on the way shortly—and the third annual installment of his acclaimed residency at Café Carlyle kicked off just last night.
As for Martin, he’s also put out four solo albums (two of them, We’re All Young Together and My Kinda Music, are acclaimed records for children)—though his fifth, The World at Night, might just be his masterpiece. While the whole album is dedicated to Lupton, the title track in particular—inspired specifically by a collage that Lupton made that hangs over Martin’s writing desk—wrestles almost palpably with the confusion of loss and the bittersweet pangs of remembrance. Martin calls it “a kind of storybook album about fear and weakness and family and pain—with plenty of love and hope mixed in.”
I asked Martin about Lupton’s outsize influence on his life, creative or otherwise. “It’s tough to say,” Martin replied. “Stew and I met when we were 11, and he was always hugely magnetic to other people, and as a performer in Fire*Eater—but that wasn’t something I cared about in the least. We were just friends.”
The book imprint of Jack White’s Nashville label, Third Man, recently published a collection of Lupton’s poetry, The Plural Atmosphere, with a foreword by Martin and an introduction by Alison Mosshart of The Kills—and Tremble Under Boom Lights, along with Wolf Songs for Lambs (the first one indispensable, the second one optional) has been reissued by Third Man Records.
“To have Stew’s poetry, which meant the world to him, out there in the world—and to have the work we did in Fire*Eater recognized and remembered now—it’s nice,” Martin says. “It’s gratifying. I’m very proud.”
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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/the-genius-and-the-sorrow-of-stewart-lupton
IN MEMORIAM
“Locked into a Projection Booth That Shows the Films of Your Troubled Youth”: The Brilliance and the Sorrow of My Friend Stewart Lupton, Fire-Eater
Stewart had genius, but what first made the world notice him was his daring. The sorrow tied to that quality has been mentioned in obituaries, for he gave most things a try, narcotics among them. But the joy of it was what he said, sang, explored, and wrote, when others wouldn’t.
BY T.A. FRANK
JUNE 6, 2018
When I moved in with Stewart Lupton, because all five members of our band, Jonathan Fire-Eater, moved in together, he fast dubbed me “Sarge.” I was the irritable bookkeeper and cleanliness monitor, inspired by the orderliness I’d seen in a photo spread on life in a modern submarine. Reality took the form of a rock band, which tends to go through more beer bottles and ashtrays. But our own spatial constraints weren’t entirely unlike those of a naval crew: five boys sharing a tiny fifth-floor one-bedroom on the Lower East Side. We later upgraded to a two bedroom, each bedroom with bunk beds, for the more challenging sum of $950 a month ($190 from each of us), and took on our guitarist Paul Maroon’s parakeet, Kim, named after Kim Gordon and Kim Deal. But disorder remained. After leaving town for Christmas, seriously under the weather, and returning to New York, I found a gift from Stewart, a book inscribed “to the Christmas grouch, my Tiny Tom.”
Stewart died last week at the age of 43, and, each day since, I’ve woken up feeling fine for a minute before sinking into a haze. Stewart never became the superstar he hoped—and, I’ll frankly say, deserved—to be, but one line that keeps coming back to me as I read the death notices and obituaries from afar is from Pete Townshend, talking about the premature deaths among his fellow musicians. “They may be your fucking icons,” he said, “but they’re my fucking friends!” I’m no Pete Townshend, but the sentiment resonates. This past week, articles have been describing Stewart as an emblem of many things—brilliance and thwarted promise, dissipation and hype, the 1990s and New York. But for me, he was a friend. When you live and work with such intensity with a small group of people at such a young age, as we did for the five years of the band, they enter your marrow.
Stewart wrote all our song lyrics, and he was one of the only poets I’ve known. I didn’t properly appreciate that dimension of his gifts until I was much older. His clever lines would stick with you. They could be about vicissitudes of fame (“I’ve been around so long, seen my face come and go”) or disillusionment (“Are you married to an unfaithful world?”). All were rich with atmosphere. You could be flying in a scene of dissolution, where “the lights are low in the aisle of the private jet, redhead getting sick on the carpet of the cockpit.” Or you could be somewhere in the past, as the “carriage lamps flicker past the docks and the crooked masts.” I liked them even when I didn’t get them, because they rocked: “I was struck by a painful notion, on a weekend trip to the ocean, that the high, gray seas will not recognize me through all this commotion.”
In one of our songs, Stewart sang, “Are you locked into a projection booth that shows the films of your troubled youth?” I am. Probably everyone, after the death of someone dear, is locked into a projection booth, with films of the departed playing in no particular order. One film: the bartender at Max Fish on Orchard Street is laughing delightedly as I order a round of Shirley Temples for myself and Stewart and the others in the summer of 1995. It’s on the house. All of us are back in New York after a break, and Stewart, barely 20, is free, we think, of the worst grips of his drug addiction. Another film: Stewart is playing me one of his favorite songs, “Spanish Harlem Incident,” from Another Side of Bob Dylan. I’m sitting on a $20 couch. The apartment tiny and dirty and covered with old yellowing linoleum, with a shower in the kitchen, and a slight breeze is coming from the window. We’re 19 and 20, all excitement and mission. Some of the films make me thoughtful, some make me smile, and some make me weep.
Stewart had genius, but what first made the world notice him was his daring. The sorrow tied to that quality has been mentioned in obituaries, for he gave most things a try, and narcotics were among them, devouring so many hopes. (How he hated falling prey to a cliché.) But the joy of it was that he said, sang, explored, and wrote what others wouldn’t. His jokes could be un-P.C. or obscene enough to make you gasp before the tears of laughter would erupt, and he would regularly pull off stunts like, say, running stark naked through the hallways of the Hotel Nikko (now the SLS) in Beverly Hills, with one hand covering his groin and an expression of faux panic. His stage routine could vary from terseness to charm to loquacity that, sometimes, would have the rest of us staring at the floor. His inspirations regularly teetered between brilliant and hokey, which may be the best sort. One small example: he suggested that the final song on our next record (never completed) should conclude with audio of us wrapping up a meal at a quietly busy restaurant. Was that sublime or lame? Stewart never overthought such things.
Some of Stewart’s finest boldness happened during songwriting, when the five of us were in a rehearsal space trying to thrash out an idea. A galumphing stretch in one song inspired Stewart to make gorilla sounds—Ooh-ah-ah! Ooh-ah-ah!—that left all of us convulsed. They became part of the song. (The singer has “read in the paper about a big, bad gorilla” who “escaped from the city zoo.”) During the writing of another song, for which Stewart had selected a poem he’d written about hoping to have daughters, Stewart joked about how he should count the band back in, suggesting, “Now give me daughters, and make them one, two, three . . . !” Again, all of us found it hilarious. But that became part of the song, too. The pains he took with his words never caused him to lapse into rigidity or self-importance.
The band broke up in the summer of 1998, plagued by tensions that weren’t manageable when Stewart’s addiction was thrown into the mix. Just over a month later, I was back in college, disoriented, and I threw myself into Columbia University’s core curriculum and tried not to think too much about what was lost. Three of my bandmates went on to found the Walkmen. Stewart, for his part, would later mark that moment as when “my house of cards came down and the world gave me an ass-whooping that became one in a series, the anthology of kicking the shit out of Stewart Lupton.” He kept making music and he kept writing words, many of them still beautiful. I’ll always love his line about the “shadow that’s caught in the hollow of your cheekbone” and the song that goes with it. But his troubles never abated for long, and, as happens with age, doors kept closing. I was in touch with him for short stretches, out of touch for long stretches.
In Stewart’s final years, he wasn’t always easy to reach, because he almost never answered his phone, and he had begun to hear voices, cruel and spiteful ones, in his head, preying on his worst fears. It must have been torture. When we did speak, though, the old Stewart—sweet, mordant, funny, wistful—would still come through. On one of the last visits I had with him, in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, he told me that he’d learned how to talk soothingly to housemates who were in mental crisis. “Then I notice,” he added, “everyone’s talking that way to me.”
Until I received the news that Stewart was gone, I never realized how hard I’d clung to a dream that he’d one day emerge into a quiet middle age, his demons laid mostly to rest, his genius properly revealed. I’ve had to focus on these hopes in order to let go of them, as if I were prying them out of my own grip, and lay them to rest, along with my friend. It’s a consolation, if a small one, that in his rough, final years I got to reconnect with Stewart and tell him that I thought he was brilliant and that I loved him. I still think so, and I still do.
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