Careening Through the Universe
On the music of Third Eye Blind
The soaking pool of the Kennedy School hotel is a tiled rectangle of warm water, three feet deep, shaded by Jurassic ferns. You can take a beer in with you. It’s quite pleasant, unless a young kid kicks you in the face as they struggle gleefully past. This is not as uncommon an occurrence as one might hope. I should know; I take my young kids there all the time, and they invariably end up stomping the toes of elderly women.
Anyway, my wife and I are there the other day, sans kids. We’re lolling in the water, enjoying our grapefruit ales. Just over my wife’s shoulder, a young couple who look to be in their early twenties are chatting happily, giving off first date vibes. Everyone is quietly murmuring, enjoying the heat and the calm. Then, during a momentary lull in our own conversation, I hear the young man say something to the young woman. A helpless smile lights my face.
My wife raises her eyebrows. “What is it?”
I shake my head, still grinning.
“What?” she persists. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘I’ve just discovered this new band. They’re really amazing. They’re called Third Eye Blind.’ ”
She quietly chuckles. I take a sip of my beer, and let out a wistful sigh.
I first encountered Third Eye Blind’s self-titled debut album at a sleepover in the summer of 1997. I note the year with a sense of wonder; the twenty-two-year old kid in the soaking pool was not even alive in 1997. That someone could just now be encountering the music of a band I myself have been listening to for nearly thirty years, though an obvious mathematical possibility, is shocking to me, a poignant marker of my own progress down the river of time. I didn’t feel depressed, though, that day in the pool. Quite the contrary. Listening to the enthusiasm in the young man’s voice, I felt a surge of vicarious joy.
In the summer of ‘97 I was embarking on a great journey, having spent the preceding six months gathering speed during my final descent down the launch ramp of eighth grade. Now, having finally hurtled into the air, I was streaking toward the awe-inspiring superstructure of high school peeking over the horizon. It was a fertile time in my life in general, and my life as a music lover specifically. I had been introduced to punk rock a few years earlier, at the exact moment I entered puberty, and was by now in possession of a respectable library of punk albums, a cheap electric guitar, a second-hand amp, a questionable haircut, and an Acutane prescription. It was dawn in the garden of my manhood, and I was naked and unashamed. Metaphorically.
The friend who had brought that first 3EB album to the sleepover mentioned loving it, but I don’t recall listening to it that night, only viewing the garish cover art. I had heard the singles Jumper and Semi-Charmed Life on the radio, but would have struggled to discuss the band publicly, given how committed I was to the task of pruning my identity as a punk whose tastes extended to music far heavier and faster than that which any drive time DJ would dare spin. This was the era when grunge and alternative vied for dominance in the mainstream; the time of Matchbox Twenty, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Sugar Ray; of Weezer, Oasis, and Soundgarden; of Pearl Jam, Barenaked Ladies, Blues Traveler, and Hootie & the Blowfish.
Despite my efforts to pass muster as Punk Enough in certain circles, the truth is that I still held private opinions about all these bands. I couldn’t stand Matchbox or Hootie, yet secretly delighted in the plastic nu-funk of Sugar Ray. I was enthralled by Weezer, but had zero interest in the whiny ballads and fraternal squabbling of Oasis. I was mesmerized by the Pumpkins’ goth pop, with its startling contrasts — one minute their pallid, gender-bending frontman, Billy Corgan, was screaming about a bullet with butterfly wings, the next softly crooning an acoustic cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” — and in a kind of crowning achievement of ambivalence, I managed to mostly despise the Red Hot Chili Peppers, while being unable to deny the spare power of a single like “Otherside.” It was from among these dubious peers that Third Eye Blind emerged from their chrysalis, as if fully formed, soon to flutter into the dappled meadow of my consciousness.
Fast forward a couple years. Christmas Day, 1999. The white-hot intensity of my initial love for punk rock had already begun to cool, though it would linger indefinitely, like a cache of depleted uranium whose half-life ensures its effects will never be fully eradicated, no matter how deeply buried. I had by now become a full-fledged Third Eye Blind fan, having been won over by the scouring thunderstorm of their first record’s closing handful of tracks, though I remained largely closeted about the fact, fearing the castigation of the punk cognoscenti. The band’s sophomore album, Blue, had just come out, and I had been gifted a copy. Adjusting the foam ear pads of my Sony Walkman, I settled in to listen to with high expectations.
Things began promisingly. I took in the opening explosion of “Anything,” attempted to pierce the allusory veils shrouding “Wounded,” and basked in the bouncy hooks of “10 Days Late” and “Never Let You Go.” Then, at some point, Stephan Jenkins veered into that flagrant falsetto of which he is prone to make illiberal use, and my confidence wobbled. As the album progressed, I encountered further provocations, in the form of spacey, drugged-out vocals, bizarre lyrics, and Jenkins’ infamously cheesy attempts at rapping. But then, for every obnoxious, trilling flute, every nauseatingly auto-tuned verse, every half-baked non sequitur of a lyric, I encountered some stomping new riff, spirited chorus belted out by children, or any of a dozen other audacious moves that, while they could have easily caused the whole thing to crash and burn, somehow merged with the more questionable bits to form an ecstatic whole.
Over the ensuing decades, Blue, along with the band’s third album, Out of the Vein, would expand the beachhead the first record had established, until Third Eye Blind had been etched, slowly but surely, into the granite of my own personal Mt. Rushmore. They would ultimately outlast the leading lights of various genres I was making concurrent forays into, from hardcore, to indie rock, to other, more outré styles. I rarely listen to Lightning Bolt, or Arcade Fire, or Coalesce anymore, but nary a month goes by when I don’t put on a Third Eye Blind record. As to how, exactly, this happened — why the band have persisted in my affections — the answer is not complicated; it’s the songs.
Third Eye Blind’s founder and lead singer, Stephan Jenkins, projects a quintessential rock star vibe, combining a coy self-assurance in his abilities, artistic and sexual, with a brazen optimism that everybody likes having him around. There is a cottage industry of rumor regarding the myriad ways he has supposedly stabbed former bandmates in the back, firing and hiring musicians in a style that implies he views his band as part art project, part limited liability corporation. He has been known to wear a top hat onstage, seems to own more than one pair of leather pants, and generally comes across as the kind of dude you would run into at a frat party, taking a rip on a bong filled with Red Bull.
When it comes to rock and roll, a fan’s loyalties often start and end with the singer, but here we find an exception to that rule, because Jenkins, or at least his public persona, was never all that interesting to me. He was so ridiculous, so obviously pompous, that I immediately pushed his antics to the side, focusing instead on the one thing I did find compelling about him, which was his songs.
They are very good, these songs. In fact, the previously-referenced conclusion to Third Eye Blind’s eponymous debut just may comprise the greatest single four-song progression in the history of 20th century rock and roll. That is the type of unprovable claim I imagine Jenkins would love; an argumentative, overheated, let-it-all-hang-out assertion custom-made for an aging rocker fondly recalling what it was like to be 17 years old.
The four-song run in question begins with “I Want You,” a moody, shuffling number that opens with a spare combination of sandpapery shaker and rimshot snare. The percussion is soon joined by echoing guitars, organ, and a kind of whooshing sound effect that evokes the image of a Greek god blazoned on the edge of a map, blowing a ship across the sea with his breath. The layering of many instruments is a hallmark of the band’s sound, as is this particular number’s lyrical content, which features memories of a broken relationship. If we take Jenkins’ lyrics to be autobiographical even some of the time — always a dangerous game to play, yet nearly impossible to resist — then he seems to have had at least 329 different girlfriends over the years.
Towards the end of the song, Jenkins comes dangerously close to the rapping for which he is often (fairly) derided, but this is one of the rare times when it somehow works. He’s starting to faux-rap, and then his own breathy background vocals float in over his shoulder, and he’s telling whoever it is he’s singing to, “you do, you do, you do, you do, you do, you do, you do make me want you,” and I’m bobbing my head, uncontrollably, as the organ honks its little refrain.
More organ to begin “The Background,” accompanied this time by a baroque guitar figure. The band are still playing at a slow tempo, in which they will persist for the entirety of the quartet. This is where they camp out when operating at the height of their powers, humming along at something just above the pace of a ballad, a temporal zone in which their gigantic, drenched guitar chords can ring out with an echoing grandeur foreclosed at greater speeds. Things are moving forward pleasantly, until, three minutes into the song, there is a sudden, flagrant intrusion of distorted guitar, the instrument elbowing its way through the door with the unexpected force of Kramer bowling into Jerry’s apartment, except here it is welcome, a fuse that lights a firework which soars into the dark night of this previously tame tune, illuminating the entire horizon for one hot moment before sputtering out, leaving nothing in its wake but a ripple of feedback and the quiet wash of the outro.
“Motorcycle Drive By” starts with Jenkins singing over finger-picked acoustic guitar. There is something about bands that are primarily electrified dipping into the acoustic; you’re taken by surprise, then taken by surprise again when the band drops in with full force, as they do here. It’s a trick they’ve just utilized in “The Background,” yet somehow it doesn’t feel gimmicky.
One of Jenkins’ hallmarks is his tendency to marry infectious pop arrangements with dark lyrics. The contrast can be arresting, but sometimes he goes too far and a sense of the exploitative emerges, as when he cheerfully invokes the joys of doing methamphetamine, or secretly watching a naked woman shower. At his best, though, his honesty and sensuousness merge to conjure a sense of undistilled longing.
Visions of you on a motorcycle drive by.
The cigarette ash flies in your eyes, and you don’t mind.
You smile, and say, the world, it doesn’t fit with you.
I don’t believe you, you’re so serene.
Careening through the universe, your axis on a tilt.
You’re guiltless and free.
I hope you take a piece of me with you.
This is my favorite Third Eye Blind song. There is some magic in the way its propulsive engine, which carries through its multiple distinct movements, and its elegiac lyricism, culminating in the image of the narrator paddling out into a cleansing ocean swell, combine to imbue it with that inscrutable, hyper-efficient power all great pop songs possess.
The album ends with “God of Wine.” I have just called the preceding track my favorite by this band, so you might fairly assume the coda involves an inevitable come-down, but the booming drums and cavernous guitars of “God” are so majestic, its slow-burning invocation of a choice that cannot be taken back so tastefully tragic, that, against all odds, it is not weakened by comparison.
Jenkins strikes me as a tragic, cautionary figure; a man who has never quite grown up, and whose chief desire is that he be allowed to stay on tour forever. Yet his music, as exemplified in these four beautiful songs, carries a fire which burns in spite of his failings, real or perceived. He may seem a pitiable jester, but he is also the conduit for that irrepressible lust for life which fools, holy or otherwise, are capable of pointing us toward.