Of Natural History

In the years which allowed or forced the creation of the Museum’s 2nd album (2002-04), both the band and its host country had “matured” into their differing expressions of a “War on Terror.” With smoking ruin in the rear-view mirror, the big green bus turned to the long road, gathering strength from the places between “places,” the vast stretches (coming from the West) of tree and stone and moving water that separate the cities.  To these far-flung cities they brought a revival meeting, exhorting the curious throng to “open their hearts” to a “lord of light” who steps from the shadows at the hinge into the next song to reveal itself as the Donkey-Headed Adversary of Humanity, opening the discussion. This welcoming pair of hymns also opens the album and catalyzes “the discussion” which follows as a debate between the Italian Futurists (‘Phthisis’), who in 1909 championed both the speed of the gleaming machine (to be “driven through the museums”) and the “hygiene of war,” and the Unabomber (‘Freedom Club’), whose anti-tech terrorism was carried out from a remote Montana hermitage to promote his manifesto, which declared that “the human race with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.” The hygiene of war returns in ‘Gunday’s Child’ and the hungry machine of capital in ‘The Creature.’ Respite from this one battle after another is offered by the album’s places between places, the peaceful ambience of field recordings made on the road by tour soundperson Olivia Oyama and Carla: crickets, cicadas, birds, frogs, highways, and the comical mutterings of more and less dangerous humans who had wandered onto the bus, in Toledo (“You know [the club owner]? Fuck him if he don’t wanna get high.”), South Carolina (“I’d rather keep my knife than have him run off with it in his back.”), and Florida’s Okeefenokee Swamp (barely audible over the amphibian din - “We got quiet time here after 10 o’clock… They’re just prayin’ for rain.”) The last side of ‘Natural History’ eases into one of the bands most gradual songs - ‘Babydoctor’ - an outpouring of impossible gratitude and solar epiphany, experienced (and mostly written) during a single day of encounters - with Jalal Namjool, a former baby doctor of greatly reduced vocabulary, 3 madmen, and the dentist’s drill. And of course, in any museum of significant historical scope, the last word must belong to that most tenacious of elders - the Cockroach, here derided as a “loathsome crawling thing” by the deluded singer with his spray, but we all know who gets the last laugh and who can truly proclaim, “Your problems are not mine.” As with the first album, there was a changing of the drum-guard in the 11th hour, with the fateful arrival of Matthais Bossi. The artful grace of Frank Grau’s departure is there in his album liner-photo - wearing the donkey head. For a relentless touring season of ’03 the whole band processed to the stage wearing various animal-head masks for the opening hymn, but only Frank wore his for the entire show, enduring great hardship. After the last show he announced his stepping down (naturally to pursue a career in professional sports-gambling and working at the Haight’s anarchist bookshop), but noted that the transition would be smoothed by the fact that the audience hadn’t actually seen his face all year. Just who is that donkey-headed adversary of humanity anyway?  Matthais, on the other hand, had first stepped onto the bus as the drummer of Skeleton Key, a NY band sharing part of the tour with SGM. They suffered a non-fatal crash, totaling their van, and they with their salvaged gear were picked up, stitches and all, at the Chiriaco Summit rest area in the California desert, and finished the journey to the east on the big green bus. If the rest wasn’t history then, it is now. Matthias entered into the verbal spirit of things with aplomb, and helped to compose a single of sorts for the record - ‘Phthisis,’ which alone was produced at an incredible recording-compound in the Hollywood hills by Scott Humphrey, adding overdubs on a guitar owned by Motley Crue. The wild terraces of lush overgrowth which rose steeply behind the walled compound offered a perfect counterpoint to the seething city below, and an ideal place between places for the slow and dizzying contemplation of natural history.