36: The Exploding Hearts // Guitar Romantic
Guitar Romantic
The Exploding Hearts
2003, Dirtnap (Bandcamp)
It’s a very stupid thing to believe in rock ‘n’ roll, but that was my milk. Not that I was raised to think of rock as a thing one could do, per se—it existed like God, manners, and Twix bars as one of life’s generous and unambiguous positives. “Wild Thing.” “Take Me Home Tonight.” “Stay.” When she was young, my mom was radicalized by ‘70s FM radio: her high school friends gave each other nicknames from J. Geils Band songs (Wooba Gooba, Raputa the Beauta etc.) and she protested the music selections at her prom by burning disco records on the lawn outside the school. Burning music is a dumb thing to do, and there are a lot of particularly nasty reasons to hate disco that I’m sure my mom wasn’t consciously aware of, but I have to respect caring enough about a thing that you are moved to stand up for it. As I aged from a child to a teen in a weird loft bedroom with no walls to separate my place from the rest of the house, rock certainly felt important. Whenever I needed to disappear, I could always lay very still in bed with my little discman, headphones on, humming like a tuning fork.
Rock (and feel free to substitute ‘rock’ for ‘music’ or ‘art’ or ‘the sublime’) is that heavensound an error of the brain lets us experience, but also the sweaty fact of making noise. Nights alone in the garage or the bedroom or the studio. Days and nights and days and nights together in a van with other highly defective people sharing the same new-dime dream. Reliving the last show the whole next day, that fifteen minutes of power and light. I never let myself figure out how to participate in music till I was in my 30s, but I got a tiny taste of something like it grinding and touring as a poet. Making it pulls out the part of you that dreams and desires, reveals things it can take the rest of your life to come to terms with.
The Exploding Hearts are famous for two things. One is their debut, Guitar Romantic, a ‘70s pop punk revival record that converts anyone into that sound into an instant believer. I won’t appeal to logic here, but what I’m saying feels true: no matter its quality, any modern album in a bygone style will lack that inarticulable novelty and sense of discovery that pushes an album from good to great. I can’t tell you why an album that sounds 99% like Exile on Main St. doesn’t quite achieve the same effect—I only know that it doesn’t. But Guitar Romantic is the exception to that rule. It couldn’t exist without the Buzzcocks or The Undertones, but it feels just as timeless and candy-eyed and smart-stupefied by love as their best—and is probably a more satisfying front to back non-compilation LP than either of those pioneers ever cut.
The other thing The Exploding Hearts are known for is the van accident that killed three of the four touring members of the band just under four months after the release of Guitar Romantic. I think about the way I’ve felt driving out of the nighttime midwestern wastes and seeing Chicago begin to reveal itself in an orange netting of suburban lights. Of cometing over the George Washington Bridge after a gig blasting good kid, m.A.A.d. city and feeling like I had finally found my way. Of the lifting I would feel every morning at the idea of the road to another show, no matter how badly performed or attended the previous one might’ve been. I have no idea what the conversation was like between the Hearts on their way home from San Francisco, but even if they were weary and miserable, there must have been that knowledge also that they were doing it, that thing which having been done, even for a moment, sustains legends and never-weres and also-rans alike. The Exploding Hearts were the real deal, and they deserved so much more time to do that thing. But not even those who deserve it always get it.
