By J.R. Jones
I knew the song well–it was the most popular cut from Destination Failure–but I’d always heard it as another of Josh’s slightly overwrought romantic reveries: “This world is freezing cold, I long for you to hold me in your arms / This world is burning and I’m waiting for your hand to lead me home.” Now, stripped to bare bones, it had become a prayer: “This world is frightening, I see lightning in the sky, I hear the wind howl / Please help me to be strong, I know it won’t be long till I’m with you / I know that you love me / Oh, I know you love me.”
As part of the program Josh had to attend AA meetings, an experience that forced him to think about God for the first time. “It’s part of the 12 steps to admit that a power greater than yourself can help you,” he explains. “But they tend to speak in very general terms, and when they say God, always in italics afterwards it’s ‘as you understand him.’ There was some praying involved, but nothing to do with Jesus. Everything that I knew about Christianity I was getting from television and movies–which does not paint a pretty picture! I was convinced that Christianity was just a big scam to sucker weak-minded people out of their money.”
Josh quickly took the lead as songwriter, and Matt never tried to catch up with him: Josh’s tunes were really good and there were plenty of them. He’d been at it for a while already, making two-track demos by playing the drums into one boombox, patching it into a second, and overdubbing guitar and vocals. He soon tired of the joke songs he and Matt had written for their first show and began coming up with wired, sardonic pop heavily inspired by their new hero Elvis Costello. In “Sandra” he was a crazed fan stalking Sandra Bernhard, and in “Brand New Hairstyle” he pined, “I need a brand new outlook / To face a brand new day / I need a brand new hairstyle / In a big way.”
For a year and a half after his high school graduation, Josh lived with his parents, but they finally booted him because he was staying up all night and sleeping until two in the afternoon. So he moved in with the Felumlees, who loved Josh and Matt and extended the Popes an open invitation to rehearse in their basement. Josh signed on for a while as lead guitarist with Apocalypse Hoboken, a Glen Ellyn band, and through them met Phil Bonnet, a recording engineer at Solid Sound in Hoffman Estates. Bonnet played guitar with a group of prog-rock pranksters called Cheer-Accident, and he’d been recording bands since the early 80s. Josh recommended him to Matt and Mike when they were ready to record The Smoking Popes Break Up, and the band took to him instantly.
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The Popes began to gear up for another album on Johann’s Face. But this one would be different, not a two-bit punk record but a well-made pop album, something good enough to get played on the radio. They would go back to Bonnet, and instead of racing through the songs in two days they’d take their time and record it a couple songs at a go, scheduling a session whenever they’d saved enough money from shows. “Need You Around,” recorded in December 1993, crystallized the mix of punk vigor and pop smarts that characterized the band. Josh had come up with the languid melody in the car one day; with its moody lyrics and his luxuriant vibrato, it sounded like Old Blue Eyes at the end of a particularly dark night. But when he brought it in for rehearsal, the band backed it up with a thrashing, double-time rhythm, creating a sound with no real precedent–a kind of lounge punk. The tension between the two elements was what made the Popes smoke.
