Golden Smog: Summer with the Radar Bros.

Summer is once again upon us, and I can’t think of a better soundtrack for these lazy, hazy, sun-burned days than the music of Southern California’s Radar Bros. The long-running (though currently dormant) psychedelic band led by singer-guitarist Jim Putnam conjures images of sunny, smog-veiled skies; weedy, parched earth; wide, open spaces, and cool, breezy evenings across a remarkable if not prolific output of albums, which include And the Surrounding Mountains (2002), Fallen Leaf Pages (2005), The Illustrated Garden (2010), and Eight (2013). Radar Bros. are not sunshine pop, however. Theirs is not a happy, sunshiny kind of rock and roll (more pastoral, post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd than neo-Nuggets psych). Many of their songs—particularly “Papillon,” “Rock of the Lake,” “Warm Rising Sun,” and “Lake Life”—are dreamy, surreal, and laidback—but they also have a weighed-down quality to them: a profound melancholy, a current of sadness and unease that moves beneath the glassy, rippling, tranquil surface. And it’s this aspect that makes the Radar Bros. summer sounds so evocative and affecting right now. These are days of high anxiety: coronavirus, isolation, recession, George Floyd, national unrest, White House fascism and racism, and so on. So even as we bask in the radiance of the summer sun, we can’t fully escape the reality of our difficult surroundings. None of this is to say that the Radar Bros. are a summer bummer. They’re just striking a heavy chord with me—and the juxtaposition of beauty and decay that I hear in their music just sounds so right, right now. I feel an affinity for the Radar Bros., and I carry their songs in my head and heart as I begin to settle into this summer of weirdness and uncertainty.

When My Burning Airlines Concert Preview Crashed and Burned

I've been digging around in my archives lately in a futile attempt to locate a nice little write-up I did several months ago about the veteran L.A. band the Radar Bros. Their day-dreamy psychedelic music has long been a summer companion, and so I thought the short piece deserved a home here while summer is still upon us. Thus far, the archaeological dig into my archives, which has encompassed thousands of files and folders across two computers, a server and a portable drive, has uncovered no trace of the piece. But I'm not giving up yet. It's a decent chunk words, and I seldom say that about my own writing. All this searching hasn't been for nothing, though, because I managed to unearth an unpublished story from 2001, which I thought was lost forever in a cyber landfill of another dimension. And yet here it is, all 500 words of it. It's not a remarkable story -- it's just a short concert preview/interview featuring a long-defunct indie rock band called Burning Airlines. What makes it somewhat significant to me is the reason why the piece was never published: 9/11. 

The Burning Airlines story was originally written as the centerpiece of my weekly club concert column for the Friday edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I filed the column on September 10. The next day, four hijacked passenger planes ... you know the rest. Cut to September 12 and my editor calls me to say that, for obvious reasons, he couldn't possibly publish a concert preview of a band called Burning Airlines. I didn't argue; I would have killed the story myself; but in those days I was so burned out on writing that I didn't think I could muster the energy it would take to draft a new column in just a few hours. I don't remember who replaced Burning Airlines in my revised column ... it's not important. 

So now that you know the story, I give you my Burning Airlines piece, almost 13 years later. If you don't recall Burning Airlines, you may remember the band emerged from the wreckage of Jawbox with guitarists/vocalists J. Robbins and Bill Barbot. Here's the story:

Burning Airlines Give You So Much More

By Joe Ehrbar
Special to the P-I

When Burning Airlines first rolled off the assembly line in 1998, guitarist/vocalist J. Robbins, along with bassist/vocalist Bill Barbot and drummer/vocalist Pete Moffett had no intention of ever departing the basement. Burning Airlines would not be a full-blown punk rock carrier.

            That’s because Robbins and Barbot had just come off an exhausting seven-year run with Jawbox, the beloved Washington, D.C. post-hardcore band they co-founded in 1990. Having made a number of solid recordings, toured the world several times over, and punched the clock for three years and two albums with Atlantic Records, earning themselves a small, but loyal following in the process, Jawbox simply ran out of steam. Its members were eager to unplug and get on with their lives.

            So when Robbins, Moffett and Barbot convened in the Jawbox’s old practice space, their idea was to simply make music. They had no intentions of sharing their results with an audience.

            It didn’t quite work out that way.

            The low-key arrangement allowed the band greater freedom to explore new sonic destinations they were otherwise unable to in Jawbox—largely because commercial pressures stifled that band creative pursuits. Yet the project had become something bigger than mere basement noodling; it was a viable endeavor.

           Taking their name from the Brian Eno song “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” Burning Airlines, who play Graceland with Rival School and Actionslacks on Wednesday (7 p.m.;$10), started slowly, cautiously, initially making short hops around D.C. and other East Coast cities, before venturing farther. In early 1999, the band’s first full-length manifest “Mission: Control!” was released, detailing Burning Airlines’ rapid artistic ascent and revealing the band to be a sturdier, sleeker, more versatile version of Jawbox.

            “I think Burning Airlines is a lot different than Jawbox, but in my mind a lot of my concerns are obviously the same,” Robbins said in a phone interview last week. “So it’s sort of an ongoing project in that way.”

            Now, three years, two albums and one personnel change (bassist Mike Harbin replaced a departing Barbot) later, it would seem Robbins and company are giving audiences a hell of ride. The proof is in their newest CD travel log “Identikit” (DeSoto), a highly stylized display of intensity, precision and sophistication, one characterized by seismic rhythms, white-knuckle time changes, angular riffs, robust vocal melodies and guitar crescendos, and lots of thorny dissonance.

            “I feel like the two Burning Airlines records have carried on very much in the (Jawbox) spirit of wanting to reach,” said Robbins. “Maybe we’ve gotten better at being adventuresome and at integrating it into a kind of live feeling.

            “The thing I keep going back to whenever we’re putting songs together are the melodies and changes,” the frontman continued. “And usually if those are in place then we do things around the changes. Things can get pretty rich around the changes and take on a life of their own and still keep the essence of what those changes are. In my mind it’s pretty fun to see how far afield you can go from just carrying on underneath the vocal and instead do something more interesting with the instruments.”

           As Robbins says, Burning Airlines may deviate from course, but for passengers it makes for a thrilling adventure.