Truly are one of those bands where the family tree can actually get in the way.
Hiro Yamamoto — original bass player in Soundgarden.
Mark Pickerel — original drummer in Screaming Trees.
Robert Roth — once had a tryout with Nirvana when they were thinking about adding another guitarist.
You can stop there if you want.
You'll miss the whole fucking band.
The funny thing is I heard Truly before I knew any of that.
Somebody at the store back in Queens had the Heart and Lungs EP on Sub Pop, and I remember trying to figure out exactly what the hell I was listening to. This would've been before I moved west in September '92, when Sub Pop records were already making their way into independent shops all over the place but Seattle still seemed a hell of a lot farther away than it does now.
It was heavy, but not in the usual Seattle way.
There was all this space in it. Weird guitar sounds, keyboards, psychedelic stuff, songs that seemed perfectly happy to drift somewhere strange instead of charging straight at you. Robert sang like he was half awake inside some really bad dream.
I liked it.
Then I moved to Seattle and started figuring out who these guys actually were.
Robert had played in Storybook Krooks before Truly. Around the time that band ended, Bruce Pavitt's partner at Sub Pop, Jonathan Poneman, told him Nirvana were looking at another guitarist after Jason Everman was gone. Robert wound up getting together with Kurt and the band for a tryout.
One rehearsal.
That's an important distinction, because "Robert Roth almost joined Nirvana" is exactly the kind of sentence that gets better every time somebody repeats it until eventually the poor bastard is one phone call away from being on Nevermind.
He wasn't.
It was a tryout. It didn't happen.
Around that same period Robert started playing with Mark Pickerel. Mark was coming out of Screaming Trees, and eventually he got in touch with Hiro Yamamoto, who had left Soundgarden in 1989 and hadn't been playing much for a couple of years. Hiro came back to the bass.
The earliest Truly wasn't quite the famous three-man family tree yet. Chris Quinn was part of the band around Heart and Lungs, so even that neat little Robert-Mark-Hiro origin story needs an asterisk.
Which is another reason family trees are a pain in the ass.
Heart and Lungs came out on Sub Pop in 1991, four songs on a 12-inch EP. That's the Truly I heard back east, before any of the biographies attached themselves to the music. The title song is great, but what I remember most is the atmosphere of the whole thing. Even when the guitars got ugly, there was air around them. Nothing felt packed together just because heaviness was supposed to mean filling every inch of tape.
By the time I was living here, Truly made more sense and less sense at the same time.
They were definitely a Seattle band, but they weren't particularly interested in giving you the version of Seattle that everybody had started asking for.
In 1993 they put out "Leslie's Coughing Up Blood" backed with "Virtually" on Sub Pop. Both songs eventually ended up on the big record, but Truly were already disappearing into that record long before anybody could buy it.
And I mean disappearing.
They worked on what became Fast Stories...From Kid Coma across several years, with sessions stretching through different studios and different stages of the band's life. Material goes back into the Sub Pop period. Then Capitol got involved, but even that wasn't a clean "indie band leaves Sub Pop for major label" story. Capitol put out the CD when the album finally appeared, while Sub Pop handled the limited double vinyl.
That's pretty fucking Seattle right there.
Fast Stories...From Kid Coma finally came out in June 1995.
Seventy-something minutes.
Thirteen songs on the CD.
Not exactly designed for anybody with somewhere else to be.
"Blue Flame Ford" opens the thing and immediately tells you what kind of record you've bought. It has weight, but the weight moves. Hiro isn't just sitting under the guitars holding up the floor, and Mark doesn't bash every opening shut. Robert piles guitar sounds and keyboards around them until the songs start feeling bigger on the inside than they ought to be.
Then you've got "Hot Summer 1991."
"Leslie's Coughing Up Blood."
"Virtually."
"Hurricane Dance."
And eventually "Chlorine."
Eleven and a half fucking minutes.
At the end.
Of course it is.
I bought Fast Stories around then and disappeared into that record for a while.
Still do sometimes.
The whole thing feels less like a collection of songs than some strange movie you walked into halfway through. Things repeat. Things drift in and out. Songs take their time getting where they're going, assuming they're interested in getting there at all. There are moments where the keyboards make the whole record feel like somebody opened another room behind the guitars.
And that's what separates Truly from a lot of the easy descriptions of them.
You can call it psychedelic rock. You can call some of it space rock. You can call it alternative because it was 1995 and apparently we had to call everything something.
Fine.
But it sounds like Truly.
There's a story that Capitol encouraged them to think big and not worry so much about obvious singles. Maybe that explains something about Fast Stories, maybe it doesn't. Robert has talked about that philosophy since, but I'm not going to pretend I was sitting in the fucking meeting.
You don't need the story anyway.
Listen to the record.
It behaves like an album made by people who weren't worrying much about three-minute radio songs.
That probably didn't make it the easiest thing in the world to sell in 1995.
The reviews were good. The sales weren't enormous. "Blue Flame Ford" got singled out, and Capitol even put it out on this weird 10-inch with extra tracks, but Fast Stories never turned Truly into the kind of band where people who didn't already care suddenly knew Robert Roth's name.
Maybe Capitol didn't know what to do with them.
Maybe nobody would've.
How exactly do you explain "Chlorine" in thirty seconds between commercials?
Whatever happened behind the offices, there wasn't another Capitol album.
By the time Truly made Feeling You Up in 1997, they were back on an independent, Thick.
I don't play that one as much as Fast Stories, but there's some great stuff buried in there. "Twilight Curtains," "Wait 'Til the Night," "It's On Your Face." The keyboards are still hanging around — Hammond, Moog, Mellotron — and the whole thing still has that feeling that the band is building rooms rather than just recording songs.
It sounds like a band that had already figured out nobody was coming to make things easy for them.
Then things got quiet.
In 2000 a British label called Sweet Nothing put out Twilight Curtains. It's not really the next Truly album. It's an import collection of odds and ends from the '90s — alternate stuff, covers, things that had been stranded on vinyl, pieces from around the edges of the records.
Which is about the most Truly way possible for another Truly CD to appear.
No giant comeback.
Just another door into the same strange room.
I still think Fast Stories...From Kid Coma is the one.
Put it on late at night with the lights down and don't skip anything.
Especially "Chlorine."
And forget the family tree for a minute.
That's probably the thing I keep coming back to with this band. Hiro being in Soundgarden is interesting. Mark being in Screaming Trees is interesting. Robert getting one shot at playing with Nirvana is a great little Seattle story.
None of it tells you what Truly sounds like.
Truly get filed under grunge because they were from Seattle, because of when they happened and because of who played in the band.
Fine.
I've given up arguing about labels.
But if somebody asked me what Seattle sounded like in the '90s and I only played them Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, I'd feel like I was lying to them a little.
So I'd probably put on Truly next.
