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 auditioned to play second guitar in Nirvana.
You can stop there if you want.
You’ll miss the whole fucking band.
I first heard Truly before Fast Stories came out.
Somebody at the store had the Heart and Lungs EP on Sub Pop, and I remember trying to figure out exactly what the hell I was listening to.
It was heavy, but not in the usual Seattle way.
There was all this space in it.
Weird guitar sounds. Keyboards. Psychedelic stuff. Robert singing 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 been in Storybook Krooks before Truly. After that band ended, he even auditioned for Nirvana when they were considering adding another guitarist.
That obviously didn’t happen.
Instead he started playing with Mark Pickerel.
Hiro had already left Soundgarden and pretty much walked away from music for a while. Mark eventually called him and talked him into playing bass again.
And somehow those three guys ended up making music that sounded almost nothing like the bands everybody knew them from.
That’s the part I love.
Truly got called a Seattle supergroup sometimes.
Technically, I guess.
But “supergroup” makes me think of famous guys getting together to make a record because somebody’s manager thought it would sell.
Truly never felt anything like that.
They felt weird.
Deliberately weird.
They put out Heart and Lungs on Sub Pop in ’91, then “Leslie’s Coughing Up Blood” in ’93.
And then they disappeared into Fast Stories… from Kid Coma.
That record took forever.
They started working on some of that material while they were still with Sub Pop, kept recording and re-recording it, and eventually Capitol stepped in and the thing finally came out in ’95.
Seventy-something minutes.
Not exactly designed for radio.
“Blue Flame Ford.”
“Hot Summer 1991.”
“Leslie’s Coughing Up Blood.”
“Hurricane Dance.”
And then “Chlorine” sitting at the end for eleven fucking minutes.
I bought it 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.
Apparently Capitol told them not to worry about singles and to think more like an album band.
Imagine a major label saying that now.
Actually, give them a couple years.
They changed their minds.
Fast Stories got great reviews, but Capitol never really figured out what to do with it.
Which probably shouldn’t surprise anybody.
How exactly do you sell Truly in 30 seconds between commercials?
By the time they made Feeling You Up, they were back on an independent label.
Thick put it out in ’97.
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.”
It sounds like a band that had already figured out nobody was coming to make things easy for them.
Then things got quiet.
A couple years ago Twilight Curtains turned up — a collection of unreleased stuff, alternate versions and other recordings from the ’90s.
Which is about the most Truly way possible for another Truly record to appear.
No big 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.”
Truly get filed under grunge because they were from Seattle 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.
