The Finest China in the Cabinet - The Dish.

That got me thinking about history. I’ll admit I am often thinking about history. It’s a vestigial part of my bookish, dorky childhood when I was obsessed with the American Revolution, Johnny Tremain, and World War II (I watched Victory at Sea every Saturday afternoon when I was 9 years old). How I got from bookworm to indie-rocker to wannabe-professor is a whole ‘nother story.

Here is the method to my madness: a short history of the illustrious career of the fabulous Miles Dethmuffen. After completing high school in the spring of 1985, I was part of a musical group with Ad Frank, Linda Bean, and a drummer who I won’t mention here only because I am no longer in touch with him and don’t want to put his name in the public domain of the internet without any sense of where he is now and what he’s up to. It’s not really relevant, because it was only a short time after graduation that he and I had a falling out, and he was replaced on drums by my best friend since 9th grade, Adam Goodwin.

At a Fourth of July cookout (it was either that summer or the next) we decided to drop the name we had been playing under (The Method. Cool! New Wave!) and pick up something that reflected our unique musical stylings. I lobbied for Squat Thrust, my least favorite phys ed activity. But we settled on Miles Dethmuffen, a rake, man-about-town, bon vivant and party crasher who never once showed up at one of our gigs (at least not sober enough to be allowed on stage).

We played out for years during the above mentioned indie rock heyday of the early nineties. We went on tours. We recorded records (including our first release, Nine Volt Grape, one of the last records ever released on actual vinyl). We had a modicum of local commercial success and notoriety, and even have our own entry in the Trouser Press Guide to Nineties Rock.

Around the time things were getting interesting for us, the indie rock days began waning, and "Pop with a capital P" was making a comeback. Quirky, slightly off-kilter stuff had hit its high-water mark with singles like Ween’s Push the Little Daisies and Flaming Lips Vaseline; Britney and Christina, Eminen and ‘NSync were crowding everyone else off the radio. Also, the Dethmuffen joke was getting a little old for the thirtysomething members of the band (maybe with one exception). (The four members of the band were in their thirties; the band didn't have thirty members.) It was democratically agreed that it was time for a change, and Permafrost was adopted as the new name of the band.

About a year after this change, things started changing for me personally. I was getting married, something I had once thought I would never do. I was beginning to feel that all the time I spent reading history, biography and political theory could be put to better use in a more formalized setting. I was beginning to wonder if I ever really wanted to be a “rock star.” I kept all this to myself, but my friends knew me better than that, and they (especially my best friend since 9th grade) could see that I had lost whatever passion I once had for the whole process. Rehearsing, gigging, recording, and especially touring, things I had wanted to do to the exclusion of anything else, were all becoming chores. Over a couple of beers at the Phoenix Landing in Central Square, Adam Goodwin did what I hadn’t had the guts to do. He told me that I didn’t need to keep doing something I didn’t love. My friends were going to be my friends no matter what, and they certainly weren’t going to stop doing something they loved just because I wanted to quit.

I went on to get married, go back to school (I graduate September 1st) and (hopefully) start a career in academia. The band continued to play for another year, before Ad Frank went his separate way to start a solo career (aside: I am still listening to KEXP, and Julian Cope’s Beautiful Love just came on; Ad used to bellow this at the top of his lungs: “Beyootiful Love, Beyootiful Love, now what do you do!”). Linda joined Orbit, which morphed into Well, and is now in charge of the production of the wonderful Calvin Pardee VI (but I am sure her musical career is far from over). Adam Goodwin formed a blues band, The Stumble, that actually brought some originality and excitement to the local blues scene, then went on to join Dave Aaronoff and the Details.

So, what does this have to do with history? Well, it is actually a real small part of the story, but it is an interesting point. If the “official history” of Miles Dethmuffen/Permafrost is ever written, the transition from one name to the other and my leaving the band would probably be conflated (to use a nice, academic sounding term) into a single event. Essentially, that would be what happened. The period of transition was maybe 18 months long, but like in one of those Shakespeare historical plays where a decade’s worth of history happens in two days, it would be told as one essential part of the story: “Kevin Coombs left the band which continued on as a threesome power trio under the new name Permafrost.”

Historians often set the start of the twentieth century with the outbreak of World War I, in 1914. George Bush entered office in January of 2001, and the World Trade Center attacks occurred on September 11 of that year, but 100 years from now those two events will be so tightly tied together that they might as well have happened on the same day. Is this untruthful? Does this make history a lie? How many stories in history are told this way? And how much does it matter? The things we learn from history do not come from 100% chronological accuracy. Sometimes irony, serendipity and coincidence need to be put a little closer together to be truly appreciated.