Remember Days of the New? Surely you remember seeing this piss-coloured sky with the scraggly tree at your local HMV, no?
What about their Pearl Jammy debut single “Touch, Peel and Stand?”
No? Well, if you remember, cool. If not, here’s some quick background info biased toward the Canadian music listener.
Days of the New showed up on Much Music sometime in 1997. I remember seeing the video for “Touch, Peel and Stand” in rotation with Econoline Crush’s “Sparkle and Shine.” The two bands were actually kinda similar. Econoline Crush had an industrial rock thing going on that I always had a soft spot for, that NIN-influenced trip hop deal they had going, which you can hear in the synth lines at the pre-chorus of this song:
And the frantic drum machines in this one, their only other hit I liked. (I couldn’t stand their Big Shiny Tunes hit, “You Don’t Know What It’s Like.” This song, “Home,” was a lot better. Sorta like Stabbing Westward? Sounds really dated, but that’s kinda the point of this post.)
ANYWAY this post isn’t about Econoline Crush, who fizzled out after spending the equivalent of a large house in Toronto getting that idiot Bob Rock to produce a terrible piece of shit full length record called Brand New History that yielded one single (“Make It Right”) so terrible that it destroyed their career and Econoline Crush disappeared. Every once in a while I see an advertisement for them playing at Lee’s Palace or somewhere smaller and I think, “huh…maybe I’ll go see them,” but I never do.
Meanwhile Father Time is bent over his conveyer belt, cackling wickedly as he gazes downward at us, and we have all gotten older.
Which is what I wanna get at today. When Days of the New came out, they were kind of in a weird limbo spot insofar as marketing was concerned. They were too young to be considered peers of those Class of ‘91 Seattle grunge rockers like Alice in Chains or Soundgarden or Mudhoney or Pearl Jam, but they were too authentically grungy to be considered one of those Chad Kroeger protege bands like Theory of a Deadman. Nu grunge, or whatever the fuck it was Nickelback and Creed played.
In 1997, bandleader and front man Travis Meeks was just 17 years old. Look at how rock star gorgeous he was. Despite being a puzzle for the marketing department at Geffen Records, the band’s profile was raised significantly after a tour opening for Jerry Cantrell and Metallica and a performance on Late Night David Letterman.
At 17 years old, Travis Meeks had inherited the earth. He was a rock star. And he’s the one we can blame for the “eaaaaah” thing.
Although Scott Stapp is usually considered the first of the post-Pearl Jam singers to try and sound like Eddie Vedder, it actually looks like Meeks did it first. Days of the New’s self-titled debut album was recorded in late 1996 and released on June 3 1997.
Creed’s first album My Own Prison was released three weeks later on June 24 1997.
So now we know who to blame for the deluge of guttural “yeah” singers. In the 2014 article I wrote for Imaginative Ethnography about the ubiquity of yeah in popular song, I posted “Enemy” because the second “yeah” is so fucking funny. It sounds like a drunk guy at the end of the bar joining in on an argument. See if you don’t think so. It comes @ 0:13 of the song embedded below, and then repeats for almost the entire song.
“The Mets are gonna win the World Series this year!”
“Yeah!”
It’s a hilarious yeah. I’m not sure how it got past the producer. But even on the second Days of the New album, confusingly also self-titled, but this time packaged in bile-coloured green behind the skeletal tree, things were already going askew. Meeks had fired his entire band right before recording commenced (the jilted dudes went on to form Tantric…that awful band Tantric). So on Days of the New II, Meeks played all the instruments himself, which might explain the prominence of the drum machine on what fans would come to call “the green album,” like Weezer fans but not really.
So this album tanked, Meeks tried again, once again with a self-titled record, this time the sky behind the skeletal tree blood-coloured, fans calling it “the red album,” once again like Weezer but not really.
I’m not saying Days of the New were especially worth listening to. They kinda sucked. But it was interesting that they played Badmotorfinger-style hard rock in drop D tuning on acoustic guitars. That was their thing that they were known for. An all-acoustic hard rock band. But one thing stood out to me: Meeks was a pretty good guitar player. The album version of “Enemy” has an extended coda, over which Meeks plays one of the best acoustic guitar solos I’ve ever heard. It starts around 4:01 of the below video. I tried to time stamp it, but I suck at life/computers, so if it didn’t work, just fast-forward to 4:01 for the greatest acoustic guitar solo you’ll hear today:
Apparently Days of the New’s red album tanked because it came out a few weeks after September 11th. The band was dropped from their label and Travis Meeks dropped out of sight.
Not an uncommon story. Same thing happened to Macy Gray. And Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, whose solo debut Bayleaf dropped around the same time the Twin Towers did, so that nobody in the world has ever heard the album, nor will anyone ever want to. Ever.
I didn’t hear about Travis Meeks again until he showed up on an episode of A&E’s extremely exploitative show Intervention in 2005.
He’d been struggling with meth addiction and looked in poor health, as you can see from the below photo still. In this so-called “post-rehab follow-up interview,” Meeks appears fidgety and rambling, but claims to be sober and trying to maintain contact with his “baby,” whose name he does not give, either because he didn’t want his child’s name to be part of the pubic record, or because he was so fucked up he couldn’t recall his own offspring’s name. Neither would surprise me.
I’m not gonna link to any footage of the show because I think it exploits drug-addled individuals for ratings and it’s disgusting, but suffice to say, for Meeks…rehab didn’t take.
Despite trying to get a new Days of the New lineup together in the early 2010s and putting together a crowdsourced effort to fund a new record titled Tree Colors, one iteration of the band even involving former Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr, not a man known for a sterling record of sobriety, and who died in March 2011 in an apartment the two were sharing together. Traumatized from finding his friend’s dead body, Meeks relapsed and fell back into a protracted period of drug use and running afoul of the law. Fans never got back the money they donated for the Tree Colors project, and the new album never appeared, leading many to assume Meeks was back to abusing drugs. When news media reported that Meeks had been the one to discover Starr’s dead body, his relapse began to make a lot more sense.
Arrests for possession of a hypodermic needle, failure to appear, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest followed - almost all of which are bullshit charges totally up to the individual discretion of the arresting officer, which is far too much power to give any one person. Call me an anarchist or a law enforcement reform advocate, but I don’t think any one person should have the power to throw another person in a locked room for an indefinite period of time. Turns out Meeks spent a year in prison in 2016, which did not rehabilitate him at all. Surprise surprise, he left prison is even worse shape than when he went in.
Because whether smuggled in some family member’s bunghole or a jail guard’s purse, you can get drugs in jail, though you sometimes have to do horrible things to get said drugs. Things like befriending the Aryan Brotherhood and getting regularly raped by them. (I’m not speculating, Meeks has alluded to this in interviews he gave after his release).
I’m sure Meeks is haunted by his time in prison, and the American penal system being what it is, and Meeks’ reputation being what it is, further recidivism seemed the only possible outcome.
Now, remember that Travis Meeks in the late 1990s looked like this:
In December 2018 he looked like this (note the bruise beneath his left eye…undoubtedly given to him by the boys in blue):
And in April 2020, he looked like this:
^ That there, ladies and gentlemen and those who identify otherwise, is just about as close to death as a drug addict can look without actually being dead. Just so you know. Meeks needs help. Meeks needs help yesterday. I just pray he gets it soon. He may not survive another penitentiary sentence, especially with COVID running rampant in America’s jails.
I really really hope that Meeks can get the help he needs and that they don’t just throw him back in a cell to rot. He needs care, physical, mental, and spiritual. Whether his goal is abstinence or not, he deserves compassion and care.
^ words to this meme by @roni_kgg, not me
PWUD = People Who Use Drugs. Like Meeks. Like me for a lot of my life. Not now, but for a long time. I wasn’t less of a person because I was struggling. Neither is Travis Meeks.
Days of the New were never my favourite band, but I hope to hell this man gets back some semblance of control of his life. His band name is pretty cool actually, implying some kind of nascent philosophical approach to existence. Let’s hope Meeks figures out a new way to live his days.
At some point in 2020, somebody…it is not clear who, released a series of demos for the long-awaited Tree Colors album. There is one beautiful moment, a plaintive cry for help, a burst of light through storm clouds, a song called “The Gate/Temporary Messenger.”
Meeks performed the song on his ill-fated Intervention episode. I time-stamped it, but again, if it doesn’t work, either listen to the whole thing or fast-forward (do people use that term anymore?) check out the beautiful chorus Meeks hits @ 2:52. It’s still a Vedder-type vocal thing, but it’s clearly the music of a guy who has seen some shit:
Yes I’ve walked you through your darkness And I’ve seen with you your light And all the things we’ve seen they seem to come together now No I can’t stay for long I can’t stay for long
Get well soon Meeks. The earth is still yours to inherit.
I just meant a lot of the stuff sounded the same.
it was really cool that they were doing grunge riffs on acoustic guitars, but I just lost interest after a while?
Having said that...the 2nd album...the non-single version of "Enemy" where Meeks plays that amazing guitar solo over another acoustic is really special. It's amazing.
He has the "it" quality. Call it "star quality" or just charisma. But he has it. I saw them live and he was great. Jon Spencer, same thing. He's got that "it." Same with Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
I just think Meeks missed 2 full decades of artistic development. Here's hoping he comes back and does something really great.
Sorry if I angered you. I liked Days of the New
I'm not sure why you say Days of the New sucked lol. I mean yeah a lot of their music sounded alike. But it was really good music.