The Rise and Fall of Better Than Ezra

December 2, 1998

I was a freshman in college. The previous month I had seen Garbage at the Wasatch Events Center, the previous day I had seen Depeche Mode at the Delta Center. For my first semester band trifecta, Eric Jacobson and I went to see Better Than Ezra up at Club DV8 on their How Does Your Garden Grow? tour. Tickets were only available through 107.5 and you had to win them at their various promotion events. We each hit the bullseye with darts, each won two tickets, each failed to find a girl to come with us with our extra tickets. (So, so pathetic, eighteen year old self.)

I was stoked. Why? A) Deluxe was the first non-REM, non-U2 CD I bought. BTE was the first band I had found on my own. B) I was a card-carrying Ezralite. That's right. I joined their fan club so early that my initial mailing were actually addressed by hand. I received their special Christmas cassette featuring the Eggnog Singalong and Happy Christmas Eve, a signed picture of the band, and a lyric book to Friction, Baby. I bought a special club shirt that I wore for years. (High school friends should remember the maroon shirt with the exercise bike with a dog foot.) I'm pretty sure I even left my BTE fan club card in my wallet on my mission. (I know that I kept the BTE guitar pick in my wallet on my mission.) C) I had bought How Does Your Garden Grow? the day it came out, (Eric and I had done this with Friction, Baby as well. I miss the days of going to the record shop to buy a hotly anticipated CD.) and HDYGG was a huge leap forward for the band. No longer was it just straight ahead rock. There were songs that were louder than anything before (Pull), there was a song suite that went from hard to Radiohead (New Kind of Low part A/B, part B being one of the greatest Kevin Griffin moments of all time), there was weird dance stuff (Like it Like that), dark, X-filish stuff (One More Murder), and just generally strong tunes with interesting atmospherics. I remember giddily telling Eric after listening to the record for the first time, "We are watching a band evolve into greatness! This is incredible!" I felt a part of something special. Oh, and there was this killer picture on the CD sleeve.



That's right! Best band photo of all time.

Eric and I were the first ones in line. We were the first ones in. We went straight to the front of the stage. BTE played for two and a half hours. They covered AC/DC, they joked around, they did all sorts of crazy stuff that I have written down somewhere back home. That's right, I went home and wrote down all the great Kevin lines and all the awesome things they did, that's how into I was. The crowd was intense, jumping, hollering. It might still be the best interaction between crowd and band I've seen. In fact, it might be my favorite concert of all time. I'd have to think harder to see if there was a better one. Anyway, I left convinced that BTE was the best American band alive.

I went to the Philippines. I found a BTE shirt that I wore a lot over the next few years, one that my dad dubbed the "Unholy Trinity" shirt. I was still all in. When I got home, Closer was out. I was pumped. I was all set to buy it at Media Play, but there was something disconcerting about the picture on the back, so I found a listening station and started listening...



Argh! Treachery! Three of the first four tracks are summery fun crap songs! I felt dirty, like I liked Sugar Ray or Lit or someone. But...there were a couple of decent songs still on the record, so I bought it. I still saw them twice in Vegas on their Closer tour...

I had great hopes for a resurgence on their album Before the Robots. They had moved to an indie label having been dropped by their previous label, they had dropped in popularity...surely they would recognize Closer as a mis-step and go back to making killer music like HDYGG. Not to mention that the album title seemed weird and post-apocalyptic. Nope. Suddenly, Kevin was writing run-of-the-mill mid-tempo ballads with awful lyrics. The production was boring. Burned sounded like Swing, Swing. They recycled A Lifetime. The only really great song was Overcome. I was broken. But...but...Overcome showed promise! Maybe the next album...

The next album (Paper Empire) has come. Allmusic wrote: "Again, there's not much that's flashy here, but that's to Better Than Ezra's benefit, as they wind up with a set of solid mainstream rock." That's their epitaph. I don't need to say more (yes I do...it's a terrible, boring record). A band with enormous potential and great momentum at the end of the 1990s is a boring broken shell of itself.