Close to the heart of any recovery-based behavioral health service is the idea of gaining control over one's life. Concepts about how to do this vary, from "let[ting] go and let[ting] God" to honoring one's self-determination, to gaining resources and supports in one's community, to regimens of powerful drugs.
Gaining control is precisely what the help-seeking behaviors of The Dimestore Irvings did not accomplish.
The history of the seminal nod rock band can be traced back to the York, Nebraska of the 1980s and Dan Donaldson's basement bedroom. Looming large in the band's formation was the "bad radio" of central Nebraska and the heady fumes of Testor's glue.
"Nod rock is really about accidentally getting high while we put together model airplanes there in the basement," Donaldson later recalled, "That and static."
Among the plastic flash of P-38 parts and boxes of takeout pizza, Nick Pitman (later Nick Python) produced a battered bass guitar, and Donaldson a 5-gallon plastic bucket and a pair of his older brother's unused drum sticks. Eventually, the duo worked up the courage to ask Ben Hardy to join up. Hardy was a legit guitarist who played in the local high-school band and (in)famously busked in the school's hallways between classes.
"We [Pitman and Donaldson] had no idea what we were doing," Pitman noted in a recent symposium, "But Ben did." "And he liked pizza," he added.
Both Donaldson and Hardy would later write songs about Hardy's strange fascination with Donaldson's mother, an awkwardness that helped fuel the band's success and became a subject of one of its most famous songs:
You said that we were friends,
But, man, I know it's a sin;
You shouldn't be in this song,
'cause, man, dude, that's my mom! (The Dimestore Irvings)
"Man, Dude, That's My Mom" tapped into adolescent angst in a way that the corn-fed discontents of Flyover America, which formed the title of the band's first album, could relate to. But the longer-term success of The Dimestore Irvings eventually hinged on their appeal to the delicatessen crowd of Manhattan island, where the trio washed up after their ailing station wagon broke down on the Lower East Side.
"I'm pretty sure we're still paying off that impound," Donaldson told this writer in a personal interview.
Our interview took place in a New York City coffeeshop, the air outside full of fat flakes of snow, with Donaldson sporting the same flannel, blue jeans, and Justin boots combination that became the band's signature lack-of-a-look. He had that distant expression of many aging rockers and veterans of foreign wars.
And that is because this story is essentially about theory.
"It wasn't really the drugs," Donaldson contends, "I mean, sure, the Python had his cocaine, and Ben loved his benzos, and, yeah, I really drank a lot, but mostly it was Sontag and Foucault—and a hell of a lot of Scott Similaux."
Rarely read today, Similaux was a French-Canadian theorist best known for the notion of the "reticulum gynum," a sort of post-post-structuralist self-creating structure, "encoding and enfolding the signatory self," in the form of "both the verbal and the preverbal, the cultural detritus surrounding the individual and from which s/he forms a presented self" (44).
"It started to influence our work, for sure," noted Pitman at the symposium, "I became a little obsessed, I guess. And that's where the whole Python thing came from" (Bally).
Pitman had long been saddled with that moniker, but upon discovering the work of Similaux, instead of fighting it, he began to fully and publicly embrace it.
"The reticulum had a natural tie-in with the whole python thing, and the whole 'structural suffocation' Similaux describes in The Floss and the Dross. I mean, Jesus, like, that's me! I mean, like, that's all of us, right?" (Bally)
In "Seven Chocks," the band recalls Similaux's influence:
Like a plastic Airfix model,
we build with glue and blood.
Come and press my throttle,
we'll reticulate our love. (Dimestore Irvings)
"I guess these egghead coastal elites dig that kind of thing, man," Donaldson told this writer during our coffeehouse interview.
Similaux's self-creation interpolates the band's formation itself, using the "materials at hand to formulate cultural constructions from cultural deconstructions"--a cast-off bass, an overturned bucket, the latent toxins of an otherwise innocent hobby (192).
In order to avoid "the tyranny of the now" (Similaux 157), the band dropped the "the" for a time during the 1990s.
"We thought it would add to our theory-driven image and nod rock mystique," Hardy said at the same Similaux symposium at which Pitman was also impaneled, "Plus, it saved us a few bucks in printing costs" (Bally).
As The Dimestore Irvings morphed into Dimestore Irvings and cranked out albums like Lifeline Line-o-Type and Holy Sh*t! It's the Post-Post-Structuralist Blues, it became increasingly clear that its center would not hold.
"Yeah, we began to get throttled by our own theoretical precepts a bit," Donaldson was wistful at that point, as the fat flakes of snow turned into a full-on blizzard. He nursed his pour-over: "Once you commit to a critical position, man, it's hard to just back out."
From the symposium, Pitman again: "At one point, it elevated to formal papers and reading circles. There were Similaux groupies camped outside our studio in the Catskills, holding up signs about the signatory self."
Hardy: "At that stage, it had gotten totally 'meta.'"
Pitman: "I think that's when my wife laid down the law." (Bally)
"The intervention was a bit of trip," recalled Donaldson during our interview, "The three of us and what looked like everyone we knew plus some professorial types from Columbia." He looked out of the window at the gathering drifts, "I guess I'm happy about it now, but it seemed really harsh at the time."
Pitman remembers it this way: "It was in March of '98, and we'd just gotten done rockin' a conference someplace in Indiana—maybe Purdue. I'd just gotten the face of Similaux tattooed on my lower back."
Hardy rejoined: "They locked us in a meeting room at our agent's office at the studio and wouldn't let us leave until we got help."
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration fails to list any recovery resources for critical theory, and few comprehensive rehabilitation programs exist. Again The Dimestore Irvings, the band named after the stupidest and happiest employee of the Alco in York, Nebraska, circa 1987, eventually found its way to a residential facility in northern California that was, in Donaldson's words, "Very surfy. It was full of aging tweedy types trying to talk all normal. Beautiful place. Real sad people, though."
"Rehab broke up the band," notes Pitman, "Totally. I mean, I'm glad we did it, but the reticulum gynum totally held that band together."
"It was the glue, for sure," said Hardy, "That and Dan's mom's brownies. Yum-yum!"
One can only conclude from the story of The Dimestore Irvings that control over one's critical faculties must be balanced with control over one's life. This is an idea Similaux himself would have readily accepted: "The dross from which we build is also the draught in which we draw" (204). And so The Dimestore Irvings form both a primary example of the theory-driven life and something of a cautionary tale: never let your critique overplay your art.
Works Cited
Bally, R. Cade. "Reticulum Rocks: Similaux and (The) Dimestore Irvings, a Panel Discussion." 15th Annual Similaux Symposium, 15 June, 2017, Purewater University, Purewater, KS. Panel Discussion.
Dimestore Irvings. "Seven Chocks." Lifeline Line-o-Type, Septic Mule, 1994.
Dimestore Irvings, The. "Man, Dude, That's My Mom." Flyover America, Pukeboy Records, 1988.
Donaldson, Daniel. Personal Interview. 22 March 2018.
Similaux, Scott. The Floss and the Dross: Reticulated Reasoning in Post-Post-Structuralism. Translated by Marie Meuraut, Montréal: McGill UP, 1983.