THE UNCOMFORTABLE LEGACY OF GIRLS' ALBUM: 10 YEARS AGO TODAY

     THE UNCOMFORTABLE LEGACY OF
GIRLS' ALBUM

Photo: Sandy Kim

"...I was thinking in terms of what a cool band The Velvet Underground were, and how they were much bigger after they were gone and I'd forgotten that when we first started Girls, I wanted us to be a band like that."
- J.R White, 2013

            In the midst of 2009's chillwave parody and bevy of rustic-sounding artists all named after animals, 
Girls came down like a meteor: they created three records of unbridled brilliance, they conquered the indie blogosphere almost overnight, received as much critical acclaim over a three year period as anyone could possibly accept, had their street urchin / drug addict lifestyle taste tested and dutifully turned into indie chic by anyone wanting to make big, then as quickly as they came, they were gone.
            Perhaps it was never meant to last: this was a duo that were pegged to an iron cross of hyperbole the second we all read Owens' publicized backstory (in conjunction with their epic "Hellhole Ratrace" making the rounds in 2008). 
            We never had the chance to hear Girls' own story without their lead singer's origin being front and center: "damaged songwriter Chris Owens was raised in a cult + unseen / unheard genius J.R: the only child of a Dead-Head WASP family from Northern Cal, etc."
           It was as if you only needed to read a Pitchfork article to know the entire Girls story.
           Oh...but there was so much more to them.
           For all the open exhibitionism of Girls (there's a dick used as a microphone in one of their videos), there's still plenty of mystery that shrouds the process of how they created the timeless escapism of Album.
          The desire for myth-making may have turned into dangerous, refreshingly honest interviews that spilled it all: from the drugs, to the women, or the influences... but the secrecy of how Girls' debut was created lingered on. 

           Even the cover of Album refused to let us into their jaded, faded junkie world completely: The vintage necrophile photography of our times depicted a collection of photos, divided in corners: technicolor flowers, a Telecaster hiding a bleary-eyed tall dood and above that, an image of a tiny guy clutching an acoustic guitar as if you'd just caught him masturbating. 
          Musically, Album also seemed to fall right out of the sky: this was music completely of its own time and volition, bearing secrets and treasures inside. 
          Needless to say, it beckoned incessantly.
          Like many of you, opener "Lust For Life" was the first Girls song  I listened to and upon hearing 
a man courageously, snottily sing:
"oh how I wish I had a boyfriend, I wish I had a loving man in my life, I wish I had a father, 
but maybe then I would've turned out right," 
I knew that this was a record I had to own right then, no matter what. 
           Unlike most of their aforementioned contemporaries who's messages came caked in reverb and Garageband hiss, Girls' vocals and lyrics were in your face, mixed right up front and center...there was nowhere to hide from Chris & J.R's truth. 
         In fact, Girls came out with music that actually intimidated listeners and if you were a younger kid in 2009,

the level of grim reality was a welcome shock (and for those born from trauma, Album was an all too real celebration of late 20s hesitation).
          But it was also fucking cool.
          This was a perfect record...a grower and a shower...the kind they're too scared to make anymore.
          Album was (and still is after 10 years) a narcotic stew where bold lyrics meet a tumult of scuzzy surrealist production, all harvested by friends forging forward into the abyss with total bravery in the face of technological and financial limitations.  
        Considering its release in an era where originality was often buried within the guffaws of auto-tuned Beach Boys harmonies or redundant low-rent-Spectorisms, Christopher Owens and J.R White made music that stuck out, but more than anything:
they made a record that saved people...namely themselves.   
           The mystery of how Christopher Owens and J.R White started the Girls project and then went on one of the greatest winning streaks in the recorded history of 21st century music is still one that has continued to confound us all...until now.
            It begins and ends in the same place: San Francisco in the early to mid 2000s, a time when you could still barely afford to live there and a place where everyone was trying to do something bigger than themselves. 

            Yet, the city by the bay was and is a place that can swallow your ambition whole within the isolation of its casual lovers, all night parties and encyclopedic drug scene. 
           The drugs in San Francisco wouldn't just have a profound effect on Chris (the front man had already lived and escaped addictions to heroin, coke and booze in the Texas hardcore scene) it would conjure a myriad of issues for his future band. 
           Owens arrived in San Francisco with vague plans, Craigslisting his way into a Chinese family's home in Glen Park. Soon enough, the money went quick and Owens had to go corporate after the family took care of him for long enough.
               After a year of "working in an office, wearing button-down shirts and going out to jazz shows", Owens fell in and out of love with a woman named Liza. 
          The "most popular woman in San Francisco" didn't take long to introduce herself to the mopey transplant.
           Liza immediately helped him form a musical duo called Curls, then became the inspiration behind songs such as "Vomit" & "Headache", before finally assisting Chris in developing a heroin habit. 
           It was after the nasty breakup with Liza when the future Girls front man began expanding his social horizons.

HOLY SHIT!
         Owens went to a party on Mission Street where girl-group The Bubonic Plague were playing alongside a bizarre unit called Holy Shit.
         The schizo-rock group featured a local sonic luminary by the name of Matt Fishbeck, and after playing a truncated set shut down by the authorities, the Holy Shit author saw Owens. He was intrigued by Chris's crazy clothing, short hair and naive gaze and almost immediately, the Holy Shit front man and California guru introduced himself. 

         Chris started hanging out with Fishbeck and after spending "all night talking about music or clothes while doing lots of drugs", Matt then introduced Owens to his Holy Shit band mate: the legendary, charismatic L.A songsmith Ariel Pink.
          Together the pair proceeded to blow the "cult kid's" sheltered, brainwashed mind over the next year.                
          Who knows if Chris told the duo about his experiences in the Children of God cult: the psychological and sexual abuse, the tearing apart of families in the name of cult finance, the repression of all music, films, television and most books. Whether or not they knew about his past, they must've understood how "in the dark" Chris was.
          Due to his sheltered nomadic upbringing, Chris was the guy at the party who "didn't know R.E.M or who Spacemen 3 were," but luckily Fishbeck and Pink did a bang up job exposing Chris to the life of a musician and songwriter.   
        "Ariel & Matt wrote a song on the record we did where the chorus goes 'come our way and we will show you' and that's exactly what they did, they changed my life," Christopher Owens said in 2011.
        Chris was entranced by Ariel Pink, especially how the L.A madman was yet to crack fame and fortune, despite crafting hundreds of brilliant songs. This only made him seem more of a genius to the Girls front man. 
         Owens even grew his hair out to imitate Ariel after being invited into Holy Shit. 
         Fishbeck and Pink had already started Holy Shit before Chris joined their ever-evolving lineup, yet it was these experiences in the orbit of Pink and Fishbeck that would prove elemental for Christopher Owens becoming the songwriter and singer he would turn into.    
         Seeing these two artists progress forced Owens to pick up his only guitar, an acoustic he was given by COG member Jeremy Spencer (alleged pedophile and former Fleetwood Mac guitarist who'd joined the cult in 1969) and started to write original material. 
         The first real song Chris wrote by himself was the shoreline serenade "Headache" (likely a song left over from the Curls project) followed by the point blank drug honesty on "Substance", a gloomy drug ode backed by dark Fender jangle. Now on a streak, Owens next wrote "Carolina", a future eight minute monster and the raw proof that he was on to something.
          Then came his voice: a higher register form of the congested tones Owens talked through, with a little Costello-by-way-of-Orbison thrown in as a vocal-mask for Chris to feel comfortable singing behind.
          Keenly listening amongst Owens' ever-growing milieu of friends:
 Chet J.R White. 

Christopher Owens, J.R White

          J.R was an extremely talented, intelligent kid from Santa Cruz who loved recording bands and dreamt of becoming a producer. Struggling to stay motivated in music, White had forgone those plans for steady work at a San Francisco restaurant in his late 20s.
          Chet J.R White (known simply as "J.R") had a laptop to record, a bass guitar he could barely play and he'd always produced records for local acts; still, the aspiring producer had never been in a band himself.
          In late 2006, J.R was at the park on an off day from work when his mutual friends in the Holy Shit crew recognized him; serendipitously, Chris happened to be there as well. Fishbeck introduced J.R to Owens while they all got high and talked music in Golden Gate park. White and Chris hit it off immediately and pretty soon, J.R had ditched the culinary world for his truest passion and found Christopher to be his kindred spirit. 

          It was pure destiny when J.R and Chris became fast friends, near blood brothers, and it's this inclusion that uplifts every single line of lonerism within Album, making the songs something more than "poor Chris" singing about his misanthropic disaffection. 
           His snotty voice and reverb guitar became the personification of Girls as an entity in and of itself, but now that sound was reaching outward in universal tones thanks to J.R's auditory vision. 
            Just like any good friend of someone more introspective, J.R was Chris's sonic mouthpiece as much as Owens was the music's narrator: White providing the vast musical landscape Owens was only just discovering and in kind, Chris uttering the things J.R was too afraid to say. 
            It was this friendship

and musical chemistry saddled with their ability to be honest with each other (and their audience) that was really the pulse of what Girls was all about. 
            According to J.R, that's exactly what Girls was to him, two friends deciding to make music:
          "Girls was an extraordinary situation...I had come to terms with not being interested in playing music before that, but with Chris, playing music and then us working on his songs and recording them, it was different. And, it seemed like my input in our recording had now become part of the overall picture, and I wanted to see what this baby we created could do."
              While recording together and starting the Girls project may have saved both of them, Album almost killed them, too.

RECORDING ALBUM

           None of the sessions for Album were planned out and neither of the shy duo appeared as if they realistically aimed for success...but underneath the anxiety was a pair of adventurous friends who's ambition knew no bounds.
           There were long nights spent together on the famous hill in Dolores Park, gazing down at the shimmering downtown labyrinth of the city with a bottle of wine and some joints,

 plotting their future in specific detail.
          "We figured we'd be on to our 'big studio-produced album' by the time we made our 4th or 5th...we were planning everything," Chris later said.
            In 2007, Girls got together for the first time at a local rehearsal space and with J.R at the helm, Chris began running through the material he had. 
           "Headache" was met with extreme intrigue from White: the producer already imagining a literal beach in the background of the early 60s prom night track.
            "Carolina" was already a multi-part epic tale of Miss South Carolina's infamously uneducated 2007 response to a Miss USA pageant question.

The track was taken and developed by
J.R White into a masterpiece 
with a long, droning tribal intro, a Beatles-y chorus and a Grateful Dead (circa '71) stomp-out.             
           "Substance" was fleshed out with a new bridge and given aquatic whammy bar bends; elsewhere, they developed a riff Chris had jammed on during Holy Shit rehearsals. The jam turned into "Alright" yet another 7+ minute genre-bender, this time containing a Latin intro before giving way to "Eight Miles High" Rickenbacker riffage. 
          However, the sessions quickly became nocturnal when the other bands sharing the space hated the duo's bloodshot, hazy vibe and tried to boot them. White had to beg for more time and eventually, the bands all agreed

to give Girls from 1am until the first band showed up the next day.
            Lamenting the piecemeal conditions Album was recorded in, Chris boasted in 2009: "If we could've recorded with session musicians and a studio, I think it would've been like Pet Sounds, the songs are that good."
             "But it was recorded in a rehearsal space on broken equipment," J.R conceded in the same interview: "Sometimes the computer, which was really old, would crash and we'd have to start again.

Also we had to do it 
late at night...because 
all of the other bands
kept kicking us out. 
They didn't like us...
they thought we were 
both strange."
            The other bands could've been right... 
            The people making Album were strange & the songs they made were weird little creatures recorded on crummy equipment. But thanks to White's abilities, they could imitate huge tanks of reverb and analog sounding tape delay that came from little Boss or Electro Harmonix pedals, then those guitar and bass tones were equalized and improved upon by J.R in the mixing stage. 

            With Chris's underrated guitar playing carrying the album and the production firmly committed to grandiosity, everything would be awash in eternal haze...except the lead vocals which (even when effected) had to be up front.
            These late night sessions became debaucherous: bags of grass, booze spilled, pills dropped...the two friends communicating with each other through the recordings themselves: guitar and bass plugged in, tapes rolling, eyes closed, heads bobbing.
            While recording Album, Girls would hang in the overcast clouds of morphine highs, jamming on the heavy metal riff to the Girls' stomper "Die" repeatedly...at least until one or both of them nodded off for good.

           "We'd fall asleep during takes playing the guitar...very dark...but that drug helped me a lot. I was in a lot of pain," Chris Owens would later describe.
            The partnership didn't have to venture far from their rehearsal space to find these new vices. 
            "There's this place called 'Pill Hill' in San Francisco," Chris revealed, "where there was an L block shape of pill dealers. That's pretty much what we were on through the whole recording process for that first record."
            "Imagine how good you'd feel after taking a handful of Valium," Chris posed to Tim Jonze in summer 2009, "that's how good you feel after taking one morphine."

            In the same interview, J.R shot back: "It's (morphine) a lot like Oxycontin, just a bit sleepier, a bit dreamier," the producer then grins, "I guess we were pretty obsessed with taking pills for a few years there."
            Still, the duo's predilection for substances hardly distracted from the music. In fact, the genesis of Girls' Album joins a long line of influential releases where drug use enhanced the creative process: Pet Sounds, Rocks, There's A Riot Goin On, The Soft Bulletin, Revolver alongside many, many others.    
           The pharmaceutical darkness resumed, but the song that took the project to an even higher ground emerged from this freewheeling abyss. 
          "Laura" was new evidence that Owens could write a great pop song and to cap it off, Chris and J.R made damn sure the titanic emotional weight was felt in the song's unforgettable finale, working hard hours to arrange the right sound.      
         The note perfect melody of "Laura" would prove to be the opener to nearly every future Girls concert and the second track on Album, becoming many Girls fans' first exposure to the San Francisco pair.
          Chris and J.R were now on an unparalleled creative streak:

Chris bringing in the lyrics, singing and chords, J.R supplying the haunted heaven production and the aptly bruising bass lines which glued the pieces together.
           Each song contained an auditory blueprint of their own unspoken psychological odyssey through the "make-it-or-fuck-it" mentality of San Francisco, only a few decipherable flakes of the Owens backstory swimming in the tracks for intensity. 

            Still, there was some ambition missing in the bare early mixes and the two were beginning to question everything. Lyrics, chords, bridges, choruses: all were intact...yet still the songs sounded empty. 

Garrett Godard

          To further aid and beef up the recordings, outside help was culled from two local pals Tom Marzella and Garrett Godard on drums   (Marzella bringing the fast, punky sound and Godard establishing himself as the first Girls drummer with his steady force).
            Meanwhile, Girls added yet another early era gem when they workshopped the epic "Forgiveness", though it was not quite the 8 minute stunner that would find a home on their 3rd album."Forgiveness" was 
a direct soliloquy addressed to Chris's family

and a marathon possessing content and ambition loftier than the equipment J.R and Chris had in 2007. 
            However, the boys in Girls may have only felt they were casually piling up fascinating demos to prepare for the studio later...if they ever got there.
           So, they set "Forgiveness" to the side along with an early version of "Vomit" (another big budget blockbuster) and the pair kept working.   
           It was at this point in which Chris & J.R crafted most of the 12 tracks that would eventually prove to be the foundation of Album...each one an intense snapshot in time fading before our very bloodshot eyes. 
           New masterpieces arrived: the big one "Hellhole Ratrace", the opener "Lust For Life", the dark side of chillwave "Summertime", record closer "Darling" 
(a number Chris still wants Dolly Parton to cover), "Morning Light" and "Ghost Mouth"...

all grade A songs 
that evoke certain
eras of music while transcending those tags.
        Local scenesters 
were shocked at the 
ease of the new songs:
all fantastic chord progressions, great lyrics and the music dispensed a cinematic "shooting up of Jason Pierce" in the crescendos...everything sounded of its own gloriously seedy netherworld.       
         "Hellhole Ratrace" was an especially powerful piece of music, immediately reminding J.R of The Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free" 

(both songs using exaltation as a weapon and making spare use of percussion to devastating effect). 
          "That album, The Velvet Underground, was a big record for me that influenced the Girls record (Album), and I don't know if anyone has ever made that connection," the Girls producer said in 2013.            
          To do the stunning material justice, Chris and J.R (two self-described "non-musicians") took to almost every instrument in the process of recording Album and pushed their musicianship to the maximum of their abilities.
           Owens laid down nearly every guitar part, from the cascading guitars of masterpiece "Headache"

or the perfectly executed George Harrison lead part on "Laura", his teenage riot (by way of the same phaser Robert Smith uses) on "Morning Light", "Summertime" and "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker". 
           For percussion, Tom Marzella provided the high octane / sputtering fury on "Morning Light" while soon-to-be-first-Girls-drummer Garrett Godard brought the Ringoisms on "Laura", "Lust For Life" and "Darling" among others. Elsewhere, Chris and J.R made due with various homemade percussion on "God Damned", "Headache" and "Lauren Marie".
          While later EP Broken Dreams Club indicated the progression of a prolific songwriter, and their final LP would take Chris's past,

family & best
friend to task in pursuit 
of answers, 
Album
perfectly encapsulated the freewheeling fluidity and androgyny of their San Francisco community. 
           True music for the dropouts who thought they'd tried. 
          "Of course San Francisco has an effect on our material," Girls member J.R White would later admit in 2009, "the city is beautiful, the weather is great, life is great, our friends are great...But it can also be a trap...when all anyone wants to do is get high, it can be hard to get things done," the producer / bassist would foreshadow.

           In San Francisco's bustling, bizarre night life, most didn't give a fuck about Chris's upbringing or deemed him special for it, which is why Album may be the only true Girls record. 
          In comparison to the later releases, Album has little to do with Owens the persona and more of Owens the person. 
           While the lyrics on their debut may not depict Chris Owens as a former cult victim, they do their best to

show his naive, 
wide-eyed nature in a humorous, self-deprecating way through his own vocal-characters. 
           The twisted, glorious lines also show Chris coming to grips with being let down by the supporting cast of San Francisco's nihilistic, millennial drug haze. 
           Through these newer songs Chris was writing, we begin to imagine a cavalcade of nefarious city characters gnawing at him, calling him the "interesting cult dood" half a decade before those kids (the ones who survived) gave in and joined a tech company. 
          Nevertheless, Girls now had enough material for a double album,

or perhaps even three records, with most of those anthems being unabashedly ambitious, monster songwriting that White was effortlessly capturing in the rehearsal space turned studio. 
           It was at this point that the two had already written the bulk of their greatest songs, all in one place at one time...now, they wondered what the fuck to do with them all.  
            Naturally, they posted their creations online. 
           J.R finished some mixes for "Hellhole Ratrace" / "Lust for Life" and both songs were posted to the new Girls Myspace page, Chris and J.R listing drugs.com/imprints under the "band website" tab for a shocker.
            "We did use that site a lot," Chris would later confess.
            It was still 2008: Facebook had just arrived, Twitter wasn't far off and Myspace was still the place to plug your new musical project. Though the technology may have been going out of fashion by 2008, many had flocked to their page to hear "Hellhole Ratrace". 
          The somber, redemptive elegy was the new flavor of the month across their local scene during late 2007, and by Spring 2008, the dirge of "Ratrace" and the blissful lift of "Lust For Life" were starting to spread like an indie-rock virus.           
           While they posted their recordings on the increasingly popular Myspace page, they were rushed into the idea of performing live.

Chris and J.R grabbed anyone available to play an upcoming local show with them, booked at the Cafe du Nord. 
           After the shambolic, messy live debut (due to the assortment of local pals onstage), Christopher recruited his longtime friend John Anderson to play lead guitar in the band. Next, from their desire for stability and continuity, Garrett Godard resumed his station behind the drums after playing suitable, tasty parts on the record.

           Girls Mark II was now official.
           Soon after their San Francisco showcase, the band gained a manager, a few roadies and friends to help tell the Girls story. 
            Iconic photographer Sandy Kim and film director Aaron Brown shot classic press photos of the two in their gaunt, stoned element and filmed breathtaking music videos starring their large array of friends and muses.
            All of this action gained  momentum fast and by the raging summer of 2008, Girls became a touring commodity. 
           Alongside the 20-30 booking offers in the typical high profile indie taste making hotbeds of Chicago, L.A and New York, an invitation for the French Riviera MIDI Festival was sent to the duo. 
           After Chris convinced his partner, using his  experience with Holy Shit and since the two had an inspired sense of naive adventure, White and Owens accepted and began rehearsing. 
           On the way to France, dates at L.A's Troubador and the Bowery Ballroom in New York for July were set up, one of which was a set by the "real Girls band" the pair of Chris and J.R alone in WYNYU studios.       
          Many dates on the first Girls tour are unconfirmed, though we can appreciate that this studio project somehow took the plunge, attaining a shimmering subterranean revivalism onstage, even when messing with oblivion (this author witnessed 2 Girls shows). 

           Throughout the tour, they played all of their growing catalog, still unsure of 
what songs would be chosen for
the record. Most were given great responses, though "Substance" or "Lust For Life" may have been a 
bit too real and uncomfortable for many button down Vampire Weekend fans in the audiences to accept. 
             Regardless 
of the duo's fears over a lack of musical ability in the band, 
(the entity unknown
to most as) Girls were impressing & influencing many who came 
in their path. Was it their uneasy, modern re-branding of classic rock dystopia or the Van Sant street kid vibe and open use of most drugs? The indie blog hype? 
            Who knows, but future indie stars Zachary Cole Smith who would form DIIV (a band with many ties to Girls) and Cullen Omori (of future touring mates & "little brother band" The Smith Westerns) were taking notes.

           Before too long, Indie label True Panther came calling. 
           Suddenly, online blogs Stereogum, Pitchfork, Paste etc were all hyping "Hellhole Ratrace" and "Lust For Life" at the same time labels Fantasy Trashcan and True Panther offered to release singles for the band. 
           Fantasy Trashcan released "Hellrole Ratrace" in July 2008, backed with new song "Solitude" (recorded with the Girls touring lineup) and its cover art featured the debut of their visual aesthetic: photos of female friends taken by the band surrounded by a stark, trademark font.

            It was around this time Girls toyed with the idea of calling their first record Father Son Holy Ghost due to the Jason Pierce bands Spacemen 3 / Spiritualized influencing the ethereal  religiosity in the songs' moments of morphine-assisted eternity.
          With success in mind, the number one hope for Girls was sustained adventurism and high quality music. 

The Owens-White team wanted to make album after album of amazing songs...the band "older brothers and sisters would show their younger siblings", J.R would say to Paste in 2013.
         While all of the outside hype and growing expectancy swirled inside their minds, Owens and White knew one thing for sure: they had the songs to last...and maybe even a few records-worth to contend with greatness.
         The question now: how many to put on the first album? 
         The process of elimination began in earnest, however it wasn't easy picking the 12 songs that would eventually make up the final tracklisting.

         In the end, Girls went with the newer, tighter and more focused material.
         Rather than issue a sprawling double album containing "Ratrace", "Carolina", "Alright", "Vomit", "Forgiveness" and Summertime", the compact results of Album displayed an immaculate producer and a once brilliant songwriter going to work with reverb-infected, acid-damaged 

classic rock distilled through

their morning dew covered San Francisco equipment...and winning. 
        J.R White felt this way about Album's genre hopping joy-ride:
       "Like on 'Laura' I was like 'hey let's take it to this Monkees kind of 60s era and we wanted to do country you know, too. 'Morning Light' wasn't even much of a shoegaze song quite yet, but there was me really pushing for songs to be of different genres, so you know that made the process fun as well because it wasn't a real band yet..." 
         The earlier songs (that didn't make the record) had these qualities too, whilst displaying a more modern Girls sound already steeped in 21st century terror ("Carolina", "Vomit", "Forgiveness", "Substance", "Die"). 
         The 12 that made the record, 
were all of the same moment: 
mining the past
 while saying 
"oh my gawd, let's get high and never go back there." Each of the 12 tracks were simply more indicative of the eclectic influences and headspace that defined Chris & J.R right then and there in 2008/2009.
           The independent record industry insiders who'd met and talked to Owens and White (and were already battling for Girls' signature) understood the sheer scale of great material the duo had amassed during their rehearsal space sessions.

         Rumors of a gigantic, 22 song debut album were thrown around as the members themselves talked up these aspirations in the press. 
           Suppose they'd released a double album for their debut, would we have found it bloated?                         Would Album have the same impact? 
           It's interesting...
           There was serious talk of Girls being the "band to save rock and roll" or at least a group that "could produce a pile of 35 records after all is said and done" as Chris said himself, soaking gasoline on to the fires of

expectation. 
            The duo were highly sought after by many labels (major and indie) but it was True Panther who they ended up signing with for a three record deal. True Panther was headed by fellow Franciscan Dean Bein, a man who made it his mission to make Girls as big as possible. 
            The project wasn't just in the heads / hands of Chris and J.R anymore: there was major belief in the potential of the songs they'd written and an investment forthcoming for the ones they were writing next.
            The full length would be coming out in the fall of 2009 and a year of shows, including SXSW in Chris's former home in Austin

and a mini European tour were booked.
            Girls were happening. And it all went down so fast...
          ...maybe too fast for Owens:
          "I really wish we'd made another record or two, just me and J.R before we even thought about touring. But we also wanted to share these songs...and we liked playing live," the singer said in retrospect after Girls' breakup.    
            "Lust For Life" was issued as a single through True Panther in the lead-up to Album's release, and on September 22nd 2009,

the Girls debut record dropped along with its dumbfounding title.
            It had been a long road to revelation for the Girls debut: a lifetime of experience lived in its authors' 28 years before the results of what they'd cobbled together was finally sent out into the unsuspecting world...
           The record was met with near unanimous praise: Paste, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, even the legendary stick-up-his-ass curmudgeon Robert Christgau thought the songs were "deeper and more moving" when coupled with Owens' backstory.
           Album was a letter from the damned: not written or sent for the angst-ridden or faux-disenfranchised...this was a burning love letter addressed to the truly lost.
          Album was celebrated with a cultish worldwide fever, resulting in its ascension as the fastest and highest selling recording in True Panther history by 2010.

          In spite of their blossoming success as "the band they always wanted to be", Girls' morale was spiraling due to never-ending line-up changes soon after Album's release. 
           Before Broken Dreams Club came out in November 2010, lead guitarist and Chris's extremely close pal John Anderson quit the group and axeman Ryan Lynch replaced him. Dan Eisenberg came in on keys...then left, replaced by Matt Kallman (Real Estate), drummer Garrett Godard was axed and Darren Weiss picked up the sticks. Also at some point during this convoluted entanglement, Mark III guitarist Ryan Lynch left and John Anderson would return once again. Anderson would record Father Son Holy Ghost with the "band" before finally leaving once and for all, only to see his brother take his spot on guitar for the final Girls tours. 
            

           In all, twenty one different members came in and out of Girls in just under three years. While White was under no illusion that their project was ever going to be a real band, Owens hated the shuffle:
         "I wanted Girls to be a real band, like the Stones or the Beatles."
         By their July 2012 breakup, it wasn't shitty songs or creative turmoil that widened the schism: the friendship was dying...bleeding to a slow death thanks to the frayed ends of sanity that inevitably stalks all friendships during grueling tours. 

         Owens and White would have to routinely force themselves into withdrawal to prepare for the brutality of touring and after 2 1/2 years of this ravaging cycle, Christopher was done with the endless binging and purging.
         Drugs had always been a cornerstone of their aesthetic: they were part of the project's euphoric beginning, their hard-touring / hard-living middle, but now they played the major role in their unexpected sudden end... 
         By 2011, the writing was on the wall if you looked carefully enough. Owens and White were already searching for the past they'd lost by calling their

third record Father Son Holy Ghost, the original title for their sacrosanct debut and
It didn't help their case that the best moments on their recorded finale were all songs fully formed during the Album sessions.
         J.R remembered in 2013: 
        "In the beginning of Girls I would have these weird conversations with myself about the reality of being 28. I felt like I was supposed to know what to do with the rest of my life. And when we started getting attention, I had to ask if being in a band was what I wanted, particularly one with a friend. We've all seen Behind The Music...there are a lot of cliches that exist within rock and roll because they are true."
           The last thing Christopher Owens and Chet J.R White

wanted for Girls was to become a cliche, but the truth was Chris couldn't stay in Girls anymore. 
         Chris was always a diva...but once a diva is given fame, attention and critical acclaim, they tend to leave friends and those who made them in their wake, J.R chiefly among them. Owens blamed drugs, he blamed the turnover of band members, but most of all it was Chris's ego-trip that broke his partnership with J.R. 
          The singer seemed to think he had to destroy Girls and cut out his friendship with White to finally get clean...

...so, in May 2012 after all contractual obligations were filled and the Girls "band" played their final show at the Primavera Festival, he did just that.
          

           Honestly, ever since he left (sober or not), Owens has failed to recapture the lightning he uncorked with J.R in that rehearsal room. Equally, ever since Owens took off, J.R's potential as a once-in-a-generation production talent has gone unrealized, save for some phenomenal work on Cass McCombs' Big Wheel and Others.
          Just like the disintegration of their San Francisco community of friends (Sandy Kim and Aaron Brown moving to New York in what was a "betrayal" according to Chris Owens), Owens and White knew things would never be the same once 2010 became 2011. The bigger the chasm grew between the pair, the more the music suffered (they weren't talking during the making of Father Son Holy Ghost). 
          Just as the songs on Album warned us: the snapshots fade, the people and places change and move on...with or without us. 
           Since their breakup, Owens has been cavalier during interviews, saying he'd "love to work with J.R again" and he "foresees it happening at some point." 
           However, Girls aren't a band who should reunite. They always felt like a symbol of an era lost in time, a brief stint in a varied reality. They had a bizarre dominion over independent rock and roll in those years, even the haters hinging on every word of their interviews. Girls only seemed to get bigger upon each release, while simultaneously moving ever further away from the values they held to.
          Maybe Owens and White became the cliche they always feared. But with a sonic legacy like Album, Broken Dreams Club, most of Father Son Holy Ghost and at least two other unreleased records left in their trail, is it such a bad thing to join other great cliches in rock and roll (The Stones, The Stooges, The Who, etc)?
          Usually when I play Girls to 20 year olds they wonder if it's an early Spector artist they're not hip to; but when I play them for my parents, they firmly believe the sounds they're hearing come from a band in 1967, rather than two guys using a junked laptop in a damp rehearsal space in 2008. 
           And that's really all we need to remember about Girls: they were two talented friends making music we all just happened to hear.
                   
 by
Lonn Phillips Sullivan