2003: The Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantic

By Kasey Anderson

The Ranch Room was a dusky, smoke-stained bar that shared an entrance and two bathrooms with an all-night diner, which made it an ideal drinking spot for every band in Bellingham, including mine. Apart from its proximity to biscuits and gravy, the Ranch Room was lifted above the ranks of every other locals-only dive in town by the quality of its jukebox, which held a collection rivaling that of any independent record store. Every Tuesday, the staff would take over the jukebox and play nothing but Tom Waits, all night long.

June 24th, 2003 was a Tuesday. Waits was barking his way through “Come On Up to the House” when my friend Ben looked up from his phone and said, “Orion’s dead.” 

Accustomed to the cadence of conversations that happen in the back of crowded basements, bars and rock clubs, without even registering what Ben had said, I reflexively shouted, “WHAT!?”

We were 23 years old. Neither of us knew how to deliver or receive grief. 

Ben moved closer, until there was not enough space between us for anything but those two words, and said again:

“Orion’s dead.” 

Orion Satushek and Angela Leazenby had been riding their bikes along Belmont Street in Southeast Portland a little before midnight when a drunk driver swerved into them, killing both instantly. 

Like most of my friends, Orion was itinerant by necessity, his living situation dictated by the touring schedules of his bands, but he had recently settled down in Portland, where he was part-owner of Mississippi Records and Repair. His relocation hadn’t stopped Orion from visiting Bellingham often; he had been with us, singing Waits songs until last call, just a few weeks before he died.

As the news about Orion and Angela spread through town, my friends filtered into the Ranch Room from band practices and gigs, and we drank, and cried, and lingered long after the lights had come up, and then walked out into the early morning stillness.

When I got home, I put on Guitar Romantic, the debut album from a Portland band called the Exploding Hearts. The album hadn’t left my stereo since its release that April, partly because I spent half my time in Portland and was friendly with the band, but mostly because Guitar Romantic was an instant classic — thirty minutes of relentless power pop riffs and gang-vocal hooks. The record won over national critics immediately. Pitchfork gave Guitar Romantic an 8.8; the Exploding Hearts appeared on the cover of Maximumrocknroll; music writers drew breathless comparisons to Elvis Costello, the Buzzcocks, and the Jam. The influences I heard running through the record were more localized. I was of the same generation as the folks in the Exploding Hearts, so when I listened to Guitar Romantic, I heard the bands we’d been turned on to by older kids at the skate park, the songs we got stoned to in our parents’ garages — a lineage of local scenes. Producer Pat Kearns’ everything-redlined mix and King Louie Bankston’s keyboards recalled the Sonics’ early albums; the chug-chime interplay between singer/guitarist Adam Cox and lead guitarist Terry Six drew heavily from Kurt Bloch and Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows; Jeremy Gage’s cymbals splashed across everything, a style Sam Henry had perfected on the Wipers’ Is This Real?; Matt Fitzgerald’s bass playing and Cox’s vocal delivery were rooted in soul and R&B but they owed as much to Sicko as they did the Supremes. To Pitchfork, Guitar Romantic sounded like a mashup of ‘70s British influences but I knew it was a Northwest record, through and through. 

Nostalgia is a hard and heavy drug that bends memory to its will, so while I’m sure everyone who says they were at the first Exploding Hearts show truly believes it, the fact is those early hometown gigs were sparsely attended. Any of the local bands that might have embraced the Exploding Hearts’ pastiche of influences had long since split up or moved south, so it was up to those of us who knew and loved the band to make believers of our friends. There was no scene in Portland for the Exploding Hearts to fit into so we built one around them.

Listening to Guitar Romantic in the hours after Orion died, I remembered how happy he had been to read the glowing reviews and how excited we were when we heard the band might soon sign with Lookout! Records. Our little community could be competitive, petty and melodramatic, but we were united in the communal celebration of our friends’ successes. 

Orion and Angela’s memorial was held in Portland Saturday, June 28th. Two weeks later, the Exploding Hearts headed to the Bay to visit the Lookout! offices and play a sold-out show at Bottom of the Hill. The trip went so well that they decided to stay a few extra days and play an unannounced gig at Thee Parkside, a neighborhood punk bar in Potrero Hill. That sold out, too, on word of mouth alone. It seemed like the Exploding Hearts were about to break. Portland was buzzing. The days of playing to fifteen friends were over.

On the morning of July 20th, the band was driving back from California when Matt Fitzgerald lost control of the van and it rolled across the highway. Adam Cox and Jeremy Gage died in the accident. Matt died in a nearby hospital, hours later. Terry Six and Rachelle Ramos, the band’s manager, survived. The Exploding Hearts never made it home.

Orion’s name was still hanging in the air between me and my friends, and now there was new grief to deliver and receive.

That fall, the Decemberists and Death Cab for Cutie released career-making albums (Her Majesty… and Translanticism, respectively) and when Modest Mouse followed a few months later with Good News for People Who Love Bad News, scenes in the Northwest began to coalesce around those bands. Across the country in Illinois, Fall Out Boy were starting to make a name for themselves on the strength of their debut record and not long after, the Midwest punk scene exploded. Maybe the Exploding Hearts would have gone on to lead their own multi-platinum “revival,” or maybe they would have followed in the footsteps of their influences and carved out a career left of the dial. They never got a chance to do either.

Over the years, my relationship to Guitar Romantic has changed; become bittersweet. Cox and Bankston’s odes to post-adolescent angst and loneliness have not aged well, but the songs sound every bit as urgent and electric as they did the first time I heard them. I suppose that’s how it goes — people outgrow the things they loved, outgrow one another, move away and move on. While I don’t return to Guitar Romantic often, I remain grateful for the songs and the scenes that kept me alive while my friends were dying.

Kasey Anderson is a gradually retiring songwriter and Program Director at the Alano Club of Portland in Portland, Oregon. He is working on his next album, which will be released next spring but can be pre-ordered right here, right now.