Get Free

For the 20th anniversary of Highly Evolved: Thoughts on the Vines, the OC, college, fun, mediocrity, and more

Note: In 2020 I got into sort of a Stockholm Syndrome-y thing with the Vines’ debut record Highly Evolved, meaning I woke up one day thinking about it and proceeded to listen to it until I started to believe that it was pretty good. I think I tweeted something like “‘Get Free’ holds up” which is I now understand is not necessarily true. But honestly I have no idea if it holds up or not, because I’ve lost all perspective.

Anyway, in 2021 I ended up writing this pretty long thing about the Vines and, because Highly Evolved was released 20 years ago last week, I figured I’d dig it up and share it here. Forgive the typos, I’m only human.

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So there was this one day in 2020 that I decided to get very, very drunk.

Later, when my hangover woke me a good three hours ahead of my alarm (I’m not sure why I even bothered to set one, since I had nowhere to go) I cursed myself for facilitating such a totally predictable outcome. But as my stomach churned, my miserable skull echoed with a song I’d not thought of in a very long time. “I wanna get free,” it went, “ride into the sun.” Stuck at home for yet another day, I told myself, I’d simply been trying to “get free.” Even in my stripped-down mental state, or because of it maybe, I could easily pull the simple lyrics from the depths of my memory. I didn’t have to listen to it to hear it, but I brought the video up on YouTube anyway. “Getting free,” I thought. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Get Free,” the 2002 hit by Australian garage-rock/brit pop revival band the Vines, is not a very good song. It is not an especially horrible song. It’s a deeply mediocre rock song like a million others. You might hear it at a bar once in a while, or at the gym (if you’re lucky) but mostly it lives on in the deepest recesses of geriatric millennial consciousness.

I was 18, just about to be a college freshman, when the Vines released their debut record Highly Evolved on July 14, 2002. The previous year the White Stripes released their breakout third record White Blood Cells, and the Strokes dropped their debut This Is It, and a lot of music industry people put their money on garage-rock revival. 

Of course most of the bands that came out of this moment weren’t as good as the Strokes, industry kids who stole from the best and hit the sweet-spot between stylishly (if cartoonishly) sexy and existentially defeated; or the White Stripes, who had real Detroit rock cred and wrote tunes so good and lyrics so stupidly smart that their red and white/brother-sister gimmick seemed almost understated.

The Vines were widely and correctly understood to be second-string at best, in the same league Sweden’s The Hives, memorable for their matching suits and lone hit; England’s The Libertines, who had the Strokes-ish posh bad-boy thing, but didn’t do anything terribly interesting with it; The Von Bondies, Jack White’s Detroit “rivals” (as if); and seemingly countless other bands that, to some degree or another, bore time-tested signifiers of underground credibility (messy hair, leather jackets, bad attitudes). These bands may have been able to string a few chords together just fine but were moreso powered by unleaded label-driven hype. 

The Vines did manage to carve out a tiny little niche, and anyone who wrote or talked about them at the time mentioned Nirvana, and with good reason. They’d formed in Sydney in 1994 to play Nirvana covers, after singer/guitarist Craig Nicholls and bassist Patrick Matthews, who worked together at McDonalds, discovered their shared love of that band.

Their rise to stardom is a story you can probably piece together yourself through various cliches. At some point between forming and hitting it big, a Capitol Records executive was so impressed by Nicholls’ chaotic persona that he agreed to distribute Highly Evolved. Presumably he thought he’d found a good, old-fashioned headline-grabbing rock star.

Some insane coverage in NME, July 2002

Though NME called the Vines the “future of rock (and then later apologized for that error) there were always plenty of detractors, myself at least somewhat included, who characterized Nicholls as a derivative Kurt Cobain wannabe with a bit of Gallagher brother outrageousness. Dave Grohl, not incorrectly, told Spin Magazine that Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” was a more challenging song than “Get Free.” 

On its release Pitchfork gave Highly Evolved a chilly 4.1 out of 10, complaining that the record was joyless and lifeless. “I’d even go so far as to say that Highly Evolved may actually be the least fun record of the year, with its grungy vocals and hamfisted guitarwork …It's not even a problem that they tattoo their influences on their foreheads and add nothing to what they steal from The Verve (on the slow songs), Nirvana (if Nirvana were a pop act), and the rest of commercial radio’s last twenty years. But did they have to make it so dull?” 

There were almost certainly duller records in 2002. I would have given Highly Evolved a 6.1, probably, because some of the songs are really catchy. Regardless, it’s difficult to defend the Vines against accusations of redundancy. One could argue that they weren’t a band that needed to exist: why not just listen to Nirvana, or the Verve, themselves B-list rockers at best? Fortunately, there are other reasons to make music than filling a glaring artistic void: Playing music is fun, and listening to it is fun. As long as it’s emotionally convincing (and even sometimes when it’s not), it can facilitate —for listener and artist alike — a sense of liberation, or at least comradery.

I was, around this time, an obsessive reader of music media. And I spent a lot of time eavesdropping on the clerks at my local used CD store. I knew where these various bands ranked in terms of importance. If I hadn’t seen Vines fans with my own eyes, at Metropol, in Pittsburgh, they would have remained, in my mind, irrelevant.

That night I was dragged along by my friend Hallie¹, who lived in my freshman dorm. Desperate for friends in this new stage of life, she and I bonded over a shared love of generalized alternative rock and the fact that our respective families seemed to have much less money than most of our private Catholic university classmates.

The author in 2002.

She was, I thought, strangely fixated on boring Brit pop, bands I can’t even remember, but which made the Vines sound like the MC5. Her style of fandom baffled me. Even when it came to bands we both liked, her experience struck me as incomprehensible. “Oh, I love this next part,” she would say, singing along to some dull, forgettable bridge, tossing her long blond hair over her pale, heart-shaped face (she looked like Julie Taylor from Friday Night Lights), grasping an invisible microphone with thin fingers, her big eyes squeezed closed. She hated her eyes, which were framed by hereditary dark circles. As if to make up for her look of permanent exhaustion, she was practically manic with her indiscriminate adoration. 

Here’s a band that Hallie liked and I hated. In fact, this idiotic artwork and album title still make me furious. I don’t remember what the music sounds like but I’m sure it sucks.

 I was equally baffling (perhaps “infuriating” is a better word) to her. She considered me a cliche: the uptight, judgmental indie rock fan frowning at the back of the room, arms crossed, rejecting all that was good and fun about music in favor of the arbitrary rules set by generations of the world’s biggest dorks. I’m not saying she didn’t have a point. 

But this divergence points to a bigger difference between Hallie and me: she liked to have fun and I, arguably, didn’t. 

To be fair to my younger self, I actually liked fun just fine. But thanks to a leftover childhood religiosity and a controlling personality, I was hypervigilant. I did drink —say, a glass of wine at a dinner party, if it was offered — but generally thought that getting drunk or doing drugs was a waste of time and brain cells.

Hallie drank and smoked weed, if she could manage to score either. She, like me, was boyfriendless, but aimed to lose her virginity ASAP, preferably to Led Zeppelin's “Tangerine” in the back of a Ford Bronco. 

At the dining hall she’d scream-laugh when our friends dared each other to eat disgusting condiment concoctions. I, the imagined champion of the put-upon kitchen staff, huffed, “You know one of the employees has to clean up that mess, right?”

But she was studying business and I was studying writing. To me, harsh judgment was part of my insufferable “craft.” Critiquing things was, for me, both a fun activity and an extension of my being. To love one thing was the same as hating something else, and both were equally important. For her, a person who knew how to be off the clock, it was an obstacle to a good time. 

Though my memory of that all-ages show is clouded by no other substance than time, enough of it has passed that needed a little outside info. Googling “The Vines Metropol Pittsburgh,” I found a 2002 post from the Pitt News, written by Clinton Doggett, who played in a Pittsburgh band called the Channel (now called More Humans), which Hallie and I, in a rare instance of passionately shared taste, adored.

Doggett was more of a “Margaret” than a “Hallie” in his critical approach to rock ‘n’ roll. He was (and remains) a sharp guy and a good writer of prose, not to mention an excellent songwriter, and I think his description of the Vines was more or less spot-on: 

“In a music scene dying for another Kurt Cobain, Nicholls seemed like a shoe-in. The Vines’ overnight success was much like Nirvana’s, and Nicholls’ outrageous public life, scruffy appearance and half-assed live performances have certainly summoned the ghost of Cobain. Their music, despite its definitive style, does reveal itself as heavily Nirvana-influenced.

But Cobain proved to be a truly screwed-up guy. Nicholls, on the other hand, is just a kid who wants to get drunk and rock out, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.”

In retrospect, calling Cobain a “screwed up guy” rather than using today’s softer, gentler language of Mental Health Awareness seems harsh. Also, Nicholls was himself (in 2002 lingo) a “screwed up guy” or, as we might put it today, “struggled with mental health issues.”

That said, I don’t recall any especially screwed up behavior by Nicholls at Metropol that night, as much as fans might have hoped for it. But I do remember the crowd, which was (I thought) oddly bro-y and wild. A few girls hopped up on their boyfriends’ shoulders to flash their tits: I’d been to concerts, big ones even, but never any major festivals (hadn’t this behavior gone out of style with Woodstock '99, for God’s sake?) and my experience was mostly limited to small punk and DIY spaces, where people might mosh a little here and there but mostly everyone just stood around and bobbed their heads and considered the authenticity of what they were witnessing. This, in comparison, felt contrived and false, like they’d all Asked Jeeves “how to attend a rock concert.”

The Vines led with the hit, rushing the tempo to it out of the way, but a few songs later the crowd was begging to hear it again. “Um, we already played that one,” said Nicholls in a pitch-perfect tone of ironic disdain, securing the audience in an adversarial role. Then, in a very early-aughts move, launched into a half-tempo cover of OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson.” 

As his band grew in popularity, Nicholls became infamously hard to deal with, and had several well-publicized “meltdowns” on late night TV and elsewhere, including an incident where he kicked a photographer and damaged his camera, which resulted in assault charges. Eventually he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which meant that he was more negatively impacted than most by excessive drinking, drugging and fast food-eating. It’s a fair enough explanation for his out-of-control behavior, though I also wonder, what excuse does every other medium-talent hotel-trashing rock ‘n’ roll bad boy have to offer?

In retrospect, the Vines were, I think, emotionally convincing enough to justify their existence, and scored earnestness points for their history as a cover band. But to me their popularity still felt like mass delusion. It was like when Seventeen tried to tell me that Issac Hanson or Jason Biggs were heartthrobs. I really did want to understand, I wanted to believe, I wanted to be part of a cultural moment. But it didn’t make sense. Nowadays I think maybe I didn't have the context.

Last year my roommate and I watched The OC, which ran from 2003 to 2007, and played it’s own part in the indie-rock hype machine. It was a phenomenon then, and remains a cultural landmark as a teen soap opera that took it’s audience seriously. Adam Brody’s Seth Cohen was, in particular, an icon of pseudo-underground emo/alternative music culture, and via his fandom the show helped boost the profiles of bands like Death Cab for Cutie, The Killers and Modest Mouse. I didn’t watch it back then, for the same reasons I didn’t really drink or dance at shows or have a certain kind of fun: Because I was had better things to do, and whatever, TV was stupid anyway. More accurately, though, teen sex dramas made me anxious, and Mischa Barton’s flat belly and low-rise pants made me despondent about my own body. 

Misha Barton as Marissa Cooper during her punk phase

A couple of decades later I enjoyed The OC quite a lot, especially the musical content. There’s an episode in the first season where the central teen characters score all-access passes to see the band Rooney. Rooney, we’re told by a rich and well-connected peer, are “amazing live.” Later, Seth’s cool aunt tells him that she saw Rooney open for the Vines in LA, and we’re supposed to understand that that’s basically like seeing the Stooges in 1968. 

Rooney, like many moderately successful bands of the time, sounded like a less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts mishmash of the Beatles, the Cars, Oasis, the Strokes. I never listened to them, despite the fact that frontman Robert Schwartzman— brother to Jason who, was for a time, in Phantom Planet, who did The OC theme song— was very cute as the love interest in The Princess Diaries. 

Everyone spends the episode either talking about how they don’t know anything about Rooney (because they’re normies and/or into sports and/or don’t like music or fun), or talking about how great Rooney is, and how totally thrilling it would be if they played their whole debut record. The band performs and the crowd goes wild because they’re young and attractive and watching other young, attractive people playing catchy music with a lot of conviction. 

Luke, the full-hearted, empty-headed jock who initially sees all the punky-looking rock fans as freaks, has the best time of any of them, singing along to songs he’s hearing for the first time and cheering “Rooney!!!” This is presented as a minor plot twist: Who knew this big lug could appreciate alternative rock? But maybe—given a similar scene all those years ago at Metropol— the Lukes of the world were the core audience all along. Or maybe the idea of a core audience for a band like Rooney, or the Vines, isn’t really the point. Their live shows were backdrops for fun and their records were a means to process the most general of existential crises. 

Despite Pitchfork’s accusation of lifelessness, Highly Evolved sticks with me. Even mediocre art can express real pain and frustration. And what is more frustrating than creating mediocre art? And mediocre or not, whether you’re a Craig or a Kurt, what could be more enraging than an audience that demands the hit and only the hit, over and over, forever?

Whether middling art can truly facilitate joy, or freedom, I’m not convinced either way. But I often think that maybe Hallie had the right idea all along. Later I’d loosen my hang-ups and (arguably) my artistic standards, and she and I would dance around her kitchen to terrible Brit-pop, drinking gin and smoking Marlboro Ultra-Lights. We had a lot of fun. 

My friendship with Hallie lasted for a long time but not forever. She, over the years, stopped returning my texts, and everyone else’s. As Nicholls once put it, “She never loved me/why should anyone?”

A mutual friend observed that Hallie seemed to be disappointed by her life, her business degree which supposed to mean international travel and fun and new faces and freedom and time for concerts and romance and smoking and dancing in the kitchen, but really meant grim hotels and airports and dull middle-aged salesmen. I hope she still has a lot of fun.

My career path has offered its own disappointments (no money, not much room to “progress” in a normal career sense, looming irrelevancy. My own fears of mediocrity haunt me, which is probably why I’m so obsessed with the concept).

I’ve listened to all of the subsequent Vines records at least once, and they’re not horrible but they’re not very good. Nicholls doesn’t offer interesting answers, but there is some catharsis in his bare framework of desire. At best “Get Free” is a mission statement, at worst self-soothing for a brutal hangover, and really that’s not so bad. 

1. I’m changing her name just to be safe