The forgotten ‘90s rock band Thomas Pynchon was a ‘groupie’ for
In 1994, four years after Thomas Pynchon published Vineland and as grunge began to simmer down, Oasis were emerging from Burnage and the likes of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers got ready to take over the UK music scene, a couple of rock singles of immense quality found their way over from New York courtesy of an unknown band called Lotion.
Twice in succession, these towering singles, ‘Head’ and ‘Tear’, became big hits, and when the debut album, titled Full Isaac, followed it was an incredibly creative mix, almost genre defying, with huge guitar driven songs interspersed with off the wall lyrics, delicate, complex instrumental breaks, and fuzzy, melodic basslines.
Really, Full Isaac should have been enormous. It was packed full of fantastic songs, it had hints of the likes of REM and Echo and the Bunnymen at their very best, it sounded like nothing else released that year, and it swiftly disappeared without a trace. But in their native Manhattan, the band had a dedicated if small army of fans, one of whom happened to be none other than Inherent Vice author Thomas Pynchon.
Here’s where things get interesting – the band themselves perpetrated an urban myth that Pynchon himself had turned up at one of their gigs wearing a ‘Godzilla’ T-shirt and saying he was a big fan, giving his name only as ‘Tom’, but not revealing his true identity until months later when he spotted a collection of his short stories backstage. Like most good stories, the truth was somewhere in the middle – Pynchon had indeed heard the band and enjoyed their work, and had been to a couple of shows.
He liked them enough in fact, that he would not only visit them in the studio while they recorded the follow up album Nobody’s Cool, but that he would also interview them for an article in Esquire to the amazement of the American press who knew Pynchon was notoriously reclusive, spoken of by some as ‘the invisible author’, although Lotion’s singer Tony Zajkowski said: “Tom never cultivated his reclusiveness, we did. This guy was not Clark Kent.”
Pynchon eventually wrote the liner notes for that album, and when word got out that he was a supposed ‘groupie’, the erudite hipsters of the East Village began to descend on each gig clutching scripts and novels that they wanted the legendary author to cast an eye over.
The band’s drummer, Rob Youngberg, said at the time: “We wanted him to do [the liner notes], so we kept hinting… Then he offered”. But it seems there wasn’t actually any coincidence behind Pynchon becoming a fan of the band. It turns out Youngberg’s mother happened to be the author’s accountant and had passed him a copy of the debut album to listen to before it was released.
Full Isaac still sounds as unusual and brilliant now as it did more than thirty years ago; from the ominous opening chords and wall of guitars that ‘Tear’ introduces, through to the breakneck ‘La Boost’, to the acoustic, cello-backed splendour of ‘Around’, it is a forgotten, fiercely inventive, under-appreciated masterpiece. Pynchon, it turns out, has excellent music taste.
After the band split in 2001, the members went their separate ways and pursued ‘normal’ jobs, with Zajkowski becoming a successful TV editor and bassist Bill Ferguson getting a job on the Times magazine copy desk.
The group only reunites very occasionally, performing just three gigs in 20 years. The last time they came together was back in 2023 at a record label anniversary gig, but if you want to hear them at their astonishing best, give Full Isaac a listen and help a genuinely special LP finally get the attention it warranted the first time around. It’s what Thomas would want.
