The Dimes’ debut album, The Silent Generation, is packed with bright, breezy pop songs driven by lead singer and songwriter Johnny Clay’s achingly pure tenor and sparkling acoustic guitar complemented by the swooning harmony vocals supplied by the band; vocals so full of youthful exuberance that they brighten the air around you like shimmering bolts of summer sunshine. You’re already in a pleasant pop trance when you notice that they’re not painting joyful pictures of boy meets girl. No, the songs on The Silent Generation deal with murder, political riots, war, death, and people going insane before they jump into the sea in botched suicide attempts. The album has gotten raves for their ability to bring light into even the darkest scenarios, and the band’s blend of acoustic and electric guitars to create a sound that manages to be soothing and energetic at the same time. The album touches on folk, pop, singer-songwriter, acoustic rock, and more, without fitting comfortably into any pigeonhole. Are the Dimes folkies with a jones for Beatles harmonies or indie pop kids with literary allusions? Clay explains.

“The story songs came out of conversations between Pierre [Kaiser, the Dimes’ lead guitarist, Moog master, and backing vocalist] and I. We work the same day job and usually eat lunch together. I used to write boy/girl songs like most pop writers, but at lunch I’m always talking about stories I read in the newspapers. Pierre said, ‘Why don’t you write story songs? They’d be better than the crap you’ve been bringing me lately.’ I was already working on ‘Catch Me Jumping’, which is a true story about a friend who joined the Navy. He was out at sea and ended up jumping off the ship, I think as a cry for help. We’d just been in Japan, playing shows on US bases, including the one he was stationed to. He was on a tight leash, and had to check in with the guards before he could make any move. It was a real story and the other guys in the band had such a positive reaction to it, it got me addicted to the idea of story songs. It was a combination of Pierre telling me to get off my ass and stop trying to fit into some mold, and my realization after [writing ‘Catch Me Jumping’] that it could be a great thing. I started working on ‘The Battle of San Jacinto’, which I grew up hearing about in school in San Antone. I did some research and found out what both sides were experiencing, and it was my first history song. When I saw how much fun it was to write and how rewarding it was, story songs became the story of the band for the next year and a half.”

The Dimes had already put out two EPs tracing their evolution from an effects heavy rock band to a more contemplative pop band. “Catch Me Jumping” from the second EP became a buzz track among their peers in Portland, Oregon. The band was going over to Kaiser’s house to work out arrangements for the songs they were planning to put on their first album, when fate stepped in.

“Pierre has an old house he’s renovating, which made it a perfect studio,” Clay says. “He had isolated all the instruments in empty rooms and set up a studio in the basement. We were going over for an all-weekend session, and when we showed up, Pierre had a stack of tattered newspapers on the kitchen table. He’d torn up the kitchen floor and under the floor someone had used these newspapers for insulation. They were laid flat and in good shape. We must have read then for an hour and the page he handed me was a world news page from the long-gone Oregonian Daily Journal. It had headlines like ‘Reds Riot in New York’ and ‘Man Awake for 15 Years Can’t Pay His Club Bill’ and ‘Emmy Destin Dies in Czechoslovakia.’ I couldn’t stop reading. The ‘Man Awake’ story was about Captain Paul Kern, who was shot in the head in WWI. They saved his life, but the bullet hit the part of his brain that controls sleep and fatigue. He never slept again for the rest of his life. He hung out at a club to find people to talk to at three in the morning. I started singing ‘Paul Kern can’t sleep…’ I stayed up all night and wrote ‘Paul Kern.’ I showed up for rehearsal the next day and played it and we all got excited. We spent the day jamming on it and the parts came together. I got three songs from that one page of newsprint. We would have had fun making whatever album we would have made, but after those newspapers it veered from one history song to three, then seven more.”

As Clay brought in the songs, the other Dimes—Kaiser, Ryan Johnston (bass, synths, vocals), and Jake Rahner (drums, percussion, vocals)—contributed their musical magic to the arrangements. The soaring Beatles-esque harmonies stand out, but subtle touches of Moog and other synthesizer effects add mysterious accents to the tunes, while the inventive rhythms of Johnston and Rahner give every tune its own unique pulse. “The Jersey Kid”, the story of a man getting the electric chair for murder, is accented by flamenco handclaps. “Catch Me Jumping” has mournful oboe-like synthesizer fills, and “New York 1930” uses melodica and baroque vocal harmonies to tell the story of a riot following the guilty verdict in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, wherein two Italian immigrant anarchists were convicted of two murders and a robbery they almost certainly did not commit.

The melodies the Dimes put together are pure pop, accented by folk, rock, and blues influences. The band members are all fans of the Beatles, John Lennon’s solo work, Dylan, Neil Young, Baez, and Elliott Smith, so the folk influence is definitely there. The songs on the album twinkle like little gems, with each vocal and instrumental touch fully present in the mix, yet always in service of the overall sound. “We recorded and produced ourselves in our various bedrooms, basements, and attics using Pro Tools,” Clay says. “But there’s such a thing as being too perfect. If we don’t nail it in one take, it goes out and we do it again. I can’t stand pitch correction. I think relying on it is abusing the technology. We usually play live, over an acoustic guitar and vocal demo that I lay down with a click track, so we get that live feel. If you know what you’re going for, you can capture the raw element without sounding too digital.”

The Dimes came together after Clay moved out to Portland from Texas, “to follow a girl, the age-old story. But we’re now married, so it was a good move.” Clay played piano and sang at home in San Antone, and went on to major in music as Southwest Texas State (now Texas State). He switched to business after three semesters, although he did take a course in pop guitar. He was in a few bands in college and made a faux Beatles album with some friends before moving out to Portland. “I responded to an ad looking for a John Lennon for a Beatles tribute band and got the job, but the band only lasted three gigs. At the second gig I met Pierre, who invited me over to his house to jam with his roommate, Jake (Rahner), who played drums. We started getting together weekly. After writing a few songs, we put an ad for a bass player on Craig’s List and a few other sites and Ryan showed up. After we played one song with him, we asked him to join.”

Clay is currently working on the next batch of “history songs,” most of them centered on Boston. “We’re aiming to have the next group of songs ready by early ’09. When Pierre told me he grew up in Boston, I started to research the city, as if I were going on
a trip. Boston was the center of early American history, so I finished a Boston song. I had so much fun finding out about that history; I thought maybe we should have a couple of Boston tunes. I wrote about the ride of Paul Revere in the first person, and now I have 18 songs about people from Boston or events that happened there. Clara Barton, who started the American Red Cross, was from Boston; the Sacco-Venzetti trial took place in Boston, and led to the riot I wrote about in ‘New York 1930.’ The presiding judge in the case, Webster Thayer, had made up his mind before the trail that they were gonna fry, and told his friends at his country club he was gonna throw the book at them. They lost the trial and appealed, but he was the appellate judge and denied their appeal five times, which caused riots all over the world—London, New York, Moscow. The ‘Chicago 1929’ song was about the Great Chicago Fire, which was the biggest in American history, but a year later, in 1872, we had the Great Boston Fire. I wasn’t planning to tie the new songs to the first record, but I found all these connections when I started to investigate the history of Boston. It’s amazing how the threads of our history are so intertwined.”

Listen: Various Tracks  [at myspace.com]

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