However, when the footage begins, it appears as if Brock has been banished. Martsch told me later that Brock used to wear a top hat on the Treepeople show, but tonight Isaac doesn’t see one himself. He tells me about flying to DC with Bertram to tour Betsy from the Heavens and the Bratmobile during this show, how weird that was then and how it happened. He stomps his feet and smiles for a few songs, motioning to more friends. He talks about how nice Marsh has always been, even before Built to Spill, until he realized how absurd this late-night hanging out really is.
“After spending hours trying to figure out a way to watch it, we’re in our kids’ room,” he says, laughing. “I agree.” Was Kind of a pain in the ass. “I enjoyed that part. I don’t mind when things get hard – finding cables, moving around.”
nine years agoBrock was packing his bags to leave Portland after 15 years in the city. He was bound for New Zealand, bound for some place where he could start again.
Brock’s real success came in Portland. He bought his first home there near the intersection of 18th Avenue and Belmont Street good news Unexpected Benefit Brock told me, it was once a halfway house for teenage girls, and former students would sometimes stop by and tell him how important the place was. He wrote much of 2007 We were dead before the ship sank There in the attic, and it was here that he began keeping bees, an interest that has continued ever since.
That house was across the street from Colonel Summers Park, where “every scoundrel and scoundrel in town lived,” he says. The neighbors kept things interesting, at least: One day, a woman named Pandora broke into his house six times until he drove her away, waving an ax and shouting, “I’ll drown in your blood.” Another day, some people from the neighborhood broke two of his ribs when he blindly chased someone who had earlier attacked him in the park. When it got too cold, he would sometimes invite neighbors without houses to sleep inside. “This was the dirtiest house in the neighborhood at one time,” he tells me as we adjust the legs of his bee boxes against a dirty white fence near his horse barn, both of our faces hidden behind beekeepers’ masks. “It was a wild place to live. I loved it.”
But by 2016, Brock’s life in Southeast Portland had fallen apart. Bassist Eric Judy left Modest Mouse several years ago and in 2015 stranger than yourself Pushed him even further from his professional peak. That summer, Brock crashed his Land Rover into a city vehicle, causing a multiple-car pileup; Brock was not charged with a crime, but the driver was filed a lawsuit against For $865,000, claiming that Brock was disabled. (A judge dismissed the case with prejudice nearly three years later.) Of the four days he spent with Brock, this period from a decade ago is one of the few things he won’t talk about at all. “I was living the wrong life,” he tells me one night, a canned cider in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “But it is No “Something I want to discuss.”
Around that time, Shawn Hurley – one of Brock’s best friends since they became roommates in 1997, and Modest Mouse’s eventual and reluctant tour manager – visited the singer in Portland. It was no interference, Hurley insists, even about the friend who was best man at her wedding, who gave her a dog, Spooky the Fruit Bat, shortly after her first divorce: “I wanted him to look me in the face if he was going to behave like this,” Hurley recalls. “It wasn’t a very nice sight.”
