The entire quixotic notion of alternative rock as a commercial prospect was sputtering, too. Kurt Cobain had died the previous April, but the rock charts were still peppered with bands that had credible ties to the underground. Within a year, Live’s Throwing Copper would become the biggest rock album in America, helping to usher in the “post-grunge” era, when the majors stopped pretending to care about ingenuity and focused instead on signing increasingly faded carbon copies of Pearl Jam. The symbolism of Thinking Fellers’ opening slot on the Live’s 1995 tour is almost too perfect: The freaks get chased offstage and the professionals take over.
Thinking Fellers toured for another year, parted with Matador, made another album, 1996’s equally dazzling I Hope It Lands, and stepped back from the band as a career pursuit. They still played the occasional show and labored sporadically for years on their 2001 swan song, whose very title, Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner’s Celebrity Avalanche, is enough to signal the retreat of whatever aspirations to rock stardom they once held. It’s more elegiac than you might expect from the name: “91 Dodge Van,” titled after their old tour chariot, opens with autumnal guitars and Eickelberg sighing the lines “Looking back over our days, I know we’ve won/Sometimes it feels like that’s erased by moving on.” It also has a song called “Boob Feeler.”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s still one song on Strangers From the Universe to discuss, one final daydream before real life sets in. It’s called “Noble Experiment,” it closes the album, and it’s the only Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 song you’ll ever hear played around a campfire or performed by the sorts of indie rock stars the Fellers never became. The words were written by Davies and delivered by Eickelberg, with the other Fellers joining in harmony as the verses go by. “If the sadness of life makes you tired,” it begins, “and the failures of man make you sigh/You can look to the time soon arriving/When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day.”
“Noble Experiment,” a waltz-time lullaby for humanity’s extinction, brings Strangers From the Universe’s fixation on finality into clear focus, just as the album itself winds down. The Fellers receive this fate with characteristic jubilation: an opportunity to leave cruel routine behind and be reborn as sparrows chattering in the treetops or weeds busting up through old sidewalks. It would be disingenuous to suggest that Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 experienced a similarly transformative rebirth after calling it a day, that the band received the kind of widespread recognition in death that had eluded it in life. They’re not Pavement, or even Duster. There have been well-received reissues—the 2022 pressing of Strangers From the Universe sold out quickly—but they remain a band for the freaks. Still, the records live on, like the trees in “Hundreds of Years” that outlast the squabbling people, monuments to possibility yet unexplored. Or like the heart in “The Operation,” still pumping even as the body passes away.
