Music lovers who have been in tune with indie rock since the 90s surely know about Modest
Mouse.
Hailing from Washington state, they had a huge hit in 2004 with "Float On," but there's
a lot more to them than that.
This is the untold truth of Modest Mouse.
Perhaps one of the biggest mysteries around the mythos of Modest Mouse is the band's name
itself.
It turns out that it comes from a rather unexpected source, specifically the renowned English
novelist Virginia Woolf.
Her debut 1917 story "The Mark on the Wall" features the quote:
"I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting
credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds
of modest, mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their
own praises."
As noted by the book The Big Book of Rock & Roll Names, frontman Isaac Brock read the
story in a class he was in and intended to name the band "Modest-Mouse Like People,"
but he ultimately decided that that was too long.
After a while, he actually regretted his choice, but he's since grown to embrace the name and
build it into his band's grand mythology.
Isaac Brock had a pretty wild childhood.
As he told Buzzfeed in 2015,
"If I wanted to count divorces and separations, on paper I have something like 16 or 18 [...] stepbrothers
and sisters.
The guy who kind of identified as my dad was my dad's brother, who was the second person
my mom married.
[She] left my dad for his brother."
His mother Kris said in response,
"His stories are born, in part, of his memories as a child.
And though they may be fractured memories and sometimes not completely accurate in chronology,
they were his perception and truth at the time.
Isaac isn't necessarily a linear kind of fellow.
You have to get used to that when you talk with him."
Some of the most notable aspects of Brock's youth include being raised in a fundamentalist
church and having hands placed on him until he spoke in tongues.
For a time, he and his family were part of the Great Oaks commune in Oregon.
According to his mother, these were people who lived in yurts and were into things like
raw foods, fasting, and enemas.
The Black Panther Party was a Black Power political organization founded in 1966 and
led by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.
They're a famous part of American history, but a little less famous are their counterparts,
known as the White Panthers.
The latter group was started in Detroit by Leni Sinclair, her husband John, Lawrence
"Pun" Plamondon, and the rock band MC5.
The Sinclairs heard that the Black Panthers didn't allow white people into the group,
and Seale told them they should create their own organization if they wanted to help.
According to Leni Sinclair, the group's main goals included:
"fighting for a clean planet and the freeing of political prisoners"
as well as,
"rock 'n' roll, dope, sex in the streets and the abolishing of capitalism."
This is all relevant to Modest Mouse because in 2015, Buzzfeed asked Isaac Brock's mother
Kris about a story he likes to tell of her being a member of the White Panthers.
She set the story straight by noting,
"I left home when I was 17 years old and through a friend I was given a safe place to live
by a White Panther collective.
They were not happy to have an underage liability on their hands, but luckily for me they were
not willing to put me on the street either.
I learned how to advocate on behalf of our elderly neighbors whose homes were threatened
by developers."
Like many bands, Modest Mouse has had a revolving door of members over the years.
Only Isaac Brock and drummer Jeremiah Green remain from the original roster.
And that revolving door has welcomed some very big names on occasion.
It's not every day that a band gets to collaborate with members of other iconic bands, and it's
even more rare to be able to incorporate them into the band's roster.
But between the years 2007 and 2015 in particular, Modest Mouse racked up quite the collection
of famous musicians on its recordings.
During that time, the band worked with four record producers, two mixdown engineers, Nirvana's
bass player, and the guitar player from The Smiths.
The song that Nirvana's Krist Novoselic recorded with Modest Mouse still hasn't seen the light
of day, as it was cut from the band's 2015 album Strangers To Ourselves.
As for Johnny Marr of The Smiths, he played on their 2007 album We Were Dead Before the
Ship Even Sank and toured with them for a stint between 2006 and 2008.
Back in 1997, before the release of their album The Lonesome Crowded West, Modest Mouse
was driving through Montana and Minnesota to get to a gig in Chicago.
Along for the ride was photographer Pat Graham.
In a 2015 Washington Post article, Graham revealed pictures of the band and told a fascinating
and scary story about that fateful trip to Chicago.
As he recalled,
"Twenty-four hours after [one] photo was taken, [former Modest Mouse bassist] Eric [Judy]
crashed the tour van as he spun out on a bridge in the snow.
The guardrail stopped us from plummeting to our deaths.
Thirty hours after [another] picture was taken, we almost ran over a frozen cow that was standing
dead in the middle of a snowy Montana highway.
Thirty-four hours or so after [another] picture, the van got stuck in the middle of a huge
snow drift.
Eventually, a hay-bailer pulled our van free and we drove to Minnesota."
A dead, frozen cow in the middle of a Montana highway sounds like the stuff of nightmares,
but Modest Mouse managed to incorporate this trip into the iconography of their album.
Go figure.
"Cow."
On March 13, 1997, near Phoenix, Arizona, a seemingly completely silent V-shaped craft
emitting lights of some kind was spotted by hundreds of witnesses, including Isaac Brock.
One of the witnesses had this to say about the occasion, which was dubbed the Phoenix
Lights Incident,
"It didn't seem threatening [...] When it was right overhead and we couldn't hear a
sound, it was like you're just awestruck."
"Thousands here in Arizona witnessed the most documented UFO sighting in the world."
Experts still don't know to this day what was actually witnessed that evening.
For his part, Brock has his own story to tell about that night.
In a 2015 interview with Studio 360, he claimed,
"I was in a plane in a holding pattern while that was going on."
He also revealed that the Modest Mouse song "The Best Room" was an homage of sorts to
that evening.
Six years later, he told the Irish Examiner,
"Look, I saw the Phoenix lights.
My flight was put into a holding pattern, for hours, I know what I saw."
So was Brock merely an unknowing bystander or an unverified witness to the lights?
Whatever you believe about his plane ride that night, it only makes his persona that
much more entertaining to behold.
"It was weird."
While Modest Mouse was recording 2000's The Moon & Antarctica, Isaac Brock was living
above a studio in Chicago.
On one occasion, he came home from a bar drunk and decided to smoke a cigarette before going
into his apartment.
There was a group of 14 local kids outside, and he decided to talk to them.
As he recalled to The A.V.
Club in 2004, one kid punched him out of nowhere, and the other kids started throwing bottles
at him and insulting him.
No other punches landed, but Brock still walked away with a broken jaw.
Considering all the wild tales that Brock has told throughout the years, this all could
be just another unverifiable story.
But The AV Club was unfamiliar with the incident before Brock brought it up, so perhaps this
really is one of those stranger-than-fiction situations where the truth actually matches
the mystique of Isaac Brock.
In the run-up to recording 2004's Good News For People Who Love Bad News, drummer Jeremiah
Green found himself beginning to lose track of reality while taking the prescription drug
Haldol.
As he recalled to the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier in 2005,
"I started having these religious hallucinations.
I believed I could put curses on people, and I also started to think I was possessed by
a demon."
Green's doctor told him to check himself into a mental health facility, and he came to realize
after a day that it was really just his meds that were off and that he wasn't going crazy.
A year-long departure from Modest Mouse resulted in Green missing the recording of the record
that proved to be the band's major breakthrough into the mainstream.
At the time, he found a companion in Tristan Marcum, whom he played with in the band Vells,
and who was having similar issues.
Every week, they would check in on each other and see which one was crazier.
In a 2015 interview with Newsweek, Isaac Brock was asked why it took eight years to release
the album Strangers To Ourselves.
He responded by noting the various producers the band went through, the recording process,
the touring, and eventually their struggles finding a place to record.
As he put it,
"Our six-month lease was done, and rather than just have a makeshift studio that was
going to work, we actually f---ing built one — which, you know, a lot of time and resources,
personal time and money, went into doing [that]."
Brock also talked with Relix Magazine about what building their own studio entailed, as
he explained,
"We were thinking really bare bones — rent a warehouse, put mattresses against the wall
to deaden it, stacks of used books around the engineer [...] The lease was coming up.
I got carried away.
So I had to buy the building at that point because I’d dumped so much money into building
an actual studio."
The space was eventually dubbed Ice Cream Party Studios.
"Yum."
In August 2016, Isaac Brock collided with a city of Portland vehicle after falling asleep
at the wheel.
He wasn't charged with a crime at the time, but he would eventually be sued by city employee
Cassidy Kane for physical damages, including herniated disks in her spine, as well as other
tissue and muscle damage.
Kane claimed that she continued to experience pain and numbness in her extremities.
She sued Brock for $865,000, and the lawsuit filing also claimed that she would need steroid
injections and possibly surgery.
Brock was reportedly checked for signs of intoxication or drug use, but neither were
able to be confirmed.
He got a ticket for "careless driving" that came with a $435 fine.
According to Kane's attorney, the case was ultimately settled for an undisclosed sum.
In 2021, Spin Magazine interviewed Isaac Brock about Modest Mouse's new album The Golden
Casket, and the discussion took a very paranoid turn when the subject of Brock's stalkers
came up.
As the singer recalled,
"Honestly, I had three prominent stalkers.
One of them got arrested for lighting the security cameras on my porch on fire.
There's another one who I won't even mention any of the details, but he went to jail for
a while.
And then there was another one.
He was very, very interesting.
He at some point basically drew my attention to the fact that I was not only being stalked
by him.
The reason that he thought I was so fun to stalk was that other people were following
me."
Brock also talked about "gang-stalking," in which several people work together to stalk
the same person in order to drive that person crazy.
According to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health,
gang stalking does indeed involve a single stalker enlisting the help of others in a
concerted effort by a group.
Clearly, it did a number on Brock, though he's at least survived to tell the tale.
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