The Big Shot Chronicles

By early 1985, all of the original members of Game Theory had left the band, except for Miller. Miller relocated to San Francisco together with future Game Theory member Donnette Thayer. Miller assembled a new line-up in the San Francisco Bay Area, featuring Shelley LaFreniere on keyboards, Gil Ray on drums, and Suzi Ziegler on bass.[2]

Miller and Gil Ray, prior to first show of new line-up, 1985.

The newly formed San Francisco version of Game Theory commenced a national tour in 1985 in support of Game Theory's previous album, Real Nighttime, an album on which none of them (except Miller) had appeared.[2] During a break in the middle of the band's tour for Real Nighttime, it was this line-up that recorded The Big Shot Chronicles.

Prior to touring in support of The Big Shot Chronicles in 1986, the group experienced another change of personnel, becoming a five-piece band. Suzi Ziegler left the band shortly after the conclusion of the Real Nighttime tour in 1985.[2]

For the 1986 tour, Donnette Thayer joined Game Theory as rhythm guitarist and vocalist, and Guillaume Gassuan replaced Ziegler on bass. This line-up remained together to record and tour for two subsequent albums, Lolita Nation (1987) and Two Steps from the Middle Ages (1988).

According to Burt, this song "follows a fragile promise, or a premise, not unique to nerds: that the gang of kids with whom you might belong, who share your tastes and habits, can make whatever you like stay with you for good."[9] Burt wrote that the song

follows a party run by "MIT-grad alleycats with time on their hands," at the Victoria Hotel (a real hotel in Berkeley) to which "all the kids from 916" (Sacramento and Davis) show up; Miller has joined them, but can’t seem to join in their fun—he may be too old, or too lovelorn, or too self-conscious. "Gifted children link your arms in rhyme," the last verse implores, as the big guitar rises beneath it: "better make this world while still it gives you time." Pounding along, for a while, like any teen anthem, "I've Tried Subtlety" works so memorably as a song because it fails as a call to arms: each verse, each break, goes on a measure longer than we expect, as if to accommodate second thoughts.[9]

Former Game Theory member Fred Juhos filmed an unofficial video for "I've Tried Subtlety," with the 1986 five-piece line-up of the group.[11][12]

"Erica's Word," regarded as the best known track on The Big Shot Chronicles, was released as a single,[13] and became Game Theory's first official music video. Commissioned by Enigma Records, the video featured the band's 1986 five-person line-up, and was directed by Jan Novello, with art direction by Modi Karlsson.[14][15] The video received airplay on MTV's 120 Minutes, and contributed to the song's durability as "a popular college radio track for years."[16]

AllMusic's Stewart Mason wrote that "the super-catchy melody and Mitch Easter's crisp production" made it "ear candy for eggheads."[16] The song has been variously described as "sunny",[3] "soaring,"[17] or "restrained";[7] but according to Mason, "The moment in the final verse where Miller sweetly sings 'Girl, I hope it comes through for you in the clutch' and adds a teasing extra bar before spitting out a snotty 'But I won't bet much!' and swinging into the final chorus is one of those perfect little moments power pop fans savor like truffles."[16]

Assessing the song's popularity, Mason wrote:

If Game Theory was ever going to have a hit single, it would have been 1986's "Erica's Word." It did get them closer than any of their other songs ... but although the song has a strikingly memorable tune and a killer singalong chorus, accented by ideal little production touches like the slow instrumental build-up of the intro, acoustic rhythm guitars, expertly deployed handclaps and fuzzboxes, plus bassist Suzi Ziegler and keyboardist Shelley LaFreniere's chirpy backing vocals, it's still unlikely that a song with an opening line like "Erica's gone shy/Some unknown X behind the [why]" is going to burn up the charts. People don't like to be reminded of algebra in their nice little pop songs.[16]

According to Stephanie Burt's scholarly analysis, Miller's algebra "joins up with physics ... mass not conserving in the old way" to yield energy, Burt speculated, in a song that was "energetic indeed, the should-have-been breakthrough hit" that "even has a conventional video — the band mimes the song, and Miller tosses his hair."[9] In Burt's reading of the song, Miller seemed "almost happy to be so frustrated, since it gives him a reason to sing; he sounds even happier to be led, or misled, by the charismatic Erica, whom he says he has known since high school, when they were photographed in her car, going nowhere."[9]

Gil Ray and Suzi Ziegler performing "Regenisraen" in July 2013 at Scott Miller memorial tribute.

The title of the song "Regenisraen" sprang from Miller's attempt at "a sort of Jabberwocky speech meant to communicate a dreaming state," influenced by reading James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.[8] The title was a portmanteau word which Miller explained as a combination of "regeneration; crossed with the word Israel, which is a sort of symbol of the beginning of religion, Judeo-Christian tradition; and the word rain, just as a symbol of recurrent events, a cycle of nature. It all adds up to a word which to me means a sort of faith in regeneration after death, a hope that things will get brighter before the dawn, a song about depending on that kind of cyclical hope."[5] Miller later wrote, "I suppose my intention was to conjure up the feeling of finding yourself in need of spiritual renewal."[8]

"Crash Into June," according to Miller in 2007, was "about coming to terms with impulses toward nostalgia, and how that involves a feeling that the good times, such as they are, are necessarily hurtling past and can't be latched onto."[18] Miller added that he was convinced that the song was "a failed piece of writing as we were working it up," resulting in "a strange grudge against it" that later softened.[18]

"Never Mind," according to Burt, was a song of "pulled punches," bringing out tensions of a relationship in the repeated line: "The things I do for you girl, I ... never mind."[9] Analyzing the line's multiple possible meanings, Burt found, "(a) 'I never object inwardly to all the things I do for you,' (b) 'I never pay attention to what I do for you (serving you has become my second nature),' and (c) 'I expect you to pay appropriate attention to what I do for you (but I know you won't, so forget I brought it up).' Can they go on like that forever?"[9]

Scott Miller, 1985, from cover shoot for Game Theory LP The Big Shot Chronicles. (Photo: Robert Toren)

Calling the song "a marvelously oblique closer" to the album, Mason wrote:

"Like a Girl Jesus" starts as a nearly solo performance, just Scott Miller's hushed vocals and electric guitar against a backdrop of Suzi Ziegler's almost subliminal bass part and occasional random keyboard and percussion sounds. The tension builds throughout the song, Miller's vocals getting closer to a Chris Bell strangled whine than at any other point in his career, until, with less than a minute to go, drummer Gil Ray and keyboardist Shelley LaFreniere finally burst in to drive the song home '70s-prog-ballad style, complete with busy tom-tom rolls and a seemingly tongue-in-cheek bombastic quality.[19]

In Stephanie Burt's analysis, the song was "true to Miller's cerebral innocence," with its mathematical reference in the line "Like a girl Jesus, she's undefined."[9] According to Burt, "Miller's melisma, sliding four notes into the long 'i' in 'undefined,' gives listeners time to pursue double meanings: (1) the boy doesn't know what the girl is really like (since he worships her), (2) some operations—division by zero, for instance, or his dating her—cannot take place in a given system of rules."[9]

Miller recalled that the recording of the instrument parts "was all one take stuff," and added, "I wrote the song almost instantly, too; I distinctly remember my intent was to get it put out as a flexi disk in Bucketfull of Brains magazine."[3]

According to Mason, the song became a "beloved Game Theory classic – and one of the few to get covered, by both Sleepyhead and the Killjoys."[19]

The Guitar Player by Vermeer

The song's title alluded to a Jan Vermeer painting, The Guitar Player (1672), and was also inspired by Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles.[20] The lyrics include a reference to artist Henri Rousseau, among other influences of Miller's early university education as an art major.

Under the title "The Girl With the Guitar (Says Oh Yeah)," this song was first released by The Three O'Clock, appearing on their 1985 album Arrive Without Travelling. On that album, the song was credited to Miller and Michael Quercio, who contributed the middle portion (bridge and lyrics).[20] An earlier demo version appeared on The Three O'Clock's compilations The Hidden World Revealed (2013) and Aquarius Andromeda (2014).

"Faithless," written by Fred Juhos, was a song from the 1984 Real Nighttime recording sessions, and was recorded by the 1984 Davis-based line-up of Game Theory. The Big Shot Chronicles included it as a bonus track in an apparent effort by Alias Records to balance an error made on the CD release of Real Nighttime (originally by Enigma Records).

Game Theory's cover version of Todd Rundgren's "Couldn't I Just Tell You", recorded in 1985 during the same sessions as The Big Shot Chronicles, appeared as a bonus track on the 1993 CD release of Real Nighttime, rather than on the contemporaneous CD of The Big Shot Chronicles. In an interview, Miller said the recording "sounded glorious... I was sort of unconscious during the mixing of that; Mitch pretty much did all of it, and I just sort of slept through the performance of it."[10] He further noted, prior to the 1993 CD release, the rarity of the recording:

[I]t took me two years to obtain a copy of it because it was released in Australia. What happened was Enigma sold the [Australian] rights to Game Theory to Big Time Records and then apparently pulled out of the deal right when they were going to release the record or something really awful like that. So Big Time just pressed up Big Shot Chronicles ... and this single with "Erica's Word" backed with "Couldn't I Just Tell You." We wanted to give them something that wasn't available on the record. So there were 100 copies made, or something like that, and all pulled [from release].[10]