American Football — American Football (1999)

Contrary to the beliefs of most every human not in the nearby physical vicinity, Champaign-Urbana is a real place. A real place that, sometimes, people visit.

A Champaign-Urbana visitor might be pinching their nose on the rural roads in from a nearby village, the smell of cow manure from the infamous South Farms overtaking all senses, clouding out even the drawl of Garth Brooks on crackling FM. Flocks of vehicles perform this routine reverse white flight migration, returning to “the city”—whose government copywriters tout as a “micro-urban community”—to catch a film at Savoy 16, in the tiny C-U suburb they perceive as safe, because it’s so far south.

They might be a family of three ripping down I-57, the two-hour straight-shot interstate from Chicago, a nearby place known to global outsiders as “The Windy City,” or “The Sufjan Stevens song,” but to “locals” from the North Shore as “The Only City In The State.” No cow manure seeping through the station wagon windows, just a crisp fall breeze from the endless corn and soybean farms on a route which unverifiable C-U legend claims Chinese President Xi Jinping once referred to as “the most beautiful drive in the world.” Trunk packed with all the belongings an 18-year-old could need to survive half a year in the middle of nowhere, including of course an array of green tops to-be-decided-upon later for “Unofficial,” the pre-St. Patty’s Day bash where drunken teens spill out of 19+ bars and onto Green St. to terrorize “townies.” 

They could be pulling off I-74 to refuel with a Big Gulp in a white out blizzard an hour’s trek southeast from Bloomington-Normal, Central Illinois’ faster growing “micro-urban community” where C-U-born David Foster Wallace lived and taught when he published Infinite Jest.

Relatives of Champaign residents could be visiting from any corner of Illinois, via car or bus or train, from Rockford to East St. Louis to Kankakee to any pocket of whatever people collectively agree to be “Chicago.” 

They could be landing at the airport from anywhere in the world (on one of a few often-canceled American Airlines flights, via either Dallas or Chicago).

However these visitors arrive, whatever they look like and however locals perceive them, they come for a reason. 

They usually come for sports. To watch Illini basketball, or the State High School Championships. Or—in the 2002 season, when the Bears played at Memorial Stadium while Soldier’s Field underwent construction—they might be coming to watch some good old fashioned American football. 

Believe it or not, coastal humans, but people also come to Champaign for the arts. For the specific type of culture that American college towns tend to provide. Like Ebertfest, to catch an overlooked film and a Q&A with an underbooked director at the Virginia Theater; red carpet replaced with a freshly-salted sidewalk stretching past the bench statue of Roger himself, flashing two bronze thumbs up for eternity. 

Perhaps no one would come just to pay tribute to REO Speedwagon Way, but they catch an Uber from Tolono, after drinking in at Hum member Matt Talbot’s bar The Loose Cobra, to watch local boomer alt-rockers Terminus Victor at any of the liquor and now cannabis-stenched downtown venues. Or Maybe they’d leaf through recycled Dan Fogleberg records at Exile on Main St. Or catch Japandroids or Jeff Rosenstock or another Polyvinyl act at Pygmalion Festival. Maybe they’d dance to country and bluegrass at Urbana’s Rose Bowl Tavern.

Most often they come to visit friends or family, drink, and drive or fly back to wherever they came. To distant places which don’t believe that the Bubbly City exists. Not in America, at least. Not without the g, and the associated alcoholic beverage.

These are the most common types, but there’s one more kind of person that comes to Champaign-Urbana. A place to which they have no familial or other obvious connection.

A stereotypical portrayal would assume they’re outfitted in tight blue jeans and a slim band t-shirt, long hair swooped to one side. But that’s not real. That’s imagination. They look like anyone, and come from everywhere. 

These visitors flock to central Illinois to see for certain that the place they collectively agree to be true in their hearts—that mystical universe of twinkling guitars and unfiltered feelings—exists. They come to see a building which makes them feel at home. They come to 704 W. High Street, Urbana IL. 61801. 

The American Football House.

The structure looks like what you would expect from student housing near the campus of a Midwestern state university encircled by cornfields. White siding. A porch. Pointy roof. Lone rectangular window just below the ridge. It is just another house. 

Except it is much more than that. It is Emo Mecca. Music fans from all over make the pilgrimage to stand in front and snap a selfie, to the chagrin of whatever aloof array of young adults happens to occupy it any given semester. 

Residents come and go from year to year and move on without second drunken thought, but to a specific community of passionate fans, the house is frozen in time. In 1999, when Chris Strong emerged from the basement where he dwelled and routine punk shows thrived to capture its facade in a simplistic, yet impactful, perfectly-angled photograph. Winter-bare trees hovering over the roof in the cloudy sky. Warm lights glowing from upstairs bedrooms. A classic album—somewhere nearby, but not, contrary to uninformed perception, inside—being made. 

This photograph is the lone visual accompaniment to American Football, the 1999 eponymous debut LP Mike Kinsella recorded in four days with two Steves—Holmes and Lamos, both fellow U of I students—before disbanding and moving away from Champaign-Urbana forever. The group fell apart as suddenly and spontaneously as it began, but in the ensuing years, its popularity and influence has oozed into crevices far beyond the flatlands where it sprouted up, like a soybean.

American Football emerged from the real place of Champaign-Urbana but its lineage stretches back a few years, up the opposite direction on I-57. As a high schooler in the Chicago suburb of Wheeling, Mike Kinsella was a member of Cap’n Jazz with his other brother Tim and two other non-Steves. That group can most accurately be summarized with the most simplistic and obvious of descriptors: ahead of their time, both in the context of the larger culture and their own young selves. Scrappy non-poor punks who injected elements of the genre in their namesake into a scene that otherwise would have rejected concepts like time signatures and actual musicality. A group who, like their lesser-known contemporaries, raged not against the machine but their own inner mechanics. Dissected their hearts, leaving them bleeding out over sloppily calculated but somehow precise AP-level musical math equations. 

When Cap’n Jazz dissolved in 1995, Tim formed Joan of Arc and enlisted his brother Mike to contribute in various unofficial capacities. But Mike moved away from the place where their elder relative lived and performed. Attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where by junior year he was probably saying what Fall Out Boy would popularize in a song title a few years later (“Chicago Is So Two Years Ago”). 

The same year Cap’n Jazz broke up, Matt Lunsford—a DIY punk fanatic who grew up in Danville, a Central Illinois town known for its pervasive smell of factory-produced rotten sewage—founded Polyvinyl Record Co. Like any good indie, the label distributed records from underexposed bands in the local regional scene. Their first pressing was a compilation album called Direction, featuring acts like Madison, WI’s Rainer Maria and Ezra Pound, Alton, IL’s Back of Dave and local C-U behemoths Braid. Polyvinyl’s breakout hit was Braid’s 1998 LP Frame & Canvas, which memorialized the band’s adopted hometown on track eight, “Urbana’s Too Dark.” Polyvinyl ensured that, despite the ill-informed notions of temporary visitors from distant lands or that lakeside metropolis up north, Champaign-Urbana’s unique and vibrant scene could connect with the wider world.

In Urbana 1999, it was too dark and too cold, but Chris Strong took that picture of his rented house anyways. Polyvinyl immortalized the image on the cover of American Football. No one expected much to happen beyond that, aside from the Kinsellas’ graduation, and their uncertain futures.

American Football was a side project. The band knew it would dissolve after their first collection of recordings came out. They didn’t plan a tour. Didn’t do much promo. But the energetic interplay of Mike Kinsella and Steve Holmes’ guitars was too kinetic not to capture. The band members didn’t think they’d be what they ended up as, but they knew they were doing something special. Using atypical tuning and complicated time signatures derivative of Cap’n Jazz, but slower and more calculated, American Football proved musical patterns that should work against each other can coalesce into a new sound more powerful than the sum of its parts. Whereas other Midwest Emo bands of the time were loud and explosive, American Football stayed within the pocket of subtle dynamics. Kept crooning instead of bursting into screams, filtering feelings atop instrumentals whenever the feeling struck. Songs this complex rarely come so easily, but these nine emptied out onto tape in less than a school week.

In the ensuing years post-American Football, Mike Kinsella carried on with his solo project Owen and the foundation of the Midwest scene fractured into infinitesimal bits. American Football, however, grew out of death into something bigger and better, like a successful corn or soybean yield. Most bands of the mid-aughts emo rock scene were inspired by the album, either directly or indirectly. Fall Out Boy and Paramore followed its lead to tabloid superstardom. Fans found it, passed it along, loved it. The photograph of the house on the cover was static, but it began to animate itself in the minds of listeners who—until a 2014 reunion retrospective video for “Never Meant,” shot within the building, courtesy again of Chris Strong—had only that white siding and glowing window for their eyes to latch onto. The image became “The American Football House.” The legend spread. 

In his 2010 Ted Talk entitled “How Architecture Helped Music Evolve,” David Byrne speaks about how physical location has an inextricable effect on the creation and consumption of music. He references an image of a jazz band performing on a riverboat in the early 20th century. “It’s noisy,” Byrne says. “They’re playing for dancers.” The music, as a result, adapted to fit the context of the room in which it was played. Jazz bands, Byrne explains, would improvise new melodies in order to appease their raucous crowds. Much like how composers centuries earlier would write music to fill the space of gothic cathedrals. He goes on to compare human music to the songs of birds, who use higher or lower frequencies depending on the density of surrounding foliage. Like birds, Byrne suggests, humans adapt songs to their surroundings.

The sounds of American Football display Mike Kinsella reacting to his new environment. Away from home and a little bit older, the music is stripped-down and subdued, yet still informed by the louder, brasher tones of bands in nearing regions. The teen angst of Cap’n Jazz gives way to the melancholy of young adulthood, as experienced by a random concoction of astute, eccentric and frigid Midwestern college kids. The end of summer—sung about, of course, on “Summer Ends”—is a pivotal marker of time for a university student, less so for the average working adult. For a specific person in a specific place at a specific time, the end of summer could mean the return of an estranged love. A lifetime of difference. New possibility. Everything. 

American Football is an album defined by its time and place and also its cover art, which is the visual representation of that specific time and place where emotions like those spurt forth from individuals undergoing a transformative period together. It encapsulates the bleak mundaneness of a Champaign-Urbana winter. Showcases how places with gravitational pull can camouflage themselves in ordinary plainness. The house is a symbol that resonates with fans far beyond its geographic coordinates. 

Would American Football have had the same impact if the art displayed, say, a big burly guy in pads flattening another guy holding a prolate spheroid pigskin? Impossible to determine. It is the music that matters. But that image of the house gives listeners a better understanding of the place where the band created the songs. Instills the sounds with an additional layer of feeling, taken in by another sense. The American Football House reveals the important relationship between music and place: both real physical location, and the ephemeral “places” music can take us. 

In May 2023, more than two decades since their initial formation and dissolution, and about ten years since their reunion, American Football’s official social media accounts announced that the band—along with a coalition including Chris Strong, Polyvinyl Record Co., photographer Abita Jefferson and a Chicago-based art gallery called Open House Contemporary—purchased the house at 704 W. High St. in Urbana. Their official justification was that they bought the building in “an effort to preserve its place and legacy within the community that built it.” They mentioned not wanting the house to get torn down and rebuilt as a condo. 

The news inflicted me—a Champaign born and raised American Football fan who hasn’t lived in my hometown for over a decade—with a wave of emotion similar to what I experienced the first time I heard “The One With The Wurlitzer.” A little bit of happiness, but not quite the “sincere joy” the band described in their announcement. 704 W. High St. is just a house. A crappy one. I knew someone who lived in it during college, whose tales of fending off intrusive emo tourists have become legend in their own right among our specific scene of fading friends. Although the housing crisis plaguing all of America and most of the world has not flown over Champaign-Urbana, and the campustown of my youth transforms skyward with new ugly modern monstrosities each time I visit, condos aren’t popping up in that particular neighborhood. American Football hasn’t lived in Champaign-Urbana in this millennium. What could they possibly do with that house that would be in service to anything aside from their own narcissistic self-image?

The band, it seems, is clinging to tangible physicality. Byrne isn’t wrong. The architecture of that house did inform the music. American Football could have only come from that specific place, at that specific time. In turn, the photograph of the house informed consumers’ appreciation of the album’s sounds.

But it is still just a house.

Decades have passed, unmemorable students have shuffled in and out, the leaves have fallen off the trees and regrown again and again and again, that predictable pattern of unpredictable weather repeating itself. 

It is not the house that matters. It is the stories about the house. It is what the house means to the people who love American Football, who in their misguided quests for connection or vapid likes, go out of their way to visit a place that exists—in much realer of a form than they’ll ever find in Champaign-Urbana—in their minds. Who is anyone, let alone a greedy developer, to take that away?

As long as the house stands, tethered to the plains in defiance of natural disasters like swirling tornados or human catastrophes like predatory real estate, American Football fans will always have a real place for their emotions to latch onto. But they don’t need to visit Champaign-Urbana to verify that their feelings are real. The house is a physical manifestation of the “place” music can reliably bring us back to, if we just flip past the album artwork, and come back home. The house will always exist, whether or not it does.