The Alternative Number Ones: The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.

For the life of me, I cannot believe that the Verve and the Verve Pipe happened at the same time. Within the same calendar year, these two bands had giant alt-rock radio hits — big, stormy, ambiguously meaningful ballads that continue to get stuck in my head decades later. The two bands were played at the same time on the same stations, and the only difference between their names was the nonsensical use of the word "Pipe" in one of them. In the past 29 years, I haven't encountered any other bands with the word "Verve" in their name. That one year, though, we had two of them. What the hell was that? Why?

I'm happy to say that I never got them confused. There were too many differences. The Verve were from England, and the Verve Pipe were from Someplace Else. The Verve's singer had floppy dark hair, while the Verve Pipe's singer had floppy bleach-blonde hair. The Verve had been around for a while, and the Verve Pipe, at least for those of us who don't come from Michigan, had not. The Verve were in music magazines, and the Verve Pipe were not. The Verve guy smashed into lots of people in his video, and the Verve Pipe guy didn't smash into anyone in his. This was light work for me. Anytime anyone got the two bands confused, I was right there, heroically willing to set them right.

But even with my complete, encyclopedic knowledge of which band was the Verve and which one was the Verve Pipe, I could sympathize with the poor unfortunate souls who couldn't keep them straight. It didn't make any sense, these two Verve bands landing on the same radio stations at the same time. People were still signing up for AOL accounts in 1997. Nobody could use a phone to settle an argument in a bar. You couldn't expect anyone to keep all this information straight in their heads. It was too confusing.

Maybe that's why "Bitter Sweet Symphony" never quite reached #1 on the Modern Rock chart. Obviously, that's what should've happened. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is a fucking masterpiece. When that shit played on the radio in my friend's car, we felt like we were in outer space, or maybe like everything outside the car was floating in slow motion. That song is pure, beautiful epic gibberish. When I play it today, I get the same charged electrical feeling that I do when I smell an incoming rainstorm. The song sounded huge, and it was huge. It remains huge. On the Modern Rock chart, however, "Bitter Sweet Symphony" peaked at #4 in January 1998. (It's a 10, obviously.) Maybe the powers that be at the alt-rock stations simply wouldn't let the song get any further than that. After all, the Verve Pipe got there first.

It's not fair to compare "The Freshmen," the one big hit from the Verve Pipe, to "Bitter Sweet Symphony." One was not written in conversation with the other. The Verve and the Verve Pipe came from two completely different places, and their cultural contexts had very little in common. Richard Ashcroft has probably already forgotten that he ever had to fight for radio airtime with a band called the Verve Pipe. "The Freshmen" can't hold a candle to "Bitter Sweet Symphony," but neither can the vast majority of songs in the history of popular music. The Verve Pipe can't be held responsible for that.

I won't hold the Verve Pipe responsible for the creeping omnipresence of grunge-adjacent melodramatic yarling on alt-rock radio, either. I could, but I won't.

"The Freshmen" is a song about abortion and a song about suicide. Over the years, the Verve Pipe frontman Brian Vander Ark has said conflicting things about "The Freshmen." At various points, the song was an entirely made-up story, or else it was a real story about an old girlfriend who died by suicide. Many years later, Vander Ark cleared everything up. Once upon a time, he and a friend both had on-and-off relationships with the same girl. That girl got an abortion, and Vander Ark never knew whether or not the kid would've been his or his friend's. He felt a lot of guilt about that. But the girl never took her own life. Vander Ark made that part up.

The storytelling on "The Freshmen" isn't exactly clear. On the first verse, Vander Ark sings about an abortion in only the vaguest terms: "I'm guilt-stricken, sobbin' with my head on the floor/ Stop a baby's breath and a shoe full of rice." I never got that "stop a baby's breath" was the abortion part and that the "shoe full of rice" was a reference to the hypothetical wedding that would never happen, but that was what Vander Ark meant. I think someone once told me that "The Freshmen" was a song about abortion, and I just accepted that and moved on without really thinking about it.

The suicide part is a little more sharply drawn. On the second verse, Vander Ark sings, "My best friend took a week's vacation to forget her/ His girl took a week's worth of Valium and slept." He never quite explains that the girl in the first verse is the same as the girl in the second verse, but '90s alt-rock was built for that kind of ambiguity. Someone probably also told me that "The Freshmen" was a song about suicide, and I probably accepted that, too.

On "The Freshmen," Vander Ark's narrator is older, and he feels a terrible tenderness for himself and the people he knew when they were merely freshmen. (He doesn't say whether he's talking about high school or college freshmen, and I suppose it doesn't much matter, since the precipice-of-adulthood thing makes sense either way.) These dumb, confident young people merely lived their lives in blissful ignorance of the consequences that waited for them, the idea that they'd ever die for these sins. But people do die. Plenty of freshmen never live long enough to regret their younger decisions. I knew some of them. You probably did, too.

I don't think abortion and suicide are anywhere near each other on the trauma spectrum. I knew kids who had abortions, and they grew up. I knew kids who died by suicide, and they did not grow up. But guilt is a heavy thing, and it can lead to a Midwestern alt-rocker making up a suicide just to turn his abortion story into something more tragic. Actually, "The Freshmen" was not the only big, sweeping abortion ballad to get heavy alt-rock airplay in the late '90s, and maybe that coincidence is even weirder than the Verve/Verve Pipe thing.

In February 1998, Ben Folds Five reached #6 with "Brick," their own regretful personal-experience song about feeling bad because your girlfriend terminated a pregnancy. (It's a 7.) "The Freshmen" and "Brick" are both songs are about the ultimately-irrelevant dude experience. The same is basically true of another song that'll eventually appear in this column. If there were any '90s radio hits where women sang about abortion experiences, I can't think of them right now.

But maybe it's not that helpful to think of "The Freshmen" as a song about abortion or suicide. It's perfectly possible to hear that song a million times without really considering the specifics of its story. What I always took away from "The Freshmen" was the idea of living an entire life with the fog of guilt and regret clouding your head. One guy blames himself for the abortion, and the other blames himself for the suicide. Both try to tell themselves that they can't be held responsible, but they still feel it. They fall through the ice when they try not to slip. I think "The Freshmen" works because it wraps itself up in that regret, finding some level of comfort in it. That, more than any hackily addressed societal issue, is probably why the song resonated the way that it did.

I haven't gotten into the Verve Pipe's story yet because the Verve Pipe's story basically is "The Freshmen." They're a band that emerged from nowhere, made one giant hit, and then quickly slipped back into obscurity. It happens. We've covered many such stories in this column. The Verve Pipe weren't long-struggling underground heroes or art-punk provocateurs. They were just some dudes. Today, they're still just some dudes.

Specifically, the Verve Pipe are some dudes from Michigan. When "The Freshmen" took off, Brian Vander Ark was in his early thirties, and the song itself was a few years old. Brian Vander Ark and his brother/bandmate Brad grew up in Grand Rapids. Brian loved '70s rock and singer-songwriter stuff. As a teenager, he got a job playing cover songs in a Holiday Inn bar, a line of work that is sadly unavailable to today's youth. He joined the Army at 19, and he spent the next few years serving overseas, doing intelligence work in what was then Czechoslovakia. When he got back home, he started a band.

Sometime around 1990, Brian and Brad Vander Ark formed a group with the frankly terrible name Johnny With An Eye. They played around the Grand Rapids area, and they released one 1991 demo tape. Like a lot of early efforts from people who have appeared in this column, Vander Ark's earliest music is the work of someone who clearly really, really liked R.E.M.

That demo included the very first version of "The Freshmen," a song that Vander Ark estimates that he wrote in 1990. The details match up. Vander Ark claims that he wrote the song in his living room, with MTV on mute. He says that he had most of it written before he came up with the chorus. He'd rented The Freshman, the 1990 comedy where Matthew Broderick plays a college student who gets mixed up with Marlon Brando's mob boss, and his eyes happened to fall on the tape at the right moment. Then he looked up at the TV, which was playing the Divinyls' "I Touch Myself" video. He saw Chrissy Amphlett touching her face in that clip, decided that it was sexy, and wrote the "she was touching her face" bit. Boom. Song finished. ("I Touch Myself" peaked at #2 on the Modern Rock chart. It's a 7.)

Johnny With An Eye didn't last long. After they broke up, the two Vander Ark brothers hooked up with two members of Water 4 The Pool, another Grand Rapids band whose name might've been even worse. The two groups basically joined forces to become the Verve Pipe. Years later, Vander Ark said that the name was a masturbation joke, and I'm glad he kept that secret for as long as he did.

The Verve Pipe, much like Johnny With An Eye and Water 4 The Pool before them, played collegiate-circuit shows around Michigan. They released a couple of independent albums, 1992's I've Suffered A Head Injury and 1993's Pop Smear. I've Suffered A Head Injury had another early acoustic version of "The Freshmen." Pop Smear sold a bunch of copies regionally and got attention from RCA, and the Verve Pipe signed with the label. They recorded their 1996 major-label debut Villains with Jerry Harrison, who has been in this column as a member of the Talking Heads and as a producer for Live and the Crash Test Dummies. (As a solo artist, Harrison reached #13 with his 1990 single "Flying Under Radar.")

For the most part, Villains is a pretty solid but forgettable piece of mid-'90s quasi-grunge, and that's how it was received, at least at first. Somewhere along the line, the Verve Pipe added keyboardist Doug Corella, and his organs gave a cool, sinister texture to lead single "Photograph." That song got a bunch of radio and MTV play, and it did well enough to reach #6. (It's a 7.) But follow-up single "Cup Of Tea" didn't go anywhere. If not for "The Freshmen," the Verve Pipe would've ended up as just one more half-forgotten '90s major-label alt-rock obscurity. You could argue that they still are that, even with "The Freshmen." But "The Freshmen" was a real-deal hit, one that at least guaranteed the Verve Pipe a spot on future '90s-nostalgia package tours.

The version of "The Freshmen" that conquered the Modern Rock chart isn't the album version that the Verve Pipe recorded with Jerry Harrison. Instead, they went back and re-recorded the song yet again with Jack Joseph Puig, a prolific recording engineer who'd been working since the '70s. The song came out as a single in January 1997, and that recording replaced the Harrison-produced one on subsequent pressings of Villains. Clearly, someone thought that there was money in "The Freshmen," and the band must've agreed, since they kept re-recording the damn thing so many times.

The three earlier versions of "The Freshmen" are all relatively quiet and composed. On the single version, though, the Verve Pipe truly went for it. The guitars twinkle. The keyboards imitate strings. Brian Vander Ark wails with guttural flair. The whole song does the quiet-to-loud thing. The rhythm section doesn't even show up until the first chorus, and then it goes ham through the rest of the song. In the video, Vander Ark looks about as '90s as a human man can possibly look — soul patch, lank bleached hair hanging in his face, intense eyes, flickery light illuminating pale skin. He and his band crank up the song's drama and present it in its most accessible, radio-ready form. They really sell that shit.

When "The Freshmen" was all over the radio, I hated it. I was merely a junior. For the life of me, I can't remember what made me think I was so wise and I'd never compromise. Actually, that's not true. I can remember it perfectly. I wanted every song to be giddy and fast and energized, and the radio insisted on playing melodramatic ballads at me instead. I don't feel the same way today. For one thing, I can now acknowledge that I remember every single tiny part of "The Freshmen," a pretty clear sign that some serious craft went into it. Also — and this is related — I now realize that it's pretty fun to sing along to "The Freshmen." That doesn't make it a great song, but it helps.

For his part, Brian Vander Ark now knows that he went pretty far over the top when he wrote "The Freshmen." In 2020, he told American Songwriter, "I was pretty happy with the song then. But over this many years and putting out this many albums and writing this many songs, I realize that it’s a pretty weak narrative. I mean, it’s a little bit too ambiguous. But that’s one of the things that made it a hit song; everybody could take something from it." He's right! It's a muddled and ridiculous song, but its muddled ridiculousness might be a strength, not a detriment.

In any case, "The Freshmen" took off and became one of the defining songs of that weird little post-grunge moment. It went #1 Modern Rock, #1 Adult Alternative, and #9 Mainstream Rock. The video was all over MTV. Unlike a lot of the big rock radio hits of that time, "The Freshmen" actually came out as a commercial single, which means it charted on the Hot 100, too. There, it went all the way to #5. The single went gold, and Villains went platinum. The Verve Pipe played my local radio station's annual festival in summer 1997, but I don't think I saw them; I was probably out watching Soul Coughing on the second stage instead. Later in 1997, the title track from Villains reached #22. I bet I heard it once or twice. It's not bad!

In 1999, the Verve Pipe followed Villains with a self-titled album, but the world had already moved on. Lead single "Hero" peaked at #17, and then the Verve Pipe never appeared on the Modern Rock chart again. The self-titled album didn't sell. The late Fountains Of Wayne co-leader Adam Schlesinger produced the Verve Pipe's next album, 2001's Underneath, which is cool. That one didn't sell, either. (Fountains Of Wayne's highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1996's "Radiation Vibe," peaked at #17.)

After Underneath, the Verve Pipe went on a long hiatus. Brian Vander Ark put out some unsuccessful solo albums, and he did a little bit of acting. He's in Rock Star, the 2001 movie where Mark Wahlberg plays a tribute-band frontman who goes on to become a popular band's replacement singer. Vander Ark also wrote a Verve Pipe song called "Colorful" for the soundtrack, and there's a weird scene where Wahlberg lip-syncs it. Wahlberg actually was a pop star at one point, but that man could not convincingly lip-sync a Verve Pipe song if his life depended on it.

In 2009, the Verve Pipe returned from hiatus with A Family Album, a record of kids' music. Over the years, they've put out a few independent records and done some touring. Brian Vander Ark apparently became friends with the actor Jeff Daniels somewhere along the way, and they make music together sometimes, which is fun.

It's entirely possible that "The Freshmen" will became TikTok sensation at some point and lead to a wave of Verve Pipe reappraisals. But unless something like that happens, they'll have to be content as the Verve band that didn't make "Bitter Sweet Symphony." But I guess that also means that they're the Verve band who didn't have to hand all their royalties over to the Rolling Stones, so it could be worse.

GRADE: 7/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's the absolutely absurd ska-punk version of "The Freshmen" that the Verve Pipe's fellow Grand Rapids band Mustard Plug released in 1998:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's Brian Vander Ark singing a karaoke rendition of "The Freshman" to an adoring, attentive crowd: