Luxury - Trophies
It was spring, in 1995. I’d made a trip to the Christian bookstore on a hunt for new music.
I had recently discovered the band Plankeye, a Christian alt-grunge band from Southern California that was signed by Tooth & Nail Records.
I was hungry for more Christian alternative that was less Amy Grant and more like Pearl Jam. And since Plankeye was in heavy rotation, I knew I had to take a gamble on a cassette from the band Luxury.
Look at that album cover. It looks like something that came from my grandparents record collection. But I chose not to judge by the cover alone, and bought the cassette with zero hesitation.
When I popped it into the cassette deck at home, I was hooked.
I don’t know what the lyrics were or if there even liner notes in the cassette. But I knew that I loved the sound. It was rock music like I’d never heard before.
And I dug it.
The lyrics were not hard to decipher for the most part, and I can’t say that I know them by heart after all these years. But none of that mattered. What mattered was, I felt like every emotion in my teenage body was baked into that record.
And then they disappeared. I wore the cassette out, and couldn’t find anything from them for a long time. I had no idea what happened, but I probably theorized that they just broke up, went their separate ways, like a lot of bands do. At one point, early in my marriage, I found one more album by them, The Latest and the Greatest, in a discount bin at another Christian bookstore.
And of course, I bought it. But it didn’t feel the same as Amazing and Thank You. Sure, the music was still awesome, but I was so far removed from my teenage angst that it didn’t quite hit the same.
A few years later, on Facebook, naturally, there was a post in a group that I was in about a Kickstarter that we might want to back. It was for a new album by Luxury. I wasn’t able to back them at the time, but they were on my radar once again.
That album eventually became Trophies.
Trophies is a mature record. The music is still there, the poetry is just as powerful. And it hit just right. Many people insist it’s the best of their work. I’m inclined to agree with that assessment.
And as for liner Notes? Since most music is digital, it’s nice to see an annotated version of the lyrics available on Lee Bozeman’s
website. Check it out here. I haven’t been able to get through it yet, but it’s an insightful read.But what happened to Luxury in the mid-nineties?
It turns out that, while they were on tour in late 1995, they got into a really bad car accident. Soon after, they left Tooth & Nail, and released a third and fourth album on a different label. Since I wasn’t following them closely, I didn’t know this.
And the most interesting part of this Story? Three of them became priests in the Orthodox Church in America.
Yes, a rock band where the front man, guitar player, and bass player are all members of the priesthood. Crazy how things develop over time, huh?
And while serving in the priesthood, Lee Bozeman is also writing and recording solo music. And it’s really good. Good enough to suggest in another post.
At this point in my life, I was just beginning a slight obsession with the Tooth & Nail label. I think I saw them in HM Magazine, and started buying every album that I could find that they had released. And this was before I could sample them; I bought them on a gamble.
This isn’t to say the music is bad. It was really good. But it was music for 17 year-old me, not 23 year old me.
The lead singer and primary lyricist for the band.