Hollister, 1922

Lyrics

[Intro]
(gulls, surf, a shop door with a bell — all of it piped in)
John M. Hollister. Founded nineteen twenty-two.
None of that is true.

[Verse 1]
He sailed to the Dutch East Indies, he bought a rubber plantation,
he married a girl called Meta, he came home to California,
he opened a little shop, he sold the goods of the Pacific,
he had a son who loved to surf and it all got very specific —
dates and names and places and a whole entire life.
And every word of it was written in the year two thousand and five.

[Chorus]
Hollister, nineteen twenty-two! It says so on the wall!
There's a photograph of nobody in a frame above the till!
He has a hometown. He has a wife. He has a founding year.
He has a biography. He does not have a birth.
Hollister, nineteen twenty-two — the surf shop that was born
in a boardroom in Ohio, seventy-eight years late.

[Verse 2]
Now the town of Hollister is real, it's inland, it's not coastal,
it's a farming town in San Benito, ninety minutes from the ocean,
and they did not ask the town, and the town was not delighted,
and the mayor had some words about it, publicly, in writing.
The shop smells like a scent they had a laboratory build.
The dark is on purpose. The whole thing is on purpose.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And here's the thing I keep on turning over in my head:
it worked. It absolutely worked. The kids believed the legend.
Not because they checked — because it didn't matter if it's true,
a founder is a feeling and the feeling came right through.
We didn't want a person. We wanted him to have existed.
That's a cheaper thing to sell you. That's the whole entire trick.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the piped-in surf cuts off abruptly)
Nineteen twenty-two.
Two thousand. It was two thousand.