San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Drummer co-founded indie rock group Modest Mouse
Jeremiah Green, a drummer who co-founded and then became a stalwart member of Modest Mouse, an indie rock band that rose to mainstream fame, died Dec. 31 in the small coastal city of Sequim, Wash. He was 45.
His mother, Carol Eckerich-Namatame, said the cause was cancer. She added that Green had been staying with his stepfather, Brian Namatame, while being treated for cancer at a nearby hospital.
Green created Modest Mouse with lead singer and songwriter Isaac Brock, bassist Eric Judy and guitarist Dann Gallucci in Issaquah, Wash., outside Seattle, in the 1990s. They played atonal rock, with Brock singing in an angry falsetto. His lyrics took a brooding, introspective approach to suburban ennui, winning over the sensitive souls of the indie rock community.
But Modest Mouse transformed with the 2004 album “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” and went on to produce multiple hit songs, most notably “Float On,” which was among the most popular rock tracks of the 2000s. The band’s vocals and guitar lines became more melodic, and Green’s drums drove a sound that listeners could dance to.
“Modest Mouse has built a career out of music that sounds like it’s on the brink of falling apart, but importantly, it never collapses into the threatened hodgepodge,” Stylus magazine wrote in 2007. “Jeremiah Green’s drumming gathers the mess of howling vocals and scrabbling guitars and focuses it into something approaching pop music.”
Jeremiah Martin Green was born on March 4, 1977, in Oahu, Hawaii, where his father, Donald, was stationed as a staff sergeant in the Army. His parents divorced when he was young, and he moved with his mother to Washington state. Eckerich-Namatame worked as an administrator at a trucking company and in the office of a produce wholesaler. By the time he was 12 or 13 years old, Jeremiah knew he wanted to play punk rock. His mother found him a drum teacher, but Jeremiah found him uninspired and decided to teach the instrument to himself. He attended small rock shows on the Seattle music scene and studied the movements of the drummers he saw, he told Modern Drummer in 2015.
He graduated in 1995 from Best High School, an alternative school in Kirkland, Wash., that gave him time to pursue artistic projects. Modest Mouse’s first studio album, “This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About,” was released in 1996, shortly after Jeremiah turned 19.
Green was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and in 2004 he told Spin magazine about his attempts to find appropriate medication and about the difficulties he had communicating with bandmates. There were terrible fights, and Green briefly found himself in a mental hospital. But he wound up becoming one of Modest Mouse’s most enduring members, alongside Brock.
In 2021, Modest Mouse released “The Golden Casket,” its first album in six years. Last month, radio disc jockey Marco Collins wrote on Facebook that Green had been forced to pull out of a tour marking the 25th anniversary of Modest Mouse’s second studio album, “Lonesome Crowded West.”
In 2017, Green married Lauren Engle. They had a son, Wilder. Green lived with his family in Port Townsend, Wash.
In addition to his mother, stepfather, wife and son, Green is survived by a brother, Adam; a half sister, Teri Dean; and a stepsister, Emiko VanWie.