Real Nighttime is the second full-length album from Game Theory, a California power pop band founded by guitarist and singer-songwriter Scott Miller. Released in 1985, the album is cited as "a watershed work in '80s paisley underground pop." A 30th anniversary reissue was released in March 2015, on CD and in a limited first pressing on red vinyl, with 13 bonus tracks.
The album was the group's first to be produced by Mitch Easter, who continued as the producer of subsequent Game Theory albums through the rest of the 1980s.
Background
Real Nighttime was the last of Game Theory's albums to be recorded by the band's Davis, California-based line-up, a quartet fronted by Scott Miller on guitar and lead vocals. According to rock critic Mark Deming, "while Miller was clearly the leader of this band, the outstanding percussion work from Dave Gill, the evocative keyboards from Nan Becker, and the solid, propulsive bass of Fred Juhos played an invaluable role in making these songs work."
Production notes
Scott Miller sought out Mitch Easter to produce Real Nighttime after hearing his production work on R.E.M.'s Chronic Town, and Easter went on to have a long association with the group, producing not only the rest of Game Theory's catalog but also the first two albums by Miller's next band, The Loud Family. According to Miller, Easter's main contribution as producer was "competency" and a bigger, more professional sound. In 2003, Miller stated, "I don’t think he and I ever clashed at all.... just suddenly we had someone who knew a lot more than I did and we were all grateful." For his part, when Easter was asked in 1999 about his favorite projects as a producer, Easter named Chronic Town and Game Theory's records, which Easter called "a lot of fun, because of the variety in the way they approached recording."
Mitch Easter later wrote that Game Theory defied the dogmatic "guitar aesthetic" of that era, and it was therefore "an initially disconcerting and ultimately delightful breath of fresh air to arrive at the Game Theory session for Real Nighttime to find an electronic drum kit, somebody's ancient modular synth, and other taboo devices being cheerfully employed by the band, seemingly with no awareness or concern that these were, er, questionable items in the prevailing fashion. This boldness never left." Easter added that he was "inclined to think that Scott was so fantastically and entertainingly aware of the minutia of pop culture that he probably foresaw the latent dangers of using all that ... and charged ahead anyway." Easter credited this to Miller's appreciation of a cyclical "time stamp factor" of hipness becoming dated, and sometimes then "evolving into Genius."
In 1988, Miller told Musician that Real Nighttime "was just sort of out there compared to the records I'd done before, and the one after it", identifying this as the beginning of a pattern of making "alternately down-the-line, then off-the-wall" records.
The album was recorded in Union City, California from July 22 to July 31, 1984, and mixed at the Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from August 15 to August 21, 1984. In addition to producing, Easter was credited as a musician on Real Nighttime, as were future Game Theory members Jozef Becker and Michael Quercio (of The Three O'Clock), both of whom would join Game Theory in 1989.
Cover art and liner notes
In response to the band's change in personnel, a photograph of Miller was substituted for a photograph of the full group that had previously been taken for the album's front cover. On the back cover, band members and guest performers were credited equally as "musicians."
The back cover of the LP also featured cryptic liner notes by Miller, written in the style of James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. In the 1993 CD reissue on Alias Records, this text was altered from the original, due to an apparent misperception of Miller's Joycean wordplay as spelling errors.
In the 1990s, Miller's Joycean liner notes were the subject of an unofficial project, coordinated at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, to create an annotated edition with analysis of Miller's references.