Continuing our deep dive into the early years of MTV’s 120 Minutes, we revisit three bands that were all staples on college radio in April of 1987.
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Episode 4 -April (201 downloads )TRANSCRIPT
And welcome back to 120 months. We’re doing a month by-month retrospective of MTV’s 120 Minutes, the whole first decade of one of our favorite video shows, I guess I guess you would call it. If you were alive in the late 80s and early 90s and you wanted to see some of your favorite college radio bands or, you know indie bands.
I don’t even think the term alternative at this point we’re in 1987 right now was really a thing. You had to kind of wait until, was it Saturday night or Sunday night? It was Sunday night later on.
I’m not sure if it started on Sundays. I think it may have started on Saturdays. Yeah, so you had to wait.
You had a twohour block. You had your VC already and hopefully you were going to get to see your favorite band. And maybe for the first time ever, see what they look like or whatever.
So it’s been kind of fun to go back and dig into those playlists and we’re each picking a song of a band or a song that we really dug from that particular month. And then we’ve got a mystery song that none of us had ever heard before that we’re going to dive into at the end of the episode. We are right now on episode four, so that means April of 1987.
And I’ve got my co-host with me, Keith Porterfield, and kicking it off for us this week week’s Scott Mobley. All right, so for this episode or this month, I chose the song My Biggest Thrill by the Mighty Lemon Drops. it’s feel so bad and it should be all right by by I’ make my feel stand I will feel alone my biggest This is a British pop band from the mid ’80s. They form in ’85 right before this.
So they have three core members, Paul Marsh, David Newton, Tony Linhan, are these rhythm guitarist, lead guitarist, and bassist, respectively, and they kind of rotate through some other guys. They have some other band names, they have some other projects that they settle in ‘ 85 on the Mighty Lemon Drops and they get signed by Cyre Records and release the album Happy Head. It comes out in 86, and this was the leadoff single from that album.
I have a feeling their second album was probably in the Can, ready to go when this video pops up on MTV at this time. It comes out just shortly after this. So their sound is very typical of this era of British pop music.
It’s kind of upbeat, sort of punk flavored, maybe a little psychedelic, Definitely hints of Echo in the Bunnymen is what you’re hearing here. And I think this is, although this, I would not in a million years call this songSoegaze, you kind of hear the early hints of it here. Like, I think.
I was trying to look up, like, who claims this band is an influence, and you don’t find a lot, but I have a feeling that bands like the Jesus America Chain probably think these guys are an influence and stuff like that. So, even though this isn’t technically shoegaze, I think it sort of fits the bill as an influence on that. So these guys are around from 86 to around 92, and they have some hits.
They have several albums. They go on tour, all that stuff. They’re being mildly successful.
And then there’s no story about why it ends. They just get to about 92 and say, man, screw it. And they go their separate ways.
So one of these guys is like a record producer. He’s produced a fewer British bands, like the other ones, I think, you know, sell insurance or something. I don’t know.
But there’s no real story about, you know, they just weren’t getting along or they put out an album that was, you know, too weird and tanked and got dropped by their label. None of that is out there. These guys just kind of played around for seven years and then went, all right, well, we’re done.
We’re right and quit. So I think there is some interesting information influence here. I think this is a good band.
I think this is a great song. And I’ll tell you how I, why I picked it, why I stumbled across it. So when I was younger, you know, this is 1986 when this album comes out at 87, when this is on MTV.
This is not my style of music at that time, but I liked when there were record stores to go to record stores and shop around. And I would buy things because I liked the name of the band, or I liked the cover of the album that they were selling. I don’t remember why I bought this album, but I did, and it’s got to be that.
I either liked the name of the album, Happy Head. I thought the album cover was cool. Something like that.
But I had this album, and I always kind of dug this band. But after this, after maybe an album or two, I just stopped following them. So it was kind of neat to go back and look at these guys again and kind of remember, you know, I couldn’t remember why I bought the album.
I’m assuming I just like the name of the band. But I remember having this. I remember enjoying it.
The video I don’t think I had ever seen. I thought when I put it on in my trigger or something, but I don’t think I’d ever seen this video. It’s basically just them playing live kind of typical ladies video.
And then, you know, somebody come get a girl. I don’t know who’s dancing and that girl is dancing around in, you know, in the studio there. But they’ve got this girl kind of bopping around in between guts of the band playing.
It’s, by the way, it seems to be the only person having a really good time in that video. Exactly, yeah. The other guys.
She’s digging it. She’s feeling the song. So But anyway, that’s my biggest throw by Mighty Lemon drops.
This was a fun little cruise down memory lane for me. I remember this band. I remember this song, and I kind of forgotten about the episode this was fun for me.
Yeah, I have a stoic underlined for the lead singer’s demeanor during this entire song, which was kind of funny because I had, I was vaguely familiar with the band and the style. This song, I couldn’t remember if I remember the specific, specific song or not, but like the vibe was kind of what I thought I was going to get from the Mighty Lemon drops. But then when I saw them, if you saw the video and you took the girl out and you didn’t hear the music, you would assume it was like a funeral dirge, maybe or like, like the saddest song you’ve ever heard?
I think that was pretty common at this time for the be sort of stoic. You know, maybe that’s a holdover from Joy Division or something. Like these British bands were all kind of like that.
Like if you watch Echo and the Bunnyman videos, they’re like that too. They were very, they looked much angrier than the music would suggest they were. Yeah, the song is quite upbeat and it’s, you know, I think that’s pretty common.
I echo the Bunnymen. Roxy music comes to mind. They had that sort of vibe of being dark and brooding and even though they were kind of rocking out.
I was going to say, Sto’s definitely one way to put it. My note that I put was, this dude looks like he’s about to fall asleep while you singing the song. He’s gonna stay awake through the entire video before he’s just going to fall over and stop singing the song before the video’s done.
It’s like they’re rocking out, but they don’t want you to know they’re enjoying rocking out. Yeah. It’d be great if they cut back to him at one point and he’s just like asleep..
Like he’s like sleeping on the drum set. The other connection I made, and granted, like, if you’ve listened to the last two episodes and spoiler alert, this episode as well, I’ve been kind of in the Athens, Georgia scene for my last couple picks. This song could be a love tractor song.
Like it’s got a little of that Athens. We talked about it last episode, Dance Rock, which is not really a thing anymore. It stopped being a thing, I would say, even in the early 90s, where bands played music you could sing along to, but also dance along to.
Like that very quickly kind of not became a thing that just wasn’t really that popular, certainly not an alternative in indie music. I guess pop music maybe has always kind of had some of that these days, not so much. So I like, I could see them like showing up in Athens and playing and everybody just, you know, totally getting where they were coming from because there is that connection.
I mean, obviously it has a British twist to it, but I also, I heard a lot of Brian Jonestown massacre in this, like, which is, they were obviously more on the the psychedelic tip and some of their music obviously goes in a different direction. But this particular song, and and I was really trying, I listened to it twice to try to specifically put my finger on it. what it was that was triggering that. And it’s, I think it’s as simple as like some of the melodies and chord progressions just felt very much like the Brian Joan Massacre, which I thought was kind of an interesting connection. that, you know, they wouldn’t record until eight, nine, 10 years after this.
So whether or not they were influenced, I’m not sure, but but those were the two things that kind of connected in my head when I was listening to this. And also just great song. Yeah, great, happy, upbeat, very enjoyable, and it was fun to go back and reacquaint myself with these guys.
I don’t know if the Brian Jonestown Massacre would call these guys an influence, but I think they would definitely call the Jesus and Mary Chain an influence and the connection is there. I think that’s the link, you know, is that kind of that kind of early shoaze where it was still poppy and rocking, you know, before it got to droney. I think part of that, you know, you mentioned that you thought it kind of also sounded a little bit like a precursor to shoaze, and then, you know, the psychedelic kind of effect, you, that, you, made, you know, you might think about, Brian Jonestown.
I think a lot of that has to do with the guitar. You know, he’s the lead guit is playing that 12 string guitar, and then, you know, he’ kind of got a lot of reverb and distortion and all that on it. I think it’s that guitar sound that to me, anyway, kind of, you know, when you mentioned shogaze Scott, when you mentioned, you know, kind of psychedelia, my, like both of those things seem true to me, but I think a lot of has to do with that guitar sound, you know, that kind of ringing, echoey guitar sound that he gets out of that 12 string, and I’m not sure I’d have to look out to see exactly what it is that he’s playing there.
But I do remember I almost positive it was a 12 string guitar. That’s definitely it, probably. You know, There’s probably something to that that that sound is linked to that guitar.
Yeah. I, you know, I had never heard these guys either, and I have, on multiple nonconsecutive occasions, had people recommend this band to me and you just just never, you know, never followed on it. I said, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, that’s something I should do.
I’ll check those guys out at some point. After listening to the song, I know Now why people were recommending it to me because this is right up my alley. Yeah, I really I was going to say, I knew you were going to like this one.
I don’t know how, but I knew when I listened to it again, I was like, oh, Keith’s going to dig this one. I think maybe the reason that you never like connected to it, you know, other than people recommending it is like, like I said, there’s, they’re just not in the zegeist. Like, they kind of came in and did their thing and disappeared.
Like, there’s no, and then nobody mentions them anymore. If it wasn’t for this, I had forgotten about them and I had this album. I was a fan of of these guys, you know.
So I think maybe that’s it. You just don’t hear about them enough, you know. that could, you know, there’s multiple reasons for that. Not the least of which is there’s just not that much output.
And they do kind of sound like some other bands. And I think they kind of just got, you know, washed into, you, the whole, that whole sound of British pop at the time, and they’re just not maybe that memorable, but they are a good band. And if you like this song, I think you’ll like just about everything they do, honestly.
I also thought the bass part on it, we talked a little bit about the guitar. I thought the bass part was a little similar to kind of the stuff that was going on with like the farm and soup dragons and those kind of bands. So it kind of feels to me like you’ve got some disparate elements of like different, you know, types of music.
Not that they were drawing off these other things, but all kind of coming together to make its own little thing. It’s got little elements of different things in it. overall, yeah, just a great little guitar pop song. Yeah, and I think that’s the other link.
You know, if you, you can link it to Shoegaze one way. You can also link it to that other British pop that came out in the late 80s and early 90s, like Soup Dragons and Jesus Jones and those bands. You know There’s some connection there to, you know, where pop music, where that branch broke off in pop music in Britain.
It’s that’s there, too. And yeah, you’re right. That baseline is funky.
It was funny because when you said they made it to 1992 and then they just kind of disappeared. My first reaction was, geez, that’s like right when they probably had their biggest opportunity, right? Like that should have been where they they blew up.
But, and I still think that’s true. But I was remembering from when we did an episode of 35,000 Watts and I was doing some deeper research on blur. And I remember when they were talking about recording their first album, them getting pressure from labels and everything to sound like the soup dragons and Mighty Lemon drops.
And that late 80s British music wave as opposed to what kind of ended up becoming bp-pop in the 90s. Like they, and Blur, I think, is is largely credited for helping kind of make that transition. And that was a very deliberate choice on the part of Blur to distance themselves from that style of British pop and start to kind of usher in this newer type that ended up becoming what you heard in the 90s.
So maybe, you know, that’s that’s it. The Mighty Lemon drops were kind of a a casualty of that switch in Britain. Yeah.
That’s certainly possible. But yeah, you’re right. They disbanded in 92 when this kind of music started getting really popular.
So who knows why? It certainly. From our perspective, it’s hard to find the wise of that online.
So I dug pretty deep on these guys, and I couldn’t find, you know, they hated each other or, you know, their producers stole all their money. That’s just not out there. It’s not there.
They just woke up one day and went, all right, we’re good. You know? And I wonder if that’s our perspective as being like in college radio in the USA and thinking, man, like we were, you know, we were hungry for British music and we were more than happy.
I know we played the Mighty Lemon Drops on KTXT. We would have been more than happy to play their new album and whatever. But I’m wondering if in Britain something else was happening that maybe we weren’t as hip to where that type of music was kind of falling away.
And so they were they weren’t seemed the same way they were seeing over here in the USA, maybe. You know, they were sensing this like, oh, we we’re on the way out. You know, we’re dinosaurs, whereas we really didn’t perceive that, you know, from our perspective.
Yeah, I think that’s fair. You know, we don’t know, and we can’t know. You can’t.
It’s a shame, though, because I, I think they would have done quite well, at least in the USA in the early 90s. But who knows? I don’t know.
Maybe not. All right. Well, moving on to a band that did do quite well on the late 80s and early 90s on KTXT and in the USA, we’ve got the choice of Mr. Keith Porterfield up next.
Yeah, so this week I picked a song called Take the Skinheads Bowling by Camper Van Beethoven. Last night, there were skinheads all alone Take the skinheads bowing, Take them bowling Take the skinheads bowing, Take them falling The Last episode, we talked a little bit about Hooker Doo and Bob Mold, and I know I’ mentioned I checked in on Sugar, but I never checked in on anything else, Bob. Mould had did.
I had done, I should say. I’m in the same boat with Dave Lowy, actually. I had bought a couple of Cracker albums in the early 90s, early to mid 90s.
Really really enjoyed them, but I just had never really followed through, didn’t stick with them going going forward, never went back to check in on Camper Van Beethoven or anything. I picked that one specifically because I saw the name of the band on there and I was like, ah, this is a band that I have for a lot of years, probably should have gone back and looked at and never did. So this gave me the opportunity to do that.
Dave Lowry, as it turns out, is a really interesting dude. I was looking on his wiki bio and it says like, you know, guitarist, producer, songwriter, mathematician. I was like, mathematician?
So go to R, sure enough, he has got a degree in mathematics from State or Cal Santa Cruz. He’s also got a doctor of education from the University of Georgia, and he’s a lecturer at the University of Georgia, none of which, did I have any idea any of that stuff was going on? He’s been really active in like artists’ rights as far as like, he was part of a law lawsuit against Spotify to get them to set up a fund to compensate songwriters and publishers.
And so even above and beyond all his music stuff, this is guy that just led an interesting life. His first band back in the 80s was Camper Van Beethoven. And you were listening to Cracker, they’re a little more of a kind of a straightforward, just guitar rock band, Camper Van Beethoven, from what I read and the stuff I listened to is a little more eclectic, this song, Take the Skinheads Bowling, is very much just kind of a jangle pop song, and it’s a really good jangle pop song.
It came off their very first album called Telephone Free Landslide Victory. It came out in 1985. They were not expecting the song to do much.
They weren’t expecting it to be a hit or anything of that nature because they wrote it as kind of a just a goofy one-off. Like, if you listen to the lyrics and are trying to parse their meaning, there isn’t any. Dave Lowry himself has said that this song, they specifically tried to write lyrics that didn’t really mean anything.
Like one verse has nothing to do with the number. verse and all that kind of stuff. And there’s no, there’s no secret meaning behind taking the skinheads bowling or anything like that. I think that was just a funny phrase that they came up with and thought would be, you know, the funny name for a song, funny ch chorus for a song.
So, yeah, they were not. And they were correct. Yeah, and they were correct.
Yep, exactly. But yeah, they were not expecting this thing to be a hit or anything because they were not taking this song at all seriously. It has been covered a few times.
Other bands have done this. Teenage F club covered it, and that version of it, the Teenage fan Club version of this song made it onto the Michael Moore film bowling for Columbine. Manic Street Preachers have covered this song..
So it’s been covered by various people. You know, It’s got its following and everything. It’s a pretty groovy little song.
Like I said, kind of jangly guitar pop, not a whole lot going on here. There are a couple of interesting things I thought about it. If you’re listening through to it on the second verse, some background vocals come in, I think it’s a neat little touch that are only on that one verse.
And then when it gets to the third verse, the background vocals don’t come back in, but there’s a second little guitar part playing kind of a countermeody underneath that’s not on any of the rest of the song that only comes in on that part of the song. So straightforward song for the most part, but there are a couple of little interesting things going on in there that I thought were pretty neat. And yeah, you know, I don’t have a whole lot to add to that.
You know, I went and listened to Camper Van Beethoven songs just to see, you know, if this was representative of what they did. And it seems like it pretty much is. Some of the other stuff was a little harder.
But anyway, you know, this one seemed pretty representative of what they do. So I enjoyed it. You know this may be a band that I go back and try to listen to more stuff of.
But yeah, Dave Lowry’s still producing albums. Cracker went on for a lot longer than I thought it did. Camper Van Beethoven got back together in the early aughts and actually, of all things, recorded a cover of the Fleetwood Mac album Tusk in its entirety and released that, among other things.
So he’s been active with both of those bands. He’s also put out a lot of solo records. So, yeah, interesting dude, long career, and it began with this song, this weird little jangle pop song that means nothing, apparently, but it’s also a lot of fun, actually.
And a fun little video, lots of imagery of bowling alleys and guys with shaved heads and crew cuts, throwing bowling balls around and that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it was a fun one, but that’s that’s Take the Skinheads Burling by Camper Van Beethoven. You know, I had never seen this video.
I knew the song, and I remember the song because we played it a lot at KTXT, but I had never seen this video and I loved it. I just said, where did they find that footage? It almost it almost makes me think it was faked.
Like it was shot and then made to look like it was old, scratchy film. I don’t know. I think maybe.
There can’t be a lot of B-roll of skinheads bowling laying around in studios. You know, I just, but maybe there is. I don’t know.
Anyway, I love the video. I had never seen it before. But yeah, this band, this is one of those bands that, and I could name 50 of them, probably, that was around and was being played when I was on the air on ADXT, and I just never dug into.
I never, like, I knew the songs we played, and I never thought much more about it than that. And I don’t know why. I can’t really tell you why.
I never, because I like everything I’ve heard from them. I love this song. In reading about these guys a little bit.
One of the things I love about them, and this is, if you read a little bit about David Lowry, he’s kind of this guy. Like, he likes to ruffle feathers and and kind of push boundaries a little bit, you know? And so when this band formed, I think it’s fair to call them a punk band, even though it’s more maybe more of like the post-punk Jangle Pop sort of thing, maybe a little closer to like Min Men than it is to hardcore.
But they would go to hardcore shows and get on the bill. Like they would they would show up in Southern California where like black Flag and the germs were playing and be like, “Yeah, we’re a punk band, too. Can we play?”
And they’d be like, “Yeah, sure.” And then they’d get up and play “Take the Skinheads Bowling to like an aggressive hardcore punkunk crowd, and probably really, really pissed them off. I love that.
I That’s really cool. You mentioned that, you, David Lowry, after this goes on to form Cracker.Cracker is a fantastic band. If you haven’t heard anything from them, fix that problem.
They are really, really good. But yeah, you, go back and listen to some of this. It’s, like I said, it’s all kind of sounds like this.
It’s very kind of of a thing, but they’re good at it, and their songs are catchy and fun and kind of funny sometimes when they make sense. And yeah, I’ve got a kick out of revisiting this one like I did the other song as well. And yeah, I’d never seen this video.
I wanted to shout out real quick too. If you do is search for this video on YouTube, somebody has done a mash up of this song with “Here Comes Your Man by the Pixies, and it’s really great. Like I would have never put that together in my head, but it really works.
So that’s just something fun to check out if you’re out there looking at this. I really like this song. This is one I definitely remember playing at KTXT.
It’s, it’s not exactly a novelty song, but it’s obviously very memorable because of the name of it in the chorus. I was trying to express this earlier, and I think I ended up muffing it so bad that it’s going to be edited out of the episode. So I’m going to try again now.
So we, you know, we were four episodes in. We’re in 1987. I guess what I was what I was trying to express is that to me, this is the song that most feels like what’s going to be coming up in the 90s or the late 80s and the early 90s as alternative and indie rock takeoff and college radio really blows up.
It feels the most, it feels like the most 90s song we’ve done yet, if that makes sense. I mean, it’s still very much an 80s song of its time. But the sensibility of it, the, you know, the talk verse, the joke or the whatever of take the skinheads bowling, you know, just the irreverent lyrics or whatever to me is kind of of the ones we’ve talked about, starting to really kind of be a window into what’s going to happen with 90s alternative rock.
And the Weezers of the world, for example, that just kind of irreverent, hard rock, kind of punk, kind of whatever vibe. And so that was kind of the first thing that hit me when I heard this again for the first time in a long time. I was shocked that this came out in 1987.
Like, I didn’t know that. In my mind, and my mind is a terrible place, but in my mind, these guys were contemporaries of pavement and Seado and like the early 90s country rockish punk bands, you know, like that’s where I had them in the in sort of the chronology of all of this, to know that they were, you know, they actually formed in 83. So they were they were they were around for a while when this came out.
I had no idea. I did not know that. So to me, this was a KTXT band at the time that I was at KTXT.
But we were actually playing, I guess, playing their oldies. Yeah. Which I didn’t know.
I’m kind of the same. Yeah. If you listened to this and didn’t know, I think you would probably guess early 90s track, you know, that’s an early 90s track.
And I think in my headcon, that was kind of also where I was putting it. And it is. It’s such a precursor to what was would happen across the wide breath of the type of music that we played, but there’s definitely a certain type of band that, that blew up on college radio and alternative radio in the 90s.
And I think a lot of them would look back to Camper Van Beethoven as as being an influencer and Cracker too, but Cracker was a little more contemporary with them. I will also say about David Lowry being an awesome dude. He absolutely is an awesome dude.
He was going to be in 35,000 watchs of the movie, which we haven’t talked about yet, by the way, there’s a movie documentary called 35,000 Watts The Story of College Radio. It’s out right now and Amazon Prime and on Tubi and we talk about all things College Radio. David was lined up to be in the film and his wife as well, who his wife is Lina Vigo, who was in a band called Mystery Date, also kind of part of the Athens, the Southern, you know, that southern scene that was happening.
But she has been for a very long time been been the talent buyer at 40 Watt Club. So all the amazing music and bands and stuff that has happened at the 40- Watt Club, a lot of that is due to his wife, Felina. So they’re kind of a power couple in the rock world.
I mean, for sure. Not to mention the fact that he’s a freaking PhD mathematician, you know, and that was actually why I wasn’t able to interview him. I showed up at their house and he was like, I got to go do a lecture.
I don’t know if like we had a scheduling conflict or a mistake or something came up, but he was actually on his way out. So I got to meet him, but I didn’t get to interview him for the film, but his wife is in the film. Anyway, yeah.
So that kind of was an interesting thing that I learned in researching the film was that not only beyond being a great songwriter and a great musician and very active in helping musicians get what they deserve. Financially speaking, he’s also brilliant mathematician and and teaches that at University of Georgia, which just totally blew me away. Yeah, definitely an interesting dude.
And before we leave real quick, you mentioned that you kind of drew a lie between Campper Van Beethoven and Weezer. Scotty, you mentioned a couple of other bands as well. I see the line.
You mentioned some of the country rock bands. I see the line going to bands like The Lemonheads and Matthew Swift and like M material issue and bands like that, a little more on the kind of the jangle pop side as well. So I think if you look at the, you know, all three of us had kind of different ideas of where the tree branched off from Camper and Beethoven, where it went.
So, I mean, I think these guys are a pretty, pretty influential band, you know, a pretty eclectic mix of elements. That probably did lead to a lot of different kinds of music, you know, of different things that then that kind of followed up, that had that kind of as an influence. I think you could say that, you know, they are an eclectic band.
You can say the same thing about Cracker, too. It’s hard to pinp what Cracker really is. It’s like it’s hard to pinpoint what this really is.
But to be fair, when I say I compare them to those other bands I mentioned, you, I’m wrong. They don’t sound anything like Pavemen or Sebo, but in my mind, that’s that’s where they were. That was their genre at that time when I was at KTXT.
And, you know, they probably have some songs that do sound like that, but I just, in my mind that this was a an early ‘ 90s band that, you know, we put on the air on KTXT when they came out. They were 10 years old when we put them, when I was playing them on the air, you. And so good.
Like I really, yeah, I really, I really liked the song I really liked when I was preparing for the film, I went back and listened to a lot of Campperv Van Beethoven and Cracker that I had missed because I kind of just knew the, the hits, I guess, quote unquote. And yeah, yeah, really solid if you ever want to go back and dig into their catalog. Yeah, the two albums I have are great.
Yeah, very, and very consistent, like all the way through, if I remember, right. So we spoke a little bit about Athens, and I did mention that my last two picks were kind of related to Athens and the Southern Rock scene that was happening. And today is going to be not going to be an exception to that because we had another band pop up on 120 minutes that was part of that scene that I also interviewed for the film, by the way.
So I chose the squalls and the song is na 9 9. Na, na na The Squalls are an interesting band. They were first formed in ‘788 or Bob Hay is the lead singer and kind of I don’t want to say the leader of the band, but he’s kind of the front man and he actually lived in Maine and met a guy who played guitar named Ken, who was up in Maine and was about to head back to Athens and was telling him about, man, you got to come down and see the scene that’s happening.
And it’s really amazing. And they were both, they both learned that they were fans of the Grateful Dead. And so they actually followed the dead down the eastern seaboard and saw like several dead shows on their way to Athens and then kind of set up shop down there and became part of that scene that we talked about this, you know, in the last episode that something was in the water down in Athens and we kind of talked about how that you had the 40 Watt Club.
You had a WUOG, a very solid college radio station. You had W Street Records. You had an art scene and a college scene that was just kind of an incubator where all the right pieces were in place for these bands.
And then you had the B-52s who broke out and got to New York and kind of broke the scene open a little bit because they were so successful and were so different from what people were hearing in New York that people kind of followed the trade, the trail back to Athens and then discovered all these the rest of the stuff that was happening. So the squalls were part of that and they were a little, they don’t have as much of a catalog as like Love Tractor that we talked about last week. They certainly don’t have the success of like REM or even Pylon or whatever, but if you talk to people that were around that time that were in Athens around that time, I should say, and part of that scene, they always mentioned the squalls, like right there with REM and Pylon and love tractor and side effects, because they were, they were an integral part of that scene.
And every one of those bands brought like a slightly different quirk. You know, they each had a take on on kind of a similar vibe, but yet you wouldn’t really confuse each band for one of the other bands. The squalls, I think, maybe embraced the country rock aspect of what was going on Athens a little more than than some of the other bands.
They were a little, a little, I don’t, I was going to say weirder, but I think Pylon, you know, is also kind of weird. like B52s are certainly weird in their own way. So weirder maybe isn’t quite it. Eclectic, you know, again, you could apply that, but they eclectic in their own way, I guess, you know, and you really have to kind of listen to the music.
They have another song called Crickets, which I think if you listen to that, you’ll definitely kind of get a vibe for like, oh, yeah, that’s that’s that’s quirky. That’s that’s a funny thing. That that song actually was one of the big ones on college radio, both in Athens on WUOG and then one of the ones that kind of broke out and got some nationwide airplay and helped them have kind of a big time in like 82, 83, 84 was kind of when they were at their peak and still involved in the Athens scene and in 86 and 87.
So the video that you’re seeing is from Athens Inside Out, which is kind of a famous documentary about Athens at that time. I think this is the first live video that we’ve done on the show, like first like actually recorded live. First purely live one, yeah.
Yeah, like a pure live. And that’s because it comes from this documentary and I think in the same episode of 120 minutes and also last month, REM has a song that also came from that, a documentary that is in the playlist. And I was going to, I was thinking about choosing that, but I’ve I’ been wanting to highlight these other bands first.
So the Squads was part of that documentary. And again, just really an integral part of the Athens scene that they didn’t quite break out as big as Love Tror and and Pylon and certainly not as big as REM, but a really fun band and one that I think if you are a fan of REM and a fan of the Athens music scene, but maybe somehow the squall slipped by you. Go check it out.
They have a very, they have like one studio album and then a live album that was recorded at the 40- Watt. So it’s not a deep dive that you have to do to really get caught up on the squalls. There’s not a lot out there.
I think probably like 2022 songs total, maybe in terms of what you can find like on YouTube and Apple Music. Worth the time. Yeah, Bob’s a great dude.
He’s He’s in the film at 35,000 Watts if you want to hear him talk a little bit more about his experience. Yeah, I think they deserveerve a listen and maybe a little more credit for some of the influence they had on some of the other bands that were happening around that time. Yeah, I’d never heard these guys before at all.
Never heard of them, never heard any of their music, never heard anything at all about them until, you know, you picked them. And so I kind of looked in, looked into them for this. I liked the song.
It is, I don’t know how their entire catalog is. This song is as harmless a piece of bubblegum guitar pop as you’re ever going to find, but it’s a really good piece of bubble gum guitar pop. I mean, they’re good at it.
I liked the video. I liked the live video. My favorite thing about it, of course, is the bass player who’s smoking a pipe throughout the entire song.
And like, at first I thought, he’s just chomping on this thing. He’s not actually smoking. No, he’s smoking a pipe while he’s playing the bass throughout this entire song, puffing away on it.
So that was good. And then the singer what was his name? Bob?
Bob. Bob. Yeah.
He looks like he might very well also be the president of the math club at the local university there in Athens., yeah, I finally, I founded up the video to be funny for those reasons. But I liked the song. It’s just, yeah, there wasn’t a whole lot of background to get into on these guys.
But, but yeah, good stuff for sure. Yeah, I felt the same way. I mean, Keith, you nailed it all the head.
Like, this is like a harmless jangle pop, but it’s really good at it, and I I enjoyed this. I heard of this band, but I didn’t know anything about him. I had not heard this song, I don’t think.
But yeah, I mentioned earlier to Michael, this is, it sounds like that Athens thing, like the sort of pop jangly country flavored sort of thing. This one felt just a little more country to me than some of these other stuff I’ve heard. You know, not in a, you know, it certainly doesn’t sound like what they call country music now, but it had a little bit more of like a genuine country flavor than a lot of the, you know, early REM stuff or some of the other stuff we’ listen to.
But yeah, I really got a kick out of this one. I liked it. But yeah, like I said, there’s there’s not a whole lot.
There’s not a deep tunnel to dig down here, but this was good, and I wanted to take the time to listen to some more stuff. I didn’t get a chance to do that yet, but I will. I enjoyed this one.
Definitely check out Crickets. That’s a fun one and a little more quirky than this. But yeah, they’re pretty straight down the pipe with what they do in a good way.
Absolutely. And Bob definitely, you know, he doesn’t look like, like a rock star. You could picture him and Mike Mills going and just like playing Dungeons and Dragons after the show.
He has that kind of vibe to him. But it’s super nice. He was so nice when we when we met and interviewed him and he had like, it was like a box of like recipe.
It was almost, well, was index cards, but it was kind of like a recipe box like your mom used to have that had all the recipes in it. But it was, I mean, a stack of index cards and you. It’s in the film where he holds up the stack and that stack is all college radio stations information.
And he was talking about it was fully organized and like, you know, they recorded the album and then they basically went through and sent the album out to every single college radio station, you know, and they, it’s not like the label was doing it for or they had like, you know, promotion, but they were doing it themselves because it was, that was when, you know, unless you had like a really great contract, you were DIY in it and stuffing envelopes. And so it’s really fun to hear him talk about it’s he’s just the nicest guy. And yeah, like like you guys said, there’s not a lot of information about them on Wikipedia or out there.
Their website kind of has their history that tells the story that I just told you of him meeting Ken and, and coming down. But I mean, they played 64 shows at the 40- Watt. So like, you know that everybody in Athens went and saw the squalls at some point, right?
There were that they were that kind of band where like locally they just kept playing and playing. And when a band does that many, and that’s just one club. So they played other clubs in Athens and of course they toured.
So like when you play live that much, you get, you get really good and you can tell seeing this video, because it is very much a live video, not a fake live video. They’re great. Just like we talked about Love Tractor, great musicians.
They’re super in the pocket. Like everything I’ve heard from them, because they have a live album on Apple Music that’s out called Live from the 4 Watt Sounds just like the studio album. I mean, they nail it.
It’s, they’re very, very good live and it’s the one, the only difference I really picked up from listening to the studio version of this, the live version was I think Bob’s country vibe comes out even more, like in his vocal, it’s a little more even apparent in the studio version version that is in the live version, which is kind of goes back to what you were saying, Scott, of them embracing that part of that’s that’s just a sign of a really tight band that they could get in the studio and do one thing and then do it exactly that way when they get on. I mean, just nail it. They are tight, you know?
And that’s that’s what that is, is that, you know, whoever produced them probably got the studio and said, all right, you guys just do that. Like, do what you did at the 40 watt the other night. And they recorded.
I think so, yeah. Yeah, that’s what they do, you know? And they’re they’re good.
They’re a tight band. That’s a real talent to be able to do that. You guys are both bigger film buffs than I am.
Have either of y’all actually seen Athens Inside Out? I’m interested now after just doing a little reading about it? I did, but it was a while ago.
I don’t remember much about him, and I know I have seen it. So I’d be happy to sit and watch it again it again and report back, but it’s been so long that I couldn’t really tell you much about it. I remember that I saw it, I remember that I enjoyed it, and that’s about it.
I can tell you off the top of my head. Yeah, it’s definitely worth worth seeing seeing, and it’s got it’s got a ton of live performance in it, so it’s not, you know, just a dock of like talking heads, talking about Athens or whatever. And it’s very contemporary.
You know, it was made at a time when these bands were still on the, you know, not, not even like at the prime, but some of them were still on the upward swing. So like you, you, you’re seeing them definitely, you know, contemporary with when that scene was alive and, and vibrant. Not that it, you know, died, the Athen scene, it’s remained vibrant, but yeah, for a documentarian to capture that moment instead of like kind of going back 20 years later and trying to get stories and stuff, that’s what I liked about it, you know, as well is that you’re getting to see, you know, that contemporary view of what was happening in Athens.
And then if you like those bands, then you get to see, you know, some really cool live performances, you know, the sound quality and, and the film quality are both, you know, hit or miss, but yeah, yeah, definitely worth tracking down. I just looked it up. It was released in 1986, which means it was filmed probably between 83 and 85.
So that’s this is early on in that, you know, the only band at that time that was, you, really big was probably the B52s, and REM is getting there at that point. So that’s really a good time capsule of sort of what that was at the time. All right.
So we’ve each chosen our three songs from April of 1987, but now we’ve got what may end up becoming our favorite part of these episodes. I don’t know. So far, So far, it’s been a blast, and I don’t think this episode is going to be any different because this was a hell of a choice.
We choose one song that none of us had ever heard before, and we listened to it, usually just like a week or so before we record. This one, I think, was so funny that Scott was like, okay, you guys got to listen to this like last week. He was like, I know where know record for a week, but you guys got to hear this because it’s it’s it’s everything you would hope for in a mystery song that just comes out of nowhere.
So tell tell us what we what we’ve tell us what we’re talking about, Scott. Okay. so the song that we chose this week is by a band called Swinging Pistons. And the title is varies, depending on where you look it up.
But it’s something along the lines of ever since I was young, I love the sound of machines. Two in solid meal Well, it and Ever since I was young I love the sound ofines Ever since I was young I love the sound of machine And you can find it under the title, I the Sound of Machines. You can find it since I was Young.
Anyway, it’s one of those. Since I was young, I love The Sound of Machines by swinging Pistons. You know, we picked this one because we like the name of the band, and I put it on, and every once in a while, guys, you you just stumble across something that brings you an immense amount of joy.
And this song was that for me. I cannot, I mean, I almost feel like I should stop because you guys may not not have loved this as much as I did. I’ Maybe, you know, being a little hyperolous.
I don’t know, but man, did I love this song. So I the video is a bunch of old footage of people from the 20s and 30s, flappers, basically dancing, and a couple of things of guys hitting hammers with machines, a la, Metropolis, like that sort of thing, all edited together to this song that is basically a sort of early form of industrial is the best I can describe it. This guy basically, you know, decided to make a song about how he loves music made by machines, and then he made a song with a bunch of machines and sound.
And by God, he did. And by God, he did. It’s It’s catchy and fun, and the video’s great, and I loved everything about it.
So I started going down the rabbit hole, and that’s where things start to get weird. But the song was made by a guy named William Tucker. He is a guitarist from New Jersey.
Before this, he was a guitar teacher, and he was in several other bands. I looked into a little bit of it. The only one that was of any note was a band called Regressive Aid, which was an instrumental band.
All this instrumentrumental music. But unlike other instrumental bands of this era, like Man or Astr Man or Shadowy Man from a Shadowy Planet, who leaned more into like surf guitar kind of stuff, it’s not that. It’s a almost like early pop punk, just with no lyrics.
It’s pretty good. It’s a bunch of little two minute songs that you keep waiting for some guy to start screaming over, and it just doesn’t happen. Like, you know, but it’s pretty good.
Anyway, they don’t really go anywhere. So he is, like I said, a guitar teacher. He famously taught one of the guys in Wien how to play the guitar.
He was his guitar teacher. I don’t know if that speaks highly of his skill for a guitar teacher, but I was going to jump in. I was like, no, okay, never mind.
Yeah, never mind. But he did teach somebody famous how to play a guitar for whatever that’s worth. So he makes this song kind of on a whip.
He gets on his machines and puts together this just delightfully catchy song, and releases it as a single with the intention of swinging pistons and this project becoming something more. However, that never happens because Al Jorgensen of ministry, hears this song and says, I dig this and you need to join ministry as our touring guitarist. And he does that.
And so for the rest of his career, he is the guitarist for ministry on the Mind is a terrible thing to taste tour. He plays with Chris Conley, he plays with My Life with Thrillo Cult. He plays with all the Chicago industrial bands, basically, and that becomes his career.
He unfortunately committed suicide in 1999. And there’s not much information about that. But what is interesting about this to me is that this song is only available as a single.
So Swing Pistons Never Became anything. He never went back to the project. And the other thing that really threw me off was, if you watch the video on YouTube, there’s one that obviously was taped off of MTV2.
And you know, on the videos, they put name of the band, name of the song, and the name of the album that it is on. That video has as the name of the album Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, which is the debut album by a band called The Mesaderos, which was Joe Strummer’s first side project after the Clash broke up. This song is not on that album.
So YMTV chose to put it, as the album title for this song, no idea. There’s a whole lot of big giant question marks sort of surrounding this. But forget all of that.
Get on YouTube and watch this song and video. It is a delight. And I hope you guys liked it half as much as I did.
Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know if anybody has ever liked it as much as you did, but maybe Al Jorggeson, apparently. But wow, yeah. I mean, I didn’t know what to expect when we, you know, when we choose these.
You try to guess kind of from the sound of it. Like, what is it? What’ it going to be in you’re like, well, swinging pistons?
I like the sound of machines. I think it maybe is going to be industrial. And it is, but it in a really poppy sort of, it’s hard to describe, honestly.
I had no idea where it was going. Like it starts and you’re kind of like, okay, maybe, you know, if you added a really crunchy guitar, this could go almost into like a nine inch nails kind of direction. It’s, you know, but then it very quickly veers into something a little different and you see him on screen, but, and then that, the flapper 1920s chorus comes in that’s just like, where is this, where is this coming from?
Because you, I never saw that coming. And then like halfway through in the middle, uh, he rips off Yaz, don’t go, the riff from Yazda just right in the middle of that. I don’t know where that comes from.
I doubt he gave them any songwriting credit for that, but I was wondering, you know. Yeah. Yeah, you could not get away with that.
Yeah, you couldn’t get away with it now. If they if they heard it, they would have sued him, but I doubt they did. It is really good.
It It’s a song that like if it came out 10 years later, it would be less interesting to me, but it’s it’s super interesting because of the time it came out and because it, I didn’t know the ministry connection. So like it kind of is a precursor to what would become industrial music. I mean, I guess some other people were doing, some stuff like it and and maybe harder stuff, but it’s the elements are all there and then, and then it’s got this whole other thing that’s going on in the that I still can’t quite w my head around.
The interesting thing to me is that where Al Jorgensen heard this and said, I can see Al Jorgensen hearing this and going, well, I also like music made by machines, so let’s rather and do something. However, that’s not what he does with this guy. He takes this guy who made this song and makes him the guitarist for a Ministry’s tour where, you know, if you’ve ever seen Ministry Live, you know, that the industrial parts of their sound kind of disappear when they play a live.
They basically become a speed metal band. And that’s what this guy was hired to do on the strength of this song, which is really odd to me. Which I don’t even think has a guitar in it at all.
But there is It does. There’s some guitar in there, there’s not a there. Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I know, I hadn’t heard or heard the song either. Let me first say, this is the video I’ve been waiting for four episodes for us to see.
Like, I want every 80s video to be this. wild and madcap. Like this video was fantastic. And I think my favorite part of it is at the very beginning, and they run it twice.
There’s some dude in a suit and he’s like, he takes his hat off and he’s like waving it in there and like skipping around in front of like there’s like a truck falling. It goes along. It looks like the most joy I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
Like, I want whatever that happen because that dude looks like he’s having a blast right now. But you yeah, the video in particular, like I said, this is the one I’ve wanted us to watch for four months now. But the song is great too.
I like kind of the polyrthms with all of the percussion going on, mean, the industrial sounds, all kind of the boys that came to my mind with the chorus vocals was ragtime, kind of the female, like ragtime style vocals that go along there. Yeah, just a very, very bizarre song and not really something I’m probably going to want to listen to all the time or anything, but I did really enjoy it. I watched the video again, though.
Oh, yeah. Oh, Scott’s got that shit on repeat.. I burned a hole in this thing since I heard it the movie.
Yeah, the other thing I wanted to compare it to, because while I was listening to it, I was like, this reminds me of something this reminds me of something. And unfortunately, it does remind me of something that’s also probably maybe as obscure as this, maybe not quite as much. But there was a song around’ 93, ‘ 94, by a Danish rapper slash producer named Lucas.
The song was called Lucas with the Ld Off. yeah. He sampled a Benny Goodman song in that track, and that’s what it reminded me of. That’s what my ears were telling me I was listening to, was this sort of, you know, taking old swing beats from the 30s, 20s, whatever, and kind of hardening them up a little bit with the drum beats and whatever.
That’s what this is. So I know I probably just, you know, tried to link an obscure song to another obscure song, but if you if you know Luke is with the lid off, which is kind of a jam, by the way. And a hell of a video, by the way..
Speaking of videos. Yeah, that is a great video. If you like that song and video or whatever, there’s something here for you.
It’s got the same sort of vibe. If you’ve been yearning for industrial 1920s mashup. That’s what I was like, who who was this made for?
Who like, not in a bad way, but just like, I don’t think anyone really attempted anything like this. Well, it was obviously made for me, but I didn’t know it until just now. Yeah.
And I mean, I never would have made the Lucas connection. I kind of see where you’re going with the Lucas with the lid off connection. But because what I was going to say was no one ever attempteded an industrial mashup with like old school, you know, 20s.
The closest at this time, the closest thing you had was like Jive Bunny and the Mix Masters, you know? Yeah. And this is so much better than that.
You know, that that’s just, that’s just taking old swing songs and putting a bead underneath them. This is this is reworking it in a really interesting way, you know, so it’s it’s much better than that, you know? Yeah, that’s exactly where I was going to, I was going with that.
Now, I really like the original Jive Bunny and the Master Mixer song. Their stuff got increasingly terrible as they cranked out more and more stuff But that very first one, Swing the Mood. Oh my God, I still love that.
It’s fun. You by of the mix Masters is fun. It is.
But it’s not this. No, it’s definitely not. Yeah, this is so much more creative, I think, than that.
Yeah, it’s the song’s creative. The video is creative because I like that, you know, he is in the video, so there’s contemporary shots in the video mixed with the 1920s stuff, but it’s it’s very well. It flows very, very well.
Like you don’t you don’t feel like you’re getting yanked back and forth between like the 20s and the, you know, the 1980s or whatever. This also has a very happy, excitable woman in it too, like, like the other. This is like two, two out of the four videos that have like a very bubbly, happy woman.
And it if I remember the video, right? We got the bubbly, happy woman in the two videos and then aside from this video, it’s the non-rostar rockstar week. This guy, William Tucker, was the only guy we talked about this week that looked like he might want to actually be a rock star.
He does, that’s true, yeah. that’s very true. No, let’s’s let’s go ahead and just point out no one in any of these videos is even remotely as happy as that first dude that you were talking about in the suit just dancing in front of the.. I don’t know if any of us have ever been that happy.
No, no. He and the lead singer from Mighty Lemon Drops are on such different parts of the spectrum in terms of their vibe for these videos. I don’t see those two hanging out.
No, I don’t think so. We have taken, we’ve gone from, possibly the least happy singer I’ve ever seen, to possibly the most happy human being we’ve ever witnessed do anything, which that that actually was a 192020s video, I think. There is definitely like some actual footage in there like sort of interspersed with the guy that did the song.
Unlike the camper Van Beethoven video where we think it was probably all stage. This one definitely was not. No, yeah.
This is actual, like old footage. Yeah. Yeah, the camper Van Beethoven video, there might be some real footage in there, but a lot of that, I think, was filmed and then, you know, scratched the film up or whatever.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, you find yourself an old super 8 camera and you, it doesn’t take much work to make it look crappy and old. Right.
That’s pretty much.. And at that time, I mean, I mean, a home video camera is almost expensive as shooting three minutes of eight. Super eight.
Really hard to edit, too. Yeah, and the editing would be even more difficult, whereas, yeah, Super 8, I mean, oh, speaking of editing, one thing I forgot to mention that was in the Mighty Lemon Drops video, I think. is that big old reel to reel that’s sitting in the middle of the state, yeah? Yeah, I totally forgot.
Yeah. That was in my notes and I forgot to mention it. That brought me back to the old days of, of college radio.
And when Keith Scott and I all started, we actually edited on a real-to- reel. I think of probably our entire college radio career because I think they switched to digital right after you left, Keith because you were the last of us there, but you were still real to re on your. It was during my time there that we switched to digital editing.
It was during my time. Yeah, that we got the first digital editing system. So I did get to play around with the first digital editing system that we had at KTXT.
But yeah, for most of the time I was there, it was still cutting and splice and tape. Yeah, I went to work at a commercial radio station right after KTXT, and I was still cutting tape and hanging it on the wall. were they not digital yet? They were not digital as of 95, 96, somewhere.
Interesting. Did you stay in radio long enough to switch over to digital production or did you get out of radio before that? Just briefly.
I got to play with it just a little bit, and then I moved on., I wish I had because I, years later, when I was in Houston working at a nightclub, I went to the radio station there to cut some commercials for the club I was at, just voiceover. But watching that guy, like record me and edit that together, I was like, damn, I wish I knew how to do that. Like he had his board.
He would set the board to my voice where he liked it or whatever. And then I could come back six months later and he would push a button on a computer and the knobs would all go he wanted it for me. So he didn’t have to do it again.
I was like, God, that would have saved me so much time back in the day, you know? But yeah, so I wish I had got more into digital editing, but I never really, I played with it, but I never really got into it. I never got too professionally as a DJ or when I did limited production work at the AM station that I worked at. for a while and I used to cut stuff.
But uh, obviously now, when I, you know, I cut the film, obviously, in like Final Cut Pro digitally and and do a lot of editing that’s more related to the videos that I’m doing, but uh, I look back and I’m just like, God, how long? Because there’s like today, I mean, I spent this morning editing some stuff together and like looking back and just thinking, God, how long would that have taken me on a freaking real or real, you know, doing some of the stuff? Tape hanging on the walls everywhere.
Tape all over the place. And yeah, like you have to kind of try to label it so you don’t lose track of what’s. It just.
It’s so much easier these days. Like, I can’t even tell you how easy. I mean, I was editing footage this morning from guys that recorded it yesterday in New York, you know, and were able to get it to me digitally and I’m able to open it up digitally and instantly start editing and forward I mean, just, uh, but that seeing that reel to reel in the video was the point of that that brought me back to the, brought me back to the KTXT days of razor blades and tape and, and just, yeah, beating your head against the wall because you forgot to turn the record levels back up or you forgot to, you know, didn’t degost the tape properly all the little, all the little things.
All right. Another fun episode three, three fun songs for our regular rotation choices and an especially fun mystery choice this week. They’ve all been pretty fun.
I’m really loving this part of the episodes. But just going back and hearing, it was really fun to go back and listen to Camper Van Beethoven, even though I did listen to them some about four years ago when I was doing the interviews for the film, but like that was a fun look back. And I really like Shining a light on some of the bands that maybe didn’t hit it quite as big, like the squalls, but man, yeah, I think the winner of this week is the Swinging Pistons.
Not that’s not that there’s an award, not that there’s a trophy, not that This is a competition, but but if it was. Like I said, every once in a while, you just hear a song and it just it just makes you happy. And this song made me so happy.
It’s a good one for sure. Thanks to 120 minutes..org. They are the website that has, for the last several years and for many years, I think they’ve been collecting all these playlists and all this information about 120 minutes on MTV.
So I appreciate them doing all that work because it’s helped us to be able to just go in and find songs and do these episodes. Next episode will be May of 1987. I don’t exactly.
I think we may have some songs chos by, but I don’t even know what’s coming up, so we’ll just, it’ll be a surprise. But thanks for tuning in on this journey through 120 minutes. I appreciate it for Keith Porterfield and Scott Mobley.
My name is Michael Millard and we will see you next time