Our exploration of MTV’s 120 Minutes continues into the dog days of 1988, featuring a pioneer of electro-pop, an all-time college radio icon and one of our favorite bands of decade.
And welcome back to 120 months. My name is Michael Millard. I am here with Scott Mobley and Keith Porterfield, and we are traipsing through the 1st 10 years of 120 Minutes, MTV’s Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, College Rock, kind of show, that you may remember from the late 80s, early 90s.
We are currently in the month of August of 1988. And we’ve got an interesting lineup this week. I have a feeling there’s going to be some contention, maybe some disagreements.
We’ve had some shows where it was just like all lovey dovey and everybody loved everybody and I don’t think that’s how it’s going to play out. So we’ll see how it goes. First of all, we’re going to set the landscape up for August of 1988.
Now, I have been kind of reading off just like the top the top 10 on the top 40 charts. And I realize that’s not really a good indicator of kind of what was on MTV and then why and why there was a 120 minutes. Because I think now you hear all these songs and some of them, and you’re like, yeah, that was on that was on MTV or whatever, but I think it’s more interesting to kind of walk through what was in rotation on MTV, which is hard to find charts that like really are MTV charts, but now we have entered the era that I actually had MTV and watched MTV religiously.
So now I think I can start to kind of fill in the gaps in terms of what was on, what was in rotation on MTV in August of 1988 versus what we’re about to talk about in 120 minutes. So in August, videos that were in heavy rotation on MTV. What’s on your mind?
Peer Energy by Information Society. we kind of talked earlier about that era of music where EMF and Information Society, and the mystery band that we talked about, I don’t remember the name of that mystery band, because I did not write it down, that were making that style of music, and it was just like, there was kind of like a five-year heyday of that, but man, love information site. I particularly love that song. Obviously, hair metal was huge.
Poison, fallen angel, Def Leppard had 2 songs, poured some sugar on me, and love bites were both in heavy rotation. Aerosmith Ragdoll was in heavy rotation at this time. and actually, on the billboard charts as well. Guns N’ Roses, Sweet Child of Mine, was number 4 on the billboard charts at this time.
So that song was heavy, heavy rotation, a classic. Interesting. Two songs called Don’t Be Cruel.
We’re both on the charts at this time. Cheap Trick and Bobby Brown. Both had a song called Don’t Be Cruel.
One of those, obviously, a cover of the older song. Bobby Brown’s very much not a cover, but very much a very cool song for me at that time as a 15 year old or 16 year old. Yeah, it’s a jam.
Of note to us, I think, our last episode, we covered a track by Tracy Chapman called Fast Car. That song is now number 6 on the billboard charts and was also moved into mainstream rotation on MTV around this time. So it did not take long for that one to go from a 120 minute song to a main rotation song.
And then I also thought it was funny. This actually is a billboard chart thing. Number 2 and number 3 on the billboard charts, I don’t want to go on with you like that by Elton John, and I don’t want to live without your love by Chicago.
Two, I don’t want us songs. Back to back on the charts at that time. And oddly enough, I don’t want to listen to either of those songs.
That’s just that, let’s just call it episode over. It’s not going to get any better than that. Yeah, I don’t mind the Elton John song, but it’s not my favorite Elton John song.
I have never liked Chicago, I have to say. I don’t mean to just… Especially the Peter Siterra, Chicago.
Right, yeah. Yeah, and there’s a lot of that. Like right now on the charts, there’s Steve Winwood.
There’s there’s Huey Lewis, who I actually do like Huey Lewis in the news, but Perfect World was on the charts at this time, which I think is a great song, but, you know, Eric Carmen, we talked about last week is on the charts around this time. Like, there’s there’s that weird Kenny Loggins also. There’s just that style of rock.
Peter Cetera is actually on this chart too as a solo artist, so there you go. You lose in the news, man. That was the greatest bar band of all time.
I don’t know how those guys got as big as they did, but they were they were strictly a bar band that somehow hit it huge. Yeah, I mean, they they they had a string of, I mean, really good songs. Do I want to say that?
Yeah, sure. Power Love? Good.
Perfect world? Good. So that’s the landscape.
So, if you tuned in to MTV on, I think we decided Sunday nights by now. Maybe for 2 hours. You got to hear what you may have heard if you had a college radio station in your town, or if you didn’t, maybe you never got to hear these tracks.
And so that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing, and we’re going to start this week with Scott Mobley. So, um, for the past few episodes here, I’ve been, I’ve been picking songs that were favorites of mine, bands of songs that were important to my musical taste, and the, and the changes it was undergoing in the late 80s. I decided to take a little break from that today.
And take a look at a band whose popularity and fan worship has always kind of eluded me. So my choice this week is the song so important by… Because to me to me Right now So, Park is a band that at its core is 2 brothers, Ron and Russell Mayo, Ron is the keyboardist.
He’s kind of the goofy looking one with the chaplain slash Fiddler Mustache, and Russell is the singer, and I believe their main songwriter, although I think Ron probably works out the keyboard parts, which are very much part of this. They formed in 1968 under the name Half Nelson. They were discovered by Todd Rudgrin and then released an album under that name, Half Nelson in 71.
That album flopped. A couple songs for men ended up on compilations, and then it was re-released in 72 as Sparks, and it was a minor hit at that time. That’s about as much history as I’m going to give you because I just wanted to say that to point out that these guys, the core brothers that have been Sparks, have been doing this for over 50 years.
Lots of albums, lots of singles, lots of videos, not a lot of huge success, but they’ve always just kind of been around. And well, I think it’s fair to say that their fan base is small in that they’ve never broken huge. That fan base is a fervent and devoted group of people that worship this bad as being some kind of genius musical group.
So I set out this week to try to see if I could hear it. They had a little surge in interest in 2021 and filmmaker Edgar Wright released a documentary called The Sparks Brothers. It’s a really, really great documentary.
It’s obviously done by somebody who loves this band, and found a whole bunch of other people who do too. You leave that movie feeling like if you’re not into these guys, then you’re missing something. Um, because I certainly did.
I have one small memory of sparks for my childhood. I remember the video for the song Cool Places because Jane Wheedland from the Go-Go’s was in it. She’s on the song and in the video.
So I liked that. I liked her. That song is pretty generic. keyboard driven pop, but it’s fine.
And I believe that that is their biggest commercial hit. know that their fans would tell you it’s their greatest song, but I think it’s the most success they ever had was that song. So obviously I didn’t have the time to listen to 50 years of music from a very, very prolific band, but I did do some listening, and I’ll start with this song right here. So so important is the lead single from their 1988 album.
It’s called Interior Design, but not a commercial success, which is a fairly common story with these guys. It’s a fairly generic keyboard driven pop song. You might see a trendforming here.
I didn’t think it was bad, but I didn’t think it was anything special either, and the more I listened to Sparks, the more I realized that this is just what you’re getting. You know, their their bio talks about how their styles change and they morph and they try new things. At the end of the day, all I hear is generic keyboard driven pop music.
Like I don’t hear all these these magical differences in their in their music. It all just kind of sounds the same to me. So the video for this song, we talked a lot about these videos at this time being boring and uninventive and forgettable.
And I mean, I was going to say it. I found this video to be actively and aggressively bad. It is sloppy.
It is washed out. It has nothing to say. Even something subtle, or at least, you know, be visually interesting.
I found none of that in there. I just didn’t like it at all. So I sat out trying to convince myself that I missed something with Sparks, and I don’t think I succeeded.
We’ll give them a couple of minor shout outs. However, if you watch the documentary of the Sparks Brothers. There’s a fairly good amount of time devoted to a song called My Baby’s taking me home, um, from an album called Little Beethoven, which the band calls their Magnum Opus.
I have not heard the whole album. The film shows, I’m playing this song live and then all the talking heads and the dog kind of gushing over it and breaking it down for a while. I’m gonna give them that one.
It’s a really great song. It’s minimalist, it’s beautiful, it’s subtle. kind of an experience to listen to. So that’s one.
I’ll give him a check mark on that song. I just wish my time spent listening had more to offer up, but honestly, that was the only song that I really was even slightly blown away by. And I also wanted to give just a real brief shout out to a movie called Annette, uh, for the sake of time, I’m not going to go into it, but it’s this wonderfully weird little movie that happens to be a musical and Sparks did the soundtrack for it.
Somehow, their simplistic minimalist style really works in this bizarre little movie. I think when I saw that is, and after seeing the doc and that movie, kind of back to back, is when I decided I needed to dig more into these guys. It was just kind of disappointed.
I didn’t find anything more to latch on to. So I hope I was gentle enough here. I know these guys have their fans.
I tried to be one of them, but I just don’t get it. With a few exceptions. I think they’re just kind of boring.
And there’s this thing in pop music where, Quirkiness is sort of hiding some kind of genius. Um, we we throw the bandivo around a lot on this podcast, but I’m going to throw them around again because they are exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah, they’re silly.
And but underneath all that quirkiness and silliness. There is something really groundbreaking and innovative and great going on with a band like Debo. I think Sparks is just quirky for quirky’s sake.
I don’t think there’s any genius underneath the silliness. I kind of hope that one of you guys might have the other opinion on this. I don’t know.
I didn’t want this to be a sparks bashing party, but I tried and I couldn’t get there. Any fans out there? Well, I can’t say that I am.
But, uh, it’s funny because when we, we started this, you know, when we got the, we’re making our list of what we were going to do for the show, I saw the name Sparks and felt like I should know that band, but I didn’t, like I couldn’t think of any songs, I couldn’t think of any song titles or anything that I’d ever heard from them, but I felt like that, I know the name somehow. Um, so it was, it was kind of weird to me. So when I do these things, the 1st thing I do is always just go watch the video, you know, 1st things 1st before I do any reading about the band or anything about that.
So I put this video on. My 1st thought was that this guy is doing a one guy is doing a pretty passable midger impression that turned out to be Ron Mayle, the keyboardist guitarist brother. So then I went and did a little reading about them and found out that Sparks have been around forever and, you know, had like 28 albums or whatever.
And so I thought, well, maybe Midjur is doing a pretty passable Ron Mail and proersonation, actually. I’m not sure which one of those guys came first. But so yeah, yeah, that was the 1st thing I thought about as far as the video goes.
But I listened to the song. It was it was fine. It’s okay.
It’s not great, but it’s not bad. So I decided I wanted to explore them a little more. listen to a little more of the stuff. And so I went, I listened to a town, a song called This Town ain’t big enough for both of us.
And ooh, that song is terrible. That’s not good at all. We’ll leave it at that.
After that, I got to cool places and then realized why I thought I knew the name Sparks. I remembered cool places, and I listened to it again, and I remembered, I don’t like cool places by Sparks. I didn’t like a phone that was out before and I didn’t like it hearing it this time.
So I then went and listened to a song called When I’m With You. I didn’t like that one either. So of all the Spark songs I listened to, this one’s so important, actually, was the best one.
It’s, it’s, again, it’s not great, but it’s not terrible. It’s certainly better than the other ones I listen to by these guys. So yeah, I can’t come to your rescue on this.
Sparks just is not for me. And for all their fans out there, you know, I’m glad you found a band that you’d latch onto and really love, but boy, yeah, yeah, I don’t see it either. It’s just, this is not a band that I enjoyed even a little bit.
I think what you said is exactly where I ended up too, which is that, you know, for a band that’s been around 50 years and you read about how they, you know, all these different musical styles they’ve tried and everything. Everything you quick play on sounds exactly the same. It’s it’s, they just do one thing.
And if you like that one thing, then great, you know, but it’s, you know, I think maybe recently, like that, that, that song I did like is from 2002, I think maybe in the last maybe 15, 20 years, they’ve gotten a little more experimental, a little more trying some different stuff, but you listen to anything these guys did in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, and it’s all just this. It’s sounds exactly like this. Yeah, everything that I listened to was.
I will say, though, that the one difference that we did have about this is that I liked the video. I didn’t think it was great, but I thought it was a pretty cool concept that was kind of held back by the 80s technology. But I liked kind of like Chiron and the guys in on like static photos or, you know, like scenes and then having them moving around while everything was staying, you know, still behind them and then kind of putting them in with like, you know, there were some like scenes in houses and scenes out on the streets or whatever.
I thought the idea of it was good. I thought, you know, basically the technology they had in the 80s kind of kind of hamstrung it a little bit, but overall, I actually liked the video. That was the best part of this as far as I was concerned.
I could give you that, that maybe the technology held them back. I still feel like we’ve seen the same thing done a whole lot better, though. And, you know, I’m more than willing to probably guess that, uh, they were not being given a ton of money by any, you know, recording label to do videos at this time.
These guys never really sold any album. So the fact that they’ve been able to go for 50 years with minimal success is, I guess, impressive enough in itself, but. I think that’s the impressive part of them is, you know, they they were making music in the early 70s and doing it, maybe in a style that wasn’t, you know, may possibly a little bit pre-craft work, pre-devo.
You know, they may have beaten them to the punch a little bit on some of this, some of that. And so that they get a little credit for at least being there at the beginnings of electronic music and that’s how I always thought of Sparks. The song that, uh, when I think of Sparks, I think of music you can dance to.
That’s the song I used to play that on retro radio. I used to even play it in the club on retro nights occasionally. It’s, I can’t say that I ever loved that song, but that and cool places were the 2 things that I kind of really knew by Sparks that, you know, are the, to me were the kind of their classic songs, but that’s kind of a weird say about a band that, like you said, has, you know, 50 years and 28 albums and probably 400 songs.
I’m sure that all there are, you know, other fans have different opinions and stuff about that. And that’s fine. Uh, I, you know, do I like this song?
Not particularly. It feels pretty generic. It has more guitar than I would have thought.
I think, you know, my my exposure to Sparks being more from the electronic side of it because I was looking for songs to play, sometimes in the club or whatever. I don’t know that I realized maybe that they even really had, you know, guitar forward songs like this. But I mean, he’s he’s pretty well jamming away on it.
Their 70s stuff is pretty guitar heavy too. Like, they didn’t start getting electronics still around. Cool Place is about when they become an electronic band, which I think was like 82, 83.
So they were ahead of the game a little bit, you know. A little bit. I think that’s probably why, you know, people give them the credit.
The video, my note on the video is that I think the video totally misses the mark what they were shooting for. I think. I like the concept that I think they were trying to get to, but either the technology or there’s some editing decisions that I’m just like, they did not have a better shot that they could cover than that.
Like, why did they use that shot? That shot is absolutely terrible. Maybe that was the point because they are pretty quirky and maybe they were trying to make a bad, you know, green screen because this is 88.
This comes off as sloppy thing. That’s my whole reaction to it. It’s slop.
I mean, that’s the danger of trying something like that, if that’s what they were going for, is that if you’re not in on the joke, you’re just going to see it as crap. I’m giving them the credit to think that maybe they were kind of trying to do like a crappy green screen. Because if not, like, come on guys, it’s 88 by now, people knew at least how to do better green screen than that, but that is what it is.
The one thing I will say, and I will referencing the doc that you talked about, I watched a clip about their 1st appearance on top of the pops that was pulled from the dock. And I do think that that had a big influence on people in the UK. You know, there’s, like you said, there’s multiple talking heads.
Duran Duran was in that group and some other people that were talking about seeing that performance on top of the pops. And we’ve talked before about one of the things that I’ve learned from being over here in Europe is that top of the pops had such a big influence on kids in the UK because it was, it was via, you know, things could go viral before that was even a term because you saw it on top of the pops and then you went to school the next day and talked about it. And I was trying to think of something that I could draw a line and compare that to.
And what I remember from being a kid is watching. I remember watching the Motown 25th anniversary special, and it was the 1st time that Michael Jackson busted out the Moonwalk. And like the next day at school, we all were trying to do the Moonwalk.
Because we all watched that for whatever reason. It’s not like my family was were big fans of Motown and none of us were huge Michael Jackson fans, but I mean, everybody kind of was a Michael Jackson fan at that point. But like, it was that kind of thing where you went to school the next day and you were like, holy crap, did you see that?
Let’s try to do it. And I, I, from what I understand from the doc and, and following up on it, that that appearance on top of the pops was a very big deal. People were really intrigued by them or pissed off by them because the guy looked like Hitler, particularly in that performance, TA had the full on Hitler mustache, and he was called out as maybe, you know, that was a bit even problematic at the time, but besides that, it had a big influence on the kids that saw it.
And so maybe that played into their lore a little bit, played into, you know, people remembering them being more influential than they were, or maybe they were more influential than we think they were because of that. That’s all I can add to like trying to kind of give them more credit. They clearly are popular.
They clearly have had an influence. It sounds like it’s missed all 3 of us in terms of why that is exactly. Um, and I don’t know that we’ll, you know, we’ll ever probably catch on to that, that, that wave.
Yeah, they are what they are. I encourage people to come into the comments on YouTube or on Facebook or wherever you are and tell us why we’re wrong. Tell us what we should be listening to.
Uh, you know, we’re very open-minded about music, but we’re trying to be honest, and I think it’s safe to say none of us are big Sparks fans, and that’s okay. I am, however, a big fan of this next band, so I’m going to get my feelings hurt if this doesn’t work out, but we’ll see how we’ll see how it goes. I am going to talk about the another Australian band.
I talked about Midnight Oil a couple episodes ago. I am going to talk about the hoodoo gurus. The song is I want you back.
I want you back. I want you back. This is a band that I have in my in my brain bucket of bands.
This is a band that I consider like a absolute college radio band through and through. And after reading more about them and doing the research, I think everybody considers in that as far as how they broke in the US. College radio was absolutely 100% essential to them finding an audience.
They, you know, they did some tours in the US. They were friends with the Bengals, oddly enough, so they did get to open for the Bengals, and that certainly didn’t hurt. They do call out.
Actually, I think on their Wikipedia page that getting airplay on 120 minutes, this very show that we’re talking about helped them as well. But this is a 100% would not have, I think, gotten traction in the US if it hadn’t been for college radio play. And when you listen to them, it makes a lot of sense, particularly in the time period that we’re talking about.
And if you’ve, if you’ve watched any episode, or listen to any episodes of this podcast, you know, I am a big fan of Jangle Rock and the Athens music scene, and I keep coming back to it and coming back to it. These guys are from Australia. They were not part of that scene, but they are absolutely a jangle rock band that sound a lot like they could have been recorded in Mitch Easter Studio, you know, in North Carolina and played at the 40 watt club in Athens because they sound a lot like that at this time.
For most of their career. I’d say they lean a little harder rock as they get a little bit deeper in their career, but not really. I mean, they are kind of a jingle rock band that just happens to be from Australia and they’re great at it.
I mean, I think they’re fantastic. Like I really, really like this song. This one comes off of their debut album.
So they formed in 1981. They recorded this album, Stone Age Romeos in 1984. This was actually the final single from that album, but it was also released in 84.
I think they must have released the 1st 3 singles before the album came out because this was the 4th and final single, but it was released the same month as the album, so they must have kind of done some pre-released singles and tried to get like some buzz going. of their albums have been necessarily huge. This is not their biggest song in Australia or the US, but it was one of the ones that kind of started to get them noticed. It started to get them college radio airplay.
The biggest song in the U.S. that I think most people are probably familiar with, if you were a big fan of college radio, and this kind of stuff was Come Anytime, which is on the album that came out in 1989. So right after this period that we’re talking about 120 minutes, they released magna come louder and that had come any time on it. That, I think, hit number one on the modern rock tracks and tracks in the US.
So they did get some some pretty decent success. They had another album in 91 that has a song called Miss Free Love 69 that also had a lot of college radio play in the U.S. that that album did fairly well or that song did fairly well in the U.S. And then, I think it was 94 that Crank came out and then, um, the right time was another song. We were definitely playing that.
That was my era, our era of being on KTXT, and that one, I think, was in heavy rotation at KGXT for a while. So it was like, throughout this period, they had one or 2 songs up in every album that really got pushed pretty hard on college radio in the US. They had a similar experience in Australia, but they had more success in Australia.
It’s their home country. So of course, some of the songs are different. Like, company time didn’t do as well there.
So, like, the songs that did well in Australia weren’t always necessarily the ones that broke big in the US for different reasons. And Australia doesn’t have really the college radio scene. I think, especially back then, that the US did.
So they were really kind of competing more with mainstream rock and stuff in Australia. But to me, you know, I made the joke that when we were talking about Midnight Oil, I was literally in the process of saying, hey, maybe Midnight Oil is one of the most popular Australia. And as I was saying that, I realized that, you know, ACDC does exist. in excess does exist.
So those bands are bigger. Scott rocking an ACDC shirt as we speak, which would have been that would have been really helpful the other day before I almost put my foot in my mouth. Hoodoo gurus, I think it’s safe to say, are maybe one of the most underrated and unknown Australian bands that I think I wish did get more airplay.
They’re still around. They still put out albums they still tour, but I think their sweet spot was probably, from their day album, debut album in 84 through crank in 94 was, I think, probably their best, their best output, but that’s, you know, that’s that’s subjective. So, uh, and then just circling back to the video.
This video, I think, is excellent use of green screen, if you just want to be silly. The background is like claymation dinosaurs who are kind of fighting, kind of singing along with a song. The guys are just doing their thing in front of it on a green screen.
Their hair is beyond reproach. It’s just the most ridiculous hair you’ll ever see, but it’s fantastic for 1988. It’s it’s funny.
His hair is something to talk about until the Miss Free love video that came out in 91. He has cut it to be like super short. Really, from a, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, it was a very, very good choice, but man, he just had some crazy hair that that’s kind of, it was kind of sad in a way, but I kind of understand why he did it.
He definitely he improved his looks, but the hair in this video is really, really something to behold. But, yeah, this video is, is what I, I think the Sparks video maybe wanted, well, that’s not really true. The Sparks video wanted to be something specific and they didn’t hit the mark.
This one just clearly wanted to be stupid and silly and it absolutely works. I watched it 3 times and I liked it all 3 times. So, yeah, I do love this band.
I always have, since I discovered them, when I was working at KTXT and I, like, dug back in their catalog. I like, you know, there’s 10 or 12 songs by them that I think are just really really, really solid. And their whole catalog is not bad.
Um, I would say the album tracks start to kind of run together after a while. So they’re more of a, it’s one of those bands that are like, if they have a greatest hits, that’s probably your best bet or go to like Apple Music and listen to their essentials or whatever, but, um, I have no idea what you guys know about this band, how you feel about this band. I do feel strongly about them being a good band, so I’m going to have to fight back a little bit if you push back, but I’m curious to know, yeah, where you guys stand on these guys.
So this is a band I did not know a whole lot about, but I did know this song. I heard this song at one of my earliest KTXT shifts back in the day. fell in love with it. It was a favorite of mine the whole time I was there, like anytime I got a DJ choice song.
This was probably it. I did dig a little deeper and I know a couple of the other songs. I particularly remember finding the album titled Magna Cum louder or whatever it is, really funny.
But I, you know, I did always love this particular song. It’s just your basic rocking banger, but as rocking bangers go, it’s a pretty great one. I’d love the back vocals in the chorus, um, which apparently were done by the band and a group of animated dinosaurs.
I’ll get to that. But great riff, super catchy. There is nothing wrong with this one at all.
I decided to let their top songs play for a little while after I listened to this again. And I am happy to report that I agree with you. If you like this song, you’re not going to have any issues with anything these dudes are doing.
This is just great straightforward power pop rock songs. You know, it does have a little bit of the jangle vibe, hooky, catchy, fun songs. This is a great band.
And it’s a band that I’m sure a lot of younger people have not heard about. Um, so I am like you giving them a solid recommendation. So this video.
I talked a little bit about how the Sparks video and you did too, was just kind of lazy and bad and maybe missed the mark a little bit. This video, while he does kind of look like it. It’s similar in appearance.
It’s doing this so much better. The visuals have nothing to do with the song. And we talked a while about, you know, a while back, a couple episodes ago about really good stop motion animation.
This is not that. But man, does this work? What a fun video.
This is proof that you don’t have to do anything fancier or expensive to be memorable. You just have to get a dinosaur to join you on a guitar solo and you’ll be just fine. So yeah, I just, I thought this was a blast.
I loved every 2nd of it. I’m also, I’m not going to say anything bad about the hoodoo grooves. I like these guys.
I liked them backward at KTXT. You mentioned come anytime and miss free love. Everything on crank is good.
All of that stuff’s good. I believe this is the 1st time I’d ever heard this song. And like I said, with the Sparks video, the 1st thing I ever do is put the video on and, you know, watch the video, listen to the song.
And this one, you know, it starts with him in bed, like laying down, and he’s like tossing a term, and then, you know, it melts away into what you figure is going to be a dream. Um, and then the camera pans up and you get the 1st look at uh, at Faulkner, David Faulkner, the singer with that hair, as you mentioned. I literally laughed out loud.
Like I literally started laughing the minute I saw that, that hair was so spectacular. And the funny thing about it is, I mean, I’m a fan of the cure, and Robert Smith, you know, the top of his head looks like it exploded for the last 45 years. So you would think I’d be cool with this, but this haircut on this guy really cracked me up.
And then, you know, the other guitar player also had like a very new wavy haircut going. But then the other 2 guys looked like they should have been playing for like bad company or the Allman brothers or somebody in the 70s, like they were strictly straight out of the 70s. It looked like somebody took half of a new wave band, and half of a 70s rock band and smashed them together and made them record together, and that’s how you ended up with the hoodoo gurus.
So I love their look because it cracked me up. I thought it was great. And I said, I like the song too.
You know, I didn’t know this one going in, but I liked it. And so yeah, let’s get to the video, though, because that’s the best part of this thing, as you guys already mentioned. Yeah, love the concept with the dinosaurs and everything.
And I like the fact that it started off with him asleep and then this goes into this dream with these dinosaurs around because I don’t know about you guys if anybody else has this happened, but I, through my life, have not necessarily recurring dreams in that they’re the same dream, but like dreams that have themes to them. Like when I was school, there was always school dreams. I’d forgotten a final, and I was trying to get there on time, or nowadays, I have a piece of equipment at work that has to go up and down an elevator, and all the time, I’ll dream, like the elevator gives way, and it falls all the way down to the ground and explodes, or it gets somehow gets stuck halfway up or whatever.
So I like to think that David Faulkner constantly has dreams about dinosaurs interrupting their live shows. Like this is something that happens to him a lot when he goes to sleep, he sees this. Because, yeah, I loved it.
Love to play dinosaurs. And you mentioned the part where the guitar player and the dinosaur are dueling guitar solos at the same time. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
So, yeah, man, I love the video. Uh, like the band, have always liked the band. I can’t say I’m a huge fan, but I’ve like everything I’ve heard from them.
But yeah, man, this was fun. I agree. wholeheartedly across the board, who do guru is a great band to check out and absolutely go watch this video. Yo, yeah, yeah. definitely watch the video.
Yeah, you would think a dream about dinosaurs crash in your band, you know, trying to rehearse or play would be like a nightmare, but it is not. It is the happiest dream. You could probably.
I mean, the dinosaurs are on key. Rock in the backing vocals, you know, contributing, contributing to the entertainment, not causing anybody any trouble, just minding their own business, doing their thing. I think it’s great.
Yeah. Love it. The hair, though.
If for no other reason. Because I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, yeah, it’s rock, you know, we’ve seen we’ve seen crazy haircuts.
No, no, you are not, you are not prepared for David Faulkner’s haircut in this video. And actually, go watch, um, I think the video for company time, because then he’s he’s starting to, you know, as we all have receiving hairline, but he still has the long hair, so he’s got that vibe going, very, very different, but also funny, and then watch Miss Free Love, where he actually cuts his hair and he looks like a completely different person that you probably would not recognize on the street if he ran into him. So he has quite the journey.
I haven’t seen a recent photo of, Actually, that’s not true. I did see a recent photo of him. He still has short hair.
So he has not gone back to I don’t even know what you would call the hair in this video, but let us know in the comments if you have a name for it. I mean it’s a little bit of a mullet. amazing. That’s what you call it.
Yeah, why mince words? All right. So this is going to be interesting.
So Sparks was kind of a 3 thumbs down, Hoodaguru is 3 enthusiastic, enthusiastic thumbs up. I think I know where this next one’s going, but I, but I’m not sure for a couple reasons. So I’m curious about how this discussion is going to go and this one is going to be introduced by Mr. Keith.
Yeah, so today I’m going to talk about a song called All That Money Wants by the Psychedelic Furs. And I forget you, I am good to see their faces. But it’s all nothing to me now All that money, once…
First things first, I would like to start by having an opinion here, making a proposition, whatever you want to call it. I posit that the psychedelic furs were the best singles band of the 1980s, at least as far as this type of music, you know, whatever you want to call it, alternative, new wave, whatever. When you start to think about these guys, like, think about the songs.
I mean, you got pretty in pink and President Gass, and high wire days, and ghosting you, and love my way, and heaven, I mean, it just goes on and on, heartbreak beat, dumb waiters. Every one of those songs is fantastic. And the funny thing about it is, is I don’t have a single 1980s psychedelic Furs album.
So I couldn’t tell you anything about the album tracks on any of those albums, but the singles throughout the 80s were so, so good. So as I finish this up, I challenge you guys to take a minute and think, like, who challenges these guys for being the best, like, alternative new wave, uh, singles band of the 80s. See, if you guys can come up with somebody.
Because I couldn’t. I think it’s these guys. I really do.
This song, all that money wants is off a compilation, which actually works really well because we’re talking about their singles and the things they do. This was the new song on a single, or a compilation called All of This and Nothing, that came out, I think in 88, actually. The song itself is pretty good.
I don’t think it really stands up to the best of their catalog. But it is good. It’s a solid psychedelic 1st song.
If you like what they do. I think you’re going to like this this song. The 1st themselves are the band that was formed in London in 1979 by a couple of brothers, Richard and Tim Butler.
Richard is the singer and primary songwriter. Tim Butler’s the bass player. They have had a ton of other members over the years.
But the ones that I’ll bring up. There were a couple. One is a guitar player named John Ashton that was with them throughout the 80s and all of their their best stuff.
He was kind of the guitar player there. And then they had a saxophone player called Mars Williams that was with them a little bit in the early part of their career more in the late part of it. He passed away in 2023.
But those 2 guys are the guys that had like the longest tenure with the band, but it’s basically the Butler Brothers and whoever’s playing with them are the psychedelic Burs at this point. So they put out, you know, albums throughout the 90s. Their last album came out in 1991.
That’s what, and I actually do have. Like I said, I didn’t buy any of their, uh, 80s albums while they were going on, but I knew of the succulent version. When the album world outside came outside, I bought that one.
It’s got a song on it called Until She Comes. It’s really good, which was also a single for them. Um, it’s a good album.
I don’t, it’s not fantastic. It’s got some other good stuff on it, but it’s it’s pretty good. And then they broke up for a while.
They got back together in the early 2000s as just a live and touring act. And then in 2020, they put out another new albums, their 1st new album in about 30 years. Um, and that one’s called Made of Rain.
And that album is really really good. If you have not heard Made of Rain, the late era Psychedelic Furs album, absolutely check it out. It is a fantastic album. really good.
I highly, highly recommended. Um, All that money wants, uh, was a pretty big success for these guys. It went to number one on the modern rock tracks charts.
Like I said, it got play on MTVs 120 minutes. I do think it’s a good song. I said, I just don’t think it’s as quite as good as the best stuff they did in the 80s.
Um, and that’s really about all I have on. You know, you’d think that a band that’s been around this long would have a lot of cool stories to go along with them, but this is a band that’s never really had a lot of like drama involved around it or anything like that. They are been a pretty, you know, like I said, the lineup has changed a lot, but it doesn’t seem like there was a lot of acrimony there.
It’s just kind of, you know, whoever happened to be playing with them was who was playing with them at that time. So there’s not a whole lot to dig in on these guys other than the fact that they are just a fantastic band. The video for this, I did like as well.
It’s black and white. It got a lot of close-ups of Richard Butler’s face as he’s singing, and then there are shots of the other band members kind of walking around. They’re on a bridge at one and they’re walking through a field at one and then there’s some shots of them together in what looks like a rehearsal space.
And there’s some like superimposed, like, I’m not sure exactly what it is, but like motion, like something in motion going on, like over his face while he’s singing. All in all, I thought the effect of it was pretty cool. So I like the video as well. like the song, love the band.
And really probably ought to go back and check out more of their 80s albums. Like I said, I’m much more of a singles guy with these or a singles fan with these guys, but yeah, that’s all that money wants for the psychedelic furs. And like I said, I’m interested to see what you guys think, whether or not you agree, disagree, hate the idea, but I will stand by.
This is the best new wave singles band of the 80s. I love the psychedelic first, so I’m on board with you for the most part, I think, in terms of their, I mean, they’re just, they are an absolutely fantastic top tier 80s band. No question.
I don’t know their albums as well, just like you. I do remember. I owned one or two, so I’ve listened to their albums, but I don’t remember necessarily thinking, ah, this entire album kicks ass.
I always have gone back to the singles, like you said. So I would agree, and I would, your challenge is a great question. I don’t, it’s hard to think on the fly.
Like, the 1st band that popped in my head was the Smiths, just because they’re kind of known for having a lot of singles that didn’t make it on an album, and they’re one of those bands where compilations might be your best bet, you know, if you’re digging into their catalog, I might be able to think of a better example because that’s not exactly the genre, you know, as you laid it out, but that was the only band that popped in my head right away of like, you know, they’re more of a singles band than an album band, but I think a lot of Smiths fans would totally disagree with that because they have some great albums as well. And a lot of people do, you know, have affinity for those albums that I think for the most part. People would agree with you that they have affinity for psychedelic 1st songs, but not necessarily the albums.
So I’m going to just jump on board and say, yeah, I think you’re correct about that. I mean, there’s at least 10 that I think are in the top, you know, 180 songs of all time, that they’re that good and they’re that, they’re very unique to me too. I don’t feel like that they followed some of the trends that you hear in these bands in terms of, you know, oh, we’re gonna do the electronic thing or we’re gonna do, you know, a post-punk new wavy thing.
They’re a little of that. They’re a little of this. They’re not disconnected from the 80s, but I always just, I think of them as being kind of in a bubble.
Like, when you hear a 1st song, it’s a psychedelic 1st song. It’s not, I don’t think of it as an 80s song or a new wave song or an electronic song or a rock side, just like the furs of the furs, and I like bands like that. I like bands that kind of carve out their space in that way.
And I don’t know what it is specifically about them that make it feel that way to me. I don’t, I don’t know if they’re, because they’re not, they’re not just exceptionally unique, but they’re different enough that they seem to just kind of live in their own little world and, and I dig that. That said, I do not dig this particular song.
This is not their best work and it’s not one that I think really represents what they’re capable of or what they even really do a lot of like this. If this is kind of indicative of what their lesser songs sound like, and their album tracks sound like, then I think that really bolsters your argument, because it’s not bad, but it’s just, it’s a little more generic, it is one that does sound just kind of more like it could be a generic 80s song. And I just don’t feel that way about so many of their of their best work that that this one feels like it just falls flat.
And that’s only in comparison to how good their stuff usually is. It’s a perfectly good song. A lot of bands would probably kill for this song.
But for the Furs, I think, you know, it’s not their best stuff. And the video also, I don’t know that the furs are really known for having great videos. I don’t I can’t really think of of what their video output looks like, but it’s kind of been along the same lines.
It feels a little generic. Didn’t really stand out much match for me either way. So, you know, I won’t co-sign this particular song as being all that great, but man, I will 100% cosign the Furs as being one of the top 80s fans.
Absolutely. I do think I actually do like this song. I really do.
I think the reason it doesn’t come off as great is just because of how good the other stuff is. I don’t think it’s that this is a weak song. I think it’s just the other stuff is so good.
And they’re just one of those bands that, for me anyway, you know, this was a few years ago when I kind of went and started like cherry picking songs of theirs, just to kind of bulk out my collection a little bit with them. I just didn’t realize how many great songs they have until I started really looking at them. And there are other bands that are that way.
You know, we talked about midnight oil recently. I kind of feel like they’re the same way. Um, you know, when we were talking about the uh, top uh, 40 tracks, you know, I’ve mentioned foreigner at one point defending those guys.
This era, the, by the time we get to the late 80s, 4, it’s not that great, but man, you look back at the early, late 70s, early 80s, they’re, it’s another band where you don’t realize how many great songs they have. Um, and the furs are very much that way for me. Like, you know, at a certain point, I was just like, you know, I like the psychedelic first.
I should go look at some of their songs. And I was just dumbfounded by how many of them I knew and loved. Yeah, it’s weird to me that, you know, they kind of seem to fly under the radar a little bit.
So I am here to answer all your questions. So I’m fairly familiar with psychedelic furs, more single as a singles band than a man. I worked on your question, Keith, and I like the answer of the Smiths as being a possibility, but to me, that’s kind of a different genre than this, even though their boats are alternative and whatever.
I did think of one band that cranked out single after single after single in the 80s. They are a band that maybe would never be called alternative, but I think they do fall into new wave a little bit, and that’s Duran Duran. Those guys were cranking out the hits in the 80s.
But they were a little more mainstream than this. So I think if you want to go with like the sort of those outsider bands, the bands that were on John Hughes soundtracks, that kind of stuff, this is it. These guys were the one.
I think, you know, there’s an argument to be made for a couple others, but whatever. I think that’s a pretty solid declaration that this might be that band. That said, I don’t think I’d ever heard this song.
If I had, I had forgotten it. And it just didn’t ring any bells. But I liked it.
I think maybe more than both of you. I started thinking about, like, why it is that every time I hear these guys, and you mentioned this too, Mike, that there’s this, like, you know you’re hearing a psychedelic 1st song, and there’s something about it that’s sort of different, or at least noticeable about them. And I really think it’s just this dude’s voice.
I, there’s something about his voice. We talked a lot about how the British bands at this time are kind of have a similar sort of delivery and a similar sort of sound. This is not that.
I mean, you hear one of these songs and you instantly know who it is you’re listening to. I really enjoyed that about it. There’s something about psychedelic verse that every time I hear them, I just go, oh, yeah, that’s psychedelic verse, you know.
Even though this song is nowhere near on the level of, you know, some of the other ones you mentioned, it’s still, okay, you know, it’s good enough. I also got to give these guys a lot of credit for their ability to write a solid hook. I mean, that’s what it is about these songs.
You know, you listen to songs, I love my way, and pretty in pink, and especially heartbreak beat. There’s just, there’s no denying the hooks in these songs that get to you immediately. One listen is all you need.
So yeah, this is what I didn’t know, but I really enjoyed it. The video was fine. Nothing to get too excited about, but nothing really to get mad about either, like I did earlier.
But yeah, this is a, this is, this is one of those bands that I didn’t, I didn’t listen to a ton, but every time I do hear them, I, I like it. So I probably should give them more time, but yeah, but I do enjoy listening to these guys. I like their sound a lot Yeah, I think Richard Butler’s got a very distinctive voice, and I don’t know that anyone would want to sound like Richard Butler.
Like, if you’re picking, like, who do I want to sing like? I don’t know that there’s a single person out there that’s gonna say, ah, I need to sound like Richard Butler. But it totally works for what the furs do.
And so… It’s what makes a psychedelic 1st song a psychedelic 1st song. And yeah, you’re right.
No one’s out there trying to emulate it, but it just works so well for them. I was actually, last night when I was going through this, I was trying to think of another example like that of a vocalist that, you know, you like because they’re that vocalist, but no one else tries to do it, and I didn’t really come up with anything off the top of my head. One other thing I will say about, we mentioned some of their songs.
My favorite, all-time favorite, uh, psychedelic 1st song is pretty in pink. And, of course, there was a movie that got made, you know, of the same name, and they went in and re-recorded the song for the soundtrack to that movie. If you’re just getting into the Furs, and looking at their songs, and you’re going to check out Pretty and Pink.
Do not listen to the version that came out on the pretty in pink soundtrack. Go back to the album, talk, talk, talk, and listen to the album version. They, for whatever reason, when they re-recorded it, they did, and this is the thing that happened a lot in the 80s.
They really slicked that song up. They toned the guitars down. They toned the keyboards up.
They added a saxophone. They cleaned up Richard Butler’s vocals and all to the disservice of the song. Yeah, the rougher, raw talk, talk version of that song is so much better.
And this happened a lot back then. Like it happened with Can’t Hardly Wait by the replacements, like the single version versus the version that’s called the Tim version, which is the earlier, rougher, rawer version, is that that version is so much better than the single version of Can’t Hardly Wait. When the cure released close to me, for whatever reason.
They went ahead and put horns on it when there’s not horns on the album version. I don’t know why this was a thing in the 80s, but it was. It was.
And it’s really interesting you say that because I remember in the 80s having the Pretty and Pink soundtrack and not thinking much of the song Pretty and Pink on it. I liked a lot of the other songs on it, but I didn’t particularly like that song. And it was years later when I went, oh, you know, that song’s pretty good.
I probably heard the original version when that happened. I never thought of that, but that’s, you know, yeah. It’s far better.
And I don’t know why that was a thing in the 80s, but I don’t think there was a single song that actually benefited from that treatment. The earlier versions, the rougher versions are always better. And that’s definitely true of Pretty and Pink.
So if you’re checking out the psychedelic furs, do not go for that version of Pretty or the soundtrack version of Pretty and Pink. Go for the original. Yeah, there definitely was some sort of something in the air that convinced either producers or the record company executives or whoever was making that decision.
Okay, the song is good, but it’s not ever going to get radio airplay. It’s not ever going to be a hit if it doesn’t have either a saxophone or a full horn section or both. It was a softening of them is what it is.
Whether or not it, whether or not it worked is debatable, but that was the goal, was to soften the songs for a wider range of years. That’s that’s really all it was. And it’s, I guess we could, that would be an interesting exercise.
Is there one of the remakes, re-recordings that actually does sound better than the original? I can’t think of all the ones we named? The originals are clearly clearly better.
I’m sure there’s one that maybe like was like, oh, yeah, that actually does kind of punch it up a little bit, but I can’t, I can’t imagine that happen very often. And yeah, 2nd guessing an artist’s initial decision is usually not not wise. Um, but, uh, I don’t think I actually realized that, but that makes a lot of sense because I think I had that same experience of the version I’m sure I was exposed to 1st was the, you know, the one on the soundtrack and that probably got top 40 play.
And it never was one of my favorites, but then there was some point probably working at KTXT that I was like, you know, I never gave this song a chance, right? I never really understood what, you know, I don’t think I gave this song a fair shake, and it’s because I was listening to a different version, probably. That makes a lot of sense.
All right, it is time for everybody’s favorite part of 120 months. It’s time for the mystery song of the week. We don’t really do this weekly.
The mystery song of the episode. We’ve had some fantastic surprises. We’ve had a few songs that I think maybe even turned us on to like a new band that we’ve discovered and have enjoyed.
We’ve met Bill Paxton, dressed as a cowboy, singing a song that he apparently was involved in the recording of, which I don’t think any of us thought was going to happen when we started this podcast. And today we will soldier forward with yet another mystery song and Scott’s going to take us there. So this week, the mystery song is called Baby Scott Rockets.
It’s from a band called Dancing Hoods. cr Baby got a rocket And I’m losing Um, this band is the brainchild of a singer songwriter named Mark Linkas, who formed the band in the early 80s. They had one EP, 2 albums, and then they called it quits in 88. Shortly after this song was played on 120 minutes.
They weren’t getting any traction and they gave up. Lingus went on to do a solo project that was called Sparkle Horse. It was basically just him, but there were some other people that helped him out.
I hadn’t heard of them either. But every time I looked up something about these guys, you know, you’d see something along the lines of, oh, this is the band that the sparkle horse guy used to be in, or, hey, it’s that guy from Sparkle Horse. So they obviously had some fans out there, but I had heard of neither project.
Linkus also had a fairly successful career collaborating with some other names you have heard. Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Daniel Johnston, Cracker, Radiohead, Frank Black, Danger Mouse. Fairly impressive list of musicians that all worked with this guy.
He unfortunately is no longer with us. He suffered from addiction and depression, and he died by suicide in 2010. This song is a pretty straightforward little rock song.
There was this group of bands in the 90s that sort of lived somewhere between pop and hard rock. And I’m thinking of bands like Goo Goo Dolls and Matchbox 20 and Toad the Wet Sprocket, the band that this really reminded me of, Soul Asylum, aesthetically, but also musically too. The video’s just a performance.
The band is playing a song in the room, so there’s not a whole lot to discuss here, but I kind of dug this song. I don’t know what you guys thought. Yeah, I don’t have a whole lot to add.
I liked the song too. I didn’t think it was fantastic, but I did like it. I had heard of Sparklehorse.
And so when I went to look up a little bit about these guys and saw that this guy was involved with Sparkle Horse. I knew the name, but I’d never really dug in on them either. You know, I wish I could add a lot of insight here, but I just don’t have it.
I don’t know much. It looks like this Mark Linkus guy has had a lot of different projects and you, you know, you listed to a lot of the people that he’s worked with before. And so maybe I’ve heard some stuff that he’s worked on because some of those bands, I’m fans of and have a lot of their stuff.
So it’s impossible that I’ve come across them and just didn’t know it. But for this guy to have had the long and prolific career working with a lot of different collaborators and different bands and everything. It kind of surprised me that I had never really run across these guys.
And like I said, I’ve heard of Sparklehorse, but I don’t know anything by them. So, so yeah, I, you know, maybe I need to go do a little digging on Mark Linkas because he obviously had a long career really prolific. But yeah, as far as this goes, I liked the song, fine.
The video, you know, what’s funny is because we discovered that the link on 120 minutes.org was not linked directly to the video, but there was a live version of the song that was like right there next to it. And so I watched that live version, and then Scott, you, you know, said, just search for the video, you’ll find it, and I did watch the video. The video, the live part of that video is from the live version that they recorded on that.
So, yeah, I’d actually seen the video before I saw the video because I had seen just the rough raw footage of the live part of it before then. But it’s fine. It’s, it’s, it’s a fine video, but uh, and then they decided to randomly throw a bunch of clips of a Venus fly trap into it just for the heck of it.
More randomness from these 80s videos. You know, it is, it’s interesting. You said, you know, you like a lot of these artists that he work with.
I mean, obviously, none of those things were going to come out, you know, Radiohead featuring Mark Linkas or whatever, but I wonder how much work he really did. You know, I’d like, was he just like a songwriting collaborator or a production collaborator? don’t know.
It’s hard to find any information. But he obviously worked with a lot of really cool people and and, you know, a lot of people wanted to work with him. So he was on to something, but I, you know, his name just never got out there, I guess.
So this is really interesting because I don’t generally do a bunch of research on the ones that aren’t like my picks. So like when you guys do a mystery start pick. I kind of, I kind of don’t want to know, and I’ll go into the podcast and learn, you know, along with our listeners, all this information, and so then I have to kind of like scramble when I feel like, oh, wait, I wish I had known that because I am, I do know who Barkley is, and I do know who Sparkle Horse is.
I have a bunch of sparkle horse in my Apple Music library, in fact, because they’re really, really good. Sparkle Horse is awesome. Listen to someday I will treat you good.
That’s a good starting point. It’s off. I got to pull up the album name because it’s all one Viva Dixie submarine transmission plot is the name of the album.
All one word smashed together. That is, I think, 2003-ish, probably early 2000, so it’s probably about 25 years oldish. I knew I heard of them because of their connection to, or his connection to Radiohead, and Radiohead said that this was one of their favorite bands.
They love Sparkle Horse, and that was good enough for me. So I listen to Sparkle Wars, and I also like Sparkle Wars. So I can’t highly recommend Sparkle Horse and I don’t know a lot about his other collaborations.
That’s all news to me. I’m like kind of trying to integrate that into what I learned by watching this, the mystery song this, you know, before this episode because, oh man, do I actively dislike this song? I hate this song.
Oh my god, I did not like this song. Terrible, terrible, so generic. Yeah I didn’t like it at all.
And it didn’t, to me, it sounds, it, you know, putting music in buckets is just a fool’s game, and I know you shouldn’t like. The line between what is indie and what is alternative and what is pop and what is hair metal and what is whatever, but this to me sounds like, uh, it could have with a slight difference in instrumentation and maybe dirty enough the guitars a little bit. It would have been like the 3rd or 4th single off of a pop metal album from like Poison or somebody like that.
Because I don’t know if you remember how this sequence used to go in the 80s, but like hair metal bands would put out an album. The 1st single would be like a really rocking song because, like, you got to make sure that you’re heavy metal fan still. So, yeah, you rock.
Okay, great. And the 2nd song was the ballad because now you got to actually make some money and like get everybody on board. And then the 3rd song was kind of like a mid-tempo rocker that still had some pop appeal because now you’ve got an audience because, you know, your ballad hit. you have this big ballad and now you got to follow it up, but you still want people to remember that you rock, but not too hard because you don’t want to piss off all the people that you got from your ballad.
So you would release like a mid-tempo poppy or song. This could be that song. It even sounds like I think it’s a 12 string guitar, although he’s playing a 6 string in the video.
It sounds like a 12 string guitar, a very, very clear, ringing 12 string guitar sound that just is so reminiscent of 80s metal bands when they wanted to soften up a little bit, but not too much. I’m thinking specifically of Don’t go away mad, just go away by Motley Crew, I think, had that sound. So when I heard this, I was like, this is a, it sounds like a throwaway from a, from one of the hair metal bands, but with just dialed, like, this dial got turned this way a little bit and this dial got turned this way a little bit and now it’s going to be an alternative indie song instead of that, but to me, they were indistinguishable.
It just sounded like super generic 80s, I, and maybe, maybe I need to listen to it again. Maybe I didn’t give it a fair shake. Um, listening to it now, knowing who it is, might change my opinion a little bit, but I like to think that I’m above that, that I still wouldn’t like it, even though I know that this guy will go on to do much better stuff because he, believe me, Sparkle Horse is way freaking better than this.
Video is terrible too. I didn’t like it either. What’s the Venus Flytrap doing in there?
Who knows? Why did they use it 20, 25 different times throughout the video? Definitely don’t know the answer to that.
Uh, it was kind of interesting. You know, music videos are known for kind of sexualizing women and using women’s bodies as kind of a way to make your video more popular. There is a woman dressed as a belly dancer, I think, in this video, but the close-ups are so extreme and the shots are so weird that you almost really, it’s almost abstract that you can’t tell that it’s a woman in the shot.
I actually kind of like that. That’s kind of artistic to me because, like, you get this sense of a woman belly dancer, but you don’t, it’s not like… Yeah, it’s not sexualized or exploitative because you can’t even really tell exactly what it is.
So that was kind of cool if they should, they should have gone with that theme maybe a little bit more instead of just the, let’s intercut what apparently is a live performance with a Venus Flytrap opening and closing a dozen times or 20 times, however many times. So maybe I’m being too harsh, but I, you know, I like to I like to keep it real as kids say. I heard myself say that before I even said it and then I just would, I will 100% give you generic.
It is that, you know, there’s nothing special going on here. I don’t know. I just found it kind of catchy and sort of, you know, but I, you’re also right, I think, to say that, is this alternative music?
I’m not sure that it is. I don’t know why these guys get put on 120 minutes and, you know, somebody like, like some of the bands I mentioned, like the goo goo dolls, you know, they were never 120 minutes. the distance between this song and what they were doing is not that far. So who knows why?
But, you know, yeah, you’re absolutely right to say this is generic. But yeah, I just, I don’t know. I found it kind of catchy.
I am a little embarrassed, I guess, to admit that I’ve never heard of Sparkle Horse. Apparently, that is a thing, and I didn’t realize that it was. I mean, it’s, I, you know, I don’t, we all love music.
We all listen to tons of music. We’re probably better versed in music than the average person just because of being DJs and stuff, particularly 90s music and stuff. That said, I, you know, I, I can’t claim to know all these super unknown bands and like, oh, man, let me show you all these secret bands, but Sparkle Horse kind of is that for me.
I think they aren’t particularly well known. I don’t think they ever really, really in the US, in particular, hit the mainstream in any sense, or we were even particularly well known among, you know, people like us who do dabble in, in, you know, digging deeper in digging for bands. I think it was a real, like, I read an article that was about Radiohead, and it happened to mention that he was a big fan of Sparkle Horse, and maybe Sparkle Horse opened for them on one of their tours, something like that.
So I dug into it and I just happened to really like, particularly that song that I mentioned, someday I will treat you good, but that album is really solid as well. So, you know, I, I, why would it have crushed your path? That was such a happenstance kind of thing?
So I don’t think that it’s that you missed out on like, wow, everybody knew about this band, but me. I don’t think anybody knew about this band and I just happened to happen to stumble across it, but they are really good. And so, you know, if I don’t know how many people from the podcast go and listen to all of the songs, even the ones that we don’t necessarily recommend, but if you listen to this song and you’re like, yeah, I don’t think I want to really dig any deeper, still give Sparklehorse a chance.
It’s totally different. completely different style of music. Absolute, like you would never guess it was the same person and worthwhile. And, hey, maybe you would like this.
I don’t know. Like, I feel like I’m a little in the minority. You guys seem to like it okay.
So is Sparkle Horse? Do they sound sort of like this? Are they more rocking?
In my head, and again, I’ve heard of, but never heard Sparkle Horse. I always thought of these guys or of those guys as being like a like a 4AD type band, like a dead can dance and red house painters, like really mellow, you know, kind of slow-paced kind of stuff. Is that what they are?
They have, that’s, they have that in their bag, as they say. The song I keep mentioning, and it’s really the only song I know super well because it’s in my, like, shuffle is, uh, someday I will treat you good as a fast-paced rocker. I would say more akin to psychedelic furs, actually, in that way, like a little bit, yeah, it sounds like it sounds more.
It sounds closer to the psychedelic 1st than it does this mystery man that whose name has escaped me at the moment. I don’t know that it’s wrong. I, you know, they, they do, they, I think that it could be both things.
You know, I don’t know their catalog well enough to say. And I think they might lean a little bit more towards that than on this album that I have in my, because I only have one of their albums in my library and I think I’ll listen to one of their other ones. And maybe the reason I didn’t put that one in is because it was a little more of a, I like, I’m not a huge fan of Dick and Dance.
So if it sounded anything like that, I probably didn’t latch onto it as quickly, but… Yeah, try out, someday I’ll treat you good and see what you think about that and then go from there, but yeah, that was a rocker. It’s fast and it’s, you know, reading about Sparkle Horse a little bit.
Apparently it was just him. Um, I’m sure there were other people involved along the way, but apparently it was it was sounds like it was one of those, uh, do it all in the studio kind of projects. which definitely, you know, a lot of those names I mentioned is people he work with, that would certainly appeal to them, I think, you know, radio and Danger Mouse. You know, these are people that do their work in the studio.
So maybe that’s that’s what his role was, you know, was getting in the studio and turning knobs for people. And interestingly enough, I’m just learning this now because I think I discovered them later, but the album that I mentioned Viva Dixie submarine transmission plot actually came out in 1995. Oh, wow.
Which is super interesting because I don’t think we were playing it. I don’t think my, I don’t have a KTXT playlist that would, that would include 1995. I’m curious if we were playing this because we were, I was still at KTXT, Keith, you were still at KTXT at 95.
Um, Actually, I guess you would have been the person that maybe would have added it, although you might have been in the, you might have been in the GMC at that point. If I did, I don’t remember it. Maybe I did, but it’s not something that stuck out to me, if so.
You did lots of things you don’t remember back then, I think, we all did. I know. I’ve been told I did a lot of things I don’t remember.
I could probably get in a time machine and find myself playing like 18 sparkle horse songs. This is the best panda ever. Never heard of them.
Sparkle horse marathon. Here we go. KTXT.
Interesting, interesting episode with some real mixed opinions about some stuff. Often we kind of have like a, like bat in a thousand. We love the bands, we love the songs.
We love the mystery band. everybody’s happy. Kumbaya. Not this time, so much, but I think that makes it more interesting.
The Sparks, I’m sure we’ve made somebody mad. I’m sure we have. They have, like you said, a very fervent fan base.
Please come at me. Please. Yeah, begging someone.
Give me 5 songs that will change my mind about Sparks. I welcome it with open arms. Yeah, and do it on YouTube.
Go to YouTube and make do the comments because we get we get comments on different places and sometimes it’s hard for us to all keep up, but like go to YouTube, find this, if you’re listening on a different, if you’re listening on like Apple Podcasts or something that doesn’t have comments. Go to YouTube, find this podcast in the comments, 5 Spark songs that you think we should listen to to change our minds, and we will acknowledge it on another episode. We don’t normally do that.
We don’t normally go back and whatever, but I do, it is a band that I feel like we all should have liked and should have been like, yeah, these guys, you know, were the progenitors of this. I mean, I’m a Devo fan. I have heard that Devo, you know, was somewhat inspired by Sparks and Kraftwork and all that and craftwork I see, Sparks I never have quite seen.
They were more contemporaries. So, I mean, maybe that’s stretching it a little bit, but like, Maybe we’re wrong. Let us know.
I would love, I would actually kind of welcome that because I think it would be really fun to go back and be like, oh, okay, this is what people are talking about. And one thing I love to do is admit when I’m wrong. So please prove me wrong.
Who doesn’t? Psychedelic furs? I mean come on.
Come on. It’s the psychedelic furs, right? Like, no arguments there.
Also, talking about the comments, you know, come tell us who the band that had as many good singles as the Furs did because we can’t think of one. I think it’s the first. That’s a yeah, that’s another good one.
And I mean, it’s a little more specific than that too. Bands where their singles were the way to go and don’t bother with the albums. Because, like, you could say, well, a cure had, you know, 20 excellent singles in the 80s, but their albums are amazing.
Like you can’t call a cure a singles band. They’re clearly, you know, REM had a couple great singles, but they’re an album band through and through. So we’re looking for a band like Psychedelic Furs, where the albums are missable, but the singles are absolutely like top tier.
That would be a fun conversation to have. Hoodoo gurus. Maybe that’s the one, particularly if you’re a younger listener to this podcast.
I think there’s 2 or 3 of you out there. There are bands that somehow slide under the radar and that is a term that gets thrown around a lot and maybe gets overused. This is truly a band that did slide under the radar that I do think deserves more attention.
They are catchy. They are hooky. They’re poppy, power pop, goodness, and if you’re a fan of, you know, REM and Jangle Pop, they do slot in pretty nicely.
If you had a playlist with a lot of that type of stuff, you could put hood gurus in and they would miss a beat. I think you’d love them. They’re not exactly that.
You know, they have their their unique sound as most bands do, but I think you would absolutely love them and check out, uh, and watch that video. And yeah, for sure. Don’t miss video for why I want you.
Three words, dinosaur, guitar solo. Boom, done. Yeah, if you’re not watching it, if you haven’t stopped the podcast and gone to watch that video, what are you what are we even doing here?
What’s the point? Okay, mystery song, look, look, I’m not the, I, I, you know, it’s not for me to say what’s good and what’s bad. This is not a good song in my opinion, but it’s, you know, it’s not the worst song I’ve ever heard.
It’s not the worst video I’ve ever seen, but it’s way far from the best. I’ll just I’ll just put it that way. If you, you know, if you’re short on time.
I agree with most of that. It’s not the best thing we’ve seen by far, you know. Yeah, we’ve we’ve hit it out of the park with some mystery songs.
Up to and including last episode, man. The Godfathers were fantastic. Hugh Cornwell was pretty good.
There’s been some really good stuff. This isn’t that. If it leads you to Sparkle Horse, though, that might be worthwhile.
That’s they’ve, you know, there’s 5 or 6 sparkle horse albums. Start at the very beginning because that’s where I did. I think I only know the 1st two.
So I don’t know where it went after that, but that 1st one is pretty solid. So check it out. Tell us why we’re wrong about that.
Maybe there’s some Dancing Hoods fans out there that can tell us why we’re wrong about that. I suspect there aren’t, but um, hey, it takes all kinds, right? Maybe there are.
Thanks for tuning in. We will be back next time with September of 1988. Don’t forget to check out 120 minutes.org, the other website that has compiled all these 120 minutes playlists.
It’s tons of fun to go in there and just reminisce and watch videos because we’re only we’re only kind of hitting the tip of the iceberg. There’s usually a couple playlists for each month so that you can go back and just enjoy all this music that was, you know, you’ll probably be like us. Like, you’ll be like some stuff that you love and you’re like, ah, yeah, I haven’t heard that for a while.
There will be some stuff that maybe you don’t like so much, but you remember. And then there’s, I guarantee there’s going to be stuff that you absolutely do not remember, and that’s kind of been the most fun part of this. I think.
Also, don’t forget about 35,000 watts, the story of college radio. A lot of these bands that we’re talking about were played and found success on college radio and that’s why we are talking about them. That movie will tell you all about college radio and lots of artists like Mark Weathersbaugh from Devo and Joey from The Pixies and folks from Pylon and Love Tractor and Mitch Easter, all those people talking about how college radio affected them.
They’re all in the film. If you haven’t seen it yet, go to Tubi and watch 35,000 watch story of college radio, and we will see you for the next episode of 120 Months.