If you listened to a college radio station in the late 1980s, you probably heard at least one of these songs every day. Tune-in as we talk about three bands that helped define college radio and alternative music.
And welcome back to 120 months. We are walking our way through MTV’s 120 minutes, everybody’s favorite indie rock alternative show from back in the day. I’m here with Keith Porterfield and Scott Mobley.
My name is Michael Millard, and we are each picking a song that played in that month, actually a video, technically, that played in the month of October of 1988 for this particular episode. And we’re just talking about, we’re talking about the band, talking about the song, talking about the video, all three, you know, just whatever, whatever struck us about that particular video, will come up in conversation, and this episode is quite a lineup of certainly college radio, iconic, across the board, songs and bands. Not only did we pick some pretty iconic bands, but sometimes in past episodes, the songs maybe haven’t been like their best work or one of our favorites.
In this case, the songs and the bands are all super, super solid across the board. So it’ll be really interesting to talk about that. I will say it has like a spoiler alert in watching you guys’ choices.
I don’t have a ton of notes on the videos for opposite reasons with Keith’s choice. The video was kind of so generic. I didn’t have anything to say about it.
And with Scott’s choice, there’s so freaking much going on in that video. I didn’t even I didn’t even know where to start to like make a note about that video. The word whirlwind comes to mind.
It just comes at you like a fire hose, so that’ll be fun to talk about. I don’t know what you guys were able to glean from it. It is something.
So that’ll be fun to talk about. Real quick, we’ll talk just briefly about the musical landscape in 1988 in October. It’s really pretty similar to the last couple episodes.
If you listen to the series, you know, music didn’t change as quickly back then. It wasn’t as fast moving, so you still have kind of the same songs that we talked about before. Like Love Bites is getting played all the time.
Red, red wine by UB40, Cheap Trick, Don’t Be Cruel, and Bobby Brown. Dont be cruel, which I still find delightful. Sweet child of mine, fallen angel.
It’s kind of interesting to see that over the course of a couple months, MTV’s main rotation, really. I mean, you know, songs were coming in and out a little bit, just like they would in top 40, but they weren’t changing on a monthly basis the way nowadays, I think, not that there’s even really such a thing as top 40 radio anymore. I don’t really know.
But songs, I think, come and go kind of more quickly through the zeitgeist than they used to. Maybe that’s just my opinion of it, but it just feels that way. looking at these lists. But that was kind of the landscape we’re looking at.
And of course, 120 minutes was meant to highlight bands and songs that weren’t in MTV’s main rotation and a lot of times they would look to college radio to find those songs or those bands. And I think in this case, it is very, very, very clear that all 3 of these probably came from somebody hearing on college radio 1st and then deciding, hey, we should we should showcase this on on 120 minutes. So, um, we’re going to look at 3 those and we’re going to kick it off with Keith Portfield.
All right. Well, for this episode, I have chosen the song Sweet Jane by the Cowboy Junkies. Love, sweet, sweet.
Start off a little bit about the band. Cowboy Junkies were a Canadian band formed in Toronto in 1985, largely a group of siblings. It’s Michael, Peter, and Margot Timmons.
Michael plays guitar, Peter’s the drummer. Margot is on vocals, and then they have a bass player called Alan Anton. And those 4 people have been the cowboy junkies for their entire existence.
These are not one of those bands that we’ve seen a lot of lately where there’s like one guy that’s kind of the mastermind of the entire thing and then just a revolving cast of musicians around him. It’s been these four. They do have another guy named Peter Bird that has played with them pretty much since the beginning.
He’s on all of the albums except for the 1st one and has also been on all of their tours. But for some reason, they apparently refused to bring him into the band. I don’t know why he is not officially a member of the band, but he’s not.
It kind of reminds me of a REM back in the day. Peter Holzapple, who was like the dedicated side man for REM, but never got any credit for it. So yeah, the cowboy junkies have one of those.
They’ve got Peter Bird as their sideman who never gets credit. That’s so funny. I was just about to say he’s the Peter Holz apple of cowboy chunkies and you beat me to it.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and it’s funny. I mean, you know, what would be the difference for just, or they have to give him a little bit better paycheck if they actually called him a member of the band?
Is that what it is? Who knows? It’s probably all it is.
Yeah, and it could be something where, like, his management does not want that for him. Like, they don’t want him, his name on those albums because it means they couldn’t do something else. I don’t know.
You never know where that where that road leads you, but they had something that stupid, I guarantee it. Well, let’s go with that. because that lets us think that the Cowboys Yankees are maybe a little less petty than we might otherwise think they were. We’ll go with that.
This song, Sweet Jane is off the 1988 album called the Trinity Session. This album actually is really interesting. It was recorded in the Toronto Church of the Holy Trinity, an actual church there, that is famous for its acoustics, has really good acoustics, and so they wanted to record an album there because they are a rock band or rock-ish anyway.
They were worried that the church wouldn’t want them to do that. So they lied to get the church to allow them to record there. They told them that they were a band called the Timmons family singers and they were recording a Christmas special for a radio broadcast and then went in inside and instead recorded a rock and roll album.
So we got to give them more props for that, just because that’s a kind of a cool thing to do to get yourself into a cool recording space. But the other cool thing about this is that this album was recorded in takes, not in, you know, regular sessions where one, you know, musician plays their part, and then another musician comes into place, theirs, whatever, they set up in the room with a microphone right in the center, and the band surrounded the mic and a circle formation around one microphone and recorded live and recorded this album all in one shots. Just each song is a take.
There’s one song on there that that’s not the case for. It’s the song called Mining for Gold. That one was actually recorded later, but everything else on this album was recorded in that one session.
And they have said that nothing on this record was mixed, overdubbed or edited in any way. It just was recorded tape and then put out. And so they did that on purpose.
They were kind of rebelling against kind of the 80s music of the time where, you know, it was a lot of, as they said, drum machines and MIDI were what they were not happy about the way music was being made. And so this was what they decided to do, kind of just to, as a, as a, you know, to thumb their nose at that a little bit is just to record an album straight up, just the band playing live. And, uh, if you listen to it, it sounds fantastic.
It’s hard to believe that that was actually done all in just, you know, one takes, you know, 1st takes, or probably not 1st takes. They probably did the songs more than one time, but still, you know, it sounds great to not have any overdubs or any editing or anything like that on there. So I thought that was really cool.
This song, Sweet Jane, is a cover of a velvet underground song of the same name or obviously the same song. But what’s funny about that is that they covered a version of it that is not the actual album version of this song. This song was recorded in a live show back in 1969.
And then in 70 was included on the album loaded. I believe it’s that album was called Loaded, if I remember right, something I probably should have written down in my notes, but and when they recorded it for the album, they sped it up and kind of rocked it up a little bit and kind of has this kind of shuffling rock groove to it, that was different than what their original live version of it was. And then that live version that was recorded in 69 got put out on a live album that came out later.
I think it was 7273 when that live album came out. That’s the version that the cowboy junkies heard and liked and covered. And it’s much slower than the version that’s unloaded, much more mellow and the Cowboy Junkies, that was right in the Cowboy Junkies wheelhouse.
I mean, they did a fantastic job of this. It’s very slow. It’s very mellow, very atmospheric, just a beautiful song and a really great showcase for Margot Timmons voice.
She does a fantastic job singing on this one. The song, it didn’t get a lot of chart success or anything like that. It did get played some on college radio.
It got included on a couple of soundtracks. It’s on the soundtrack for the Oliver Stone song, Natural Born Killers. It also got included on the soundtrack for one of the seasons of Stranger Things.
So that’s actually pretty recently that that one showed up. Man, I love this song. I have loved it pretty much since the 1st time I heard it.
And I can tell you the exact 1st time I heard the song. It was at KTXT. This is one that came up on a playlist of mine at one point that I, you know, put on and listened to as I was going through my shift.
And I recall not having ever heard of it, not ever having heard of the cowboy junkies at the time, and just kind of just sitting there and listening to it. And like I said, it’s a very mellow, very pretty song. And I remember just being kind of transfixed by it and just kind of standing there in the studio and listening to it to the point where I had to scramble to get my next song queued up.
I mean, I kind of just lost myself in this song, listening to it, even that very 1st time. And that’s kind of my experience with it every time since then. I man, I just love this song.
It’s just when you can sit back, close your eyes and just kind of, you know, melt into a little bit. It’s just a beautiful song. Perfect for, you know, late night after hours, you’re winding down.
If you’ve got that playlist for mellow after hours, music already, and don’t have this song on it. I highly recommend it. If you don’t already have that playlist.
This is track number one for you. Add it right now. Sweet Jane by the Cowboy Junkies.
Start your mellow late night playlist with this one. It’s a great one. The only other song I really know by these guys is one that’s called Me and the Devil Blues.
I said a minute ago, I’d never heard of cowboy junkies before. That’s not true. I had heard of them by this song. called Me and the Devil Blues that’s on the soundtrack to the movie Pump up the Volume, which we actually talked about in an early episode of the 35,000 Watts podcast.
So, those are really the only cowboy junkie songs I’m real familiar with. I have heard a little bit more of this album, Trinity Session. I’ve not heard much of the other stuff that these guys have done over the years.
They are an ongoing band. They’re still together still recording. They put out something like 18 or 19 albums over the years.
I have a big following. I know, you know, they, as I said, they recorded this one kind of kind of spare and, you know, intakes and whatnot. They have gone back and done regular recording on other albums since then.
So they’ve had, like I said, a long and storied career. But I have to admit, I’ve never really checked in on them much more than this song. I just have always, always really loved this song.
The video is not much to write home about. It’s kind of just a performance video with them like on a sound stage somewhere. It’s got some other imagery floating around through it, but it’s largely just them.
The one thing that’s kind of cool about it and the only kind of remarkable feature at all is that it does have a lot of play with light and shadow. So there’s a lot of, you know, shadows falling across the members as they’re playing or singing and then emerging into the light and that kind of thing. It’s fine.
It’s cool. It kind of fits the song a little bit, but it’s not, you know, not a video that’s going to change your thoughts about what music video should be or anything like that. I don’t really have a whole lot else on this.
You know, like I said, I have always, always loved this song. And I can’t, like I said, I can’t say that it ever really got me to take a deeper dive into the cowboy junkies. You guys may actually be bigger fans of these guys than I am.
I don’t know. to hear what you guys think. But this song, I absolutely love this song. This is like a 10 stars out of 10 cover song for me, and not very rarely will I say the cover outstrips the original song, but this is one of those that, in my opinion, the Cowboy Junkies version of this song, Sweet Jane, is the definitive version of it.
So, yeah, that’s the cowboy junkies. Sweet Jane. I’m right there with you on several things.
One of those being not knowing a damn thing about cowboy chunkies, to be perfectly honest. Discovering Sweet Jane at KTXT while on the air. You know, I would have guessed it was actually released later because it seemed to come up so often at KTXT, for whatever reason, I’m sure it was in one of the, you know, rec plus or like one of the higher recurrent categories, but it had to have been, you know, not in power rotation at that point.
That would have been 5 or 6 years later. But I definitely associate that song with KTXT, even though it did come out, you know, years before I got there. So it must have been, you know, a favorite of people to play and for good reason.
I mean, it’s it’s just a really, really good song. I agree that it’s superior to the velvet underground version. Both velvet underground versions.
I’m sure there are people that think that’s blasphemy, but I mean, sometimes that happens. You know, there are examples that we’ve talked about in some of our covers. Uh, episodes that I just feel like this is one of them, and it’s not that cowboy junkies are better than Velvet Underground or, you know, more groundbreaking or any of that.
It’s just that this song fits them perfectly, fits her voice perfectly. They nailed the vibe. amazing that they did it, essentially, in one take or, you know, in a single take. Um, that’s pretty cool.
I love that that that’s how they recorded that album. It’s funny when they’re railing against drum machines in MIDI, and I’m like, that’s, those are 2 of my favorite things. Like, I love that stuff, but I appreciate where they’re coming from, you know, 40 years ago feeling that way about that, and I’m sure they probably have similar feelings about AI and that kind of stuff, and I, and I do share those feelings, so I get where they’re coming from.
I have loved mini, mini songs that were based on drum machines and midi sequencers, but that aside. It is very cool that that that’s how they recorded it. It’s a great song.
The video is what it is. I mean, I, what else are you gonna do with a song like this? What video are you going to make for this song?
You can’t, you know? And so it’s like, well, why bother? And, you know, I didn’t really think about the fact that the lighting is actually kind of the star of that show, like the way they have it lit and shot is really beautifully done, considering how crappy the backdrop is and that they don’t really have a concept beyond just filming the band and then there’s like chains and roses.
The video is highlighting her and that’s what you should do with this song. She’s the star. Absolutely.
And this is the 1st time I’ve ever seen it. The 1st time I ever saw her. I had no idea.
I’ve known that song almost well enough that I could sing it, but had never really, you know, looked into the cowboy junkies. So that was kind of cool. And she has absolutely highlighted beautifully in the video.
The only other thing that I noticed, and just to have something to say about the video or the song. Probably because I maybe I haven’t listened to it super closely all the way through and I really do try to like watch these and pay attention, so like perhaps something to talk about. The last 30 seconds, the ride symbol is really distracting.
And I don’t know if it’s the mix that’s on YouTube or, or if I just have not really paid attention because it’s kind of the end of the song and by then maybe, you know, especially as a DJ, you’re starting to get the next song ready, maybe you don’t pay attention to it, but like, it’s really, the whole thing is beautifully mixed and it actually makes more sense now now that I’m thinking about it. If they did it in a single take that maybe, you know, a couple things may not be just perfect, perfect, or like the drums are going to bleed into other stuff because of the way you’re recording it. It makes a little bit more sense.
But I was like, man, they have that ride symbol just jacked up in the last 30 seconds. Like, it is really overwhelmingly distracting for some reason. I never had noticed that before, but it actually kind of makes sense in the context of what you said.
That is a really, really petty argument. And the only negative thing I could say about anything else that’s going on here. So, yeah, 2 thumbs up, great song, absolutely great for a chill playlist where you just want to kick back and like relax.
And if you don’t know the song, yeah, go check it out. Top notch. I had kind of a roller coaster ride with this. this week.
I was really excited when I saw you pick this song because I’ve always liked it. And I definitely remember it from its heyday. Like, I, I, it wasn’t KTXT when I found this song.
I was definitely in high school. And I actually owned the cassette single of this song to age myself a little bit. Or the Casingle, if you will.
Yeah, a single, exactly. I, so I was in high school. It would be a few years before I discovered the velvet underground.
I don’t think I knew this was a cover at the time. I did buy the single. I remember somebody telling me to listen to the whole album, which I did, and it was, it was kind of a no thanks for me.
It was just way too mellow for what I was doing at the time musically, but I did like this song. So years later, I finally hear the Velvet Underground, Sweet Jane. And it is nothing like this.
I mean, not the version I heard, right? I heard the one from loaded. It was like a completely different song.
It had it has 2 similarities. The riff, and the words sweet Jane. Like even all the lyrics are different, right?
So I always assumed that cowboy junkies had just kind of done their own take on it. And I really thought that was cool. I thought it was like they they took this song and kind of really genuinely made it their own thing.
So this week in doing like a little digging on this, I found out that they are actually doing a cover of this live version that I had never heard before. And I put that on. And it is exactly this.
Like it’s, it is this tempo, it is these lyrics. It is, they are doing a cover of that specific song. And I’m not sure why, but it kind of changed my take on this.
I think I liked this more when I thought it was its own original thing. And I still give them a lot of credit. They did record it in one take with a single mic, and her voice is beautiful, and the instrumentation is beautiful.
It’s, I mean, it’s a great song. And I love the mood of it. I like the way they did it.
I just think that, you know, it’s not quite the groundbreaking cover that I thought it was. That was a little disappointing to me to find that out. So, but yeah, really, I mean, that’s a petty argument at best, I love this song.
I think it’s beautiful. I think her voice is beautiful. I think the arrangement of this is really, really good.
And the fact that they recorded this like into one microphone and a church with a single take. Maybe the reason they chose this version is because the original one’s lyrics are kind of about drugs. Pretty common in the velvet underground oeuvre, as it were, but this version is more sounds like they’re saying more about the girl, you know, about this, you know, this sort of heartbreaking song about this girl, which may be more appropriate for them to have done, you know, disguising themselves in a church.
But yeah, so I don’t know. I kind of went from, this is one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard when I was younger to, eh, it’s a, it’s a cover and it’s a pretty down the pipe one. Take that for what it’s worth.
I still think it’s a great song. I wouldn’t steer anybody away from it. I’ll tell you.
You’re right. It is a kind of a down pipe cover, especially, you know, of that of that live version of it. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing because it turns out so well.
And then, you know, remember, you know, our last episode with Shreetback and their cover of the KC and the Sunshine band, you know, where they did try to put their spin on it by dropping that wrap in the middle of it and threaten to torpedo. What is one of the greatest disco songs of all time? For what this is worth, you know, as vocalists go, Margot Timmons is quite a good singer where Lou Reed, not so much.
So, um, you know, if you like the uh, the sort of cleaner, prettier vocals, this is definitely the way to go. If you like people what can sing. I do.
That’s good. That’s for me. I don’t know.
Lou Reed is a thing. and you can take it or leave it, but it’s… Sorry, I’ve offended velvet underground fans like 3 times already in the last 5 minutes. So moving on.
Sorry, folks. They’re great. I’m not a huge velvet underground fan, but I understand their place in music history.
I’ll put it in. That’s exactly where I’m at too. And they have songs I like, but for the most part, you have to appreciate what they were.
You don’t really have to appreciate the sounds that they made doing it. Some people may feel that way about our Knicks band. We shall see.
This is one where as I kind of have hinted at in the introduction. The video is the polar opposite of the video for cowboy junkies. It is a fire hose of stuff, which maybe Scott has been able to untangle a little bit in his research.
Let’s see. Well, it’s starting to look like I’m going to run out of my favorite band to talk about on this show. Because I’ve got another one this week.
I’m going to talk about Sonic Youth, and the song is Teenage Riot. She comes now. Listen to your guns and let us through.
Everybody’s coming from the winter, good place, to live in the sun. And’s all tast to you So, just a little bit about the band. They are an American rock band, they form in 1981 in New York City.
The original lineup, which has stayed intact for the majority of their career, is Thurston Moore on guitars and vocals, Kim Gordon on bass and vocals, Lee Ronaldo on guitar and Steve Shelley on drums. A couple of drummers have come through and gone. A couple of, you know, auxiliary people have come and gone, but those 4 people have basically been Sonic Youth the entire time.
They did hang it up. I believe in 19 No, I’m sorry, 2005. They finally sort of called it quits.
The reunion at Coachella is imminent, but for now they are they are done. So they originally sort of spawned out of what was called the no wave movement in New York. This is like a group of artists that were making sort of anti-music, trying to break conventions.
They combined that aesthetic with punk music at the time and came up with a sound that I think has been extremely influential on alternative rock music for a very long time. And it has been imitated at a time, but I’m not sure it’s ever really been duplicated. It’s hard to think of a band that you go, they sound like Sonic Youth.
I mean, it doesn’t come up too often. So this song, Teenage Riot is the opening track on their 1988 album called Daydream Nation, which is considered their masterpiece. I’m certainly not going to argue with that.
It’s one of the defining albums of the alternative music movement of the early 90s. I think it could be argued that it’s maybe one of the albums that got the ball rolling for alternative music. The band had been on SST records for their 1st 4 albums.
Then they signed to Enigma records. Enigma releases this album, and then on the strength of this album, they were immediately courted and signed by Geffen Records. So Enigma kind of got the raw end of the deal, but they did get to put out this album, so that’s kind of a win.
According to the band and the liner notes of the album. This song is about a world where JMascus, the lead singer and guitarist of Dinosaur Jr. becomes the president. I challenge anyone to read the lyrics of this song and get that out of it.
I do not know where any of that comes from, but, you know, for what it’s worth. That’s what they say it’s about. This song compared to their previous stuff, the Alpas before this was much more structured.
You know, it has verses and a chorus and a bridge, which they really had never done before. Those were all kind of new things for them at this time. So this video was produced by the band, obviously, on a very low budget.
It is a quickly edited onslaught of footage from famous music icons, sort of interspersed with footage of the band rocking out in what I assume is someone’s very tiny New York City apartment. I tried to catch all the people in the video. I don’t think I got them all, but here’s a few.
Jay Damascus is there. Neil Young, Patty Smith, Iggy Pop, Sunra, D. Boone for the Minutemen, Mike Watt, Ian McKay, Henry Rollins, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and Kiss is in there. They’re all there for half a second.
You can barely tell. They’re there, and then it shows the band rocking out. It is, I said this earlier, it is a whirlwind of a video.
It’s almost, it’s almost too much, but I don’t know, it kind of works for the song for me. Knowing what the song is supposed to be about. I’m not sure what the video means, but I’ve always thought the song was kind of about the reaction of teenagers to rock music, and the video sort of works with that interpretation, you know, meaning that it just shows a bunch of music icons.
I guess all that can be debated. But what I think cannot be debated is the greatness of this song. Even at the ripe old age of, you know, it’s approaching 40 years old.
I think it still sounds fresh and different and unique. And like I said before, I think a lot of bands were inspired by Sonic Youth to try new things and tune their guitars differently, et cetera. I’m not sure anyone has nailed it like they did.
So after this album, Sonic Youth gets signed to Geffen Records, like I mentioned, their hardcore fans start crying sellout, like fans are going to do when that happens. I will, however, defend their major label work. I think goo and dirty are both excellent albums.
Most of the ones that come after that are still really good. I think some fans didn’t like the polish that Geffen put on them. But honestly, I think it was going to happen anyway.
If you listen to their albums in order from the beginning, You can hear them getting cleaner and more polished with each one. Now, if, you know, if you were a big fan of, say, Bad Moon Rising, and then you took a little break and then you bought goo, then, yeah, I get it. You going to hear a totally different band.
But if you listen to them in order, I think they were just kind of growing over the years. And Daydream Nation is not too far off from what they end up doing for Geffen. It’s a little more raw, but it’s still getting there.
They’re cleaning up their act as it were. So, just real quick for my personal part of this. I wanted to mention that I was not into Sonic Youth in 1988 when this was going on.
I had heard the name. I never really looked into them. And then in 1990, 91.
I forget exactly when, but somewhere around there. I went to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse live. They were touring on the album Ragged Glory, which is the album people bring up when they talk about Neil Young being the godfather of grunge when you hear that.
That’s Ragged Glory is about the time that started happening. Sonic Youth opened for them on that show. And while the arena full of the old school Neil Young fans, to say that they hated Sonic Youth would be an understatement.
I mean, they were actively trying to get them off the stage, which I think Sonic you’ve kind of played into. But I was blown away by them. I went and bought goo the next day.
I started going backwards through their stuff. really when I became a fan. I mentioned that because, you know, Sonic Youth did the thing they do live where they played for about 30 minutes and then they made noise for another 20 minutes. They stood on their guitars and they kicked the amps over and they basically destroyed everything. tons of feedback, all of that stuff that they kind of got famous for.
The next time I saw Neil Young a few years later, was doing the same thing. And I always has kind of made me happy to think about Neil Young kind of standing on the side of the stage and watching Sonic Youth and going, man, I like what these kids are doing. I’m going to do that, you know?
It just, I don’t know, it brings joy to me for some reason. So anyway, that’s Sonic Youth. Go ahead.
Just to start off with first. I do have to address one thing you said there about the, you know, their earlier career, about how noisy and discordant that early stuff would have to be for goo and dirty to be considered slick and polished and that. Yeah.
If that’s the Swick and Polish version of Sonic Youth, you know the old school version of it is, in fact, really noisy. It is. Yeah.
Man, I love this song. This is my favorite Sonic Q song. Well, it’s one of two.
The other one that might be my favorite is Titanium Expose. And the funny thing about Titanium Expose is the 1st place that I ever got introduced to that song was on the soundtrack to the movie Pump up the volume, just like the Cowboy Junkies. That was where I 1st heard that song.
And so this, I had a very, very similar experience. The 1st time I heard teenage riot was at KTXT on a shift when I had to play it. And so I got up there and put that on in that immediate, that 1st guitar hits and, you know, gets into that riff that starts the, the song off and just immediately my ears perked up and I’m like, holy crap, this is Sonic Youth, because I had always thought of them as being a more noisy and disjointed and all that.
And I guess this really is kind of the, if you want to say poppy, it’s kind of the popular song in their, in their catalog, but, uh, still, I remember being like, wow, maybe, maybe I like these guys more than I thought I liked. I mean, this is a really great song. So, uh, so yeah, yet again, another one that was, I was introduced to at KTXT.
The video, man, I love the video, and you pretty much listed to everybody. I did see Marquise Smith in there from the fall. That was the one guy that you didn’t mention that I did see in the video.
But everybody else that I recognized. I think you hit. And yeah, the cuts are so fast.
It’s hard to focus on anything. The one thought I had about it was them in that little space with kind of the American flag on the back wall. I don’t know if it’s a rehearsal space or an apartment or whatever it is, but it’s where most of them, the footage of them playing was, you know, came from.
And, you know, they’re jumping around and they’re jumping towards the camera and they’re doing, you know, the choreographed moves with the guitarists together, like, you know, our metal band might do and that kind of stuff. I wonder if all that was parody. I wonder if they were aping other rock videos doing that kind of stuff.
Very possible. That choreographed thing is almost what they show kiss doing and they’re a little… half 2nd clip, yeah. Yeah, it goes from Kiss and then right to that scene.
And that was part of what made me think, maybe this whole thing is kind of aping the rock star, you know, posing kind of deal because you get Rollins doing the Rollins thing on stage and then you cut to them and they’re all jumping around and banging into each other and stuff. So I don’t know that that was the the case. I kind of like to think that it was, though, because it made that video that much more enjoyable to me.
But anyway, yeah, love the video. Love, love, love the song. So great choice.
Glad this one came up. Man, yeah, hard to beat Sonic Youth or a hard to beat teenager riot, I should say. Obviously a big fan of Sonic Heath.
Maybe not quite as big as you guys, but introduced to them at KTXT, just like you had not really run across anything, I think, before I got to KTXT. I don’t think I’ve really gone through all their albums in detail like over and over and over again. I know, I think I’ve gone through each of them a couple times and I know, you know, a handful of their songs by heart.
I will say that early on in the process of making the film 35,000 watts, the story of college radio, available now on 2B, when we were doing a teaser that wasn’t meant to be seen like on YouTube or whatever. So we could pick, I could choose any song I wanted because it wasn’t something I had to get clearance for because it wasn’t going to be like publicly released. The song I chose was actually Sonic Youth cool thing, was the was underneath the original teaser for 35,000 watch that when we were still thinking that maybe we could get like a development deal or something that we would send out to people, because it just embodied everything about like, I mean, they embody college radio.
The song’s amazing. That’s probably my favorite Sonic U song, but Teenage Riot is fantastic as well. But that’s just how much to me, like, they’re not even my favorite band, but to me, they embody college radio as much as, you know, the pixies or REM or a handful of those bands where you just think of, like, the top tier of college radio bands.
Sonic Youth is right there. Yeah, the video is is something, you know, as someone who had its video and film like, I can’t imagine trying to put that together. It’s just so schizophrenic and so fast and so very low-fi in a way that’s that’s endearing.
It’s really funny. I noticed this on a couple videos. We, um, you know, we get our list from 120 minutes.org, and they’re the ones that have put together these lists of what was on 120 minutes and they link directly to YouTube.
So it’s really easy to just click the link and you go to YouTube, but what I have discovered is that sometimes they put those on there years and years ago. And someone else has uploaded a better version since then. So like sometimes if I get a bad version of a video, I’ll look and see if there’s a better version.
So for this one, naturally, I did. And there is a newer version out there. It’s in 1080 P, and it still looks exactly the same.
And there is no, that video. That’s what that video looked like the day it came off the press, like that is it. It is as low-fi as it gets.
But what my note is, it looks exactly the way Sonic Youth sounds. Like if there is someone you know in your life that’s deaf and you want to explain to them what Sonic Youth is. have them watch that video. Like, that’s the best Sonic Youth experience.
I think a deaf person could possibly have it. It feels like them in every way. And I can’t even explain why necessarily, you know, it’s, I mean, part of it’s being lo-fi and not being, you know, you know, perfectly composed.
We’ve talked about this before, but, you know, one of one of their sort of signature things, in addition to a lot of it, but one of the things that kind of defines them is that that thing we’ve talked about about beautiful noise, like there is nothing but chaos happening here, but somehow it all comes together, you know, to make a very listenable song, I think. I mean, this is probably their most accessible or one of their most accessible songs. Like Keith said, I’ll, you know, reiterate that again.
If Goo is the polished version of this band, you should hear what they were doing before that, like, it’s it, their 1st 2 albums, especially, are just people in a studio trying to destroy instruments and recording it. Like that’s that’s really all it is. It’s fun to listen to, I think.
I mean, I find I find something cool about it. But, yeah, this is what you’re getting here and beyond this is the cleaned up radio friendly version of Sonic. The chaos of it, I think, is what’s so appealing about it.
You know, you mentioned titanium expose. That’s another great example. Like, try to hum that riff to somebody.
It’s impossible. It’s so discordant, you know? But you listen to it and it sounds great.
You know, it works. It’s one of those bands that’s so hard to put a label on and yet, like, you can’t, you can’t deny what they’ve done at the same time. Yeah, super, super influential.
Another one that I like just absolutely associate. Anytime I hear a song, it puts me right back in the booth at KTXT, which is always fun. Like, I like that, you know, some bands I’ve kind of grown with.
And so now they represent different things to me. And then there’s certain bands like cowboy junkies. like Sonic Youth, that even though I have listened to them since, You know, it’s not like I didn’t listen to them for the last 30 years, they just are in, you know, they’re always going to be associated with being in that booth and having those discoveries happen, you know, during that time of my life. And so I appreciate all those bands.
And actually, this was this was unintentional, but my choice is also in that category. I think I had maybe heard one song by these guys before, but my deep love for they might be giants, started at KTXT, and that opportunity to talk about them came up this month, October of 1988. 120 minutes played. They might be Giants, Anna E. and I are given an old in the glow of each other’s majestic breath.
Listen and hear my words. They’re the ones who would think I would say if there was a meat for you. And, yeah, I think I had heard Birdhouse in my soul, probably, which is on the album after the one that Anna Ing is on, Flood, that came out in 91, and that song broke containment and got into, you know, mainstream airplay, certainly on MTV, and even a little bit on top 40 radio.
So that kind of came into my world. And, I mean, being a pretty big nerd. Um, I was able to kind of get like, wait a minute, these guys, there’s something going on here and that’s, you know, the early 90s for me was right when like, all of a sudden I’m starting to discover all these bands that are unlike poison and Motley Crew and Def Leppard and the stuff I was listening to, and they might be Giants is probably, you know, on the far end of the scale of stuff that I was starting to be exposed to.
I was like this is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. Like Sonic Youth, there is no other, they might be giants. You will never hear a song and be like, is that, could that be the amount?
No. You either know right away it’s they might be giants or it’s not. There’s no there’s no waffling on that.
Like, when they make a song, it is theirs, and you will know that, and it’ll probably be fantastic, but not always. I mean to be perfectly honest, not always. If you’ve gone through their entire catalog.
It can be hit or miss. I’m not going to sit and try to defend every song they might be Giants has made, but I am absolutely about to defend this one. But first, they might be giants formed in 1982.
It is John Flansberg and John Lennell, uh, and it has been and always will be, those 2 guys, I think. They have a backing band that they tour with. They’ve played with other backing bands. really interesting going down the rabbit hole.
They’ve done a lot of appearances on late night shows. And to see them just jump in with like Dave Letterman’s band and Paul Schaefer, you know, the world’s most dangerous band, they jumped in, had with Doc Severinson on the Carson, on the, you know, the Carson show. I don’t I don’t guess Carson.
I guess it was Leno at the time, but Doc Severinson was still there, and played a version of Birdhouse in my soul with like the full orchestra and Severrinson just blowing on the, like, they could just jump in and play with all these different bands that I think probably enjoyed jumping in with them and playing these really off the wall songs, you know, just as much as they did, but it is kind of interesting to see those 2 kind of chameleon their way into these different setups and still just jam. But they actually met as teenagers in high school in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Spoiler alert, the name of the album that Annie Ing is on is called Lincoln, and I am guessing there’s a connection there.
They met as teenagers, but then went to separate colleges, didn’t actually, you know, stay in touch with each other, and then reunited because they both moved into the same apartment in Brooklyn, not same apartment, same apartment building in Brooklyn on the same day. Literally like show up. They’re moving into their apartments.
They’re like, hey, I, you know, I know you, I know you. became friends again, and the rest is kind of history. They formed a duo and started playing shows and as happens, you know, they started catching the air of some folks and and things took off. The name itself, which is was something I had never looked into, comes from a 1971 film, which in turn comes from a Don Quixote, quote.
So Don Quixote was, if you know the story, famous for mistaking the windmills on the horizon as being evil giants instead of windmills. So they might be giants, was something that he apparently said at some point during in one of those books or in the book. And that’s where that comes from.
So in 1986, they recorded their debut album. self-titled and it included a song called Don’t Let’s Start, which is also an absolutely amazing. They might be giant song. heavy, heavy, heavy rotation on college radio. They really, just like, like violent films like RAM, like they captured, I, Karen Glauber said this so well in in the 35,000 Watts film.
They captured the hearts of college radio DJs. Like something about them, something about they might be giants just like really taps into college kids at that time, I think, in particular. And so they got a lot of support for that 1st album that carried over into the 2nd album, which is the one we’re going to talk about now called Lincoln.
And Anna Ing, which was not actually a single in the U.S. off of this, but still managed to get to number 11 on the U.S. modern rock charts. So this was kind of their first, I guess, breakthrough into, I wouldn’t say the mainstream, but it kind of set them up for what would be some mainstream success with Flood, the next album that came out later with Bird House in Your Soul, and Istanbul, not Constantinople, both of those songs. I’d say your average person on the street, probably, you know, that’s our age, has heard those 2 songs.
But Lincoln is really the ones that Lincoln is really the album that set them up for that success. And I think Anna Ing is clearly the standout. I would say on that album, and I would also say probably in their catalog, it’s got to be top 2 or three.
Um, it’s, you know, for me, it’s number one. Don’t let’s start is a is like a one-B. It’s a one A1B thing, but Anna Ing is, to be just an absolutely perfect song and a perfect distillation of what they might be giants does. Like, it’s just is them to a T. It is listenable, it’s melodic.
It’s interesting in a way that other music at the time wasn’t like it’s just different from what other bands were doing. The lyrics and delivery aren’t so like inscrutable that you’re like sitting there trying to figure out what they’re talking about. They are describing, you know, someone that lives across the world and and never having met that person is kind of the essence of the song.
But the way they put it, and it’s very poetic. the way that it all comes out in the song. So I love, I love that, love the music, love the the staccato guitars and just the juxtaposition of like the really kind of angular instrumental with like the really melodic vocal, just top notch song. The video.
Also top notch. I fucking love this video. It is so great.
It is, oh, it is so good. Directed by Adam Bernstein, who did seven, they might be giant videos. He directed the video for Punk Rock Girl by Dead Milkman.
He directed the video for Love Shack by B-52s. He directed Baby Got Back. That’s right.
The same guy. Baby Got Back. He also has directed episodes of almost every major TV show you’ve ever heard of.
Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, 30 Rock, the new silo on Apple TV, and like 30 or 40 others. He is a director extraordinaire. Apparently, he’s won Emmy Awards.
He’s very, very good at what he does. And he just gets to be absolutely unleashed. I don’t know what the band gave him as like a guideline.
I don’t know if they just said, make us a video. There are tangential connections to the lyrical content of the song, but really it’s just this collection of like slow motion. Stop motion, time lapse, extreme close-ups, crane shots, long shots, super weird angles, all just like coming together and it just works.
It’s as quirky as the song. It works perfectly with the music. I don’t even know, like, I don’t know why I love it as much as I do.
There’s certain things. You know, the Ramones was the last time that I said, like, ah, I really, really loved the video for Ramones want to be sedated, but I knew exactly why I loved it, and I could describe the video and talk about why they did it the way they did it, because it’s kind of a, you know, it’s kind of like a bottle video. It’s just set in that one scene and it plays out.
They might be Giants is the opposite of that. It’s everywhere. They’re all over the place.
It was filmed at Wards Island Fireman’s Training Center. So those weird buildings and all the weird spaces because it was like a place where you train firefighters. So they were able to get that space and just use it to the best of its, like, I mean, they use every inch of it.
It feels like, because they’re just all over the place. I don’t know what else to say about it. Love the song, love the video.
I don’t know what you guys, how you guys feel about they might be giants. They tend to be kind of polarizing. I feel like you’re on my side, but we’re about to find out.
Well, I am on your side. Well, you know, we’ve talked about, we’ve talked before about bands to kind of do one thing and how that can get old sometimes, you know, it came up with violent fams and there’s been a couple others. And that’s always kind of been the deal where they might be giants for me.
Like, I will say, however, though, that they, unlike some of those other bands. They have a ton of songs that I like. I just I think they work better in small doses.
But I really, really do like these guys. I saw them live once and that’s a real treat if you ever get the chance. They’re a fantastic live band.
So I am in no way going to diss these guys. I just feel like a few songs at a time is all I really need. But that said, if I’m going to sit down and listen to 3 songs from these guys, There’s a 99% chance that this is going to be one of them.
I mean, this is just one of my all-time favorite songs. I’ve always loved it. And what I love about it is this.
If anybody ever asked me, hey, tell me what I need to know about they might be giants. It’s right here. Listen to this, and you will know exactly what you’re going to get from these guys, and whether or not you’re going to like it.
So, you know, sometimes it takes bands some time to settle into something or they develop or they, you know, whatever you want to call it. This is not bad. This is a fully formed thing. and this is pretty early in their career and it’s right there.
And it does get bigger and it gets more produced and it gets more flashy, but it’s always this. And, you know, and for me, this is this is as good as they ever got. They, like I said, they have a ton of songs that I like.
But I, this is just an all timer for me. So, the video. I don’t think I’d ever seen this one before.
If I had, I didn’t remember it. There isn’t a whole lot of one on here, like you said, and it obviously wasn’t very expensive, but man, is it just perfect. It totally captures like the sort of manic, nerdy energy that fits this band.
And even though it doesn’t really have anything to do with the song. It just fits it magically. It’s perfect.
And so, yeah, no notes on this one. It’s just, this is one of my all-time favorite songs, great video to go with it. If you don’t know anything about, they might be giants.
You can start right here, and you’ll know what you’re getting. This is an all-time classic for me. Well, believe it or not, this is a song that I heard for the first time at KTXT.
All 3 of our picks today were that way. But yes, this is something I had never heard. I think I had heard the band name they might be Giants, but I was not familiar with them.
In fact, I know I had heard the band name. They might be Giants, but I wasn’t real familiar with them until I got to KTXT, and that was my 1st real introduction on them. Um, and this is one of the 1st songs I ever played.
And yeah, this song is just fantastic. You guys mentioned, don’t let start. You mentioned Birdhouse in Your Soul.
Great, great, great songs. Another one, a little bit later, that I would mention from the 90s that I think is one of their best songs is called Until My Head Falls Off. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that one.
But I, man, I love that song as much as I love some of the earlier stuff too. So I can’t claim to be a huge fan of these guys. I don’t have a lot of their, or I don’t have any other albums.
Another one of these bands that I know more by song than I do by album. Yeah, you just can’t beat this song. It’s just really, really fantastic.
And and quirky in a way, a lot of the times you hear the word quirky and like the depths may send up a little bit of a red flag. These guys are quirky in the perfect way of being quirky. I mean, if that is ever going to be used as a compliment.
It is going to be used as a compliment here because that’s what these guys are. They’re quirky and just the most perfect way. The video.
You guys mentioned a lot about it, and I don’t know that I can add a whole lot to it. The funny thing about it is, is that one of the 1st note I took was, this is the perfect mix of video and song, which is exactly what you guys just said. It is. it’s perfect And it has nothing to do with the song.
Like, literally, nothing in this video has anything to do with the song, and yet it is perfect for it. And I think it’s exactly like what you said about the Sonic Youth video, Mike, is that if you know someone who’s deaf and want to show them visually what they might be giants is like, show them this video and they’re going to have a real good idea of what they might be giants is like. A couple of things I’ll point out with the video, just a couple of moments that I really, really liked.
There’s a lot of the stuff in there where they’re doing synchronized movements like at the same time. I really like the very beginning of the video where they’re both sitting at those 2 desks, banging their hands on the desks in time to the beat of the song, and then looking really, like I had just these terrible agonized looks on their faces while they’re doing it. That part I really liked.
And then about 2.5 minutes in, there’s a scene of them, kind of like running down this colonnade or deal, and they’ve got their arms like kind of bowed out and they’re running kind of bowlegged. I knew you were going to pick that one, right? When you started…
Yeah exactly. I’m not sure what that is supposed to be, but they’re doing it in perfect time, exact same move together. Man, I actually did like rewind and watch that through again, just so I could see that little part of the video again.
I don’t know that you could possibly get a better mix of video and song than these two. Like this, it just works for whatever reason. And I mean, that’s a tough assignment.
I feel like, you know, coming into this, because you’ve got a song that’s clearly really good. Like, I feel like anybody that, and considering Adam Bernstein had either worked with him before or was going to, like, he clearly liked this band, and I feel like he had to have felt like, I need to make this good because this could be these guys breakthrough because, like you said, it’s a super quirky song, but in the most accessible way possible. Like, you can’t, I don’t know that you could combine something so quirky, and yet something that isn’t gonna put off people that normally might be put off by something that’s quirky.
I mean, you could give this, you could hand this song to almost anyone that loves music and I think that they’re going to just be like, oh, man, yeah, I totally get, I get this band. I get it. I get the whole thing just because it’s it’s that good.
And that’s not true of their entire catalog. I mean, for sure, they have songs that are too quirky for sure. does exist. This song is quirky without being novelty.
And I think that’s the line. A lot of their stuff gets novelty. That’s where I think the difference would be.
This song is very quirky, but it’s not, it’s not goofy. I mean, it’s so catchy and hooky. It’s catchy and it rocks.
I mean, it’s, and it actually still kind of rocks. Yeah. It’s got a great beat, you can dance to it.
Yeah. If you haven’t heard, they might be giants. Or maybe you’ve just heard Birdhouse in your soul, which I think is a great song, but I could see how maybe that one didn’t win you over.
This is the place to start. Or if you’re trying to turn someone on, they might be giant. like, what should I start with? Don’t even think about it.
This is the one to start with. Absolutely. 100%.
And like Scott said, you’re gonna know a minute in, whether you, you or if you’re giving this to someone else, if you’re gonna like, not only the song, but like, they might be giants. Like, if you don’t like this, you’re not going to like the maybe Giants. If you do like this, yeah, you’re going to have you’ve got some fun exploring to do.
You guys mentioned that you heard this on KTXT, and again, I think I was a little ahead of that, and I wanted, I meant to mention this earlier, I wanted to give a shout out to my sister, whose musical taste and mine never gelled at all, but she actually bought this album. Um, for what reason I don’t know, and put it on and I was like in my room and I remember going, what is that? You know?
And that’s when I found this song in this band. So shout out to my sis, who, who other than that, would have only turned me on to like new kids on the block or something. Oh man.
All right. We are at the magical inflection point of every episode where it can take any number of turns. We were on a hot streak with our mystery song for a while there.
My personal opinion is that hot streak ended an episode or 2 ago. I’ve had a couple that I don’t want to just say our straight out duds, but I certainly, the last one, the last one was a dud. I’ll just say it.
The last one was not good. It was not good. We all 3 agree. understatement.
Yeah, yeah, Dud might be singing high praises for that song. Again, I apologize. I know people put I know people put work into these things.
I know someone at some point was like, ooh, yeah, that’s pretty good. Let’s put that on the album, but we struck out last episode. This time I think we’re, I’m going to say we’re back on track, but I don’t want to, I don’t want to lead the witness, so we’ll let Keith take us into it and see, see where we land.
Well, I did not do this on purpose, but today for our mystery act, I have picked another Canadian band that was formed in 1985, just like the Cowboy Junkies. This is a band called The Pursuit of Happiness, and the song is called I’m an Adult now. No more boy beats, girl, boy, loses, girl, more like, man, I understand what the hell went wrong.
And I’m an adult now. Oh, oh, I’m an adult now. I’ve got the prom I wanna go Um, like I said, they were formed in Canada in ’85 by senior guitarist Mo Berg and drummer Dave Gilby.
They’ve had a couple of other guys that have kind of been the main members of this band, the guitar player Chris Abbott and Brad Barker, who’s the bass player. And then they also have a female backup singer named Renee Suchi. And those 5 right there have been the band from most of its existence.
They did have an early bass player before Barker, but he was out pretty early and Barker’s been in for most of the band’s history. The other thing I thought was kind of funny about lineup wise with these guys is that it’s been a stable lineup at every position except for that female backing vocal position. They’ve had 6 other female backing vocalists before Renee Suchi joined the band.
So I don’t know why they keep running off backing vocalists, but that was a thing earlier in their career, apparently. This song was originally recorded in 1986, and as something that they financed, and then later on when they got signed to a label, they recorded rerecorded it for their debut album in 1988, that album was called Love Junk. And it was re-released as a single again in 88 and actually made it all the way to number 6 on the billboard alternative songs chart.
So this song actually got some traction for these guys. I had never heard it before. But yeah, it actually, like I said, got to number 6 on the modern rock charts.
They haven’t put out a whole lot of music in the last 20 or so years, but they are still a live band. They still do play together live, and actually were inducted into the Canadian Indies Hall of Fame and back in 2006. So apparently Canada has a Hall of Fame strictly for Indie Rock Acts or Indie Acts.
So who knew? And the pursuit of happiness is actually in that particular role. Who knows?
That’s a good question. We should probably do a little research on that. brutal. Yeah, who knows?
Who knows? This one, I think I’m going to have a different take from what you guys had, apparently, because I really tried to get into this song and like it, and I just did not. It’s a generic hard rocker.
There’s nothing going on musically in it that did much for me. I tried to think that the lyrics were clever about a young person becoming an adult and going through the tribulations of that and I couldn’t get there. Um, they just, I just not very good lyrics to my mind.
Yeah, I have to say, I did not really care for this song a whole lot. I did listen to one other of their songs. They had another hit called She’s So Young.
I liked that one a lot better. It’s very different. It’s kind of a power pop jam, whereas like I said, this kind of is a bad hard rock song.
So I can’t say that I’m a big pursuit of happiness fan, per se, of of 2 songs, they’re batting 500 for me. So, yeah, we’ll take it as for whatever it is. If you if you like hard rockers, spend this one and see what you think.
The video or videos, I guess I should say, are interesting. I’m interested to see what you guys saw when you went to watch the video because there are 2 of them. In 86, they self-financed a video, um, that got onto, uh, the Canadian music channel much music, and that was how they ended up getting discovered and getting their major label deal, which is what allowed them to record love junk and then re-recorded this song uh, for that album.
They did, though, then, in 88, record another video for it, a different video that actually had some money behind it. I saw both versions of that video. I did not know I was going to see both versions of that video.
I clicked through the link on 120 minutes.org on one occasion and got the newer version of it, which is not very good. It’s got some like kids wearing like war fatigues crawling around like this war zone and the bands playing in that war zone. And then later they’re playing the song again somewhere else, and there’s like an ungodly amount of fog.
Like somebody bought like 8 fog machines and turned them all on high at the same time to put fog around the band. It was just ridiculous. You came to see the band.
They were just kind of English shapes in the fog. Not a good video at all, in my opinion. The original video, when I went back today this morning to rewatch the video again.
I clicked through the link, and somehow that same link took me to the original video, which is just the guys playing on the street with like some people coming up and watching them play. At one point, there’s a little kid that comes up and the singer like bends down and stairs face to face with this little kid and sings right into his face for about 30 seconds, which I thought was kind of interesting. Um, so as far as video videos go.
I thought that the original low budget video was far superior to the bigger budget video, but the problem was that in both of those videos, it was the Pursuit of Happiness song. I’m an adult now, which I didn’t care for. So neither of the videos did a whole lot for me just for that reason.
But I think having listened to you guys a little bit as we intro this, I may have been in the minority on my opinions on this. So pursuit of happiness. I’m adult now.
How you guys have at it? You know, I’m not going to sing the praises of this song, maybe I’m comparing it to the last episode and the improvement over that. You know, is pretty substantial.
Well, a couple things. One, this song apparently charted higher than Anna Ing on the U.S. modern rock charts. or not. Yeah, which that just goes to show that charts are sometimes worthless.
No offense, but to me, my note is that this song is really close to being really, really good. It’s really close. And the thing that you said about the backup singers actually ties into my feeling about this, which is that I saw, I just looked at their Wikipedia really fast and just saw that they had backup singers.
That’s not immediately evident watching the video. They should have used the damn backup singers on the chorus. The song is fine until you get to the chorus.
And then it just, he doesn’t have the vocal like charisma. Maybe he does in other tracks and maybe this was a choice or whatever, but like his vocals don’t take the chorus over the top that you need to make this song work. Because, like, the instrumental is there, the guitar solo is just scorching, man, I love the guitar solo.
He was killing it. And like, the verses are, I guess, kind of spoke, you know, talk song or whatever. So, like, you don’t, whatever.
And then when he actually starts to sing those chorus and it’s like, that’s where they could really have landed the plane, they just don’t. And so that’s where I think the whole thing just kind of falls apart. Knowing that they’ve rotated through backup singers, maybe that’s why the backup singers were mad because they didn’t get to participate enough because they should have. absolutely.
Like him trying to kind of sing because he’s not, again, maybe other songs is different, but like he’s not a very powerful charismatic singer, at least in this instance, having the backup singers maybe would have helped push that over, but that was kind of my thought was like, I like where this is going. I kind of like the lyrics of, you know, I mean, it’s a little, it’s a little whatever, but like, I get where he’s coming from. Like, it sucks to be an adult because of this or that or the other.
And then it just, it just doesn’t get over that hump. And that’s where I, I’m kind of like, yeah, I can see where you’re coming from where like it just doesn’t quite do it for you. I apparently saw the old video, the original video, because I love the video.
I thought the video was actually really charming. Love, love, love the dude in the red zip up jacket that like drops a coin in the guitar case and then just commences to dancing his ass off for like 20 seconds, just gets down and funky. and then just like casually like stops and puts his headphones on and goes about his day, like, chef’s kiss, loved that moment. The little kid coming up and just getting kind of shouted at like in the face for like 30 minutes is kind of hilarious.
Like, uh, there’s a part of me that, you know, as a kid, that would have absolutely terrified the bejesus out of me and I would have hated it, but it was just kind of funny in that, the way that that goes down. But yeah, the dude in the red jacket just steals the show. That, to me, I think, was enough to put this over the top of like music and video together if I have to go like from one, a scale of one to 10, It would have been like a four, but the video put it up to a 5 and then that guy dancing put it up to like a six.
So that’s what, like, tilted me into, like, I’m going to put this in the good category, but just barely. If it had a good chorus, it would have hit seven. that’s that’s about where I landed on this one. Yeah, that’s what I got.
I’m shocked that it charted, shocked that it was that they’re famous in Canada shocked about many things that you said that I did not think about this band, but that’s kind of where I landed on it. Well, real quick, I was going to say, I think you could add up my score for both videos and it would not reach a seven, but that’s true. The video you described may take one down off of my, like, that does not sound good at all.
So I think I’m more leaning towards Mike’s stake on this. I didn’t think the song was great. But, you know, compared to that thing we watched last week.
I mean, this is Bohemian Rhapsody compared to that. So I think I liked it just because it sounded sort of fresh and fun and whatever. I thought the video, however, was great.
And I love the random things in it. I saw the old one too, I think. The dude dancing.
You mentioned that. You mentioned a little kid coming up and getting berated. I like that.
You know, something is pretty simple stuff, but I actually liked some of the lyrics. I thought some of them were kind of clever. I liked when he said, I’m paraphrasing, but he said something like, no more boy meets girl, boy loses girl, now it’s man tries to figure out where it all went wrong.
I like that, you know, and there were some other lyrics like that that I thought were kind of clever. So we got a few genuine laughs out of me, sort of the video. I’ll give it a yeah, I’ll give it a 7 overall, well done.
I wanted to give a shout out to the drummer who stands and it has the kick drum and the lone snare. I always kind of dug that. Uh, you know, stray cats, violent femmes.
You always see that kind of thing. Um, the Avid Brothers more recently. But yeah, it’s I always like that kind of drumming, so shout out to him.
It’s always a good look when you’re trying to rock out. I just I thought this was fun. And maybe it’s because of the disappointment of last week.
I mean, this is nothing I’m going to go out buy or listen to or, you know, certainly not going to become a huge pursuit of happiness fan, but for this, you know, 3.5 , 4 minutes, I had a pretty good time at watching this. So that’s where I landed. It’s interesting to me that both of you guys saw the original version of the video, because like I said, I did most of my prep work for this yesterday, and I watched that video 3 or 4 times, the, and linked to it off from 120 minutes.org, and it was the, you know, the newer version of the video.
Did the video play more than once on these playlists? Well, and that’s another thing. Today, this morning, like I said, I was going back and trying it again, just going to rewatch the videos real quick before we started up.
And it does play twice and I thought, I thought that exact same thing. I must have done the link on the other one. No, I went both links and it took me to the original video this time rather than the other one.
I swear I clicked on that. That’s usually how I do it. Yeah, I don’t know.
Now, when I after I watched the video, it immediately rolled into the live video of this. No, there is another music video out there for this. So, you know, if you’re interested in it, go check it out and see what you think.
The live video was obviously shot somewhere in Canada where these guys are insanely popular. Like they are rocking out on a stage in front of 1000s of screaming fans. So I don’t…
Yeah, I don’t get it either. But it seems impossible. Maybe at this time Canadians were starving for music, you know, right?
I, you know, there’s going to be, there will be a Canadian somewhere that is going to comment and be like, you guys just completely like have missed the boat on this. You guys don’t get it. These guys were huge, but, and, you know, they’re not terrible.
There have been worse bands that we’ve come across. kind of remind me of a little bit of the godfathers. That other song, though, what it’s me look, she’s so young. That song sounds nothing like this at all. absolutely.
So, you know, it’s it’s just a different thing. Maybe this isn’t representative of what they do. Could be.
Yeah, I don’t know. kind of clever and fun. I don’t know. Like I said, nothing groundbreaking, but it was an enjoyable watch for me.
Yeah. I might have to go listen to a couple other ones and for all our Canadian listeners, you can throw this apology on the pile of apologies that Americans owe you guys for everything else that we have been doing to you over the last year or two. Just add this one to that.
Sorry, we just pursuit of happiness. But there, you know, and funny, I mentioned the Godfathers, because it kind of reminded me, I was looking at, in October, I don’t know if you guys noticed, they had like a live show on 120 minutes that they played at the end of, and the Godfathers apparently opened that show because there was like 4 Godfather’s tracks and it was like the Sugar Cubes. And I think it might have been the Godfather’s opening for the sugar cubes.
I think it was. I looked at it. They did 3 songs.
There were 3 bands on that on that bill. I remember specifically looking at this. It was the Godfathers, the sugar cubes, and living color.
Living color, right? Oddly enough, have talked about recently. We’re all on that bill.
Yeah, all 3 that we took. Sugar Cubes played damn near their whole album. So I assumed they were the headliners of them.
Yeah, yeah, that looked like it, and it looked like the Godfathers and Living Color only got like 3 or 4 songs each, and then Sugar Cubes got to play about a dozens or about 8 or 10 songs. When I hear the sugar cubes, I’m always like, who should open for these guys? Nah, living color.
What a perfect, what a perfect match. It would be a great show. I mean, I wouldn’t be mad at it, but I, I don’t know who thought that that, they must have just been in town at the same time or something because that’s a very weird.
I can’t imagine living color like opening for them on a tour or something. Maybe that tour opened for the Rolling Stones. Oh, that was like the Stone’s big comeback was steel wheels.
The steel wheels. Yeah, they did that big tour. Living color open for them.
And Mick Jagger sort of gets a little credit for discovering them, I think. That makes a lot more sense than the sugar cubes. put it that way. But anyway, you can also see that at 120 minutes.org. if you want to go back and watch.
All those videos are linked. Go to October 1988, you can see the stuff that we chose. You can see that, I think it was a live show from Auburn University, I believe, was where they recorded it.
And so sometimes you’ll see that. I think we’re going to also start to see more videos of the actual 120 minute show so we see like the interstitial stuff and the VJs. I noticed that some of that starts to be available as we get a little later on and more people have VCRs and more people were doing recording.
So there’s more stuff available for them to pull for them. So we might be able to actually watch the actual show and see some of the stuff because I think that’ll be interesting just to kind of put it into perspective. But anyway, what an amazing episode.
I mean, honestly, like 3 iconic college radio bands and alternative bands, all in a row, great songs, all three. My guess is most people listening to this are familiar with them, but if for some reason any of those 3 bands have snuck by you. These, I would say these songs are great places to start with each of those bands as well, for sure.
It’s like you don’t even have to kind of like dig and be like, oh, where should I start listening? Start with the ones that we chose. And I think all of them represent, you know, the band pretty well.
If you like what you hear, you’re probably going to like more of the stuff. And if you don’t, then, I mean, cowboy junkies might have a little more variety, but, I mean, that’s pretty, but like Sonic Youth, then they might be giants. I feel like if you don’t like these 2 songs, you probably are not going to like anything else that they do.
But I think that probably applies to cowboy junkies as well. Apparently not, pursuit of happiness. So that might be your mileage may vary on that one.
You might want to dig a little deeper if you want to check them out, but that’s October of 1988. Folks, don’t forget about 35,000 watts. The story of college radio, a documentary film about college radio, where we talk about bands like Sonic Youth and Cowboy Junkies, and they might be giants.
I’ll get mentioned in there, I think at some point. It is available on Tubi. So go to tubi.com and search 35,000 watts, and you can watch it right this very minute.
We will be doing November of 1988 in our next episode. So come back and join us right here on 120 months. Well see you there.