#NostalgiaUltra- Lost Classics From The Summer of 1997
To say that the summer of 1997 was seminal is a bit of an
understatement—for pop culture that aged poorly (Men in Black), for the face of music (OK Computer), and for myself; it was the summer I turned 14, it was
the summer I formed tight bonds with my classmates that quickly diminished once
we got into our first year of high school and they all discovered underage
drinking, and it was the summer that I spent one weekend a month in Dubuque,
IA.
My parents had divorced two years prior to this, and my father
had been slowly moving west of the rural Illinois town where I was raised. By
the tail end of 1996, he had taken a job in Dubuque, at the Ertl Toy Company,
and he and his second wife rented an apartment in a newly developed area of
northern Dubuque.
Because I was a teenager, and very wise with my allowance
money, I spent a bulk of it on CDs. Many of those from my teen years have come
and gone, long relegated to a used CD store somewhere, but there are a couple
of titles that have stayed with me into my adult life, one of which I still
listen to with some regularity, and two of which I still have held onto,
attaching some kind of fuzzy nostalgic feeling to them.
In Dubuque, in the late 90s, there were three record stores
that I would visit when it was a visitation weekend with my father—two of which
were in the Kennedy Mall. Both of those are long gone, now, though. One was a
Sam Goody, and the other was a Musicland. I’m not even kidding. Two of what was
literally the same store in the same relatively small shopping mall. The Sam
Goody was strangely positioned in food court, so you could get a slice of
Sbarro pizza, and then go browse the CDs.
The other, non-mall related, record store I frequented, and
still frequented years later when I went to college in Dubuque, was Moondog
Music, which is still operational today. And like many independently owned
record stores, the smell of incense is strong, so if you are to shop there, I
hope you don’t mind your purchase smelling of the store long after you’ve taken
it home.
I believe it was at the Sam Good (but not the Musicland)
that I bought the albums Against The
Stars by the Boston pop-rock group The Dambuilders, and Rock Crown, the introspective
“singer-songwriter” album from Seven Mary
Three, a post-grunge outfit that had hit it big in the summer of 1996 with
the hard rock anthem “Cumbersome.”
Against The Stars
was a premeditated purchase. I used to tape “120 Minutes” late Sunday nights on
MTV, and watch it the next day when I got home from school, and I was
fascinated by the video for the album’s lead single, “Burn This Bridge,” where
the band’s members are playing in a room with walls that continue to close in
on them. The song itself is an endearing slice of 90s pop-rock (something you
don’t really hear a ton of anymore) and in trying to find the video to
reference for this, I was unable to—the band itself is completely obscure, and
broke up within a year after releasing Against
The Stars. Most notably, they are known now as the band that Joan Wasser
(AKA Joan as Police Woman) used to be in before her solo endeavor began. And it’s Wasser’s slightly sexualized face
that graces the front of the album—suggestively touching two fingers her to her
lips.
Taking it song by song, some of Against The Stars is less effective. Stylistically it’s a little
all over the place, with the overall focus being the creation concise pop
songs. The quiet/loud/quiet dynamic and fast tempo of “Burn This Bridge” has
obviously stood the test of time. A bulk of the album’s lyrics deal with
one-sided love (“Break Up With Your Boyfriend” appears early on in the record),
and then there’s the dramatic slow jam, “You’ll Never Know,” with the somewhat
laughable, somewhat earnest lyric, “You
put the swing in my mood swing/you skip the beat in my heart.”
The Seven Mary Three album, Rock Crown however, was a bit of an impulse buy—I mean, a lot of
CDs or records are. The night before we were going to the mall, I was watching
music videos on the cable channel The Box. For those that are unfamiliar with
it, The Box was a request-based music video channel where people could call in
and spend between .99 cents and up to $3.99 to request a specific video to
play. One of the videos I saw was for the song “Make Up Your Mind,” the single
off of Rock Crown, where lead singer Jason Ross stalks a very 90s looking girl through a supermarket.
The song itself is pretty much a total 180 from the “agro”
rock found on the band’s American
Standard; I mean, the whole album is pretty dense and multi-layered in
comparison to Seven Mary Three’s humble rock band beginnings. “Make Up Your
Mind” is a short song, coming in at like two and a half minutes, where it’s
kind of long enough to feel fulfilling, but short enough still where you wish
there were a little more.
Rock Crown is
actually a record that stuck with me well into my early 20s before I finally
found I wasn’t listening to it very much. It’s a long record, so I used to
listen to it a lot in the car when I was driving between Iowa and Minnesota. It
kind of falls apart slightly in the second half, with the pacing becoming a
little less even. However all is forgiven by the time the gorgeous (and still
devastating) closing track, “Oven,” arrives; a song that is apparently
partially about Sylvia Plath, subject matter that I’ve always found a little
heavy for a band like this.
Not purchased from the mall, but from across the street at
Moondog, The Sun is Often Out by the
British post-Blur/post-Oasis rock group The Longpigs. One of the few acts
signed to U2’s vanity imprint Mother Records, the group released the album in
1996, and to my knowledge, it never really found footing here in the United
States, despite securing a track on the Mission:
Impossible soundtrack.
I think it was an advertisement for The Sun is Often Out in a summer 1997 issue of CMJ that prompted me
to look into buying it—and as luck would have it Moondog Music had a used
(former a promo CD) copy of it for sale.
To say that The Longpigs, in all their 1996 “Brit Pop”
trappings, are dramatic and theatrical is drastically underselling The Sun is Often Out. It’s brash and
sloppy, with hyperactive the vocals from Crispin Hunt (what a British name,
even) anchoring everything down. And much like Rock Crown, this album too falters after the halfway point. But its
first five tracks are practically unfuckwithable—opening strong with the epic,
slow motion grandeur of “Lost Myself,” followed by the spastic “She Said,”
(then later on “Happy Again”) before settling into that real 90s Brit Pop sound
on “Far” and “On and On.”
Of the three albums mentioned here, The Longpigs is the one
that I still listen to the most; my wife is very fond of the song “Lost
Myself,” and despite how dated it can come off sounding, it’s something that
has aged surprisingly well if you don’t take it too seriously. It’s also a record
I tried to work in occasionally back when I was on the radio, in a small
attempt to introduce people to what could be considered a “lost classic.”
All three of these records could, in a way, be classified
that way—as “lost classics.” The internet leads me to believe that all of them
are out of print, or at least not very easy to find physical copies of. And I
guess that is part of the charm with all three of these albums—aside from the
fact that they all were purchased within the same span of time in the same
city. And unlike countless other records that have come and gone through my
life, that I’ve bought a second copy of, or downloaded in the iTunes store or
whatever, these three have stuck with me through 14 years of my life—college,
apartments, houses, etc.
I don’t have any
particularly fond or important memories attached to them, which is usually how
specific songs or albums stick with me for so long. They are just albums that
are unique to one another; in some cases they were bought for one song only,
but as they unfold, they are all relatively strong when taken as wholes.
I feel like this ending is going to come off like a Stereogum piece, but as you finish reading this (if you are even still reading
at this point), think about all the albums you’ve purchased in your life—it
helps if it was a CD or a tape that you bought from a record store rather than
just hitting “Buy Album” in the iTunes Marketplace. But in thinking about all
those albums, what are some of your own “lost classics,” or records that you’ve
carried with you through time, for personal reasons, or otherwise.
Comments
Post a Comment