This Band Probably Wasn’t Your Life
By Steve
In the first of a fully self-indulgent multi-part series on bands that meant a lot to me in my formative years, here’s a look at one of the more obscure awesome ones, The Young Fresh Fellows.
(I probably should’ve started with The Replacements, who are kind of my Beatles/Stones. But I was ripping CDs this fine evening and found my Fellows stash. So the ‘Mats will have to wait, which seems appropriate. And I’d probably have to think more than I want to about how I feel about Don’t Tell a Soul.)
So, “who’s The Young Fresh Fellows?” you say? YFF is a Seattle band led by the inimitable Scott McCaughey. They got their start in the early 80s and have released a dozen or so records in the last 20 years.
They debuted in 1984 with The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, an amusing bit of pop punk packaged to look like a real chamber of commerce promotional item. Songs like “Teenage Dogs in Trouble” and “Rock and Roll Pest Control” made it seem like the band was just a bunch of jokesters.
That reputation continued on Topsy Turvy and the Refreshments EP. I was never fond of the former, though some consider it one of their better works. The Refreshments EP is considerably better, and is included with the CD of their next release, The Men Who Loved Music.
The Men Who Loved Music (released in 1987) is when I took notice of the Fellows. This should be a geek rock classic, a more rocky/poppy/punky They Might Be Giants. You have the nasal vocals and the silly/smart lyrics. You have “When the Girls Get Here,” where “We’ll talk about integrated circuits and things, to show them how smart we are.” You have the pseudo-funk of “Amy Grant,” (yes, about the former Christian singer of the 80s) where we find out that, “Alone in bed, late at night/She fantasizes about Barry White” while a bassline that sounds remarkably like the background music for Moon Patrol chugs along. And there’s a song of a longing about “My Friend Ringo,” who’s “never in time” (har). (Incidentally, drummer Tad Hutchinson never had that particular problem.)
I think the Refreshments EP showcased where they were headed, particularly with “Broken Basket” and “Three Sided Story,” both of which sound like fine 1960s garage pop. It also has “Beer Money,” a very mid-1980s dig at the band The Del Fuegos, which was one of the first “indie” bands of the day to sell out by appearing in a beer commercial. The song uses the tagline for the commercial as its chorus, “Because we’re an American band just playing some rock n’ roll.” And it case it wasn’t clear who the target was, one of the lines is, “Because the beer is free, and we’re on MTV/And we’re opening up for the Del Fuegos.”
The next year saw them release the blah Totally Lost, which sounded exactly like its title. It’s generally best forgotten.
In 1989, they turned it around with the brilliant This One’s For the Ladies, their strongest record to date. It replaces all of their sloppy play on previous records with tighter, more pop-oriented arrangements (it’s also 15 songs, where only one is over 3 minutes long). The songwriting is stronger, and new Fellow Kurt Block—he of the Fastbacks—contributes some strong tunes like “Still There’s Hope” and “The Family Gun, “which includes the heavenly choir chorus singing “Peace on earth, goodwill to everyone/my brother, my sister, and the family gun.”
It opens with the title song, which starts with a woman’s voice longingly saying, “Do you miss him when he’s gone?” Another woman pauses, and says, “No, not really… what’s his name?” And then the band kicks in with a metal lick and a wailing solo and the parody is in full force, with McCaughey sneering, “This one’s for the ladies, who wait for us after the shows, and star in our videos.” The women from the beginning of the song kick in the backing vocals.… it’s a terrific 1:30
There are so many other good tracks on this CD. There’s the silly “Taco Wagon,” or the great pop nuggets of “Carrothead,” “Middle Man of Time,” and “Wishing Ring.” It gets a lot darker at the end, starting with “Miss Lonely Hearts,” which is a rockin’ retelling of the short story of the same name by Day of the Locust author Nathaniel West. But the real standout tracks are “When I’m Lonely Again/One Day You Die,” a thrashing two-song track that starts slowly before turning into a complete cacophony by the last note. The gentle “Don’t You Wonder How It Ends” sends the record out on a sadly beautiful note.
After a two-year delay, the Fellows returned with a CD produced by Butch Vig (Smashing Pumpkins, that little Nirvana CD called Nevermind). Electric Bird Digest was much more rockin’. The laugh-out-loud goofiness—which was already in decline on Ladies—was replaced by darker songs. The band was considerably tighter and more muscular than ever before, with songs like “The Telephone Tree,” “Fear Bitterness and Hatred,” and “Tomorrow’s Gone (And So Are You)” being nearly metal. But there’s still a ton of hooks, and some of the humor from previous records can be found in songs like “Sittin’ On a Pitchfork,” “Hillbilly Drummer Girl,” and the 30-second “Teen Thing.”
The last real Fellows CD is 1992s It’s Low Beat Time. It’s uneven, but it has some of their finest pure slabs of 60s garage pop in the form of “Love is a Beautiful Thing” and “She Sees Color” (I always think that if I had a band, its songs would sound exactly like these songs). There’s also the lo-fi homages to fellow Seattle-ites The Sonics on “99 Girls” and “She Won’t Budge,” some elaborate Brian Wilson-style pop like “The Crafty Clerk,” and the “Taco Wagon”-like “Low Beat.”
The band basically ended at this point, occasionally getting back together for some random records. McCaughey pretty much joined R.E.M. as a touring guitarist and recorded with Peter Buck (among many others) as The Minus 5 (whose Down with Wilco is worth checking out).
If I trace my way backward, what I think I took from the Fellows is a steadily increasing interest in 1960s garage pop. The Fellows songs that stuck with me are generally their most primitive but poppy ones that match terrific songwriting with raw—but not necessarily sloppy—performances.
There’s no great Fellows compilation to get started with, but I highly recommend This One’s For the Ladies, Electric Bird Digest, and to a slightly lesser extent, It’s Low Beat Time. If any of those float your boat, explore the rest. All are impossible to find at stores, but amazon.com seems to stock most of them.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
—quote—
This should be a geek rock classic, a more rocky/poppy/punky They Might Be Giants.
—quote—
Interesting, considering that I really only know their name from the shoutout in the Giants’ “Twisting.” Sounds like my kind of band, though. Thanks for the tip.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:22 am
RUSH was my life, man.
…I got better, though.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:58 am
RUSH was my life. When I was 13.
March 27th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
I was 13 for a very, very long time.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
I was listening to Distant Early Warning about ten minutes ago.
I hope Throwing Muses were one of your formative bands.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I wasn’t a big Throwing Muses fan, though I thought Tanya Donelly was hot.
March 29th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Just to break up your oh-so-cool indie vibe, one of my formative bands was Dio-era Black Sabbath, a band I finally got to see live as Heaven and Hell in the world capital of heavy metal — of course I’m referring to Ottawa, Ontario — last night. Awesome head-banging stupidity, especially right down front with a few thousand other goons constantly flashing devil’s horns salutes at Ronnie. Speaking of being 13 for a very long time…
Now, if I could just get my left ear to stop ringing.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:33 am
I collect keygen music (or just the keygens, because they auto-loop), game piano sheet music, and the soundtracks to Ragnar Tornquist’s games. That’s about it.
I think I’m starting to get better though. I’m actually going to finally go to a concert. It’s a ZZ Top concert to boot – probably the smallest of the past decade. I know I love classic rock, but I just don’t have any knowledge of listening-type music. I really lack the ability to get started with a collection of any kind.
May 29th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
I found this blog via the Fellows’ vids that you linked to from youtube, for I was the one that posted them. It’s nice to see others rave about the YFF little known greatness. I was a bit disappoined that you failed to mention my favorite track though, “There’s a Love”. That track alone showed that they could pull off any and all musical stylings without flaw. If you haven’t already, seek out oe of the earlier Minus 5 records, “In Rock”, I have always considered it basically the long lost Fellows record. :)
LLYFF
Mikey