“Weren’t Young Fresh Fellows more important in the grand scheme of things than Nirvana? And wasn’t Popllama more significant than SubPop?
– East Portland Blog
Critic’s Roundtable, Part 1
(This conversation has four parts.)
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
Through the 1980s a couple of different strains ran through the Pacific Northwest rock music underground.
One strain followed in the garage-rock footsteps of beloved Northwest icons like The Sonics and The Wailers, was filtered through ’70s heavy metal and punk as expressed through The Melvins and Green River, and exploded in the overwrought angst and alienation of Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Nirvana. Initially called “SubPop” – the label attached to the music by a newspaper column of the same name that extolled the sound — the name was subsequently attached to the record label most associated with what the outside world came to call Grunge.
The other underground strain was no less garagey and also used The Sonics and The Wailers as touchstones. But this group of ‘80s bands, led by Seattle’s Young Fresh Fellows, were just as inspired by the frat house antics of another Northwest ‘60s iconic band—the original Paul Revere & The Raiders, as well as the quirky melodicism and verbal wittiness of The Kinks and Big Star. Given voice by Conrad Uno’s PopLlama Records, The Fresh Fellows were natural soul-mates to The Replacements in Minneapolis, The dB’s in Hoboken, REM in Georgia, and The Morrells in Springfield, Missouri. But the sound and approach of The Fresh Fellows, like other bands on the PopLlama label – bands like The Posies, The Presidents of the United States of America, The Dharma Bums, and more — borrowed liberally from all genres of rock and pop, and in that respect, even though the more limited Grunge genre itself may have ultimately been a more commercially successful enterprise, it could be argued that the broader PopLlama approach may have had a greater influence on numerous quirky indie-pop bands around the country.
– Rich Horton
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A lot of really good bands got overlooked at that time, and some were overated at that time too…
– Estevan Vargas
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To me personally, “Yes” to both questions.
– Chris Force
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“(Young Fresh Fellows and Nirvana come from) Two different eras – YFF through Dharma Bums is part of the classic era, including the many jokey records from Prudence Dredge, Squirrels, Acoustinauts and other “quirky” releases. But with “Touch Me, I’m Sick” and the Screaming Life EP, nothing would ever be the same. Nirvana played at Green River Community College to 500 kids on reputation and the single for “Love Buzz.” YFF did not achieve that with three albums under their belt at that time.”
– Timothy Thomas
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“Well, the Fellows are technically still around…. that’s all I have to say about that.”
– Steve Stav
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“Those are great questions to ponder.”
– Chris Roeder
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“The Fellows were not without merit, beloved by many if not entirely by me, and deserve some kind of admiration for pursuing their vision on their relative own. They worked at it, hard, in an era of a higher degree of difficulty. Again, not my thing, but hats off to the YFF and their drinking buddies.
Nirvana is on another level; a slightly different approach, a different intention and a different paradigm entirely. It’s impossible to create interesting or a read-worthy tension by comparing these two bands.
It wouldn’t be fair to compare a legitimately terrible band like The Posies to Nirvana either, but that comparison would be more apt. Why people like The Posies I will never understand.”
– Tim Cook
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“Dear East Portland Blog,
Having felt utterly bewildered at a distance [in Missoula, 1984-87, and from Northern Virginia, 1987-92] by Thee Fervent Cult o’ Thee Fel-Lowes, I grew mildly hostile once confronted [during my three years of warehouse minionhood at Georgetown’s long-gone one-stop music distributor, General Record Service, 1992-95] by the oft-trumpeted “truism”, circa 1993, that The Fellows were “The Greatest Band in the World”! LOL
Acquiring several of their albums [on sealed, cut-out cassette tapes I rescued from the GRS dumpster] helped me to identify and taxonomize the particular strain o’ Joke Rock that they exemplified, or perhaps even invented. Very likeable, particularly if you were stuck in Moscow/Pullman on a cold, dull February night during the late-1980s!
Bottom line comparisons, re: the band’s Music/Humor Quotient (M/HQ):
Not Devo, not Nick Lowe [they wished!], not The Angry Samoans, not Flipper, not the semi-contemporaneous Camper Van Beethoven, possibly not even the similarly-contempo Dead Milkmen, but also not at all “bad”. Some good songs, some good chuckles, plenty of good “musicianship”, all distributed at moderate intervals across an album catalog beloved of folks for whom Punk and Grunge were “just too loud and too hostile.”
Of course the guys in the band loved Punk and New Wave [they ain’t dumb], and happily Fellow-traveled with Grunge. In fact they were mostly old enough to have been in college before Hardcore produced any albums, and, once the ever-estimable Kurt Bloch began doing double duty as a Fellow AND a Fastback, they actually rocked most of the time. But why anyone would venerate Scott McCaughey’s songs or singing above ALL OTHER Rock and Roll competitors is truly bizarre!
My own thumbnail description, if pressed:
Pretty good, workmanlike pop/rock silliness of deep appeal to lifelong high school sophomores, and of more modestly witty appeal to college grads, but mostly just the ideal leisure time soundtrack for cheap-beer-swilling hepsters who grew up and/or came of age in the same ZIP codes in which THE ROCKET was commonly distributed.
Which is a not-dishonorable niche, it seems to me, but nothing I’d foist on anyone until I’d played them something by [at least] 500 of my favorite Rock Artistes, if not 1000 o’ same.
If one lives long enough, one should definitely hear “Amy Grant” and a few of their other “classics”, but obsessing o’er [or proselytizing on behalf of] Thuh Fellas, especially if you weren’t THERE, seems even sillier than any of their songs [or costumes!].
Nice guys, though, from all accounts. And good musicians. Just not musical visionaries or nothin’. [Or even all that funny?]
By the by, there’s a reason The Fellows and their avid NW fan base fixate upon enjoyable Sixties second-raters like The Zombies, The Hollies, The Small Faces, and The Bee Gees, as opposed to, say, The Yardbirds, The Who, The Velvets, and The Stooges.
To be fair, they also adore The Kinks, though the decided preference for VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY o’er the early demented powerchord crunchers is telling. And Big Star, but then what human with ears doesn’t adore their three albums, assuming they like Rock at all?!
In sum, they revere Pop over Rock, Power Pop over Punk, New Wave over Postpunk, and Alt(ernative) Country over Indie Rock. They’re soft, even when [because?] they make a big show of “rocking hard”.
“Better Posies” ain’t exactly high praise, but it’s true enough. “Not Quite Weezer” is about right, if we’re allowed to cross Joke Rock Generations.
If a gun is placed at a Fellows fan’s temple, s/he will always vote “Beatles!” rather than “Stones!” And usually no “gun” is required, as their “Pop Forever!” effusiveness knows no bounds! LOL
So that’s what I’ve got, EPB, right off the top o’ my head. Feel free to post….
TK
P.S. I guess I neglected to add that Nirvana wipes the floor with Thee YFFs, or anyone else from the Bush/Clinton/Bush Decades, for that matter, even in terms of “humor” [very dark and ugly vs. all-too-bright and dippy], much less singing, songwriting, RIFFAGE, wit, and sheer rocking FORCE. They even wrote prettier, infinitely more moving “ballads”!
But Thuh Fellas CAN hang with Mudhoney, on the whole. Lower “highs”, but also higher “lows”, and an equally provincial, similarly-anachronistic, aesthetic brought to market for two decades, off-and-on.”
– Tom Kipp
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“It seems to me that this is more an exercise in ranking genres than in ranking – let alone actually listening closely to – bands or music. Yes, Tom, you strongly prefer rock to pop, and Scott et. al. are ultimately pop musicians with some
rock influences (the converse of Nirvana there). I don’t think YFF are a particularly great band, and their recordings are superior to most of their live performances. But I do the Scott is an excellent and (in the wider world) underestimated pop songwriter.
I always found the Beatles vs. Stones comparison useless. It’s like asking “chocolate or salmon.”
– Joe Mabel
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The way I saw it as a Seattle resident before during and after the whole MTV thing, I think there were MANY different genre’s negatively impacted by the so called “grunge” movement going mainstream.
Not only bands like YFF’s but metal bands like Forced Entry who would have been HUGE had the Northwest not been pigeonholed into a single “sound.” Think of all of the great Alt/Country bands, and the industrial bands like Rorschach Test and The Pleasure Elite.
– Chris Roeder
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It did set the scene back a half-dozen years… for quite some time, if you weren’t a grunge band, you weren’t getting good gigs. But as soon as that stuff went away, there was an explosion of new – and old – music… I came back to seattle at the right time.
– Steve Stav
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One thing I can assure y’all about Tom Kipp is that there is a mammoth mound of purely pop music he absolutely adores. By his sensibilities, the “crime” is never lack of rocking unless one CLAIMS that one IS, in fact, rocking.
– Cory Davis
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‘Tis true about ol’ pure pop Tom. He actually admits (quite proudly) he saw (full price ticket I believe, no back door biz friend) the decidedly non-rocking pop star David Cassidy at the Bayou in DC and yet I am still friends with him 😉
– Marc Marshall
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…and I myself witnessed the aforementioned “crime” of pop star posing as rocker when non other than the legendary Corey Feldman, sporting that timelessly out of style leather vest with bare chest look, took the stage fronting a pseudo-metal band at Jaxx in Springfield to thundering drums and cranking smoke machines, to say nothing of the 4 or 5 screaming teens in the front row, on that critically ignored 1997 or so tour….yeah, you had to be there……
Marc Marshall
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I’ve nearly always found the Beatles v. Stones debate [because it’s really not a “comparison”, at least not in the way it typically arises in conversation; more like an expression of pseudo-religious BELIEF for those not-prone to analysis or who are largely unfamiliar with the vast majority of either band’s musical output, while being a touchstone conversational “springboard” for those of us steeped in appreciation of both bands and their respective stylistic merits] quite resonant, and even/often enlightening.
By the by, if one is to take “genre ranking” seriously, in addition to culinary pleasure, I can’t see how there’s more than an iota of difference genre-wise betwixt Les Beatles et Les Stones, particularly if one is comparing them during the seven or so years during which they co-existed [1963-70].
Both could be [and were] fairly lumped together as exemplars of “Rock and Roll Music”, “British Invasion”, “Popular Music”, “Top 40″, and [decades later, as a radio formatting commonplace at first], “Classic Rock”.
I’m not much of a cook or gourmand, Joe, while you are certainly both, but it seems to me that “chocolate and salmon”, aside from being comestible foods, have virtually nothing in common “genre-wise”, not in flavor, texture, color, odor, nutritional benefit, root source within our ecosystem, means of manufacture and/or processing prior to arrival at the marketplace, means of preparation in the home, and so forth.
Many people like [or love!] both, a few like one and not the other, and virtually no one of my acquaintance or media experience abhors them both.
On the other hand, if you were to say “Rock Music”, it is likely that, 1950s artistes aside, the first two names to come to most folks’ minds would, in fact, be….
That said, there are, upon closer examination, numerous meaningful distinctions to be made about both groups’ musical output, in addition to their public personae and relative degrees of massive success.
Re: Thuh Fellas, perhaps what I’m doing is in part a critique of [perceived] Pac NW provinciality and either the musical/historical obliviousness or smug dismissiveness of at least a core segment of the band’s cult and/or claque.
I’m also making the assertion that, even in the area of their supposed pre-eminence [“Rock Humor”], the band is quite arguably second- or third-rate. They’re not the worst students in the Joke Rock class, by any means, but they have no chance of making my “Honor Roll” either.
Perhaps that’s because I find their music [Pop or Rock, it truly would not matter to me, as I certainly rate both] rather tepid, whether compared to Abba OR The Stooges, and that of those bands I’ve cited was often quite vibrantly expressive/excessive, and their humor rather more “scandalous”, bizarre, cruel or demented, as opposed to the generally icky, wimpy, or simpy stuff TYFF specialize(d) in.
It’s not so much that Pop is not my thing, Joe, in fact that’s far from the case. It’s that [for me] Cute or Silly or Wussy or Precious had better hit the ball outta the park or I’m gonna need an injection of insulin straight to the mainline!
And Scott McC very likely IS, in some measure, less appreciated nationally and internationally than his achievements may warrant. But then few among us aren’t, unless we’ve been struck by lightning [like R.E.M., Green Day or Pearl Jam], so I don’t feel too bad for the guy.
By the way, I don’t quite know how to take the imputation that my “ranking” of genres [or bands] is somehow unrelated to “actually listening closely to bands or music”. I can’t imagine how else I’d have arrived at my 95 Theses of Joke Rock [or any other musical comparisons], but I do like to consider the further emanations [reputation, influence, celebrity, audience] that arise from musical workers and their works.
End of day, we may well hold TYFF in about the same modest esteem, particularly as local heroes. But I do think it’s worthwhile to challenge certain assumptions about their hegemony, particularly when I have a non-Straw Man asserting for it right in front of me, i.e. via today’s premise comparing Scott and Kurt, more or less!
– Tom Kipp
Critic’s Roundtable – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
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