In Defense Of: “Ever Get That… Feeling”

Couple months ago, couple of friends and I took a weekend drive to visit Dr. Leslie in Rochester, MN. With a beautiful¹ Saturday available, we chose to enjoy the day and the company with a grill, some beer, and some cards. And, obviously, some rock and roll. Flipping through Dr. Leslie’s highly disorganized CD collection; I came across the “Survival of the Fattest” comp, smiled, and dropped it in.

“Survival,” of course, is one of the more significant releases in punk history: it is, to my knowledge, the first major comp to retail at a sub-$5 cost. For some reason, it took ‘til ’96 and Fat to realize that comps shouldn’t be low-volume, high-profit sellers where $12 gets a kid a bunch of already available crap he has no interest in. “Survival” cost that kid $4 and exposed them to bands they had no other outlet to hear. Fat had lured them in with a sweet, sexy price. Marketing! “Survival” is ubiqutous to mid-90’s punk kids for this reason. Not everyone owned it; that wasn’t necessary. But one or two people in every group of friends did (‘cause it was way cheap) and, if you were between the ages of 13 and 17 and into punk rock when it was released, you knew those songs front to back. I lived in FL when it was released; Dr. Leslie in IL. I first saw her copy around 2000 and wasn’t surprised at all: UBIQUTOUS.

Now, halfway through the comp, remembering half of all the lyrics with a half-drunk mind, I noticed Dr. Leslie’s friend Dr. Phoebe not half-sure what to think. The result was a baby epiphany: this wasn’t her scene. At least, in 1996 it wasn’t. I vainly tried to explain, but to no avail. That’s when that epiphany grew up and got a job and became the confident adult-epiphany it was destined to be. See, our musical taste, no matter our age, are forever linked to our musical tastes between 13 and 17 years old. Before we can smoke or scratch lottery tickets- well before we can drown ourselves in booze- our inlet to our personalities is music. As adults, then, it’s no surprise that the music of that period of our lives is so critical to us, and so difficult to explain to anyone else.² If I heard “Punk In Drublic” or “Lucky Streak” for the first time today, I would write them off as disrespectful to what came before and never try again. Yet, for all their obvious faults, those records still sound as important to me as ever.

…Which brings us to this blog project, my “In Defense Of…” feature, and, specifically, this tape. Looking at the track listing, I’m not sure if I can have more conflicted levels of love and “what the hell was I thinking?” Side A, 1-4 cannot be denied: a solid modernized cover of one of the best reggae songs ever by a genius band outside of any genre, the title track to the second best EP of all time³, the pinnacle of Dropkick’s 1.5 album awesomeness, and the track that forced me to explore deeper into the Church of Speedo (HALLELUJAH!). Showoff, though, was a time-and-place love that hasn’t held up. Cherry Poppin’ Daddies? Ugh.

That, I think, is the interesting thing here: why do some bands, some songs, stand up over time? Why don’t others? There are clearly huge misses here (anything of ska-punk origin⁴, Showoff), but the hits are still built into my musical personality on deeper levels than most anything I’ll hear for the rest of my life. “I Met Her At The Rat” is the best thing Joe Queer ever did and one of the basic staples in the history of punk. “I Wanna Be With You Tonight” is one of Ben Weasel’s best pop songs (and given the source of that comment, that means a whole lot in regards to its romanticism and beauty). F.O.C’s stuff still lingers in my heart as a band that should have been national but never got out of N.E. FL. The 88 Fingers Louie and Three Days⁵ songs are period pieces to me: more personal now than at the moment I heard them. The Bouncing Souls stuff was still during their period as my generation’s Descendents (kind of a joke but capable to be heart-breaking-ly honest).

Wait. Goldfinger? Jesus, what the fuck was I thinking? Burn it. Now.

Notes and Corrections:

• Tom was right about “All Ages,” although part of me is surprised that some version of it is still on the air. Amber, original co-host of the show, still owes me a Supersleuth⁶ CD for calling in the correct Cubs score one Friday night in ’98 or so. I looked the score up on the internet, by the way. Oh, and once I went to the Naperville Borders (where, obviously, she worked and looked supercute) and gave her a copy of the GB! demo to play a track or two on the air. She didn’t. Gonna hold my tongue.
• The Rancid stuff is found on the “Tibetan Freedom Concert” CD and the first EP (“Rancid”). I still hold onto Tim Armstrong’s stuff (minus a majority of The Transplants who get points for trying, I guess) as being genius pop writing. Which leads to…
• …My 14^th birthday, not my 13^th.
• It seems as if the first wave ska/reggae doesn’t hit the family until later in life. We get it later, though…

¹ 40 F. It was March. In south-central MN. It felt like spring and we took what we could.

² The corrolary to this theory is posited by Andy Greenwald in “Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo.” In the book, published in 2003 when Dashboard Confessional was supposed to take over the World, Greenwald explains that the reason that we, as adults or nigh-adults obsessed with punk and indie, are not able to understand the rise of early-00’s emo is because it is a TEEN revolution. That is, we cannot understand because we didn’t grow up with this music. It’s a mostly interesting book, but seriously fails when trying to sell Dashboard via jocks that use “Chris” to convince girls that they have “emotions” and “fuck them.” My major issue with the book is that the audience is never established: at any point it feels like it’s written to us punk-indie kids to try to explain the phenomonon, while other times it feels like it were written to parents to explain what their kids are doing at unsupervised hours.

³ The greatest, of course, is the Archers’ “Greatest Of All Time.” Thanks, Tom. More on this in a later post…

⁴ Minus The Pietasters, who perfectly bridged the neo-trad style of the Slackers or Hepcat and the 3rd-wave ska-punk stuff. Until I saw RFTC for the first time, The ‘Tasters long held my belief in what a band should be doing on-stage.

⁵One cannot do a google search for Three Days, because they picked a name that is simply undiscoverable via the internet. Simply: snotty punk band from Naperville that had a significant following in the area. I never saw them live nor heard anything of theirs outside of “All Ages.” “Jet Boy, Jet Girl” was (duh?) a cover by… … I still don’t know. The Damned did it at one point, but there’s a French version, and… Wiki it. It doesn’t make it make any more sense.

⁶ 88 Fingers Louie rip-off band from Naperville circa ‘97. They have a myspace page that dates to 2002 and the stuff they have on there (live at the Fireside) is more on the emo-core side of what they did when I first heard them. Of course, I was “punk” back then just dismissed their stuff, so I’m not going to judge too harshly…