A wise man once said, "Tha streetz is a mutha." That dude wasn't telling lies. Things are getting really crazy out there. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about streets in hour 2, as well as new music from Lawn, Car Seat Headrest, Daniel Romano and The Convenience in hour 1. It'll hit you hard like an old friend in a crosswalk.
This playlist is street legal:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Lawn - Sports Gun/Single
Car Seat Headrest - True/False Lover /The Scholars
Shark? - King of the Chaff/A Simple Life
Viagra Boys - You N33d Me/Viagr Aboys
Mclusky - Cops and Coppers/The World is Still Here and So Are We
PUP - Needed to Hear It/Who Will Look After the Dogs?
Daniel Romano - Sweet Dew of the Kingdom/Even If It's Obscure
The Convenience - I Got Exactly What I Wanted/Like Cartoon Vampires
Momma - Rodeo/Welcome to My Blue Sky
Lambrini Girls - Special Different/Who Let the Dogs Out
Scowl - Cellophane/Are We All Angels
Jeanines - On and On/How Long Can It Last
Daily Worker - Delmar Overload/Field Holler
Preoccupations - Sken/Ill at Ease
Model/Actriz - Audience/Pirouette
Friend of a Friend - Moonlight/Desire!
Lunchbox - Letter from Overend/Evolver (2025 Vinyl Edition)
Tunde Adebimpe - God Knows/Thee Black Boltz
Hour 2: Streetz
METZ - Entwined (Street Light Buzz)/Up On Gravity Hill
Superchunk - Rainy Streets/Here's to Shutting Up
Beeef - Street Signs/Somebody's Favorite
Bloodshot Bill and King Khan - Tandoori Street/Tandoori Knights
Kristin Hersh - Constance Street/Clear Pond Road
The Cure - Fascination Street/Disintegration
Girls Against Boys - Park Avenue/Freak*On*Ica
PUP - Cul-De-Sac/PUP
Lou Reed - Dirty Blvd./New York
Ween - Joppa Road/Chocolate & Cheese
Pavement - Shady Lane/Brighten the Corners
Ted Leo - Lonsdale Road/The Hanged Man
Courtney Barnett - Rae Street/Things Take Time, Take Time
The Pursuit of Happiness - The Downward Road (Revisited)/The Downward Road
Part 3 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey as we wrap up the second round of a March Madness-style tournament featuring our favorite rock artists. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").
Show notes:
Round 2 forced some difficult choices
The Smiths vs. Spoon
Led Zeppelin vs. Prince
James Brown vs. Queens of the Stone Age
Rush vs. Allman Brothers Band
Rolling Stones vs. Beastie Boys
The Cure vs. The Afghan Whigs
The Tragically Hip vs. The Clash
The Police vs. Mark Lanegan
Stevie Wonder vs. U2
Sonic Youth vs. The Replacements
The Who vs. Beck
Talking Heads vs. Dinosaur Jr.
Tom Petty vs. Pixies
Neil Young vs. Steely Dan
Van Halen vs. Beatles
Pearl Jam vs. David Bowie
Next: The final two rounds
Completely Conspicuous is available through Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and write a review!
The opening and closing theme of Completely Conspicuous is "Theme to Big F'in Pants" by Jay Breitling. Voiceover work is courtesy of James Gralian.
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at the rise of the audio cassette and its impact on the music industry.
There have been many audio formats that consumers have used to enjoy music over the years. Digital audio streaming is currently the most popular and convenient format, but vinyl records, 8-track tapes, compact discs and digital audio files like MP3s and WAVs have all had their moments. I mainly use MP3s and streaming these days, but I still have a ton of records, CDs and cassettes that I've acquired since the late '70s. They all hold sentimental value for me, but I have a lot of love for the cassette, which played a huge role in my growth as a music fan.
The Compact Cassette, as it was initially called, was invented the Dutch company Philips and first released in August 1963. The cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which magnetically coated tape is passed and wound; they're enclosed in a small case. The audio cassette as we know it is essentially a miniaturized version of the reel-to-reel audio tape first developed in the 1920s. Engineers improved the audio fidelity in the 1940s and reel-to-reel recorders were used by major recording studios; less expensive recorders were sold for use in homes and schools, as well as for business dictation. My dad actually bought one in the late '60s and would record some audio of us kids goofing. I still have it and one of these days I'll see if it still works.
Anyway, once the compact cassette was released, it became popular with consumers for its portability and ease of use. I highly recommend the book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape by Marc Masters for an interesting look at how cassettes were developed and how they became popular and in some small pockets, still remain so.
As for me, I was too young to experience the popularity of the 8-track tape, which around from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. It was bulkier than the compact cassette and was mainly used in cars; it could play continuously in an endless loop and did not have to be ejected or flipped to play the full tape, but you couldn't rewind it.
I became aware of cassettes through my dad, who would sometimes play them on a small Panasonic mini-boom box. When disco was getting popular in the late '70s, I remember him bringing home a few mix tapes of disco hits that a work buddy of his had made. Around 1979, I got a clock radio that had a built-in cassette deck, so I would buy cheap 3-packs of blank tapes and make crappy mix tapes of songs I liked off the radio. The audio quality was shit, but I loved those old tapes, especially when we moved a few years later to a city in Washington state that was lacking in quality radio stations. I used to listen to those old tapes all the time.
It was 1982 when I bought my first Sony Walkman, which had been introduced a few years earlier and was revolutionizing the personal audio space. Now people could listen to their music anywhere. I wasn't rollerblading with it or anything like in the commercials, but I definitely brought it to school to drown out everybody else. (Here's a post I did a while back about the different audio devices I'd purchased over the years.)
I didn't typically buy pre-recorded cassettes; I preferred to buy music on vinyl and later CD and then record it on cassette to listen to in a Walkman or the car. I also enjoyed making mix tapes for personal use (as well to give to friends).
Not everybody was thrilled about the advent of cassette recorders. In 1981, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) launched a campaign called Home Taping is Killing Music, which argued that the rise of home taping would eat into record sales. The logo had a Jolly Roger pirate flag in the shape of a cassette with crossbones and the words "And It's Illegal." It turned out to be for naught, as it was parodied by many artists and indeed, record sales continued to rise.
Meanwhile, taping or bootlegging of concerts was more of a trend than taping off the radio or from friends' collections. Bands like the Grateful Dead would create dedicated areas for tapers and it was common to find classified ads for bootleg concert tapes in music magazines; I contacted and received a list of available tapes from a bootlegger who had put an ad in Circus magazine, but I never actually ordered anything from it. A bootlegger used to set up in the student union building at UNH selling cassettes when I was a student there; I bought a version of Prince's then-unreleased Black Album.
If anything, the cassette increased interest in music instead of the BPI's alarmist claims. Similar concerns were raised in the early 1980s by the Motion Picture Association of America about the advent of the videocassette recorder and in the early 2000s by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) about CD burning.
Of course, the audio format that really did major damage to the music industry was the MP3. As Napster and then other peer-to-peer file sharing networks emerged in the late '90s/early '00s, CD sales took a nosedive and sales of recorded music dropped by 50% from 1999 to 2009. Even though the RIAA and the major labels led the charge against Napster, forcing it to shut down in 2001, the damage had been done and the genie was out of the proverbial bottle. Apple launched the iTunes store in 2003 as a way to sell music files and other services followed suit, but the sale of recorded music never returned to previous levels.
As high-speed internet and WiFi became commonplace, Spotify and other streaming audio services made it affordable for users to have access to a huge catalog of music via their cellphones. And that's where things stand today. You can still buy CDs and records of new albums (as well as some cassettes), but it's more of a hipster trend than anything else. I still use MP3s because I put together my radio show with them and I still like to own music, but I think I'm in the minority; I refuse to pay for Spotify but my daughters do and listen to it constantly. I buy vinyl on occasion, but mostly older used stuff. I still love going to a record store and combing through the stacks for cool albums.
As for cassettes, I still have pretty much all the tapes I made in the '80s and '90s, but right now I have nothing to play them on. I bought a used tape deck from someone off Craigslist about 15 years ago but it crapped out after a few years. Plus my old Walkman that I bought around the turn of the millennium doesn't work anymore, either. I want to buy a new deck but they're expensive, so I'm keeping an eye out for a good deal. Also, I was driving an old 1996 Explorer that had a tape deck in it, but that died about seven years ago, so no more tapes in the car.
Those were my favorite times with cassettes, driving around listening to a kick-ass mix I made. I have great memories of bombing around the North Shore in the early '90s, driving to interview someone for an article or going to a party, cranking the tuneage. Not quite like Wayne, Garth and pals, but pretty close. Long live the cassette!
Much is made about the insanity of the world right now, and with good reason. It's good to remember that things have always been crazy, although it's ratcheted up now. It was pretty nuts in the year 2000: post-Y2K, pre-9/11, Napster was blowing up and then blown up. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs from the year 2000 in hour 2 (after playing new hotness from Model/Actriz, Blondshell and Melvins in hour 1). In 2000, the biggest thing these guys were worrying about was the location of their car.
Dude, here's my playlist:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Model/Actriz - Vespers/Pirouette
PUP - No Hope/Who Will Look After the Dogs?
Mclusky - People Person/The World is Still Here and So Are We
Viagra Boys - Uno II/Viagr Aboys
Blondshell - T&A/If You Asked for a Picture
Preoccupations - Ill at Ease/Ill at Ease
Friend of a Friend - Beautiful Ppl/Desire!
Ekko Astral - Pomegranate Tree/Pink Balloons: Popped EP
Lunchbox - Gravity/Evolver (2025 Vinyl Edition)
Melvins - King of Rome/Thunderball
Bob Mould - Breathing Room/Here We Go Crazy
Crime Oblivion - And Again/Chime Oblivion
Rude Television - Emphasis/I Want to Believe
Tunde Adebimpe - Pinstack/Thee Black Boltz
Dean Wareham - New World Julie/That's the Price of Loving Me
Mekons - Surrender/Horror
Cameron Keiber - Never Let Me Go/Nurser
Hour 2: 2000
Outkast - B.O.B./Stankonia
The Hives - Main Offender/Veni Vidi Vicious
Rollins Band - Get Some Go Again/Get Some Go Again
PJ Harvey - Kamikaze/Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock N' Roll Fun/All Hands on the Bad One
Pedro the Lion - A Mind of Her Own/Winners Never Quit
At the Drive-In - Rolodex Propaganda/Relationship of Command
Hot Snakes - Salton City/Automatic Midnight
Queens of the Stone Age - Leg of Lamb/Rated R
The New Pornographers - Execution Day/Mass Romantic
The Tragically Hip - The Bastard/Music@Work
The Twilight Singers - King Only/Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers
Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place/Kid A
Modest Mouse - Tiny Cities Made of Ashes/The Moon and Antarctica
Elliott Smith - Son of Sam/Figure 8
Yo La Tengo - Cherry Chapstick/And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at early '90s Gen X marketing.
Generational marketing strategies have always had a certain amount of bullshit to them. It's kind of ridiculous to think that an entire generation of people would respond to the same themes and calls to action. Advertising really took off in the 1960s, '70s and '80s with the Baby Boomer generation, especially as they had more money to spend.
As a member of so-called Generation X (people born between 1965 and 1980), I grew up watching an inordinate amount of television and seeing an onslaught of commercials. We didn't have ad-free streaming services, so when we watched a show or sporting event, we typically just sat through the commercials. Now it's a lot easier to avoid ads, except when you're watching local stations or live events.
It definitely became noticeable when advertisers started to market to my generation when we became adults in the early '90s, especially as terms like Gen X were adopted, grunge became a thing and Madison Avenue became convinced that we were all slackers who wore flannel shirts and ripped jeans and didn't have a clue about what we wanted to do with our lives. And sure, there were people like that, but some of us were also career-driven professionals who had goals and aspirations.
So it was amusing to see some of the lame attempts to sell shit to us. Here's a few notable commercials that stood out to me.
'This Car is Like Punk Rock!'
Thanks to YouTube, we can go back watch early commercials featuring actors who went on to become familiar faces. Jeremy Davies (whose given name was Jeremy Boring) started out with appearances in the early '90s on General Hospital and The Wonder Years, but in 1993, he starred in a commercial for Subaru, comparing the Impreza to punk rock. He's wearing a baggy jacket and pants and a Cobain-esque striped shirt, pontificating on the inherent punkness of a crappy hatchback: "This car's all about reminding you and me what's great about a car, and moving forward, and making cars better and less disappointing. Just like punk, except it's cars." Sure, pal. I remember seeing the ad a few times and thinking about how dumb and obvious it was. No disrespect to Davies, who went on to appear in Saving Private Ryan and have great roles on LOST and Justified, two of my favorite shows. But I could picture some ad copywriter in his mid-50s thinking he was onto something with this punk rock thing, even though grunge and punk were not the same thing and clearly buying a Subaru was not remotely related to punk. I can only imagine what the guys in Fugazi thought about this bunk. It's fun to look back at, though.
'Things Are Going to be OK'
History is littered with the debris of soft drinks that came and went. In 1993, Coca-Cola tried to appeal to apathetic Gen Xers with a new beverage called OK Soda that was marketed with ironic ads that emphasized its "OK-ness." Trying to be cool by pretending to not give a shit about the product, Coke focused more on the marketing than the drink itself, which its own ads said tasted like "carbonated tree sap." It was supposedly similar to an orange soda mixed with Coke and it didn't sell well. The ads were oh-so-clever and hip, talking about "OK-ness," but they didn't resonate with anyone, let alone with the 20somethings they were going after. The cans had bleak packaging with drawings of glum-looking young people who couldn't care less if you liked the drink, and featured dour slogans like "What's the point of OK Soda? Well, what's the point of anything?" The underlying message of the ads was "Things are going to be OK," but ultimately they weren't for OK Soda, which was test-marketed in nine cities and was a huge flop.
'Obey Your Thirst'
Coca-Cola had better luck in 1994 with its "Obey Your Thirst" campaign for the lemon-lime beverage Sprite. The ads targeted African-American consumers with hip-hop-themed ads featuring NBA stars Grant Hill and Kobe Bryant and cool artists like Nas, LL Cool J and A Tribe Called Quest. One from 1996 featured three street ballers making a soda commercial, who when they screw up a take are revealed to be English thespians, with the lead saying, "Don't talk to me like a child. I played Hamlet at Cambridge." Then "Image is Nothing. Thirst is Everything" flashes on the screen, followed by a voiceover that says, "Trust your gut, not some actor." Sprite continued with the campaign until 2006, and has revived it a few times since.
'Save a Buck or Two'
One of the more '90s developments was the advent of services like 1-800-COLLECT. After AT&T's monopoly on collect calling was broken up in 1993, MCI made a big splash into the collect-calling market by launching 1-800-COLLECT, which would allow users to place collect calls at a cheaper rate than AT&T; of course, the person you were calling was still on the hook for the call. MCI rolled out a huge marketing blitz with commercials featuring celebrities like Phil Hartman, Wayne Knight, Mr. T. and Arsenio Hall, but some of the more memorable ads from 1994 featured SNL star David Spade and the great Larry "Bud" Melman, who rose to fame as a comic foil on David Letterman's late-night shows. Spade was known for his snarky personality and certainly brought that to the fore in the ads, which presented him as an irreverent and sarcastic/annoying Gen Xer (which of course he was). I never used the service and didn't know anyone who did, but the ads were on constantly. Most of the service's users were on pay phones, which were also prominently featured in the ads. But by the early 2000s, the burgeoning popularity of cell phones and declining use of pay phones led to the end of the ads, although the service is still operational, despite the fact that MCI isn't a thing anymore.
'Los Angeles, Start Your VCRs'
Beer commercials have always been a staple of TV advertising, and in the '90s, Bud Light began a regional campaign called Bud Light Spotlight in different markets around the country, focusing on "real" Bud Light drinkers in local bars. I never saw this at the time, but the Los Angeles market got a grunge-themed ad that is so cringeworthy and amazing. It features a long-haired Evan Dando wannabe who's singing "I just want a Bud Light" while one of the women he's with breathily describes how drinking a BL makes her feel good all over. It's something, that's for sure. I'd love to see a follow-up ad in 2025 that catches up with these three, just to see what they look like now.
Winning isn't everything, but it's pretty cool. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about winning in hour 2 and hot new numbers from PUP, Mclusky, Viagra Boys and Wet Leg in hour 1. On your marks, get set, go!
This playlist is off to a good start:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
PUP - Get Dumber (feat. Jeff Rosenstock)/Who Will Look After the Dogs?
Mclusky - Chekhov's Guns/The World is Still Here and So Are We
Viagra Boys - Man Made of Meat/Viagr Aboys
Scowl - Let You Down/Are We All Angels
Wet Leg - Catch These Fists/Moisturizer
Ekko Astral with Mikie Mayo and Dreamrats- Shred Empty Blues (Popped Version)/Pink Balloons: Popped EP
The Bug Club - Better Than Good/Live at KUTX's Studio 1A
Ty Segall - Possession/Possession
Savak - Tomorrow and the Day After/Squawk!
Lunchbox - Satellite/Evolver (2025 Vinyl Edition)
Model/Actriz - Diva/Pirouette
Preoccupations - Bastards/Ill at Ease
Chime Oblivion - The Uninvited Guest/Chime Oblivion
Friend of a Friend - Oasis/Desire!
Tunde Adebimpe - Somebody New/Thee Black Boltz
Bantom Woods - The Chase/All Due Respect
Mekons - You're Not Singing Anymore/Horror
Hour 2: Winning
Motorhead - Live to Win/Ace of Spades
Ty Segall - Every 1's a Winner/Freedom's Goblin
Infinity Girl - The Winner Always Talks/Somewhere Nice, Someday
David Bowie - Win/Young Americans
Baked - I Win/Farnham
Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton - Winning/Knives Don't Have Your Back
Kathy Valentine - Win/Light Years
Girlpool - Like I'm Winning It/Single
Quasi - The Losers Win/Breaking the Balls of History
The Police - When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around/Zenyatta Mondatta
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at ABC's Afterschool Specials, an anthology series that ran for 25 seasons.
The concept of the latchkey kid is mythologized by Gen Xers such as myself, but it was a real thing. For those of us whose parents both worked full-time, it was just a part of everyday life. I'm sure there are still kids who come home from school to an empty house and are left to their own devices until their parents get home, but the term really caught on in the 1970s as more mothers began working instead of staying home with the children. The term actually came up in a CBC Radio program all the way back in 1942, discussing the phenomenon of kids left home alone during World War II when the father was away at war and the mother would need to get a job.
For me, it began in the mid-'70s when my family moved into our first house in Pickering, a suburb of Toronto. I was 7 and in second grade and would walk a mile to and from school every day. With both my parents working during the day (usually; sometimes my mother would work a different shift at the hospital), I would have my own house key and let myself in after school. My younger brother would be with a babysitter down the street until my mother got home, so I was on my own, making myself a snack and either playing street hockey in the driveway or watching TV.
With the latter, I remember watching a lot of reruns of shows like Happy Days and Gilligan's Island, but another show I would occasionally check out was the ABC Afterschool Special. These were hour-long mini movies that ran once a month during the school year and often focused on a hot-button topics like divorce, AIDS, rape, drunk driving, teen pregnancy, drugs and even child molestation. They were designed to be educational and entertaining and occasionally controversial. I didn't watch them all the time, but every so often I'd catch one. I didn't watch them after the early '80s, when I was either doing homework or playing sports after school.
The specials weren't always standard movies; sometimes, they were animated or were done as documentaries. The series won 51 Daytime Emmy Awards and four Peabody Awards over the years. Of course, when the ABC specials started doing well, CBS followed with Schoolbreak Specials in 1980 and NBC ran similar programs called Special Treat from 1975-1986. ABC also aired Weekend Specials from 1977-1997, but these were often adaptations of children's stories.
ABC's Afterschool Specials featured a lot of early appearances of actors who went on to bigger things. In the '70s, this included Jodie Foster, Kristy McNichol, Lance Kerwin, Leif Garrett, Rosanna Arquette, Anthony Kiedis (under the name Cole Dammett), Wendie Jo Sperber, David Paymer and Melissa Sue Anderson. In the '80s, the shows featured Melora Hardin, Rob Lowe, Dana Plato, Nancy McKeon, Scott Baio, Amanda Plummer, Helen Slater, Matthew Modine, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Cynthia Nixon, River and Leaf (later known as Joaquin) Phoenix, Sarah Jessica Parker, Yeardley Smith (who later became Lisa Simpson), Justine Bateman, Val Kilmer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mare Winningham, Ajay Naidu, Viggo Mortensen, Lisa Bonet, Kyra Sedgwick, Jennifer Grey, Ben Affleck, Marisa Tomei and Sherilyn Fenn. The '90s featured early appearances by Will Smith, Sam Rockwell, Adam Sandler, Lacey Chabert, Freddie Prinze Jr., Jessica Alba, Kevin Connolly, Lauryn Hill and Sara Gilbert.
Oprah Winfrey's production company took over the series in 1991, with Winfrey introducing the episodes, which included panel discussions on relationships and race relations. But by this time, youth-oriented sitcoms and dramas were regularly producing "Very Special Episodes" that focused on similar hot-button issues for much larger audiences. Eventually, the Afterschool Specials were canceled in 1996, with the last episode running in January '97.
The series didn't shy away from difficult topics and tried not to be preachy, unlike, say, Nancy Reagan appearing on "Diff'rent Strokes" to tell kids to just say no to drugs. There were definitely seriously heavy shows and then more lighthearted stuff, like 1987's The Day My Kid Went Punk, starring The Love Boat's Bernie Kopell and featuring a truly ridiculous premise (nerdy kid who plays violin is rejected by girl he likes and decides to become a "punker"). Or 1980's Stoned, in which Scott Baio starts smoking weed. Or 1984's Summer Switch, in which Robert Klein plays a dad who does a "Freaky Friday" personality switch with his teenage son. Or "Wanted: The Perfect Guy" from 1986, in which a 13-year-old Ben Affleck places a personal ad for his widowed mom.
"One Too Many" first aired in prime time before becoming an afterschool special in May 1985, starring Val Kilmer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lance Guest and Mare Winningham as four high school friends whose lives are changed after one of them drives drunk.
Of course, all these aired during the era where TV choices were limited to the three big networks, PBS and a handful of UHF channels (as well the burgeoning pay cable stations like HBO and Cinemax that emerged in the '80s). Now there are so many options and ways to watch shows, it's hard to keep up. But when I would get home from school in the late '70s, I would toast up a Pop Tart and pour a glass of milk and watch some TV, which might have been an afterschool special starring Robbie Rist as a rich kid granted seven wishes by a genie.
It's been a long week. Ah, who am I kidding, they're all long weeks. Anyhoo, take your mind off the craziness with two hours of rock jams on Stuck In Thee Garage. This week, I played songs with vocal intros in hour 2, in addition to new hotness from Jon Spencer, Chime Oblivion and Tunde Adebimpe in hour 1. It's a great show, but it won't help you deal with your kid who's gone punk.
Smile for the camera:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Jon Spencer with Kendall Wind, Spider Bowman and Deke Dickerson - Come On!/Single
Chime Oblivion - Heated Horses/Chime Oblivion
Tunde Adebimpe - Ate the Moon/Thee Black Boltz
Bantom Woods - Nerves/All Due Respect
Leatherman - Slow Motion/Turn You On
Scowl - Fleshed Out/Are We All Angels
Rude Television - Artificial Paint/I Want to Believe
Dean Wareham - You Were the Ones I Had to Betray/That's the Price for Loving Me
Mekons - Sad and Sad and Sad/Horror
Horsegirl - Sport Meets Sound/Phonetics On and On
Guided By Voices - Elfin Flower with Knees/Universe Room
FACS - Ordinary Voices/Wish Defense
Ex-Void - Pinhead/In Love Again
The Taxpayers - Nightmarish Population/Circle Breaker
Lunchbox - Evolver/Evolver (2025 Vinyl Edition)
The Drowns - Boston Accent/View from the Bottom (2025 Jack Endino Remaster)
Kestrels - Nightlife/Better Wonder
Hour 2: Vocal intros
James Brown - Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine/Funk Power 1970: A Brand New Thang
Run-DMC - Hit It Run/Raising Hell
Run the Jewels - Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck) (feat. Zach De La Rocha)/Run the Jewels 2
The Stooges - T.V. Eye/Fun House
Dizzee Rascal - Fix Up, Look Sharp/Boy in Da Corner
Queens of the Stone Age - Emotion Sickness/In Times New Roman...
AC/DC - Kicked in the Teeth/Powerage
Iron Maiden - Can I Play with Madness?/Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
INXS - Mystify/Kick
Johnny Foreigner - Feels Like Summer/Grace and the Bigger Picture
Titus Andronicus - I Lost My Mind/The Most Lamentable Tragedy
The Beatles - Nowhere Man/Rubber Soul
Queen - Somebody to Love/A Day at the Races
The Who - A Quick One (While He's Away)/The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at 1983's US Festival, which set the tone for big music festivals to come.
I've never been a huge fan of rock festivals. I'd rather see my favorite bands headline in smaller venues than go to some gigantic field with a gazillion other people to see a few bands I like play short sets and sit through a lot of other artists I don't care about. Admittedly, part of this is written through the lens of an old man, but I pretty much reached that conclusion in my mid-20s after going to Lollapalooza '93.
That said, certain festivals have historic impact: Woodstock, Live Aid, regular ones like Glastonbury and Reading and more recently, Lolla, Coachella and Bonnaroo. One that tends to get forgotten is the US Festival, which was launched by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who wanted to create a new Woodstock for the '80s.
He teamed with famed promoter Bill Graham to put on the first US Festival in September 1982 at Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernadino, California. This festival got a lot less attention than the one Wozniak held the following year, but it had some big names. Day 1 featured The Police, Talking Heads, the B-52s, Oingo Boingo, the Beat, the Ramones and Gang of Four; Day 2 was the AOR day, featuring Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Pat Benatar, the Kinks, the Cars, Santana, Eddie Money and Dave Edmunds; and Day 3 had Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Browne, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker and the Grateful Dead. The fest featured temps up to 110 degrees, a total attendance of over 400,000 and lost $12 million.
Wozniak returned with a second US Festival on Memorial Day Weekend in 1983 and it got a lot more media attention. Day 1 was the New Wave lineup, headlined by the Clash (playing their last show with Mick Jones and featuring new drummer Pete Howard), along with Men at Work, Stray Cats, A Flock of Seagulls, the Beat, Oingo Boingo, Wall of Voodoo, INXS and Divinyls.
Day 2 was Heavy Metal Day, which I was more attuned to at the time as a 15-year-old metalhead who read Circus and Hit Parader magazines voraciously. Van Halen was the headliner, along with Scorpions, Triumph, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue and Quiet Riot. It was timed well, as hard rock and metal was on the rise and all the acts who performed on that day got a huge boost from it. Triumph's performance was especially lauded as a breakthrough for the Canadian power trio, which I had been following since the late '70s. The band ended up releasing their set on VHS; now you can see it and the rest of the sets on YouTube. The bands all played impressive sets, although Van Halen's was marred by the fact that David Lee Roth had been partying all day and was completely shitfaced by the time the band went on. He spent much of set poking fun at the Clash's seriousness and rambling, but the fans still had a good time.
Day 3 was called Rock Day and figured some of the bigger names in music at the time: David Bowie, Stevie Nicks, Joe Walsh, The Pretenders, U2, Missing Persons, Berlin, Quarterflash, Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul and Los Lobos. There was also a fourth day of the festival held the following Saturday, featuring country artists: Willie Nelson, Riders in the Sky, Waylon Jennings, Alabama, Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams Jr., Ricky Skaggs and the Thrasher Brothers.
The '83 edition of the US Festival also lost $12 million, which was enough to convince Wozniak not to hold another one. But it certainly inspired festivals that followed: Live Aid was held in Philadelphia and London in 1985 and Amnesty International held a series of benefit shows. Lollapalooza followed in the early '90s and there were Woodstock festivals in 1994 and 1999, and then came the current series of regional festivals like the aforementioned Coachella and Bonnaroo and others like Boston Calling and Riot Fest.
The '83 US Festival had two deaths, but it was relatively uneventful, unlike the chaos that erupted at Woodstock '99. Wozniak innovated by making US the first festival to have Jumbotron-style big screens so folks way in the back could see what was going on, as well as having speakers halfway through the crowd to make the sound better. He also spent huge bucks on the talent, with Van Halen getting $1.5 million and Bowie getting $1 million alone. The festival also featured a satellite linkup to the Soviet Union to promote goodwill between the two Cold War rival nations.
Forty-two years later, festivals are very different in terms of the artists included but they're still big business. They can thank Steve Wozniak for providing the template for the modern rock festival all the way back in '83.
BOOM! Getting off to a good start is important in every industry, but especially in music. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played great album openers in hour 2. They'll help you figure out a way to defuse that bomb before, well, you know.
Quick, pass me that playlist!
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Pulp - Spike Island/More
Stereolab - Aerial Troubles/Instant Holograms on Metal Film
Dean Wareham - The Cloud is Coming/That's the Price of Loving Me
The Bug Club - Have U Ever Been 2 Wales/Single
Rude Television - Nuclear Dome/I Want to Believe
Mekons - Glasgow/Horror
Leatherman - Tryin' 2 4get/Turn You On
Scowl - Not Hell, Not Heaven/Are We All Angels
Bob Mould - Thread So Thin/Here We Go Crazy
The Taxpayers - I Am One Thousand/Circle Breaker
Destroyer - The Ignoramus of Love/Dan's Boogie
Art D'Ecco - Tree of Life/Serene Demon
Squid - Showtime!/Cowards
Pigeon Pit - Dear Johnny/Crazy Arms
The Men - Black Heart Blue/Buyer Beware
Dax Riggs - Even the Stars Fall/7 Songs for Spiders
Charm School - I Wanna Feel It/Debt Forever
Hunger Anthem - Sun/Lift
Hour 2: Openers
R.E.M. - Begin the Begin/Lifes Rich Pageant
The Godfathers - Birth, School, Work, Death/Birth, School, Work, Death
Fugazi - Waiting Room/13 Songs
Mission of Burma - Secrets/Vs.
Sloan - The Good in Everyone/One Chord to Another
Frightened Rabbit - The Modern Leper/The Midnight Organ Fight
Public Image Ltd. - Happy/9
The Afghan Whigs - Somethin' Hot/1965
Run-DMC - Peter Piper/Raising Hell
A Tribe Called Quest - Excursions/The Low End Theory
Lush - Ladykillers/Lovelife
Elastica - Line Up/Elastica
PJ Harvey - Big Exit/Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
Guardian Singles - Chad and Stacey/Feed Me to the Doves
Superchunk - Precision Auto/On the Mouth
Butthole Surfers - Who Was in My Room Last Night?/Independent Worm Saloon
Mclusky - Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues/Mclusky Do Dallas
It's been a little over three weeks since my mother passed. I haven't written about it until now because honestly, I just haven't felt up to it. She had been living down in Washington, D.C., with my brother and his wife since 2022. It was strange to have her living that far away because she'd always been under an hour's drive away from me up until then.
She was 92, although there was always a question about her real age; she was always cagey about it, saying her birth records burned up in a fire in the village in Kerala, India, where she was born. Growing up, we always thought she was born in 1940, which would have made her 27 when she had me and the same age as my father. Later, I saw that her birth year on her official government documents was 1932 and when she was asked about it, my mom would claim she didn't know how old she actually was. Her parents died when she was young and she didn't have much in the way of family left, other than some cousins.
My mom was always pretty headstrong. She decided to become a nurse at a time when that profession wasn't seen as appropriate by her family, which would have preferred her to become a lawyer. They were devoutly Syrian Orthodox, an Episcopal branch that started in the Middle East and spread to India. My mom always remained very religious, but she pissed off her family first by becoming a nurse, then moving to Canada in the early 1960s to pursue a career. But the ultimate in-your-face move was marrying a Hindu, which she did in 1967 when she married my dad (his family wasn't thrilled about the situation, either).
They met in Toronto when they were both attending the wedding of friends of hers; there weren't a lot of Indians in Toronto then (unlike today, when there are Indians everywhere) so my dad somehow scored an invite. My mom was a looker and my dad was immediately smitten, and apparently he just started showing up everywhere she was until she finally agreed to go out with him. They were married in January '67 and I was born nine months later. My brother came along in the spring of '72.
We bounced around different high-rise apartment buildings in and around the city until we finally bought a house in Pickering, a suburb east of Toronto in 1975. Life was good there. My dad worked as an engineer for Ontario Hydro and my mom was a nurse. I was in school there from second to eighth grade and started high school in the fall of 1981. But that summer, my dad was getting restless at work and decided to take a job on the other side of the continent in Richland, Washington. It was a big change and I'm not sure how much he consulted with my mom about it, or how much resistance she gave. Ultimately, she came from a generation of women that deferred to their husbands' wishes, so she went along with it, even though it meant she would have to study to get her nursing certification in Washington (despite having nearly 20 years of experience as a full-time nurse). There was no doubt some bitterness building up, as well as from the fact that my dad cashed in her pension to help pay for the move, something that would come back to haunt her in later years.
So my dad moved out to Richland early, leaving in June '81 to start working at the Hanford nuclear plant while we stayed in Pickering. We knew we would be leaving at some point, but it wasn't clear exactly when. I started high school and just as I was starting to make some friends, I was told we were moving at the end of November. We first moved into a tiny duplex with my dad and I was enrolled at a junior high nearby. I just remember being sort of shell-shocked by the whole deal. After a month there, my dad found us a pretty nice house across town that we rented, which was great, but it also meant I would be going to my third school in three months. Not ideal.
Another thing that made me question my dad's strategic competence was the fact that as soon as we got to Richland, we were seeing stories about how the nuclear plant was on the verge of closing. In his haste to get a new gig, my dad clearly hadn't done his research. Richland was basically full of families that moved there because of the plant, so unlike much of the rest of country that was anti-nuke, it was all about it. We got released from school early one day to march in a pro-nuclear power rally. But by early 1983, my dad was transferred to another nuke plant, this one in Seabrook, NH. I finished my sophomore year of high school, was starting to make some good friends, and then we moved the day after school got out.
Again, he moved out several months before us. My mom had gotten her nursing license in Washington. She was annoyed, to say the least. She actually strongly considered moving us back to Toronto, even going so far as reaching out to a high school there and starting the process of getting me enrolled. I remember we had a coursebook so I could start thinking about what classes I would take there. But it never happened. She didn't want to break up the family, so she decided to go along with the move to New Hampshire. Of course, when she saw the cottage my dad had bought in the middle of nowhere in Kingston, NH, my mom immediately had second thoughts. Like a lot of things he did, my dad didn't put much thought into his decision-making. We were in a tiny town of 3,000 people that was spread out over a huge area, and our house was on the outskirts.
We persevered. My mom got a job as a nurse at a local hospital and I finished the last two years of high school before going to the University of NH. My brother ended up going to a private school and then Dartmouth (he's smart). But my dad started losing the plot. He began drinking heavily after work, and then after getting laid off (not surprisingly, the Seabrook plant was not doing well, either), he spent most of his waking hours watching TV and drinking. Then his dad and one of his brothers died and he really went off the deep end. I was at college for the bulk of this, while my mom and brother had to deal with it every day. He got a job selling electronics at Sears for a while, and then got a contract engineering gig that sent him to Tennessee for a year. My mom stayed in NH, but it was clear he wasn't doing well on his own. The '90s were rough for him and the combination of diabetes and alcoholism led to his early demise at the young age of 55 in 1996.
Mom kept working for a few more years before retiring. She moved to Toronto in 2002 and stayed there for four years before moving back to NH. She lived in Hampton until 2020 when it was evident she couldn't live by herself anymore. I had already started managing her bills and doctor's appointments and meds because she was forgetting things. We moved her into an assisted living facility here in Beverly in the fall of '20, where she lived until the summer of '22 when the facility closed for renovations. By this point, her memory was getting pretty bad and she was dealing with a stomach ailment that was making her miserable; she went to many GI docs who couldn't figure out what the issue was. She moved in with my brother for the last few years and it seemed to be a good move for her; she was eating better and was living in a much nicer place. But her health struggles continued and her mental state began getting worse. I visited a few times over the last couple of years and she had gotten pretty surly at times with caregivers (including my brother and his wife).
I had planned to fly down there in February for a visit and just before I got there, she ended up in the hospital with the flu; while that got better, her body started to shut down over the next few weeks. She didn't recognize/acknowledge me during those few days. Her health didn't improve over the following week and it became apparent she didn't have much time left. We made plans for another visit in mid-March, this time all four of us, to see her one last time. She was in a geriatric psychiatric facility to get her behavior under control; she slept for most of the visit, but occasionally would open her eyes. She seemed to acknowledge us every so often. It was tough to see her in there, especially with other, louder, more disturbed patients around her. As we were driving home, my brother messaged that Mom had been accepted into a hospice facility, where they would make her as comfortable as possible. It was going to be a matter of days, according to the doctor there.
On March 25, my brother told me she had passed. We had been waiting for that news, but it still hit hard. Even though she had been so frail over the last several years, somehow she kept hanging on. Obviously, I've been used to not having a dad for decades now, but it's very different to not have Mom around. I'm glad she's not suffering anymore, because the last several years were difficult for her. And us.
Here's her obituary, mostly written by my brother.
My brother was much closer to her than I was, but that was partly due to dealing with my dad while I was away. Shared trauma and all that. I was always a little more independent in that I didn't lean on either parent too closely, but I was always closer to Mom.
It's strange to think she's gone now. She was a great woman who dealt with a lot of difficulty in her life. In a lot of ways, I still haven't dealt with it. I imagine it's going to take a while.
Part 2 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey as we wrap up the first round of a March Madness-style tournament featuring our favorite rock artists. Listen below or download directly (right click and "save as").
Show notes:
Finishing up the rest of round 1
Stevie Wonder vs. the Pretenders
Talking Heads vs. U2
St. Vincent vs. Sonic Youth
Elvis Costello vs. the Replacements
R.E.M. vs. the Who
Beck vs. Dire Straits
Jimi Hendrix vs. Jason Isbell
Dinosaur Jr. vs. Foo Fighters
Drive-By Truckers vs. Tom Petty
Pixies vs. Fleetwood Mac
Neil Young vs. Sleater-Kinney
Steely Dan vs. Husker Du
Van Halen vs. Blondie
White Stripes vs. the Beatles
J. Geils Band vs. Pearl Jam
Nirvana vs. David Bowie
Coming soon: Round 2, with more tough decisions
Completely Conspicuous is available through Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and write a review!
The opening and closing theme of Completely Conspicuous is "Theme to Big F'in Pants" by Jay Breitling. Voiceover work is courtesy of James Gralian.
There have been some bumps in the air lately, but people still fly all the time. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about flying in hour 2; in hour 1, I paid tribute to Clem Burke and Dave Allen and played a bunch of hot new rock jams. Even the snakes on a plane dig it!
This playlist watches out for snakes:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Blondie - Dreaming/Eat to the Beat
Blondie - Hanging on the Telephone/Parallel Lines
Gang of Four - Not Great Men/Entertainment!
Gang of Four - Natural's Not In It/Entertainment!
Savak - No Man's Island/SQUAWK!
Scowl - Special/Are We All Angels
Rough Francis - Great to Be Alive/Fall EP
Ty Segall - Fantastic Tomb/Possession
Hallelujah the Hills - Fake Flowers at Sunset (3 of Diamonds)/DECK: Diamonds
Mekons - War Economy/Horror
Billy Nomates - The Test/Metalhorse
Bria Salmena - Closer to You/Big Dog
Destroyer - The Same Thing as Nothing at All/Dan's Boogie
Cameron Keiber - Habsburg Jaw/Nurser
Hour 2: Flying
Plastic Bertrand - Ca Plane Pour Moi/An 1
Pavement - Hit the Plane Down/Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Husker Du - Private Plane/Flip Your Wig
Silkworm - Pilot/In the West reissue
Drive-By Truckers - Shut Up and Get On the Plane/Southern Rock Opera
Guided By Voices - Test Pilot/Earth Man Blues
The Tragically Hip - Fifty Mission Cap/Fully Completely
Kristin Hersh - From the Plane/Wyatt at the Coyote Palace
Kurt Vile - Goin' On a Plane Today/(watch my moves)
Tigers Jaw - Plane vs. Tank vs. Submarine/Live at Studio 4
Max Webster - Night Flights/A Million Vacations
David Bowie - African Night Flight/Lodger
Mark Lanegan - Night Flight to Kabul/Somebody's Knocking
Bad History Month - The Flight from Hell/Death Takes a Holiday
Part 1 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey as we talk our way through a March Madness-style tournament of our favorite rock artists. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").
Show notes:
We left out artists that we both didn't like: Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, Radiohead, Joni Mitchell, Phish, Iron Maiden
Also had to leave off a number of artists just for space considerations: Ramones, AC/DC, Feelies, Breeders, Camper Van Beethoven, etc.
Some tough matchups in round 1 with randomized seeding
The Smiths vs. PJ Harvey
Spoon vs. Courtney Barnett
Led Zeppelin vs. Bob Dylan
The Cure vs. Prince
Elton John vs. James Brown
Pavement vs. Queens of the Stone Age
Buffalo Tom vs. Rush
Allman Brothers Band vs. Soundgarden
The Kinks vs. The Rolling Stones
Alice in Chains vs. Beastie Boys
Bob Marley vs. The Cure
Joe Jackson vs. The Afghan Whigs
The Tragically Hip vs. Velvet Underground
The Clash vs. Iggy Pop
Stevie Ray Vaughan vs. The Police
Sloan vs. Mark Lanegan
To be continued with the rest of Round 1
Completely Conspicuous is available through Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and write a review!
The opening and closing theme of Completely Conspicuous is "Theme to Big F'in Pants" by Jay Breitling. Voiceover work is courtesy of James Gralian.
Hey, I get it. The world kinda sucks right now. Which is why radio is more important than ever; you need something to get your mind off the constant stream of bad news. Unfortunately, commercial radio blows, but that's where the innernet comes in. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played hot new stuff from the Taxpayers, Bria Salmena and Destroyer in hour 1 and rock blocks in hour 2. It's just like the old days with Dr. Johnny Fever, only...not.
This playlist rocks the block:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
The Taxpayers - Evil Everywhere/Circle Breaker
Bria Salmena - Rags/Big Dog
The Drowns - View from the Bottom/View from the Bottom (2025 Jack Endino Remaster)
Destroyer - Sun Meet Snow/Dan's Boogie
Daniel Kleederman - Answers/Another Life
Spun Out - Pale Green Sky/Dream Noise
Escape-ism - Beneath the Underground/Charge of the Love Brigade
Throwing Muses - Libretto/Moonlight Concessions
Cameron Keiber - Beach Party Iran 1970/Nurser
Bob Mould - Sharp Little Pieces/Here We Go Crazy
The Murder Capital - Can't Pretend to Know/Blindness
Rough Francis - Moving Backwards/Fall EP
Kestrels - Total Bummer/Better Wonder
Pigeon Pit - Keys to the City/Crazy Arms
The Laughing Chimes - A Promise to Keep/Whispers in the Speech Machine
FACS - Talking Haunted/Wish Defense
Hour 2: Rock blocks
The New Pornographers - Letter from an Occupant/Mass Romantic
A.C. Newman - Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns/Shut Down the Streets
Neko Case - Star Witness/Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Destroyer - Your Blood/Destroyer's Rubies
Boss Hog - Walk In/Boss Hog
Boss Hog - I'm Not Like Everybody Else/Suburbia soundtrack
Boss Hog - Billy/Brood X
Public Enemy - Prophets of Rage/It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Public Enemy - Brothers Gonna Work It Out/Fear of a Black Planet
Public Enemy - Gotta Give the Peeps What They Need/Revolverlution
The longer things go, the weirder things get. Life in 2025 is so insane it makes 1990 look like a quaint, archaic fever dream. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs from 1990 in hour 2, and it was a blast. But don't tell the guy it was funny.
This playlist is funny how?
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
The Drowns - Take Me Back/View from the Bottom (2025 Jack Endino remaster)
Rough Francis - Summer Sun/Fall EP
The Men - Get My Soul/Buyer Beware
Daniel Kleederman - Compromised Positions/Another Life
Cameron Keiber - Forever 25/Nurser
Bob Mould - When Your Heart is Broken/Here We Go Crazy
Escape-ism - Black Gold/Charge of the Love Brigade
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at Altered Beast, Matthew Sweet's 1993 follow-up to his breakthrough album.
The music business is a mysterious and unpredictable thing. Many artists have recorded brilliant albums that go underappreciated while the dumbest shit imaginable totally blows up. This is about one of those underappreciated albums.
Matthew Sweet got his start in Nebraska, playing in the bands the Specs and the Dialtones while still in high school. He went to college in Athens, Georgia, as that city's music scene was hitting its stride. Sweet had met R.E.M. when they played in Lincoln, Nebraska, the previous year; he teamed up with Michael Stipe in a duo called Community Trolls and played guitar in Oh-OK, a band fronted by Stipe's sister Linda. He also formed The Buzz of Delight with Oh-OK drummer David Pierce and released an EP in 1984, which led to Sweet scoring a solo deal with Columbia Records.
His first two albums, 1986's Inside and 1989's Earth, received positive reviews but didn't sell well. By the end of the '90s, his label was done with him and his marriage ended. Sweet signed with Zoo Entertainment in 1990 and he put together a powerhouse band featuring indie guitar gods Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine. The resulting album was 1991's Girlfriend, a power pop masterpiece that broke through on FM radio and MTV with the title track (which hit #10 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart). While the album only hit #100 on the Billboard 200 chart, Sweet got a lot of attention in the indie rock world and was poised for bigger things.
But by July 1993, when Sweet's fourth album Altered Beast was released, a lot had changed in the rock world. Grunge was king and music fans were chasing after the latest big thing, which was guitar-dominated heavy rock from the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Sweet's super-melodic power pop wasn't in demand, but Altered Beast also had a darker edge to it that turned some fans of Girlfriend off. It was still catchy as hell, but there was a lot more anger and intensity to songs like "Devil with the Green Eyes," "Someone to Pull the Trigger," "Knowing People" and "The Ugly Truth." The grunge acts had plenty of that darkness as well, but for whatever reason, Altered Beast didn't catch on with the public as much.
It's too bad, because it's an impressive record. Sweet brought back Lloyd and Quine to provide hot lead guitar on several songs but also recruited a who's who of killer musicians: guitarists Ivan Julian and Greg Leisz, Nicky Hopkins on piano and drummers Rick Menck, Pete Thomas, Jody Stephens, Fred Maher and Mick Fleetwood (producer Richard Dashut worked on several huge Fleetwood Mac albums).
The album's title came from the videogame Altered Beast, and Sweet told Spin magazine that it referred to "whatever is inside you that someday might explode, and maybe you don't know it's there."
I became a Matthew Sweet fan after hearing "Divine Intervention" from the Girlfriend album, so I was looking forward to Altered Beast. And while I was at first disappointed that it wasn't Girlfriend 2, it only took a few listens to realize this was something different and excellent. It didn't hurt that the album's release coincided with the similarly dark turn my life had taken; I was 25, recently out of a long-term relationship, renting a room in a house in a town I didn't know and working crazy hours (5 a.m. to 1 p.m.). I was depressed and this depressing album really spoke to me.
You know Sweet was dealing with some serious shit when he put not one, but two clips from the X-rated movie Caligula on the album. The musical scope of the album was all over the place, from stinging rockers like "Dinosaur Act," "Ugly Truth Rock" and "Knowing People" to hooky pop-rock like "Time Capsule," "Life Without You" and "Do It Again" to country-rock gems like "What Do You Know?" and "The Ugly Truth" to searing guitar rippers like "Falling" and "In Too Deep." It's a rewarding collection that it took some folks decades to appreciate.
Strangely enough, Altered Beast charted higher than Girlfriend, hitting #75 on the Billboard 200, but it didn't have near the cultural impact of its predecessor. In 1994, Sweet released Son of Altered Beast, an EP featuring live and alternate versions of Sweet songs, plus a live cover of Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears."
In 1995, Sweet returned with the more upbeat album 100% Fun (although the title came from Kurt Cobain's suicide note), which featured the hit "Sick of Myself." In the subsequent 30 years, he's released nine more studio albums as well as covers albums with Susanna Hoffs and an acoustic album as part of The Thorns with Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins. His latest album was 2021's Catspaw. Sweet was touring in Canada with the band Hanson last fall when he suffered a serious stroke; a GoFundMe helped raise enough money to fly him home with a medical crew and to a rehabilitation hospital. To date, nearly $570,000 has been crowdfunded to help Sweet as he relearns how to perform basic tasks again. It's unclear whether he'll ever be able to play music again, but here's hoping. He's one of the underrated greats.
Obsession can take many forms: Love, lust, hobbies or something even darker. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about obsession in hour 2. Break out the cattle gun, friendo.
Call it, playlist:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Cameron Keiber - Sons and Daughters/Nurser
Throwing Muses - Albatross/Moonlight Concessions
Miynt - Blu-Ray Land/Rain Money Dogs
Rough Francis - Fall/Fall EP
Real Sickies - Should Have Seen It Coming/Under a Plastic Bag
Bob Mould - Fur Mink Augurs/Here We Go Crazy
Ovlov - Land of Steve-O (Demo)/Buds Demos
Cardinals - Unreal/Live at Scholz Garten, KUTX
Swervedriver - The World's Fair/The World's Fair EP
The Men - Buyer Beware/Buyer Beware
The Flamingos Pink - Burn/GROWF
Peel Dream Magazine - Interiors/Modern Meta Physic
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - 103/Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010
Sloan - Median Strip (Andrew Vocal)/Smeared box set
Escape-ism - If You Feel Like Rockin'/Charge of the Love Brigade
Dax Riggs - Blues for You Know Who/7 Songs for Spiders
King Hannah - The Mattress/Big Swimmer
Hour 2: Obsession
PJ Harvey - Down By the Water/To Bring You My Love
The Police - Murder By Numbers/Synchronicity
Peter Gabriel - Intruder/Live in Athens 1987
Gang of Four - Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time/Solid Gold
Hatchie - Obsessed/Keepsake
The Godfathers - Obsession/Birth, School, Work, Death
Queens of the Stone Age - You Can't Quit Me Baby/Queens of the Stone Age
Living Colour - Postman/Stain
Soundgarden - Mailman/Superunknown
Sonic Youth - Self-Obsessed and Sexxee/Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star
The Afghan Whigs - I Keep Coming Back/Gentlemen
Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Possess Your Heart/Narrow Stairs
I've never understood the fascination with the British royal family here in the U.S. Wasn't this country founded to get away from the monarchy? But whenever there's a royal wedding or some other event going on over there, all the networks (and a lot of the public in general) fall all over themselves in wonder over the pointless pageantry. Nevertheless, I've got songs about queens this week in hour 2 of Stuck In Thee Garage.
Must...crank...the...playlist:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Bob Mould - Neanderthal/Here We Go Crazy
The Men - Tombstone/Buyer Beware
Hunger Anthem - Bloodsucker/Lift
Swervedriver - Pack Yr Vision/The World's Fair EP
Art D'Ecco - Cooler Than This/Serene Demon
Kinski - Staircase Wit/Stumbledown Terrace
The Murder Capital - A Distant Life/Blindness
Ovlov - Eat More (Demo)/Buds Demos
Dax Riggs - Ain't That Darkness/7 Songs for Spiders
Squid - Crispy Skin/Cowards
Guided By Voices - I Couldn't See the Light/Universe Room
The Laughing Chimes - Mudhouse Mansion/Whispers in the Speech Machine
Pigeon Pit - Bronco/Crazy Arms
Kestrels - Interstellar/Better Wonder
Charm School - Youthquaker/Debt Forever
Amyl and the Sniffers - Pigs/Cartoon Darkness
Hour 2: Queens
PJ Harvey - 50 Ft. Queenie/Rid of Me
David Bowie - Queen Bitch/Hunky Dory
Ty Segall - Orange Color Queen/Ty Segall
Shellac and David Yow - God Save the Queen/Halloween 1998 at Lounge Ax
Japandroids - No Allegiance to the Queen/No Singles
Fucked Up - Queen of Hearts/David Comes to Life
The B-52s - Queen of Vegas/Whammy!
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory/So Divided
Guided By Voices - Queen Parking Lot/Surrender Your Poppy Field
Quasi - Queen of Ears/Breaking the Balls of History
Nirvana - Hairspray Queen/Incesticide
The Subways - Rock & Roll Queen/Young for Eternity
Johnny Foreigner - The Last Queens of Scotland/You Can Do Better
Thee Oh Sees - Poor Queen/Mutilator Defeated at Last
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at the TV sensation that was Battle of the Network Stars.
Growing up in the 1970s was very different than it is for kids today. We spent a LOT of time unsupervised, especially those of us who were latchkey kids; in other words, both parents worked and we were left to our own designs while they weren't home.
For me, that really came into play in 1975 when we moved from the high-rise apartment buildings of Scarborough, Ontario (at the time, a suburb of Toronto; now it's actually part of the city) to the eastern suburban town of Pickering. I was in second grade at the time and would walk home from school, let myself into the house and find ways to occupy my time until my parents got home around dinnertime. I didn't really have homework until 5th or 6th grade, so I would either play hockey in my driveway (this WAS Canada, after all) or make myself a snack and watch TV. Typically, it was syndicated reruns of Happy Days, which aired in the afternoon (called Happy Days Again to differentiate from the newer episodes), Barney Miller and M.A.S.H. or older shows like Gilligan's Island.
Like many kids of my generation, I watched a LOT of TV growing. Of course, my biggest role model, my dad, would come home from work, eat dinner and then plop himself down on the couch to watch TV until it was time to go to bed. He loved reruns of shows like Bewitched, the Bob Newhart Show and Hogan's Heroes, but would also watch newer shows like Dallas, the Love Boat or Fantasy Island. And we followed the Toronto Maple Leafs, who at that time typically played on Wednesday and Saturday nights.
These were the days of the Big 3 TV networks: ABC, CBS and NBC. There were UHF (aka cable) stations that showed old movies and reruns, but all new, non-syndicated programming was on the Big 3. Non-scripted shows back then were still all about stars; if you were an ordinary person, you could get on game shows, but the networks were big on star power. A lot more people watched network shows back then, so there was serious competition for eyeballs.
In 1973, ABC began airing the show Superstars as part of its weekend Wide World of Sports programming, with top athletes competing in different sports. One of the first winners was O.J. Simpson in 1975. After seeing its popularity, ABC got the idea to hold a similar competition featuring TV stars competing in different sporting events. Dubbed Battle of the Network Stars, the first episode aired in November 1976 with the competitors participating in swimming, kayaking, volleyball, golf, tennis, bowling, cycling, 3-on-3 football, a baseball dunk tank, running and an obstacle course, as well as game of "Simon Says." After the regular events, the team with the lowest score was eliminated and the remaining two teams determined the winner in a game of tug of war. Legendary sports announcer Howard Cosell was the host, providing overly dramatic commentary for events featuring the likes of Gabe Kaplan, Telly Savalas and Robert Conrad, the three team captains in the first two years.
The great Will Harris put together an entertaining oral history of the Battle of the Network Stars for the A.V. Club several years back, featuring interviews with many of the competitors. The games were entertaining, especially considering the fact that in the mid-1970s, there was much less of a premium on working out than in later years. A lot of the participants were terrible at sports, but that was all part of the fun. There was a combination of big names (the aforementioned captains, Hal Linden, Tom Selleck), young talent (Ron Howard, Jimmie Walker, Scott Baio, Kristy McNichol, Valerie Bertinelli, Todd Bridges), up-and-comers (Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Kurt Russell) and starlets (Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Cheryl Tiegs, Lynda Carter, Erin Gray, Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd, Adrienne Barbeau). With the last group, the networks were also all about T&A, so getting your hottest stars in bathing suits was definitely good for business.
ABC ran episodes every six months until May 1985, with one final edition in 1988. It also inspired Circus of the Stars, a CBS show that featured TV and movie stars performing circus acts; the show ran from 1977-1994.
There was a lot of good-natured fun, but the actors started to take it seriously because there was money on the line. They received $10,000 each for just showing up, the second-place team won $15,000 each and the winning team got $20,000 each. Sometimes this led to heated confrontations; one year, there was a controversy over the relay race finish. Robert Conrad, the tough guy star of the NBC World War II show Baa Baa Black Sheep, was so incensed by his team getting penalized for a violation that he challenged ABC captain Gabe Kaplan, the standup comic star of Welcome Back, Kotter, to a footrace. Kaplan smoked him in the race, creating great TV in the process.
It was dumb fun and very much of its time, just like the insane network promos that would feature hundreds of stars doing song-and-dance disco numbers to hype the new season. In 2017, ABC revived Battle of the Network Stars as a weekly series, with teams featuring celebrities based on their roles: TV sitcoms, variety, White House, prime time soaps, cops, doctors, etc. It ran for nine episodes and I have zero memory of it even happening.
Of course, the concept of TV celebrity has changed since the '80s with the advent of reality TV. There are plenty of celebrity competition shows, whether it's on Jeopardy, Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, MTV's endless series of Real World/Road Rules Challenges, The Surreal Life. As the definition of a celebrity has changed to include YouTube streamers and TikTokers, so has the impact of these competitions.
I don't recall paying a whole lot of attention to Battle of the Network Stars as a kid, other than to know that it was on every so often. But much like the entertainment options of today, they were created to distract us from the scarier stuff going on the world like wars, economic troubles and assassinations. It worked. Almost 50 years later, they're still a lot of fun to look back on through grainy YouTube clips.