Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).
Sleeping Bag (1993)
Everybody thinks of grunge bands as coming from Seattle, but there were plenty of bands signed from all over the country at the height of the grunge gold rush. One of them was Paw out of Lawrence, Kansas, who signed a three-album deal with A&M after a bidding war early in the grunge era.
I first heard of Paw when I won a prize pack from A&M in late '93 and one of the things I received was a VHS tape with videos of A&M acts, including Soundgarden. The Paw video was for "Couldn't Know," a song about a whale. The band rocked and the singer, Mark Hennessy, had a powerful roar of a voice. I picked up the CD of the band's 1993 debut Dragline and listened to it a LOT over the next 18 months.
Paw was formed in 1990 by Hennessy, guitarist Grant Fitch, drummer Peter Fitch and bassist Charles Bryan. The band combined metal power with Southern rock and got some MTV airplay with their three videos, "Jessie," "Couldn't Know" and "Sleeping Bag." Much like labelmates Soundgarden, Paw was straddling the line between metal and alternative. The band toured with Nirvana, the Afghan Whigs, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill and Firehose.
"Sleeping Bag" tells the tale of a brother who's looking out for his sibling after an accident.
"I don't want to see your head caved in/I can't stand to see them wheel you in/Why'd you go and do that to your head?/Are you so goddamned miserable/You'd feel better if you were dead?/And then the tears from my eyes/Makes the road all wet and hard/For you to drive me never/Had a chance to see/The car, she's comin' straight at you/Hey, what are you gonna do?"
Hennessy's emotional vocals bring the brotherly concern to the forefront.
"Someone call a doctor!/Hey, you're dying and you don't know/Hey, you make me hate myself/'Cause you're my only brother/And I can't say, 'I love you'/And this is pretty hard/Aww, you're not around, so I can't hold your hand/So I crawl/I crawl inside your sleeping bag/Oh, and I don't think he's gonna make it, make it home alive/Please, make it home alive."
The album never charted. Paw's next album, Death to Traitors, came out in 1995 and had more an alt-country feel mixed in with the heavier side of their sound, but it fared poorly and Paw was dropped by A&M a year later. In 1998, the Fitch brothers formed the band Palomar and released an album. Paw released an odds-and-sods collection, and then an EP in 2000 before splitting up.
In the years since, the band reunited in 2008 for some shows, but that was it. Grant Fitch has played in the New Franklin Panthers, but more recently has worked as a production manager on TV shows. Hennessy formed Godzillionaire a decade ago.
Paw was one of many grunge-era bands who never made it, but they had some good songs.
No comments:
Post a Comment