The lost late eighties college rock interzone

i left a lot of stuff off that list up there (mercifully, perhaps), but feel remiss in not mentioning jonathan richman, flipper, the feelies, the violent femmes, beat happening, jawbox, polvo and a few others.

it occurred to me while compiling it that my list would wind up being overwhelmingly male-dominated, and of course it did, absurdly so. it includes a few bands with prominent female members - for instance X, sonic youth, pixies and yo la tengo - but not many. i perhaps should have made room for the likes of 10,000 maniacs, the cowboy junkies and michelle shocked, but that wouldn't have tipped the balance much, and they were arguably fellow travelers for only a very short while. female-fronted bands and solo artists only seem to assume a central place in the "independent rock" narrative in the 90s, often by forwarding their exclusion (bikini kill, liz phair). it's a self-selected list, of course, but the interzone really did seem to be a boy's club for a while there...

also, this really is white music. the groundwork for the list i posted runs from the velvet underground and the stooges in the 60s to bands like television, the talking heads and the B-5s's in the 70s, along with traditional punk and hardcore. few of the major "interzone" bands show any strong influence from R&B, soul, funk and/or jazz, not even by way of forebears like the talking heads. dance music was mostly off-limits, except as a mocking gesture.

what are Big Audio Dynamite not "college rock interzone"?

ah nevermind, didn't see you limited your scope to a large degree

always wanted to write something positing that Psychedelic Furs epitomized the divide that second-tier bands faced between what they sought (growing mass audience, top billing on a John Hughes soundtrack, money for expensive hair gel) and what they got (cult audience disgusted by big hair and top billing on a John Hughes soundtrack).

it occurred to me while compiling it that my list would wind up being overwhelmingly male-dominated, and of course it did, absurdly so. it includes a few bands with prominent female members - for instance X, sonic youth, pixies and yo la tengo - but not many. i perhaps should have made room for the likes of 10,000 maniacs, the cowboy junkies and michelle shocked,

where are Sinead and Suzanne Vega?

tbf i don't think contenderizer's list is really what this thread started out about at all. It's the gauche crossover shit, not Flipper.

like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS4ALgm6Rsc

any band that is connected to nirvana is not lost in the interzone

There was a counter-cultural vibe to late-'80s indie that got lost at some point in the early '90s, I think. It was really widespread and had a sort of seriousness to it.

― timellison, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 11:20 AM (5 hours ago)

to return to this, i think "punk rock" helps explain this. almost all the bands in the list i posted earlier got their start in and grew out of more traditional punk and hardcore. even the ones that didn't were steeped in punk culture. camper van beethoven covered black flag and sonic youth just like sonic youth covered the ramones and crime. i'd argue that an identification with explicitly punk music, culture and values is the glue held the interzone together. when american indie and alternative rock shed this connective tissue, becoming things in themselves rather than direct outgrowths of and responses to punk, they lost the the essence of their countercultural stance.

someone does not want to remember the hoodoo gurus

can we just list every band that got college airplay in the 80s and call it a day

any band that is connected to nirvana is not lost in the interzone

― da croupier, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 4:43 PM

yeah, i agree. i'm just trying to map the interzone (or an interzone) as a product and part of american culture. in that, i'm particularly focused on "college rock", what became "indie rock" and a specifically american sort of postpunk.

that's swell, but you can still find all that shit in SPIN best-of lists, which defeats the whole purpose of pondering what's "lost"

the interzone is everything michael azzerad left OUT

okay, i figured the interzone was the landscape in general, and the lost were what you might turn up under this or that rock. either way...

but you're not discussing the "landscape in general," you're trying to limit it to white american indie rockers everyone still thinks is cool

not at all! i'm trying to reconstitute a culture as it seemed to view itself then, in the moment, not as remembered from here.

i mean, obviously the "lost late 80s college rock interzone" is going to mean different things to different people...

no you're trying to limit it to white american indie rockers that everyone still thinks are cool

1986:
Big Black - The Hammer Party
Big Black - Atomizer
Butthole Surfers - Rembrandt Pussyhorse
Camper Van Beethoven - II & III
Camper Van Beethoven - s/t
The Flaming Lips - Hear It Is
Husker Du - Candy Apple Grey
Meat Puppets - Out My Way
R.E.M. - Lifes Rich Pageant
Scratch Acid - Just Keep Eating
Sonic Youth - EVOL

Nick Marsh (vocals and guitar) and James Mitchell (drums) formed the band and soon recruited Rocco (originally from Wasted Youth, guitar and vocals), and Glen Bishop (bass), taking their name from an American cult movie. They signed to Polydor Records in 1983, and soon thereafter, bassist Glen Bishop left to join Under Two Flags, and was replaced by Kevin Mills (formerly of Specimen).

The label dropped them a year later after their eponymous first album failed to find any commercial success.

In 1985, the band signed to Hybrid Records and released a mini LP, Blue Sisters Swing, which was produced with Craig Leon. The cover image of two nuns kissing resulted in the album being banned in the United States and Europe.[2] Flesh for Lulu then joined Statik records, who released Big Fun City later that year.

The following year, the band signed to Beggars Banquet Records, and their song "I Go Crazy" was featured in Some Kind of Wonderful and saw some airplay on American college rock radio stations. This allowed Flesh for Lulu to sustain a successful tour of the US.

In 1989, "Decline and Fall" followed and became a top 15 hit on the new Modern Rock Tracks chart. The next year, "Time and Space" written by newest member Del Strangefish[3] became their biggest US hit, hitting the top 10 of the Modern Rock chart, but the song failed to chart on any other US chart. The band were dropped again, and dissolved soon afterwards.

The song "Postcards from Paradise" was covered by Paul Westerberg as a secret bonus track on his 2002 album "Stereo". Unfortunately, the 'secretness' of the cover meant zero royalties for Flesh, and as the original publishers remain unwilling to provide any accounting to the band, the real extent of their dues in this instance remain unknown. The Goo Goo Dolls also covered the same song, which will be part of a "deluxe edition" release of their 2010 album Something for the Rest of Us available on the band's website.

i mean compare and contrast that list with the hang the dj comp and this: http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/pjres86.php

i have no memory of flesh for lulu's biggest american hit time and space. but i do think its funny that paul westerberg and goo goo dolls covered the same flesh for lulu song!

no you're trying to limit it to white american indie rockers that everyone still thinks are cool

honestly, i imagine that few people these days think that all those bands are particularly cool. those that do were probably indie rockers in the 80s and/or 90s. the artists i mentioned are those that i remember reading about in option, the village voice, spin, forced exposure and smaller publications back in the day - the bands, at least, that seemed to cross over from one pond to the next. they're the bands that seemed to be treated as "prominent" or "important" by the tastemakers and scene arbiters i was aware of, and i tried hard to read and hear everything. plus they sold well. collectively, i think they do a pretty good job of describing the context in which less well-known artists operated.

also, most everything i've said here has been an attempt to answer timellison's question about the era's lost counterculturalism, so that's steered me away from college rock playlists and toward american postpunk as a culture.

for younger people i knew in philly in the late 80's the stuff to listen to that was current was industrial stuff (skinny puppy, nine inch nails, ministry and wax trax stuff was really big in philly) or grunge and amrep type bands that would play at the kyber pass. people loved when nirvana came to town before they hit it big. people loved tad and other sub pop stuff. mudhoney. this was all 89 and 90. and the hipster older record store people i knew were into their own local bands and the siltbreeze stuff and the whole grifters/thinking fellers/gbv thing as well as noisier like-minded byron coley-approved stuff and, you know, old krautrock and all the same hipster stuff that people like now.

yeah, i left off industrial music in toto, which was dumb of me. also should have mentioned the red hot chili peppers and jane's addiction, as they had so much to do with what happened in the 90s.

people probably still listen to EVOL. i don't get the idea that people listen to the butthole surfers much at all anymore. and they were cooler than cool back then. same with husker du. there is no way husker du mean the same thing to people who first hear them now. i have no idea what they would sound like to a kid today. especially that terrible album.

no you're trying to limit it to white american indie rockers that everyone still thinks are cool

1986:
Big Black - The Hammer Party
Big Black - Atomizer
Butthole Surfers - Rembrandt Pussyhorse
Camper Van Beethoven - II & III
Camper Van Beethoven - s/t
The Flaming Lips - Hear It Is
Husker Du - Candy Apple Grey
Meat Puppets - Out My Way
R.E.M. - Lifes Rich Pageant
Scratch Acid - Just Keep Eating
Sonic Youth - EVOL

― da croupier, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 8:05 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

honestly, i imagine that few people these days think that all those bands are particularly cool.

― contenderizer, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 8:17 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

facepalm.jpg

http://obsoletegamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/wtf-cat.jpg

hey guys remember dumptruck

I saw tad at the revival in philly, too young to get into the khyber. sat outside so many cool shows at the khyber cause I was underage. cop shoot cop snuck me into their show there once. and when I interviewed live skull at the arch st empire they offered to hide me in the dressing room until the show started but I didn't want to get them in trouble.

Contenderizer, why are you trying to needlessly complicate a thread concept that it took everyone else 2 seconds to understand?

Dumptruck was one of the bands I thought of when we first started talking about this earlier.

I was there, in the interzone

hey guys remember the bolshoi

the fact that matt pinfield is synonymous with 120 minutes these days and not dave kendall says a lot

― da croupier, Wednesday, June 27, 2012 6:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^show me a motherfucker in this world that loved swervedriver more than dave kendall

his favorite was naked raygun iirc

Dumptruck was great! But, yeah, they were the band my college radio staff were chanting when talking about bands they wanted to get for spring concert '86.

"I saw tad at the revival in philly"

i saw tad open for gwar there!

you guys really had your finger on the pulse

xp

I was at that show! I have a funny story

Contenderizer, why are you trying to needlessly complicate a thread concept that it took everyone else 2 seconds to understand?

― wack nerd zinging in the dead of night (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, June 27, 2012 8:40 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

solitary posts that

bands like buffalo tom were the boring link between REM and wilco.

i know i know someone here LOVES buffalo tom and saw them open up for sister double happiness when they were 12. its okay. they were still boring.

They were super boring, you are otm.

i feel like rolling stone magazine won the war in some ways. they always wanted the blander roots rockers to carry the rock torch and they wanted the goths and freaks and weirdo europeans to go away.

good time to be a hongro though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIU7qSr72a4

there is a reason why so many indie rockers started listening to australian and new zealand bands in the late 80's. they had finally gotten rock there - it takes a long time to travel that far - and their bands were innocent and untainted. nobody had ever needed salvation from kiwis or oz people before!

where do shitty bands like the pursuit of happiness fit in here?

but Midnight Oil's beds were burning