Slept On: Yum-Yum, Dan Loves Patti
The kids (especially the Chicago ones) love to hate on this album.
Back in the day when I was a teenager, with no status, and no pager, I was working as a music director for the nascent OSU student-run radion station, KBUX, later to be known as The Underground. The kids working there, we had no freaking clue how to run a radio station and we didn't have anyone to tell us how to do it--the whole situation was so MacGyver. Everything was trial and error. And it was fucking great. We pretty much just assigned ourselves titles and taught ourselves how to use the equipment. We weren't capable of wreaking too much havoc, though, because the signal (91.1) was so weak; you could only get it from maybe Lane avenue to 12th avenue, in good weather, during the vernal equinox. The broadcast, out of the Ohio Union basement, was heard mainly through something called UNITS--the dorm information channel (channel 41). There was never any way to know how many people were listening. We did some marketing and promotion, but nobody on campus, this enormous campus, smack in the middle of one of the most fertile college-music scenes in the country, seemed all that interested. All the same, we were happy simply to be this band of music freaks, living out the music freak's greatest fantasy: free records.
Most of what the mainly labels sent me was junk (Perfume Tree or Gastr del Sol? Anyone? Bueller? Kula Shaker, maybe?), but every now and again, I'd get something great, something that I wanted to share with everyone. Dan Loves Patti was one of those albums. I couldn't play it on my show, London Calling (I know, how clever!), as it was devoted to UK music (surprise!), so I tried to get the other DJs to slip it into rotation. When it became clear that Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and Guided by Voices were the golden children of the station and more or less setting the tone of the regular programming, I ferreted this gem away in my personal collection. Nobody missed it.
Songs like "Apiary," "Ring," and "Words Will Fail," were sweet, little confections. Near perfect in their twee, pop construction, and resplendant with French horns (Dan Folgerberg? Are you in there?), Chris Holmes crafted the best stoner heartbreak album in the vein of, I don't know, "Pet Sounds" that I'd ever heard. (And, before I get any High Fidelity, loser, music-critic types leaving comments like, "Dude, that's fucking stupid," may I remind you that A) I don't care, and B) Blogger is free, so get one of yer own.) The music had emotion and depth and catchy melodies and melancholy lyrics! The liner notes came with guitar chords for each of the songs! Fun! Cute! So what happened? Why wasn't this album at least as big as Pavement's Crooked Rain Crooked Rain?
Maybe it was a little too twee, a little too polished; all I know is that everyone, EVERYONE hated this record. I don't know a single person who will own up to liking it. Even Chris Holmes, according to a Harper's article about him, claimed that Dan Loves Patti was some sort of send up of indie pop music, that it was a farce, that it was irony.* Par example:
"Yum-Yum, as the group was called, would be an ironic pop band--ironic, that is, if you understood 'pop' as the softest, most openly sold-out, most compromised, most manipulated music ever produced. [The] music industry had been assiduously falsifying Chris's world; now he would do the same to theirs. He would fake fake itself." [emphasis mine]
Yeah! You get 'em, Chris! You're gonna be a big star! A BIG star. **
And ... scene.
Obviously, this didn't happen. I mean, have you ever heard of Chris Holmes? Something like, only 10,000 units of Dan Loves Patti were sold. A few months after I got my copy, I started seeing them in the bins and on the shelves at Johnny Go's and Used Kids. They were going for $0.99. Ouch.
Yum-Yum, Dan Loves Patti
Promo copy from TAG/Atlantic, May 1997
*And, if I may editorialize for a minute, one thing I've always hated about the indie music scene is the pervasive cooler-than-though attitude, the repulsion at the possibility of the hoi polloi liking "your" music. What's wrong with liking the some of the same things that "mainstream," Anytown USA people like? If I have to do a fucking Google search to figure out how to pronounce your band's name (i.e., !!!) or send away to some P.O. box for your band's cherry-red colored 7", I'm going to pass. And it's not about being average or common or lazy or fat or unfashionable--it's about liking what you like and not being so goddamn judgmental about what other people like.
** Here's a link to a well-written article in response to the Harper's article. It's pretty much saying what I said above, only with much more eloquence.
Back in the day when I was a teenager, with no status, and no pager, I was working as a music director for the nascent OSU student-run radion station, KBUX, later to be known as The Underground. The kids working there, we had no freaking clue how to run a radio station and we didn't have anyone to tell us how to do it--the whole situation was so MacGyver. Everything was trial and error. And it was fucking great. We pretty much just assigned ourselves titles and taught ourselves how to use the equipment. We weren't capable of wreaking too much havoc, though, because the signal (91.1) was so weak; you could only get it from maybe Lane avenue to 12th avenue, in good weather, during the vernal equinox. The broadcast, out of the Ohio Union basement, was heard mainly through something called UNITS--the dorm information channel (channel 41). There was never any way to know how many people were listening. We did some marketing and promotion, but nobody on campus, this enormous campus, smack in the middle of one of the most fertile college-music scenes in the country, seemed all that interested. All the same, we were happy simply to be this band of music freaks, living out the music freak's greatest fantasy: free records.
Most of what the mainly labels sent me was junk (Perfume Tree or Gastr del Sol? Anyone? Bueller? Kula Shaker, maybe?), but every now and again, I'd get something great, something that I wanted to share with everyone. Dan Loves Patti was one of those albums. I couldn't play it on my show, London Calling (I know, how clever!), as it was devoted to UK music (surprise!), so I tried to get the other DJs to slip it into rotation. When it became clear that Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and Guided by Voices were the golden children of the station and more or less setting the tone of the regular programming, I ferreted this gem away in my personal collection. Nobody missed it.
Songs like "Apiary," "Ring," and "Words Will Fail," were sweet, little confections. Near perfect in their twee, pop construction, and resplendant with French horns (Dan Folgerberg? Are you in there?), Chris Holmes crafted the best stoner heartbreak album in the vein of, I don't know, "Pet Sounds" that I'd ever heard. (And, before I get any High Fidelity, loser, music-critic types leaving comments like, "Dude, that's fucking stupid," may I remind you that A) I don't care, and B) Blogger is free, so get one of yer own.) The music had emotion and depth and catchy melodies and melancholy lyrics! The liner notes came with guitar chords for each of the songs! Fun! Cute! So what happened? Why wasn't this album at least as big as Pavement's Crooked Rain Crooked Rain?
Maybe it was a little too twee, a little too polished; all I know is that everyone, EVERYONE hated this record. I don't know a single person who will own up to liking it. Even Chris Holmes, according to a Harper's article about him, claimed that Dan Loves Patti was some sort of send up of indie pop music, that it was a farce, that it was irony.* Par example:
"Yum-Yum, as the group was called, would be an ironic pop band--ironic, that is, if you understood 'pop' as the softest, most openly sold-out, most compromised, most manipulated music ever produced. [The] music industry had been assiduously falsifying Chris's world; now he would do the same to theirs. He would fake fake itself." [emphasis mine]
Yeah! You get 'em, Chris! You're gonna be a big star! A BIG star. **
And ... scene.
Obviously, this didn't happen. I mean, have you ever heard of Chris Holmes? Something like, only 10,000 units of Dan Loves Patti were sold. A few months after I got my copy, I started seeing them in the bins and on the shelves at Johnny Go's and Used Kids. They were going for $0.99. Ouch.
Yum-Yum, Dan Loves Patti
Promo copy from TAG/Atlantic, May 1997
*And, if I may editorialize for a minute, one thing I've always hated about the indie music scene is the pervasive cooler-than-though attitude, the repulsion at the possibility of the hoi polloi liking "your" music. What's wrong with liking the some of the same things that "mainstream," Anytown USA people like? If I have to do a fucking Google search to figure out how to pronounce your band's name (i.e., !!!) or send away to some P.O. box for your band's cherry-red colored 7", I'm going to pass. And it's not about being average or common or lazy or fat or unfashionable--it's about liking what you like and not being so goddamn judgmental about what other people like.
** Here's a link to a well-written article in response to the Harper's article. It's pretty much saying what I said above, only with much more eloquence.
posted by Iseult at 3:47 PM
1 Comments:
I've always loved this album since I bought it in the late '90's at Tower records. A friend of mine had told me about it and I went there and listened to it and knew I had to get it.
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