Saved By The ’90s: A Maple-Flavoured Blast-From-The-Past

So my friend and I put our heads together and thought it’d be fun to have this battle—his words, not mine—where we compile some mixtapes and square off against one another. After a few tries at figuring out a theme we decided on childhood memories: in his case the ’80s, in mine the ’90s. Old man. Anyways, after narrowing the field of songs I wanted to use down to a handsome figure of 92 I figured it was time to revise the plan. This week Aaron and his wife will be travelling north and making their way across western Canada, so I figured: HEY! why not focus on some Canadian songs that accompanied me through my youth. But that, too, left me with an ass-load of music. So I cut it shorter… HEY! why not focus on some Canadian songs that accompanied me through my youth, and were pretty much considered alt-rock at the time. Alt-rock? God I hated that term.

So anyways, here’s a bunch of songs I liked in the ’90s that I pretty much put together for Aaron in the event that he missed them along the way. I doubt he’s going to dig many of them, and I can’t promise that they’ll help either you or him in any particular way, but if nothing else, they might make you both feel a little more Canadian. Cheers.

(Oh, also, this is his mix – you’re probably going to want get to that first before you tackle any of my nonsense here.)

TSURURADIO vs. Culture Bully: A friendly comparison & contrast of the music of our youths! Alternate title: 90s v. 80s WOOOOT!!!

Side 1: Hi, How Are You Today? (37:09)

Side 2: Fine, Thank You. (40:14)

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If you really have nothing better to do, I jotted down some memories that helped me narrow the mix down to this bunch of tunes. Consider them the liner notes. Although the thoughts are pretty dull, self-indulgent musings, it was fun to take a look back, dammit.

Side 1: Hi, How Are You Today?

Remember the ridiculous opening ceremony for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver? Remember the ridiculous attempts at covering Canadian culture without an eye for completism? Remember the ridiculous fiddle players who were mocked up all half-kilted/half-Hot Topic’d? Well, Ashley MacIsaac was one of those players, but long before then he was a ridiculous Canadian persona that found fame through his prodigious skill at a young age. He later adopted an unusual public persona for his recklessness, which usually just manifested itself in the occasional fight or “shocking” statement. He also purchased one of Elvis’ pink Cadillacs and later openly addressed his homosexuality after years of “curious” behavior. I can’t remember the exact year—maybe it was 2000—but my mom and I went to see him at the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary. While I don’t remember much of the performance, I do recall enjoying it despite it leaning heavier on his traditional Celtic songs rather than his pop/rock tracks. Even with his last studio album I can’t say that I’ve ever felt as though there was a reason not to be supportive of the guy’s music.

MP3 Ashley MacIsaac “Beaton’s Delight” (Purchase)

This song is one that really helped anchor a correlation between my appreciation for music and my appreciation for music videos. The song is good: it has a good chorus and fit into the era nicely without sounding “too Canadian”… The band later went on to release the tremendously popular album (in Canada) Make a Pest a Pet before disbanding: the two sets of brothers which made up the quartet went their separate ways; the Kerns brothers forming Static in Stereo and the Dahle brothers returning to a side-project they’d started a few years before: Limblifter. Oh, then Kurt Dahle joined some band called the New Pornographers.

MP3 Age of Electric “Ugly” (Purchase)

Originally I thought Limblifter was a band from Calgary—I hadn’t heard anything about them before their first single “Screwed It Up” was released and from what I remember, they were played on a “new artist” type radio show that occasionally focused on local talent. Regardless, I was impressed, and the CD was on sale for something like six or seven bucks, so why not, right? If I was to go back in time and compile a list of my favorite albums of that year, Limblifter would likely be in the pack despite the fact I can’t even tell you what half of the album sounds like; the singles dominated the record for me and “Vicious” my favorite.

MP3 Limblifter “Vicious” (Purchase)

I don’t have too many memorable thoughts about 54-40 that took place before their 1996 release, Trusted by Millions. Hootie and the goddamn Blowfish covered their song “I Go Blind” and made a pretty decent hit out of it, which, I imagine, made 54-40 a good amount of money in residuals. Which is nice. Other than that, they were just always around. While they don’t sound much of anything like Soul Asylum I tend to think of them in the same sense: 54-40 was always on the radio and has probably stuck around way past their prime, but when they were good they were good.

MP3 54-40 “Nice To Luv You” (Purchase)

The Tragically Hip aside, the Headstones are my all-time favo(u)rite Canadian band. From their cover of the Traveling Wilburys’ “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” in 1993 I was hooked. They added a dark side to rock that wasn’t readily available on traditional radio stations and that really appealed to me. If you ever get the chance I recommend checking out Hard Core Logo, a film which Quentin Tarantino purchased the U.S. distribution rights to that stars the band’s Hugh Dillon. He has since gone on to build a pretty solid acting career for himself.

MP3 The Headstones “When Something Stands For Nothing” (Purchase)

I didn’t really like this song when it was released, but I liked it enough to own it. Looking back it’s ridiculous how many CDs I owned based on that simple principle: if you kind of like it, and you can get it for five or six bucks, you might as well. When I was a freshman in college I joined a friend of mine as he drove across Iowa to the Quad Cities where his family and friends lived. While there, in Rock Island I believe, we stopped in a bunch of thrift and pawn shops. Sure enough I found this CD and a copy of the Tragically Hip’s 1992 classic Fully Completely. There were probably five or six of us in the vehicle when we were driving around and I wouldn’t let the guys get off without listening to at least a few tracks from the CDs. They hated them, I loved them. That’s pretty much the Tragically Hip in a nutshell if you ask me though, they just make more sense in Canada.

MP3 The Gandharvas “Downtime” (Purchase)

This isn’t my favorite song from the Trouble at the Henhouse, that’d be “Gift Shop,” but this song stands out because of its inclusion on the Kids in the Hall’s Brain Candy soundtrack. It’s a basic song and really doesn’t do much to immediately grab the attention of a non-fan, but that was the point: in Canda if you were listening to the radio, you knew who the Hip were, and if you weren’t changing the station, you were at the bare minimum a casual fan. So to put out a single that is casual, but still retains a good hook, they did more than attempting to bait listeners with a live version of a new song… or something along those lines.

MP3 The Tragically Hip “Butts Wigglin” (Purchase)

I never really got into Hayden, which means I never got to brag about how I was into him years ago when he had somewhat of a breakout in the States. That said, I absolutely adore “Tree’s Lounge,” the song, not the film. Despite being a pretty big Steve Buscemi fan—who isn’t though, right?—I have yet to actually check the flick out. It’s only been around for about 14 years… I’ll get to it some day.

MP3 Hayden “Trees Lounge” (Purchase)

By the time Much Music released the inaugural edition of Big Shiny Tunes—their annual compilation that at the time collected a variety of rock “hits” ranging from Marilyn Manson to, well, Sloan—I had come to an entirely different appreciation for the band than I had previously. “The Good In Everyone” unexpectedly popped and “The Lines You Amend” ironically wrapped a gruesome song about suicide into a lighthearted sound that I had come to unjustly expect from them. Those songs, and “Everything You’ve Done Wrong,” remain some of my favorites the band has released to this day.

MP3 Sloan “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” (Purchase)

I Mother Earth was a strange band in some ways. They came out of the gate with a really sharp edge on their 1993 album Dig. Some of that same grittiness translated to the first single from 1996′s Scenery & Fish, “One More Astronaut,” but a lot of the album showcased a smoother sound. The band’s singer, Edwin Ghazal, later left the group and he was replaced, but that didn’t really pan out…

MP3 I Mother Earth “Used To Be Alright” (Purchase)

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Side 2: Fine, Thank You.

To say that I hated Our Lady Peace following the release of Clumsy would be a bit much, but having “Superman’s Dead’ seemingly playing everywhere all the time for months on end got a little tiresome. Before that though, I really dug into the band’s debut, Naveed. It was cool, and more importantly it was pretty good. I remember a friend putting the tape into his boombox while we played street hockey; how much more Canadian can it get? One of my personal highlights of 2009 (with the blog, at least) was having the opportunity to interview the band’s lead singer Raine Maida. It was the first, and to this point only, phone interview I’ve ever done and I was nervous as shit. I mean, I’ve been listening to the guy for a decade and a half, and here he is on the other end of the phone. We talked about mixed martial arts, it was pretty rad.

MP3 Our Lady Peace “Starseed” (Purchase)

If there’s a running theme here, it’s how much impact Much Music had on my listening habits in the ’90s. Sometime late in the decade the station used Squarepusher’s “Come On My Selector” as the song for one of their commercials, but earlier in the decade they used “Shine.” Or maybe it was the theme song for one of their shows, I can’t really remember. Regardless, the introductory riff hooked me. The band released a couple albums but none of them matched 1993′s Crush.

MP3 The Doughboys “Shine” (Purchase)

As ridiculous as they are, Gob was one of the bands that helped introduce me to punk. Despite eventually Avril-ing it up with “I Hear You Calling” I can’t really say much bad about the band. At the time I was listening to Rancid’s …And Out Come The Wolves a lot and Gob fell right alongside them; except they were ridiculously over the top with immature humor in both their songs and videos (see: “Soda” or their album Ass Seen On TV). All the more reason to love them.

MP3 Gob “You’re Too Cool” (Purchase)

There’s really not much I remember about Furnaceface. Actually, I’m pretty sure there’s not too many people who can remember much about Furnaceface. Ultimately when looking back, I remember just a handful of things:

1) The music video for the song was pretty cool at the time. I enjoyed it and it spurred me to go out and purchase the CD. Apparently it doesn’t exist on the internet though. Someone needs to resolve this.

2) I purchased the CD at a store called Tramps—where I also purchased one of the band’s patches which I sewed onto my backpack—which also sold comic books, VHS tapes, video games and book-books; I got it as one of a ridiculous amount of CDs I purchased on Boxing Day during their half-price sale (which was an annual event that I looked forward to every year). I remember going home and turning the stereo up, putting this on, and enjoying life. Then I listened to some Jamiroquai. Don’t ask me why I remember this.

3) One of the other songs on the CD was called “Biff Bang Pow,” which was also released as a music video. For some reason this video is on the internet.

4) One day my friend Ryan and I were playing the CD and we added “Cara” to the equation, creating a song called “Biff Bang Pow Cara.” While we were both in no way capable of following through with anything like that with the most beautiful girl in all of junior high, it made sense at the time.

MP3 Furnaceface “Slip and Stumble” (Purchase)

Huevos Rancheros were a surf/instrumental band from Calgary that I first latched onto because they filmed a video at Lloyds Rollercade, a roller skating rink that I used to go to with a friend of mine every so often. Because we were so badass however, we used to rollerblade there rather than wear their tacky rollerskates. I know, pretty baller.

MP3 Huevos Rancheros “Rockin’ In The Henhouse” (Purchase)

Much Music used to have a lineup of fantastic programs that showcased a wide array of music, two of which were called something along the lines of Much West and Much East; I would almost bet that those weren’t the titles, but they were something close. Anyways, the Super Friendz were represented on the East show, and to me, the band upheld a sound that was representative of a lot of Eastern bands (they were from Halifax), exuding lighthearted pop rock with soft vocals set over inoffensive guitars. The song itself isn’t anything too special, and this is another case where I really came to enjoy it based on the now-apparently-non-existant music video. It’s a good memory all the same.

MP3 The Super Friendz “Karate Man” (Purchase)

Many viewers of MTV in the early-to-mid ’90s may have caught a bit of Moist if they followed Beavis and Butthead, the band’s “Push” made a cameo as one of the videos the duo tore apart in one episode. My single-greatest Moist moment came down to a free performance they held at a shopping mall—Southcentre—in support of their 1996 album Creature. It was only supposed to be a brief “public appearance,” but overcrowding by a flood of teenagers instantly created a bit of mayhem (or at least what I perceived to be mayhem at the time, my definition of the term has since evolved a bit) as textbooks, binders and other crap began to fly as soon as the band touched down with their first note. I think the whole thing lasted about 15 minutes, so it wasn’t really a huge deal, but it was a lot of fun at the time. That night Moist was opening for Neil Young at the Saddledome… I can’t imagine that they were met with the same reception.

MP3 Moist “Silver” (Purchase)

This song represents a lot of Canadian rock from this era to me. There’s nothing remarkably special about it on the surface: at its core the song comes down to a cool riff, a memorable, if brief, chorus and a short solo. But it was received well by radio stations and remained a mainstay until I left the country in 2001. It is what it is, but I happen to think it’s a great song.

MP3 Junkhouse “Out of My Head” (Purchase)

When I first heard Rusty it was through the medium of their music video for 1995′s “Misogyny.” I could’ve cared less about the song and moved on. But as time went by I became a little more interested in the group and eventually ran across their 1995 album Fluke. I still look to a few songs from that album, “Groovy Dead” and “California” as some of my favo(u)rites of the genre/era. Best I can tell though, the spark that lit the fire of interest came from “Empty Cell.”

MP3 Rusty “Empty Cell” (Purchase)

Casual listeners might remember the Odds because of the Kids in the Hall. While they weren’t as essential to the troupe as Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet, the gang starred in the Odds’ music video for “Heterosexual Man,” which received a bit of play on both sides of the border. The Odds were really hot and cold throughout their career (wow, just looked it up and apparently they reformed in 2007), and I stopped following them with the release of the 1996′s Nest.

MP3 The Odds “The Truth Untold” (Purchase)

The Tea Party went through many stages, and even back in the ’90s they seemed a little insincere. Starting out with Splendor Solis (their second album, but first in many people’s books)—which was admittedly a really good album—they sounded pretty much just like an updated version the Doors. They didn’t even try to hide it. Later they moved into a hybrid, retaining some of their older sound while moving into a deeper “rock” groove, and with 1997′s Transmission they moved into this bizarre (excuse the pun) stage which included bits and pieces of soft industrial/hard rock. They released three more albums before disbanding in 2005.

MP3 The Tea Party “The Bazaar” (Purchase)

To say that you’ve never heard of Tom Cochrane is one thing, but to say that you’ve never heard Tom Cochrane is another. While played to death, “Life is a Highway” is still a classic; despite Rascal Flatts pissing all over it and turning the toilet paper into gold for the soundtrack to Disney’s Cars. Cochrane’s older stuff (well, it’s all older stuff) is pretty memorable too, but my favo(u)rite song of his might be “The Boy Inside The Man.” It just so happens that the song wasn’t released in the ’90s though, so here’s “No Regrets.” Oh, and Mad Mad World has sold over one million copies in Canada (just like Our Lady Peace’s aforementioned Clumsy). Think about that for a moment… that means that between 4-5% of the country owns a copy of the record. Not bad for a dude that’s pretty much as old as my parents.

MP3 Tom Cochrane “No Regrets” (Purchase)