round 1
(2) the breeders, “cannonball”
wrapped up
(15) fishbone, “sunless saturday”
432-121
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 9.
One Long Splash: Susan Briante on “cannonball”
Most articles about the Breeders include an image of the Melody Maker cover from December 1993 featuring Kurt Cobain and Kim Deal. Cobain sneers. Deal looks like she’s exhaling from a long drag. The tinsel wrapped around their shoulders and necks seems oh-so-Gen-X-ironic. The holiday greetings are beside the point, the image provides a quick reference to star power these two anti-stars commanded that December.
In June 1993 The Breeders released “Cannonball,” the first single from their sophomore album Last Splash. It quickly became a grunge-pop anthem (named song of the year in 1993 by Melody Maker and NME) with a delicious and bubbling baseline, lifeguard whistle, layers of guitar distortion, girl-group harmonies and a nearly indecipherable chorus (“Want you coocoo cannonball,” according to Lyrics.com). The song opens with a deft mix of whatever was on hand sounds: Kim Deal yells “Check, Check, One, Two” into a distorted mic, and Jim Macpherson taps out a frantic little rhythm on a snare rim and cymbal stand. From there on in its loud and soft, polished and rough, clear and smeared and nothing but fun. The video (directed by Spike Jonze and Kim Gordon) shares in the delirium: a cannon ball rolls and bounces down sunny streets, Kim Deal alternates between singing at the mic and into a bowl of water. There are mirrors and costumes, deadpan expressions and joyful horseplay between Kim and her twin sister Kelley, the Breeder’s other vocalist and guitarist.
But nothing in that moment is as light-hearted as it seems. By 1994, Kelley Deal would be arrested for heroin possession and end up in rehab. Kim would battle with drugs and alcoholism. The Breeders would not release their next album until 2002 without Macpherson or The Last Splash bassist Josephine Wiggs. And, of course, four months after the Melody Maker cover Kurt Cobain would be dead.
At its worst, grunge can be moody as fuck and kind of lame in the way it takes itself too seriously. Writing in the midst of a pandemic, in the wake of a white supremacist attempt at insurrection and during the worst economy since the Great Depression, it’s hard for me to remember why my generation was so angry and sad. Reading interviews from the time doesn’t help. “It’s not fair that folk singers preach a happy message and the goodness of living off the land and ‘if I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning.’ That doesn’t exist,” Kim Deal told Rolling Stone in 1994. “…When I grew up and went to Sunday school, they said that it was going to be really great, and God is love, and God is good. I believed everything everybody told me. And that’s why I’m so pissed off now….”
“I just thought it was gonna be better,” she said. “Just . . . life. I thought it was gonna be better.”
At the time Deal registered her complaint, she had been playing and touring for 8 years as the bassist for The Pixies. The Breeders started out as a side project but became her main gig when The Pixies split up. The Breeders opened for Nirvana, rose in the charts and fell into their own drama and addictions. By the mid-90s, Deal was blacking out on stage.
And yet, despite of all the rage, melancholy, and self-destruction, The Breeders’ music could always take you someplace else. That’s what makes “Cannonball,” an infectiously catchy song that croons and sneers, distorts and harmonizes, so great. Like the Breeders, the tune starts, interrupts itself, stops, and comes together finally in an undeniably pleasurable way. Even now, how can you listen to it and not want to shake your ass or grab your skateboard or fling yourself into a thrashing crowd in front of a stage?
Despite all of their stops and starts, the Breeders with the Deal sisters at their center never died, although they went through various iterations and long stretches between albums. A Dutch documentary on the group (The Real Deal) features the 2002 incarnation of the band playing “Cannonball” before the barred windows of an East LA stucco home. They perform at what looks like a yard party with people milling around and drinking beer in the background. There’s no riff on the drum rim to open the song. Kim plays an electric instead of an acoustic guitar. This version feels a little leaner and maybe a little slower as Kim sings squinting into the sun. As the documentary continues, the band (which at the time included bass player Mando Lopez, drummer Jose Mendeles, and guitarist John Presley) walks the neighborhood where they live, buying treats from an ice cream truck, listening to a street corner mariachi band. In other scenes, Kelley knits, Kim gets high and beads. The Deals have always had a kind of I-don’t-give-a-fuck swagger. Kim used to the cover her grays with shoe polish. One commentator from The Pixies documentary Gouge, recounts seeing her slick back her hair before going on stage by rubbing her hands on a ham slice from a green room buffet. In The Real Deal, that attitude is on full display. The Deal twins smoke too many cigarettes and walk on the railroad tracks. They finish each other’s sentences. Kelley braids Kim’s hair in a gloomy house. “I struggle with staying sober,” Kelley says. “I don’t drink or smoke pot. I miss the narcotics. I only relapse on heroin.” By this time grunge has given way to something else. When Kim sings “Off You,” the first single from the band’s album Title TK, you get the sense that band is moving right along with whatever that is.
And they’ve kept moving.
That Melody Maker cover from 1993 displays all the antifashion and screw-you power of the moment: the mismatched, thrift store clothes; the irreverent cover models. (“Advertising looks and chops a must!” Stephen Malkmus screams on Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair” in another kind of anthem of the moment.) But antifashion became fashion; the 1994 Rolling Stone article on the Breeders describes in detail the Deal sisters’ sartorial choices. The reporter notes Kim’s “clunky J. Crew luggers, which she buys in a men’s size” and Kelley’s “black, ragged Florsheim ankle boots, one of which has duct tape wrapped around it to keep the sole from flopping open.” By then all of it—the style and the music—had become just another commodity. And maybe that in and of itself would have been enough to depress any young artist.
I was a moody-as-fuck kid when I begged my mother to buy me a pair of Doc Marten boots for my birthday circa 1994. I wore them with sundresses and cardigans as I walked the streets of Mexico City where I studied, translated for an art magazine, and lived for a good part of the 1990s. At the time, I was no more articulate than Kim Deal about what was so overwhelmingly rotten about the world I was growing up into, even with all of my considerable privilege and good fortune. Despite my initial dismissals (see section 2, above), life in the 90s was as violent and unjust as it anything facing us today: the Gulf War, the Bosnia war, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, the brutal beating of Rodney King, the LA uprisings, NAFTA—the continuation of so much of that foundational evil that dogs us today.
I still have those Doc Martens. They’ve come in handy over the last 30 years substituting for work, snow, or hiking boots. Although they are back in fashion, I wear them because they feel more comfortable than most of my shoes on the days when I park my car in a neighborhood adjacent the university where I work and walk a mile to my office to avoid paying for parking.
The Breeders are back in fashion, too. When The Last Splash line up reunited to record a new album, All Nerve, in 2018, The New York Times, the New Yorker and the Guardian wrote pieces hailing the band’s return. Still, they are no longer the center of any music universe.
The Deals have returned to their hometown of Dayton, Ohio, to help care for their mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s. Kim lives down the street from her parents. Kelley lives only a few blocks away as does Macpherson, who keeps a day job as a carpenter. When they began recording the latest album, Wigg left her Brooklyn apartment to live in Kim’s attic. Speaking to The Guardian, Kim remarked “…just look outside my window… Nothing. Nobody recognizes us or knows us at all.” Being where you need to be or where you can be useful, doing what you want to do without the approval of an industry—there’s something that feels authentically grunge about that to me.
Journalists no longer comment on what the Deals are wearing, but they look great. In an appearance on Later…with Jools Holland the band plays a tight and fun version of “Cannonball.” Wigg looks like a hip grad school professor. Kelley’s face shows the beautiful lines of a woman in her 50s who hasn’t been Botox-ed, filled, or tucked. You can see the age in Kim’s face as well as she screams and smiles and blows into a lifeguard whistle. It might be stage lights, but it might also be shoe polish that leaves her hair with a kind of sheen.
An earlier version of this essay incorrectly stated that the Deals returned to Akron instead of their hometown of Dayton, OH. WTF, says the author, who is embarrassed about the mistake. But perhaps fucking up is as grunge as it can get.
Susan Briante is the author, most recently, of Defacing the Monument. She lives and works in Tucson, AZ.
Who put Angelo in a straitjacket?Carolyn Kellogg on “sunless saturday”
Fishbone: screwed by fate, screwed by the music industry, and now even screwed by March Plaidness. How can they possibly take down “Cannonball,” one of the most lasting songs of the era? And, as so many people asked me, Are they even grunge? Not really, although this song is. No genre ever contained them. Recordings didn’t capture them. And here I am, trying to describe them. Stay for a spell as I tell you about the gorgeous brilliant mad ensemble that tore through the Los Angeles music scene and never, no matter how hard they tried, not with their almost-breakthrough 1991 record “The Reality of My Surroundings,” nor its grungy ditty “Sunless Saturday” and its music video by Spike Lee, not did they ever crash into the national consciousness like they should have.
The best way to experience Fishbone was to be at a live show in the late ‘80s. I regret that I can’t take you there, so here’s the deal: six guys come out and make a wild fast racket, a punk band with a horn section, tunes spinning between ska (I mean, ugh, but what are you going to do) and singalong anthems and sheer speed and funk and country and who knows what. Angelo was the frontman, manic and goofy and intense, running, climbing scaffolding, wearing a mohawk and pinstriped suits and suspenders plus freak-psychedelic hats and glasses, hurling himself into the pit which carried him aloft always. But even given Angelo’s charisma, and with a counterpoint leader in Norwood on bass, the band was a full-blown presence on stage: they *all* ran around and swapped spots and took turns on vocals or harmonized all at once, jumped on each other’s backs, stripped down, pogoed, rolled around, leapt in the air. Joyful combustion veering into chaos.
What I didn’t know then, but know now, is that they met in junior high. They were Black kids at an affluent white school in Woodland Hills who bonded, five bussed from a bad part of South LA. At the center of the group was Norwood Fisher; Fish, the drummer (Philip Fisher), his little brother; Chris Dowd played keyboards; Kendall Jones, guitar; “Dirty” Walt Kibby II, trumpet. Angelo Moore appeared in 9th grade, brought up Jehovah’s Witness and one of the first Black families to move into the white school district. They practiced at Norwood’s mom’s apartment in south LA, getting really good at making music together that didn’t sound quite like anyone else. They won a high school battle of the bands, then started playing out at punk clubs.
The rest should be history, but it’s largely invisible. What if, instead of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones being the center of the popular rock narrative, it had been James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone? I recently read a review that sniffed at the obvious “Everyday People” influence on Fishbone’s 1991 song “Everyday Sunshine.” But what if Sly Stone had been the root of all the popular music that came after? What if the mainstream had been allowed to be creative and funky? What if white music executives hadn’t payola’d the airwaves with Led Zeppelin et al while creating a separate market for soul music? Would it be so hard to have both together? Why did Prince have to be an outlier? What I’m saying is, in this alternate reality, you’d know who Fishbone was. Their grunge foray would be a blip in a cheerier, chart-topping discography; their many personalities would have held together instead of fracturing under the strain of dreams unfulfilled. They’d release well-praised late records and take lucrative nostalgia tours, tinker in home recording studios. They’d be like their more famous friends, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, or the kids who took a few pages from their playbook, No Doubt. But that was not their path, at least, not yet, not quite.
Fishbone hit LA’s punk scene in early ‘80s in what was not quite the first wave: the iconic punk club The Masque had closed in 1978, Darby Crash of The Germs died in 1980. Bands like The Circle Jerks and X and the Minutemen were still playing around town in 1983 and 1984, but a fleet of slightly younger or newer bands were coming up, like Fishbone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Thelonious Monster. Fishbone landed a deal with Columbia, releasing their first record, an EP titled Fishbone, in 1985. Then came the full lengths In Your Face in 1986, Truth and Soul in 1988, more of the messes of genres with lyrics that were part socially conscious, part partytime. In 1991 Columbia released The Reality of My Surroundings, the band’s first CD, not vinyl, album. I know. That’s how I bought it.
From here it all seems like one era, but at the time it felt like several epochs. I started going to shows in LA in 1986 or’87, and by the time of this grunge song in question, I’d seen Fishbone approximately a zillion times, so frequently on bills with Thelonious Monster and the Red Hot Chili Peppers that it felt almost trite. I’d also dropped out of college, and gone back—and then dropped out again, and then gone back again. I’d learned to skateboard, worked graveyard at an all-night cafe called Gorky’s, driven a shit-brown Pinto until it lost reverse, assistant edited a film and drove to Sundance to watch it, lived in a couple of those houses where people are always coming and going, organized divestment protests and painted pro-choice graffiti, been to hundreds of terrible poetry readings, drunk a thousand cheap beers, driven across the country a dozen times, and been to as many shows as I could get to.
I was an avid music fan, but just a fan. Going to shows was essential, amazing. I was thrilled, it was enough, it was everything, to get there and listen and throw myself into the pit, back out to be safe, to move and clap and holler. Of course there were girls who went to shows to hook up with bands—one in particular would perch on the edge of the stage, and you could tell who she was sleeping with by who kicked her off and who let her stay there. It never seemed like a possibility to me? Maybe if I’d been prettier. Maybe if I hadn’t casually absorbed enough feminism to think “I’m With the Band” was a cute sixties cliche. (Due respect to Pamela DesBarres: It’s a great book). To me, the musicians seemed impossibly far away up there on stage, even if it was only the stage at The Roxy or the Music Machine.
The thing is, I knew they weren’t that far away—I remember seeing Angelo once at Rocket Video and working up the courage to compliment him on his shoes. (I realize that memory is a tricky thing, these are mine, forgive any shuffle and bleed.) Friends lived in an apartment near Melrose and La Brea, three guys with a pool table and “King of New York” on endless repeat; it was a great place to kill time (so much time, we had so much time). Their downstairs neighbor was a friendly, beautiful woman who let piles of us join her for “Beverly Hills 90210”-watching parties. She was Flea’s ex, raising their toddler daughter. If I’d wanted to meet a real Red Hot Chili Pepper, I could have. But I’d seen them play Raji’s and wasn’t that the best version of knowing them? And what would I say?
It’s not like anybody in the music scene had any interest in my college studies, that I was president of the International Relations Undergraduate Association, that I was going to departmental faculty meetings, that I was in an honors English program and I had once stumbled into a Derrida lecture on campus—not *about* Derrida, Derrida himself, sitting there with an English translator, fielding astronomically pompous questions with wry humor.
I don’t think I even told anybody that I had a radio show at my college station, because no one could hear it unless they were on campus, and who would want to listen when our station manager had decided our format was Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode, and yes, it was awfully late for that to be our format but there you go. So I was on freeform Sundays, playing my noisy and funky LA bands, anything new with a weird name like Too Much Joy, and the loud as shit 45s that were coming down from Seattle every month.
In 1991 I felt like I had lived several lifetimes but maybe was on a path of not fucking up, and maybe that’s what it felt like to be in Fishbone. They’d started out in punk clubs and gotten signed right away. They’d toured with the Beastie Boys. They’d appeared in a Disney movie, “Back to the Beach,” and an indie movie, Tapeheads. But they weren’t at all central; the charts over the last few years had been dominated by hair metal, a totally different scene, or very polished pop. They still didn’t sound like anyone else, and while now you could find similarities in bands like Faith No More and Primus, they were truly sui generis. They remained solidly popular with the college/alternative music set; that summer they’d be part of the first Lollapalooza tour.
If you’d asked any of us then, maybe we’d known something was going to blow mainstream music apart. Billboard charts were full of crap. The music industry was full of bloat. All the good stuff was happening around the edges. That fall, I liberated an advance CD from my college radio station because I was the only DJ who’d ever played their other stuff: blue cover, floating baby—Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”
Of course that sound—the heavy guitars and hooky vocals—had been coming out of Seattle, Chicago, Boston. Maybe Fishbone guitarist Kendall Jones was listening to Mudhoney or Dinosaur Jr. when he composed “Sunless Saturday,” because The Reality of My Surroundings was released in April 1991, and Nevermind wasn’t out until September (or a few weeks earlier, keys to the advance CD cabinet permitting). The band’s next record out in 1993, Give A Monkey a Brain and He’ll Swear He’s the Center of the Universe, had many more heavy guitars, so it seemed like a natural progression. (In one of the stranger stories of the era, Kendall left the band then for personal reasons, which may have involved his father recruiting him into a religious cult, which a few friends, including Norwood tried to break him free of, for which Kendall turned around and actually sued them for kidnapping, taking them to court.) Anyway, on the track, Kendall starts with acoustic riffs then BOOM the band comes in, the perfect grunge style quiet-LOUD dynamics, with the guitars slamming in heavy electric.
“I see the pestilence outside my window,” Angelo sings in the opening line, an anthem, sadly, for the ages. He looks out the window at “dung heaps” and “shards of shattered dreams in the street.” Then, “I face the morning with my customary sigh.” Such ennui for such a brassy band! So far from where they started with “Party at Ground Zero” which, sure, has an atomic blast but also, you know, a party!
Now it’s 1991 and Fishbone is down in the dumps. There’s not a whisper of a trumpet or brass. Angelo sings of seeing children then begs the sun to come and “chase these clouds away / I hate this sunless Saturday.” Chris Dowd’s keyboard trills up and down. That’ll stick with you, the keyboard line. There are big guitars and heavy drums. Kendall does an ace guitar solo. “Perhaps the charcoal gray and brown around me / Is just the mirror image of my tainted soul,” Angelo sings. It’s grungy grunge grunge, from its imagery to its misery. Black hole sun, won’t you come and wash away the rain?
Spike Lee’s video starts with children in wire cages, and damn if that man wasn’t ahead of American society by a few decades. Half the video are the kids, trying to get out of their cages and also in a New York playground, playing with toy guns, lying down with chalk outlines. Spike Lee, again, with the prescient, present social commentary. A cop car rounds a curve. Bits of New York skyline are black on gray. Don’t worry, the kids are just playing, they run off in the end, cute in puffy coats. Spike Lee is a genius, of course, and the video is entirely fitting for the Fishbone grungy dirge.
My trouble with it is the Fishbone part. The band is also in wire cage, all smushed together, miming playing their instruments. In a way it’s a callback to the cover of their first EP, where all 6 members are crowded together yet nearly busting out of the frame. But it’s also a strange thing to do to a band with so much stage presence, so much motion in their performance. They can’t hardly move in their cage. And their style is tamped-down, subdued. Angelo wears a gray suit. Then he’s on his own in another cage, bound in a straitjacket. I mean, I get the message and straitjackets were a common music video meme, but what kind of Fishbone-hating sadist at the label looked at the wild physical presence of the band’s frontman and said, wrap him up, don’t let him move his arms, tie him down tight. He even manages to do a front flip, almost, while bound up in it.
I would like the video a lot more if it was the only thing I knew of Fishbone.
But as someone who’d been seeing them live since I was using a fake ID, I knew so much more. Ska and soul, funk and punk, country riffs and hard noisy blasts, songs that only ended when they played so fast that they couldn’t play any faster. Fishbone as a band always had lots of personalities, and their push and pull on stage made the shows incomparable. I realize it’s really tough to put everything that the band could be into a single song, or a single music video, or a single cage. The only way to get them, really, is to take more than a single slice.
I’ve always thought of “Sunless Saturday,” the last song on The Reality of My Surroundings, as a counterpoint to the record’s other single, “Everyday Sunshine.” This is the song that wears its Sly Stone influence in not just its “Everyday People” knockoff title, but in its instrumentation and its entire vibe. Big fat happy chords, vocal harmonies, horns and keyboards in the front instead of growling guitars. I don’t care if it was what keyboardist Chris Dowd was talking about when he later told documentarians “I was going to write THE song. That was my little secret to myself. Like, OK, I’m going to write the song that blows us up.” It didn’t blow them up, but I love the song “Everyday Sunshine.” (The documentarians like it too—it’s the title of their movie). The music video could use a little less editing and the outdoor performances feel a bit forced, but it gets much closer to Fishbone’s strengths. Dynamic personalities all getting a chance to shine, unexpected musical interplay, chaos and joy.
The last time I saw Fishbone was in 2018 at an outdoor stage in Los Angeles, a show with five of the original members: Angelo and Norwood and Chris and Fish and Walt (and a different guitarist). They played Levitt Pavilion, a restored band shell in MacArthur Park, a place that when the band started was known for scoring heroin, and yes they sang their classic, “Junkie’s Prayer.” Everything from the singalong, dancealong “Bonin’ in the Boneyard” to the current-again “Subliminal Fascism.” The dense neighborhood full of old apartment buildings is mostly immigrant families with an influx youngish hipsters, and that night, a big dose of aging punks. I ran into people I hadn’t seen in years. All my fault, I didn’t get out to shows much. Everyone was grinning like crazy. It was Fishbone.
Carolyn Kellogg was books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years and in 2019 served as a judge of the National Book Award in nonfiction. Ages ago she got an MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh and can now be found sorting her records in Kingston, NY. Online she’s @paperhaus.