No particular song stood out this month, but an album did: Sloan started listening to Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom Live At Pearl’s, and many of those songs took up residence in my head.
For those not there at the time: Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom was a short-lived but wildly popular acoustic trio from Austin, Texas that got their start playing outdoor pickup sets at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. The songs were silly, catchy, fun and hearkened back to the Violent Femmes, so of course they exploded into The New Hotness. The only problem was, none of the three (Davíd Garza, Chris Searles and Jeff Haley) ever thought their silly busking would amount to anything, they had other career ideas in mind, and some label suits in New York hated their audition when they presented their songs. So Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom collapsed after ten months and never recovered.
Fortunately, I was able to record their last live show when it was broadcast on KLBJ-FM in October 1990 (yes, on cassette tape), and digitized it a few years back. Now such persona favorites as Your Only 8 Ball, Nicotine Queen and Big Stick live on in Sloan’s CD player.
And Twang Twang has personal resonance for me, because I ran into one of their early outdoor shows before they exploded (yup, proto-hipster here), picked up quite a bit of unconscious lessons about how to craft a song from these creations, and even jumped on stage with a friend to help Davíd sing Ob La Dee Ob La Da by the Beatles at one of their club gigs. Excellent early college memories!