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Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog, Week 16

April 16, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Yes, another song not written by me, from the same 1991 demo as the last two weeks' entries: "Wild Flower." However, I did play this 40 million times and wrote the swell bass line and contributed to the somewhat out-of-tune backing vocals. The performance is actually pretty darn good, and the recording was only left off of the eventual album because we preferred to show off the later line-up instead. This song (also written by Steve Petrinko when he was in high school) was our crowd pleaser and set opener, and everyone got to do a solo (well, I don't solo in this version, but there's a bass solo on the album version that's also linked there). Simple, fun, happy, cheesy. So why not just play this kind of stuff all the time and get many more frat party gigs? Not our ideology, I guess.

So I want to ask about the futility of art vs. playing what people like, but the subject tires me and the question is, I think, ill-formed. This song was and is a highlight for me, and if it's derivative, it's blocked out for me what it might be imitating, and Steve's hippie lyrics save it (for me) from the cringe-inducement involved in, e.g., the Spin Doctors, whose big album was released the summer after this recording was made. I buy the comedy here (whether it was intentionally comic or not), whereas for the Spin Doctors, I just don't, but this just points to the fact that it's hard to enjoy a band if the lead singer strikes you as a douchebag.

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