St. Johnny on the Spot

My third eye watches TV…

Saturday nights we stay up and watch SNL on TV. We usually make it to the Weekend Update with Seth Meyers. Which means we usually see the music acts that precede the news. Passion Pit on Oct 13 and FUN on Nov 3. “What is this crap?” Katherine asked during both performances.

I am immune/to falling rocks/and catchy tunes…

Remember when the Replacements played on SNL? Paul Westerberg bowed to the audience in drunken, mock allegiance.

What a mess – Video Dailymotion.

Now that’s the spirit. Unsafe, unruly, unkempt, unscripted, undeniable. Banned fron SNL after that.

You could have had a future but you had a fit!

So what happened to alternative music? If the music industry is dead, how come Bruno Mars is on SNL and not The Obits?

I’m feeling a bit of nostalgia for alternative music of the 80s and 90s. Let’s call it alternostalgia. Back then it was a steady diet of Fugazi, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, fIREHOSE, Pond, the Jesus Lizard, Pavement, Sebadoh, Guided by Voices, Chavez, St Johnny…

This coffee is cold, this highway is black…

One of my favorite alternostalgia records has got to be “Speed is Dreaming” by St Johnny. I bought this on cassette at the Great Escape in Nashville around 1996 and I am surprised that it didn’t fuse itself to the cassette player in my car. It has everything I loved about alternative music back then, both a wall of dissonant, overdriven guitars and a deadpan vocalist.

I still know very little about this band. I think they were signed to DGC by Thurston Moore. But who knows. I used to wonder if singer Bill Whitten was in some way a part of the Twisted Village family. But Whitten is from Connecticut and the Twisted Village records family was more of a Harvard/Northhampton thing.

What I do know is that I still find joy in listening to this album. The I-could-give-a-fuck vocals undersell some fucking brilliant lyrics.

Someone uploaded it all to youtube, of course, if you’re tape deck ain’t working: