Winamp Wednesday is our continuing series about songs I fed into the music player Winamp in the wild-west days of the MP3. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today’s track…
Marvelous 3, “Freak of the Week”
All hail Butch Walker, who could make the metalheads cry.
Let’s go back in time about twenty-five years and let’s go a little bit north to Rensselaer, New York so that we can drop in on the studios of WQBK-FM, “The Edge” in the Capital Region. Here is the state of Rock Radio in early 1999: Alternative as we knew it is all but dead, a tombstone that has both The Colour and the Shape of Dave Grohl creating a new path. The heavy bands are almost too heavy for radio; 103.5-103.9 was a frequency where you would hear Stabbing Westward but not a hint of metal-adjacent like Sevendust or the fully Industrial like KMFDM or Rammstein. The New Rock Alternative would therefore swing wildly between extremes in an attempt to cover everything that was new and noteworthy and not too much for drive-time. My off-air recording from early February 1999 includes Eagle-Eye Cherry’s “Save Tonight” and Everlast’s “What It’s Like” alongside Cake’s “Never There”, which feeds into my thesis that 1999 was its own ecological music niche.
(I’d like to thank the intrepid listeners who saved more than a half-hour of airchecks off The Edge back in 1997 so you get an idea of what we were dealing with. This lineup is fantastic: The Foos, K’s Choice, even a new band called Blink-182.)
Even in this eclectic assortment Marvelous 3 feels slightly out of step, both of the past and of a tenuous future. There’s echoes here of bands that had almost made it over the past few years, all of whom owe debts to the rock-inside-new-wave movement of the Late 70s. Several reviews noted Marvelous 3’s indebtedness to Elvis Costello, and singing “I’ve got a shrink, I swear he’s Elvis, I think” in that pinched-nerve croon that typifies My Aim is True and This Year’s Model proves the point. But the real lie is in the production, and that Jim Ebert also produced Meredith Brooks’ Blurring the Edges (as well as one of my favorites from 1998, Everything’s Supernatural) and would go on to produce records for SR-71, All Time Low, and Hot Chelle Rae is not at all surprising. “Freak of the Week” is the crossroads where we stood at the beginning of 1999, where we could either head towards “everything sounds like it is produced by or is actually produced by Ric Ocasek” or “post-hardcore band members getting really into crunchy guitars and harmonies”.
As it stands still in 1999 “Freak of the Week” has a surplus of ideas in service of the last gasp of Nineties Posturing. The very idea of selling out had already been lampooned and shot into the sun by a Reel Big Fish, and the age of the new media star was nearly upon us. The concerns of fame that it put forward, being different because you were a face on TV, the fight against monoculture conformity, were starting to feel as old hat as the Swing Revival. The age of the Internet was upon us and anything seemed possible. Not only did we have access to all the Pop in the world through Napster and Shockwave and RealPlayer, but we could start to find our own little niches of weird art and mini-celebrities. I didn’t have to care about dumb teen movies ostensibly made for me because I had badmovies.org to help me find old oddities, and I didn’t need to know the names of the Backstreet Boys because Internet Celebrities were so much more interesting. (Hey, remember JenniCam?) The macrocosm that made GenX care about who was a sell out felt like it was exploding and letting us make our own canon. The structure of “Freak of the Week” reflects this as it throws angry chorus on top of frantic verse, culminating in one last taunt to the previous decade:
“Tell me I sold out. Tell me I sold out, go ahead.”
That’s what really made the song feel like it was on the edge of The Edge. It was something else, but what was it? A curtain call? A clarion call? A Rosetta Stone for a language that had yet to be spoken? This song and the entirety of Hey! Album make more sense in my collection now than they did upon first release. Marvelous 3 was a few years ahead, not so much a vision of the future as the first to the party. They’re blowing up the balloons so the dance floor can be just right.
You’d hear this tune constructing other hits like Lego brick notes in the years ahead: the layers on “make me a promise” are Weezer Green, the muttered “tell me I sold out, go ahead” everyone from NFG to FOB in the coming Emo storm. If it sounds like this band is writing the future by reaching back to the past, it’s because those involved would eventually do just that. Co-producer, lead singer, and songwriter Butch Walker bounded away from the untimely demise of Marvelous 3 to become an in-demand punch-up artist, producing, writing, and playing backup for…
Weezer, Bowling for Soup, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Train, P!nk, Avril Lavigne, Fall Out Boy, The Academy Is…, Panic! at the Disco, Green Day, The All-American Rejects, Hot Hot Heat, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, The Struts, Pete Yorn, and that’s just scratching the surface.
Perhaps only Adam Schlesinger had a bigger influence on American pop music going into the mid-2000s. And while the frontman of Fountains of Wayne always seemed to revel in pastiche to allow something new to form, one can’t help but see Butch Walker’s similar constructions as slightly less joyous. He became the guy to bring in when you needed a reinvention; for better or worse, “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Walker can write a chorus for someone else like none other, but he tended to save the best ones for himself. My favorite post-Marvelous solo number of his is “Song for the Metalheads”, and when you take a glance at the lyrics you see a summation and a warning. Of nostalgia, of constant propping-up of old properties, of maybe anything like what I write here. Of forgetting how to make your own communities and finding joy in reinvention and creation, of becoming old and not having to say “hey, remember [X-Y-Z]” because [X-Y-Z] is now deified and returning to theaters for a sixth po-faced installment. We didn’t stop it before it began and now it’s out of control. It’s dangerous to have been at the crossroads and keep returning to pillage it, because:
“When you live in the past, there’s one thing that will last/Is resentment that time won’t sit still…”
Next Time: I have a present. It is the present.