I think of the Soup Dragons as one of the highly favored bands of the 90FM DJs during the early nineties, but I’m not sure I’m correct about that. As I’ve written before, they were a fiarly unlikely band for me to champion at the time with their glammy, danceable grooves standing in marked contrast with the one-foot-in-the-gutter rough-hewn guitar rock that I favored. The Soup Dragons sounded like they knew what they were doing in a recording studio, understood how to get the most out of the technology at their control. They didn’t sound overly manufactured, but there was definite glossiness to their records. Looking back, there were plenty of bands that could be described the same way that I absolutely adored, but I probably never would have listed the kind of attributes found on those records as something I was seeking when listening to new music.
The Soup Dragons always held some unnameable appeal for me, though. I regularly played tracks from the earlier albums that predated my appearance at the station, and when I first had the opportunity to play one of their albums from the new music rotation (which always afforded the bliss of constantly revisiting the same great record while simultaneously honoring the station’s full-on commitment to new music), I grabbed a hold of it. It was a regular part of my playlists the whole time it tracked through rotation, from heavy to medium to light, all the way down to the bottom shelf of the most frayed and worn new releases that we dubbed NMS, an acronym that I can no longer say with authority what it stood for. Once it moved to the main library, I revisited it as much as was prudent, occasionally even a little more than that.
So I was really primed when the Scottish band’s follow-up arrived two years later. I think of Hotwired as an enormous success, the sort of late spring effort (it was released in April of 1992) that was prominent of the station through the summer, fueled by the sort of attention-getting, pulse-racing singles that were made to coax car windows down to let in the sun and wind. Or maybe just to lead off mix tapes. Regardless, I think of those songs as being everywhere for us through that year, blasting at parties and sparking across the airwaves at nearly every last DJ’s behest. Maybe that was the case (the lead single, “Divine Thing,” made it to #3 on the Billboard Modern Rock Singles chart and must have had similar success on the CMJ equivalent), but it could be that my memory is playing tricks with me.
Then again, maybe not. When I hear “Pleasure,” which was the second single off of the album, the sights and sounds (and let’s not forget the smells) comes rushing back to me. There are other bands that more clearly represented the bygone sound of 90FM to me–the Smithereens, the Replacements, R.E.M. and Material Issue, to name a few–but certain songs are a reminder to me that there were other groups and songs that occasionally elbowed their way into that select group.
(Disclaimer: As far as I can tell, Hotwired is no longer available as a physical item that a person can walk into their favorite local, independently-owned record store and buy it. In fact, most of the Soup Dragons’ discography seems to be out of print. It can be acquired through a digital purchase, but nuts to that. Regardless, the song is shared here with the understanding that it’s largely out of the fiscal mix for the band. Even with that belief, I will gladly remove it if I’m contacted by some with due authority to make such a request making that request.)
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Coffee for Two 
I just ate an entire piece of fudge that was the size of a child’s fist, and so this will not be the most coherent thing I say all day, but whataya got against downloads? Is it the convenience? The way they don’t destroy the environment? The speed?
Granted, there is something magical to hopping into my car, driving out to the Mall, going into “Tape World” or “Sam Goody” and wandering around among the stacks to flip through a set of discs to get to Soup Dragons, if they have it, and then waiting in line to have the Robert Smith lookalike ring up my purchase instead of the hot girl that is standing near the register just being hot, and then I get to go out to the car and rip open the package and throw the plastic on the floor where my McDonald’s fries bag is, too, and then listen to the CD in the order the person making it wanted me to instead of the freedom to listen to it however I want, plus I get to go back home and load that CD into my computer so I can play it on my iPod…
…wait, there’s nothing magical about that at all. I was mixed up.
True story: When I was 17, there was a Tape World at the mall near us, and a girl who worked there who was superhot. Her name was Tina. We called her “Tape World Tina” and we all wanted to date her. Once I danced with her at a teen bar.
THAT was magical.
I’m listening to “Divine Thing” as I write this, by the way. I don’t know what I started out saying. Darn fudge.
I actually appreciate downloads a great deal and have become highly dependent on them. As much as I sometimes miss the protracted hunt for favorite obscurities in musty old used record stores, I find a grand enjoyment in a modified version of the same practice online. Further, I greatly appreciate the wider availability of music that would otherwise be hopelessly, forever out of print by now.
My issue with downloads is primarily related to the rationalization-laden rules over what I’ll post in this weekly space. I strongly prefer not posting songs that can purchased in a way that provides due compensation to both the artist and the proprietor of a record store. The reason local, independently-owned record stores are denied compensation for an online purchase is obvious. As for the artist, a revelatory blog post from former Too Much Joy frontman and current Google employee Tim Quirk eradicated any hopeful doubts I may have had about the music industry abandoning their eternal inclination to screw talent. I don’t believe for a second that digital purchases made through Amazon, iTunes or a similar corporate online retailer are making their way fairly and duly to the artists in question, except in the cases where the artists have already made the labels so much money that the performers are already flush anyway. That’s why I’ll occasionally invoke something I can the Quirk Rule when I post something such as this Soup Dragons song, which can be bought online.
There’s one other thing that’s great about downloads, which is the occasional opportunity for the artist to take distribution largely into their own hands. For example, as much as I would love–and I do mean love to post songs by Michelle Shocked or the Sicilian Vespers in this weekly feature, clicking on the hyperlinks attached to their names in this sentence will show you that they seem to have secured greater ownership of their respective efforts and found a means to sell the material directly to the consumer. I still believe it would be “fair use” to post their songs, but I’d rather not give away something they can get paid for.
Wow. That’s a long answer. Insomnia will inspire such things, I suppose. I hope it’s cogent.
Tina sounds nice.