90 Songs That Explain My 90's: Volume V

Jambands, perfect songs, scandalous album art

Inspired by Rob Harvila’s podcast/book 60 Songs That Explain The ‘90s, in which he reads sprawling and personal and funny and weird and rambling essays about songs he believes explain how the 90’s were, I thought I’d write my own version: 90 Songs That Explain My ‘90s. Emphasis on the personal, hence the MY.

I promised no sprawling essays, though. Blurbs, I said, just blurbs. Or essay-sized blurbs. But that’s been more of an optimistic thought than an actual execution. This one has a footnote longer than some of my other posts. David Foster Wallace would be proud.

As always, you can listen along via ever-growing 90 Songs That Explain My 90s playlists on Spotify or on Apple Music, should you desire to follow along at home.

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This one is a lot. Like, a lot. Feel free to ingest it in pieces. Also: there is brief nudity, for those of you into or not into such things.

23. Spin Doctors - Two Princes (1991)

I’m gonna level with you. I loved the Spin Doctors. I cranked them as loud as my sibling-shared Toyota Camry would allow. I can’t defend it. I liked plenty of bands that, with hindsight, I can objectively sense are probably terrible from that era but my nostalgia kicks in and I still love them, irrationally¹. The Spin Doctors do not pass that test².

But, alas, I cannot front: I loved Spin Doctors. I loved the white-funkiness³. I loved the hippie-adjacent vibes. I loved the grooviness. I loved Eric Schenkman on guitar, a true blues-driven shredder. I loved how singer Chris Barron’s lyrics leaned into the romantic underdog role—a la “How Could You Want Him When You Know You Could Have Me?” (a rather direct song title) or “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” (summary: you are Jimmy Olsen, trying to woo Lois Lane at the same time as Superman). As a teenager who was scared to death of talking to anyone he was remotely attracted to (but also somehow, somewhere deep down, believed he would be a good boyfriend), Barron’s underdog lyrics (a precursor to Taylor Swift’s “She wears short skirts / I wear sneakers / She’s cheer captain / And I’m on the bleachers….you belong with me….”⁴) and their simultaneous low self-esteem and high self-belief spoke to me.

In retrospect, sometimes Barron’s underdog POV could veer into creepy/stalker territory, like:

”I know she needs me more than she knows.”

Ick.

Anyway, there was nothing cool about Spin Doctors. I think they knew that. So they just did what they wanted to do, which meant….a lot of things.

Scatting.

Slapping the bass.

Goatees.

Hippie-adjacent “fashion.”

I believe I already mentioned guitarist Eric Schenkman. Dude could play.

An abundance of patchouli.

A very 90s snare drum sound. CRACK!

And the lyrics. I know I just said how I connected with the romantic underdog lyrics. But that was just part of Barron’s lyrics. Not everything was romantic underdoghood.

There was another part. Two parts, actually.

The first? A love of pulling allusions—literary, historical, pop culture—out of his hat. Just off the top of my head, here are some names Barron drops in his lyrics: Caesar, Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s cat, Mark Antony, Ayatollah, Guildenstern & Rosencrantz, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Cain & Abel, Frankenstein, Einstein, Desi Arnaz, Athena, Sisyphus, Tarzan, King Saul…

The dude was well-read. Give him that.

The second part to note about the lyrics? Well, let’s play a little game. I’ll list some song titles and you guess whether they’re real Spin Doctors song titles or made-up by me. Answers in the footnotes:

- Big Fat Funky Booty⁵
- You Lie (And Yo Breath Stank)⁶
- Whatchu Thinkin’⁷
- Biscuit Head⁸
- You Shouldn’t Judge A Man (By The Hair On His Butt)⁹
- Everyone Loves A Fuzzy Butt¹⁰
- Yo Mama’s A Pajama¹¹
- All In The Groove¹²
- Unfunky UFO¹³
- I’d Like To Love You (But I Think You Might Be Crazy)¹⁴
- The Ballad of Bodacious¹⁵
- You Enjoy Myself¹⁶
-The Bigger I Laugh, The Harder I Cry¹⁷
- Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication¹⁸
- Ninety Three ‘Til Infinity And Beyoncé¹⁹
- Bringin’ Da Noise²⁰

So the lyrics were often more than a little doofy.

Making that list, it dawned on me that, as absurd and cringey as some Spin Doctors song titles are, there’s actually a direct line to their obvious influences (Parliament, Funkadelic, funk music in general) and peers (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Phish, jam bands) as a New York City funk band.

Still, though.

Let’s just move on.

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24. The La's - There She Goes (1990)

This is a perfect song. No notes.

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25. Golden Palominos- Little Suicides (1994)

Here’s a prime example of the Dilemmas We Faced When We Used To Buy Music.

So I first heard this song on Salt Lake City alt-rock radio station X96. Just one time, probably late at night. And I freaked out. The melancholy, slightly off-balance verses followed by the ultra-melodic, mega-singable chorus just floored me. There was no Shazam app to tell me who it was, so I impatiently waited a song or two until the DJ came back on and, luckily, he informed me that it was a band I’d never heard of called The Golden Palominos. I immediately wrote it down. This was pre-internet (in our house at least), so I couldn’t look them up on their own website (they still don’t have one) or Wikipedia or Angelfire or wherever. I also couldn’t hop on Napster or Deezer or DownloadKingzzz and download it, much less “streaming.” So they were just this mysterious, faceless musical entity of unknown origin with, as far as I knew, one nearly perfect song.

Singer Lori Carson’s voice had an unpolished (albeit gorgeous) fragility to it that was both refreshing (in a world of perfect contemporary singers like Celine Dion and Sade and Mariah Carey) and startlingly vulnerable. The lines that stuck with me:

“If love heals anything at all
We should be flying”

and

“Is there no stopping when it starts?
These old hearts
Just come apart”

A couple days later, X96 played the song again. And I had to have it.

So I drove to my local record store, Sound Off, with my little piece of paper that said “Golden Palominos” and had myself a little perusal. I sorted through some of the newer releases, albums I’d wanted for a long time (second tier Led Zeppelin albums, for instance), albums someone had told me about (Leonard Cohen, often), albums that seemed like they might be good (Beck’s debut album). If it felt like a Purchase Finalist, sometimes I’d carry it along with me, both to remember it and maybe to paranoidly make sure no one else nabbed it as I roamed the other aisles.

Eventually, I found myself in the G’s and there it was: Pure by The Golden Palominos.

In marketing, we sometimes talk about friction and specifically about removing friction from the purchasing process, i.e. helping prospects and potential customers easily get what they need/want. Clearing the runway. Shoveling the walks, so to speak.

Pure did not do that.

Not for 17-year old Mormon-raised, easily-embarrassed, perpetually-blushing pollyanna Paul Jacobsen. Nope. Pure laid on the friction. Doubled down. Because there, unmistakably large and unnaturally pink on the cover (taking up as much of the square as it, uh, “artfully”—pre-Kate Winslet in Titanic—could) was a woman’s bare breast.

You can see how it was not exactly hiding.

How was I gonna take this album cover to the store counter²¹, much less home?

Here in 2024, after 20+ years in the ad industry, the image seems pretty tame and unpornographic (to me), albeit still quite, uh, prominent. But at the time? It felt tantamount to carrying a spilling stack of Playboys into my parents’ house.

Friction.

So there I sat in Sound Off, holding a few different cassettes (yes, in 1994, I was still stubbornly devoted to cassette tapes; I didn’t bend to CDs until late 1997; we can talk about this later), including Pure, face—er, nipple—down against my leg. I probably had a single 20-dollar bill to my name and so there were a choice to be made.

I don’t want to tell you how long I would sometimes stand there in the record store, going back and forth in my mind and in the store. Deliberating. Agonizing. Picking one up. Putting one down. Picking it back up. Mulling like you’ve never mulled. Praying to the musical gods for some discernment re: will the whole album be good or just the one song?

I didn’t want to tell you how long and then I did anyway: it was a long time.

I eventually put down Beck’s Mellow Gold and whatever album Adam Duritz had name dropped in his latest interview (probably Dog’s Eye View or Propagandhi or something). And I plunked down my paper money for Pure. The clerk didn’t give me the “are you a perv” side-eye I was dreading, instead telling me about how this project was “cool” and how REM’s Michael Stipe had guested²² on some albums.

The second I got the shrink wrap off, I flipped the cover inside out²³, so it the cassette cover was now lyrics.

It had just one²⁴ great song²⁵ (thanks for nothing, musical gods).

But what a song.

1. For instance, I went whole-hog on jambands. It spanned the good, the bad, the ugly, and the really really ugly.

How have those bands aged for me?

I can still listen to a few Widespread Panic albums. They hold up.

I still put on the Dead quite a bit, actually. A couple of years ago, I was asked to play music at my friend Seth’s funeral. His widow, Shannon, asked that I only play Grateful Dead songs and I honestly loved jumping in and learning a good 5-6 new Dead tunes, including the elite Ship of Fools and Brokedown Palace. The Dead are the prototype for jam bands but they have some sneaky-great songwriting tunes.

Phish is spottier, but I still love some of it. I actually think I love different songs now than I loved then. Like, the reasons I put on Phish now are vastly different from why I might’ve listened back then. The musicianship is high, the songwriting is, like I said, spottier to my ears.

The Allman Brothers are legit. Don’t even start. Imagine having a band where, over your career, you had Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Warren Haynes, and Derek Trucks playing guitar. SOMETIMES A FEW OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME. (I saw Betts/Haynes/Trucks in the 90s.)

The Black Crowes are criminally underrated. Their musical peak is up there.

Big Head Todd & The Monsters had a few really good albums. They combined Stevie Ray-loving blues with alt-rock and a singer/songwriter sensibility really well.

Speaking of Colorado…The Samples? I can’t be objective. Their reggae-tinged sadboy things resides in my veins. If you went to East High School 92-97, you had no choice.

Freddy Jones Band is good, man. You’ve probably never heard them unless you listened to 105.7 The Mountain in the 1993. Their love of the delay pedal and my love for U2’s love of the delay pedal collided. I once got an email back from them and it made my year.

But then…

I got a Frank Zappa live album from my neighbor as a gift. Pretty sure he didn’t run that one past my dad. It was… an experience. I still quote one of the songs here and there, “who you jivin’ with that cosmic debris?” But I would never put it on, voluntarily.

Blues Traveler makes me feel sad about what my ears used to love. So many notes! And….scatting! And they were probably one of the bands, at the time, I loved the most. I owned at least four Blues Traveler albums and one t-shirt. My least favorite song of theirs (“The Hook”) was one of their biggest hits. I knew it was over when I saw them headline the HORDE tour in Boston and found myself thinking this absolutely-not-made-up thought: “Did Blues Traveler just get blown off the stage by BARENAKED LADIES?” That said, they’ve gotta be the best band ever in which the front person routinely wore a fishing vest onstage.

String Cheese Incident is…a lot. Too much.

I bought a Colonel Bruce Hampton & The Aquarium Rescue Unit album! No, actually I bought TWO! Imagine walking through the record store, debating where to spend your hard-earned cash, between Nirvana’s Nevermind and one of these albums. (I didn’t even own Nevermind until the mid 00s! I didn’t need to. It was everywhere.) I bought these instead. And tried to like them! Like really tried. It was a different time. A different me…

Rusted Root. I owned that album. I saw them in concert (opening for Allman Brothers). I put “Back To The Earth” on a few mixtapes, thinking it made me deep and granola-y. I can get onboard with idiosyncratic vocalists pretty easily (Dylan, Waits, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Daniel Johnston, Jeff Magnum, Bjork, Randy Newman), but man… a-mumbity-say a-mumbity-yah.

I have not wholly disavowed Dave Matthews Band like many of my contemporaries (Probably partially due to Yasi Salek’s constant advocacy on her podcast Bandsplain and a neighbor who lent me the album with Groogrux in the title) but I wouldn’t put them on most days. Still, I have said, in the past calendar year, “Hey Siri, play Number 42 by Dave Matthews Band” and Siri has played it and I have liked it.

I saw Bela Fleck & The Flecktones in concert at least three times. One of them was amazing, to my 17-year old ears, at least. Even with Future Man—a pirate playing an art class steampunk drum machine.

Maybe the show was awesome because of Future Man...

I rolled the dice on all kinds of jamband-adjacent records, like 1993’s Uncommon Goal by a band called Allgood that I must’ve read about in some magazine or seen that they had opened for one of the other bands. It wasn’t mind-blowing though it did feature a very good cover of Buddy Miles’ song “Them Changes” that turned me onto the even better version (the original).

All of this to emphasize: I was all in on the world of 90s jam bands.

2. And yet, as I was writing this, I queued up some Spin Doctors and found myself involuntarily tapping my foot.

We are but animals, are we not?

3. Actual, real-life lyrics to the song “Hungry Hamed”:

I'm beige and funky, like a rubber band
I'm a lapis-eyed devil with my pen in hand

4. That Taylor Swift song is really good, even if I maintain that the Grammys setting her up to duet with STEVIE FRIGGIN’ NICKS on this particular song was a misfire, just from a purely subject matter perspective.

5. Spin Doctors

6. Infectious Grooves

7. Red Hot Chili Peppers

8. Spin Doctors

9. Skankin’ Pickle

10. Swim Herschel Swim. What was it with ska bands in the 90s and their obsession with rear end follicles?!?

11. Spin Doctors. I should wear a Cone of Shame for the number of times I voluntarily listened to this one.

12. Blues Traveler

13. Parliament

14. Spin Doctors

15. Primus

16. Phish

17. Spin Doctors

18. Parliament

19. Andre 3000

20. *NSYNC. So none of them were made up by me.

21. The summer I did my first advertising internship at a little boutique ad agency up in Jackson Hole, I also worked part-time at a media store. Remember those? A place where they sold CDs, books, videos, novelty pop culture stuff, random snacks, and had a busy-on-the-weekends video rental business (remember those?). The line for video rentals on a Friday would get pretty long around 7pm.

One particular Friday, this was exactly the case. A line of maybe 9-10 people, all with their copy of Donnie Darko or Some Kind of Wonderful or Police Academy VII, just waiting to check out. A couple approached the register and the boyfriend nervously slid the video across the counter, trying to be discreet, a tight smile jittering on his face. The girlfriend nonchalantly avoided eye contact. That’s when I realized what was happening.

They were buying an, um, “adult movie.” From our cordoned-off Adults Only section way in the back of the store.

It was right there, on the cover: some woman’s superhuman, ultrasilicone, shiny nude torso (there’s a theme in today’s newsletter, I guess, sorry?).

But when I say they were buying an “adult movie”, what I mean to say is: they were trying to buy an “adult movie.” Because it wasn’t that simple.

I had never sold an adult movie during my time as an employee. And suddenly my nerves kicked in, compounding theirs. Which compounded mine, compounding theirs. It was a transfer of nervous energy, a perspiring chemical reaction that probably increased the temperature in the store.

I tried to play it cool (if you know me, you know I don’t really do “cool”). I really did. Normally, checkout was easy. Scan the barcode>take the payment>you’re done. But this was a little different.

I dug in one of the drawers to find the case-removing tool. Because the adult movies were kept, of course, in higher-security cases. Cases that required a special tool to open. It took a moment that felt like a week, but I found the tool. I wanted to wield it over my head like He-Man, bellowing “I HAVE THE POWER!” But I did not. Instead, I took a deep breath and—trying to avert my eyes from the blaring superhuman, ultra silicone torso—applied the tool to the locking mechanism.

It wouldn’t unlock. Not this way. Not that way. Rinse. Repeat.

I smiled nervously. Tried again, this time with feeling. Then more feeling. Then even more feeling.

It wouldn’t unlock.

I turned it over to the other side, applied the tool, this time with some nervous oomph. Elbow grease. It simply would not unlock.

People farther back in the line started craning their necks to see what the holdup was, attention that neither the couple nor I were hoping for.

The couple looked at me with pleading eyes that said, “please, can you just open it and set us free?”

I looked back at the couple with pleading eyes that said, “please, can you just take it home in this case and somehow figure it out there.”

All three of us laughed nervously.

Finally, I beckoned my manager. You could see the couple wince in embarrassment as another human being became aware that they were buying this adult movie they had already been sheepish about bringing to the counter.

To make matters worse, when he came over, my manager (not the King of Tact) took a look at the cover and “joked” to the couple, “you dirty, dirty people” with a chuckle. They nervously giggled.

He jiggled the thing open somehow. And walked away with a sly “you two have a GREAT night” and a cartoonish wink. I don’t know who hated that more, me or the couple.

So then I go to scan the video with the little bar code scanner and, I’m not lying, it won’t scan. You’ve been there, in the self checkout, when for whatever reason the bar code just won’t cooperate? This was that.

Next thing I know, I’m holding this video at all kinds of angles, just trying to get this stupid thing scanned.

The couple is giggling uncontrollably at that point. And the line is fully aware. Which is actually quite helpful because most of them find it amusing enough that they’re no longer mad about how long the line is taking. They’re just basking in the second-hand cringe of it all.

Finally it scans. I sigh in relief. The boyfriend pays. I give them their paid-in-full torso video in a nice opaque bag. And they’re off to their car.

“Thanks for coming in,” I say via habit.

I look to the next video renter in line, “Thanks for your patience. What can I do for you?”

22. Eventually I dug up the narrative that the Golden Palominos were essentially the umbrella project name for drummer/producer Anton Fier, a vehicle he used to collaborate with whichever musicians tickled his golden fancy.

The list of Fier’s fancy-tickling collaborators is mighty impressive:

funk pioneer/bassist Bootsy Collins
producer/bassist Bill Laswell
Cream bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce
REM singer Michael Stipe
guitar god/British folkie Richard Thompson
funk legend Bernie Worrell
superproducer/Bob Dylan collaborator T-Bone Burnett
power pop demigod Matthew Sweet
pedal steel icon Sneaky Pete Kleinow
punk royalty John Lydon
singer/guitarist Syd Straw
indie leader of Husker Du/Sugar Bob Mould
keyboard/erstwhile Allman Brother and touring Stone Chuck Leavell
onetime Rolling Stone Mick Taylor
avante garde legend John Zorn
singer/guitarist Kevin Kinney (Drivin N Cryin)
producer Michael Beinhorn (Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Herbie Hancock)
singer/songwriter Lori Carson (she’s the perfect voice you hear on “Little Suicides”; she actually re-released the song a decade later on her compilation album Stolen Beauty)
producer/post-punk dude Chris Stamey
americana bro Aaron Lee Tasjan
guitar virtuoso and friend of Pat Campbell, Jim Campilongo

23. I did this with a few albums. Anything with a EXPLICIT sticker on the front and then anything that Perry Farrell art directed. Usually those were the same thing, I guess.

24. Not that streams are pure measures of quality (I should hope not, given my personal streaming numbers), but no song on the album has more than 103k streams (this one). The most-streamed song in their whole catalog has 113k streams, thanks largely to REM’s Michael Stipe singing the lead vocal.

25. The title track “Pure” and “Heaven” were both pretty decent, but a little more sensual than my pollyanna still-teen-self was ready for.

The whole album has a sorta trip-hop-adjacency that I wouldn’t have recognized then.