How Harvey Danger Taught Me to Rock

I remember the first time I heard Harvey Danger. I was a sophomore in high school, and had just started listening to popular music. Under the watch of very religious parents I was only allowed to listen to music as racy as you'd pre-Beatlemania. Luckily, my parents were gone for a whole week, which meant indulgence in everything I shouldn't do: smoking, watching PG-13 movies, and (most importantly) listening to the radio.

There was a lot of interesting music on the radio that summer, but for every "The Way" or "Closing Time" there was a "Hit Me Baby, One More Time" or "I Want it That Way." Due to the music I was raised on, I looked to the lyrics before I listened to the music. If the person singing the song didn't care to layer his lyrics, I really didn't care to listen to him.

Then, I heard "Flagpole Sitta."

The first few times I listened to it, I rolled my eyes and the angst that dripped off the song. But as I heard it more and more, I realized that they were poking fun at that kind of song.

I was impressed.

The parents came home, and I started working on the school paper. The editor assigned me a CD review, and I think you'll know who I picked. I requested a press kit through the website, and received a complementary "Merrymakers" and a bevy of articles about the geek-rockers. After reading through the packet, it was no trouble to write a knowledgeable and glowing review of the band (one I still keep in my scrapbook).

Those articles also exposed me to Sean Nelson's thoughts about modern pop music. He claimed that too much modern pop sounded like bad high school poetry. He bemoaned the current state of musical "genres" and a lack of originality. These comments he made in random 'zines had more of an effect on my musical taste then years and doo-wop and southern gospel.

I listened to HD's album exclusively for months, "Wooly Muffler" and "Terminal Annex" being personal faves. Eventually, I overplayed it and resigned it to a lesser position in my listening schedule, supplanted by artists like Elvis Costello, Barenaked Ladies, and Ben Folds.

I still look for music that sounds like more than bad high school poetry, and I picked up the next two Harvey Danger discs and played the hell out of them. The standards that Harvey Danger set in that first few weeks of listening to popular music are ones that I still adhere to, both in writing music and in buying it. And I still get a gritty smile every time I hear "Flagpole Sitta.'"