“World Tour ‘88″
YOUNG FRESH FELLOWS
from Totally Lost

Younger readers will want to know that, for a time, the shambling, transcendent Young Fresh Fellows had a decent following; their obscure but plainly beloved power-pop, driven by Scott McCaughey’s insanely memorable songs and one of the sharpest drummers in the business, snapped heads live and made a lot of fans. (One of the group’s claims to fame was being asked to play at Paul Westerberg’s wedding.)

The provenance of “World Tour ‘88,” a mock history of the band and one of the funniest tracks I’ve ever heard, is a bit muddled. It was a “bonus track,” back in the day, that was either not on the CD but on the vinyl edition of “Totally Lost,” or on the CD but not the vinyl. I forget.

Many years ago, interviewing head Fellow Scott McCaughey, I complimented him on the song’s in-jokes. He said thanks, but that he hadn’t actually written it. As I recall, I think he was the credited songwriter, and like I said the song is about the band; confused and backpedaling, I said, Well, it’s certainly sung with a lot of spot-on deadpan humor. He said he hadn’t sung it, either. This comedy went on for a while before he said a friend of the band’s had written and recorded the thing solo, for the group, and that rather than re-record it they just added it one of the editions of their next album.

As I recall, it was done by a brother or a cousin of one of the band members; this Fellows fan site says it’s Mike Ritt.

So now when you listen to it, you can hear that it was probably done in a home studio, with a simple drum machine and a few instruments and sound effects layered on. That just makes the joke funnier.

There’s a million “rise and fall of a rock ‘n’ roll band” songs; this one imagines the Fellows as superstars, wined and dined and playing Japan. Part of the joke here comes from the time; in the late 1980s, the “college rock” era, selling out and going large was a big issue—for a while it was about the only thing Westerberg wrote about. It was hilarious even to consider the Fellows playing Budokan, and a little bit of a tweak to suggest that if the Fellows did get huge that they’d be just as foolish about it as any hair band.

(This was all before Nirvana, of course, when a lot of things folks thought would never happen … happened.)

Anyway, music politics aside, the song is distinguished by the vocals: the singer, ruefully, can see what’s going on, but he’s helpless to stop it. He can only marvel at the steamroller:

Well the royalties get spent up quick
‘Cause we buy stuff for our friends
And Bruno wanted some Sennheiser mikes
So Joey Roth from A&R
Picks up our tab at the bar
Our label treats us nice and says we’re great
World tour ‘88

“World Tour ‘88″ peppers this “Behind the Music” melodrama with YFF arcana and music industry in-jokes. They’re all having a lot of fun, but listen closely and you see it’s all coming out of the band’s advance. There’s an electric wash of a crowd noise, an emcee shouting “All right, Tokyo!” and a dorky guitar fanfare, but what you come away with is that sorrowful inevitability. The song ends with a statement of paralyzed wonder that captures stardom as well as anyone has:

Somehow I still feel pretty much the same
And we never really asked for all this fame
But it’s pretty cool what’s happened as of late
World tour ‘88

——

Last week’s “Song about rock.”

The complete “Songs about rock.”