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Patient Popsters
06/15/1998 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Matt Ashare
"We're a fairly bashful band," admits Harvey Danger's
sardonic singer Sean Nelson. "Our whole goal was just to be a local
band with an identity in Seattle, and we didn't really even work too
hard at that. We mainly just focused on writing songs together, and we
did that for five years before we put anything out. We'd record, but
whenever it came time to scrounge up the money for the pressing and
stuff, we'd be like, 'I don't know if this is really good enough to put
out.'"
So Harvey Danger waited and wrote, somehow managing to avoid the
throngs of A&R scouts who descended on Seattle back in '92, the same
year that Nelson hooked up with bassist Aaron Huffman, guitarist Jeff J.
Lin and drummer Evan Sult. For three years they even lived under the
same roof, in the house pictured on the cover of their indie debut Where Have
All The Merrymakers Gone?, originally released by the Arena Rock
Recording Company in May of '97. Fellow Seattlites the Presidents Of The
United States Of America formed, released two major-label CDs,
toured the world, and broke up in less time than it took Harvey Danger
to work up the confidence to put out that first full-length. But their
patience paid off when Seattle's KNDD plucked a wry little revved-up pop
number with topical references to publishing zines and raging against
machines off of Merrymakers, and put it on its prime-time
playlist.
That song, "Flagpole Sitta," was Harvey Danger's ticket to
the majors --Slash/ London signed the group and re-released the album
earlier this year. And it's also helped put the once bashful and brainy
band, named after a obscure character from The Great Gatsby,
into heavy rotation nationwide and on their first-ever U.S. tour.
"It's a little weird that 'Flagpole Sitta' is being played all
the time on the radio because for us it's a really old song,"
Nelson admits. "We wrote it in '96. We just wanted to write a
bouncy pop song. That was really the only goal. It came out as kind of a
parody of a pop song--it's supposed to be lampooning the sort of false
concern that you hear in a lot of serious pop music. But I think a lot
of people take the lyrics literally, and I guess it kind of works that
way, too. To us it's just one of 10 songs on the CD." Fortunately, it's not
the only single-worthy track of the 10. Like Weezer's first
album, or the Presidents Of The USA's self-titled debut,
Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? is loaded with the kind of
clever, winsome, rough-around-the-edges pop nuggets that balance
amusingly wimpy and/ or underconfident sentiments against the tough and
tuneful blare of punkish guitars, as well as one song ("Carlotta
Valdez") that more or less synopsizes the plot of Hitchcock's Vertigo.
"It's really weird to go from never really having much of an
audience of more than a hundred people to all of the sudden being rammed
down the consciousness of the mainstream," Nelson reflects.
"We don't really listen to the radio much--it's not really our
scene. But it's fine. It's interesting. And it's really been fun."
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