1. The Young Fresh Fellows, “Still There’s Hope”
Long before chief Fellow Scott McCaughey went on to more ostensibly respectable gigs with R.E.M. and Robyn Hitchcock, the Seattle-based YFF ripped through some of the most hook-laden, gloriously messy, criminally overlooked garage-rock gems of the Eighties and early Nineties. “Still There’s Hope,” from 1989’s “This One’s for the Ladies” LP, is fairly indicative of the group’s fabulous sound of the Pacific Northwest.
2. The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”
3. Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, “How Do You Keep Love Alive”
4. The Violent Femmes, “I Held Her in My Arms”
Gordon Gano, Victor DeLorenzo and Brian Ritchie are best known for their classic (and uproariously snotty) debut album. But this track from the trio’s third record stands as a wonderfully straightforward broken-heart ditty.
5. Peter and Gordon, “I Go to Pieces”
6. Beck, “New Round”
7. Fugazi, “Latin Roots”
8. Wheatus, “Something Good”
9. X, “White Girl”
I dearly miss this band. One of the biggest kicks of my life — other than losing my virginity, getting married, having kids and dancing the Macarena, natch (and all on the very same night, no less) — was seeing this seminal Los Angeles punk band at the Whisky a Go Go many moons ago.
10. Neil Young, “Southern Man”
– Chase
August 6th, 2008 at 10:17 am
I love that Searchers song!