For his part, when asked exactly why the Young Fresh Fellows still exist, McCaughey deadpans, “That’s a gooooood question. I’m not sure what the answer to that is.
“I guess it’s just still fun occasionally when we play. I don’t think we have any pretense of making any kind of career out of it at this point; everybody’s doing other things. Sometimes it’s really hard to even get a practice together, or certainly a recording. But we still have ideas about things we should do, that seem like they’d be really funny or really a blast. Actually doing them is a little bit harder. But we’re still inspired, in some way or another, to carry on.”
Examples of those continued moments of inspiration are plentiful on Because We Hate You. Take, for instance, the album’s final track, “The Ballad Of Only You And The Can Prevent Forest Fires” — which sounds like the ridiculously extended outgrowth of a band-name joke.
“Well, yeah, actually, it was,” McCaughey confirms, giving credit to drummer Tad Hutchison for the song’s inception. “Tad had that on his answering machine. I called him one time, and he had something like, ‘You’ve reached the information line for Only You And The Can Prevent Forest Fires,’ or something like that. And a week later it was gone. But I always remembered that, and I just thought, ‘God, that’s just a great band name.’ And one night I started strumming the guitar, and it just came out. It was a total story based on that.”
Then there are long-abandoned ideas deemed worth revisiting, such as the Gunsharp’ners, whose 1990 Cruddy Records single “Dancin’ In The Moonlight”/”Do You Care Theme” was voted by one critic for Seattle biweekly The Rocket as the third-best Northwest release of all-time (OK, it was me). The ghost of the Gunsharp’ners haunts the new Fellows album in the form of a straight-outta-Brixton anthem titled “Your Truth Our Lies”.
“It was total 1978 English political punk,” McCaughey remembers of the Gunsharp’ners concept, “and that was one of the songs I’d written for that. But we never really got it together to do a whole album’s worth of that stuff.
“I had kinda forgotten about it, and then I just stumbled across it when we were playing a show a year or two ago. And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this Gunsharp’ners song,’ and we learned it, and everybody was really into it, so we kept playing it. It’s funny too, because everybody thinks it’s a cover. Whenever we play it live, people go, ‘Wow, is that like some weird Sham 69 song, or a UK Subs song?’ I’m so psyched by that.”
Sometimes inspiration that strikes during McCaughey’s R.E.M.-related travels will wander its way into a Fellows song, as was the case with one of the more intriguingly titled tunes on the new album, “Mamie Dunn, Employee Of The Month”.
“I actually saw that written on a sign of a fast-food place in Athens, Georgia,” he says. “They had the little letters that they put up on the sign outside, and it said, ‘Mamie Dunn, Employee Of The Month.’ I was walking back to my hotel room, and I just started humming that in my head. And I just sat down, picked up the guitar, and out it came.”
Such absurdities are fairly commonplace within the Fellows canon, to the point that they’ve largely been pigeonholed as a novelty band. In truth, the Young Fresh Fellows have always been considerably more than that. Their best record, This One’s For The Ladies, is a true classic of the ’80s underground-rock era, showcasing perfect pop melodies on “Carrothead” and “Middleman Of Time”, moving ballads such as “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “Don’t You Wonder How It Ends”, and the best cover of the Kinks’ “Picture Book” in existence. Like their good pals the Replacements (the Fellows played Paul Westerberg’s wedding reception), they had reputation for raucously crazy live shows and mischievous hijinks, but also delivered great emotional songwriting in spades.
As such, McCaughey’s early ’90s instinct to apply his darker, folkier material to a new band rather than the Fellows was perhaps misguided. Bloch, asked if he thinks the Fellows could have made a record of these songs that broadened the scope of the band, replies point-blank: “Certainly.”
“But,” he adds, “when the Minus 5 started going, the Young Fresh Fellows were not playing constantly. I think if we were all getting together and playing shows, recording, practicing, there probably would be a good chance that the Minus 5 never would have existed.
“But I know as well as Scott does that you don’t sit down, like, between the hours of 2:30 in the afternoon and 7:30 and write music. You might go a month without writing a single piece of music, and then the next week you might have these brainstorms. And if you have a bunch of music that wants to get played and you don’t have a way to do that, then you’ll figure out something.”
