#305 (of 365) "Summer Here Kids" Grandaddy

Grandaddy released one of the greatest albums in the history of indie rock with 2000's The Sophtware Slump, which I bought in 2000 and never removed from the CD packaging. At the time, I was in a transition period as a music fan. I had spent more than the last decade as an "alternative" music fan--starting with New Wave bands of the 80s (The Cure, The Smiths, New Order), moving on to more American and expansive "college radio" acts like The Replacements and R.E.M. and Dinosaur Jr. then graduating to the first wave of indie rock, Pavement and Superchunk and Sebadoh, music that was in many ways a rebellion against the corporatization of post-grunge music in the 90s with so-called alternative artists like, well, pretty much everything you might have heard on K-Rock in the late 90s. I listened to some of it, because this was pre-Internet and it was still better than pop music, but man was it bad. Then in the late 90s, the one true source of good local alternative (really by then, indie rock) radio--FM106.3, Modern Rock at the Jersey Shore, in Eatontown, sold out to a fake alternative corporate station and became, well, unlistenable within a year. K-Rock was crap by then (after a brief foray into good music in the wake of the Nirvana wave) and there really weren't any other decent stations in the NYC area and like I said, this was pre-Internet, so truly my only outlet for new music became the CMJ New Music Monthly magazine--yes, a magazine!--that I subscribed to from ~1998 through 2002 or so, collecting the included CDs of 20 to 25 songs, which invariably would include songs from bands I didn't know, but liked enough to buy their album. Grandaddy was one of them, in 2000, I assume with "The Crystal Lake" (which will be heard from later on the countdown) and I purchased the album but never played it. This was a pretty low point of my music fandom and maybe I just didn't have the energy to listen to a CD of something new, I don't really know. I just remember that in spring 2001, I ordered "sound unseen" (because I had never heard a single song of theirs) Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 masterpiece In the Airplane over the Sea, only because they were on Merge Records, which is the label founded by Superchunk, and Superchunk were one of my top 2 favorite bands at the time (now #1!) and they would send me mailers--mini-catalogs of their stuff--with every Superchunk CD I bought, and at the time I was super desperate for any new music from anyone I loved, so I'd buy every EP and CD-single ever released by Superchunk, so I got a lot of mailers, and every mailer talked about what a masterpiece Neutral Milk Hotel's album was, so I bought it, listened to the first 3 tracks and was about to shut it off because it was so--different and strange and weird and not at all what I usually listened to--and then I heard "Two Headed Boy" and my life changed forever. Literally. I listened to it again, then the whole album, then again, then again, then I went on the Internet (now, slightly burgeoning) and found websites that praised the album, including one called Pitchfork Media :) and within a few days, I was reading about all of these great indie rock bands who had put out incredible albums in the late 90s that I was completely unaware of (because K-Rock and corporate alternative) and one of those highly praised albums was the second studio album from an indie rock band from Modesto, California, named Grandaddy, and it was sitting unopened in my CD collection.

I did listen. And I did love it. And for the next 10 years or so, Grandaddy were one of my favorite bands. This song is off their first studio album and is one of an incredible 7 tracks from the band that made this list. Sometimes you just have to look at what you have...

"Summer Here Kids" - Grandaddy // Under the Western Freeway (1997)