that dog.

“totally crushed outtakes”

that dog was the first band I ever saw live in a true concert setting. They opened for the Foo Fighters in ’96 and I while at the time I thought I wasn’t impressed, the moment I saw “Totally Crushed Out” for sale at the Harmony House in Grosse Pointe I, as if by instinct, immediately gravitated towards it. From then on, I absorbed it. I’ve never not come back to “Totally Crushed Out” and it is probably among the top ten albums I’ve listened to most in my life.

(Side note: my ideal afterlife is just a book with my post-life stats…how many total hours I slept, how many pairs of shoes I owned, how many times I ate macaroni and cheese, how many times I listened to “Totally Crushed Out”, you get the picture)

So in the post-second child haze, that dog announces a Kickstarter for their new album that I totally missed. Luckily (coincidentally?) my lovely wife Malissa was in touch with Anna from the band (who has since become a family friend) and pledged the appropriate amount to get this slick 7” of demos and an original “Totally Crushed Out” promotional poster autographed by the band.

(I’ve since gone back at the completed Kickstarter and looked at the other incentives offered and Malissa’s spot-on estimation as to what items I would want is a deep sign of true love)

“Ms. Wrong” on the album is so 100% perfect, both in its placement and end-result, that I’ve never really considered it existing otherwise. So the demo here is eye-opening. The tempo is sooooo slow! Hearing the demo makes me so glad the band kicked up the speed on this drag-ass tempo. In researching the song, I notice a credit that I’d apparently overlooked the past twenty years which is a cowriting credit to Jenni Konner…a woman best-known as the show runner for Lena Dunham’s Girls. Apparently Konner contributed to a handful of that dog songs way back when. With the lyrics of “Ms. Wrong” always embedded in my mind as terribly clever…the recontextualization is enjoyed in this instance.

“Silently” album version is solid high-pitched “woo-ooh’s” with Weezer-style wall of fuzz guitars and one of the more enjoyable songs in that dog’s repertoire. The outtake version features Beck on banjo (apparently the song is written about him) and was featured on a few different compilation CDs back in the day. How in the hell did I miss those? The understatement of the song (no drums) coupled with the tasteful pedal steel accents by frequent Beck collaborator Smokey Hormel imbue the song with an impact that is completely different from the album version. I like this.

Oh “One Summer Night” feels like such an encapsulated short story in song form, I adore it, so strongly lyric-driven with driving guitar cymbal thrash and punctuated by languorous violin interstitials. The difference between the released and demo versions is nominal at best. The song feels like it was pretty fleshed out already by demo time, once the “proper” studio form took place it’s just a matter of more attention to sonics and detail, making everything as crisp and quality sounding as possible.

Finally, never released before in any form is “Punk Rock Lobster” with a spiritual debt to the “ooh-ahh’s” of the B-52s “Rock Lobster” this song ultimately unfurls as a studio goof off that accidentally hits on some memorable moments, overdriven guitar pedal overdose notwithstanding.

I find it rare that any sort of documentation, whether it be audio, anecdotal or even paper ephemera/documentation can stand to change a long-seated impression or opinion on a piece of art. But in some small way, I feel like these demos do. And the way that marital bliss, teenage confusion and modern day record reissuing all comes together with this feeling warms my heart.

Buy the single here (on white vinyl…the Kickstarter version looks like a hand-labeled test pressing…gotta love it)

https://www.hellomerch.com/collections/hellorecords/products/totally-crushed-outtakes-7-vinyl

Listen to the acoustic version of “Silently” here…

PS. I wrote about that dog previously and after revisiting it almost ten years later I feel like it still resonates. It was for some website long gone but here are those thoughts from 2003, as relevant as ever…

I remember that dog’s “Totally Crushed Out” because the album came at a transitional period in my tender youth. I had seen the band open for the Foo Fighters on March 30th, 1996 and was non-plussed. Granted, it was the first live show I’d ever attended, but I think I was overly-anxious to see the guy who used to be in Nirvana.
Two months later and I was different. It was an awkward time…I’d finished 8th grade and we were done with school a good two weeks before the rest of school. Hanging around at this time was a strange, unknown pleasure of nothing to do during school-hour weekdays. Ordering pizzas in the middle of the day, riding bikes down streets we’d never been, perpetually throwing water balloons…me and this motley group of rag-tag others lived as unchallenged kings in our own four square block stomping ground.
Be we did other shit too. I’d dyed my hair forest green…only to have it fade that same day in a gruesome shaving cream fight. The rest of the summer was spent with faint pea green locks atop my head. We’d gotten unusually obsessed with the Anarchist’s Cookbook, but all being under-18 were unable to purchase said text from the local head shop.
So we improvised. We had a general idea of what a Molotov cocktail was made of, so the Snapple bottle was filled with lighter fluid with a paper towel hanging out of the top. We lit the paper towel and sat there, basking in the pyromania that most twelve-year-old boys go through. I’d say the flames got a little over my waist, so at that time, about three feet tall. We never seemed panicked or worried or scared…someone simply filled a kitchen pot with water and doused our sorry excuse for overthrowing the government. The concrete on that spot had actually been bleached a bright white from our actions and would remain so until we tore up the backyard six years later.
But behind all this pre-pubescent machismo, that same fucking day, I rode my bike to the Harmony House and spent what felt like an eternity trying to decide between that dog and the Vaselines. The Vaselines album had the originals of three songs that Nirvana had covered and was on Sub Pop to boot and was so terribly hip and tempting. But I kept coming back to that dog. Something about the cover drawn to look like a teen romance novel or the no short of brilliant use of all the song titles in a well-written, coherent paragraph on the back cover was all too much. I was secretly scared that some suburban youth would come and buy “Totally Crushed Out”, having witnessed the same mediocre opening performance for the Foo Fighters I had, and I would never find the album again. I bought that dog and came back a few days later for the Vaselines.
The songs on “Totally Crushed Out” are heartbreaking stories of lost love, missed chances, the “what could have been?” which is totally what leaving eighth grade is all about. It made sense to me, but not too quickly. As I grew, I kept finding myself coming back to the record…it never aged and always seemed to equate to that particular moment in my life that I happened to be living.
After meeting Anna Waronker, she told me that she thought of that dog as an art band…the whole thing being a kind of art project. And I thought that a little queer. “Totally Crushed Out”, a masterpiece that I revered as highly as any Beatles or Stones effort, was almost shrugged off by its inceptor as a one-off art thingy. I prided myself on telling her that it meant so much more to me and she was flattered.

So what I think of when I think of “Totally Crushed Out” is the confusing time at the end of my pre-teens, my stupid ugly green hair with the stink of lighter fluid still fresh on my hands and the squeak of bicycle breaks humming in my head, partaking in some psuedo rite of passage with a bunch of other hormone-addled freaks, and later, in secret, hoping that no one would find me out, listening to this “pop” album and feeling utter bliss and confusion and ecstasy and bewilderment. I liked the album so much that I was scared. “Totally Crushed Out” made a difference in this poor white boy’s life.