it's a sausage grinder

A few more thoughts on the no-longer-lost video:

• Comparing the Pee Shy video with the Caulfield Sisters' concert footage can be both fun and educational. For instance, ponder Cindy's sultry swaying-back-and-forth in "Little Dudes" (perhaps amped-up for purposes of the video) versus her ironclad gravitas when playing the accordion in "Some Candy Talking." In the latter, I was struck especially by how strong her upper arms must be, how she wields the instrument as if it were a part of her body, and especially by the epic way she fucks with it toward the end of the song. (She was messing with accordion feedback as far back as Who Let All the Monkeys Out?, of course, but not nearly to this extent.)
  
  There's probably not enough evidence here to say for sure whether Kristin is a better drummer than Bil. At the very least, she has more to do here than Bil did in "Little Dudes," which after all was originally an accordion-and-clarinet song with no drum part.
  
  To make the comparison complete, of course, we need to see Jenny performing one of her own post-Shy songs. So here she is rocking out on "Harbour" last October in St. Pete:
  
  


• For some reason, the Monkeys version of "Little Dudes" has always struck me as suffocating and inert, as if everyone had been locked in a tiny room unable to move, not at all as jaunty and organic as the original demo version from Don't Look. Fairly or not, I've blamed that on Rick Chertoff, the head of the Mercury/Blue Gorilla label, who apparently insisted on producing "the big hit" himself.
  
  Chertoff brought along his recording pal William Wittman, who had worked with him on Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, along with two-fifths of The Hooters. In my opinion, the results don't have nearly the fun or dynamism or even the melancholic twinge of the rest of the album, which was produced by Dean Wareham of Luna and Galaxie 500. Wareham really seemed to get what Pee Shy were about; I can't imagine a better recording of "Smoking Gun" or "Dance Motherfuckers" or "Red Ink" or "It's the Love" or "Godforsaken Baby."
  
  This is not to diss Chertoff, who after all had the supreme good taste to release not one but two Pee Shy albums and deserves major props for keeping their musical vision intact. But the band members apparently were smart to pick Wareham to produce the rest of the album. Anyway, their presence in the video seems to restore the song's personality somehow, even though the audio is identical to the CD version.


• It's easy to focus on what some consider the "perverted" aspects of the "Little Dudes" lyrics (I prefer the term "gleefully demented"). After all, this is a song that uses the word "pedophile" to humorous effect and references the ick factor of the Barry Williams/Florence Henderson dalliance. And it does appear on the same album as other classic Wheeler lyrics such as "dance, motherfuckers" and "bend over, want you to meet a friend of mine."
  
  But there's more to the song, as one of the commenters on that song-meaning website hints at:
  

  I don't really think it's about these women wanting sex with younger guys, but rather them wanting a 'relationship' without the complications that come with normal relationships with other adults (maybe even sex?).

  
  More to the point, I think, is Cindy's subtle feminist critique, for instance in the women's appreciation that the younger guys "never try to tell us what to do." They value their autonomy and don't want to surrender it solely for the sake of being with some guy, even though folks like the website commenter think that this kind of submission is just one of "the complications that come with normal relationships." Compromise is a part of any relationship, but Cindy appears to have a problem with the notion that it's supposed to be one-sided. And of course, the statement "when you were born I was already 10" would be no major obstacle at all if the genders were reversed, at least if both people were adults.


• Did Pee Shy belong on a major label to begin with? Cindy has said she doesn't think so. This video seems to revive that question, with its combination of the patented made-for-VH1 alternapop panning and color schemes, mixed with Cindy's circa-1993 just-learning-to-write-songs lyrical style and Pee Shy's classically unorthodox subject matter. It's a fascinating combination but clearly wasn't as marketable as Mercury had hoped. And from what I've read about the label's lack of promotion, whatever success the band had was due largely to the members busting their collective ass.
  
  On the other hand, the two major label albums made their music available to many more people than might have heard them otherwise, and have ensured that the CD's remain widely available in the Amazon Marketplace afterlife to anyone who wants to catch up on what they missed. So yay for that.

i told you, so don't lie

Oh. My. Fucking. God. Part II.

After 11-12 years of being locked in some forbidding, Dick Cheney-style netherworld in some record company's vault, the video for Pee Shy's "Little Dudes" single has finally surfaced. So for anyone who ever wondered what the Sisters were like before they were Sisters, back when Jenny was still in the mix, Bil was just being Bil and the Shy's classic configuration was fully and absolutely in command of Da House, feast your eyes:



I'm not sure if this video ever got any airtime in 1996, so for the past decade it's been an object of intense curiosity among Pee Shy fans -- as eagerly sought after as those original Velvet Underground acetates, or a missing Gutenberg Bible, or maybe even the lost tapes of the Butt Chakra sessions. Many have embarked on manic quests to find this footage only to be driven mad in the attempt, waking up years later, naked and in a drunken stupor, in the middle of some uncharted Antarctic penguin colony just as the ice sheet is breaking off into the sea amid an ecological apocalypse.

Did I say "many" have done this? I meant "none." Can you tell that at this point I'm basically just making shit up?

But that's a sign of how amazed I am to have stumbled upon this piece of Shy history. Look at how young they are! (Not that they're not still young now, of course.) Look at how much hair Cindy and Mary have, and Jenny's blond little 'do, and that wonderful clarinet waggling back and forth, and the ivory Bernini accordion that doesn't seem quite as beat up as in the Sisters' 2004 Rothko video. Mainly, just feel that vibe among them, back when the band was cohesive, still having fun and seemingly about to conquer the alternative-pop music world. (I was predicting the cover of Spin within six months. Of course, I also didn't think they needed to add a bass player. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong.) Witness the assemblage of charisma and brains and talent that so captivated audiences all the way from the Blue Chair record store to the Stone Lounge.

Now, granted, this video takes a somewhat creepy Mary Kay Letourneau-ish turn beginning around the 2-minute mark, freaking out even the child actors by 3:19. Clearly, this was just an attempt to match the light-hearted theme of the song, unless maybe the label was trying to provoke controversy. Either way, it seems unlikely that this approach would be able to fly nowadays (as one of the folks on the YouTube page asks, "Did Debra LaFave write this song?").

One could also question: Is the video even chronologically accurate? Jenny and Cindy were both pushing 30 when they wrote the song. "When you were born I was already 10." Do the math. I never got the impression that the real-life Little Dudes were 12, as is portrayed here. And what self-respecting Nineties kid was going to sit around playing Pong? Wasn't that a game for ironically detached Gen-Xers?

But that's just quibbling. The label's hopes for "Little Dudes" to become a sleeper hit never came true; one could even suggest that the company was way too fixated on this one song, when by '95 the band had written stronger ones that would have made much better singles. (*Cough* "Yellow Race Car." *Cough*). But at least they've left us this glimpse back to the early days of this musical dynasty, and for that the universe can be grateful.

Bonus round: Can't get enough of "Little Dudes" reminiscences? OK, maybe you'd like to join these folks, all of two of them, who are having a grand old time debating what the heck these cryptic lyrics mean. "I love this song because it's so perverted," writes one.

trying hard not to be the piece of cloth that it is

For anyone who's interested, looks like those message boards at American Laundromat are finally back. And there's a special corner all set up for discussions of everyone's favorite accordion-, bass- and drum-slinging trio -- even though it's accompanied by some disquieting hints that the Holy Trinity have retreated into their own state of Salinger-like seclusion:

What can we say about these ladies? Even though they are on a semi-indefinite hiatus, we still have the candle lit for an eventual reunion, new 48 song CD, and world tour...

Semi-indefinite? Isn't that term they used for the Iraq war? Or was that a "slam dunk"?

Anyway, this has me wondering anew what's going on with the Sisters' official site, which apparently expired on April 24 (looks like the name can be renewed for a year for only $30, according to these folks, in case anyone's thinking of getting them an early Christmas present). Or why the MySpace page for that Cinnamon Girl Neil Young tribute lists Cindy, not the Caulfield Sisters, as contributing.

I just hope all is well with them (aside from that whole new-motherhood, not-sleeping-for-two-years thing that Mary has no doubt been going through). Then again, Cindy has always said they're taking a zen approach to this Caulfield Sisters business. And it has always seemed like her projects take a long time to percolate. They happen when they happen, and the results are almost always glorious. So I'm happy to light another candle, set it by the window and wait.