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.