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.