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Seattle’s Young Fresh Fellows are haunted by a song. It’s a wacky number called “Amy Grant” that follows them wherever they go. Because people often yell for that tune as soon as the foursome hits the stage, Young Fresh Fellows often open with “Amy Grant.” That way they don’t have to hear requests for it all night.
But sometimes their fans will scream for “Amy Grant” even after the band has played it. With its chunka-chunka guitar rhythm and the immortal opening lines “She goes home from church, she takes off her pants/That’s what I like about Amy Grant,” the song has become a funky albatross. It became a college- radio smash in 1987 and helped establish Young Fresh Fellows as a national act, but now “Amy Grant” won’t go away.
Thinking about Young Fresh Fellows in terms of one song is like sending the jury out to deliberate after the testimony of one witness. In their eight-year history, the Fellows have constructed stark hymns like “The Family Gun,” soot-shaking rockers such as “Rock N’ Roll Pest Control” and “Get Outta My Cave,” crafty pop tunes like “Whirlpool,” and stupid white-boy anthems like “When the Girls Get Here” and “Beer Money.” On their new album Electric Bird Digest, they pulverize you on “Evening,” then hypnotize you on “There’s a Love.” Young Fresh Fellows are the Great Young Hope for fans of NRBQ and post- Face to Face, pre-Misfits Kinks. “In retrospect, it probably wasn’t such a great thing to make our mark with a novelty number. It’s gotten so we hate the words `zany’ and `wacky’ almost as much as we do the words `last call,'” singer-guitarist Scott McCaughey (pronounced “McCoy”) says with a laugh. He says almost everything with a laugh, not to mention a West Coast accent that sounds like he’s been dusted in the hot sun too often. Peter Tork, that’s who he talks like. Sings like him, too, and that’s a compliment.
You wouldn’t know it by their exuberantly sloshing live show, which is the aural counterpart of Gene Kelly’s umbrella dance in Singin’ in the Rain, but this band has been guilty of thinking too much. Though the albums leading up to 1987’s The Men Who Loved Music–1984’s The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest and 1986’s Topsy Turvy–combined the band’s off-kilter sense of humor with irresistible pop songs, 1988’s Totally Lost found the group tamping down more serious MD120 Col 1, Depth P54.02 I9.03 terrain.
“We started worrying too much about how our music would be perceived. At the time, I would’ve completely denied that, but thanks to the miracle of CDs it now sounds like Totally Lost was a conscientious effort on our part to not be too offbeat,” McCaughey says. “That was a mistake, but at least no one was killed or maimed.”
YFF rebounded nicely with 1989’s This One’s for the Ladies, which introduced new guitarist and songwriter Kurt Bloch, and they’ve reached new creative heights with Electric Bird Digest. These later albums find the Fellows honing their songwriting craft, slipping cleverness in where hilarity once reigned. Everyone in the band contributes compositions on the new album except Jim Sangster, who plays bass on occasion like he’s the lead guitarist for a mid-Sixties band opening for the Standells.
This is the part where we talk about Tad Hutchinson. He’s a superstar and he almost knows it, as his frequent forays from behind his unorthodox drum kit attest. (Since one of his cymbals is a wok attached to a golf-hole pin, Tad is not sponsored by Zildjian, but by Yan Can Cook.) Along with NRBQ’s Tom Ardolino, Tad is one of the few drummers since Gene Krupa who can smack some sense into the skins while wearing a suit and tie. He’s suave, he rocks and he’s cute enough to be Vanilla Ice’s stunt double in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II. (Sorry, girls, he’s got high standards.)
It wasn’t until Hutchinson joined in 1983 that Young Fresh Fellows became a real band. They didn’t even have a name before then. It was just McCaughey and Tad’s cousin Chuck Carroll writing songs and making demos. The two moved to Seattle from the Bay Area to start a rock ‘n’ roll newspaper, but finding that Seattle already had a good one, The Rocket, they concentrated on making music. At the time, Tad was going to college in Iowa and playing with a couple of guys who would later become the band Scruffy the Cat. It wasn’t hard to lure Tad away from Iowa to the big city of Seattle (this was before Soundgarden and Queensryche), though he was temporarily upset that they didn’t make corn dogs from scratch in the Pacific Northwest.
The trio (Sangster was to join soon after) went through half a dozen names during its first six gigs before a foreigner referred to the three as “those Col 3, Depth P40.02 I6.69 They’re an example of what happens when you worship the Sonics and Mark Lindsay and haven’t built up your resistance to Jaegermeister.
The trio went through half a dozen names during its first six gigs before a foreigner referred to the three as “those young fresh fellows.”
Mad Tad pounds the snare like he’s Jake LaMotta and he just caught it in bed with his wife.
