The Vulgar Boatmen are an archetypal cult band. Those of us who love them really, really love them, but the three albums the Indiana/Florida band released between 1989 and 1995 never reached a wide audience. So, the reissue of debut You And Your Sister, bolstered by a pair of new remixes and three previously unreleased tracks, is a gift. Dale Lawrence and Robert Ray wrote strummy, propulsive tunes that could recall Good Earth-era Feelies, the Velvet Underground or Stax/Volt soul. The band will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with Lawrence.
Lawrence: Every few years, I’ll become mildly infatuated with the Monkees, probably my number-one guilty pleasure. I suspect I’m not alone, since for people of a certain age, they were a seminal band. I’d discovered rock ‘n’ roll the year before their debut (at age nine), but they were the first band I would actually call my favorite. And while over the years there have been plenty of groups who were cobbled together by outside forces, none of their stories can claim quite the weirdness of the Monkees: Hired essentially as actors to portray a rock group, they instantly became the biggest-selling recording act in the world, eventually morphing into an actual self-contained band. Their music was underrated for a long time and now is no doubt a bit overrated. (This is again partly due to their backstory, which makes you so want their music to be worthwhile.)
But while the point at which they won their autonomy is where their story gets really interesting, I have to disagree with the general consensus that the music gets better at that point as well. Not that they didn’t release some nice stuff while holding the reins themselves (particularly some scattered nuggets of pop psychedelia worthy of Donovan). But for me, the records that hold up best today are mainly from early on—the groove of “Mary Mary” and “I’m A Believer,” the Buddy Holly notes of Mike Nesmith’s “The Kind Of Girl I Could Love” and “You Just May Be the One” (the earlier faster take), the swampy gnarl of his “Sweet Young Thing” and, best of all, “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow),” the toughest chunk of bubblegum this side of “Indian Giver.” For my money, their best album is easily More Of The Monkees, the one Nesmith famously called “probably the worst album in the history of the world.”
Video after the jump.
