Preface To Shoulders: Shoulders The Band

Some time in the early 1990s, someone gave me a cassette tape of a local Austin band called Shoulders.    They don't play out as much as they used to, but at that time they seemed to be on the verge of some kind of fame (or infamy) that never quite materialized.  (This happened to so many bands & musicians I saw in Austin during the twenty years I lived there, but there's no reason to believe that doesn't happen in pretty much any city with a thriving music scene.)  You can see their website (not updated since last September) here, & there's a Wikipedia page here with more information than I'll give on this blog.

Though the Wiki page calls their work "drunken carnival music," it's not a stretch to simply say they sounded, from the music to lead singer Michael Slattery's voice, like Tom Waits.  Pretty much every band these days that's trying to make "drunken carnival music" (there's a band in town called the Ford Theatre Reunion that does pretty much the same thing) is chasing the dragon that is Tom Waits' two seminal 1980s records, Swordfishtrombones & Rain Dogs.  I don't believe this is an insult - there's a whole genre of music, power pop, which is a subset of bands trying desperately to make perfect pop a la the Beatles.  & truly, there were some Shoulders songs that were much, much better than what Waits was doing at the same time.

I listened to that cassette a lot, & was a little let-down when they released a record which contained re-recordings of many of the songs on the record.  Too slick, I thought.  In particular, they had somehow managed to overproduce a lot of the delightful rough edges of my favorite Shoulders song, "Uncle Achin."  I had seen them play at least half a dozen times, but (if the Wikipedia page is to be believed), they achieved some notoriety in Europe, & toured there.  At some point, I didn't go see them anymore; in fact, I feel like they weren't even gigging in Austin anymore.  Or I just wasn't paying attention.

I bring the band up because (although this hasn't happened) it's usual for me, when I do a show, to get a request not for a song that fits a theme, but for a band whose name that fits the theme.  Maybe in the next couple of days someone will ask me to play a Shoulders song.  But as I've talked about before, it's one of my dumb rules that it's the subject of the song, not the band's name, not the name of the album, that qualifies a song for my show's theme.  If Shoulders did a song about shoulders, yes!  I'd play them.  But as far as I know - & I confess I never heard their second record - they don't.  So I won't.

It doesn't stop me from sharing one of their songs here, though.  Here they are, three years ago, performing my favorite song of theirs, at one of my favorite pubs in Austin, which sadly no longer exists: