Shut Up and Play the Hits (and also Evil Dairy Products)

Look, I get it. While “The Longest Goodbye” makes Eric and me giggle, chances are most of you don’t find an endlessly looped bit of dialogue from “The Hugga Bunch” movie as funny as we do. I mean, fair enough. And even I would be happy to never hear “Don’t Wanna Hear Ya” again in this lifetime. Yikes.

So here’s a playlist of the fifi tracks that I find the least embarrassing, plus one new song – “The fifi Story” – and a couple of behind-the-scenes snippets of He’s Aboy in the studio. Plus, if you order now, we’ll include all extant chapters of the long-gestating-but-never-completed “Evil Dairy Products” song cycle.

RE: “Rabid” v. “Live and Rabid”

For the songs taken from our debut album, I’ve mostly opted to include the, er, non-“live” versions from our “Rabid” release instead of the originals. That’s mostly because we only ever mastered “Live and Rabid” to a cassette tape, while “Rabid” was mastered to two-track reels, so the “Rabid” versions sound better, lo, these four decades hence. Despite, you know, lacking the looped crowd noise nicked from the lengthy pre-encore section of Rush’s “All the World’s a Stage” (which I think they only included on the LP).

The fifi Story

If memory serves… sometime around 1994, I got an itch to do some more recording. A co-worker (Andy) and I split the cost of a 4-track cassette deck, and I started working on some song ideas with Joey (okay, fine: “Joel”). I had written the lyrics for this song, and recorded the drum track (which I copied from a Neneh Cherry song, “I Ain’t Gone Under Yet”). Joel added some things, and it was sounding pretty good but then… I dunno. I sorta lost interest, and left the 4-track deck at Andy’s apartment. When I re-claimed the deck several months later, I found that Andy had recorded several excellent guitar tracks. My interest re-ignited, I finally recorded the vocals and mixed the thing, just before loaning the 4-track to a different co-worker (Brian), who moved out of state soon thereafter, and thus died the possibility of a late-era fifi resurgence.

Anyhoo, enjoy.

Video

The fifi Story

Audio

Here’s the album, hosted on Bandcamp. Note that if you download an individual track or the entire album, you will have the opportunity to actually *pay* for it, but also note that the default amount is zero, nada, nothing, goose eggs and that is exactly how much I expect you to pay.