Go Real Slow, Thirteen

I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was starting my morning shift at KTRU one bright Wednesday in 1994, sifting through the piles of CDs looking for something to play — let’s see…Codeine, A-Bones, Liz Phair (yecch), Charles Gayle…Green Day. Green Day? Warner Bros. Oh, hmm, well, let’s see what this is…. I popped the CD in the player, and after playing the first track of Dookie out over the Houston airwaves, put the CD back in jewel case, and set it back in the “New” box, thinking, “That’s a nice poppy little band that deserves an mainstream audience. Sure hope Warner’s doesn’t screw ’em like Atlantic did Eleventh Dream Day.” I forgot all about it, of course, for all of a week or something, and then they proceeded to take over the world and everything in it, such that their legion of imitators would one day launch their assault from garages all over the earth.

Go Real Slow was one of them (the band broke up a while ago), to be sure, and it’s probably not fair to assess them as rank imitators, but it just goes to show you how ubiquitous the style is: adenoidal back-of-the-throat vocals, triple-time drumming, neat chorded bass licks, passes at some not-bad harmony, and hooks, hooks, pounding guitar hooks. Lyrics about girls, miscommunication, self-consciousness, yadda yadda yadda. A sample, from “Self Portrait”: “I think it’s time that everyone should know / that I’m not the boy I used to be / and I don’t care if you look down on me / The way it used to be / Well things have changed, I’m not the same…” In other words, the kind of lyrics your average 14-year old can use to bind their days, each to each, with apocalyptic misery. Kudos go to “Jamie’s Song,” a melodramatic DUI tale, and the triumphant, textured closer “Asleep with Claire,” an anthem about overcoming heartbreak, confusion, and rejection. Proof enough that they were a talented little combo, and 15 years ago, they would have deserved a mainstream audience.