Winamp Wednesday: Treat You Like a Queen
It's a history report, not a future report.
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
The Ataris, “San Dimas High School Football Rules”
What’s the song-title version of clickbait?
I wasn’t not going to listen to a band that had named a track after a tossed-off line in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s like how I knew I loved The Bouncing Souls after listening to “These Are the Quotes from Our Favorite 80s Movies”. They were speaking my shared language of teenage media references, that dreadful bit from High Fidelity that shows the first indicator of compatibility is what you like and not what you are like. The Ataris were also fans of a movie that I had watched so many times that the tape wore out, so I knew they were good people. They’ll find like-minded people by shouting out that title, like same-show cosplayers meeting in convention hallways or members of tiny fandoms all congregating in the same webring in the days before social media. (Shout out to everyone talking Quantum Leap on Compuserve back in 1996!)
Never mind the fact that they recorded in a genre I had not even heard of before, let alone fully embraced. One of my high-school friends impressed upon me the superiority of some band called Sunny Day Real Estate, and that same group of music cognoscenti were deeply committed to pushing The Promise Ring on anyone who would listen, but the word “Emo” hadn’t entered my vocabulary. (The only Emo I knew was a Northern Conservative Baptist.) Any album I liked enough to memorize immediately became my gospel, so seeing True Love Always in concert sent me down the alternate routes that were Jangle and Twee, turning me towards Teen Beat before Kung Fu or FBR.
Even now I’m not exactly sure what’s Emo or not. Do MCR and Fall Out Boy fall under the same umbrella? Are you telling me that I’m supposed to draw some kind of straight line from Strongarm to Further Seems Forever to Dashboard with a remainder of New Found Glory? Atom and His Package appear in The Emo Game, but that seems like a major stretch. I guess we could include any band that Fred from The Color Fred was in and then expand the definition out from there.
The Ataris, at least on their first records, are the perfect distillation of early Emo. It’s a little sincere, a little arm’s length, a little joking, a lot solemn, and obsessed more with the ups and downs of the personal rather than the political or the worldly. This genre had to be Emo because it sure couldn’t be Punk. Check these lyrics out:
Whitney, don't you understand that what I say is true? I just want you to know I have a major crush on you I'd drive you to Las Vegas and do the things you wanna do I'd even have Wayne Newton dedicate a song to you
“Nazi Punks Fuck Off” this ain’t. It was Punk adjacent, but it was something weirdly personal. This song sounded like my adolescent heart. The lyrics were gooey and occasionally awkward and quick to retreat into sentiment. (And what’s with that weird Stand by Me reference? Your love is like…finding a body?) They’re full of in-jokes that are either obscure (as 99% of the audience would have never even heard of Rainbow, let alone drank a sad LA night away there) or just wrong (because San Dimas High School is very real even though Bill and Ted was filmed in Arizona). Any writing group I’ve ever been in would have told me to keep the melody but scrap everything after the opening lyrics, because at least the Disneyland stuff is amusing.
It takes brass balls to end a song complaining about your crush’s boyfriend and title the next song “Your Boyfriend Sucks”. That’s dedication or maybe the our-first-idea-rules inertia of writing something as a teenager. Ataris frontman and lead songwriter Kris Roe was twenty-two at the time. But there’s still something lovely in the beginnings here, in the melodies and ideas of someone who had come to California from the Midwest to make music and strike it rich. Blue Skies, Broken Hearts…Next 12 Exits is ahead of the curve in terms of where pop music was in 1999; bands would be making a fortune with this kind of record in a few years’ time. Take the lyrics from thudding to inscrutable and you have much of Fall Out Boy’s early output, then put it all in a minor key and you’ve got My Chemical Romance, get a faster lead guitarist and a bigger sense of fun to get New Found Glory. It’s all connected and it all feeds off each other to make bigger and better records.
The Ataris made a better album with 2001’s End is Forever—“Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start” is everything “San Dimas High School Football Rules” is but with a sharper eye and better hook—but they didn’t taste chart success until they did that cover of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”. Like trapping yourself in an Alien Ant Farm. They never hit the Top 40 again and have had a revolving door of members ever since, including former child actor Brian Bonsall.
I was drawn in by the title. Who wouldn’t be? I felt snookered the first time I listened, because this song didn’t have a damn thing to do with Wyld Stallyns. But the earnest honesty kept this album in rotation for years, long enough to say “hey, The Ataris are back! I’m sorry, they’re covering what now?” Some of the lyrics are worthy of an eye roll or two, but who wasn’t like that when they were younger? The Ataris were the first step in a long journey for a lot of us, and who knows if without them we would have had MxPx or The Vandals or Ozma or The Bouncing Souls or a hundred other bands on deck. (Thanks, Kung Fu Records!) Kris Roe wrote better songs and fronted better albums, but this one still has wonderful adolescent charm. Adventures big and small have to begin somewhere.
Next Time: I was afraid of a girl like that.