The Buck Pets Never Asked For This
In celebration of the Buck Pet’s To the Quick being finally released/reissued on vinyl, I’m re-posting something I wrote for Antiquiet (RIP) in 2016.
At some point, I stopped recommending to friends that they give a listen to the Buck Pets.
Something finally got through to me that a band I loved wasn’t so much an acquired taste as much as a lonely pursuit. What once was something I thought I could introduce people to eventually became something that I kept to myself. In some ways, it would be how you might react if someone told you that you had to listen to an obscure rapper from the late 1980s — there is no possible way that it would have the effect on your current ears as they would have if you’d been around to hear them when they were fresh.
For me and the Buck Pets, maybe it was a combination of location and timing when I first heard them and how they had an impact on my life. The band came out of the Dallas scene in the late 1980s, a grungy combination of punk and metal, a potent combination that predated Sub Pop’s glory days by a year with their self-titled debut in 1989. As if to prove this point that they were just slightly ahead of their time, Charles Peterson, the photographer whose iconic blurry, black and white photos were the look of Sub Pop, took the album’s cover photo.
On top of that, the album contained a track, “Song for Louise Post,” named for Veruca Salt’s Post four years before Veruca Salt even was a band.
I guess the above explains why my uber-fandom scare people off.
I was lucky enough to live in a small college town that had a great Alternative radio station, when Alternative didn’t mean Lincoln Park or Sublime; in 1989 it meant The Pixies, Wire, Pere Ubu, The Replacements,and the Sugarcubes. I heard the Buck Pets on WOXY and my friend Aaron bought the cassette. He put the tape on his big stereo and it was like hearing my inner thoughts over Marshall stacks.THere was sensitivity and confusion and angst and anger in the lyrics, and the music was just complicated enough that the jocks wouldn’t understand.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I remember driving back after dropping my dad at the airport very early in the morning and hitting the highway with the windows down, cranking their “hit” “A Little Murder” without a care in the world. Maybe part of my obsession with the band comes from always wanting to be 16 years old, loving rock and roll as if it were something I could keep to myself. This was well before the internet brought us pictures and tweets from every band ever and there was mystery about them. They resonated with me, but they weren’t in Rolling Stone or Spin or Alternative Press. There were no websites to track their every move, so information was scarce.
So scarce that when their second record Mercurotones came out my first year of college, I didn’t know it was coming until I went into a record store. (Can you imagine?) I took the CD to my dorm and was perplexed. It wasn’t as heavy as the first record, it had acoustic guitars in some places and sounded almost radio-friendly, and there was even a sort-of dancey song, “Libertine.” But it slowly slid into my self-consciousness and my friend and I even played one of the songs at a party, much to my delight.
Again, they were ahead of their time. Mercurotones was produced by Michael Beinhorn, who would go on the produce Soul Asylum and Soundgarden. And that dancey song? That was produced by the Dust Brothers, who would later produce Beck’s Odelay.
The record didn’t make a dent, just a year before Nevermind and all of that. Somehow it just got was lost in the air. I would have put that record up against anything else that year: Sonic Youth’s Goo, Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, or even Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de la Habitual.
Speaking of Jane’s Addiction, the Buck Pets landed the opening spot on that tour in the fall of 1990. I drove from Oxford, OH to Cleveland (a five-hour drive) the day of the show to see them…not knowing that they had been kicked off a few days earlier. Or they left on their own.
Which meant I was in the front row, only to realize the Rollins Band was the opener, instead of the band that meant so much to me. So there I was, a few hundred miles from home, with my broken heart at not getting to see them multiplied by the macho rock of Rollins Band.
I started my own band around that time. I took it as a sign that when I found a drummer’s flyer in which among the standard list of grunge bands, he also listed the Buck Pets. I often used the Buck Pets as a touchstone when trying to write songs, though they were never as good. I didn’t have a reference point to their live shows, never having seen them and with no Youtube to bring them into my room.
The band went quiet for a couple of years, resurfacing the summer of 1993 on a new label. To The Quick was produced by Ted Nicely, who worked with Fugazi, Jawbox and Girls Against Boys. It was a mellower album, with a feeling of heartbreak and melancholy strewn throughout, as evidenced by the song title alone of “Nothing’s Ever Gonna Be Alright Again,”and “Rocket to You”’s desperate loneliness of “You can catch depression through the telephone/Lonesome line that stretches across 17 area codes.” But they still had their raw power, such as on the title track with its defiance in the face of fashion lyric, “Cut my losses, cut my hair,” which I actually took literally that summer. I cut off my grunge hairstyle going into my final year of college, and that year I often found myself putting on that record’s all-skies-are-grey-skies attitude on like a warm blanket, finding consolation that I wasn’t the only person in the world that sometimes fell down a hole of sadness that even buzzsaw guitars couldn’t fix.
And they came through Cincinnati, just an hour’s drive from me in the winter of 1994. An ice storm came through that same day, so I chose to sit that one out. Assuming, with the foolishness of youth, that a band as amazing as the Buck Pets wouldn’t do three albums and split. They’d surely do another record, another tour and then it would all come together and I’d get to see them live.
It wasn’t to be. They went poof. With a whimper, not a bang.
I was fortunate enough to find a great woman who supported my writing habit, and then we moved to Los Angeles and I found work at a music trade magazine, HITS. This was the kind of magazine that took pride in being self-effacing and allowing the musicians who came through to sign the walls of offices and hallways. It wasn’t uncommon to see something like Pink’s Sharpie scrawl next to Afroman’s.
So I wrote in big letters above my office “Buck Pets 2000” as a way to convince the people I met in the industry to figure out a way to get them to reunite. Even though I didn’t realize that I actually knew people who knew them. The next year, I crossed out the year and added to it. “Buck Pets 2001” was not to be.
However whenever I could, I would talk up the Buck Pets. I made friends with one of my wife’s coworkers and at some point, I brought up my love for the band. As it turned out, Brendan had gone to see them in Dallas when he was still in high school. His dad took him to the show, and his dad was the band’s manager through their last two albums. I now had narrowed the gap between me and the mysterious band to one-single step.
One of my friends worked at the recording studio where they did part of the Mercurotones album. My own band recorded at that same studio and while were there, we dug around the archives, looking for the master taps from their sessions.
I don’t know what I would have done with two-inch analog tapes, but the idea of them gathering dust and decomposing makes me sad.
In the same way that if I see one of their CDs at a used store, always in the bargain bin for $4 or $2, I want to liberate it and then give it to someone worthy. But the problem is, nobody I know hasn’t heard of the Buck Pets because I still talk about them like it’s 1992 and they’re going to break out and play stadiums.
I suppose they did play a few huge venues, touring as the opener for Neil Young, but the Buck Pets are more like a very secret, members-only kind of club. That might be okay for a little bit, but great bands deserve fame and money and all of that, right? Instead, they got a mention in 2009 from Spin as one of the “100 Greatest Bands You’ve Never Heard Of.”
A few years after my Buck Pets 2000 campaign failed, I was at a meeting at a record label and a mutual friend’s name came up in conversation, so I said I’d always wanted to start a Doobie Brothers/Buck Pets cover band with our mutual friend. The woman I was meeting with turned bright red and said that she hadn’t thought of the Buck Pets in years, but during their touring days, she had a “lost weekend” with one of the guys in the band.
Her words, not mine.
Still, when I joined Facebook, I added the Buck Pets as band I liked. There was one other person who also liked them on the site at the time.
Their records were out of print on CD, you can’t find them on Pandora or Spotify. I have seriously considered trying to buy the rights to To the Quick and reissuing it, but I know as soon as I started that process, the cost would skyrocket. Also, my wife has talked me out of it since there are better ways to spend that kind of money, such as seeing the band live.
That’s right, the Buck Pets have reunited three times. Once in 2010, which I somehow didn’t know about! They also reunited in September 2015 at the Toadies’ all day festival in Dallas and again in Dallas in January 2016. They were not inexpensive trips, but we went to Dallas for both shows, because it’s likely that a band as great as the Buck Pets are only going to do three albums and split (though they did self-release a demos/rarities disc).
No more tours, no more shows other than the infrequent Dallas concert. I offered to cover their guarantee if they wanted to come to Denver, where we live now. I don’t think they’ll take me up on it. They’re too old and wise to want to get in a van and play for small crowds.
I’ve been a total fanboy, adding the members as friends on Facebook, talking to them after each show, getting photos with them, taking the set list from each show and getting their autographs. And one of those photos actually made it onto our official holiday card we sent to friends and families, some of who knew of my semi-obsession
I guess even though I’m jaded enough to say the music business has shrunk so much that it should be called “music hobby,” I’m still a geeky fan, 17-years-old and blown away that some guys in Dallas with guitars and drums were able to encapsulate my emotions and put them to music.
The shows, by the way, were amazing. They didn’t miss a note. They sounded like what they must have sounded like more than 20 years ago, when it was all new and fresh. That’s one of the things about music, it brings people together in a way that no other medium does.
