The Salad Diaries II: Still Angry After All These Years

So, we’ve estab­lished that I not only admit to lik­ing the band Angry Salad, but own signed copies of all three of their CDs, and can safely say that they’re the one band I’ve seen live more times than any other. I’m likely over-sentimentalizing them because I was a fan dur­ing some piv­otal times in my life, but that’s not going to stop me from some prime navel gaz­ing. Come along for the ride if you so desire…

1996 — The Guinea Pig EP

While tech­ni­cally this EP was released in 1995, my Salad jour­ney begins New Year’s Eve of 1996. I was liv­ing in a two-room apart­ment in Worces­ter, MA at the time, and was invited out to “First Night Worces­ter” by my buddy John, home for win­ter break. He told me he’d seen this band play at USM and that they were really good.

He was right. Even in the poor acoustics of the gym at Girls, Inc. (as strange a place for a rock show as any), you could tell these guys were headed for big things. They were ryth­mi­cally tight, had great melodies, and they were gen­uinely funny onstage. I left that night with some new guitar-pop heroes, a sense of hope for the com­ing year, and a copy of their lone (at the time) CD, “The Guinea Pig EP.” I remem­ber throw­ing it on after the con­cert and being slightly dis­ap­pointed — like most local indie bands of the mid-90’s, the pro­duc­tion on the CD was a lit­tle lack­ing. I didn’t really lis­ten to it again for a while.

My sense of hope proved to be only par­tially unfounded — I was evicted from the apart­ment a few months later and ended up mov­ing back in with my par­ents. How­ever, it did clear the decks for the next part of this Salad story…

1997–98: Bizarre Gar­den­ing Accident

I’d been mean­ing to visit John at school for ages. We finally coor­di­nated sched­ules for a week­end visit in late April, right around USM’s SpringFest. Springfest’s fea­tured enter­tain­ment — Angry Salad.

It was yet another gym gig, but much more inti­mate than First Night. John and I got a chance to hang with the band, and they were just as approach­able and funny off­stage as they were on. They even remem­bered us from First Night.

That week­end John also intro­duced me to a class­mate and friend of his named Carla, who I imme­di­ately took a lik­ing to. The three of us spent pretty much the whole week­end together — hear­ing Angry Salad rock yet another gym­na­sium, wan­der­ing Portland’s Old Port, and watch­ing the late night ani­ma­tion block on Com­edy Cen­tral. Over the sum­mer, Carla and I kept in touch via email and soon I was mak­ing reg­u­lar trips from Worces­ter to Maine just to be with her. By Decem­ber, we were engaged.

Decem­ber was also our last Salad con­cert of the year, once again at First Night Worces­ter. Street team reps were hand­ing out 20 ounce bot­tles of Coca Cola’s new “extreme” soda Surge for free that night. I can safely say that with­out this steady influx of sugar and caf­feine, it would never have occurred to me and John to jump onstage at the band’s urg­ing, head­bang­ing and and play­ing air gui­tar dur­ing “How Does It Feel to Kill,” while our respec­tive sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers laughed and gri­maced at our twen­tysome­thing stupidity.

1999–2000: The Self-Titled album

This is where my part of the story starts to lose focus. Carla and I mar­ried in Novem­ber of 1999. Angry Salad got big (or as big as they were going to get). They signed with a major label, who remixed and re-released Bizarre Gar­den­ing Acci­dent as a self-titled national release. The four of us (me, Carla, John and his girlfriend/fiancee Jen­nie) saw them a few more times, but it was obvi­ous this was not just “our band” any­more. Where only a year ear­lier, we had seen them at a 3-night stand at Portland’s Old Port Tav­ern and chat­ted with the band after every set, now we had to wait for seem­ingly hours until the crowd of pubes­cent girls who loved “The Milk­shake Song” dis­si­pated enough for us to get in and say “hi.”

At the end of 2000, Angry Salad fell vic­tim to cor­po­rate down­siz­ing in the wake of the Time Warner/AOL merger. A few of the mem­bers went on to take mate­r­ial intended for the next Salad album and release it under a new band name, Star64, but their only release, You May Be Beau­ti­ful, was the last we ever heard the guys. They played some gigs in China, and faded into the mist of one-hit-wonder obscu­rity. Appar­ently some of them are work­ing in busi­ness devel­op­ment now, and their gui­tarist is in a “new glam” band.

A few weeks ago, this whole nos­tal­gic jour­ney was spurred on by see­ing a signed copy of Angry Salad’s major label disc in the used rack for $2.99. It’s strange how mem­ory can go so cheaply…

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