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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March 8th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Damn. I had forgotten about Surge. Maybe some high caffinated Mt. Dew wannabes are best left in the past. What can I say about a band that I clung to like a leach, and helped me jumpstart a career in journalism. What can I say, except that time, after we helped them tear down, we got to ride around in their van for a short while.
March 29th, 2006 at 8:02 am
[...] I can’t believe I forgot to mention this, but a few weeks ago, John and I saw Queen. I could wax (Bohemian?) rhapsodic about the whole thing - I mean, it was an incredible show - and go into details about how the music of Queen defined our lives (a la my “Salad Diaries” posts from earlier this year), but John’s a professional journalist. He’s said all this with much more eloquence and economy than I could here. [...]